Solace (3 page)

None of this, Mark had quickly discovered, was valuable at all. It was nothing better than local gossip, and it could not help him get to the core of his central argument, if he could even
remember what his central argument was. ‘Promising’: that was how his supervisor, McCarthy, had described it at first; later, ‘promising’ was downgraded to
‘interesting’, and later still ‘interesting’ became ‘tentative’, and Mark was not eager to know what McCarthy’s current assessment was. But he had to get
him the chapter; without the chapter, he risked losing his funding, that complicated marriage of university, departmental and government money, which, put together, allowed him to live a little
more comfortably than he suspected a graduate student in Anglo-Irish literature should. Getting it for another year depended on getting McCarthy’s signature on the renewal form – which
could only happen, McCarthy had warned Mark, if the second chapter arrived before McCarthy left for his annual month in West Cork. And as Mark watched his housemate, Mossy, return from the bar with
yet another round, he knew the chances of securing McCarthy’s autograph were fading fast.

Walking with Mossy was Niall Nagle. Mark had known him when they were undergrads in Trinity – he was the guy who was always sitting, yammering, on the desk of some female business student
in the library – but he had barely seen him since, and he was surprised to see him now, and to hear that he and Mossy were deep in conversation about the rugby. Nagle must have just come from
the match: he was wearing the polo shirt with a bank’s name plastered across the chest – a chest that was looking, these days, almost as generous as those of the girls whose desks he
had haunted in the Lecky. With a paunch to match. He was telling Mossy something about backs, how hard they had to work, how much brainpower had to go into every move. ‘Contrary to popular
impression,’ he said, and took a swig from his bottle of Miller. He had always been like that in college: a vocabulary like a radio pundit. How did Mossy still know this guy? How had they
stayed in touch? And since when did Mossy care anything for rugby? He had always, like Mark, been contentedly indifferent to sports. It might matter to him fiercely whenever Clare reached an
All-Ireland final, but everything else he ignored. Mark, meanwhile, came from a county where the teams barely lasted a month into the season, so it was a rare Sunday that Micheál Ó
Muircheartaigh’s commentary – like a cattle auctioneer let loose in Croke Park – became part of the soundtrack. But now here was Mossy, talking about this match as intensely as
though he had been in the dug-out in Lansdowne Road.

To Mark, it was a mystery. But then, so much about Mossy was, even after six years of sharing a place with him. The people in Mossy’s life were a mixed bag, seduced and snuck and stolen
from the many lives Mossy seemed, already, to have passed through. A year ago he had been writing a master’s thesis on de Valera, quickly abandoned; a year before that he had been temping in
a borrowed suit at the Stock Exchange on Anglesea Street; a few years before that, he had been backpacking in an Argentina where money was suddenly worth nothing. And now he was working in a
self-proclaimed arthouse DVD store on George’s Street, shelving cases and calling in late returns and coming home with subtitled films and stories of the customers he dealt with: the widows
and widowers in need of something to get them through the day; the new couples trying to impress each other; the Indian guys looking for Ben Affleck films; the porn addicts, some of them showing up
twice or three times in the same day; the foreigners, looking for relief from the English language; the junkies, looking for a hidden corner.

‘I’m surprised to see you here on a day like this, Casey,’ Nagle shouted from across the table. He was smirking, lighting himself a cigarette. ‘Don’t you have hay
to make or something like that?’ he said. ‘Cows to milk, turf to stack, whatever it is you do down the sticks when the summer finally cops itself the fuck on?’

This was how Nagle had always addressed him back in Trinity; the same loud amusement at the idea of someone his own age, in his own college, choosing to spend so many of his weekends on a farm.
There were rugby matches to go to. Rugby bars to cram into. Rugby birds to pursue. What was Mark doing, driving tractors and testing cattle and shovelling shit-caked straw out of sheds? Nagle never
understood, but he never seemed to tire of asking, either.

‘Not this weekend,’ Mark said now, but he knew it would not be enough for Nagle.

‘Jesus, Casey, even when it’s lashing rain you seem to be down there fucking around at some animal or other. Sun’s splitting the stones today, and yet here you are, up to your
balls in beer. What, did you finally get them off your back? What, did your old lad die?’

