There Are Little Kingdoms (11 page)

You’d be mistaken for angelic, said the old woman. Peachy-creamy, oh lovely, look—petite! But there’s awful distance in you.

She smiled but it was sardonic, ironical.

There’s coldness, isn’t there, Sarah? You were going to get out as soon as you could and not a word to anyone about it. To hell with it—let ’em suffer!

The world around withdrew from them. The woman reached across the table and took the girl’s slate-cold hands in hers. The pulsing ovals weakened, faded, and disappeared. There was no sound except for a soft, lone breathing. There was no way to reverse from this, or to pull back.

Listen, she said. I have news for you. Brace yourself, child, ‘cause here it comes. There is no such thing as forgiveness. Everything has a consequence. Would you believe that? Years later, you’ll still have to answer the question: was the right thing done?

The girl looked away, abruptly, into the steel glimmer of the morning. She bit on her bottom lip, so prettily. It would be hopeless to try and find a flaw on her.

I wouldn’t fret about it, said the old woman. Maybe it was the right thing. He didn’t have the courage, did he? He wouldn’t say how he felt. He wouldn’t tell you how he felt, Sarah. You see you have to stand up for it. You have to declare it.

Then it was the Clondalkin yards, mostly disused, and the dust and seep of the city had fallen on them. The train stopped to take on maintenance workers. Another train was stalled alongside, it was headed in the opposite direction. Passengers from each stared wearily across to the other. Movement, and she felt as though her train had eased slowly forwards but it was the other, pulling away west. The old woman went out through the yards. She threw no shadow in the white sun. She went over the sidings and past the rusted trailers. She went in among the carriage-building sheds and vanished, left no trace. She became light, air, dust.

Now it’s Heuston and here she comes. A thin girl in a pencil skirt, pulling a trolley-case behind, and the midday crush parts before her like a miraculous sea. She flips the key-guard of her phone and scrolls her texts. She moves on again, straight-backed and hard-eyed, with world-class invulnerability. She doesn’t know that every step from now will change her. She is so open, so fluid. Every conversation will change her, every chance meeting, every walk down the street. Every walk; every street.

Party At Helen’s

H
ow does a young fella born to a place of dismal fields and cold stone churches turn out to be fuck-off cool? How do you compute boreens and crows and dishwater skies and make it add up to a nineteen year old who walks into a party and every girl in the place goes loop-the-loop?

But not walks—walked. The party has been over for fifteen years. It was in Galway, a Saturday night, a Sunday morning, after the nightclubs had closed and the late roar of the streets had started to break up. A couple of dozen people—you’d say children, if you could see them now—went back, in pairs and in small groups, to a rented house. Most of them were still mashed on cheap nightclub drugs. The house had tongue-and-groove walls greening with damp and was filled with the smell of the damp and with the cloying waft of a low-grade cannabis resin. It was a little past four. The panes of the sash windows trembled with vibration from the music that was playing and the miserable furniture was pushed back to the walls. He went alone to a vantage corner. He hunched down on his heels and scoped out the ground. The girls wore lycra and had their hair styled in blunt retro fringes, like Jane Fonda in Barbarella. They wore clumpy shoes and tiny silver dresses, or flight jackets with heavy fur collars, they wore Lacoste, Fila and Le Coq Sportif. He sized them up, one by one, from ankles to nape, and he paid special attention to the tendons and the neck muscles; he was a canny young farmer at mart.

He made his decision, quickly and without fuss. He crossed the room towards where she was dancing and he said hi. She ignored him. He felt dry-mouthed, tense with concentration, excited. He would need to follow her eyes, carefully, and find the words that would lighten them. This was work. She was aloof and this had its magneticism and he may have begun to despair but he received a quick enquiring glance from over her shoulder and so was heartened. Gesture politics, in an old house, on a rough winter’s night, down a backstreet of Galway. There was water moving nearby, it wasn’t far from the Claddagh. She had a hindquarter on her it was unbelievable.

‘I saw you at Wiped, yeah?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. What was your name again?’

‘Martina.’

Two words were enough to give it away as a Clare accent, flat and somehow accusatory, an accent he didn’t approve of, normally, but she was good-looking enough to get away with it. His accent was from further north, and a shade east, pure Roscommon. It was designed for roaring over chainsaws and horsing out ballads to the fallen martyrs of Irish republicanism but he had honed it, somehow, to a hoarse-sounding, late-night cool.

