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‘I don’t know,’ Solomon says, yawning, never really hung up on the minor details that Bo dissects, particularly now, as the hunger and tiredness kick in again. ‘People say odd things when they’ve a camera pointed at their face. What do you think, Rachel?’
Rachel is silent for a moment, giving it more clout than Solomon did. ‘Well he’s not reading anything now,’ she says.
They arrive at the Toolin farmhouse and are more than familiar with the land; they spent many dark mornings and nights, in torrential rain, traipsing over this treacherous land. The brothers had separated the work. As hill sheep farmers, they had split their responsibilities from the beginning and stuck to that. It was a lot of work for little income, but they had each stuck to their designated roles since their father died.
‘Tell us what happened, Joe,’ Bo says gently.
Bo and Joe sit in the kitchen of the farmhouse on the only two chairs at the plastic table. It’s the main room of the house and contains an old electric cooker, the four hobs the only part of it in use. It’s cold and damp, even in this weather. There is one socket on the wall with an extension lead feeding everything in the kitchen: the electric cooker, the radio, the kettle, and the electric heater. An accident waiting to happen. The hum of the heater, Solomon’s sound enemy. The room – in fact the entire house – smells of dog because of the two border collies that live with them. Mossie and Ring, named after Mossie O’Riordan and Christy Ring who were instrumental in Cork’s victory in the All-Ireland Hurling final in 1952, one of the few times the boys travelled to Dublin with their father, one of the only interests they have outside of farming.
Joe sits in a wooden chair, quiet, elbows on the armrest and hands clasped at his stomach. ‘It was Thursday. Bridget had dropped by with the food. Tom was to put it away. I went off. I came in for my tea and found him here on the floor. I knew right away that he was gone.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I put the food away. He hadn’t done that yet, so it was early enough when he died. Must have been soon after I left. Heart attack. Then I made a call …’ He nods at the phone on the wall.
‘You put the food away first?’ Bo asks.
‘I did.’
‘Who did you call?’
‘Jimmy. At the station.’
‘Do you remember what you said?’
‘I don’t know. “Tom’s dead”, I suppose.’
Silence.
Joe remembers that he’s on camera, remembers the advice Bo gave him three years ago to keep talking so it’s him that’s telling the story. ‘Jimmy said he’d have to ring the ambulance anyway, even though I knew there was no bringing him back. He came by himself then. We had a cuppa while we waited.’
‘While Tom was on the floor?’
‘Sure where would I move him?’
‘Nowhere, I suppose,’ Bo says, a faint smile on her lips. ‘Did you say anything to Tom? While you were waiting for Jimmy and the ambulance.’
‘Say anything to him?’ he says, as if she’s mad. ‘Sure he was dead! Dead as dead can be. What would I be sayin’ something for?’
‘Maybe a goodbye or something. Sometimes people do that.’
‘Ah,’ he says dismissively, looking away, thinking of something else. Maybe of the goodbye he could have had, maybe of the goodbyes he’d already had, maybe of the ewes that needed to be milked, the paperwork that needed to be filled.
‘Why did you choose the church today?’
‘That’s where Mammy and Daddy were married,’ he says.
‘Did Tom want his funeral to be held there?’
‘He never said.’
‘You never talked about your plans? What you’d like?’
‘No. We knew we’d be buried with Mammy and Daddy at the plot. Bridget mentioned the chapel. It was a grand idea.’
‘Will you be all right, Joe?’ Bo asks, gently, her concern genuine.
‘I’ll have to be, won’t I?’ He gives a rare smile, a shy one, and he looks like a little boy.
‘Do you think you’ll get some help around here?’
‘Jimmy’s son. It’s been arranged. He’ll do some things when I need him. Lifting, the heavy work. Market days.’
‘And what about Tom’s duties?’
‘I’ll have to do them, won’t I?’ He shifts in his chair. ‘No one else left to be doing it.’
Both Joe and Tom were always amused by Bo’s questions. She asked questions that had obvious answers; they couldn’t understand why she questioned things so much, analysed everything, when to them that was that, all the time. Why question something when the solution was obvious? Why even try to find another solution when one would do?
‘You’ll have to talk to Bridget. Give her your shopping list. Cook,’ Bo reminds him.
He looks annoyed at that. Domesticity was never something he enjoyed, that was Tom’s territory, not that Tom enjoyed it either, he just knew if he was waiting for his brother to feed him, he’d die of starvation.
