That Old Country Music. Кевин Барри
five times a week, and she was almost always on. The once or twice she hadn’t been were occasions of crushing disappointment, and he’d glared hard at the mulluckers, as they bickered and barked like seals over the trays of buns and cakes. Even the hissing spout of the coffee machine was an intense annoyance when Katherine wasn’t there. Along with its delicacy, Seamus’s mind had, too, a criminal tendency – this is often the way – a kind of native sneakiness, though he would have been surprised to have been told this. The café’s toilet was located right by the kitchen, and Seamus could not but notice what looked like a rota pinned to the back of the kitchen door. Catching his breath one Monday morning, he reached in with his phone and took a photograph, and in this way he had her hours for the week got. Also, her full name.
*
Katherine Zielinski she was called, and he wasn’t back in the van before he had it googled – it might be unusual enough inside quote marks to give quick results, and indeed within seconds he was poring over an Instagram account in her name. The lovely profile picture confirmed her identity – it was his Katherine all right, with her fourteen followers. She had posted only six times, six images, going back to the January previous, and relief flooded through him like an opiate when he found no photos of a boyfriend nor of a baby. It was something more intense than an opiate that went through him when he studied the most recent post, which was from the weekend just gone. It was of Katherine’s right hand resting on the bare thighs revealed by her shortish denim skirt, and in the hand she clutched a slim box set – it was ‘Tales of the Four Seasons’, four films by Éric Rohmer. Her accompanying caption read, ‘Goracy weekend.’
It was a swift job to go to Google Translate with that and find that it meant, merely, ‘Hot weekend.’ She had humour as well as taste, it appeared, though in truth Seamie Ferris wouldn’t be putting Rohmer at the top of the league in terms of the French directors; he would in fact rate him no more than highish in the second division, but at least he might be able to argue to her a rationale for this. Her knees were lovely and brown, though possibly a little thickset, but as it was a case of mother fist and her five daughters up in the pebbledash cottage, this was not a deal-breaker.
He spent time with the other images. He tried to decipher them or, more exactly, to decipher from them something of her character. Her only other personal appearance was in a blurry selfie that showed her reflection in a rain-spattered windowpane and that was suggestive, somehow, of Katherine as a solitary. There was a poor vista of the river from the bridge at evening. The rest of the images were reposted from other accounts – someone’s pencil drawing of Sufjan Stevens; a cityscape that might have been of the Polish winter, its streetlights a cold amber; and, finally, a live shot of Beyoncé at a concert in Brazil in the stance of some new and utterly undefeatable sexual warrior. These images spoke to Seamus Ferris, in a low, insistent drone, of a yearning he recognised, and he felt that now he should end his playacting and confide his feelings to the woman.
The idea sent him into a foetal huddle on the couch, his back turned to the hot afternoon sun that poured through the window to show up the cottage in its bachelor meanness. The strangest thing he had learned while alone in his mid-thirties was about the length of the nights. They were never-fucking-ending. They opened out like bleak continents. They were landscapes sombre and with twisted figures. He lay there and flopped and muttered on the couch until the darkness again fell on Dromord Hill and the extent of the night shamelessly presented itself. He felt backed into a corner. He would have to ask her out. The worst that could happen was a refusal and the subsequent embarrassment of that, but there are worse things than embarrassment, he had learned, in the night, when his mind wandered across such things.
In the auditing of the night a plan had been laid down. He would raise the question on a Thursday morning, and so he had not shaved since the Monday – this provided a shadow of interest across what was in truth a weakish jawline. He scratched at the stubble helplessly as he picked at his scone, sipped at the cooling coffee. His stomach tumbled and spoke. He would leave it until he was ready to depart, and if he was refused at least he would be out the door and could go and fuck himself into the Shannon. He was about to stand and make grimly for the counter – he felt like a man heading off to be shot – when she stepped out from behind it and for absolutely no good reason came to saunter around his table, looking out at the rain that as sure as Jesus had returned to make another wet joke of the summer.
‘Back to the usual,’ she said.
‘You’d nearly do away with yourself altogether,’ Seamus Ferris said.
‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘Nothing by it,’ he said. ‘Do you want to go out with me sometime?’
‘That will be fine,’ she said. ‘When is this happening?’
*
He believed now that they were in telepathic contact with each other. She must have known and read his intention. She must have known, too, that he had sensed her likely compliance. This was how fatedness worked, how love discovered itself. In the long three days, the endless three nights that led up to their Sunday meeting, he attempted to send mental messages down Dromord Hill and across the slow meander of the river. The content of these messages was even to himself uncertain but had to do with ardency and truth.
The Sunday of their arrangement came up to dense clouds and a heavy mugginess. He went to the toilet five times in the morning and took Imodium against the thunder of his insides. Attraction as physical catastrophe was not exactly news to Seamus Ferris. He had been besotted before. Always it was with slightly humourless-looking women who appeared to be in a condition of vague disbelief about the world. If involved in any level of romance, he was given to lurchy moves and hot declarations, and always in the past he had scared the women off within a few dates. He had not had anything even close to sex for three years. With his Katherine he vowed that all would be different.
He met her by the bridge at three – the arrangement was for a spin in the van.
‘Have you ever been to the coast of Leitrim?’ he asked her, unpromisingly.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It has a coast?’
‘The coast of Leitrim,’ he said, ‘is four kilometres long. Which is in fact the shortest length of coast belonging to any county in Ireland.’
‘Now I know,’ she said.
‘I mean barring the landlocked counties,’ he said.
‘Okay,’ she said.
As he drove and they went through the rituals of small talk, he tried to communicate with her directly, too, without words, by way of pure mental focus. He tried to let her know that he needed her badly and that in his own modest way he was a prospect. He told her that he had a house that wanted work but was situated well. There were few bills. There was more than an acre of land to grow vegetables and flowers, and already he had begun this garden. It could be beautiful yet, he said. As they drove out of the Cortober side of town, a parade of drunken women skittered towards the bridge in glittery cowboy hats and stretch-nylon skirts, with bottles of Skinny prosecco to hand and in their eyes the dissolute, the haunted look of a three-day hen at its fag end and emblazoned on their tight-fitting t-shirts the legend ‘MOHILL PUSSY POSSE’, and with something already close to love he turned to see the tip of Katherine’s nose rise to match his own disdain.
‘Why would they do this to themselves?’ Katherine said.
‘There’s a sickness around the place,’ Seamus said.
A rare thing occurred then in the van as it hoovered up the N4 – a companionable silence. To his awe he found that they were perfectly comfortable with each other and they didn’t even have to try.
*
The coast of Leitrim sat under a low rim of Atlantic cloud. The breeze made the cables above the bungalows whisper of the Sunday afternoon’s melancholy. The waves made polite applause when they broke on the shingle beach. She told him that she came from Stalowa Wola, a small city in the south, and that she could not see herself going back there. His heart soared.
‘Is there no work?’