There Are Little Kingdoms (12 page)

‘Who’d leave a window open on a night like this? It’s a fucking icebox in here.’

‘Actually the breeze is kind of nice now, leave it open a while. Whose room is it anyway?’

‘Probably Alan’s. It certainly smells like a wankpit.’

‘Does, doesn’t it?’

‘Well, if it’s Alan we’re talking about, there’ll be no shortage of action,’ and he made the jerk-off motion with his hand.

‘Please, Jack. Not an image I want to stick. He’s not here, is he?’

‘Think he’s home still. There are cows to be milked in Leitrim. There’s no such thing as Christmas for cows, you know. Come here.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘What?’

‘What what? Do you honestly believe I might be feeling romantic?’

‘You’re making too much out of this.’

‘Easy for you to say.’

‘I thought the plan was we weren’t going to talk about it. Tuesday it’s done with and we can forget about it.’

‘It was crazy taking a pill.’

‘What difference does it make, Kay? You’re getting it looked after on Tuesday.’

‘Looked after! This is starting to sound like something from the 1950s.’

‘I know, yeah. She takes the lonesome boat. I am in the moody, guilt-ridden role. It’s a play-of-the-week starring Cyril Cusack and Joan McKenna. Can you hear the uillean pipes?’

‘Siobhan McKenna. Anyway nothing’s decided.’

‘Don’t. Everything is decided. We’ve been all around the houses with this, it’s set for Tuesday. We do it and it’s done.’

‘I’m the one up on the table!’

‘Woosums! So fine, okay. Tell you what. Let’s have it then. We’ll buy a semi-d and sign up for Fianna Fail.’

‘You’re an arse. Why don’t you go and rub off Mary Pearson some more?’

‘Maybe I shall, maybe I shall,’ and he made the cross-eyed look, and he did the Twilight Zone music, and she laughed.

‘What are we going to do, Jack?’

‘Another half?’

‘Unbelievable! Really, I mean you’re outdoing yourself tonight.’

‘I know. I’m a maggot. And you adore me, so deal with it. And come here, look? Please.’

She could taste a mercury note in her mouth and she wondered if this was in some way connected. She rose to leave. She was quickly getting towards the end of Jack. She saw that all was used to reinforce his masculine place in the world. All was weighed and tested for advantage. In everything that occurred, he saw possibilities for developing his own sense of himself: he had used the crisis merely to give a burnish to his self-importance.

‘Where you going?’

‘Stay where you are, Jack, I’m just getting some water. I’ll be a second.’

Everytime she left his presence she felt a delicious lightness come on her. She went lightly down the stairs and into the late throb of the party. The house was full of music and breathless talk and attempted romance but just as it peaked it began to fade, too, and people were tiring some, they were beginning to splay out on the cushions on the floor. The cheap drugs were wearing off and Sunday morning had begun to announce itself. It threw rain against the windows, like handfuls of gravel and nails, and there was stomach cramp and dryness of the mouth and morbid thoughts. Serotonin receptors tipped over like skittles—dead. Kay went to find her coat. The coats were in a pile behind the record decks and she winked at the dour-faced Northerner playing records.

‘Kay, what about you?’ he said.

‘Alright, Coll?’

His world was round, twelve inches in circumference, and made out of black vinyl. He had tight hair composed of tiny curls and he would take a curl and twiggle it between thumb and forefinger, a nervous tic. His calling was to educate the west of Ireland to the pleasures of old-skool Detroit techno. The trouble with this town was that people didn’t want to know. They wanted to listen to the same old same old, week in week out. They wanted the big tunes. They wanted the cheese. Well, they could look elsewhere. He wasn’t going to play ball. If they didn’t like it, they could piss off. If they wanted cheese, they could go down and listen to Sonny Byrne. They’d deserve each other, Sonny Byrne and that crowd. Fucking mouth-breathers the pack of them.

‘Do you know what I’m saying, Kay?’

