Foggage Read online

  Patrick McGinley

  Foggage

  To Kathleen

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  A Note on the Author

  My name is Death: the last best friend am I.

  ROBERT SOUTHEY

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  The January day was cold with a grey sky that seemed to rest on the hedge at the end of the unploughed field. Kevin Hurley was digging a drain. He was wrapped in a grey overcoat in the narrow tractor cab, a dirt-caked sack on the metal seat beneath him, tentacles of cold exploring his legs inside his mud-splashed Wellingtons. His father’s legs were also cold, blue-veined shanks frozen stiff from toe to knee. Cold gripped the surrounding hedges and the small animals they sheltered, and the gap-toothed wind that came down from Slieve Bloom in the north broke twigs off trees and hissed at the loose door of the cab. The warmth of his life seemed to have evaporated forever. Summer and autumn had made way for winter, and yet he was only in his fortieth year. Cold weather, cold clothes, cold flesh, cold clay. His father would fail to wake from sleep one morning, and then he and Maureen would be alone.

  A solitary crow rose over a hedge and dipped twice as it fled before a whirring tail wind. In this same field on a warm day of summer he had seen a bird he did not recognize pursued by a grey-glinting sparrow hawk. Something dropped from the bird’s beak, the hawk swooped, and Kevin realized that the nameless bird had lost its fledgling. He himself lacked a fledgling; he had neither son nor daughter to meet him in the lane. When the time came, his farm would go to his younger sister’s only son, little Breffny Kilgallon, who, because of his hothouse upbringing, would see it as collateral, not land.

  He could bear the numbness in his toes no longer. He jumped out of the tractor and set off briskly for the Three Acres to check the earliest of his winter barley. A flock of cantankerous starlings descended like a shower of hail from the sky, settling noisily on the bare lea land with jerky movements. He detested starlings, the yobbos of the open fields. Luckily, they were small. He felt certain that if birds ever took over the planet, the starlings would be in the van of destruction. One of them pulled a long earthworm out of a poached track and flew into a hedge to consume it alone. Uncivilized buggers, they did not even trust one another.

  At ten to one by his watch he returned to the tractor and drove home to dinner. As he swung into the rutted lane, a moulting hen, the picture of misery, dashed headlong in front of the wheels, and then he saw Pup lolloping towards him, his hindquarters slewing as if he were about to keel over. Pup was the silliest dog he had ever seen, good for nothing except chasing the hens. He had tried to train him on wet days, but all tutelage was lost on him. At first he had thought of calling him Bosco after all the other dogs he’d had at Clonglass, but when he discovered how stupid he was, he decided that to dignify him with a proper name would be unforgivable, that simple “Pup” was good enough for him.

  The kitchen reeked warmly of boiled potatoes. His sister Maureen laid a platter of cold beef in the centre of the table and a plate of marrow-fat peas and steaming parsnips at the end where he usually sat. The peas were overdone, a glutinous mess, emitting a cloud of steam that mingled with that of the parsnips, making his nostrils twitch with the expectation of warmth and nourishment. As Maureen never troubled to lay the table, he went to the dresser and got out a worn knife and fork and a bread knife to carve the beef.

  “Will you get me an onion?” he said, letting a large dollop of mustard fall on the edge of his plate.

  She reached up, pulled on onion from the string above the range, and placed it beside the mustard pot.

  “Go easy on the English, it’s all we’ve got,” she said. “I cycled down to Carroll’s for more this morning, but all they had was French. And he told me they haven’t got any in Killage either.”

  “French mustard’s no good. I hope you didn’t waste money on it.”

  “I only bought a six-ounce jar. I thought you might mix it with what’s left of the English to make it less obnoxious-like to your lady’s palate.”

  “You know bugger all about my palate,” he grumbled as he peeled the onion. He was concerned about the lack of English mustard, so concerned that he had decided to drive eleven miles to Roscrea after dinner to stock up for the rest of the winter.

