Mark Keane
Music filled the car, honey-rich mandolin and plaintive uillean pipes. He rolled to a stop at a traffic light and turned up the volume.
The sun shone bright on old Scariff town
“Scariff, that’s where we’re headed, Lucy,” he said. The black edged clouds looked ominous. “But I doubt we’ll see much sunshine.”
Memories so precious to me now
There was enough in the tank to take them fifty miles, no need to pull in for petrol before Naas. They had started late and lost an hour getting Lucy's things together.
Finally free of the Dublin traffic, he turned onto the motorway. Though he preferred the less travelled back-roads, he wanted to get to his mother’s house before dark.
At the petrol station, he took a walk to stretch his legs. Lucy stayed in the car. Two men unloaded bags of coal and pallets of peat briquettes. The middle of September, no hint yet of an autumnal nip in the air. He knew what his mother would say when the topic of Canada came up.
“It must get very cold there.”
Cold beyond her understanding, wind chill and frostbite, ice storms coating tree branches with sparkling sleeves. A sharp, life-affirming dry cold, hard blue skies, and fleecy snow. Not the winters she knew, drizzle and downpour under an unforgiving grey awning.
“What time is it there now?” she was bound to ask.
He would tell her, investing no significance in the five-hour difference and what it meant in terms of physical separation.
They passed a sign welcoming visitors to County Clare and continued on a narrow road that would take them into Scariff. Barbed wire on timber posts provided a slack fence line. The shifting clouds released a blinding burst of sunlight, broken into dazzling shards by overhanging branches. He pulled down the sunshade.
“Not far to go.”
It started to rain when they rounded the final bend.
Heavy raindrops spattered his shirt as he crunched the gravel to the front door and announced his arrival. “Almost beat the rain.”
His mother stood in the hallway. He handed her the bunch of flowers he had bought in the petrol station shop. She took it without a word, and he went back to the car to get his bag.
“This is Lucy.”
The dog, freed from the confines of the car, circled his legs, tail wagging vigorously.
“Take it easy Lucy, no need to get so excited.”
He followed his mother into the kitchen. She filled a vase with water for the flowers. Music played on the radio, traditional airs, fiddle and concertina. Jesus looked down from his station on the wall, plump external heart wrapped in thorns and dripping blood. One of the good white plates sat on the hob, half-covered by a tea towel. She had prepared him something to eat.
“Why have you brought the dog?”
“I’m leaving her here. Lucy will be company for you,” he said, matter of fact, not allowing her the opportunity to protest.
The dog pawed his knee, quick brown eyes fixed on him. His mother frowned.
“Come on Lucy, outside.”
He attached the lead to the dog’s collar, brought her into the yard and tied her to some metal piping. The same piping had served as a goalpost for his solitary games of football as a boy.
His mother waited in the kitchen, standing by the dresser. She reached over and turned off the music. “What made you get a dog?”
He stopped himself from saying anything about the walks they took with Lucy on Dollymount Strand. Instead, he said, “Border collies are very intelligent animals.”
“I suppose it was Helen’s choice.”
“We both chose Lucy.”
“Has she finally gone then?”
Helen had left him. They weren’t able to find sufficient cause to bridge their differences. She said she couldn’t live with his brooding.
“Helen can’t look after Lucy. That’s why I brought her here, she’ll be a good guard dog.”
“There hasn’t been a dog in this house for years." His mother started putting things out on the table, a knife and fork, salt and brown sauce. "I’m too old for a dog like that.”
She handed him the plate. Potatoes on one side with a cut of meat, either lamb or pork, dry and gristly. Over-boiled tinned peas filled the rest of the plate along with two sausages. He poured milk from a carton into the cup he always used in this house. When she wasn't looking, he wrapped a sausage in the napkin on his lap.
“Are you staying long?”
“I have to leave tomorrow. I need to clean up the flat, so I get back my deposit,” He said it, knowing she wasn’t interested in his flat or the deposit, “I’m flying out on Saturday.”
Rather than sit at the table, she busied herself, cleaning the hob and organising cutlery in a drawer.
"What time is it there now?"
He looked at his watch. "Ten past two."
She took away his plate and cup and washed them in the sink. He stood up from the table.
“I should check on Lucy.”
The dog was digging under some bushes. He held out the sausage, which she sniffed, and then accepted.
Twilight, the moon clouded over, too late for a walk. Tomorrow, he would take Lucy for a jaunt across the fields.
He got her bowls from the car, filled one with water and the other with food. Back in the house, he left three bags of dog food by the door.
“This is what Lucy eats but you can give her whatever leftovers you have. She’s not fussy.”
His mother looked at the bags with apparent indifference.
He went into the front room. Nothing had changed, the same haphazard arrangement of books on the shelves. He pulled out a copy of Richard Yates' Disturbing the Peace and thumbed through pages dotted with mildew. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked loudly.
