Chapter Nine #2
“There you are,” Mart says, appearing at his shoulder and steering him towards an awkward-shaped nook that’s apparently standing in for the pub alcove: Bobby, Senan, and Francie are squashed around a table that holds a surprising number of pints.
Mart has also dressed up for the occasion, meaning he’s not wearing wellies and his pants aren’t held up by baling twine.
“Senan’s after getting in a rake of pints, the way we won’t have to fight our way to the bar for a while. You can get the next round.”
Cal looks around for Lena and Trey, who have somehow disappeared.
The crowd has segregated itself neatly by gender, age, occupation, and other factors that Cal can’t decipher; he catches Lena’s fair head amid a group of women he didn’t even know she knew.
Trey has materialized among a bunch of teenagers at a corner table discreetly tucked away from adult sightlines.
Cal can tell, from Aidan’s rapt expression as he nods along to whatever Ross is saying, that under the table he’s pouring something extra into his glass.
He catches Trey’s eye and gives her a warning look; she gives him back a blank one.
He ups the warning level. She ups the bafflement.
“Don’t be fussing over the child,” Mart says, planting Cal on a stool. “She’s grand; if you don’t have her fit to be let out in public by now, you never will.”
“Get that into you,” Bobby says, shoving a pint across the table to Cal.
“Don’t bother,” Francie says. He’s eyeing his glass at arm’s length, like he just found a bug in it. “The head on that is a fuckin’ disgrace.”
Cal takes a swig of his pint. “I’m not a Guinness man,” he says, “but even I can tell that’s shit.”
“To match the day that’s in it,” Senan says.
He’s in a dark mood. Today has got to him, and Senan is used to being able to hit back at things that get to him.
“And the weather, and that fuckin’ priest. Drink your pint and quit your whinging.
You’ve still got your young one, haven’t you? What else do you want?”
“Not a thing,” Cal says, and means it. He downs some more of his shitty Guinness.
“They’d a great turnout, anyway,” Bobby says, trying to find a positive. “Everyone’s here, only the lads that couldn’t leave the farming.”
“And look what we’ve got to make up for the farmers,” Mart says, digging a bony elbow into Cal’s ribs and pointing with his chin. “I was right about Sir Tommy’s grand plan. I’m right that often, boyo, sometimes I amaze myself.”
The Moynihans have taken over a big table across the room from the Holohans’, but they’ve given pride of place in the center of the banquette to a scrawny little guy with an out-of-date check suit, a beat-up fedora, and the colorless, lipless, lashless face of someone Jimmy Cagney would fist-fight.
Tommy and Eugene are sitting one on each side of him, like favorite courtiers, nodding wisely at everything that comes out of his mouth. “Who’s that guy?” Cal asks.
“Fuck me,” Senan says. “Innocence is a beautiful thing. Don’t tell him; today’s been bad enough already.”
“Where have you been these last few years, Sunny Jim?” Mart demands.
“D’you live under a rock? That’s Dickie O’Shea.
” And when Cal still looks blank: “Our TD, man. Our congressman, is that what you’d call it?
The fella that goes up to Dublin and gives the city politicians an earful about treating us better.
Not that they pay him a blind bitta notice, but it gets him in the papers and he has a rare aul’ time. ”
“And a rare aul’ load of wee brown envelopes,” Francie says.
“That fella’s the biggest landlord in the West,” Mart says. “Apartments, he owns, and pubs, and hotels. All on a TD’s salary.”
“If I was the biggest landlord in the West,” Cal says, “I’d have a better suit than that one.” He doesn’t want to get into politics, not on a day when everyone is already on edge.
“Jesus, man,” Mart says, “you’d never make it in politics.
Dickie’s had that suit since the first time he put his name on the ballot; he wouldn’t trade it for pure silk satin Armani.
That fella might have enough in the bank to buy and sell the lot of us, but as long as he’s wearing that yoke, Dickie’s a man of the people, don’tchaknow.
No notions about Dickie. Just like yourself and myself.
There’s an awful lotta fools around here, Sunny Jim. ”
“I voted for Dickie,” Bobby says, offended.
“Course you did,” Senan says. “That’s the man’s point.”
“What you do,” Mart tells Bobby with magnificent disdain, “doesn’t even count as voting. You just tick whatever box your daddy did. That’s not voting. That’s taking a stroll down to the polling station and back.”
“It is so. He got in, didn’t he?”
“The Holohans know Dickie Whatshisname?” Cal says. They didn’t strike him as the type to hang out with politicians.
