Now is not the right time.
The woman standing in the porch is persistent, though, and will not be deflected. A mass of heavy red curls frames her narrow, lightly-freckled face. Even though it is not cold, her breath mists while she waits for Licia to answer her question, to admit her, even. The woman is wearing a rhinestone denim shirt buttoned to the neck and cinched in a knot at the waist, scuffed leather ankle boots with broken buckles.
“Can’t you spare a cup of tea or a drink of milk on this thundery summer’s day? God bless you, Ma’am.”
“Licia, who is it?” William, Licia’s husband, calls from inside the house. When Licia last looked in on William, he was at his desk, finishing a bottle of wine. Since taking special leave from his job he has been writing longhand in a yellow notepad, poems he will not show to Licia.
Licia wants to call out to William that it is nobody; but this woman seems anything but a nobody.
She is no danger to me, is she?
“Come in,” Licia says, despite herself.
In the kitchen, Licia makes tea and invites the woman to sit. The woman is very talkative, speaking directly, mostly about small details, asking what things are for, what they are called. When the woman asks about the cuttings in a vase, Licia is shocked that she cannot remember the name of the flowers. What? Nothing? Instead, she tells the woman that her husband cut the flowers from a tree in the garden.
The woman is sitting in the armchair beside the Aga, a Selig that William’s father used to sit in at home when he was alive. After he died, William took it from the old house and brought it here. The woman, as soon as she was invited to sit, walked around Licia and flopped comfortably into the chair, her foot rocking a faint tambourine noise from the broken buckle of her boot.
“Have you ever had your tay from a jam jar?” The woman sits forward in the chair, not waiting for Licia to answer. “I bet you haven’t. No offense, Ma’am.”
The woman is wrong about the jam jar tea. When Licia was a child, she spent her holidays on her grandparents’ farm in Roscommon. They had always drunk their tea from jam jars when they worked on the bog. The woman says that tea tastes better outdoors, any traveller can tell you that. “Nathin tastes proper insides.” She tells Licia that she lives in a caravan – a van, she calls it – on the dual carriageway near Naas.
“Nine vans. All hobbled together on a lumpy oul verge.”
She goes to the table and sits beside Licia. She talks about her father and mother and her family, life on the road. She has five sisters and four brothers living. Two sisters and a brother died when they were very young. She is not specific about ages, or causes of death. Some details are contradictory. With her elbows on the table, her back straight, she holds the cup in front of her face in the mesh of her long, pale fingers. She drinks a second cup of tea in silence and, after a few minutes, asks Licia if she has finished hers yet. Licia shows her she has finished before reaching for the pot for a refill.
“No,” the woman says. “Give it here.”
She tilts the cup, studying the pattern of leaves. A tiny flash of blue light catches the rim. “Pain. From bottom to top.” She says it simply, truthfully. Licia feels slightly faint, and then there is a sudden whooshing noise.
William has pulled back the sliding door. He stands there, a bottle of wine in his hand, his shirt open to the waist. “I’m going out to have a look at the car,” he says. “Just a look. That’s all.” He takes a long swig from the neck. He doesn’t move.
The woman goes to the range and fetches the teapot. When she has refilled Licia’s cup and her own, she takes a third cup, fills it, milks it, and, without asking, adds two sugars, and hands it to William. He puts the bottle down and sits at the table. The woman talks to him in a low voice, a soothing, rolling sound with burry r’s. Walking the roads is no life for a young woman, she tells him. Today, she says, she has walked all the way from Kilcock to Clontarf. She slips off her boots and shows him her blisters. William hesitates when she stretches out her long leg and holds her foot in the air above his knee, and then, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, he takes her foot in his hands and rubs the rough sole of her foot with his thumbs, carefully avoiding the water-filled blisters on the ball of her foot. The woman moans a little when William hurts her accidentally.
The woman has put her boots back on and is sitting between William and Licia at the table. William is drinking the wine again and talking volubly about his lifelong passion for British vintage sports cars. In the garage he keeps a blue TR6 from the 1970’s, a car he restored himself. Since Stephen died, William hasn’t driven the car. The woman is interested in what he is saying. She tells him she knows how to service a 4x4, and she nods her head when he talks about straight sixes and V8s. But Licia wants to shout at him, to tell him that no one gives a damn about his useless knowledge, his relentless competencies. She pitches the dregs of her tea into his face. Wet leaves slide like fat ants down the prominences of his cheekbones. Shuddering, without a trace of disgust or self pity, he says, “Ah” a few times, and then the woman gets up and fetches a roll of kitchen paper from the worktop.
“Our son was killed in a car crash nine months ago,” William says, at last.
A bubble of grief travels up from Licia’s chest to her throat. The woman stands up and walks to the French doors.
“We’ll go outside,” she says, half-turning.
Outside, the air is filled with small insects attracted by the light.
“You never forgets em,” the woman says. “They’re always with you, they never wither away, the part of em that’s left with you. I lost me first when I was seventeen. A boy. You can’t look away. Honest to God it’s the hardest kind a lookin. Me husband bet me a week later for the first time. A few months later I was in the club again. Seven times it happened before I left. Me father bet me after that. In the car park of the Bush hotel. Nearly finished me with the scelpin he gev me with the electric leads. That was Daddy. I stays east since. West is too chancy. A cousin might see you, you know. Word’d get back. And I don’t want no word a me gettin back.”
