CC 73: Answers from the Hill

I took the first taxi with Geary and Jane, and Emer and Paidi hung around for a bit for further farewells while waiting for the second taxi to come along.  As I climbed into the back seat of the car, Emer shot me a look over Mickey Douglas’s shoulder.  There was apprehension in there, and I felt something like it expanding in me too.  We’d overcome some creases this evening, ironed a few things out, but maybe we were pressing too hard on things by continuing into the night.  It was a weird look she gave me.  I couldn’t make out if she was showing retained anger, mere reluctance, or even a resolve to have some things said and done finally.  I knew there was the matter of the house to deal with now.  Did she want to say it to me?  I wasn’t sure as I’d always found it tough to read her signs when she was anxious.  The process of separation had been more difficult for me to come to terms with over the last year because I just hadn’t imagined it getting to that stage.  I’d gone halvers on the rankles, and was not oblivious in those last few months, but as far as her wanting to call the whole thing off, I’d been blind.  She maintained that she’d given me all the signs, but I just hadn’t been able to work it out.  Never good with puzzles or crosswords, as I’ve mentioned already.  I found it hard to read between the lines.  But she confessed that she’d been telling me all along (‘It is over’), and I just wasn’t prepared enough to see.  I’d missed it. 

                       Y         E          N         K         Q         Z          J

            R         L          T          A         B         P          D

                        Q         I           W        T          V         I           L

                        A         E          S          M         K         F          N

                        U         C         S          I           D         O         H

                        N         O         Y         K         V         C         Q

                        B         J           X         E          U         A         S

                        G         W        R         Z          P          H         U

                        S          O         R         R         Y         Z          O

                        I           F          M         D         W        P          V

Our taxi took off and immediately, Geary, in the front, was gobbing off about politics with the driver, though I had no serious objection.  There were many political items out there for discussion, and discussion was sometimes more gainful with taxi drivers, the nomads of their chosen landscape, who observed the changes in people and places whilst seeing little change in their cubbyholes.  Unless they were on strike; then you’d see them out from under their roofs surely.  Jane had her face against the window steaming it up with her breath and drawing shapes in the dew with her finger like she was Alice in Wonderland after a few wines.  She wrote Fuck Off when she realised I was looking at her doing it. 

Maeve Lodge would soon be upon us.  From one haunted house to another.  They’d certainly planned their Halloween well.  Props to Paidi for that.  Though the party was not actually at Maeve Lodge, the house we were going to, on Mount Avenue near the old waterworks, overlooked the notorious cottage sitting alone in a field, murmuring at the back of the town.  I had never been to Maeve Lodge, but I’d seen it many times.  It was a stone’s throw away from Cuchullain’s Castle, so Emer and I would often look over at it when we used to go there, and picture ourselves fixing it up in the future and making it our home.  We had all kinds of ideas.  Emer fancied a place like Mr. Tumnus’s in Narnia with lots of mad books on the shelves and a nice fireplace for making toast.  I imagined us taking advantage of the land and turning into farmers or something with hens and pigs running around as we squelched about in our wellies.  Emer didn’t fancy that one so much.

Halloween’s noise was waning as the car rolled along the Castletown Road towards the hill.  There were nevertheless a few rockets flying over the Cox’s estate to our left, and the occasional window smashing from a nicely-aimed brick, but apart from that, the town seemed still, and ready for sleep once the current horror film on TV had played its final shock minutes out.  A thrill and fear gripped as I considered another encounter with Emer in this area.  Maybe that hill which had been so much a part of our early days together would answer the whole bloody mess of things.