The Shelter of Neighbours by Eílís Ní Dhuibhne

shrugged. ‘ ok ,’ he said. But he looked sad.
    â€˜You never want anything to change,’ she said accusingly.
    â€˜I know,’ said Alex, with a tiny laugh. ‘It’s true. I don’t.’

    They ring from Murphy’s first thing in the morning before she has woken up. Her mobile trills loudly, vibrating on the bedside locker.
    â€˜Where exactly are ye living?’
    She gives them the complicated country directions. ‘Turn left at Alice’s B & B. Drive up the hill. You pass the old Church of Ireland where the road bends. There’s a white farm gate. A red station wagon parked outside.’
    She didn’t expect them to deliver it so soon. Down she runs, all excited, in her dressing gown, to clean out the hearth.
    Last night they’d lit the fire. She’d built it up with the new Eco logs, which burned bright but very fast as they watched a new art-house film on dvd . Alex’s son, Andrew, who is literary, had lent it to them because he knows Olivia shares his taste in movies. (She and Alex have no children; he already had two sons, now grown up, when his wife was murdered, stabbed to death by an insane neighbour on the small, almost private, beach below the house, where she liked to skinny dip in the hot summers they used to have then.) Alex hadn’t liked the movie. It was too modern for his taste, confusingly plotless. She’d poured them both a glass of wine, towards the end, to reward him for having stuck it out. And although it was almost midnight, she’d thrown a few sods of turf on the fire. Real turf, bockety, with bits of straw stuck to the sods. The faint peaty smell had floated into the room.
    â€˜This is the last fire,’ he said.
    She reached over and patted him on the knee. ‘The stove will really look quite nice,’ she said. ‘And it will be so much more efficient.’
    Now she tries to envisage what it will look like, sitting there, a squat, black, cast-iron stove, blocking the cave where the fire used to be. She can’t actually imagine it in place. And how efficient will it really be?
    She runs upstairs, takes off her dressing gown and pyjamas and puts on her jeans and jumper. Through the window she can see the truck making its way along the road by the coast. Red, with an ad for lawnmowers on one side and the name of the shop, Murphy Ltd, on the other. She is just tightening her belt when the knock comes to the door.
    A man in a blue overall stands on the step, one of the big, thickset men who don’t talk much, whom you get in these parts, alongside the quick, fiery type, like Joe in the shop.
    â€˜Murphy’s, sor,’ he says.
    That is a peculiarity. Some people here call everyone, man and woman, ‘sor’. When she first came across this, just after she and Alex married and she came to live in the rectory, she wondered if they were mistaking her for a man. Alarmed, she let her hair grow and did away with the country-look clothes. After a few years, she noticed that ‘sor’ wasn’t gender specific, necessarily, and she started wearing her wax coat and big boots again. Alex never seemed to notice what she wore, one way or the other.
    â€˜Where do you want it put?’
    She points to the pride and joy of the house, and then follows him outside. The enormous truck is parked out on the road. Perched on its back, all alone, is a small brown cardboard box.
    â€˜I won’t be able to get the truck through that!’ He looks accusingly at their gate.
    Olivia wonders why they use such a big truck to deliver a small object, but she knows better than to ask.
    â€˜I’ll have to swing it over. It’s very heavy.’
    She nods. The man is kind, sorry that everything has to be so awkward and that circumstances conspire against efficiency. It is an attitude she’s accustomed to. After much foostering around, he hooks the cardboard box to a crane, swings it over the gate, and begins