scenic route,’ he replied shortly. We reached a small roundabout and Luke turned left on to a smaller country road which was ploughed up, with pipes and machinery parked on what was once a grass verge. Luke seemed to be trying to track back to Dublin along a network of lanes crisscrossing the countryside between the airport and the city. But there were half finished roads and diversions everywhere. Shane remained silent, slotted into his role as a younger brother, yet I sensed his satisfaction as it became obvious that Luke was lost. I had expected tears at the airport or angry promises of revenge, but instead a web of tension and distrust hung between them. Christy had not yet been mentioned.
‘Where the fuck am I?’ Luke was forced to mutter at last.
‘It’s structural funds from Brussels, that Maastricht shite we got bribed into voting for a couple of years back. You’d know about it if your Government across the water allowed people a say in anything.’
‘What do you mean, my Government?’ Luke said.
‘Well, you’re not exactly queueing up to vote here.’
‘Dublin is still my town and you know it,’ Luke said, suddenly bitter.
I thought neither was going to back down, then Shane said quietly: ‘I know, but if you want to convince people it might be wiser to come home more than once every five years.’
Luke stared ahead, trying to recognise some landmark.
‘I hardly know this way myself,’ Shane added, soothingly. ‘The Government’s gone mad for building roads.’
‘So everybody can emigrate quicker.’ The bitterness in Luke’s voice seemed tempered as he admitted to himself he was lost. ‘I wanted to slip in by the back of Ballymun.’
‘You’re miles away,’ Shane said. ‘Half the old roads are closed. They’re ringing the whole city by a motorway.’
‘You could have said something.’
Shane shrugged and Luke pulled in among a line of JCBs and earthmovers parked beside a half constructed flyover. Below us, an encampment of gypsy caravans had already laid claim to an unopened stretch of motorway. Luke got out to change places. The brothers passed each other in the headlights of the car. Shane got back in, but Luke stood for a moment, caught in those lights, staring down at the caravans.
The fields beyond were littered with upturned cars, where men moved about, dismantling vehicles for spare parts in the half light. Cars were pulled in as motorists negotiated deals at the open door of a caravan. Children in ragged coats played hide and seek among the smashed bonnets and rusting car doors. A dog vanished into a pile of tyres. Smoke was rising and although the windows were closed I was convinced I could smell burning rubber. I wondered again what my life would have been like if Mammy hadn’t persuaded Frank Sweeney to move to Harrow three months before I was born. I stared at the mucky children careering through the wrecked cars. This was what I had been saved from. As a child I’d had romantic visions about what it might be like, but now it felt as if Gran was beside me, smugly witnessing the justification of everything she had done. What would Luke feel if he knew that his mistress was an Irish tinker’s daughter?
‘Are you English?’ Shane asked quietly.
‘Yeah,’ I said, looking away from the children.
‘Just don’t come to the house or the funeral, please.’
There was no animosity in his tone. I didn’t know if he saw my nod in reply, but he flicked the lights for Luke to get back in. Instead of sitting next to him, Luke climbed into the back seat beside me. I had never known him to display affection but now he reached for my hand and I sensed Shane tracking the movement in the rear-view mirror. Shane started the car.
‘Does Carmel know?’ he asked after a moment.
‘Neither do you,’ was Luke’s terse reply. The tension between them was only partly to do with me. Luke stared out at the December twilight and I could only guess at his thoughts. Five minutes later we pulled in at the entrance to an exclusive golf course. Shane cut off the engine and the brothers stared up the long curving driveway.
‘The back of McKenna’s farm,’ Luke said eventually.
‘I didn’t know if you’d recognise it.’
‘I’m not likely to forget the shape of that blasted hill, am I?’
A BMW came down the driveway and accelerated away. Shane watched the tail lights disappear.
‘I said it to Christy,’ Shane said, ‘the week before they shot him. There was no need for all this aggravation for years. He should have just bought McKenna’s land and built a golf course. You sit on your arse all day and they queue up to hand their money over.’
It was the first time Christy was mentioned and although nothing else was said it seemed to ease the reserve between them. Perhaps their shared memories were so engrained that they couldn’t speak of them. But, from stories Luke had told me after love-making, I began to understand the need he had felt to drive out here. It was a need Shane must have understood. Soon Luke would be swamped by his extended family, with public rituals and duties to perform. But here in the gathering dark, the space existed to come to terms with death.
On the flight over I had told him for the first time about my mother’s death and my visits to Northwick hospital as she grew weaker and more withdrawn until she had just stared back at me. I had grown to hate those visits and to hate myself for resenting the way she used silence like an accusation. I had avoided being there when my grandparents visited, but once I met an old school friend of hers, Jennifer, who called me out into the corridor. ‘She’s dying,’ she said. ‘So what are you doing to contact him?’ I had stared back, uncomprehendingly. ‘Your father,’ Jennifer said angrily. ‘Surely at least the man has a right to know his wife is dying.’
It was the first time I’d ever had to think of him as flesh and blood. He had been an abstraction before, a shameful bogey-man. Frank Sweeney would be eighty if still alive. But because no one spoke of him, I’d presumed him long dead. I had read in a magazine that the average life-span of Irish travellers was under fifty. Even if he were alive, I had told Jennifer, I could hardly chase around every campsite in Ireland. He’d had twenty years to contact us. Besides, after what he’d done, my mother would hardly want to see him now.
Jennifer had a large house in Belgravia, a husband working in the City, children who passed through private schools and emerged polished as porcelain. All the things Gran had wanted for her daughter. Yet although Gran spoke of Jennifer glowingly, I’d never known her to set foot inside our house. Now she glared at me in the hospital corridor. ‘Did you ask her?’ she had snapped, momentarily furious. ‘You’re not a child any more, Tracey. You’ve caused your mother nothing but grief with your silly games and yet you’ve never bothered to find out the least thing.’
Jennifer was right and I knew it. At a certain level I had always withdrawn from other people’s pain into my interior world. After she left I went back to my mother’s ward and asked nothing that might require an awkward response. I had matched her silence with silence and, later, Gran’s grief with flight. This was partly why it had felt important to come to Dublin and to just once be there when somebody needed me.
Luke stared up at the lights of the clubhouse and I squeezed his palm. The curved lake, lit by spotlights beside the final green, had to be man-made. I glanced at Luke’s face, feeling I was in the way, but also that he wanted me here. I could imagine all three brothers here as boys of twelve, eleven and ten, with those extra years providing a hierarchical chain of command. These roads would have been smaller as they walked out among similar bands of boys at dawn. One night Luke had described McKenna, a burly countryman wrapped in the same greatcoat in all weathers, who would eye up the swarms of boys to decide who might have the honour of filling his baskets with fruit and who would walk the two miles back to the city disappointed.
I remembered how Luke pronouced McKenna’s name with quiet contempt, but also a faint echo of childhood awe which I could imagine no adult adversary ever meriting.