‘Did Tom like reading?’ she asks.
‘Ha?’ he asks her, confused. ‘I don’t think Tom ever read a book in his life. Not since school, anyway. Maybe the sports pages when Bridget brought the paper.’
Solomon can sense Bo’s excitement from where he stands. She straightens her back, ready to dive into what’s niggling at her.
‘When you put away the shopping on Thursday, was there anything unusual in the bags?’
‘No.’
Understanding Joe’s grasp of the English language, she rephrases, ‘Was there anything different?’
He looks at her then, as if deciding something. ‘There was too much food, for a start.’
‘Too much?’
‘Two pans of bread. Two ham and cheese, sure I can’t remember what else.’
‘Any books?’
He looks at her again. The same stare. Interest piqued. ‘One.’
‘Can I see it?’
He stands and gets a paperback from a kitchen drawer. ‘There you go. I was going to give it to Bridget – thought it was hers, and the extras too.’
Bo studies it. A well-thumbed crime novel that Bridget had picked up from somewhere. She opens the inside hoping for an inscription but there’s nothing. ‘You don’t think Tom asked for this?’
‘Sure why would he? And if he did it wasn’t just his heart that there was something wrong with.’ He says this to the camera and chuckles.
Bo hangs on to the book. ‘Going back to Tom’s duties. What are the duties you have on the farm now?’
‘Same as usual.’ He thinks about it as if for the first time, all the things that Tom did during his day that he never thought about, or the things they used to discuss in the evening. ‘He saw to the well by the bat house. I haven’t been there for years. I’ll have to keep an eye on that, I suppose.’
‘You never mentioned the bat house before,’ Bo says. ‘Can you take us there?’
The four of them and one of the loyal sheepdogs get into Joe’s jeep. He drives them across the land, on dirt tracks that feel dangerous now, never mind during the winter on those stormy days or icy mornings. An eighty-year-old cannot do this alone, two eighty-year-olds were barely managing it. Bo hopes that Jimmy’s son is an able-bodied young man who does more than Joe asks, because Joe’s not a man to ask for help.
A rusted railing stops them in their tracks. Solomon beats Joe to it and jumps out of the jeep to push it open. He runs to catch up with them. Joe parks in a clearing by the forest, Solomon collects his equipment. They must walk up a trail the rest of the way. The dog, Mossie, races up ahead of them.
‘Bad land, we could never do nothing with it, but we kept it nonetheless,’ Joe tells them. ‘In the thirties, Da planted Sitka spruce and lodgepole pine. Thrive in bad soils, good with strong winds. About twenty acres. You can see Gougane Barra Forest Park from up here.’
They walk through the trails and come to a clearing with a shed that was once painted white but now is faded, beaten away by time, and reveals the dull concrete beneath. The windows have been boarded up. Even on this beautiful day it’s bleak, the austere outbuilding at odds with the beautiful surroundings.
‘That’s the bat house,’ Joe explains. ‘Hundreds of them in there. We used to play in there as boys,’ he chuckles. ‘We’d dare each other to go inside, lock the door and count for as long as we could.’
‘When is the last time you were here?’ Bo asks.
‘Ah. Twenty years. More.’
‘How often would Tom check this area?’ Bo asks.
‘Once, twice a week, to make sure the well wasn’t contaminated. It’s over there, behind the shed.’
‘If you can’t make money from this land, why didn’t you sell it?’
‘After Da died, the land was up for sale. Some Dublin lad wanted to build a house up here but couldn’t do anything with that bat house. Environmental people’ – he throws his chin up in the air to note his annoyance – ‘they said the bats were rare. Couldn’t knock down the shed or build around it because it would ruin their flight path, so that was that. Took it off the market then. Mossie!’ Joe calls for his dog, who’s disappeared from view.
They cut filming. Rachel moves close to the bat house, presses her face up to the windows to see in through the cracks in the wood. Bo notices Solomon walk away, equipment in hand, and head towards the forest. She hopes he’s heard something interesting to record and so lets him go. Even if he hasn’t, she knows she’s gotten him and Rachel up early and driven them here with no food, and they can’t function without it, unlike her, and she’s starting to sense their irritation. She lets him go, for a few moments on his own.
‘Where’s the well?’
‘Up there, beyond the bat house.’
‘Would you mind if we filmed you checking the well?’ she asks.
He gives her that same grunt that she recognises as signalling he’ll do whatever she wants, he doesn’t care, no matter how odd he regards her.
