Solace by Belinda McKeon

what kind of junk your father had on that back seat when he took the car this morning.’
    ‘It’s fine,’ Mark said, in a tone that suggested he wasn’t interested in talking about bread, or back seats, or his father.
    She drove out past the petrol pumps, past the parked cars she recognized and put faces on as instinctively as though they were their owners themselves and not her neighbours’ Almeras,
Mondeos, Hilux jeeps. Even at this time of day the traffic was heavy: not for a few moments was it clear enough for her to pull out on to the road for home.
    ‘First she wanted to know how long I was back for,’ Mark said. ‘Then she wanted to know whether I liked being at home. Then she wanted to know if I preferred being at home to
being in the city. Then she wanted to know how I could stand living up there in the city, because she could never stand it herself, living in the middle of all those strangers and hooligans and
junkies, and she wanted to know did I live in a house by myself or in digs, and when I said neither, she wanted to know how I could be sure of the people I was living with, and would I not be
worried that they’d steal from me, or be ’ithin in their bedrooms doing drugs or something, and then did I hear what happened to Jimmy Flynn’s niece ’ithin in the town, and
did I ever see drugs myself, and did I know anybody who did drugs, and did I think that the judge would go hard on Jimmy’s niece for what she did, sorry, what she done, and were you glad to
see me, and wasn’t Dad doing a great job around the place without me, and would I ever think of moving home and . . .’ He shook his head and looked out the window. ‘Jesus Christ,
she’s a bag.’
    ‘She’s full of questions, anyway.’
    ‘Fuckin’ bitch,’ Mark said, and Maura wondered if she should say something to him, but he was past that a long time now and, anyway, he was probably right.
    ‘Jimmy’s niece was caught dealing Ecstasy or something, I don’t know,’ she said, trying to change the subject.
    ‘I don’t know her.’
    ‘She’s younger than you. Poor Jimmy had to bail her out. I think the case is up next week. They say she’ll probably be all right unless she gets Naughton.’
    ‘Naughton is the woman?’
    Maura nodded. ‘She’s the one is always being given out about on Liveline . The one that said things about Africans hanging around the shopping centre and girls dressing up like
they wanted to get raped.’
    ‘Jesus Christ,’ Mark said, but he was barely listening to her now, she could tell: he was looking at his phone. He wiped the screen with the pad of his thumb and clicked through the
keys. Wondering who he was making contact with, or who was making contact with him, was an old instinct Maura had learned to bat down in herself as quickly as it bubbled up; still, it did bubble
up, and her mind flicked, as it used to do when he was a teenager answering the phone in the house, through a rapid list of possibilities. She knew some of his friends, heard him talking about
others, had a gallery of imagined faces for the rest; the kinds of friends he must have now, the kinds of women he might be associating with, going with, sleeping with, which was something she
still found strange to think. At nearly thirty, how many women would a man have slept with, these days? Was it really like the television programmes made it out to be, that parade of one-night
stands, that stumbling from one hurried, noisy affair to another? No problems taking their clothes off in front of each other nearly straight away, no problems looking each other in the eye
afterwards, no problems doing it at parties or in toilets or in public, even, girls not even blinking about going down on their knees and opening their mouths in the corner of a nightclub? She
couldn’t imagine. Before Tom, other men had slid their hands between her thighs in the front of a car, and there had been the backs of cars, too, but there were things