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“I’m voting for the incumbent,” I assure him.
“Thank you, Holly. Every last vote will count.”
“There’s no serious opposition, is there?”
Fern O’Brien points behind me to the church noticeboard. Over I go to read the new, large hand-drawn poster:
ENDARKENMENT IS GOD’S JUDGMENT
GOD’S FAITHFULL SAY “ENOUGH!”
VOTE FOR THE LORD’S PARTY
MURIEL BOYCE FOR MAYOR
“Muriel Boyce? Mayor?But Muriel Boyce is, I mean …”
“Muriel Boyce is not to be underestimated,” says Aileen Jones, the ex–documentary maker turned lobster fisherwoman, “and thick as thieves with our parish priest, even if they can’t spell ‘faithful.’ There’s a link between bigotry and bad spelling. I’ve met it before.”
I ask, “Father McGahern never did politics in church, did he?”
“Never,” Martin replies. “But Father Brady’s cut from a different cloth. Come Sunday I’ll be sat there in our pew while our priest tells us that God’ll only protect your family if you vote for the Lord’s Party.”
“People aren’t stupid,” I say. “They won’t swallow that.”
Martin looks at me as if I don’t see the whole picture. I get this look a lot these days. “People want a lifeboat and miracles. The Lord’s Party’s offering both. I’m offering peat logs.”
“But the lifeboat isn’t real, and the peat logs are. Don’t give up. You’ve a reputation for sound decisions. People listen to reason.”
“Reason?” Aileen Jones is grimly cheerful. “Like my old doctor friend Greg used to say, if you could reason with religious people, there wouldn’t be any religious people. No offense, Martin.”
“I’m beyond offense at this point, Fern,” says our mayor.
UP CHURCH LANE we come to Kilcra
I chat with Niamh Murnane, Tom Murnane’s wife, who’s sitting at a table with hemp sacks of oats and sultanas; Stability no longer has any yuan to pay teachers, so it’s sending out salaries of tradeable foodstuffs instead. I was hoping to find sanitary towels for Lorelei, too, as Stability no longer includes them on the list of necessities, but I’m told there weren’t any on the last Company container ship. Bra
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IN THE ANNEX, Sinйad from Fitzgerald’s bar serves hot drinks and soup made on the kitchen range that keeps the Big Hall warm in winter. As I trundle up with my pram, Pat Joe, the Co-op mechanic, pulls up a chair for me with his giant oily hands, and by now I need the sit-down. The road from Dooneen gets longer every Friday, I swear, and the pain in my side’s more acidy than before. I should’ve spoken with Dr. Kumar, but what could she do if it’s my cancer waking up? There’s no CAT scans anymore, no drug regime. Molly Coogan, who used to design websites but who now grows apples in polytu
Nobody else has had any luck with threading out of the island of Ireland for two or three days now. Pat Joe spoke with his cousin in Ardmore in East Cork last night, however, and holds court for a few minutes. Apparently two hundred Asylumites from Portugal landed on the beach in five or six vessels, and are now living in an old zombie estate built back in the Tiger Days. “As bold as you please,” says Pat Joe, nursing his soup, “as if they own the place, like. So the Ardmore town mayor, he leads a—a deputation up to the zombie estate, my cousin was one of them, to tell the Asylumites that, very sorry and all, but they can’t winter there, there’s not enough food in the Co-op or wood in the plantation for the villagers as it is, let alone two hundred extra mouths, like. This big feller walks out, takes out a gun, cool as you please, and shoots Ke
“Shocking! Shocking!” Betty Power is a theatrical matriarch who runs Kilcra
“Sent a messenger to the Stability garrison in Dungarvan, asking for assistance, like—only to be told their jeeps had no feckin’ diesel.”
“The Stabilityjeeps had no diesel?” asks Molly Coogan, alarmed.
Pat Joe purses his lips and shakes his head. “Not one drop. The mayor was told to ‘pacify the situation’ as best he could. Only how’s yer man s’posed to manage that when his deadliest weapon’s a feckin’ staple gun?”