There Are Little Kingdoms (8 page)

He walks on. There has been an unpromising start to the new season—two draws and a loss—and black squalls cross his brow when he thinks of the remarks that have been made. Do not say the wrong thing about Manchester United in the vicinity of Foley. Then the storm clouds will gather. Then you’d want to leave a wide berth. He wears the number seven jersey that says ‘Cantona’ on the back. It’s the biggest size the mail-order people can do but still a tight fit. See him of an evening, sat on the corner stool, there in the shadows, with the dry-roasted nuts, and the pint glass like a thimble in his hand. It would go through you, if you were unfortunate enough to be in any way soft-natured.

He follows the creek, goes past the factory, and the creek begins to quicken once it rounds the bend that leaves Mungret behind. Ahead of him on the pathway there’s a distraction. On the last high bank of the creek there are some boys gathered and as he approaches them he grows wary because he can see the shimmer of their gold in the afternoon sun. They wear streaks in their hair and dress shirts in bright colours. They have alert brows and startled eyes. There are six of them, no, seven, there’s eight of them, count, nine? Travellers.

‘Story, boss?’

‘What’s the story, big man?’

‘Some size of a creature we’ve on our hands here, boys. Look it!’

They stand in a half-circle to block the pathway but they keep switching position, they keep dancing around the place, it’s as though they’re on coals, and their voices have hoarse urgency.

‘Where you headed, sir?’

‘Are you headed for the hills, I’d say?’

‘Come here I wancha? Where do they keep you, do they keep you in a home?’

‘What brings you out this way, sir? And what size are you at all, hah? If you don’t mind me asking, like. You must be seven foot tall?’

‘Tell me this and tell me no more. What size is the man below? The women must think it’s Leopardstown.’

‘Now listen,’ says Foley. ‘That’s the kind of talk I won’t abide.’

‘It has a tongue!’

‘Ah come here now and go easy. Where do you live, fella? Are you inside in the city? Are the Health Board looking after you?’

They move in closer, and the talk changes to a confiding tone.

‘Listen. You’d do us a turn, hey? You see what it is, we’re short a few yo-yo for a game of pitch ‘n’ putt below in Mungret.’

‘Pitch ‘n’ putt my eye,’ says Foley. ‘You fellas are no more playing pitch ‘n’ putt.’

‘You’re calling us liars?’

A leader emerges. He spreads his arms like he’s nailed to a cross and he looks to the sky in great noble suffering and he bellows from deep:

‘Hold on, boys!’

It should have been obvious who the leader was. His shirt is of the richest purple and his hair is the most vivaciously streaked. His gold shimmers in the sun and he slaps a stick off the ground.

‘Hold on, boys. What we’re dealing with here is no old fool. You’re right, sir. We are having nothing at all to do with the pitch ‘n’ putt. Truth be known, there is a tragedy we’re dealing with. Martin here—the runt—Martin’s mother is laid out below in Pallasgreen. Misfortunate Kathleen! God rest her and preserve her and all belongin’ to her. And the situation we’re after been landed in, through no fault of our own, we’re short the few euro to wake her right. So help us out there, boss, will yuh? Martin is in a bad way.’

‘I’m bad, sir,’ says Martin. ‘I am bad now. And I guarantee you there’ll be prayers said.’

‘Shush now,’ says the leader, and again he slaps the stick off the ground, but Foley just smiles.

‘Out of my way, gentlemen,’ he says. ‘I’m going to walk on through.’

The leader slaps the stick again and exhales powerfully through his nose.

‘We’re not getting through to you, hey? Put your hand in the pocket there and help us out, like.’

They dance around him again, they swap and jostle with each other, they have terrible static in them, but Foley doesn’t move, and Foley doesn’t speak. The leader comes a step closer.

‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’

Foley smiles.

‘Look,’ he says. ‘We’re off on a bad footing. Can we not be civilised? Can we not calm ourselves? Look. I’ll tell you what. Will you shake my hand?’

The leader smiles. Negotiations have been smoothed. He opens his face to Foley. He is a reasonable person.

‘Of course,’ he says. ‘Of course I’ll shake.’

Foley closes his hand softly around the boy’s hand then and a cold quiver passes between them. It’s the feeling in the hazel switch when it divines water, and it’s the feeling that comes at night when a tendon in the calf muscle has a twitched memory of a falling step, and it’s there too, somehow, in the great confluence of starlings, when they spiral and twist like smoke in the evening sky. Foley holds the boy’s hand and the feeling sustains for a single necessary moment.

