The Railway Station Man (26 page)

‘I do. I promise you I do.' She took a step forward and leaned her head on his chest.

‘Why, then?'

‘I want to own myself.'

‘Darling, it won't be like that. I swear. I don't want to take anything away from you. I only want to give you whatever you want. Everything.'

‘I only want one thing, you know.'

‘I know what you're going to say… freedom. Isn't that right? I'll give you freedom.'

‘I don't want you to give me anything. I want my own space. A little bit of time. I don't want anyone to give me anything. All that kindness, all that giving that you talk about, offer me, it could be like a prison. Couldn't it? I'd rather love you outside that. I haven't the energy for another marriage, Roger. Please try to understand.'

She rubbed at his cheek with her fingers. She smiled.

‘I'd say the same thing to Paul Newman.'

He pulled himself away from her and walked across the rocks back towards the lane where the car was parked.

‘Bloody man,' she shouted after him, as if he were the cat. ‘Why don't you understand? I thought at least that you would understand. That's one reason I love you. Because … you should … you …'

He walked away.

Tears filled her head.

The lark was quite unperturbed.

The sea, the rocks, crumpled and splintered with the tears in her eyes.

I will not cry, she said. Not cry after any person who doesn't understand.

‘Hail to thee blithe spirit,' she shouted into the splintering sky.

‘Bird thou never wert

That from heaven or near it –'

The danger receded. The world came once more into her own peculiar focus. The bird flickered in the light, remained in her eye's sight.

‘Pourest thy full heart in profuse strains of unpremeditated art.'

Flick, flick.

‘That's what comes of sleeping through all those years of expensive education. You can't get beyond the fourth line of one of the world's classics'

Bastún. Ignoramus. Layabout.

She sat on the edge of a rock and felt in her pockets for the cigarettes.

Or was it perhaps the fifth line?

She heard his step on the rocks.

‘I've forgotten the rest,' she said.

He carried the thermos flask under his arm and in his hand her cigarettes. ‘There's a bit about harmonious madness. I never liked Shelley.'

She looked alarmed.

‘Keats. Surely. “Ode to the Skylark” is Keats, isn't it?'

He sat down beside her with a heavy graceless thump.

‘Shelley. Nightingale Keats, skylark Shelley. I'm sorry, Helen. I didn't mean to be insensitive. Here. I've brought your poison … and the coffee.'

She took the box and the matches from him and put them in her pocket.

He put the flask between his knees and unscrewed the top. He handed the top to her and then filled it with coffee. Her hand was shaking and the liquid swirled up to the edge and back to the centre again. She ducked her head down towards her hand and sucked some coffee into her mouth. It was black, sweet, laced with whisky.

‘Oh, that's good.'

She drank some more and handed him the cup.

‘A loving cup,' she said.

He took a drink and put the cup down on the rock beside him. He picked up her hand and kissed it.

‘I only thought that perhaps we could push a bit of loneliness away. Yours as well as mine.'

His mouth moved against her fingers.

The lark had now moved so far away that she could barely hear it.

‘No,' she said. ‘Time. Perhaps if we'd been young there would have been time for everything. I don't think so. You think that all time is there before you. Lovely empty time. If you're not very careful your past is empty time too and you have nothing to recognise yourself by. That nearly happened to me. Only a cruel accident stopped it happening to me. A cruel miracle maybe.'

The sky was now silent.

‘I have so many questions to ask, Roger. Ask and ask and ask.'

He passed her the cup of coffee.

‘Thanks'

She took a drink, and then another and then handed the cup to him.

‘That's all,' she said. ‘That's the only reason. It's to do with me, not you.'

He looked silently at the cup in his hand. Tiny freckles patterned his wrist. She wondered how she had never noticed them before.

‘Marriage isn't a cure for loneliness anyway. Sometimes it makes it more painful. I suppose some sort of close relationship with God is the only real answer to that. How absurd we are on such a day to be so melancholy.'

‘Yes.'

