Solace (6 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘Fuck’s sake,’ she said, with a huge grin. She gripped him by the arm; startled, he stared at her hand. ‘We’re neighbours. You seriously don’t recognize
me?’

‘From Smithfield?’ Mark said.

‘No,’ she said, taking her hand away, running it through her fringe. ‘Not neighbours in Smithfield. I mean
really
neighbours. In Longford. At home. You’re Mark
Casey, right? From Dorvaragh?’

Mark felt himself flush. His heart speeded up. He had never met anyone in Dublin who knew him from Dorvaragh. Nobody knew Dorvaragh. It was too tiny; it was only two houses separated by a long
lane. One house, really – his parents’ house – since the other house, at the lane’s other end, was nothing more than a ruin. It had been a cottage once, a tiny place with a
roof of corrugated iron, and around it a few scraggy fields. It had belonged to an old man who had been a friend of his father’s, and when the old man died, his fields had been bought by the
son of the local solicitor, much to his father’s disgust. His father had really hated that guy – the solicitor, not the son, though he was not exactly keen on the son either. Lynch.
Frank Lynch. That had been the solicitor’s name. He was dead now, but Mark’s father still hated him. Mark remembered being down the fields with his father the day Lynch had been buried,
and seeing the funeral procession pass slowly on the road, and watching, in disbelief and in discomfort, as his father had turned his back. It was not like his father to show such disrespect for
the dead. But that was the effect Frank Lynch had had on him. Thinking about it now, Mark was disturbed to realize that what he himself thought when he thought of Lynch was also hatred, even though
he had no reason of his own to truly feel that way. He had taken it on, taken it into himself, without even noticing; it was now his to pass on in turn. And yet he could barely even picture Frank
Lynch’s face. He could picture the son, a long streak of piss, and he could picture the mother, her skin always tanned, her cars always flash. But the father: the father was gone. And yet
when Mark thought of him, a dull anger clouded his mind.

Joanne was laughing again; the sound brought him back to the room. She was standing closer to him, and he could smell her perfume, and he thought, for some reason, of leaves.

‘I don’t know you,’ he said. ‘Why don’t I know you?’

‘I’m a couple of years younger than you. Maybe that’s why. And I didn’t go to school in the town.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘I was a boarder in Ferbane.’

The boarders in Ferbane were rich girls. Bare brown legs and white knee socks. They used to come back into Longford on the bus on Friday evenings, spilling into the car park opposite the
cathedral, kilts hitched up and blouses hanging out, and you didn’t know whether you wanted them to tuck the blouses back in so that their tits would be more obvious or leave them untucked so
that they looked half undressed already. Both, preferably. An assortment.

‘Ferbane,’ Mark said, and shook his head.

‘I lived up the road from you,’ she said, and she shrugged. He had to work out who she was. If he didn’t do it soon, she would get insulted and walk away. If she wasn’t
insulted already.

‘Your name is Joanne,’ he said.

‘Mossy probably told you that,’ she said, and she drank her wine.

‘You’re from Edgeworthstown?’

‘I’m from Caldragh,’ she said.

And then it was as though he was in a field, and he had lost his footing, and he had grabbed an electric fence for support. It went through him the same way. A jolt, a quick searing of
everything’s edges. Caldragh was a townland ten minutes up the road from Dorvaragh, and Mark had scarcely ever had reason to be there; he was on no more than nodding terms with anyone from
there. But there was one name from Caldragh that he knew. And as he looked now at the girl in front of him, and around him at the scene in which she seemed so at ease, the circle to which she
seemed to belong, that name was coming in on him like a current.

‘I think I have you,’ he said.

‘You know me?’ she said, smiling widely.

‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Joanne Lynch, am I right?’

She gave a cheer, as though he had pulled her name from a hat. ‘That’s me,’ she said. ‘I knew you’d remember me. I knew you’d get me eventually.’

‘Well,’ Mark said, and then he couldn’t think of anything else to say, so he smiled at her, and he took a long slug from his beer.

