Chapter Seventeen
Seventeen
Cal wakes up feeling both the fight and his age: he’s sore in places that haven’t even occurred to him before.
Senan has sent him a gif of two penguins having a slap-fight, which Cal takes to be himself and Mouth.
He sends back one of Russell Crowe yelling “Are you not entertained?” Then he showers away some of the aches, makes himself breakfast, and gets ready to wait.
This being Sunday, Trey will presumably show up at some point or other, depending on how late and how wild Aidan’s party got.
Cal finds himself hoping she won’t come.
Probably anyone with information to share will go to Mart, who not only has status around here but has firmly established himself as the guy leading the charge; but there could be someone out there who has a complicated generational grudge against Mart, or a special appreciation for Cal punching Mouth, or who would just be more at ease unburdening himself to a man with a comparatively uncluttered outlook.
Any such guy is likely to be scared shitless, liable to shy away if he’s faced with an unexpected teenager.
Cal almost texts Trey to say he’s come down with some bug and she should stay clear, but he can’t bring himself to do it.
The kid has always been furiously sensitive to any hint that she might not be wanted, and she’s moving away from him fast enough as it is; he can’t make himself do anything that might push her farther and faster.
Not much is likely to happen today, anyway.
Anyone calling on Cal, at least for helpful reasons, is likely to come in darkness.
He makes himself accessible, just in case, by finding random shit to do in his front yard—his car could use a wash.
It’s not raining, but the cloud thickens both the light and the cold so that it feels like dusk, a dusk that stretches on and on unchanged.
Mart and Kojak, up in their back field, are steering another ewe towards the shed; even at this distance, Cal can see the limp that says she’s picked up the scald.
P.J. is clipping hedges and singing—P.J.
has a fine tenor voice which he mostly uses for melancholy folk songs and Mario Lanza, but today’s number, although Cal can’t hear the words, has a more martial sound.
Apart from P.J.’s song choice, everything is exactly, impeccably its usual self.
The rooks are delighted to see Cal; fucking with him is one of their favorite pastimes, and in winter they don’t get enough opportunities.
At least a dozen of them swoop over to explore his possibilities.
They warm up by perching on the wall for a while, making rude remarks about the state of his car and cracking up when he insults them back; when that gets stale, a few of them start trying to lure him away from the Pajero, by waving mysterious objects and hassling Rip and whacking rocks on his kitchen window, so their buddies can steal his sponge and scrabble all over the parts he’s just washed.
This field where Cal’s house stands is called Derryrucach, the rooks’ oak.
His rooks have been hanging out in that oak tree since before English took over from Irish on people’s tongues.
It occurs to him for the first time to wonder what he’ll do if Tommy’s buddies take his land away. The threat doesn’t seem to be immediate, but Mart was very sure that it’s on the way.
Mart was right, this doesn’t hold the same weight for Cal as it does for the rest of the guys.
He feels like it shouldn’t hold any weight at all: given what’s going on both with Lena and with Trey, there doesn’t seem to be any real reason why he shouldn’t just up sticks and go, anywhere that will take a middle-aged American and a dog, and maybe even has sunshine.
But somewhere along the way, he stopped thinking in terms of moving on from Ardnakelty, and now he doesn’t know how to get back into the habit.
He had come to believe that Ardnakelty, like Lena, was his final love, to be valued all the more for being unexpected and unsought.
Trey shows up around eleven, swinging through the gate on her bike, with Kate cruising along beside her. “Brought Kate,” she says, unnecessarily, as they pull up next to the car.
Both of them look reassuringly un-hungover. Also reassuringly, they’re not wearing the kind of clothes Cal associates with nightmare-fuel parties. He’s not sure what teenage girls wear to go wild these days, but he doubts it’s baggy jeans and hoodies.
“Hey,” he says. Trey has never brought her friends over before. “How’s it going? You guys need some breakfast?”
“Nah,” Trey says, leaning over to give Rip’s head a rub as he wriggles and wags. “We crashed at Aidan’s, so we et there. Thanks,” she adds, as an afterthought.
“Right,” Cal says. He wonders if something horrifying happened at the party and they need him to get them out of trouble—Aidan’s dad is known to be a hard man—but they don’t have that air. “How’d it go? Aidan’s house still there?”