‘We can enjoy what we have, you know. There's nothing to stop us doing that. Darling Roger, thank you so much for your generosity. I'm just sorry I can't be equally generous in return. But let's enjoy what we've got.'

She was wearing those damn shoes again and dampness was seeping through to her feet. Will you never learn sense? Dan had always been so right in the things he said to her.

‘Will you let me take you away somewhere … just a couple of weeks … a holiday… that sort of thing?'

‘Yes. I'd love that. As soon as I get my pictures up to Dublin, weather that storm. Yes.'

He smiled at last. He finished the coffee in the cup and poured some more into it from the flask.

‘It struck me the other day,' he said, handing her the coffee. ‘That we should go to Florence. You shouldn't spend the rest of your life here painting neolithic rocks without having been to Florence. It would give me great, great pleasure to be with you in that particular city.'

‘Oh, yes. Such a beautiful prospect. Let's go home and light the fire and make plans. I love making plans.'

She stood up and held out a hand to him.

‘And make love?'

‘Of course.'

She pulled him up.

‘My feet are wet. Cold. Think of all the lovely Italian shoes I can buy. I'll be able to throw all my clompers away.'

He laughed.

She bent down and picked up the flask and the top.

‘Loving cup again.'

She took a long drink and handed it to him. He finished it. She screwed it onto the top of the flask.

‘Are you sure about Shelley?' she asked.

‘Quite sure.'

The miles drove by under their wheels.

As before, Manus didn't speak, though this time he was awake, his eyes open staring out through the windscreen of the car.

It was the old situation of the right hand not letting the left hand know what it was doing. Presumably Manus had been organising the thing for days. If I followed in my mothers footsteps, I'd now be devouring the cigarettes, stick after stick. From time to time Manus broke a piece of chocolate from a bar in his pocket and put it into his mouth. Never offered it around. He must have had about a dozen bars softening away in there. Amazing he didn't ever feel the need to puke.

He'd been standing outside the Arts block when Jack had come out of his last lecture and had followed him across Front Square to his rooms.

‘Right,' he said, as Jack put his papers down on the table. ‘We're off.'

‘Off where?'

‘Donegal. Come on. I've been hanging around for the last hour waiting for you.'

‘I'm supposed to be going to my grandmother tonight.'

‘Ring her,' said Manus. ‘And get a move on. The lads are waiting beyond Maynooth with the stuff in a truck.'

‘You mean …?'

‘Don't ask any questions, because I'm not answering them. Here's money for petrol.'

He took six fivers from his pocket and handed them to Jack. ‘Now ring your fucking granny and let's go.'

Half an hour later on the road heading out of Dublin, Jack spoke.

‘What am I supposed to do?'

‘Drive.'

‘Don't be damn silly. When we get there? What then?'

‘We'll see when we get there. There may be no call for you to do anything but sit in the car and drive me home again.'

‘It all seems a bit undefined to me.'

‘What does that mean?'

That was when he took the first bar from his pocket, Cadbury's Fruit and Nut, a meal in itself. He snapped a row off the bar and dropped the paper on the floor between his feet.

‘Casual. Unplanned. Liable to fall apart at the seams.'

‘When I want your opinion I'll ask for it. Just drive.'

He shoved the chocolate angrily into his mouth.

Jack drove.

Kilcock, Mullingar, Langford, Carrick on Shannon, Boyle, interminable flat miles.

From time to time Manus turned his head and stared out the back window, checking that the lorry was still behind them. Outside Killucan, Jack had drawn into a petrol station and he had watched the lorry drive past them, two men in the cab. He wondered what their load consisted of. Manus ate more chocolate. Through the town and the lorry pulled off the verge and fell in behind them again.

As it began to get dark, Manus spoke.

‘Don't drive too fast. Don't make it hard for them. We don't want the buggers getting lost.'

Silence.

