All the Old Haunts (8 page)

The festival was a new thing then. Galway was a new thing. Fastest-growing city in Europe, was the word all over the radio, all over the
Advertiser.
For the first few days that was a trip, was fun, was electric. Even when the caller to the Gerry Ryan show pointed out that Calcutta was generally considered to be the fastest-growing city in the
world,
but did that make it a good thing? I didn’t care. What did I know about Calcutta? I had never been to Calcutta.

I had never been to San Francisco either, so I wasn’t about to differ the first few times I heard Galway called the San Francisco of Europe. It was all fine with me. Might as well have been Calcutta, since I was with Cait and Cait was choice in every way. We waded through the jugglers and the clowns and the big German tourists on the tiny little sidewalks of Shop Street and Market Street and the street that crossed them, Cross Street, and if I did get the temptation to make fun of the creative effort that went into naming the streets, and if I did act on that impulse, it didn’t matter because Cait could smile through whatever I did. I think she liked to hear somebody takin’ the mick out of the place.

Takin’ the mick. Is that a phrase, or is that a phrase? Never heard nothin’ like that before. I was taking that one home with me.

And I never held a girl’s hand before. No kidding, I never ever did. I laughed for real the first ten twenty thirty minutes of it because it was just so nuts. I looked at Cait’s little china-white hand inside my kind of gray-beige one, and I was just made to laugh, as she led me through the streets. She looked back, laughed at it too, but didn’t let go.

Did plenty of other things with girls and hands before that. Never did the holding before. Lovely. That’s a word too, isn’t it? Lovely. They use it a lot. I knew of the word, but had never had occasion to use it, not one time in my life, before Galway and arts festival and Cait. Go figure.

“You are lovely, you know?” I blurted, and blurted that very first evening in fact.

“Where ya goin’ with that?” she asked. Amused. Surprised. But not really. “Enough of that carry-on, O’Brien.”

We passed either the same spot, or a spot that looked a helluva lot like other spots, for the fifth time before I snapped a picture of a fiddler in front of a sweater shop. There are loads of fiddlers and sweater shops, but this guy had a beard like a full sheep was clamped onto his chin. So I snapped his picture with my disposable panoramic camera.

With his foot, he started pawing hard at his cap on the ground. Like a fiddle-playing trick donkey.

“He wants money,” Cait said.

“Who doesn’t? For what? For taking his picture?”

She shrugged.

I had never heard of such a thing in my life. Back home me and my boys would have resined his bow for him if he wanted to play that shit with us.

We crossed to his side of the street. I pulled a gigantic deer’s-head coin out of my pocket and tossed it in.

“Ath
lone
? Where is Athlone? And why Athlone?”

“Where,” she said calmly, “is noplace. Athlone is noplace. Why, is because. Because I’m related to about a million people around here, and so are you, I might point out. If I’m seen going into the local place I make all manner of trouble for meself.”

“Oh,” I said. “Right. Right, of course.”

“I hitched. Not that you’re asking.”

“I’m asking, of course I’m asking, if you give me a chance.”

We were sitting in one of the many dark cavelike coffee spots of the city at ten
A.M.
midweek. Not a great buzz in the city at that hour. Which was fine with us.

Cait slid a small pamphlet across the rough wooden table at me. I took it without looking.

“Have a scone, will you?” I said.

She shook her head. “I couldn’t. Couldn’t eat a thing. Sick.”

“Right,” I said, and picked up the pamphlet. I heard the flint of her lighter spark, followed by the deep intake of smoky breath. At night in this same place there is no need to light a cigarette to accomplish the same thing.

“I don’t have any money,” she said.

I looked up. She was smoking hard and fast now, in a way I had never seen her, or anybody, smoke. She was blowing out old smoke as hard as she could, sticking the butt back in her mouth as fast as she could to get the lungs refilled with new smoke.

“Please smile,” I said. “Or at least unfrown. It’s unnatural, and scary, to see you all puckered up like that. Please …”

“And I have no access to any money,” she said.

The grim atmosphere, the smoke, the darkness, combined to give this the feel of some World War II spy scene, rather than the pointless and artless nonstop fun we had been enjoying for weeks now.