His PhD thesis, wrapped in protective plastic, stood prominently on display in the cabinet with the China dogs, souvenir mugs and sad gewgaws. His mother was the curator of this abject collection. He looked at the familiar furniture, the velour couch and three armchairs with their covers of needlework daisies.
In two or five or ten years, he would be back, emptying the shelves and clearing everything away.
She appeared in the doorway. “You’ll have a drop of whiskey? There’s some left in the bottle. I keep it for callers but there are few of them now.”
The first time he had visited with Helen, he bought a bottle of wine, forgetting there was no corkscrew in the house. Attempting to extract the cork with a kitchen knife, he forced it into the bottle and had to put up with gritty fragments in the wine. Helen refused to have any, and they had sat at the table in silence. Later, as he got the bedding together, his mother delivered her judgement. “You’ll have a hard time with her.”
She handed him whiskey in the glass that had been part of a gift set. “Do you want me to turn on the heat? It can get chilly in the evenings.”
"There's no need for that."
She remained standing and adjusted the cover on one of the armchairs. “Is the job permanent?”
“As permanent as anything is these days.” He didn’t say it was a new start, that there was no going back and nothing for him here.
“Will you be able to manage?”
How well he knew that casual undermining, and how much he hated her for it. Capable of hating this frail woman, her face faded with age, tissues poking from under her sleeve. She had no curiosity about anything beyond her ken and used the weapons available to her, none more so than her meekness. He could feel no tenderness for her. She was the wronged party, he the offender.
“It must get very cold there.”
“Yes, it does.”
He spent the night in his old room. The pattern of rings on the bedside table reminded him of nights with cups of instant coffee as he read into the early hours. The drawer in the bedside table contained a key for a bicycle lock long since lost and a pocket-sized German dictionary he had once used for an unremembered purpose.
Lying awake in the soft bed, he watched the dawn through a gap in the curtains and fell asleep.
* * *
An overcast morning, mottled sky pressing down remorselessly. Identical stone houses hunkered down in distant fields. A misty wind from the west combed the long grass.
He found Lucy tied to a post under metal sheeting that provided shelter from the rain. His mother had put a large plastic basin lined with an old towel beside the bowls. Lucy would adapt, life in the country was better for a border collie.
He fixed a leaking tap, turned the mattresses and rehung the blinds in the bathroom. There were forms to fill relating to his mother’s pension. She handed him a pile of bank statements, and he was surprised to see how much was in her account. He cut the hedges and weeded the flower beds.
“Do you need anything else?”
“There’s a local man I can get to do odd jobs,” she said, withdrawing into her martyrdom.
A last meal, sausages with home-made brown bread.
“You’ll hardly be back for Christmas?”
“You never know.” But he did know; he wouldn’t be back at Christmas, or the following Christmas.
He retreated to the bedroom, repacked his bag, and took a final look into the front room. The empty glass from the night before stood on the coffee table.
It was time to leave. He returned to the kitchen. The door to the pantry stood ajar.
“It’s getting late,” he called out.
She emerged from the pantry, carrying a plate with a slice of Swiss roll. Her resignation was a scourging reproach, but he couldn’t summon any empathy.
She held out her farewell offering. "Have some cake."
He sat in silence as she poured tea. There was nothing left for him to say, no words that would make any difference. She spoke about a neighbour in hospital and two others who had died. He nodded and added more milk to cool the tea so he could drink it quickly.
“I need to get a move on.”
No goodbyes or parting embrace. He left her with her corrosive loneliness.
The gravel underfoot sounded unnaturally loud. It took forever to get the key in the car door. He dropped the bag on the passenger seat.
As he drove away, he waved to the front door, his head averted but he knew she was there. At the bottom of the road, he stopped the car to attach his seat belt. Looking in the rearview mirror, the house was hidden from view.
Back on the main road, he pushed the CD into its slot.
Long ago but the memories linger
Four days from now, he would be in Toronto, taking in his new surroundings. A walk along the lakefront to get his bearings, everything new and unencumbered, the urban skyline replete with promise.
My mind keeps running back to those days in County Clare
Something caught his eye on the floor of the passenger side. A well-chewed rubber bone, Lucy’s favourite toy. In his rush to leave, he hadn’t taken her for a walk.
He had gone more than twenty miles, passing signs for Nenagh. Too far to turn back. He pulled over at a gateway and stared at the road ahead. Reaching for the controls, he ejected the CD. The car was silent, but the song continued.
The sun shone bright on old Scariff town
All that remains is sweet bitter
About the Author
Mark Keane has taught for many years in universities in North America and the UK. Recent short story fiction has appeared in Midsummer Dream House, Avalon Literary Review, Bards and Sages Quarterly, Cape Magazine, Empyrean Literary Magazine, Seppuku, Shooter, untethered, Night Picnic, upstreet, Granfalloon, Liquid Imagination, Into the Void, Firewords, and Dog and Vile Short Fiction. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.