Chapter Ten #3
Mrs. Duggan leans back in her chair and chuckles.
“That means trouble,” she says. “I always knew you’d be trouble.
There’s you going about all prim and proper, like you only want to be left in peace.
I knew better. The first time I saw you, and you a wee baba, I told your mammy: that one’s got trouble in her eye.
I been waiting a long time for it to come out. ”
Lena has her balance back. “If you go talking like a fortune teller,” she says, “you can’t blame the young ones for thinking that’s what you are.”
“I blame no one for nothing,” Mrs. Duggan says. “I’m not in that line of work. I just stay in my place and watch the resta them go about their business. Same as yourself, sure.” She smiles up at Lena. “Or the same as yourself up until now, anyhow. What changed?”
“Thanks for your time,” Lena says. She resists the impulse to check that no jinxed domino or magenta bead has wormed its way into her pockets. “I’ll see you at Christmas, when I bring the kids their presents.”
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” Mrs. Duggan says. “I’m going to have a wee bet with myself, that you won’t let me down again.” She reaches, with slow deliberate movements, for her cigarettes. “I’ll see you soon,” she says.
Lena drives out into the countryside and keeps driving for a long time.
This is not, by a long shot, what she thought she was getting herself into.
She knows the shapes secrets take, around here.
They’re dark and jagged, dense enough to wear a hole right through you, but they’re small, confined things; they lack scale. This has scale.
She has no idea what she’s going to do about it. What’s been carrying her along isn’t some orderly plan, it’s a current, willful and deep. She has no strategy prepared for this place where it’s landed her.
The fields lie neat and empty, ready for plowing, swept by veils of soft rain.
Tall grass and weeds bow on Mossie O’Halloran’s fairy hill, never touched even though no one believes in fairies any more.
Leaves scud across the roads and pile high against the stone walls; branches of gorse, still lavish with yellow, reach from the hedgerows to skim the car.
The houses huddle, smoke drifting from their chimneys, smudges of darker gray against the gray sky.
Off in the distance, a man tramps steadily behind a wheelbarrow, his dog running in wide curves around him.
Lena overlays the fields she passes with the map of what she knows: the bits of land Tommy’s already bought, the bits he’s been sniffing at. The bits in between lie peaceful as churchyards, under the rain.
Tommy can’t afford to have his plan get out before he has all the pieces in place: the land bought, Eugene voted onto the council.
As things stand, there are plenty of people around here who’ll give Eugene their vote, plenty who’ll sell Tommy a few acres to build a house for Eugene or an apartment block for the factory workers—doing whatever he asks by reflex, or out of gratitude for everything he’s brought to the place, or just to stay on his good side.
If his grand plan comes out now, all that will go up in a mushroom cloud.
Some people will stick by Tommy no matter what, agreeing with his assessment that whatever a big man wants, he deserves, but plenty of others will feel that what Tommy deserves is to be kneecapped and run out of town for good.
It’ll be civil war. Tommy doesn’t give a shite about any of that, as long as the explosion doesn’t come till it’s too late to make any difference.
Rachel was a home bird, she loved this place; Rachel couldn’t stand to see anyone hurt. Rachel thought you could always fix things somehow, Rachel didn’t know that sometimes there’s nothing to be done. Rachel couldn’t hold her water, God rest her.
Tommy wasn’t hiring Cal to find out what happened to Rachel. Either he assumes the worry was too much for her, or he doesn’t care, or he already knows fine well. He was hiring Cal to find out whether Rachel talked, while she had the chance.
Lena has known Tommy and Clodagh all of her life, and Eugene all of his.
They’ve been part of her landscape, taken for granted and navigated by habit like the tricky kink in the road behind Skippy Gannon’s farm.
The realization of how little she knows any of them is disorientating, as if she’s peered under a familiar hedge and found, as her eyes adjusted, the den of some unidentified savage creature.
She has no idea how far any of the Moynihans would have gone to keep Rachel’s mouth shut.
She pictures Clodagh’s pinched smile as she brings Rachel a nice cup of tea, Tommy saying soothing words as he takes her by the elbow and leads her stumbling to the bridge.
Flapper Deery, out in his yard rooting unhurriedly at the same broken-down old van he’s been rooting at for ten years, raises a hand as Lena passes, and she raises hers in return. Flapper’s two sturdy Connemara ponies watch her solemnly, over the wall.
