Malarky (16 page)

Not much to boast of this library, but like the train comfortable as long as you get a seat. Four hours can pass in the company of a sniffing farmer or a factory worker, in on her tea break, to borrow the novels everyone wants to read. Except Our Woman. Plagued with query she is, yet when she sinks herself into the chair, her anxiety settles until she departs. It's regretful she ever has to leave the library at all, many's the day she'd like to stay put and be allowed to mould away to her own finality.

Officially she's here on the strict business of horse related procurement and pony knowledge, but drifts to books on Middle Eastern architecture instead. Her brain snuggling them intention-less. Nestling for a place to rest. Other library patrons wonder about her chosen books too. Since this is rural Mayo, people huff-to-ya, puff to-ya and comment: that a good buk is it? Usually they announce on the weather. It's gone very cold they might say, like this has happened in the past 10 minutes unbeknownst to you. Sometimes they extend a quip about what you're holding. Very often they complain about the state of the country. These are the welcome interruptions of rural life. You wouldn't want people to leave you alone entirely as you might forget you are alive. Somedays it could pass over you entirely. A woman, the cousin of a woman, she hasn't seen for a long time, asks after her: you often meet people you haven't seen for a long time at the library, like they're hiding away in here from you. And the inquiry about what she's reading or the coughing, the sniffing or throat clearing of some one beside her and the odd beam that escapes across the table of what they call in the news these days
foreign
nationals. Folk who have done her much less harm than her own husband has.

One of her fleeting Ballyhaunis Bacon moments has just scraped by her, when the pork of her husband's action clouts her forcefully out of nowhere and she finds brief comfort in the thought of him, entering the factory to have his flesh separated from his bones for betraying her the way he has. Stood in a queue is often when such thoughts slap her.

It's sleets through her and is gone. They go these moments.

She reminds herself, she's up beside him now. Awakened and sat at a more accurate breakfast table tho' it's uncomfortable on her elbows and conscience.

Today, opposite her, as she admired the photographs in The Land and People of Syria in the Portrait of Nations series, (She'd already read Libya and Nigeria) a young man, with dark skin, snatched a repeated gander over at the spine of her book. Our Woman obliged him, lifting it up on the table, so he can catch the title. Approach, she willed him, go on and approach.

—You're reading this book? Have you been in my country?

For two full hours, she had sat, desperate to go to the toilet, pondering that incontinence can visit women as they age with a sneeze and the state of Bina's kidneys, but not daring to lift from the seat lest he venture her way. There will be murder at the house, she'll never have the dinner made in time and Himself'll be in, hungry, looking for it.

She shook her head, no, noh she hasn't. Closed the book, but hastily he dropped beside her, put his hand out to take it. Opened it to a map, his thumb – and she noted he has a perfect thumb, a young thumb with a clean nail, no nicks to his cuticle

– pressed along a river as he recited guttery towns, until he finds the one he's after.

—This is where I was born, the young smile. He is handsome, his eyes are bright, he was not born here in Ballina that was all she cared about.

—Is that right? She could hear the language of inquiry return.

For someone to have been born inside the book she's reading, that's worthwhile. That these tiny mapped blotches have as much significance to Syria as Shraheen or Cloghans have to the entire island of Ireland. She'd looked at this book many times on the shelf, but never dared touch it. There was something about the word Syria, always uttered in hostility and it has brought something decidedly softer along to her today.

She peered again at that depressed thumb, it's tiny pouch of browned flesh spread on that page, now she's interested.

She cannot believe this. She watched the clock, counted the minutes to see how long would he stay beside her. How long could she keep him from his actual life?

He was lost in his story as he traced it in the book. Though fascinated by the manner in which his hands navigate the page, she contemplated his face. He was youngish. She needed youth. Youth was her way to understanding. Unfamiliar youth. It was kneeling right beside her. Patience, quiet now, she told herself, take care not to scare the living daylights of him, aging lady.

And on he talked.

Comfortable he talked.

He talked as if he'd needed a chat for an awful long time, the words queued up to discharge out of him. Stunned into silence by his company. Company that couldn't last.

Within two months I had moved to Al-Qunaitara. It's famous for its fruit trees. And he continues his thumb-tracing-trajectory. In my ninth year
my father
had some problems. At 11, my mother died.
I was sent to
live with my aunt in the North and he found the spot, his voice ceased and somehow he became aware of the fluorescent lights and the cramp in his knee from kneeling and she noticed he was wearing a security guard uniform. Can he take the seat beside her? She flipped pages back.

—It's the people I like, she offered, I like imagining their lives. The weather looks hot. She lifted pages rapidly back to a green shirted man near the front cover: what's this bread he's selling?

The book rotated diagonal, but his head shook. I don't know. Some kind
of
. . . maybe the man is Assyrian. She agreed he looks like an Assyrian, she'd have agreed he looked like a
man in the Texaco ad if this fella'd stop here alongside her. I think this bread is from the West, he said. The equivalent of O'Hara's fruitcake or a scone, she thought. (Hannah, a woman in her gang, cleans their machinery in the local bakery each night 'til 2am.)

There was a lull between them now that demanded the question: Why did you come to Ireland? Or what are you doing here? But she won't delve into that bucket and opted to let such wondering dissolve into the carpet, where she placed her gaze. They sat, examining pictures, silent, together.

Something in the carpeting of small town libraries absorbed her questions and wondering. She can't deliver them. She caught his eye instead, said nothing, let him turn the page and they continued examining pictures, not speaking. He could be good, she thought. Very good. But how were they to get from bread and bakeries and Assyrians to the place Red the Twit and her husband dived.

Slowly, slowly, now or you'll frighten him.

—We hear an awful lot of auld rubbish about your country, she told him, but I've never believed a word of it. A lie, necessary, she'd rarely thought about his country, let peace be fostered here. And he relented, offered the beam she's hoped for, the grin that said welcome. Come on in. Enter, she thought. She was ready.

By the time he rose, he expressed a strong hope he'd see her again. I am often here, she said. Sure you know where to find me. It's light, polite and specific. Find me, it said.

That evening, she scrutinizes her husband.

Took a good long drink of him. She hasn't examined him closely for years, his familiar features have blended into each
other so much that all he amounts to now are a few ambling limbs and a bobbing head. Tonight she observes him closely. She will understand how his skin ticks. And into which dark corners his brain extends. She considers their lovemaking. Every few months or maybe longer, a hand, his hand, comes across her chest to collect her and tweak her nipple, sharply like he's opening a valve. No longer than 10 minutes start to finish. She's glad of it. She read in a magazine that once there's none of it at all, a marriage is utterly sunk. Their marriage is not sunk so. She has always considered it quality.

Too much participation from her, unsettles Himself. Say she grabs for him, he'll readjust himself beyond her reach. It takes him a long time, half the minutes, to find his way in, there's a degree of squishing below, against her thigh, for which she cannot identify a purpose, but once in – and sometimes he misses – he mooches about for a bit and just as she's registered his arrival, it isn't long before he's gone. Slack, rolled off her. After he's very silent, like his vocal chords have been sawn in half. Either he's exhausted from it or this man, her husband, cannot have undertaken the acts this woman, Red, insists he did.

She tries to calculate how he'd sustain himself to perform the plethora of moves Red described and wonders would his back hold up? The maths does not tally. Yet, wait now, she recalls how surprising that her own triangular shape did not put the sales man off. The way she'd laid like the lid removed from the biscuit tin. How could that entice? They're like dogs these fellas, they'd take a sniff of any old passing rump. Literally stick their noses square into it, she thinks. Angry. Betrayed. Squashed. Determined.

She must succeed at, what this woman claims, her husband did.