‘You were born the fourth son in a lay-by outside Tarbert,’ he says, ‘and you’ll die a wet afternoon in the coming May. The way I’m seeing it, a white van will go off the road at a T-junction. A Hitachi, if I’m seeing it right. And I can tell you this much, Bud—it ain’t gonna be pretty.’

‘What you sayin’ to me? What you sayin’ to me you fat fuckin’ freak?’

The leader shucks his hand free and takes a step back, and the others step back too. Foley, arrogant now, draws a swipe through the air, as though he’s swatting flies, and he walks on through. For a while the traveller boys follow and they taunt him from a distance but he knows they will not make the decision.

The creek dwindles to its outflow, and the estuary has an egginess, a pungency. The lethargy of swamp gives way to the slow momentum of the Shannon. From across the water, the hills of Clare look on unimpressed. You would be a long time impressing the hills of Clare. A path branches off from the creek and from here you can follow the river back into town and it’s a weary Foley that turns onto the branching. Sweat pours from his armpits and stains the number seven shirt that says ‘Cantona’ on the back. Oystercatchers work the rocks, most efficiently, and the lapwings are up and gregarious, but Foley doesn’t want to know. He limits his thoughts to each step as it falls. His heavy head lifts up now and then to find the town come closer, and still closer.

It is more difficult to look back. At the way Foley Snr would come home in the evening, take off his workboots, slap his fleshy paws together and do the hucklebuck in the middle of the floor. Twist the hips and pout the lips: ladies and gentlemen, a big hand now for the west of Ireland’s answer to Mr Jerry Lee Lewis. He’d manhandle the missus. He’d make slurping noises at his supper. He’d bounce the big child on a giant’s round knee.

‘Is the water on? Have you the water on at all? How am I supposed to get washed?’

‘Where you going, Dan?’

‘Out! I’m headin’ for the plains, Betsy. I’m gonna make me a home where the buffalo roam.’

Later she’d throw plates into the sink with such venom they’d sometimes smash. She’d smoke a fag, have a long chew on the bottom lip, then get on the phone and give out yards to a sister. Later she’d roar at the child and her brow would crease up as she plotted an escape. Later she’d weep like a crone because she was lonely. Dan’d be down the Dock Road, doing a string of bars and getting knee tremblers off fast girls in behind chip shop walls. Dan’d be going to dances out Drumkeen and swinging them around the floor, making husky promises beneath the candy-coloured lights. He’d sing ‘Are The Stars Out Tonight?’ as he walked them home. He’d play Russian hands and Roman fingers.

But the way it happens sometimes is that pain becomes a feed for courage, a nutrient for it: when pain drips steadily, it can embolden. She worked up the courage and left him, and left the young fella, too. It was a Halloween she went—Foley was dunking for apples. He was near enough reared, and he was the head off his father. She moved to Tipp town, or was it Nenagh, and fell in love with a bookmaker there and died a happy woman. The lights went down on the Foley boys. They didn’t get on. Violent confrontation was the daily norm and the worst of it, like in a country song, was when Foley started to win.

He hits the suburbs of the town and takes the Dock Road into the heart of the place. He steps away from the water and enters the grid of her streets, and his mood improves. He has before him the consolations of routine. He will go to the shade and dampness of the basement flat, where mushrooms have been known to grow from the walls. It is not much of a place to lay your head, no, but it is near the bar where they are used to him sitting in the shadows. (Lou Ferringo, they call him there, but not to his face.) It’s near the place he buys the fish. It’s where he braces himself for the afternoon walks by the creek, and we all have our creeks. He will put eight mackerel in two frying pans and fourteen potatoes in the big pot. He will turn on the television and go to page two-two-zero of the text to check on the football news. He will sigh then and stretch and take the keys of the car from the saucer by the door. At eight o’clock, precisely, he will turn the key in the ignition, put his size seventeen to the floor and he’ll switch on the two-way radio.

‘Fourteen here, base. I’m just heading out.’

And Alice at the base will say:

‘Okay, Tom, can you pick up in Thomondgate for me? The Gateway Bar. Sullivan.’

‘Uh-oh. What kind of a way is he?’

‘He doesn’t sound great, Tommy.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

And for eight hours he’ll pinball all over town—Thomondgate and Kileely, Prospect, Monaleen—and there is a sort of calmness in this and calmness accrues, it builds up like equity.

Maybe Foley will pick you up some night. You’ve had a few at The Gateway, or you’ve taken a hammering at the dogs, or you’re stood in the rain with bags at your feet outside the Roxboro Tesco.

‘Busy tonight?’