While Rachel and Joe talk bats – Rachel can hold a conversation about just about anything – Bo takes a little wander around the back of the bat house. There’s a cottage behind it, run-down, the outside in the same condition as the bat house, the white paint almost completely gone and the grey concrete dreary amidst all the green. Mossie wanders around in front of the cottage sniffing the ground.
‘Who lived here?’ Bo calls.
‘Ha?’ he shouts, unable to hear her.
She studies the cottage. This building has windows. Clean windows.
Joe and Rachel follow her and turn the corner into the path of the cottage.
‘Who lived here?’ Bo repeats.
‘My da’s aunt. Long time ago. She moved out, the bats moved in.’ He chuckles again. He closes his eyes while he tries to think of her name. ‘Kitty. We tormented the woman. She used to hit us with a wooden spoon.’
Bo moves away slightly, closer to the cottage, she studies the area. This house has a vegetable patch beside it, some fruit growing too. There are wildflowers sitting in a tall glass in one of the windows.
‘Joe,’ Bo says. ‘Who lives here now?’
‘Nobody. Bats maybe,’ he jokes.
‘But look.’
He looks. He takes in all that she has already absorbed. The fruit and vegetable garden, the cottage, the windows that are gleaming, the door painted green, fresher paint than anything else in the vicinity. He’s genuinely confused. She walks around the back. She finds a goat, two chickens wandering around.
Heart pounding, she calls out. ‘Somebody is living in there, Joe.’
‘Intruders? On my land?’ he says angrily, an emotion she has never seen from Joe Toolin or his brother in all her time with them.
Hands in thick fists by his side, he charges towards the cottage, as fast as he can, and she tries to stop him. Mossie follows him.
‘Wait, Joe, wait! Let me get Solomon! Solomon!’ she yells, not wanting to alert the person inside the cottage, but having no choice. ‘Rachel, film this.’ Rachel is already on the case.
But Joe doesn’t care about her documentary and places his hand on the door knob. He’s about to push open the door but stops himself – he’s a gentleman, after all. He knocks instead.
Bo looks in the direction of the forest where Solomon disappeared, then back to the cottage. She could kill Solomon right now, she shouldn’t have let him wander off, it was unprofessional of him. She let him leave because she knew he was famished, because as his girlfriend she knows how he becomes. Grumpy, unfocused, ratty. Again, one of the frustrating parts of being romantically linked with a colleague is actually caring when your decisions mean they go hungry. The sound will have to be compromised. At least they’ll have a visual, they can add sound in after.
‘Careful, Joe,’ Rachel says. ‘We don’t know who’s in there.’
There’s no answer at the cottage and so Joe pushes open the door and steps inside. Rachel is behind him, and Bo hurries after.
‘What the …?’ Joe stands in the centre of the room, looking around, scratching his head.
Bo quickly points out singular items she wants Rachel to capture.
It’s a one-roomed cottage. There’s a single bed by one wall, with a view through one of the small windows beside the vegetable patch. On the other side there’s a natural fire, a cooker, not too dissimilar to the one in Joe’s farmhouse, and an armchair beside shelves of books. The four shelves have been filled to the brim and stacks of books are piled neatly on the floor beside it.
‘Books,’ Bo says aloud, wonderingly.
There are a half-dozen sheepskin rugs on the floor, no doubt to warm the cold stone floor during the desperate winters in a house with no obvious heating other than the fire. There’s sheepskin across the bed, sheepskin on the armchair. A small radio sits alone on a side table.
It has a distinctly feminine feel. Bo’s not exactly sure why she feels this. She knows it’s biased to base this on the glass of flowers; there’s no scent but it feels feminine, not the dirty rustic feel of Tom and Joe’s farmhouse. This feels different. Cared for, lived in, and there’s a pink cardigan folded over the top rail of a chair. She nudges Rachel.
‘Got it already,’ she says, the sweat pumping from her forehead.
‘Keep filming, I’ll be back in a minute,’ Bo says, and runs out of the cottage towards the forest.
‘Solomon!’ she yells at the top of her voice, knowing there are no neighbours around to disturb. She returns to the clearing in front of the bat house, sees him a short way down the hill in the forest, just standing there, looking at something, as though he’s in a trance. His sound bag is on the ground a few feet away from him, his boom mic leaning up against the tree. The fact that he’s not even working tips her over the edge.