Around them, all was nervousness and elation. Lit up like stars, everybody loved everybody, and there was little shyness about saying so. Hugs and love and tearful embraces. It was all tremendously fluffy. These were children born to unions of a pragmatism so dry it chaffed, they came from supper tables livid with silence, they came down from marriages where the L-word hadn’t darkened the door in decades. There was the feeling of sweat from the nightclub cooling on the small of your back.

He wore a number two cut, it was Daxed and brushed forward, and the sideburns were daily tended to. He by habit checked out people’s shoes: she was wearing Fila creepers, of which he approved. He owned three hundred and eighty-seven twelve-inch records, mostly made in Berlin, Sheffield or Detroit. He had a father with a head like a boiled ham.

‘It’s coming on in waves, like.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I know what you mean.’

Not by any stretch of the imagination could you say she had big tits but fine, really, at least not like your one out of the art college the other week, like an ironing board she was.

‘Waves,’ he said, and he chewed his jaws and rolled his shoulders.

The windows shuddered with bass and rattled with wind. There were the usual January gales off the Bay. It was one of those nights you’d be skinned walking down Spanish Arch, if you were heading for the taxis on Dominick Street. He weighed up his chances of getting her into a taxi and out the far end of Salthill. He lived in a bedsit there the size of a shoebox. He could make tea and toast without getting out of the bed. It was a row of old seaside boarding houses, mostly in disrepair. He could see down to the prom, to the low breaking waters and the power walkers in rain gear, their garish colours moving quickly through the rain. He sometimes followed random women on the prom. Yummy-mummies, coming out of Mass or the Centra: he walked at a reasonable distance behind, and was pleasantly hypnotised by the swaying quick switches of their rears. He almost always managed to control himself but sometimes they were very pale and beautiful. He scribbled down their car regs, just to mark the sighting, for no other purpose than that. He kept a list of regs and descriptions in a folder beneath his bed.

Only once had he become fevered. That was the day he followed the woman to her house on Taylor’s Hill. He had hauled up over the high wall and huddled in the wet garden behind her hedge. He peered into the kitchen—the light was on at three o’clock, it was such a dark afternoon—and he watched her boil a kettle for tea, the steam rising out of it, and the blood rushing in his ears. This was the most erotically-charged moment of October. He was on ketamine at the time.

‘Waves, like,’ he said. ‘I think I’m coming up on the third one now. I wouldn’t be surprised.’

She sensed something about him. When he looked at you, handsome and sharp-featured though he was, you got the feeling that comes after you’ve chewed a mouthful and you just know that the chicken is dodgy. She moved away from him. She went to her friend, Alice. She asked Alice if she knew him.

‘To see,’ said Alice. ‘Majorly cute. You must have seen him around the place. At Wiped and that. At Sex Kitchen?’

‘Yeah but why is he always on his own though?’

‘Maybe he’s just a bit quiet,’ said Alice.

Alice had a forgiving nature, especially when it came to men. She could find a good word to say about most anything in pants. She came from Tipperary and was the shape and texture of a kiwi fruit. She was so button-nosed you would think to press on it and hear a bell. She stood a jaunty five-nothing in her tallest heels. She was vivid, emotionally, and would make an opera out of the smallest crisis. She feared the routine and the humdrum. She sensed how easily these might overwhelm the paltry glamour available to a small wet college town in the west of Ireland. She was intuitive: she had an idea of the vast adult dullness that loomed around the next turn. She shook her head to be rid of the thought; tonight, she was hellbent on fun.

She drifted away from Martina, politely, still smiling. She loved her friend dearly but Martina was five ten and supple as a fawn: in the foreground perspective of a house party, the contrast-gain would not be Alice’s. She went to the kitchen, where there was a congregation too sophisticated to dance, or too smashed, or too shy. Alice’s gift was to immediately offer herself as an intimate and to be accepted as such. People let it all hang out when they talked to Alice. She enjoyed this but it could be a burden, too. She was left with little space for her own worries. Even her father had spilled to her, always, even when she was a kid, and with shit she didn’t need to hear. This had made her mother jealous, even though she couldn’t understand why. Theirs was the first divorce in Tipp after divorce came in.