  Maureen poured herself a mug of vegetable soup from the black saucepan and sat down beside him while he carved three thick slices of beef for her. She always made vegetable soup for dinner, thick, creamy soup with large cubes of carrot and turnip floating in it and an inch-deep layer of barley at the bottom. She never ate the soup before the main course; she drank it from the mug to wash down the meat and vegetables, making a sucking sound as she drained it before licking the barley off a teaspoon. As usual, she offered Kevin a mug, and as usual he refused with the comment that “for the workingman dry packing is best.”

  For a while they were silent. Kevin smeared the cold beef with mustard, peeled six good-sized potatoes, cut the raw onion into rings, and fell to. He liked potatoes and other vegetables, especially on winter days when the steam from them took the frost off his chin, but he liked beef more. A favourite saying of his was “Bacon is meat and so is mutton, but beef is beef.” He killed his own beef, choosing for the knife the best bullock of the herd, and as he did so he told himself that he knew the joints as intimately as any butcher. The freezer in the dairy was always well stocked. They ate beef in various forms six days a week and pig’s liver on Sunday. He bought the liver in Killage on Saturday evenings, and while other people were roasting their weekly joint on Sunday mornings, Maureen would fry the liver for dinner and, if any remained, again for tea.

  His imagination was running so vividly on winter barley and the profit from last year’s winter fattening that he had cleared his plate before he had time to take in the taste. He felt so cheated that he peeled another six potatoes and carved two more slices of beef. He would have carved three if he’d had enough mustard; a quick look in the pot had told him that he only had enough for two. When he had finished, Maureen said that the postman had brought a letter from Concepta, their younger sister, who was married to a bank manager in Roscrea. She had asked once again if Kevin had any intention of marrying and threatened to come to see them next week. Kevin detested Concepta even more than he detested her husband, so he peeled another potato and said nothing. Encouraged by his silence and fortified by the postman’s gossip, Maureen began a roll call of the sick, the dying, and the newly dead. He listened with fortitude, noting her unerring ability to draw comfort from each separate piece of news, from illness as well as health, from death as well as life.

  “Will you get me my beer?” he said when he had cleared his plate and she had finally paused for breath.

  She went to the parlour and came back with a tumbler and a bottle of ale. He levered off the cap with his penknife and drank straight from the bottle so that the rising gas might tickle his nostrils. Maureen must have known all that by now, but she still placed a tumbler before him, and afterwards she would wash it, though he had not touched it. It was a womanly foible, he supposed, and as such it deserved acceptance if not respect.

  “Will you be having your tea upstairs?” she asked.

  “I’m going up to lie down,” he replied without looking at her.

  He pulled off his dirty Wellingtons and in stocking feet climbed the dark stairs and tiptoed down th
e corridor so as not to disturb their bedridden father. His sister’s room was small and bare, with nothing between the walls except a double bed, a kitchen chair, and an old bureau with a statue of the Infant of Prague in the centre. He took off his trousers and underpants and jumped into her bed in his shirt and vest. It was freezing between the sheets, and he faced the wall and closed his eyes, wishing that he’d installed central heating when things were cheap. After a while Maureen came up with his tea and placed it on the chair beside the bed. Then she kicked off her unlaced shoes, drew the curtains, and slid into bed beside him. She put a muscular arm round his waist, pressed the tip of her chin into the back of his neck, and rubbed her hard mound against his bony backside. They lay in silence in the semidarkness while he waited for the sheets to thaw, and in his mind two images contended for supremacy—the white roots in the clay from the drain-digging and Maureen like a mischievous monkey on his back.

  Maureen was the flickering flame that radiated what warmth he enjoyed in his life. She was his twin, a big handsome woman with a big freckled face, heavy udderlike breasts, thick thighs, and a bottom that overflowed the edge of the chair when she sat down. In that respect, she resembled her dead mother, who was also shapeless, with a stomach that spilled over the top of her steel-ribbed corset. Maureen was more sensuous than her mother, though. She had a wide mouth with big lips that became sweetly slippery when he kissed them, and though she wore loose dresses to conceal her figure, she only succeeded in betraying bulges in unexpected places whenever she stooped. She was an earthy girl, assiduous in bed and equally assiduous in the farmyard. She would shuffle about in wide unlaced shoes with splashes of slurry on her unstockinged calves, and when she stooped over a tub to mix the hens’ feed she would place her flat feet apart, and her unkempt hair would hang down like thrums about her face. She never left the farm except to go shopping in Killage on Fridays and to accompany him to early Mass on Sunday mornings. The house and farmyard were her life, and if her horizons extended farther afield she had to thank the garrulous postman and Monsignor McGladdery, who came once a month with comfort and Communion for their senile father.