I wonder why I do this. I get no satisfaction, no glory… just an aching bum. What am I trying to do? Right some ancient wrong? Come, come, surely not that. Cancel out in some way the labels they hand on me … West Brit, shoneen, bourgeois? Show them … whoever they may be, that my heart is in the right place? He drove a car for fifty thousand miles for Ireland. Got blisters on his arse for Ireland and a first-class degree to please his grandmother… with a bit of luck. Some curriculum vitae that. Menial tasks for Ireland. What about the dead? The sad? The suffering? You can't make an omelette without, ha ha, breaking eggs. I have my own dead.

My mother sat alone all those evenings. She never held my hand. I could run this whole damn outfit a million times better than Manus, with his devious ways and his bars of chocolate. This operation for instance. No plans … just a vague hope of muddling through. We'll see what happens when the moment comes. Apart from the Englishman and my mad mother there's Damian to contend with. Maybe I just conjure up difficulties. Have too much imagination, like Manus said. Officers should only see what will happen, not what might happen. Stick to driving cars, Jackson Cuffe, certainly until you have your motives sorted out.

‘Easy. Slow down. Easy through Sligo. Who do you think you are? Stirling Moss?'

Motives.

Could we look at the possibility of creating a situation where the blabbing mouths of the political posturers were silenced once and for all? That, as Shakespeare said, is a consummation devoutly to be wished. Worth getting blisters on your backside for.

But. Oh but, but, but, is it worth, ha ha, breaking eggs for? I often wonder to myself why I don't use that brisk word … kill. It makes me feel uneasy, that's why. Manus has a gun on his person. Manus has no scruples. Does he really have a dream, or merely no scruples?

I would think that I am probably driving across Ireland with a chrysalis beside me. One day, he too, like so many others with no scruples, will emerge, blossom from his chrysalis state into a free-flying political posturer. For that it is not worth getting blisters on your…

Do I really have to do this to prove my identity?

Or am I just too lazy to do it any other way?

Why was I born with a silly name like Jackson Cuffe around my neck?

If my father hadn't been shot and I hadn't been the recipient of a considerable sum of compensation, I wouldn't have a car in which to drive Manus interminably silent miles. What then? What other menial task would they have entrusted to me?

I depress myself at times.

‘Pull up here, for a minute or two. I want to piss and have a couple of words with the lads.'

Jack drew in to the side of the road and stopped. The lorry stopped about twenty yards behind them. Manus got out of the car and walked back along the road.

Jack opened the door of the car and got out to stamp the stiffness from his bones. It was very cold and starry bright. The huge flint-sprinkled sky hung silent above him. His hands were silver, the road, the low thorn hedge and the hills, quite silver, naked, nowhere to hide. He could smell the sea, hear though no sound, only the low voices of the three men talking secrets.

He got back in the car and banged the door closed to dispel the unease that came to him sometimes with night silence. The inside of the car smelt disagreeable. He rolled down the window and waited until he heard Manus's footsteps returning along the road, then he put out his hand and started the engine.

Manus settled himself into his seat and groped for chocolate.

‘That's okay,' he said. ‘Want a piece?' He offered a bar of Kit-Kat in Jack's direction.

‘No thanks'

‘I've told them to give us twenty minutes. That's in case your man is around.'

‘If he is?'

Manus dropped the paper on the floor and began to eat the chocolate. ‘That's your problem. You'll think up something to get him out of the way. If that happens, if we're seen … or rather if you're seen, you'll have to spend a couple of days with your mother. I'll go back to Dublin with the boys in the lorry.'

‘What'll I say to her? She'll be extremely amazed to see me.'

‘You'll think of something. Move it.'

‘Sure they won't get lost?' asked Jack, jerking his head backwards towards the lorry.

‘If they get lost, I'll have their balls.'

There was no light, no movement at the station. Jack stopped the car and Manus got out.

‘It's a bugger of a night. You could hear the grass growing and see it too.'

Jack nodded.

‘Get on down anyway and see if he's at the house. If he is we're elected.' He looked at his watch. ‘Give us half an hour minimum. That's fifteen minutes … and half an hour… keep him occupied till ten-thirty. I'll see you back in Dublin.'