The bucket was out. The mop was out. I had the press under the stairs opened and a black sack beside it and a cup of Barry’s going cold on the counter. It was half ten on a Sunday morning and I was, by any reasonable measure, spring cleaning.
Then Bríd rang.
‘What are you at,’ she said. Not a question, exactly – she has a way of saying it that means she already knows it’s something half-baked.
‘Cleaning,’ I said.
‘On a Sunday.’
‘I had a notion.’
She made a sound that was not quite a laugh. Then she said she’d been thinking about Lispole, about the second day on the Dingle Way, and did I think she’d been quiet or had she just been managing the blister in silence, and I said I thought it was the silence that gave her away in the end, and we were off.
We talked for an hour. Maybe a little over. Bríd was at her kitchen table in Tralee with the radio on low in the background, and I was standing first, then sitting on the edge of the table, then at the window watching a thin kind of light come across the lane. March light. It doesn’t commit. It arrives and you’re grateful but you don’t entirely trust it, and by half twelve it was already softening again and the apple tree at the back had that slightly bruised look it gets when a cloud comes.
When we hung up I stood in the kitchen for a moment and looked at the bucket.
The bucket looked back.
The thing is, in that hour I had noticed several things I would not have noticed if I’d been cleaning. The way the light hit the two cups on the drying rack – the good ones, not the cracked ones still in the press – and made them look like something. The crack in the plaster above the window that I have been meaning to mention to someone for approximately three years. A spider’s web in the top corner of the press I’d opened, which was tidy and I felt it would be a shame. The letters on the windowsill – the ones from Kenmare that I still haven’t posted, because if I’m honest they needed a second look before they went anywhere – were still there, slightly curled at one corner now from the damp.
So I put the mop away. The black sack had four things in it: a broken torch, a tin of varnish that had dried solid, a plastic bag of more plastic bags, and one glove. I tied it and put it by the door. That counts for something.
Bríd texted at about three to say the sun had come out in Tralee. Fierce briefly, she said, meaning the sun. Gone already by the time she’d sent it.
The bucket is still in the hall.