“Okay, so don’t worry about the money, Cait. I wouldn’t ask you for the money. How much can these things cost anyway? It can’t be …”

She came at me like an accountant. An angry accountant. “In addition to
these things,”
she spat, “there is the ferry, or plane fare, the overnight in the …”

“Excuse?”

She sighed, a large, dramatic smoke-dense angry sigh. “England,” she said.

“England,” I repeated, afraid to do anything more.

“England, O’Brien, is where one has to go.”

“England. England? Why? Why not here?”

“’Tisn’t done here.”

“Dublin. Dublin then, right? We can go there.”

“’Tisn’t
done,”
she said, somehow more intensely and more quietly. “In fact, they’re not even technically allowed to give ya
that.”
She pointed her quarter-inch stub of a cigarette at the pamphlet, which I now realized gave all the important wheres and hows. In England.

“Christ,” I said, to the booklet, as if Cait were not still there. “I don’t want to go to England.”

She smacked her hand down on top of the booklet hard enough to make me jump. “Nobody bloody
wants
to go to England, do they now?”

I looked up, ready for the fight, but she was already done. Done with me, anyway. She was fumbling around in her raggedy bag, looking for the lighter again, shaking, cigarette clinging to her lips, tears emptying into her bag while she cried, cried, cried, cried.

I slid my hand flat across the splintery table, reaching for her, for her to take it. She slapped it. I left it there. She found the lighter, looked up at me. I wasn’t going anywhere. She slapped my hand harder.

Westport, County Mayo. Westport House, this great old Georgian mansionlike thing surrounded by hills and gardens and its own pond with cute paddleboats, and inside, world-famous artworks and things you were definitely not supposed to touch but that were right there so of course somebody like me was going to touch them. I was always touching things I wasn’t supposed to be touching.

“I’m just after tellin’ ya …” Cait said when I had once again slid up behind her as she studied an oil painting of dogs about to shred a fox. I had my hands around her waist. She scolded me. I liked it. She did not move away, and she did not make me stop.

Down in the basement of wonderful Westport House, home of generations of folks with style and class and money and nice woodwork, they had installed a collection of stupid geegaws like the faucet that ran backward and a how-sexy-are-you machine that probably would have made the previous owners puke. As we stood there, side by side, unable to step any further into the place, Cait turned to me. “You may now proceed to take the mick,” she said.

Which would have been perfect, and right up my alley. Only I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop looking at her, and I couldn’t think of anything to say.

This was my sweaters-and-poteen money. It wasn’t even mine. I was supposed to bring back sweaters and poteen for the boys. We even had a sweaters-and-poteen night arranged, first Saturday night after Labor Day. The boys were going to kick my ass when I got home. Unless I told them the story of how I got myself into this fix. Then they’d pat my back instead.

The boys were going to kick my ass when I got home.

My job was transportation and accommodation. Cait had already done the heavy sweating of making the clinic appointments. The pamphlet actually even had a section at the back with information on the most convenient and cheap places to stay in the area of the clinic, so that was what I was to work from.

“Right. And where did you hear about us then?”

I stammered, stumbled, leafed through the booklet that I had been so happy to close once I heard the man say that yes he did have vacancies.

When he couldn’t wait any longer he worked it out himself. “You’re calling from the Republic then, are ya?”

I nodded, sighed. He had heard this response before.

“Right, so what times are you scheduled for at the clinic, and when does your plane come in? We’ll meet you. We’ll take you around. We’ll get you sorted.”

Knock. I wanted to go to Knock, and see the famous crying statue of Mary. Cait, suspicious of my motives of wanting to make Mary cry, wouldn’t do it. She took me to the coast at Sligo where instead we saw sleek little bobbing black heads of seals. They popped up, here, there, silently big-eyed watching us. Bloop, back under the dark water. We would walk a ways, through cow fields that reached almost right down to the sea. After a minute the seals reappeared, watching us. Following us. We hopped a small wire fence, Cait first, then me. I got mildly electrocuted. Cait laughed. Electrified cattle fence. The seals popped their heads up to see. I could not believe there was nobody there but us and the seals. Nobody.

