Chapter Eight
Eight
Lena waits till early Monday afternoon, when Sheila will have finished her shift at the supermarket but the kids won’t be back from school yet, to call over.
It’s still new to her, knowing Sheila’s schedule well enough to predict when she’ll be home.
Back when they were teenagers, Lena and Sheila were close enough that they’re in all each other’s wild memories.
Their men took them in different directions, and for a long time neither of them wanted the other, or anyone.
Things have been changing. When Sheila’s house burned down and her husband ran off for good, the summer before last, she came down off the mountain, got herself a job, and started unfurling out of years of heavy silence into someone Lena recognizes.
She’s the only person in Ardnakelty whom Lena counts as, give or take, a friend.
It’s drizzling, but Lena’s wax jacket is solid and Sheila lives only a mile and a half away, so she walks.
Lena considers driving around here to be a pure waste, not of petrol but of Ardnakelty.
Her feelings about the people have never managed to touch her deep joy in the place itself, both intimately familiar and inexhaustible: no matter how well she knows it, there’s always a new pattern of lichen spotting a stone wall, or a strange swirl of clouds over the fields, or a different shading to the scent of the air.
It was one of the things that kept her alive, after Sean died.
She walked the roads for hours, trying to walk her mind empty, and along the way she lost the option of feeling that the world had stopped.
Lena is unsure whether this is symmetry or irony: Sean kept her in this place with him, and then the place kept her here without him.
When she has to step onto the verge to let a car pass, mud squelches under her runners; over the walls, the fields are waterlogged and the grass is sparse.
The winter is going to be a hard one: this spring it rained enough to delay all the planting, and the last few months it’s rained enough that the harvest was whatever scraps the farmers could grab during brief dry spells.
Above the fields, the mountain, unaffected, flaunts its full autumn richness, yellow gorse and dark spruces and a hundred shades of gold and brown.
Sheila is home. Her kitchen is small, darkened by the loom of the mountain behind it, but she’s made it a good place to be.
Her house on the mountainside was clean but scraped bare and drab, like she had enough in her to meet the minimum but nothing more.
Here the walls are painted a bright turquoise and hung with small watercolors and kids’ drawings, the worn floor tiles are waxed to a shine, and there are straggly plants in pots on the windowsill.
The red checked tablecloth is laid out with a teapot and mug, an open box of éclairs, and one half-eaten on a plate. “When I was a kid,” Lena says, “that’s what I swore I’d do, once I grew up. Cake for lunch, and stay up all night. You’re living the dream.”
“I am,” Sheila agrees. She finds Lena a plate and a mug. “One day last week I had pick-and-mix sweets for my lunch. Nothing else, just sitting here stuffing my face with bonbons and jelly babies. I’ll be fat as a fool.”
“You won’t,” Lena says. She says it as fact rather than reassurance.
Sheila is tall, long-limbed, and bony, the type that never puts on weight.
She’s nothing like Trey, who is far enough from striking to be near-invisible when she wants to be.
Sheila’s face is all hard, sweeping curves, and her rough auburn hair is pulled back in a ponytail that shows them starkly.
Sheila used to be beautiful; even now that she’s too weather-worn for beauty, Lena likes looking at her.
“I always thought I’d like to be fat,” Sheila says. “It’d be great after a hard day: you could sit there on the sofa and have plenty of yourself to get hold of. All that lovely soft stuff, all your own.”
Lena is grinning, and Sheila grins back at her. “You watch,” she says. “I’ll be bursting outa these jeans in no time.”
She pours the tea. Lena settles back in her chair and warms her hands, cold from the walk, on the mug. “Cal said Donie McGrath was giving you hassle,” she says.
Sheila nods. “He won’t be back,” she says. “They caught him Saturday night, Trey and her pals. I was watching them, out the window.” She puts an éclair on Lena’s plate. “Was that Cal with them?”
“It was,” Lena says. “But it was Trey and her mates that did the spade work; Cal just helped them tidy up. They had Donie all trussed up and ready for market before he even got here.”
Sheila smiles a little. “I like her pals,” she says. “She doesn’t bring them around much, but I like what I see. They take no shite.”
“The young people nowadays are better about that,” Lena says.
“D’you remember Sister Breda? Hitting us with the ruler for talking, screaming at us that we oughta be disgusted with ourselves if we wrote off the lines, and it never even crossed our minds to say anything.