But she was gone, she’d headed for the door, in a swish of auburn hair and a fun-fur coat. Little Miss Thing. Not that the thought hadn’t crossed his mind. What she was doing with the other creature he would never know. Jack Keohane? An excuse for humanity! An egomaniac! But that was this town all over, wasn’t it? It was all surface. Sometimes he wondered why he troubled himself with these people at all. They hadn’t a notion. To prove the point, he put on an old Derrick May, one of the first Rhythm Is Rhythm things—genius!—and he surveyed the room owlishly as it kicked in, but no. They didn’t get it. He twiggled a tiny curl between thumb and forefinger. He chewed a lip and sulked. He had enough of the place. He was going to take off, no question, one of these fine days, they wouldn’t see his arse for dust. They’d be sorry then, and they listening to Sonny Byrne and his cheese—big fucking piano tunes. The major problem would be the shipment of the records. There were several thousand and that amounted to serious dead weight. Everybody was sprawled and splayed, they were lying wrapped around each other on the floor. A handful of gravel against the window. He’d just put on an Orb album and leave it at that. It was as much as they deserved. He went through to the kitchen to search out Noreen. There was no sign of Noreen.

‘Nice set, Coll,’ said Helen.

‘Oh was it?’ he said, ‘was it really now? So what the fuck are you doing in here?’

She huffed out of the kitchen. The sooner somebody took that arsehole to one side and sorted him out, the better. Helen Coyle, if she insisted on anything, insisted that life should be mannerly. She was a petite dark-haired girl, carefully arranged, with an expression of tremendous pleasantness and openness. She thrived on neatness in all things. She had been at a loss, tonight, when she realised that her affairs had spun out of control. She was in the process of leaving Eoin for James. She sat on the stairs and reviewed the situation. She had not quite informed either of her plans. She felt that she had put enough out in the way of suggestion and signals, that they should each be able to grasp the new reality.

Dealing with men was like dealing with infants. If they weren’t puppy-dog, they were crude and arrogant, and which was worse? She wasn’t ever taking ecstasy again. It brought all this emotional crap up. And it… just… wasn’t… neat. She put her head against the banisters and closed her eyes. Eoin, in her opinion, had already stalled in life. When they first went out, he’d seemed to have everything opening up for him. He was rangy, good-looking, quickwitted, he was fit and active, he didn’t drink much or smoke much or do drugs much, he was sociable and presentable. But slowly, in the two years of their relationship, his terrible secret had slipped out: he was a settler. He would settle for the small solicitors firm in Galway. He would settle for a quiet, unperturbed life. He would settle for a house on Taylor’s Hill and a new Saab on a biannual basis, and he would involve himself delicately in the probate of small farmers and shopkeepers, and he would father unassuming and well-spoken children. But not with Helen Coyle he wouldn’t.

James, who was, inevitably, Eoin’s best friend, had a wider reach to his ambition. He was a broad-beamed, meat-faced man—at just twenty-two, there was none of the boy left—and he moved across the ground with a sure-footedness born of privilege. He had subtly courted Helen Coyle for the two years she had been involved with his friend—in the end, not all that subtly—because he had recognised early that in back of the pleasantness and openness there was an overwhelming want for progress. He saw that they would propel each other forward, through all the years and the bunfights, that neither would allow the other to slacken, not for a moment. James was handsome but in the way that a bulldog is handsome and in the cause of advancement he would have the grip and clench of a bulldog’s jaws. That was good enough for Helen Coyle—she’d made her decision.

Slowly, with a sense of building unease, the night gave away on itself. The slow fog of the mood drugs lifted and left nothing at all behind. Still there was some low music and people lay on the cushions and couches, and Alice, button-nosed, slept on her arms at the kitchen table. There was a tiny snoring sound if you crept up and listened to her quietly, and she dreamt of faraway places and pleasant young men in a warm light.

The nineteen year old from Roscommon had been rebuffed at every turn and he prepared for a cold wet walk out the long curve of the bay to Salthill. He would not spend on a taxi if there wasn’t cause to. They would already be unwrapping bundles of newspapers outside the churches and the gulls, raucous with winter, would circle down from the low sky in search of last night’s chips.

Helen went to her room upstairs and she quickly, neatly undressed and she stood for a moment with her left hand laid on her flawless belly—the satisfaction of that—and her pert nose twitched, she believed that she could smell smoke. She put on her dressing gown and followed the smell, it came from down the hallway, from the boxroom. She pushed in the door and saw Jack asleep on the narrow bed and the filthy old carpet smouldering on the floor. It was clear at a glance what had happened. His cigarette had fallen but there had been a piece of luck, he had the window open and rain had come in and put out the few flames that had started. It was almost at the finish of its damp smouldering by now. She went to find Coll, who shared the house, and yeah, a bucket of water, just to be sure. Fucking Jack! He could have put the whole place up, these old houses were always going up. Every year the
Advertiser
had another dreary tragedy, with names and ages and places of origin, from Carlow, originally, from Roscommon, originally.

