I tell him, patting his chest. He laughs and squeezes me, and kisses the top of my head. But he knows that I’m not joking, and that the O’Leary boys are to be his new project.
Bill falls asleep, and I lie awake, with the four O’Learys walking around in circles in my mind. I can’t imagine what Peggy has been through. First thing in the morning, I’ll call to Ciara and arrange for Peggy to go down and see her pups again. Maybe I’ll even arrange for her to take one home with her. On a heavy breath, I fall asleep, and dream that the devil comes in and washes his hands in my sink, and lies down on my spare bed. And I watch from the doorway, and let him at it.
Jack
I SHOULD HAVE GONE DOWNto the Nevans the other night. Tom and Anna came home so energised. I was sick with the jealousy, I was. They always seem to be one step ahead of me. Already digging themselves out of your grave. Turning to face the sun, moving past our old lives like they never happened. And I am still working out the difference between wanting to move on and actually moving on. Stagnant, perhaps even moving in the wrong direction.
Anna sits across the room from me, a sewing needle between her lips. She has given up making curtains for now and started fixing a tear in my shirt. Each time the needle pierces her thumb, I feel it. Fat flesh, filled up with her life, just waiting for a puncture to break the tension. Some of the blood she sucks away, some she lets stain the shoulder of my shirt. Perhaps she is trying to show the world that I belong to her; to the family. Perhaps she is trying to show the world that she has so little regard for me that she would bleed onto my clothes. Really, it doesn’t matter much what she means to say, because what Anna means to say is seldom what comes across.
She was so chipper after meeting the Nevans, but every day since, she has become more diluted. And with each passing day, it seems less and less likely that we’ll hear from them again. I suppose we wereterrible hosts, really, serving them raw food over an argument. Now she is reverting to the way that she was before meeting them, which must be even harder than it was before, because now she knows that there are good things here, which are out of her reach.
Look at her now, frowning at what’s left of her thread. She is so like Mammy when she frowns. When Anna goes quiet like this, I know exactly what she’s thinking. It’s the same thing that I sometimes allow myself to think. That we should go back to Kilmarra. That we should stop forcing Ballycrea to feel like home, because it doesn’t, and it never will.
All that we left there. Its pink evening skies. Our home. Make a sound, love, and I’ll follow your voice back. And I’ll tend to the pigs and look after your auld lad. I will see a real sunset and feel innately that I belong.
Anna sighs, because just like me, she knows that we aren’t going back to Kilmarra. I’m trying to remember how I felt when I saw things through Tom’s eyes, and I agreed that a fresh start was just what we needed. I’m really trying to get back to that feeling. Perhaps if we had something to look forward to. Perhaps the issue is that we aren’t counting down to anything, or excited for anything. We are just moving further and further away from when things felt good. From the garden, I hear Peggy begin to sing ‘I Feel Fine’, in her little Cork accent, with the words half right. I can’t listen to it. Okay, let me try something. Let me be energised by people, as she was by Betty Nevan.
‘Here, Anna, did you meet anyone nice at John Moore’s? I thought the Doyle girls seemed alright.’
Her big, glowering eyes stuck on me, as though I will slip out the door while she considers the Doyles. I want to tell her not to worry, I want to tell her that I’m going nowhere. I want to tell her a lot of things.Mainly, that I’m too fragile to be cross, and that for the moment, I forgive every bad thing she has ever done to me. I want her to make me strong again. So strong that I could hate her.
‘They’re just a year or two younger than us, I think. They seem nice enough.’
She swallows the spit in her mouth like it is thick as mud. Normally, I would be prepared to settle into her dismissal, but not today. It’s not easy to look at your siblings and realise that you’ve all grown up, and grown apart. I don’t know when it happened, but Anna changed; I don’t know how to talk to her anymore. Once, I was her closest friend. Now, I feel like an annoying guest in her house, outstaying my welcome.
‘Maybe we could all go out together? I could ask them. It might suit us better than sitting in the cottage all the time.’
She is trying to ignore me. I can see it in the whitening tips of her fingers on the needle. If she wasn’t my sister, I would be humiliated trying to fight for her attention this way.
‘He has my heart broken, Mammy.’
She whispers. I absolutely hate it when she talks to Mammy like that. We would all like to have a conversation with Mammy, of course we would. But all Anna is doing is talking to herself. I don’t consider myself a violent man, but enough of that whispering could certainly incite violence in me. I have to hurry past it.
There is a small part of me that is keen to meet the Doyle girls without Anna there. A part that would love to go out and meet two pretty sisters. The rest of me, the most of me, is just afraid of what will happen if I stay isolated forever.
‘Don’t ask them, Jack. You can’t be asking a pair of sisters to go out with you. It wouldn’t look right.’
She doesn’t want me getting close to anybody. It’s like she knows I want to move on, and she wants to stop me.
‘No, we could go out the four of us. Make a few friends like. We can leave Tom and Peg here.’
Always the victim, tears in her eyes already. She makes it hard to talk to her. Wouldn’t it be sweet to lash out and show her what she’s like? To remind her that if you had asked, she would have jumped at the chance to meet the Doyle sisters. It isn’t that I’m after romance, just a bit of company like. Can you blame me? I want to feel the buzz of meeting people, but she doesn’t want to let me.
‘Don’t ask them, Jack. Just don’t. Alright?’
Like she’s trying to protect me from myself. Like she knows something I don’t. But then she smiles at me, this funny little sneer, just like she had in the cart when we first came into Ballycrea. And I see that true version of her once more, briefly. Glimmers of who she used to be remind me of who I used to be. She comes and goes; and when she is here, it feels like the sort of day when winter suddenly becomes spring. Reminding me that I grew up feeling wildly inferior to her, and that all of her excellence still lingers, somewhere. How I miss that inferiority. How I miss my sister. I don’t mind the humiliation of trying once more.
‘Why can’t I ask them?’
If I push my way to the centre of her, perhaps all that she has built up will crumble. But just as I start to bring myself close to her, and consider asking her an honest question, perhaps even confronting the real issue, I see Tom coming up the garden path.
‘Leave it there now, Jack. You know what he’ll say.’
Anna
I WAS NEVER SO GLADto see Tom’s face at the window. Haven’t we only just had your anniversary, and Jack wants to go out meeting women? I shouldn’t have to tell him why that’s inappropriate. The old Jack is creeping out again. The way he was before you, a divil for the drink and the women and never without the boys. We all thought that the time you had Jack was the making of him. It slowed him down, grew him up. He dropped the bravado, you know? It was a relief to see him settled. These days, it seems he is unmaking himself. Regressing to the half adult he was before you matured him. I suppose he doesn’t know what to do with himself anymore.
‘Well, well!’