‘Ah, we’re kept going, you know? It’s busy enough for a Monday.’

And you’ll take him for an easeful man, a serene giant at the wheel of a gliding Nissan. Sometimes even the briefest touch is enough: you hand him the fare and he hands back the change and you feel the strange quiver, its coldness. He can tell precisely, in each case but his own. The town will lie flat and desolate and open to all weathers.

Ideal Homes

I
t was among the last bucolic fantasies of the village that Mr Delahunty, the blind shopkeeper, was secure against chancers and thieves. He could almost believe it himself, as cheerful villagers sang out the items they’d placed before him and his lively thin fingers danced across the register’s keys. Mr Delahunty kept a mental ledger containing every last price in his shop and to locate a price, he simply rolled the eyes up into the top of his head. When they came down again, they were wet smears, unpleasantly viscous, like the albumen of half-boiled eggs, but they had the price got. Omo, the large, a woman would say, and the eyes of Delahunty would roll up quickly and as quickly return. Two forty-eight, he’d say, and rack it on the reg: the figures would roll.

This was as close as the village got to an attraction. The village was an unimpressive tangle of a dozen streets. There was a main street and a square, one as drab as the other, and a woeful few streets subsidiary to these. There was an insignificant river, brown and slow, and granite hills beyond—these, it was said, gave the place a scenic charm but in truth, it was forlorn. The people were terraced in neat rows and roofed in with grey slates and were themselves forlorn, but they wouldn’t easily have said why.

Delahunty—his remaining senses sharpened—wasn’t crazy about the way things were shaping up. Sometimes, on these quiet evenings, when the streets had emptied out, and the traffic had exhausted itself, and when the twins, Donna and Dee, moved swiftly through his aisles, the eyes of Delahunty rolled up not to search out a price but with suspicion and fear. The blind man could tell bad girls by smell.

‘Just having a quick gawk, Mr Delahunty,’ called Dee, the blonde, as she rifled the cooler for sugary drinks.

‘Any sign at all of that new
Smash Hits
?’ called Donna, the brunette, who daily skinned the magazine rack of its gaudier titles.

‘No sign yet,’ said Mr Delahunty. ‘Anythin’ else I’d do ye for?’

In her own good time, Donna sashayed from the aisles and slapped a single packet of mints onto the counter. Her stonewashed jeans were lumpy with swag. Dee, shipping in alongside, was already quietly taking the wrapper off a Lion Bar. They had neck and brass and tongues like lizards.

‘Just these so,’ said Donna. ‘The auld bucks is tight.’

‘What’s it we have, ladies?’

‘Polos,’ said Dee. ‘The mint with the hole in it.’

Mr Delahunty blushed to a purplish colour, like a winegum, and Donna didn’t even pretend to hide her snigger.

‘Breakin’ hearts tonight, I suppose?’ he tried to skip past the blush.

‘Isn’t much around this place you’d break ’em off,’ said Donna. ‘But we’re causing damage all the same.’

‘Trying the handles of parked cars,’ said Dee.

‘Whistling past the graveyard,’ said Donna.

‘Haven’t they the lip taken off ye yet below in the Prez?’ asked Delahunty.

‘Sure you’d wonder what they’re turning out of that school at all,’ said Donna.

‘Eejits,’ said Dee. ‘That place is nothin’ only an eejit factory.’

‘Ye’ll be the stone cold end of me,’ said Delahunty. ‘That’s twelve pence, please.’

Donna put the coins on the table and she let her fingers linger there to playfully tip against the blind man’s reaching ones.

‘See ya later, maybe?’ she breathed it, heavily, and Dee made a wet, intimate noise with her painted lips.

Into the fade of a September evening, the two of them, brazen and sixteen. They were tallish in wedge heels. They were visions in stonewash. The hair was teased out big. There had been long hours of painful backcombing. The sky’s weak glow was the glow of a mean coal fire tamped down with slack—a widower’s fire. They made short work of the haul from Delahunty’s and whirled into a sugar frenzy. Their chatter was so nervous as to edge on violence but it succumbed, after a few turns around the square, to the notes of cheap melody. They hummed an old waltz tune, like one from the fifties films their mother watched in the afternoons—valium and vodka, curtains drawn, big woozy romantic strings—and Donna hooked an arm of Dee’s with a crook of her own, and they spun each other in slow then quickening circles, the footwork was dainty, the heels became a blur, down half the length of the main street they turned. There was a hooded crow on a windowsill. There was a notice for a sale of work pinned upside down in the display case by the grotto. All the parked cars pointed in the same direction.