Chapter Twelve
Twelve
Cal seldom comes to Lena’s house. Without knowing or needing to know his reasons, she appreciates this. Her house has had too much in it; her relationship with Cal needs a barer place in which to unfurl. He’s never been in her bed.
When he shows up at her door, it’s because he’s bringing something special.
A few weeks after she gave him Rip, he called round with a pair of bookends for her—simple ones, since he was only starting out at the woodworking back then, but made from old oak with a grain she’s run her hand over a hundred times.
He’s brought the first ripe hazelnuts from his trees, a tiny belligerent toad he found in the middle of the road.
Last year, after she told people they were engaged, he showed up with a look halfway between sheepish and mischievous, and a sapphire ring.
The sight of his Pajero turning in at her gate has come to bring with it a sense of expectation; it readies her to smile.
This time, when she lifts her head from the washing-up and sees the Pajero, she knows it’s not hazelnuts. She stands still for a moment at the sink, looking out through the morning mizzle. Then she dries her hands, takes the ring from the windowsill and puts it back on, and goes to the door.
The air outside is thick with damp and with autumn smells. The blur of rain has brought the horizon closer; only a few fields away, nothing exists. Cal kisses her too briefly and too hard.
Lena brings him into the kitchen and sits him down at the table—if they have to do this, they might as well have a cup of tea to go with it. The dogs, sluggish with the cold, lift their heads to greet Cal and then go back to dozing in their corner, twitching and snuffling through their dreams.
Cal is so careful and delicate about how he tells her, it would break Lena’s heart, except that she finds it hard to focus on what he’s saying.
She’s been expecting this; the only faint surprise is how thorough Tommy’s been, how he’s gone above and beyond just saying she’s mental, to offer the place something skillfully concocted to catch at their taste buds so irresistibly that it’ll never fade.
The rest flows past at such a distance that only some of the words reach her.
Instead she watches Cal while he talks. His crow’s-feet have got deeper, and his brown beard has speckles of gray.
For the first time she realizes what it means that the pair of them are middle-aged; that, from now on, their changes are unlikely to be in their favor.
“I’m gonna do something about it,” he says, when he’s picked his way through it all. He’s watching her, too, with worry he’s trying to hide.
Lena raises her eyebrows. “I don’t see much that needs doing,” she says.
“If Tommy takes it any further, then maybe, but it sounds like Sheila’s after putting a stop to his gallop, and I laughed in that Guard’s face; he won’t be back to you.
The rest is small-town shite. There’s not a lot you can do, only leave it till everyone gets bored.
” She finds a touch of comfort in the fact that she can sound so perfectly like her usual self.
Cal says, “This isn’t your average small-town bullshit.”
“I’ve heard worse,” Lena says. “So have you, sure.”
Cal stands up fast and starts pacing circles around the kitchen. “If people think I’m a sleaze,” he says, “I’m gonna run into trouble about Trey.”
Lena hears the things running beneath his voice, the anger and the fear and the urgency, but she can’t feel them; they slide over her without touching. Only the thought of Trey reaches her. Regardless of where it leads, she has to talk to Trey.
Cal says, “And I’m not gonna let people go around saying that shit about you.”
“You could challenge Tommy to a duel,” Lena suggests helpfully. “With hurling sticks, like. Beside the grotto in the village. You’d make a fortune on tickets.”
That gets half a grin out of Cal, but it’s gone quickly. He stops pacing and leans back against the counter. After a minute he says, “You were asking people about Rachel cheating on Eugene. I figure that got Tommy’s back up because there’s something he doesn’t want coming out.”
“Probably,” Lena agrees. “I’d say Tommy mostly has something he doesn’t want coming out.”
Cal says, “How come you were doing that? Asking around?”
For a moment Lena remembers how she loved telling Cal things; how it felt like a breathtaking surprise gift, after all those years of guarding against telling anything to anyone.
And now, if she told him this, the only thing it would do is damage.
She wants to close her mouth and never open it again.
All that talking she did with half the women in the townland, all that talking with Mrs. Duggan, and none of it did any good in the end.
She says, “I shoulda known better.”
Cal waits. When she says nothing more, he asks, “What’d you find out?”
“Clodagh started the story,” Lena says.
“Surprise,” Cal says, with a grim twitch in his jaw. “Anything else?”
“No,” Lena says.
