‘How’s the health, Finty?’ I said.
‘Not good, Tabitha. I used to go all over the world, I did. India. Australia. I sailed the North-West passage. Been everywhere. But a few things have gone now. Important things. Heart not good. Lungs on the poor side. Liver is packing up. Got a good doctor up in Cork, though. He’s about fifteen years old. But a brain like he’s lived a very long time.’
‘We’re all getting old, Finty.’ Nora had moved her stool closer to him.
‘Not you, Nora. You’re just the same. Haven’t aged a bit.’
‘I’m getting creaky and my eyes are going.’
‘No, you’ve got years left. I’ve got a few years on you. Still swimming?’
‘Every day. You?’
‘You always were hardier than me,’ he grinned. ‘I might go for a dip in the summer. When it’s calm, but for some reason I’ve lost a bit of the foolhardiness I used to have. And now I’m a bit spooked. Deep water is one thing I can’t do anymore.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s funny the things that leave you, isn’t it, when you’re getting on?’
‘I still swim but I can’t do people,’ said Nora, which was news to me. ‘I have to go shopping in the morning. I can’t face buses and cinemas and supermarkets. Everything has to be small-scale.’
He nodded, as though understanding entirely. ‘Goleen is as far as I go these days. Except for when I have to be in the big smoke for my treatment. There’s a little minibus that collects all of the ailing West Corkonians and brings us up. There’s a few cancers on the bus, two strokes and there’s me with my liver failure. We’re quite the school trip. But before we go, I have to take a deep breath of this air here. Enough to keep me going all the way up, the day in the hospital and then the journey home.’
Rosie and I left them to it, they were reminiscing about the various exploits they’d experienced together, mainly, as far as we could tell, run-ins with police. They barely looked up from their riveting – to them at least - conversation about protesting in the age of social media and Rosie and I went off to the village of Schull to find our B&B.
*
Starving, we first found a café on the hill in the town overlooking the harbour below, which had three little tables outside.
‘Still no signal, Mum,’ said Rosie. She’d been checking her phone every ten minutes, waving it around.
We popped our heads inside the door of the cafe. ‘Are you open?’
‘You’re in luck,’ said a woman behind the counter. ‘We’re open until 7 p.m. What are you looking for?’
‘A sandwich?’
‘What about crab?’ she said. ‘Caught this morning. Sit yourselves down, now, and I’ll bring everything out.’
In the evening sun, we sat beside each other. ‘How’re you doing?’ I asked.
‘Fine,’ said Rosie. She was checking her phone for signal.
‘I know I keep asking,’ I said. ‘About how you’re feeling.’
‘It’s okay,’ she said, putting her phone down on the table beside her. ‘But I’m not doing badly. Now I know what hanging in there means. It means just being able to be somewhere, the best you can, for as long as you can.’
‘You’re doing brilliantly,’ I said. ‘Thank you. These look delicious.’ The sandwiches had arrived.
‘There you are. Let me know if you need anything.’
‘We will.’
‘Down from Dublin are ye?’
‘That’s right,’ we nodded.
‘How were the roads?’
‘Grand… clear enough. It’s just nice to be back in West Cork.’
‘Spent much time here have ye?’
‘A little bit,’ I said. ‘My grandmother was from here.’
‘Was she now? What was her name?’
‘Rosaleen. Rosaleen Thomas.’
The woman gasped. ‘Well, well, well. I used to know. Rosie Thomas. She was a friend of my older sister. Went to school together. We lived outside of the town and had to take the bus in every day.’
‘Really? What was she like?’
‘I’ve never seen someone so pretty in my entire life. She had her hair just so, even back then. Used to wrap it in papers overnight. She went to Dublin, as far as I knew, but none of us heard anything else from her, not after her parents passed on. She always said she wanted to act, be in films, and whenever I went to the cinema in Bantry I’d stay to the end of the credits, just wondering if I’d see her name.’
‘She didn’t make it to Hollywood.’
‘Now, that’s a shame. She should have done. Beautiful she was. With the personality to match. Actually…’ She was studying Rosie. ‘You’ve got the look of her. Same shaped face, eyes. If you hadn’t told me who you were I would have sworn it was Rosaleen Thomas, back to see us. Ah!’ She smiled at the memory. ‘Too big for West Cork, she was. Now, we’ve all sorts down here. Actors, producers. We’ve more festivals and arty goings-on than you can shake a stick at. But then, the only thing we had going on was either fish or farming. And Rosaleen didn’t want either. She was that talented, she was. She used to make up dances when we were waiting for the bus. And act out scenes. Shakespeare was her favourite.’
‘She used to do that for me, too.’
‘How is she? Is she still with us?’
‘She died. A long time ago. She was only sixty-two.’ Ten years younger than Nora I thought. ‘Cancer. If it was today, they probably would have been able to help her.’ I refused to let the words get stuck in my throat like they always did.
‘Well, weren’t you lucky to have her all the same? Now, there’s the paper, just in. Evening edition, if you would like to have a look. More scandal. The usual gossip.’
‘Do you have WI-FI here?’ said Rosie.
‘We’re meant to,’ said the woman. ‘They say we have it. But it’s never materialised. If indeed such a thing can materialise. Patchy at best.’
‘No, it’s fine,’ said Rosie, resigned to life in the sticks and waving her phone around.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The next morning, as we sat down to a breakfast of porridge and tea in our B&B, I glanced at the Sunday papers.
Michael was on the front page. The headline was;
F**K ME FOGGY. POLITICIAN IN LOVE ROMP
I snatched the paper quickly and scanned the words. ‘Michael Fogarty admits to affair with his secretary.’ And there, in the bottom of the front paper, was a picture of me, outside our house, taken yesterday as we’d got in the car to head down to West Cork. I looked about fifty, hair all over the place. On the other side of the paper was a picture of Lucy looking splendid, as she always did, smiley and happy.
‘What’s wrong, Mum?’
‘Nothing.’ I quickly panicked and tried to hide the paper.
‘Mum, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
While we’d been in West Cork, miles and miles from home, the whole nation had been reading about Lucy and Foggy. Lucy and Foggy. Jesus Christ. I was not surprised but now here it was, in black and white and capital letters. And asterisks.
‘Rosie, I’ve just read something… now this is what happens when you have a parent in public office…’ I began but she snatched the paper from me. I thought of the piles of papers in all the shops and newsagents of the land, thousands of papers with that headline reaching as far as the eye could see.
Rosie stared at the page, her brain trying to make sense of the headline and the words. ‘Dad?’ she said and then, turning to me, eyes wide. ‘Lucy?’
‘I don’t think it’s Dad they are talking about,’ I said quickly, helplessly, ‘it must be someone else.’
‘Mum, this is Dad. Michael Fogarty. He’s Foggy. That’s him. And he’s having an affair. With Lucy!’
‘It’s all a mistake, you know how newspapers make things up. Fake news!’ My ridiculous and unconvincing smile was stuck to my face and I wondered would I always have to look like this. But Rosie was now reading the paper, scanning it for details.