Senan snorts. “They don’t have to know him. They couldn’ta kept him away with a cattle prod.”
“We’re meant to be honored,” Francie explains. “That an important man like that would take time outa his day to pay his respects to one of ours. And then we’ll all vote for him.”
“If that shitehawk shows his face at my funeral,” Mart says, “I’m relying on the four of ye to get him by the shiny suit and throw him out, arse over tip.
But that’s not the point. The point is, I told ye, and I was right: Tommy wants Eugene in politics.
D’you know how round your way, Sunny Jim, the politicians’d always be on the telly endorsing each other?
That’s what that is right there. Dickie O’Shea sitting down for chats over a pint that Eugene bought him: that’s an endorsement. ”
That could explain why Eugene is still hanging around Ardnakelty: Tommy has him cozying up to Dickie O’Shea, while Rachel’s death means there’s something in it for Dickie. “Whole lot cheaper than TV time,” Cal says.
“While we’re on the subject,” Mart says, to Cal. He dabs a bit of beer foam tidily off his lip. “We had a wee chat there not too long ago, yourself and myself, about the great Tommy Moynihan and the joys of communication.”
“I remember that,” Cal says. Senan and Bobby and Francie are all watching him. “Communication and clarity, both.”
“That’s the one,” Mart agrees, smiling at Cal. “That was a great aul’ chat. I was wondering if you’d found any bits and pieces of clarity to communicate, on your travels.”
Cal has been considering whether to tell Mart the various stuff he’s picked up, but it’s too nebulous; it’ll just get people all worked up and raring to go, without any direction to go in, and that never ends well. “No clarity so far,” he says. “But I’m working on it.”
“Are you?” Francie asks.
“Yeah,” Cal says.
Senan says, “I heard Donie McGrath got caught shiteing about at the Reddy place.”
Cal translates this, which a couple of years back would have sounded like a non sequitur, without effort. Senan wants to know whether Donie’s bullshit had anything to do with Tommy, but he also wants to know whether Cal is only taking an interest because Trey was under threat.
“Donie’s a detail,” he says. “I’m gonna want a lot more clarity than that little asswipe can give me.”
Senan nods, knocks back the last of his pint, and swaps the empty glass for a full one: his questions have been answered to his satisfaction. “There ye go,” Mart says to the table, like Cal has proved a point he was arguing. “Here’s to clarity, and the sooner the better.”
Cal drinks to that. He finds he’s slightly surprised at himself, like he just navigated a complicated conversation in a language he didn’t realize he spoke well enough to pull it off.
“Ah, Jesus,” Francie says, his face puckering with disgust. “Would ye look at that fuckin’ lickarse.”
Dickie O’Shea, being a busy man, is leaving. Eugene has walked him to the door, so he won’t get lonely, and is shaking his hand like they’re posing for a photo op.
“Christ on a fuckin’ bike,” Senan says. “If that little scut knocks on my door asking for a vote, I’ll give him such an almighty kick up the hole, he’ll land in the fuckin’ Atlantic.”
“There’s an upside, mind you,” Mart says. “There always is. I’m only dying to see Eugene Moynihan in a polyester check suit.”
The minute Lena steps inside the hotel bar, Yvonne McCabe grabs her arm and whisks her over to a table that’s apparently become the base for middle-aged Ardnakelty women who are on the easygoing side—the high-maintenance table, led by Laura Barry, is across the room, sipping gin and slimline tonic—and who aren’t close enough to Claire Holohan to gather around her.
This is exactly where Lena wants to be, but she still feels the urge to run for the hills.
“Look who I found,” Yvonne says triumphantly, presenting Lena to the group.
Lena knows all of them—Philomena Doherty, Julie Quinn, Melanie O’Halloran—or she did once upon a time, back in school.
Since then they’ve got used to not knowing Lena any more, beyond brief pleasant small talk in Noreen’s.
The last time she sat down for a drink with this lot, the drinks were mostly illegal.
“Here,” Yvonne says, pushing a glass into Lena’s hand.
Back in the day, Yvonne was the one all the boys fancied: a little thing with a ton of blond hair, a figure that hit you straight in the eye, and the kind of matter-of-fact cheerfulness that made everything feel less daunting.
Nowadays her hair is cut short and spiked up, and her figure has relaxed into a series of lavish bulges; the cheerfulness hasn’t changed, but it would take more than that to make Lena feel undaunted here.
“Vodka and Coke, the real stuff, fuck the diet shite on a day like this. I got a spare while the going was good. If you want anything else, you’ll have to catch a lounge boy, and good luck with that. ”