‘We had to,’ protested Brendan, banging the gearstick into reverse, ‘you can’t be stand-offish in this business.’
It wasn’t long until they came to the grotto on the outskirts of Buleen. Ali craned forward to look at the town. They passed the church first, a big Italian-style basilica the colour of strawberry ice-cream.
‘I see God’s sticking with pink,’ said Ali.
‘Man!’ said Davy. ‘I could sell a machine to Father Philbin to put in a side chapel. That’d bring in the young folk all right.’
‘In your arse.’
They drove down the wide village street. Brendan slowed the van and stopped outside a tiny pub with the name Melody over the door.
‘Won’t Auntie Una be waiting for me?’
‘No rush,’ said Davy, opening the door.
‘It’s business,’ said Brendan. ‘I’m trying to persuade them into a CD jukebox. C’mon.’
Ali let them go ahead. She wanted to just look at the place. Buleen hadn’t changed much from her last quick visit, down for Granddad’s funeral five years before. A little fancier maybe – the hotel had been freshly whitewashed, and frothing hanging baskets flanked the door. A blackboard was propped beside it with a list of dishes that made her mouth water: poached salmon, chicken casserole, lasagne. She’d eaten nothing but a packet of crisps since breakfast.
When she went into Melody’s she had to stop for a moment to let her eyes adjust to the dimness. Brendan was at a back table with two pints and a glass of lager. Davy was at the counter, talking with Mr Melody. She went to sit with Brendan.
He put his pint down, adjusted the beer mat under it, cleared his throat with a cough. ‘Are you all right? After what happened … are you okay in yourself?’
‘Yeah, thanks. I’d rather forget about it, though.’
Brendan nodded, pushed the beer mat again.
Davy was shaking hands with the barman, telling him, ‘You won’t regret it.’
‘I don’t fucking believe it,’ said Brendan under his breath.
Davy joined them, lifted his pint and gave Brendan a toothy grin.
‘You bastard,’ said Brendan, ‘he’s going to take the jukebox?’
‘Nothing to it – this is why you need me: persuasion is my particular gift.’ Davy sank his lips into the cream of his pint.
‘You couldn’t manage to get a job for yourself in Dublin,’ said Ali, lighting up a fag.
Melody’s was not the kind of pub where a jukebox would look at home. Dusty bottles of lime and lemon cordial stood beside a ceramic Johnnie Walker striding out in his top hat and cane, and the lino was studded with decades of cigarette burns. Through the door at the back of the bar you could see tea towels and pillowcases hung to dry over a range in the Melody family kitchen.
‘I said he could select his own music from a list of thousands of CDs and I’d give him his own free code, so he could play it to himself whenever he wanted.’
Brendan struggled to keep his voice down. ‘Then he’ll tell the regulars and we’ll make nothing.’
‘He won’t – he hates giving anything away.’
Ali looked up at the bit of blue sky visible through the clear panes of glass above the window shutters. Brendan was telling Davy about the record decks he’d got cheap, how he was setting up as a DJ on the side. Mr Melody polished the bar surface with a cloth. It was so still that her smoke settled in a thin layer just above their heads.
Davy rippled through it as he went up to get another round.
‘Business is going to boom, Bren, now that I’m on board,’ he said on his return. ‘The old Davy Brennan magic touch.’
‘Not so magic in all areas, is it?’
Davy gave his nephew a cool look, took a deep swallow of his pint.
‘What?’ said Ali. ‘What?’
‘Didn’t he tell you he’s been unlucky in love?’
‘Shut the fuck.’ Davy turned his face away. He hadn’t mentioned anything about a girlfriend, ever.
When Brendan suggested a third drink, she managed to persuade them against it, insisted she needed to eat. The light was already fading when they got outside. She was wondering where she had left her purse, when Davy thrust it into her hands.
‘The food in the hotel looks nice,’ she said.
‘Dunno,’ said Brendan, ‘never been in – it’s just for tourists.’
They climbed back into the van and Brendan steered a fast U-turn, then turned left over the old bridge and out onto the road that gradually swept them a field’s distance from the river. She recognised little landmarks along the way – the ruined chapel, the cattle mart, the brutal concrete of the handball alley in front of Glinchy’s farm. Dark squares of pine plantation patched the hills over towards Ennisbridge.
In a minute she would be at the farm, Caherbawn, with a bathroom and food and afterwards a bed to lie on. She could make out the white gate posts ahead, but instead of turning up the driveway, Brendan drove past it and pulled into a rough track about a hundred yards beyond.
‘You don’t want to go to the old folks yet,’ said Brendan, ‘you want to see Davy’s new place first.’
She looked at Davy, but he didn’t seem to be paying attention to anything. They bumped up the track and stopped in front of a new bungalow, identical to thousands of others throughout the country, a low grey shoebox with a brown tile roof and nothing to recommend it beyond the cheapness of the build. This one wasn’t quite finished. The breezeblock foundations were left bare, and the ground around it was churned mud, baked into ruts by the summer heat. A lone oak tree rose from the wasteland, a couple of its lower limbs roughly lopped. Ali suddenly recognised the site as the place where the farm’s stables used to stand, home to an ancient carthorse and her cousin Roisín’s envied pony, Skipper.
‘So where does Skipper live?’ said Ali,