Alice in the kitchen sat by Mary Pearson, and took her by the arm, and they listened, with glazed smiles, as Obran rattled on and on at one of his endless, self-aggrandising yarns. Mary kissed Alice’s button nose and laid her long, elegant fingers across Alice’s nervous knees. The manner of this, the languid ease of it, edged just a shade beyond chumminess. Mary Pearson had deep sexual talent and was becoming ever more comfortable in its realm. She was a slender, fine-boned twenty, plain-featured but attractive, with that particular charge of attractiveness that comes in freckles and neat chin and dirty eyes, and she applied it through the touch of her fingertips and Alice moved on again, bashful now. The kitchen stank of Wednesday’s bolognese and drying sweat.

Mary listened to Obran ramble on—bollocks talk—and she watched Alice join another small huddle, and she watched the stunned, wordless lads from Connemara who had eaten too much ecstasy, and she smiled for Jack and Kay. She watched over them all with the fondness that is usually reserved for watching over small children. She was born to middle age, and a lascivious one: all solace was in the senses. She’d slept already with three of the boys and two of the girls at the party. She’d been notching them off in History and Politics, and she was working her way through the hockey union too. Her father owned half Ballinasloe. She had not talked to him since the horse fair, when he’d accused her of sleeping with an itinerant. She bored of Obran—anyway she’d already been—and she crossed the kitchen towards Jack and Kay, she was convinced she could talk them into it yet. Ollie stumbled as she passed and almost knocked her over.

‘Ollie! For fucksake. Watch where you’re going.’

‘Lady Muck,’ said Ollie, bowing. ‘My sincere apologies, like.’

Ollie moved on through the hallway. He paused to steady himself with a hand on the hall table. The table had flyers for pizza, taxis and Jesus. That snot-nosed bitch, the look she always gave him. He peeped into the main room and it was writhing now—there had been a fresh intake from a party in Salthill broken up by guards. He decided that he had no interest at all in the main room. His business was done for the evening and anyway he felt short-breathed and tense and his vision was definitely blurred, especially out of the left eye. He went upstairs instead. He wore his puffa jacket, as he did at all times. He stuck his beany, bristled head into a small boxroom, saw that it was empty, and gratefully threw himself down on its lonesome single bed. Ollie had overdone it, again. Ollie had been overdoing it, in one or another, since he was big enough for shoes. His eyes were frightened and atrocious, pissholes in the snow, and they gave him a comically tormented look, always, even if he was in good form. He was local. He sold amphetamine cut with paracetamol to students, and he signed on at three post offices, one in the city and two in the county. He drove a Corolla that was rotten with rust, it had neither tax nor insurance. He smoked too much cannabis. He drank like it was going out of style. He no longer had parents, he had six brothers who between them had six wives, nineteen children and twenty-eight dogs. His brothers would slag him about the seventh bride but Ollie had no interest in women, nor in men for that matter—he had interest in money, cannabis, cars, amphetamines and long-neck bottles of Corona lager. He had a kind of antic court jauntiness, almost medieval-seeming. There was no violence in him. There was vast bitterness in him. He made up stories out of the wet salty air, about people and for people, to frighten them and to entertain. He was currently putting it about that Mary Pearson had HIV. He was subject to magical thinking about the significance of the number nine. He put together a fat cone that used up five Rizlas and two entire Rothmans. He sucked down the lovely resins and immediately took on the notion that there were guards outside the house. They could have followed the crowd that came in from Salthill. Of course they could have. It wasn’t just likely it was probable. He took another drag and felt his crown tighten and he decided it was certain, he didn’t have a minute to spare. He went to the window and looked down to the parked cars, and to the shadows, and the rain blown across the town. There were plainclothes out there, of course there were, and they were waiting for him to make his move. Well, they hadn’t bested him yet and they wouldn’t tonight. It was Ollie’s belief that he was tailed by plainclothes five or six days out of the week and he wasn’t entirely mistaken in this. The window was an attic window—a cheap Velux job set into the slate roof—and he saw that if he took off the puffa it would be easy enough to wriggle outside; he was slim-hipped as a ferret, and he could move along the rooftops of the terrace that the house was set on. Puffa out the window, and he climbed after it, with the cone wedged efficiently in the corner of his mouth, a dull burn. From the rooftop you could see to the cathedral, its wet concrete looming through the foul weather, and distant, the blur of the taxi-lights in rain, and all around the sodium gloom of the lamps. Ollie zipped into the puffa again and patted himself down to check for wallet, keys, lighter, fags, dope. He pressed back against the dripping slates and worked out his escape. He counted the chimneys along the length of the terrace—nine. He would need to climb to the other side, over the crease of the rooftop, and from there he could shin down a drainpipe into a yard, and then make his way down back towards the docks. So long as there were no dogs he’d be fine. He set to.