Beside Nagle, Mossy shook his head in laughing disapproval. ‘Nagle, you bollocks.’

Nagle affected a wide-eyed look, the only effect of which was to accentuate his jowls. ‘What? It’s a fair assumption. Isn’t it, Casey? I mean, Jesus, I’m basically not
sure if I’ve ever seen you in the sunshine before.’

‘Right, right,’ Mark said, as drolly as he could.

‘I mean, for a while there, back in college, I was starting to look for fangs on this guy,’ Nagle said to Mossy. ‘No joke.’

‘You’re some tool,’ said Mossy, reaching for one of Nagle’s cigarettes. Mark could see Nagle noting this move as he inhaled, deciding to let it go as he blew the smoke
out in a formless cloud.

‘You ready for another?’ Mark nodded to Mossy’s glass. It was only half empty, but he wanted to get away. He took a long gulp of his own pint as though to justify the
question.

Mossy nodded. ‘I’ll go with you,’ he said. ‘I need smokes.’

‘Fucking right you do, Flanagan,’ Nagle said, snatching up his pack of Marlboro and turning his attention to the girls at the next table. ‘Beautiful day, ladies,’ he
said, to the back of one sleekly ponytailed head.

‘Arsehole,’ said Mossy, as they entered the cool darkness of the inside bar. In here, the place looked as it would at this time on any day, in any month of the year, a hard-chaw bar
on a hard-chaw street in inner-city Dublin, full of life-pocked locals, all scowls and silences and sagging midriffs, all watching – they all seemed to be watching – as Mark and Mossy
came in through the back door. But glancing up, Mark saw what they were actually watching: highlights of the rugby match on a huge television high on the wall. On the screen, a player was panting
and pawing at his gumshield.

‘When did everyone in this country start giving such a shit about rugby?’

Mossy shrugged. ‘Civilized times, man.’

The barman signalled to say he’d be over in a moment.

‘I didn’t realize you still knew Nagle,’ Mark said to Mossy, with more accusation in his tone than he’d intended. He cleared his throat. ‘What’s he up to,
these days?’

‘Over in one of the big banks on Stephen’s Green. Doing well for himself. Doing something suss with other people’s money. The usual.’

‘See much of him?’

‘The odd time,’ Mossy said. ‘Think whoever brought him in here today did a legger on him. He came up to me there at the bar like I was a brother of his back from the dead. Pure
relief to see someone he could talk to.’

Mark looked around the bar. ‘Probably afraid one of this crowd would go at him with a dirty syringe.’

‘No harm,’ Mossy said. ‘Though they’d have a job ramming it into that neck.’

The barman came to them, and Mark ordered the drinks. ‘He’s still as obsessed with my old lad’s farm as he ever was.’ He shook his head. ‘Prick.’

‘Yeah,’ Mossy said. ‘Though I have to say I was wondering the same thing myself.’

‘Wondering what?’

‘Well, y’know. This good weather. I mean, I was sure you’d be heading down home. I thought I’d be getting up to an empty house this morning.’

‘I have work on,’ Mark said, without looking at Mossy. ‘This deadline for McCarthy.’

‘Decent of them to leave you at it for a change.’

‘Five missed calls since yesterday evening.’

‘Fuck.’ Mossy whistled.

‘Yeah.’

‘Ah, man, that’s a hard old buzz. You didn’t chat them at all, no?’

‘Ah, yeah,’ Mark shook his head. ‘I mean, I talked to my mother this morning. Told her the score. She understood. I said I’d be down Tuesday.’

‘Good stuff.’

‘Good stuff as long as this weather holds,’ Mark said.

‘Well,’ Mossy said, with a wince, and then gestured apologetically over to the cigarette machine, as though it were an obligation he could not escape, as though he would much have
preferred to stay at the bar with Mark, reassuring him about the weather, about his chapter, about parents and the things they expected their sons to do. But, then, Mossy’s parents did not
expect their son to do things. Mossy’s parents were busy with their own lives, with the friends they had, with the trips they took, with the visits from their children that they sweetly
encouraged but would never demand.

‘I’ll just get these,’ Mossy said, and he was gone.