“ ’S grand,” Trey says. “Lauren O’Farrell got sick all over the cooker, but it’s electric so it wiped off easy. And Ross broke an umbrella ’cause him and Callum Bailey were doing lightsaber fighting, but Aidan’s gonna say the dog done it.”
“That’s how come we’re this late,” Kate says. Rip, who knows her from rides to football matches, is jamming his nose into her hand in welcome. “We stayed to help Aidan clean up. His mam and dad won’t even know there was anyone there.”
“Good call,” Cal says. Even with everything that’s going on, he can’t help feeling the lift of this small, pure triumph: Trey, doing dumb shit with her buddies at parties like any teenager, and even having the manners to stick around and clean up afterwards.
“This what people wear to parties these days?” he inquires.
Trey and Kate look at themselves and then at him. “Yeah,” Trey says. “What?”
“Fancy,” Cal says. “You sure know how to dress to impress.”
“What’d you wear, back in the eighteen hundreds? A suit and tie, yeah?”
“Sure. And the girls wore ball gowns. You oughta get one. Bright pink.” Trey mimes gagging. “You guys have a good time?”
“Yeah,” Trey says, dismissing the party. “You said I could tell Kate what’s going on. With Moynihans and all.”
Cal says, “Right.” He drops his sponge into the bucket, dries his hands on his pants, and braces himself.
“So me and Kate, we done something about this shite. Seeing as ye were doing fuck-all.”
Cal should have known, when she agreed to stay home and let the grown-ups fix it.
He thought she was getting old enough to accept solid reasoning, but Trey has never, since he first met her, been docile about doing nothing.
The part that comes strangely to him is Kate.
Half the reason he couldn’t make himself turn Trey away, when she first showed up here, was her air of savage solitariness, an isolation forced on her so ruthlessly that it had become part of her nature.
The kid had no one and trusted no one, including him; anything she did, she did alone.
She and Kate stand there astride their bikes, shoulder to shoulder like partners, looking at him.
“OK,” he says. “Come on inside, fill me in. I can finish this up later.”
“It’ll go sticky if you leave it,” Trey says, nodding at the Pajero.
“It’s gonna rain anyway,” Cal says. “It’ll be fine.
Come on.” Whatever they have to say, he doesn’t like the thought of them saying it out here in the open.
All morning, he’s felt watched. It could be just the rooks, or his own raised level of alertness, or the fact that the whole townland is on the watch, but he wants the kid inside his walls.
He’s not sure whether he’s supposed to offer them tea, or coffee, or cookies, or whether any or all of those would turn out to be somehow wrong and terminally embarrassing, so he just puts them on the sofa and sits himself in the armchair to listen.
Rip, making up for Cal’s failure of hospitality, brings over an old sneaker of Trey’s and shakes it at them, looking for tug-of-war.
“Nah,” Trey says, shoving the sneaker away.
“Sit.” Rip gives her a wounded look, but she rubs under his jaw to settle him, and he flops down on her feet to chew the unappreciated sneaker.
“That night Rachel died,” Kate says. “Me and Trey and the lads, we were down in Mossie O’Halloran’s byre. You know that, right?”
“Trey told me,” Cal says. He finds himself watching Kate with new attention, and liking what he sees: the easy way she sits, with her feet planted firmly and her elbows on her knees, the straight way she meets his eyes.
He likes her voice, too, clear and clean of any shrillness or affectation.
This only eases his mind a little bit. Even if what he sees is what Trey gets, that’s not enough.
From all Lena said, Kate is a good kid from a healthy family; she has no way of understanding what Trey’s life has been, or what it’s built into her.
“Like I said,” Trey tells Kate. “He’s grand.”
Kate nods. “ ’Cause it was Saturday night,” she explains to Cal.
“That’s what everyone does, goes and hangs out somewhere.
We’d mostly go to Mossie’s, ’cause me and the lads are from Knockfarraney, so it’s halfway between.
It’s miles from the river, but, so we wouldn’ta seen anything to do with Rachel. ”
She pauses to check that Cal is following. He nods. The kid appears to be more at home with the concept of communication than Trey is, which is probably a good thing.
“But there’s other places,” Kate says. “Closer to where she went in the river. Like, you know Casey’s boreen, yeah, that goes down to the old bridge? There’s a house—”
“That one we went into that time when we were fishing and it started lashing,” Trey tells Cal. “With the weird pink wallpaper, and the nest in the sink.”