Solace by Belinda McKeon Page B

for the
sake of peace, for the sake of being able to go about her day. And when he asked again and again whether Mark was coming down, he was not trying to torment her, she knew: he was reaching, rather,
with a muscle that had worked so often before. He was saying the words, and waiting for them to work. And now they had worked. Now she had brought him his son.

Chapter Five
    In the kitchen, Mark sat with his parents over a lunch of cod and potatoes and salad, his mother pouring orange squash into the crystal tumblers she had started to use for
everyday. The dog, Scruff, sat by the table, hoping for scraps. All through the meal, Tom kept up a steady delivery of local news, much of which Mark had already heard from Maura. But neither he
nor his mother let on, listening and nodding and coming in with the right questions, at the right time. Now his father was talking about how Farrell, the vet, had become unpopular lately, how fewer
around were using him any more, and how they were calling a new vet, a woman, instead.
    ‘It’s that or go to one of the foreign lads,’ Tom said, laying butter thick across the potatoes he had peeled and crushed on a side plate. He smirked. ‘There’s
nobody left to look after the poor fuckers of cats and dogs now that she’s taken the cattle and the sheep off of Farrell.’
    ‘Couldn’t Farrell look after them?’
    Tom snorted. ‘Look after them with a grocery bag and a shotgun.’ He tore off a small piece of fish and dropped it on the floor. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are,
lassie,’ he said to the dog.
    ‘Tom,’ Maura said, and she rolled her eyes at Mark.
    They talked on through lunch and through the slices of the apple tart Maura had made that morning, and when they had drained their mugs of tea, Tom got up from the table and said he would see
Mark outside. No mention of work was made. They would talk about the work as they were doing it, and with as few words as possible – words shouted from a tractor cab, nodded over quickly in
the lean-to beside the barn. There was a language, and as long as it was spoken fluently the work always got done, but in fact it was less a language than a convoluted dialect, easy to slip into
and almost impossible to translate. Mark watched from the table as his father stepped into the back kitchen and knew it was only a matter of hours before they would be roaring at each other, each
of them unable or unwilling to understand the meaning of the other. He knew the rota, knew what needed to be done. To his father, it was a week’s work; to him, it was something he intended to
have over with in a couple of days. He reached for the pot and poured himself the last of the tea, and took the mug with him as he went up to the bedroom to change.
    He pulled on old jeans and a flannel shirt, soft from years of washing but still stained with the shadows of cowshit. The shirt was years old, from when he was in fourth or fifth year at
secondary school; everyone had been wearing them then, along with the kind of runners that were in that photograph of Kurt Cobain’s sprawled feet, Kurt Cobain’s dead feet. The kind of
runners, come to think of it, that Mark was still wearing now. He pulled them off; they stank of sweat worn into dirty rubber. He rummaged in a drawer for a thick pair of socks.
    From the window he could see his father in the yard below, working at the baler with a pair of pliers. He was tightening the pins below their metal shields, bent over the pick-up reel like a
quilter tweaking his threads. By now he had lost almost all of his hair. The gleaming tan of his crown, its spray of dark freckles, was somehow disorienting. He was not old, and certainly not
frail, but he carried about with him the indemnity clause of seeming an older man than he actually was; a cloud of anxiety that asked to be met with solicitude, attention, a kind of anticipatory
grief. The trace of warmth on his skin, the healthy brownness of him, complicated