If anyone tried that on Trey, she’d tell them to get fucked and walk out. ”
“She would,” Sheila agrees. “I’d like to see it.”
The éclair is good: fresh from a bakery, not packaged stuff. Lena asks, “Did Trey say why Donie was hassling you?”
Sheila shrugs. “Donie likes upsetting people,” she says. “And here’s me with a buncha kids, and no man in the house to give him a hiding. I’m not easy upsetted, but he wasn’t to know that.”
Lena says, “Tommy Moynihan hired him to do it. He wants you outa this place.”
Sheila puts her mug down on the table and stares at her.
Lena asks, “Was Tommy at you?”
Sheila’s eyes meet hers with complete understanding.
Both of them have spent enough years alone to know how many men believe that a woman without a man is fair game: the ones who lean too close in the shop and grin knowingly, stare at the wrong parts and press against you in ways that can’t be proved and make sly comments about you being lonely; the ones who offer you a lift home and slide a hand up your thigh; the ones who show up on your doorstep, late at night after a few drinks, some sheepish, some cocky, some frightening, all of them taking for granted they have a right to come in.
“Not Tommy,” Sheila says. “He never even gave me one look that was outa line. Did he with you?”
“No,” Lena says. “The worst he ever did was patronize the fuck outa me. But I thought I’d ask.
” She knows that, whatever she’s had to deal with from men, Sheila has had worse.
The widow of a respectable farmer is in a different category from a woman who’s been used and abandoned up the mountain by one of the good-for-nothing Reddys.
“He’s not that kind,” Sheila says. “He likes having people under his thumb, but he likes doing it here.” She touches her forehead. “He wouldn’t do it with his own body.”
“That’d be beneath him,” Lena agrees. She told Cal she’d ask, but she’s unsurprised. Cal doesn’t have the measure of Tommy yet. He hired Donie rather than do his own dirty work; the distance is part of the power. “Has he anything against you? Or does Clodagh?”
“Clodagh wouldn’t talk to the likes of me,” Sheila says. “I turned down a job off Tommy last month. He didn’t seem bothered, but you’d never know with that fella.”
“A job? At the plant, like?”
Sheila shakes her head. “Tommy said a pal of his needed a shift manager for his shop over in Athlone, and he’d put a word in for me. ’Cause of my situation—that’s what he called it, my situation.” The corner of her mouth lifts with amusement.
“God, he’s some tulip,” Lena says. “Is that why you turned it down?”
“I don’t want favors off Tommy Moynihan,” Sheila says. “And anyway it woulda meant moving to Athlone.” Lena’s eyebrows go up. “Tommy said that like it was a great thing: a fresh start, he said. Like he thought I’d get down on my knees and kiss his hand.”
Lena says, “He really wants you outa this place.”
“I know, yeah. I haven’t a notion why he’d give a shite.
” Sheila, lifting another éclair from the box, seems undisturbed.
“I’m going nowhere. I only just got back down here, sure.
” She flashes Lena a quick, almost shy smile.
“I’ve friends at work now, didja know that?
I went for lunch with them, the other day.
And myself and Yvonne McCabe, d’you remember her?
we take turns getting the kids from school. ”
Lena says, “Cal reckons Tommy’s trying to get Eugene onto the county council. He thought maybe you knew something about Eugene that could scupper his chances, so Tommy wants you gone before you talk.”
Sheila looks up from the éclair. She says, “Did Cal send you to ask me?”
“No,” Lena says. “Or yes and no, more like. He wants to find out why Tommy’s out to get you, ’cause he’s worried about Trey. It isn’t just him, but. I’d love to know as well.”
“Trey’s grand,” Sheila says. “We’re staying put.”
“I figured that, yeah,” Lena says. “But she wants to know what’s going on around here, and I don’t see why she shouldn’t.”
Sheila thinks this over. “What good would it do her?” she asks.
“She’s talking like she wants to stay here,” Lena says. “To live, like; after school. I’d rather she didn’t do it the way either of us did.”
They look at each other, across the small cheery table and the sweet smell of tea, seeing in each other’s face the wild girl and everything that brought her to here. The rain murmurs, soft and ceaseless, against the windowpanes.
Sheila nods, accepting that. “I know nothing about Eugene,” she says. “How would I?”