Spit Delaney's Island Read Free Page B

said he’d rather stay outside. He couldn’t see any point in a monument to a woman like that , anyway. The rest of them were upstairs in the
bedroom, looking at the underside of the thatched roof, when Old Number One started chugging her way towards them from somewhere out in
the garden.
    By the time they got to Ireland, where they would spend the next two
weeks with one of her distant cousins, Stella Delaney was beginning to
suffer from what she called a case of nerves. She had had all she could take
of riding in foreign trains, she said, she was sure she’d been on every crate
that ran on tracks in every country of Europe and northern Africa; and
now she insisted that they rent a car in Dublin for the drive down to her
cousin’s, who lived about as far as you get on that island, way out at the
end of one of those south-western peninsulas. “For a change let’s ride in
style,” she said, and pulled in her chin to show she meant business. She
was missing an important Lodge convention for this. The least he could
do, she said, was make it comfortable.
    The cousin, a farmer’s wife on a mountain slope above BallinskelligsBay, agreed. “’Tis a mad life you’ve been living, sure. Is it some kind of
race you’re in?”
    â€œIt is,” Stella said. “But I haven’t the foggiest idea who or what we’re
racing against. Or what is chasing us.”
    â€œAh well,” said the cousin, wringing her hands. “God is good. That is
the one thing you can be certain of. Put your feet up and relax so.”
    She knew about American men, the cousin told them. You had to watch
them when they lost their playthings, or their jobs, they just shrivelled up
and died.
    Stella looked frightened.
    Oh yes, the cousin said. She knew. She’d been to America once as a girl,
to New York, and saw all she needed to see of American men.
    Spit Delaney thought he would go mad. He saw soon enough that he
could stare out this farmhouse window all he wanted and never find what
he needed. He could look at sheep grazing in their little hedged-in patches,
and donkey carts passing by, and clumps of furze moving in the wind, he
could look at the sloping farms and the miles and miles of flat green bog
with its brown carved-out gleaming beds and piled-up bricks of turf and
at the deep curved bay of Atlantic ocean with spray standing up around
the jagged rocks until he was blind from looking, but he’d never see a
train of any kind. Nor find an answer. Old Number One was in Ottawa
by now, being polished and dusted by some uniformed pimple-faced kid
who wouldn’t know a piston from a lever.
    â€œWe’d’ve been better off spending the money on a swimming pool,”
Stella told the cousin. “We might as well have flushed it down the toilet.”
    â€œThat’s dumb,” Cora said. She buttered a piece of soda bread and
scooped out a big spoonful of gooseberry jam.
    â€œFeeding your pimples,” Jon said. He had clear skin, not a single adolescent blemish, nor any sign of a whisker. Sexually he was a late developer,
he explained, and left you to conclude the obvious: he was a genius. Brilliant people didn’t have time for a messy adolescence. They were too busy
thinking.
    â€œDon’t pick on your sister,” Stella said. “And be careful or you’ll get a
prissy mouth. There’s nothing worse on a man.”
    A hollow ache sat in Spit’s gut. He couldn’t believe these people belonged to him. This family he’d been dragging around all over the face of
the earth was as foreign to him as the little old couple who lived in this
house. What did that prim sneery boy have to do with him? Or that fat
girl. And Stella: behind those red swollen eyes she was as much a stranger
to him now as she was on the day he met her. If he walked up behind her
and touched her leg, he could expect her to say Get lost mister I got work
to do, just as she had