  When their bodies had warmed the bedclothes, he turned round and embraced her. Her hair smelt of turf smoke from the range and her breath was warm and heavy like a cow’s. He pulled up his shirt under his arms and then her dress, and they kissed mutely with legs entwined. He thought of a bull that is slow in service, and he told himself that if he did not hurry his tea would be cold. He had been doing it too often lately, more often than he thought good for him. He had done it on Monday and on Wednesday, and here he was doing it again on Friday. He was denying the Foggage Principle, which was first and foremost a principle of conservation. Maureen was ready, but his tardy blood still refused to rush to his sleeping member.

  He recalled going to a wedding in London as a young man, a rampageous Irish wedding with fiddle music, drink, and dancing that horrified the lower-middle-class English neighbours, a wedding that filled him with intimations of sensuality and drove him to solitary masturbation in the roofless garden shed. He came back from Holyhead on the mail boat, and on the crowded train from Dun Laoghaire to Dublin a young girl came in and stood between his legs. She was wearing a long white dress that reminded him of a field of snow at dawn before man or beast has poached it. He wanted to get up and offer her his seat, but she really was too beautiful. Perhaps she was the kind of woman who would spurn his offer, a modern woman who thought herself stronger than any mortal man. Her legs, responding to the swaying of the train and the jolting of the wheels over points, caressed his knees while he counted the tucks in her dress below the belt. Coming into Westland Row, she raised her arm to grip the rack above his head, and he glimpsed her bra through the armhole of her dress—a soiled off-white bra with a hem that had been blackened by the sweat of long wear. The train stopped, the door opened, and she was gone. He scrambled out, but she had vanished. Like a vision, she had faded from sight, but he had not lost her. Again and again she returned to him on Saturday nights, when, after a few drinks, he would seek his bachelor bed for self-given solace before sleep. She would slip in beside him in her snow-bright dress, white and off-white, at once pure and defiled. Before he had known Maureen, she was his only woman, and she had kept him warm through many a midland winter. More important, she had now returned to help him in his need.

  When he finally got under way, he did not indulge in fancy meanderings, but went to the point with such directness that any woman except Maureen would have accused him of breaking and entering.

  “Am I a good ride?” she whispered at the end of their abrupt but satisfying struggle.

  “You mustn’t ask me questions like that.”

  “Why?”

  “It isn’t right. It’s tempting Providence,” he said.

  “There’s no harm in that.”

  “Only old trollops think such thoughts.”

  “I want to know,” she persisted.

  “Well, you’re asking the wrong man. You’re the only woman I’ve ever lain with.”

  “You’re not doing it just to please me?”

  “I’m doing it to please myself. Now, does that satisfy you?” he said, sitting up in bed.

  “Do you ever think about us?”

  “No.”

  “I was thinking in bed this morning. I’ll bet the neighbours see me as an old maid and you as a sapless bachelor. Little do they know that there’s more heat in this house than in all the other houses of the townland put together.”

  She went to the window to pull back the curtains, and he drank his tea at a draught. He waited until she had gone downstairs, then got out of bed and examined his testicles. His little bag looked as it usually did, wrinkled and asymmetrical, and he weighed it in his hand, aware of the slight throb of pain inside it. For the past couple of weeks the pain always came after intercourse with Maureen; but perhaps it was one of those pains that come and go, like the pain he used to get in his rectum after masturbation with the girl in the off-white bra. When he went downstairs to the kitchen, Maureen poured him another cup of tea and he sat by the window, wondering if there was such a thing as cancer of the scrotum.