Cal watches her. She knows he doesn’t believe her, but it doesn’t matter. Their tea mugs sit there, untouched.
He asks, “You turn up something bad?”
“No,” Lena says.
After a minute Cal says, “You’re not worrying over that crap about me and Rachel. Right?”
“I am not,” Lena says, with all the force she has—she owes him that. “Not in a million years.”
“And you know I don’t believe that bullshit.”
Lena says, “I never thought you did.”
Cal says, “So what’s wrong?”
Lena tries to remember the feel of his skin under her palms. All she can find is Sean’s cold cheek. “Nothing’s wrong,” she says. “It’s a hard time round here, is all.”
Cal nods for a while. His hands are scraped up; there’s a plaster around one thumb, and he rubs the end of it, smoothing it down. In the end he says, “I think Tommy killed Rachel Holohan.”
“He might’ve,” Lena says. “Yeah.” It makes no difference, because they can’t do anything about it, but she doesn’t try to get that across to Cal.
Even if she found the words, he would try to go out and fix it; that’s how he’s made.
She thinks of Sheila saying A grown woman knows sometimes there’s nothing to be done, so you do nothing.
Cal starts to say something and then stops. Lena waits, but he just stands there, leaning against her counter, by the sink full of half-done washing-up.
The rain makes soft, unhurried rustles against the windowpanes.
Outside, the horizon has come closer again, hanging in the field just across the road, patient.
Lena thinks of the women in the stories her grannies used to tell, swapped by the fairies for changelings who sat unmoving and empty-eyed by the hearth till they withered away to husks, or until someone decided to burn the strangeness out of them.
She reckons this is the reality running under the stories: women whose own home places were the creatures that scooped them out of themselves and took them away somewhere unreachable.
She’s become a thing out of a story no one bothers to tell any more.
After a while Cal sits down at the table again and reaches a hand across to her. “I’m gonna do something,” he says.
Lena takes his hand. She’s drowning, with Cal right there by her side. She wonders if this is how Sean felt.
Trey is considerably less tactful than Cal. She bangs on Lena’s door after school and says, when Lena opens it, “Some fucker’s putting it about that you made Rachel Holohan kill herself ’cause she was riding Cal, and he found out and bet you up.”
“I know, yeah,” Lena says. “Is that how you got that?” Trey has an impressive lump, gashed and purple, above one eyebrow.
“Yeah. This prick Jayden Crilly, he said it to me so I hit him, so he hit me and I kneed him in the balls.”
Trey used to get into fights at school on a semi-regular basis, but it’s been a long time since the last one.
She looks like she’s holding herself back by sheer willpower from bursting into flames.
“You’ve still got blood on you,” Lena says, stepping back from the door. “Come in here and get cleaned up.”
Trey makes a pfft noise, but she follows Lena through into the kitchen and dumps her schoolbag on the floor. “Jayden’s thick as fuck,” she says. “He didn’t come up with that himself. Someone said it to him.”
Her fury clears Lena’s head till things feel almost real. “Here,” she says, handing Trey a swathe of kitchen roll.
Trey wets it at the sink. “This is Tommy fuckin’ Moynihan,” she says. “Again.”
“It’s got that smell, all right,” Lena agrees.
Trey leans over the sink and uses the kitchen window, already dark, as a mirror to go at the dried blood on her forehead. “ ’M not letting him away with it,” she says. She’s scrubbing hard enough that it has to hurt. “He’s not gonna call Cal a fuckin’ sleaze.”
Lena says, “What are you going to do about it?”
“I’m gonna prove he kilt her himself. Or Eugene did, whichever. Me and my mates, we’re gonna get Eugene and beat the bollocks outa him till he talks. Cal keeps saying wait, wait, don’t go off half-cocked—I been waiting. I’m not letting them away with this.”
Only a week ago, this was all Lena wanted: to see this fight in Trey.
Now she’s terrified by it. She’s fought against Ardnakelty’s current for thirty years.
When she was young she welcomed the battle, just like Trey does; there was a fierce secret joy in the way it used all she had.
She had never found anything else that would do that—only, later, her battle for Sean.
Now she’s not young any more, and she’s worn out.
Her fight for Sean is lost, and it’s been brought home to her that this one was always unwinnable.
The most she could ever have hoped for was to reach the end of her life before she could lose.