“You’re delusional, Sean. They’re not your friends. They hate you because you’re a Catholic and because you’re a peeler.”
“I don’t think that’s true. Not any more.”
“And they certainly hate me. I hear them gossiping about me behind my back. It’s awful.”
“This is some kind of class thing, isn’t it? Some kind of crazy Protestant class thing.”
“No! Don’t you know anything about me? I’m not that sort at all. I don’t care that they’re working class or whatever it is they are. I just don’t like them. They’re rude to me behind my back and I’m lonely.”
“Lonely! What do you think you’ll be out here? This is the middle of fucking nowhere.”
“Sean, please, not in front of the baby.”
“Sorry … Look, I don’t understand you. I wanted to marry you. You turned me down and told me never to bring it up again. Now you want us to move into Barbie’s fucking – sorry – Dream House complete with bloody stables. Bit of a mixed fucking message, isn’t it?”
She took Emma off my shoulders and held her. The wee lass was looking at the pair of us with bafflement in her big blue eyes. She had never seen us fight before. I had not allowed that to happen.
Beth poked me in the chest. It was unusual for her to get physical. She must be really worked up.
“What don’t you understand, Sean? Dad is giving us this house! To live in as long as we want! Who would turn that down?”
“We already have a bloody house!”
“A house I hate!”
“Aye, let’s talk about hate. Your father can’t fucking stand me. A Catholic peeler shacking up with his daughter! Jesus Christ I might as well as be Beelzebub himself.”
“That’s nonsense!”
“Is it? You want to talk about dirty looks, muttering behind backs? You don’t know the half of it, love. In the old days he’d of had me horsewhipped.”
“Oh my God, you are so dramatic! Listen to yourself!”
“He wants you up here because you’ll only be a ten-minute drive away from them in Larne whereas I’ll be all the way up in Carrick or in Belfast. No more nipping home at lunchtime to see the bairn. Leaving early in the morning, coming back late at night. Or is that what you want?”
She put her hands on her hips. “Only you, Sean Duffy, only you would react like this when someone is practically giving you a house for free! Only you. You’d cut off your nose to spite your face, you would.”
“Free? Nothing’s free.”
“This is. No strings. It’s the show house and we can live here as long as we like. I know Dad, it’s his way of giving it to us forever.”
“I’m happy where I’m living now. I know people. They know me. You know how hard it was to win them over?”
“You won’t have to win anyone over here, Sean. It’s a house in the country. Land. There’s woods. Think of Emma. Think how happy she’ll be. You’ll be happy too, I promise.”
I could see that she was trying now.
I was being the arsehole and she was trying.
“If Adam and Eve can’t make it in Paradise, how are we going to make it in bloody Carrickfergus?” she said with a smile.
“You seriously think I could live here, and be beholden to your father?”
She bit her lip in that gorgeous way of hers and nodded. “That’s what it boils down to, doesn’t it? It’s not him that hates you. It’s you that hates him. Some older guy knocks up his daughter and is barely civil to him and he hasn’t said one bad word to you. Not one.”
“He doesn’t need to say anything—”
“He drives a Jaguar and he reads the Daily Telegraph and so you’ve got this picture of him in your head that he’s this fucking Colonel Blimp at the golf club who hates your ‘fenian guts’. I don’t know who that is, but that’s not my dad! He’s been nothing but civil to you, and now he’s giving us a house … This is you, Sean. You. You …” she said and putting her hands over Emma’s ears added “You fucking ingrate.”
“I’m an ingrate? I didn’t ask for this fucking house! I didn’t ask your fucking father to stick his oar into my family business!”
“Is that the way you see it?”
“Aye, that’s the way I fucking see it!”
She stomped over to the BMW. She put Emma in the car seat and secured her seat belt, then she got in the driver’s seat in the front.
I walked over to the car and tapped the window. “So what now? You’re going to fucking drive off dramatically and leave me here?”
The BMW spun its wheels in the mud and I stepped away from the splatter.
The front wheels found some grip and Beth drove out of the field and back onto the lane. I thought, for a moment, about chasing them but there’s seldom anything more ridiculous to be seen than a man angrily chasing after fleeing missus.
And chasing her across a slippery muddy field would more or less invite an encounter with the sheugh.
I looked at the blue line of exhaust smoke curling into the air like a djinn from a bottle. I heard the Beemer shift through the gears on cue until it reached the overdrive on the Ballypollard Road. She hadn’t been easy with the clutch.