Leaving, walking home, I catch a glimpse of something glorious in the night. My heart, at once soaring and plummeting, when I lose my breath at the sight of Teresa Doyle, emptying the bins beside her father’s pub. I walk faster, hoping she hasn’t seen me. It isn’t that I don’t want to talk to her, it’s just she would be too much right now. I’m supposed to be missing you, I can’t handle the creeping interest I have in Teresa.
‘Goodnight, Jack.’
She calls after me. As I ignore her, I feel the sort of shame I often felt after making love, or shouting at Anna, or doing anything to expressmyself. It’s embarrassing, to embrace the feelings so intensely.
At home, Peggy sleepily strokes the chicken, Anna is boiling eggs. Tom sits up against the wall, and I sit in alongside him. I let my head fall on his shoulder, and he welcomes me. No questions. No worries. This unusual proximity is no hassle to him at all. Just a brother minding his brother. I let myself relax, and smell the tobacco off him, and remember a time when I smelled like that. Maybe I’ll take up the smoking again. Maybe that would put me back in touch with who I once was. It might at least take the edge off evenings like these.
I’m alright, amn’t I? I’ve my brother and a familiar smell. I’ve a place to put my head down. It’s more than I had back in the church. It’s more than some people have in their whole life.
‘Roll me a fag there, will you?’
I ask, lifting my head just long enough to see the hair in his nostril twitch, and he puts on a stern face and shakes his head.
‘Not a hope. You’ve fine clean lungs now.’
And while I drop a big, heavy sigh on his shoulder, I feel such great love in his denial. He’s looking out for me. For a moment, he puts his arm around me, squeezing and slapping my shoulder, reassuring me.
‘You’re alright, boy.’
I suppose he knows where I’ve been tonight. He doesn’t bother plastering on a smile, but he is here for me now. From this angle, he is the spit of Daddy. In more than many ways, he is just like Daddy. I suppose, in many ways, he is my daddy now.
‘I’m alright.’
And I let myself sink further into his shoulder, forgetting the cigarette and the embarrassment I felt walking home. Forgetting the sting of your absence, and the sting of Teresa’s presence. Feeling only the fire before us and his rough geansaí on my cheek. If Tom wants to look after me, I’ll let him.
Tom
PICKING STONES FROM BILL’S FRONTfield, I cannot help but think of Daddy. He used to have me picking stones from dawn on Saturdays. I’d leave his land without even the dust that would one day form a stone. Spotless clay, sparkling crops. He would sit Jack up in the cart and let him do the ploughing. Even though I was older. Even though I wanted to do it.
‘Jack wouldn’t pick half as many stones as you, Tommy.’
He used to always say. That was it then; I wasn’t allowed to argue with that. It always seemed stupid to me that a buck of my size would be reduced to the childish labour of picking stones, while a little rake like Jack was allowed to command the plough. I wonder did Jack realise how much it bothered me. I wonder did Daddy.
I see the back of the postman, Rob Keating, as a flash of colour cycling away up the hill.
‘You’ve a delivery here, Bill!’
Betty calls out to us from the house. It’s a glittering sort of day. Normally, Bill wouldn’t stop for the post, but today he seems excited. As though receiving post is a new and radical concept. He drops his pick and motions for me to follow.
A crate up on the table, stuffed with newspaper. Bill beaming at it. Obviously it is something he has been expecting. I feel wrong watching,as though his wonderful crate is private and should be enjoyed when I am gone home. Perhaps I should offer to leave.
But Betty pulls out a chair for me. She puts the water on and makes us all coffee. Bill takes off his coat, sweating in the cold.
‘Bill, will you leave those boots at the door and don’t be walking dirt into my house!’
Her shrill voice. I kick off my own boots before she starts at me. Bill uses a bar to pull the lid off the crate. We are faced with clothes, jars of tea, marmalade and lemon curd, and three pieces of a glowing fruit that I have never seen before.
‘This is what James sent over!’
Betty peers over his shoulder into the box, from Bill’s brother in Northampton, reaching in to feel the fabric of the clothes that have come. She reads the note to herself, and then a portion out loud to us, which says,
‘The peppers may be on the turn now, though hopefully the airmail was quick enough that you’ll get to taste them. In any case, they are filled with seeds which you should try to cultivate.’
‘You can’t get these in the shops at all.’
Bill says, and I never saw him happier, or prouder, as he reaches into the crate for one of the peppers. Feeling, for a moment, connected to his brother, all the way in England. And I suddenly feel inferior to this foreign food, and I aspire to be it. Isn’t that sad?
‘Peppers,’ he says, taking one in his hand and turning it over. ‘’Tis veg.’
