The other man whirled around and hit him in the shoulder with his fist.
“Give over, for the love of Jases, Finbarr!” He waved the package. “Do you think we’re doing this for entertainment value, is it? You’re such a gobshite sometimes. Here I am, getting you in on this like I used to get you in in London, and look at you-”
“Hey! Don’t fucking preach at me. We’re in it together!”
“Well, don’t you be slagging me about her! And don’t be swilling that stuff on the job either!”
“What job?” He pointed the bottle toward the cottage. “Sure my work is done for today. I can take a drink if I want to. We’re not up to anything tonight. What’s the big deal, so?”
“Just don’t be firing off that gun here.”
“No one can hear us up here, only the birds-”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s just a bad habit to treat it so casual is what I’m saying.”
“Bad habit! Hah! Look who’s telling me about bad habits!”
He tightened his grip on the package and watched his friend laugh and turn away. Something gave way in him then, and he felt the anger drop out of his chest. They had shared digs together, fallen into taxis pissed together, taken the mail-boat home together. His friend had only started going on the drink lately, really. No girlfriend…
“Well, is she still the holy terror she was the last time?” he heard him ask. If anyone was entitled to take the mickey out of him, it was Finbarr.
“She’s worse,” he murmured, the anger completely gone now. “I’m worn out.”
“Oh, you boy, you! Did she? Tell me, go on. What did she want this time?”
If only he’d act a bit more serious even.
“You’re such a cowboy, do you know that?” he muttered. “One of these days…”
He glared at his smiling, tipsy friend who stood now with his feet spread wide, swaying slightly while he looked out over the hedges to the rocky heights. Christ, he thought, the opposite of scenic. What the hell did foreigners want to visit here for?
“Come on,” he called out, anxious to shed the feeling which seemed ready to settle on him like the evening waiting close by. “Come on and we’ll put the stuff back. Get a pint in town.”
With the suburban Dublin traffic behind them, Minogue drove the Fiat fast along the Galway Road. He had had little trouble persuading Kathleen to go the Galway Road. Dinner in Galway city, a walk around the streets and then down to the farm by tea-time. Even with the new, widened stretches of roadway and the bypasses, he still considered Clare a long way off. The weeks of rain had deepened the colour of the grasses and left the air clear. He thought of last night’s Hallowe’en callers. It was either the effect of the Spanish wine or the fluorescent brightness of the cloth, but he had ranked a mummy as the best costume and given it the extra propitiation of a fifty-pence piece. How many years since Daithi and Iseult had gone out on Hallowe’en? Space blended with time as the countryside rolled by the Fiat. He thought of trips he had made all these years. When the kids were babies: that time Daithi had them up half the night with teething and he had forgotten to bring enough changes of clothes…
With his backside numb, Minogue piloted the Fiat through Athlone toward the River Shannon. He nudged Kathleen when they reached the middle of the bridge.
“Now we’re in business,” he said. “We’re in God’s country now, madam.”
She looked up from her magazine at the Shannon. Black and wide, it idled toward Limerick and the sea.
“‘To hell or to Connaught,’” she murmured.
“Typical Dublin gurrier remark,” he said, and nudged her harder. “It’s west of the Shannon where civilisation actually starts, woman.”
She flicked the magazine upright.
“Huh. You’re beginning to sound like Jimmy Kilmartin more and more.”
They had had a half-bottle of wine with a not-bad dinner of chicken in Galway city. He negotiated an hour in the hotel foyer with a pot of coffee and the paper and very nearly fell asleep, but Kathleen prodded him to go out in the streets. Minogue liked Galway very much. He sensed that this City of the Tribes, this mecca for the travelling people of the West of Ireland, was infused with a vigour and abandon due to the immensity of the Atlantic at the ends of its streets. Its visitors were in keen and anticipatory transit, passing a little time here in this portal city.
A poster of a starving child, black, naked and bloated, caught his eye in a shop window. Famine Stalks Africa Again was printed in fading black letters atop the poster. Large, glassy eyes returned the Inspector’s stare. On the bottom was the follow-up. “Famine knows no borders. Give to Concern this Sunday.” Hoey, he thought then. Cheer him up with a phone call from his home county. And gather up any gossip without having to fence with Kilmartin. He found a phone in the post office. Eilis answered.
“No, he hasn’t checked in. Might be the flu. Or something.”
The irony in her halting utterance suggested to him that she too believed Hoey might have been on a batter and was too hung over. Or still pissed. Try him at home? No. Talk straight to him when he got back to Dublin, before Jimmy Kilmartin came to the boil about it and jumped on Hoey first.
A rising wind in from the sea brought more clouds. Minogue carried the cake and bottle of sparkling wine Kathleen had bought to the car, and they headed out of the city. They crossed into Clare a half-hour later and Minogue turned inland off the Coast Road. The road narrowed and the Fiat began its gradual ascent through the Burren. As Minogue drove slowly through the limestone wilderness, the masses of stone began to exercise a subtle effect on him. He imagined that they were all there was to the world, that the earth had been petrified and worn down into this landscape. Not even glimpses of distant green lowlands between the hills broke the spell. He thought of the miles of caves beneath him, few of them mapped, which had been carved out by the underground waters. Hours and even days after rain, the further reaches of the caves flooded without warning, emerging as wells and ponds that appeared and drained enigmatically over days or weeks or years.
The votive wells and springs near the farm still flowed. His sister, home from Toronto on a visit several years ago, had brought her youngest, Kevin-a gangling, sceptical and embarrassed North American kid-to Tobar Dearg, the Red Well, for an asthma cure, he recalled. Next to the well was the cillin, a children’s burial ground. For many years Minogue had thought of asking Kathleen if they could rebury Eamonn here amongst this tight cluster of stones. He had never actually talked to her about it. The idea of exhuming their infant son, gone a quarter of a century now, and bringing that small coffin west across Ireland would be too much for her, he believed.
“Not enough earth to bury a man,” he murmured as they breasted a hill. “Not enough timber to hang him. Not enough water to drown him.”
“Name of God.” Kathleen elbowed him. She sat forward in the seat and looked hard at him.
“It’s just a saying about the Burren-”
“Can’t you come up with something a bit more, I don’t know…cheerful, man? Look up in the sky-the sun is shining. Finally get a bit of weather! Cheer up!”
Minogue nodded at the stricken uplands continuing to unfold around the car.
“Cheerful? All right. ‘Holy Mary of the Fertile Rock.’”
“Fertile Rock? What sense does that make?”
“That’s the dedication the monks put on Corcomroe Abbey back in the twelfth century or so-”
He felt the car slowing a little. A soft bump alerted him.
“Here, why are you stopping here?”
“We have a puncture. The back seat on my side.”
Kathleen followed him out onto the road and looked at the tyre. Minogue rummaged in the boot.
“Do you want help?” she asked.
“No, thanks.”
She stepped over to the remains of a drystone wall and looked through a gap between the ridges across Galway Bay at the Connemara mountains. Minogue bent to loosen the nuts before placing the jack. Aware of her watching him now, he stopped and looked over at her. A breeze caught her hair and swept it down over her forehead. She made to smile but a frown spread across her face instead. Her gaze wandered away to the heights inland. Worried, he thought. What was she thinking about?
One of the nuts was very tight and he paused several times to secure his grip. He felt himself being watched but, when he turned to Kathleen, her back was to him. He looked over the rocks. Nobody. The nut gave way