*

When she woke the next afternoon, sprawled on top of her bedclothes, with the sunlight pressing sharp against the closed curtains and the sound of children playing in the street
below, Joanne was still dressed. And she felt like she was shaking. She was not trembling – she was doing something other than trembling; she was, it seemed, jumping, jittering, without even
moving from where she lay. Her head was pounding with what felt like noise, but when she groaned and the groan came out as noise, she knew that what was in her head was pain, and her mind; her mind
she could not stop from slamming, catapulting, through one vivid, disconnected image after another. All she got, and she could not slow it down, was a carousel of people’s faces, saying
things to her that she could not hear, because although their lips moved, their voices made no sound; Mark Casey’s was one of them, and she tried to slow it down there, she wanted to slow it
down, because although he kept flashing through her mind now, she could not remember what Mark Casey looked like. She could not remember what he tasted like; her mouth felt suctioned of everything
but its own skin. She could remember only fragments of what they had said to each other, what they had done to each other, and the fragments were all out of order, were scattered impossibly across
different parts of what did not even seem like the same night. She couldn’t remember how she had got home. She could remember talking to him, and flirting with him, and kissing him, and going
into a bedroom with him, and doing a line, and doing another, and doing another, and at some stage going into another bedroom and finding someone already fucking someone else in there, and then
what? What had they done instead? She could remember talking, a lot of talking, and sitting on his lap and holding his face and telling him things it suddenly felt like a very big relief to tell,
and she cringed at that now, because she could not remember what those things were, but if it had felt like a relief to tell them, it meant that, really, they were not meant to be told at all. And
she could remember his friend with the fat face coming up to them and roaring, with absolute joy, ‘Blondie’s snogging another chick!’ and that was Sarah, her housemate, getting
together with that girl she had been trying to score for ages, which was why Sarah would not be here now, to do what they always did for each other when they were destroyed the morning after: to
answer the weak knock on the bedroom wall and bring in painkillers, bring in a washcloth soaked in cold water, bring in a fucking sleeping tablet so that you could pass out and be unconscious for
whatever else it took to get to the end of this nightmare.

She was already dreading the next morning. She had brought home so much work to do this weekend, and she hadn’t even looked at it. There was no way she was going to get it done today. If
she went near it, she would probably make such a mess of it that she would be fired more quickly than if she never did it at all. It was horrible work, case notes and court transcripts, and the
client, who was at the moment taking up most of the time and energy of Brennan and Mullooly, the firm with which she was doing her traineeship, was a sleazy, pompous boor. But it was a traineeship.
They were hard to get. They were worth it for what, hopefully, they led to: a real job doing the kind of work you wanted to do. What Joanne wanted to get into was family law, of which Brennan and
Mullooly did very little, and the partners’ ideas about training seemed to revolve mainly around how much photocopying needed to be done. What legal work she was allowed to do was dull
– conveyancing and probate, both of which left her buried for hours in convoluted leases and deeds – and there had been no chance, so far, to go to the courts; that privilege was
reserved for the other trainee, Mona, because Mona had been there almost a year longer. Mona got all the court work, and all the coffee breaks and walks in the fresh air and conversations with
other people that went with it, while Joanne stayed in the small, dusty office and photocopied so many documents that in the evenings she saw the glint of the Liffey through phantom flashes of
yellow.

She could have got a better traineeship. It would have taken one phone call. During the summer when she had worked for him, her father had introduced her to one of the local councillors and made
very clear that if there was anything she wanted she had only to let the councillor know.