Coll was back in the living room, flicking through his records. She whispered it to him. Fucksake! he said. Fucking typical of these people! There’s another deposit gone! He ran upstairs and saw that it was as she said—he didn’t and never would trust women’s accounts of things—and he went to fetch the water. When she had bent down to whisper to him, he turned just in time to see the swell of a breast beneath the dressing gown and the image now occupied his mind to a far greater degree than the non-event of a failed fire.

Martina turned to Mary Pearson, on a couch pushed back to the living-room wall, and she said:

‘Dave Costelloe? Yeah, but… kind of low-sized, isn’t he?’

‘I know. It’s the kind of way that if he was three inches taller he’d be a different man.’

‘Yeah but I do know what you mean, he’s kind of dirty?’

‘Oh, filthy! There is absolute filth in those eyes.’

‘Yeah, there is but… Jesus. Can you believe the time?’

‘Sunday’s a write-off. Come here, do you want to go and get some breakfast? I’m pretty sure Anton’s is open.’

It was eight o’clock, in Galway, on a Sunday morning. The wind had eased, to some extent. It would be a cold day with intermittent rain. Ollie drove the Corolla down the docks, his beany head swivelling left and right. He had people to see at the Harbour Bar, which kept market hours, and he had only the one wiper working. In rain, it felt as though the Corolla was gone half-blind. His shin was reefed open from the drainpipe but the wound had dried up some and, all told, it was unlikely to kill him. He passed by the house and wondered if there was anything still going on there. If things worked out at the Harbour Bar, he could knock back up and do some more business. But just as he drove past, the last of the stragglers emerged to the grey old streets and another wet morning of the reconstruction.

Breakfast Wine

T
hey say it takes just three alcoholics to keep a small bar running in a country town and while myself and the cousin, Thomas, were doing what we could, we were a man shy, and these were difficult days for Mr Kelliher, licensee of The North Star, Pearse Street.

‘The next thing an ESB bill will come lording in the door to me,’ he said. ‘That could tip me over the edge altogether. Or wait until you see, the fucker for the insurance will arrive in. Roaring.’

He took the rag to the counter and worked the rag in small tight circles, worked it with the turn of the knot and the run of the grain, he was a man of precise small flourishes, Mr Kelliher, and these flourishes were a taunt to the world. Even in desperate times, they said, proper order shall be maintained. The Kelliher mouth, like generations of Kelliher mouths before it, was bitter, dry and clamped, and the small grey eyes were deranged with injustice.

‘I’ve no cover,’ he said. ‘My arse is hanging out to an extraordinary degree. I’m open to the fates. It’s myself and the four winds. You’ll see me yet, boys, with a suitcase, at the side of the road, and the long face on. The workhouse! That’s what they’ll have to get going again for the likes of me.’

The clock considered twelve and passed it by with a soft shudder, as though it had been a close call. It seemed to be a fine enough day, out there beyond the blinds. Birds in the trees and flowers in the park and the first bit of warmth of the year. The torpid movement of late morning in the town, and the sunlight harsh in its vitality, as if it was only here to show the place up.

‘Nail me to a cross and crucify me,’ said Mr Kelliher, ‘and at least that way I’d go quick.’

The North Star was an intimate place, a place of dark wood and polished optics, with the radio tuned to the classical station for calm (it played lowly, very lowly) and the blinds let slants of light in and you’d see distant to the morbid hills, if you strained yourself. Myself and Thomas were sat there on the high stools. We were fine specimens of bile and fear and broken sleep. There was slow hungry slurping, and I finished what was before me.

‘Would you put on a pint for me, Mr Kelliher?’

‘I would of course, Brendan.’

‘Cuz?’

‘I will so,’ said Thomas.

Mr Kelliher never drank himself—not anymore—but he drank milky tea by the gallon, and a whistling kettle was kept in perpetual operation in the small private space adjoining the bar. Its whistle was a lonesome gull, or the wheeze of a lung, and it was part of the music of the house. Mr Kelliher attended to the stout. Each fresh glass he filled two sevenths shy of the brim, with the glass delicately inclined towards the pourer’s breast, so as the stout would not injure itself with a sheer fall, and he set them then, and there was the rush and mingle of brown and cream notes, and the blackness rising, a magic show you would never tire of.