  A loud thump above his head made him sit up.

  “Did you give him his drink?” he asked Maureen.

  “I did, before you came in.”

  His father was a bloody nuisance. He was senile now, with a childish but all-consuming ambition to outlive Donie Dunne, a once-litigious neighbour who was three years his junior. He was in the habit of telling everyone that he was ninety-nine, but Kevin knew from the birth certificate he had discovered inside the grandfather clock that he was only ninety-six. He lay in bed all day with a walking stick and a thermos flask of tea laced with whiskey on the table beside him, and whenever he felt in need of sustenance he took a swig of the tea and whenever he felt in need of attention he pounded the floor with the stick. He ate little now, only porridge in the morning followed by cup after cup of Bovril, and cubes of shop bread dunked in hot milk and sprinkled with sugar in the evening. The latter dish he called “goody,” a word he had resurrected from his first childhood. He was full of fads. He would not take cow’s milk in his tea because of his fear of brucellosis, and he insisted on storing the tins of condensed milk he used under the bedside table so that he could keep an eye on stocks. However, he insisted on having cow’s milk with his porridge because, he claimed, the germ of the oats was so potent that it vanquished the brucella germ in the milk before he had time to swallow it.

  His dim imagination was now permanently lodged in the 1930s. He talked of nothing but the Economic War, herding on horseback, the villainies of De Valera, and a long-dead Aberdeen-Angus bull called Henry; and he talked about them with such passion that Kevin often came away wondering if the present-day world of the farm were the real one. His opinions were those of a man who had lost the balancing influence of reason, but Dr. Blizzard said that on no account must they be contradicted. He had had a sligh
t heart attack during the summer, and the doctor told Kevin that he must keep him quiet, that his heart was so weak that it could stop at any moment.

  “What’s the weather like today?” his father asked as he entered the bedroom.

  “It’s a fair good day for January,” Kevin replied. “Cold but dry. Brass monkey weather for anyone without long johns.”

  “I’ll bet there’s shelter in the Grove.”

  The Grove was a twenty-acre stretch of woodland which his father sold to Murt Quane’s father over thirty years ago. He sold it because he was short of money, and the shame of it had eaten so deeply into his heart that he imagined Kevin had bought it back.

  “Have you been to the Grove today?” he asked, the thin jaws grinding like those of an old ram chewing the cud.

  “No.”

  “You should walk the Grove every day to let the world know it’s ours. People forget. I’m sure there are those who still think it’s Quane’s. And I hope you’re looking after the mare. It’s not right to work her with the spavin.”

  They hadn’t had a horse on the farm for twenty years, but that did not matter to his father. Yesterday the mare had angleberries; today she had spavin; tomorrow she’d probably have glanders.

  “I’m done enough on this side,” his father said. “It’s time you turned me over.”

  He gripped the old man under the arms, but he vehemently shook his birdlike head.

  “I’ve changed my mind. I want to sit up for half an hour.”

  Kevin got an extra pillow and propped his head against it. The sour breath, like an evening wind blowing over decayed cabbage stumps, struck him like a truncheon in the face.

  “My cardigan,” his father said, pointing to the foot of the bed.

  Kevin helped him on with the threadbare garment and switched off one bar of the electric fire while he wasn’t looking. The waste was disgraceful, the electric bills sky high, and mart prices down on last year. He looked at the iron bed, low in the middle like a canoe, which kept his father from falling out. He moved to the foot and felt his father’s toes under the clothes, cold like wet clay on newly dug potatoes in November. Slowly, he ran his hand up further to the knee, but his father was too insentient, or perhaps too intent on opening the thermos flask, to notice. He visualized his father in his days of strength, thinning turnips, clawing the brown clay of the drills with both hands. Now the same hands looked as if they had been washed ashore by the tide, seascoured to fragility, with wrinkled skin and branchy veins. His narrow head was too small for his still-wide shoulders, the light skin drawn tightly over jutting bone, accentuating the hollow temples, an egg that threatened to crack and spill its yoke. He turned away with a sense of reeling in his head.