I pace up and down beside a green Mazda with a battered side door, kicking a stone here and there. The shopping bags are starting to get heavy, maybe I should be off, maybe I’m getting this all wrong. The door opens and out comes her dad Gerry in a shirt and trousers. No work gear.
I wait by the cars and try to read his face but I’m not good at that so whatever this expression is I’m not sure what it means. He could be about to punch me or kiss me. I doubt Marion would have told him anything, if she did, she’d have to explain about the pregnancy and she wouldn’t have after the miscarriage fear. And she wouldn’t have told him that quickly, and he wouldn’t be walking to me like this if he’d just heard.
Allegra, he says.
I’ve come to you about Pops, Gerry.
All right, is he.
You tell me. He said that you told him he’s got rats living in his car.
Yeah, he says, and I’m relieved.
I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding in.
They climbed in the exhaust and nested in the electrics, he says, chewed through the wires. Lucky he wasn’t driving when the fire started and that it happened on ignition.
So you’ve seen this before, I ask.
Not a lot. I’ve seen it around the yard here, but it’s frequent enough in cars that aren’t being driven for a while.
How long is a while, I ask.
He looks around the yard for inspiration and says, months.
But Pops is driving every day.
He gives me an odd look. He steps back with one foot so that he’s standing diagonally. Just like in my conflict resolution training. He thinks I’m about to get aggressive, he’s preparing to leave. I don’t get it.
I wouldn’t know about that now, he says.
Okay not every day probably but most days surely, I say, he has the organ-playing at Mass and the cello at funerals. And there’s the music lessons in Killarney. And the choir. I trail off because he’s looking at me now in a way that tells me to shut up. I put the shopping bags down. I can barely bend my fingers, the fabric has been digging into them. What is it, Gerry, tell me. And I ready myself for what now.
I don’t know now exactly, but he’s not doing the churches any more.
The Masses or the funerals, I ask.
Neither. And not the teaching either. And he hasn’t shown up at choir for some time.
What, why.
You’re best off asking—
If he’d tell me I wouldn’t bother being here, Gerry.
He speaks to the ground, my feet really as he says, Something to do with an incident with the woman who works there. Is it Majella, he asks, looking up for a second to check my face at the mention of her name.
I don’t know, I say. What woman. Where.
A church administrator in Cahirciveen. Seems your dad was more taken with her than he had a right to be.
I hold my hand up to stop him from saying more, even though he probably wasn’t going to. That’s long enough of a sentence for him. And it makes sense now as to why Jamie said Pops was a perv. He wasn’t just bringing up old insults to hurt me. It was something new. Recent.
How long ago was this, I ask.
A month or two, I suppose. I heard about it way back. Not from him.
I pick the bags up again, feeling sick.
Okay thanks, Gerry.
Now, Allegra, will you come in.
No. No thanks, I say. I’m walking away and I remember the other thing I wanted to ask him, and turn around. He’s still looking at me. What about the mice, I ask.
He rolls his eyes. The flippin mice. He asked me to look in the piano. Called me over twice, in the middle of the night. Do I look like pest control, I says to him. Anyway I laid traps for him.
He shakes his head and shrugs.
I don’t know what to tell you, Allegra. Maybe it’s the stress. Can do strange things to a man.
I walk away.
Thirteen
I settle into the armchair in the conservatory at home. I’ve changed out of my wet clothes, into an old tracksuit I left behind here, it feels comforting against my skin again. Something old and familiar. Pops is in the back garden whish-a-whishing for the lamb. The sun has come out again, the day is bright and beautiful but the grass is wet after the rainfall. He’s getting muddy and he won’t listen to me. I have everything of his in the washing machine that I could find, particularly the beer-soaked towels and bedsheets. The washing machine is going, the lamb is in the oven, the saucepans are bubbling on the hob. It’s all systems go.
I used to call this room the star room. It was added to the house when I was ten or so, I thought it was so glamorous and magical; a conservatory, a room of glass that was inside but felt like we were outside. When it was brand new we used to sit in there all the time, inhaling the fresh paint, eating every meal on our laps, and looking out at Nessie’s fields beyond. And of course at night at the weekend when I was home from boarding school. I didn’t scratch my skin here, no, Pops would have seen and intervened. That occurred upstairs in my bedroom with the door closed. The star room was and still is for night gazing at the band of the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, star clusters and nebulae. Pops uses a telescope but I’ve always preferred the naked eye. Where we are, southwest Kerry, was recently named one of only three gold-tier International Dark Sky Reserves on earth alongside the Grand Canyon and the African Savanah. We’ll be able to see Jupiter tonight, an app on my phone tells me.