Orla stretched and woke. ‘It’s nothing. I find it hard to sleep with someone else in the bed with me, that’s all.’
But I’m not just someone, he thought, hurt. I’m Rufus. And I thought we were childhood sweethearts, adult lovers.
Clearly she wasn’t used to sharing her life, that was the problem. He reassured himself with that thought as he left her there and padded along to his own room to shower and dress. It would all come right, in the end.
He left it a while, let the dust settle. He was kicking himself because he’d charged at it like a bull at a gate, he should have held back. He finished chopping the wood, mended a leaking gutter, made himself useful. Then a week later, as the evening drew in, he said:
‘I thought I might come to your room tonight. If you’d like that.’
Orla gazed at him across the kitchen table. ‘All right,’ she said at last.
After that, his blood fizzed with anticipation. It would be OK this time. She no longer saw him as some threatening stranger. They’d laughed and chatted together these last few days, walking the banks of the Shannon with the salty winds buffeting them, relaxing after they’d finished their chores on the farm, sitting in the shade of an old apple tree. Becoming familiar with each other after all those years apart.
This time, it would be fine.
Only it wasn’t.
The same thing happened. She was so tight, he couldn’t get inside her. In fact, he began to fear that if he did manage entry, he would hurt her badly. And that dissolved his arousal like nothing else could.
They lay afterwards, him cuddling up to her, Orla stiff as a board. In the early hours, he awoke. And she was gone again.
He fumbled for the bedside light, turned it on.
The room was empty but he could hear a distant thumping, like someone hammering a nail into a wall. He wrapped himself in a robe and went and opened the bedroom door. Instantly, the sound was louder. He went downstairs and stood in the hall, trying to place the direction of the noise.
It was coming from outside.
He went to the front door: it was unbolted. He opened it, stepped outside into the cool night air: out here the din was much louder. It was coming from the barn beside the house. And it wasn’t hammering. It was music.
He opened the barn door and the noise almost smashed him backward. AC/DC were belting out ‘Highway to Hell’. The interior of the barn was awash with brilliant strip lighting, and there was colour everywhere. At first he thought it looked like blood, but there were dark blues, indigo-deep, and fiery oranges, great swirls of chaotic colour. And there in the centre of it, the boom box perched on a chair at her side, was Orla. She was on her feet, in her nightdress, and she was feverishly daubing paint on to a big canvas set up on an easel. The scent of linseed oil and paint assaulted his nose.