William is smoking a cigarette and humming to himself. He moves the glowing tip in little circles above the glass ashtray.
“What happened to the flowers?” the woman says.
They have let the garden go to ruin. Only a single plant is in full bloom, the one Licia couldn’t think of earlier – a Chilean potato tree. William goes back into the house.
“Your boy is gone,” the woman says, after William has gone inside.
“My boy is dead,” Licia says.
“I saw it in the leaves,” the woman says. “A shapeless sludge a nathin.”
“My boy is dead,” Licia says, trying the words again.
“But he’ll never lave ye,” the woman says.
William has come back from the house with a wad of notepaper: his poems.
Below the decking, the flat, grey earth of the flowerless centre bed is a trough of silvery moonlight. Suddenly Licia wishes she believed in ghosts. Stephen, my love, I wish I could picture you, floating above us, looking down on the little night scene we have made here with this strange woman. What would you make of us? Stop . . . Stop . . .
Licia clenches her jaw until her teeth hurt. If Stephen were alive he would at least know her name. You wouldn’t be afraid of her.
“Misery. Horror. Pain,” William says, a fist-sized ball of fire in his hand.
The woman grabs his wrist and pats out the burning pages on the table. “If ye wants a fire, we’ll do it proper,” she says.
She takes the remnants of the pages and walks into the shadows. For a few minutes, she forages for branches and pieces of loose timber. When she has gathered a small bundle, she carries it to the centre bed and arranges the branches on the dry earth.
William is standing beside the woman now, and gives her his lighter. The fire quickly takes hold, and when the flames are steady the woman hands the half-burned poems to William. He holds them away from himself and then lets them fall into the fire.
“I’n’t it horrid strange how you feels the cold more when the fire is lit?” the woman says.
When the woman leaves the fire will be a bed of ashes. Licia doesn’t want the woman to go. How can you walk in those boots? Where will you go?
Licia collects more wood and drops it onto the pile beside the fire. The woman takes what she brought and heaps the fire higher. William has gone back inside the house.
“Bring out the kettle,” the woman commands Licia. “And the tea things as well.”
When Licia reaches the French doors, William is reversing out, grunting, pulling something heavy.
“For the fire,” he says, hauling the armchair.
Licia asks him if he is sure about the chair. “It’ll make the fire burn longer, won’t it?” he says. After a moment, she throws the tea things onto a metal tray and follows him out.
The woman is piling the last of the branches onto the fire. William stands on the base of the chair. He lifts his foot and smashes each of the arms, then he turns the chair over and kicks out the legs until they break. “Here,” he says to Licia. He hands her the broken chair back and she angles it against the blaze. The flames flare up strongly for a few minutes but then die back quickly.
Why is the fire burning down so fast? Why won’t it last?
The woman places the kettle at the edge of the fire. When the water is boiled she makes fresh tea.
“What was written on them pages?” she asks.
When William doesn’t answer, Licia answers for him. “They were poems. Poems William wrote about our son.”
“How did he die?”
“He died in a car crash,” Licia says. “In a wreck he bought from a chancer. The car of his dreams. And the stupid thing is he wasn’t driving. His friend survived. Stephen died hanging upside down in the seat . . . He was so proud of himself that morning. He called me. You’d swear he’d bought a Maserati . . . ” Licia points at William. “His father loves cars, you see. You took him go-karting. Didn’t you, William? And now he’s gone. Our only child. Dead . . . Dead . . . Dead . . . ”
Fat drops of rain are falling. There is a sizzling sound from the fire. William throws the wine bottle into the bushes and leans back with his mouth open. He looks as if he is drinking the rain.
“Give me your cup,” the woman says to Licia.
Licia hands the woman her cup, and she takes it and tilts it forward in the half-light. The rain has flattened down the curls on her head. For a moment her expression changes, and she looks much older – a crone. William stretches his arms behind his head, cracking his joints. The rain bounces off his upturned face.
“What do you see?” Licia asks the woman.
The woman tilts the cup forward, and Licia sees the leaves, washed back, floating in the bottom. When she is finished reading, the woman grimaces and closes her eyes and drops the cup on the ground.
“Nathin clanes like the rain,” she says. She looks young again, taller.
“I want to be cleaned,” William exclaims, behind them.
“Please, tell me – what did you see?” Licia insists.
“He’s here. In the trees. In the rain. All around.”
William takes his shirt off and throws it into the bushes. He leans back, his face upturned to the downpour, singing to himself the nonsense words of a song never heard before.
Licia opens her blouse and takes the full force of the rain on her skin. She ululates a high, keening noise, the sound coming from somewhere between her breast bone and her throat.
The woman joins the keening and unties the knot in her shirt. A crimson blossom flashes in the runnels and scallops of healed flesh.
This is John Murphy's third nomination in the Hennessy awards. He has also been nominated in the First Fiction and Emerging Poetry categories. He won this year's Strokestown Poetry Prize, and in 2014 was a finalist in the Penguin Ireland/RTÉ Guide short-story competition and was shortlisted for the Cúirt New Writing prize. He has also been shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award and the Fish Poetry Prize. His first collection of poetry, The Book of Water, was published by Salmon; he is finishing his second collection. He lives in Dublin