There were probably about a zillion people at Knock.

Liverpool. Birthplace of the Beatles. That was what I knew about Liverpool. That was what everybody everywhere knew about Liverpool. Birthplace of the Beatles.

The man, Martin, picked us up at the airport like he said. Cait and I hadn’t spoken during the whole flight, and we still weren’t talking when Martin walked right up and picked us out of the small group disembarking.

“Mr. O’Brien?” he said.

I nodded.

He did a lot of quiet chattering in an accent I had to listen hard to if I wanted to get anything. Most of the time I didn’t. He talked about the Beatles some. I knew plenty already about the Beatles.

I listened to Cait more. Listened to her breathing, since she wasn’t speaking.

She looked out the window. Held my hand.

Martin stopped in front of what looked like a small version of the registry of motor vehicles back home. It was on a narrow street with a lot of other cold ugly stained square buildings.

“This is your hotel?” I said, trying not to sound too insulting.

Martin shook his head. “No time for that. This is the first clinic. I’ll be waiting right here.”

The first clinic, where Cait was to have her preliminary screening appointment. She pulled on the door handle and got out.

“Go on now,” Martin said, shooing me along after her.

First we sat in a waiting room until a lady called Cait. I sat. Ten minutes later, we were reunited, but directed upstairs to another waiting room. There, we encountered five other girls, ranging between the ages of fifteen and forty or so. Two of them had guys with them. Nobody was talking. The light in the room was kind of shockingly bright, compared to the waiting room downstairs, and the street outside, and Liverpool. Bright, like fluorescent light, but yellowed, not white. We sat rigidly in our molded plastic chairs, flipping through
Hello!
magazines, which they had by the hundreds.

“She’s Irish,” Cait whispered, motioning toward a very young girl in a blowsy yellow dress. “And she’s Irish,” to the older lady in the two-piece tweed. “And so is she. That one … maybe.”

Slowly, agonizingly, the staff made their way down the list. All the folks ahead of us disappeared into some exam room, to be replaced by newcomers.

They called Cait’s name, and she jumped out of her chair as if she’d been cattle-prodded. I sat, reading about Pierce Brosnan and Sean Connery and Princess Diana when she was alive, and after.

Cait came out. Sat. They called her again, and this time she pulled me by the hand into the room.

“You will be paying, then,” said a woman behind a desk, who looked too busy to be dealing with me.

“Ya, ya,” I said, overanxious. I started spilling notes all over the desk, the floor, the desk, looking at the woman, at Cait, at the floor, over my shoulder, like I was making a drug deal.

She gave Cait a card. “Be on time,” she said.

Martin was outside, just like Martin said he would be.

“You’ll want to rest then?” he asked.

“Yes,” Cait said curtly.

Martin’s wife Jane led us up narrow corridors and stairwells, all well-lighted and revealing busy sad wallpaper of horses and carriages and dogs and birds. On the third floor we were led into tiny room twelve. “If you be needin’ anything …” Jane said. She nodded. I nodded.

“Cheers,” Cait said, which sounded very strange to me.

We spread ourselves out on the oversoft bed, and tried to watch the TV, which was bolted onto a steel arm so close to the ceiling it was like watching a light fixture. It didn’t matter. We could hear, so seeing it wasn’t all that important. We had three hours before we needed to be back out again. Staring. Staring was what we were going to do.

“I’ve got to sit my exams this year,” Cait said, panicky, at one point. “I don’t know how I’m going to get through it, O’Brien. I don’t know if I’ll get through it.”

“Well … you know, where I go to school we have exams every year. I try not to worry about it too—”

“Some of those girls are here by themselves. D’ya realize … they came all the way here, with nobody ….”

She closed her eyes tight.

It was as much like a factory as anything. We ran into most of the same people from the other clinic. As if we all had been prepped, we did this little ritual thing. Make eye contact, nod slightly, look away. End of it.

Second floor. A nurselike person led us into a clean but ancient-looking concrete room with yellow painted walls. I sat while Cait got into a gown, and into bed. I put her things into her bag, took out the Walkman, handed it to her. She placed it in her lap, and stared straight ahead.