Gradually it reaches her, with the simplicity of something she’s known all along, that she’s not going to keep this to herself.
The only question is how she’s going to get the word out.
Noreen would have it all round the townland so fast it’d make everyone’s head spin, but Lena isn’t going to hide behind Noreen for this.
The rain has eased off to a fine haze; a couple of blackbirds burst out of a hedge and get to work, picking through the fields for worms. Lena finds a gap between overgrown whitethorn bushes and turns the car for home.
Maybe she’ll get Noreen to add her to every WhatsApp group in Ardnakelty.
Maybe she’ll stand up in the middle of Seán óg’s on Saturday night, or in the middle of mass.
Maybe she’ll hire a plane to trail a banner across the sky.
She finds herself grinning. In spite of Mrs. Duggan, Rachel, that prick Tommy, civil war, the lot, the biggest part of her is riding high and wild and glorious on the roller-coaster immensity of what she’s about to do.
She’s spent her life fighting Ardnakelty’s law book in all the constrained, small-time, pathetic ways she could piece together; she never dreamed she’d get a chance to just blow the little fucker to smithereens.
She can’t wait to see Trey’s face. She hits the pedal and flies down the twisting back roads, puddle-spray fanning from the Skoda’s tires, at a speed that would kill anyone who didn’t know this place like the back of her hand.
When Lena sees the black Range Rover pulled up at her gate, her first response is annoyance. She’s had her dose of shitebaggery for today, from Mrs. Duggan; she’s in no humor for a top-up from Tommy Moynihan.
Tommy is out of the Range Rover, leaning back against her wall, with his hands in his coat pockets and his brown felt hat tipped down over his eyes. Lena pulls up beside him and rolls down her window. The air is chilly and still, dense with the smells of earth and leaves.
“Lena Dunne,” Tommy says, like it’s a pleasant surprise to run into her here. “How’s the form?”
“Never better,” Lena says. She doesn’t ask him in return.
Tommy watches her with a small amiable smile. His car is blocking the gate.
Lena is used to being on a footing where Ardnakelty, while it can irritate her, has no power to frighten her. It takes her a moment to realize that this has changed.
After a minute, she switches off her engine and gets out of the car. She rests her arse on the bonnet, facing Tommy, and waits.
Tommy tips his hat back so she can see his face. “You’ve been asking an awful lotta people about me and my family,” he says.
Lena feels, sharply, how lonely the road is. For miles around, there’s no sound but the far-off burr of a tractor and the light wind fingering the hedgerows. She wishes she had brought the dogs.
“I thought I’d save you some hassle,” Tommy says, with a gracious little nod.
“Instead of you wearing yourself out, traipsing around the place trying to pick bits and bobs outa this one and that one, I thought I’d come down here and let you ask me all the questions you like.
” He spreads his hands, smiling. “Go on, then. Fire away. Knock yourself out.”
Lena says, “I’ve nothing to ask you.”
“Ah, Lena,” Tommy says, with mild reproof. “You’d haveta be fierce concerned about my family, to go bothering an old woman like Mrs. Duggan for whatever she thinks she knows. I appreciate your concern, and I’m here to put your mind at rest. Sure, isn’t that my job around here?”
Lena doesn’t know whether he’s been having her watched, or whether someone spotted her at Mrs. Duggan’s door or window and made a phone call. It doesn’t matter. Either way, the message is the same: Anything you do, anywhere, I see it.
“My mind’s grand,” she says. “Thanks.”
Tommy cocks his head. “Is it?” he inquires.
“If there’s anything you wanta tell me,” Lena says, “go ahead and do it. I’ve to feed the dogs.”
“The dogs can wait a few minutes,” Tommy reassures her. “They’re great little watchdogs, aren’t they? They were losing the head when I arrived, but they’ve settled now.”
Lena feels a more vivid stab of fear: here on his own for God knows how long, he could have put anything through her letterbox. She can hear nothing from the house. Her windows are empty.
Tommy sighs. He takes off his hat and runs a hand lightly over his hair, making sure it’s undisturbed. “To be honest with you, Lena,” he says, “I’ve concerns of my own. I can’t be having Clodagh and Eugene upset at a time like this. You understand that, don’t you?”
He raises his hands like Lena tried to cut in, which she didn’t. “Now, I’m not annoyed with you, nothing like that. I’m worried about you. ’Tisn’t healthy, the way you’ve been obsessing over alla this.”