‘That man will do any child of mine a fair turn,’ her father had said, and over that summer, she had learned just what her father’s idea of a fair turn involved. Documents
vanished. Signatures materialized. Guards came around for nightcaps; the councillor Joanne had met came around whenever he pleased. She typed up one threatening letter after another as her father
dictated without even looking up from his newspaper; when people, often old people, came in for meetings with him and left looking deathly pale, it was Joanne’s job to draw up their bills
before they had even reached their cars. Other cases were shadier, dealt with only by her father; one had to do with land for an apartment block, another with funds from an unresolved will, another
with a drink-driving case in which a local man had been killed. For the work she did, she was not paid; that was not part of the deal. Her father was giving her experience, he told her, and he was
giving her contacts, and for the last twenty years, anyway, he had been giving her a roof over her head, and would she type up that letter now like a good girl and then get the solicitor in
Longford on the phone.

Sometimes, especially when he had been drinking, her father told her how much it meant to him that one of his children was following him into the trade. But none of her brothers had followed him
– none of them had wanted, particularly, to work that hard at school. If there had been a shortcut, their father would have bought it for them, but there was no shortcut, and so he had got
Joanne.

And then one day, during that one summer she worked for him, Joanne had packed her things and walked out of his office while he roared abuse at her, and she had gone back up to Dublin, back to
the terraced house in Stoneybatter that he had bought as an investment years before, so that he could play at being landlord: the house Joanne had lived in, rent-free, since coming to the city. She
kept living there, always intending to move elsewhere, always intending to free herself of this one last debt to her father, but when he dropped dead of a heart attack two years after that summer
in his office, she discovered that he had willed the house to her; that it was hers. And yet, in those two years she and he had barely spoken a word to one another. It was something – the
silence, but also, probably, the inheritance – for which her mother had never forgiven her. It was something – or rather, something else – for which her brothers scorned her. But
she was long past caring what her mother and her brothers thought of her.

When she had passed her first set of law exams, and her mother had told her to call one of her father’s old friends, to get them to put a word in with one of the big firms, she had
refused. She had posted the applications, and waited for the rejections to come, and they had come – the firms her father’s friends would have got her into, the firms her classmates
longed for, the firms she would have loved to get into herself. Her mother had told her she was ignorant. Each of her brothers had had his own take – Paul said she was stupid, Kevin said she
was looking for attention, Frankie told her she was good for nothing and would end up as nothing, and that this was all that she deserved. And when the letter from Brennan and Mullooly had come,
and she had gone to their offices to meet them, and Eoin Brennan had asked her whether she had any family background in the law, she had told him that her father had been a schoolteacher and that
her mother had worked in a bank.

‘You’ll be a self-made woman, so,’ he had said, winking at her, and she had shrugged, and smiled as nicely as she could.

*

She watched junk on the television all evening, the pile of untouched court transcripts dismayingly within sight. She was hungry, but there was only some cereal and milk, and
the thought of getting dressed and going down to the Centra made her feel like she might start shaking again, so she ate a bowl of Rice Krispies and then a bowl of Weetabix, and as the evening wore
on she repeated that pattern until she had emptied both cereal boxes. She also drank tea, lots of it, and as the nine o’clock news ended and the Sunday evening film began, she almost began to
feel human again, and she stretched out on the lumpy couch, sighing in what sounded like contentment but was actually just relief.

The sound of the doorbell sent a scalding sensation through her chest and down to her fingers and toes. She stepped down the hall as quietly as she could; in this neighbourhood, pleasant as it
was, it was not uncommon for a night-time visitor to come bearing a heroin habit, or a needle, or a question about a recent crime involving a heroin habit and a needle.

But it wasn’t a junkie. It wasn’t a guard. It was him. And so that was what he looked like. It was coming back to her, not all of it but some of it, as she peered out through the
yellowed peephole, her hands pressed to the wide frame on either side of the door. She remembered him: he had waited with her at the bus stop on the sea road for nearly an hour that morning, the
sharp wind bullying their bare skin, families passing by on their Sunday-morning outings. He had pulled her into him, let her have his coat, stared with her out to the pier as the ferry from
England sailed in. He was dark-haired, messy-haired, and he was drunk now, she could see that, as he looked not into the peephole but everywhere else: up to the bedroom windows, down to the
keyhole, left and right to the narrow street empty of everything except closing-time waifs and strays like him, stumbling home.