Mark settled closer in to the bar. The irritation he had felt at Nagle’s goading had faded, but still he was not keen to return to the beer garden, and to be alone with Nagle, even for the
length of time it would take for Mossy to return from buying his cigarettes. What he wanted, he realized, was for Mossy to go out there alone and start up a conversation with Nagle, a conversation
about anything, and for Mark to return to find the two of them absorbed in that subject, and to come in on it, and take part in it, mindlessly, for the rest of the evening, until the beer started
to really take hold, until it no longer mattered what anyone said, because nothing could get at you.

On the phone that morning, his mother had spoken in the vague, terse sentences that meant, he knew, that his father was in the room. His father had never been one to talk on the phone, but that
did not mean he relinquished his determination to know – and, as though by a sort of hypnosis, to control – what was being said and what was being agreed to at the other end of the
line. Mark had seen it countless times: his mother, standing at the kitchen counter where the phone was kept, trying to get the conversation over with, while his father sat nearby, his chin pushed
into his knuckles, his eyes roving the floor as he followed and weighed and dismantled every word – the words he could hear and the words at which he could only guess. It was a harmless
charade, really, comical half of the time, because half of the time his father got it all arseways: the imagined details, the assumed scenarios. He was bored, Mark knew; he craved news, craved some
new narrative to add to his day, and if, eavesdropping on Mark’s mother’s phone calls, he couldn’t glean that thing ready-made, he would invent it for himself.

And his father would long since have invented his own reasons for Mark’s decision to stay in Dublin that weekend despite the unfolding, on the farm, of the exact science they both knew so
well: this was the second day with clear skies and temperatures above the mid-twenties, the second day in what was forecast to be a five-day spell, and it was a July day, so the meadows would be at
their readiest, the ground would be baked firm. It was the day to cut, and tomorrow was the day to bale, and the next day was the day to gather, and without Mark, none of this could be done quickly
or easily. And yet Mark was staying away. And as the explanation for that fact, his father would either settle on something depressingly wrong – that it was something to do with a woman
– or depressingly right: that he was up shit creek with his college work. Though his father would add to the actual problem an extra dimension of crisis: Mark, he would decide, was on the
verge of losing not just his funding, but his place on the programme, his right to continue with his thesis, to walk through Front Arch and set foot on campus at all. He would be thrown out. He
would be disgraced in the eyes of Dublin. And the eyes of Dublin would be nothing compared to the eyes of home.

Mark knew that his PhD work, and any mention of it, held a power over both his parents; a power that was often very convenient for him. In the face of what his father insisted on calling
Mark’s ‘studies’, they became as quiet and uneasy as though they had opened a solicitor’s letter or answered the door to a guard. It was to them something alien,
unfathomable, something utterly intimidating, a degree beyond a degree, an essay that would take years of their son’s life, that would turn him, at the end of all, into something just as
alien and unfathomable: a university lecturer, a writer of books without storylines, papers without news.

The fact of his mother’s having nursed at the manor house had formed a thread of delighted connection between them, for a while. That first year of his thesis work, when he was still in
love with the idea of writing about Edgeworth, his mother had talked to him about the old house every weekend he came home; she had taken him to see the place, arranged for the caretaker to show
him the parts that had been least changed since the Edgeworths had sold it in the thirties. But there were hardly any such parts left, in truth. A surviving cornice, high in the men’s ward,
high over the hooped backs and the spittled mouths. A section of tiles in a little washroom off the maternity ward where, for years, the local women had screamed their babies into being. In the
room that had once been the library, the high columns still remained, but nothing else bore any resemblance to the old drawings of the room; it was now where the patients watched television,
gathered around the screen in their dressing-gowns.

Mark was disturbed by how thoroughly the traces of the Edgeworths had been knocked out of the place. Edgeworth had written all her books there; she had collaborated with her father there on all
their projects; she had helped, there, to raise and to educate her twenty-one siblings; she had learned, there, to get along with each of her father’s four wives. Walter Scott had come to
stay there, taking Edgeworth off with him on a tour of Killarney, and a few years later, Wordsworth had come to visit, in all his ‘slow, slimy, circumspect tiresome
lengthiness
’,
as Edgeworth had written in a letter to her aunt. It had been that place, and now it was just one more maze of wards and stairwells and hallways humming with the unmistakable smells of a hospital
run by a religious order: disinfectant and candlewax, gravy and soap and starch.