New Irish Short Stories

by Joseph O'Connor

  ‘I’ve just left my boyfriend,’ I said.

  John nodded. ‘He do that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then who did?’

  The chicken and mash turned sour in my throat as I swallowed it down.

  ‘I did this to myself,’ I admitted out loud.

  John’s eyebrows rose. He looked across at Hetty, and her smile slid from him to me.

  I glanced at my phone. I told myself five more minutes, or maybe dessert and coffee, then I’ll ring back.

  After Peter first saw my paintings, he wanted to know where my father was.

  ‘Dead,’ I told him.

  Peter had dark hair and green eyes. I had watched him move about the gallery like a long cat on longer legs. I presumed him gay but what he really was was a boy who just wanted to love somebody like me.

  ‘I kidnap men on a regular basis,’ I half-warned.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ he half-promised and smiled like a boy from a fairy tale. He stood under a painting of mine – a backbone with arrowed sinews – and said it was as if I was drawing the birth of a ghost.

  John kept digging pieces from his pie but looked at me from under his eyes. Hetty smiled over. Her earrings jangled, and she gave me the thumbs up. She reached behind the counter then held up the Duluth Tribune, open to the arts section. My normal face was there.

  ‘You’re famous,’ she stage whispered at me.

  I smiled at her. She was nothing like my mother. My mother told me I looked like my father as I slept. She said I had more of his genes in me than any of her other children. She said once he had finished with me I was like something poisonous. She said what he put in me I’d keep in me for ever.

  Hetty came over to our table with more coffee.

  ‘How come you’re not where you’re supposed to be?’ she asked.

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘You like the chicken?’

  ‘It’s good,’ I lied to her.

  I glanced at her blue eye shadow and her white-flour soft face. Her lipstick was cracking. John pushed his hand towards mine, waited a second, then finger-tipped my knuckles.

  I didn’t like that. I didn’t like the way he played on my fingers, where rings should be, where things that twinkle with good love should be.

  ‘It’s my father’s anniversary,’ I blurted.

  ‘For what?’ John asked.

  ‘He died three years ago,’ I said.

  Hetty coughed. She tapped her fingers on the table then on her mouth.

  ‘Hey, let’s get wine after I finish up here,’ she suggested.

  John smiled. ‘Tash will be worried if I’m too late.’

  Hetty glanced at me. ‘His fiancée,’ she explained.

  She sat in beside me, slipped off her shoes and reached down to rub her nylon toes. A smell rose from them, and I helped myself to more coffee.

  ‘I can be late for a bit,’ John said.

  He had dry skin, and his fingers were ragged. He saw me looking.

  ‘I work with wood,’ he said. ‘Sometimes the resin reacts with my skin.’

  ‘Need to hand it over to someone,’ Hetty picked a string of chicken from my plate and laid it on her tongue. ‘Fifty means you’re not so young.’ She elbowed me. But don’t he look good for fifty? Like a really old thirty-year-old.’

  She giggled, and the chicken string spat out of her mouth and onto the table. She picked it up, rolled it into a ball between her fingers then dropped it to the floor.

  ‘Hey,’ she remembered and pulled out the napkin from her apron pocket. ‘You’ve got to sign this.’ She handed me her waitress pen, and I signed my name under the sketch. She tried to touch my cheek.

  ‘So, who did that?’ she said and settled her fingers into a small claw over the napkin.

  I gave her back her pen. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  Hetty smiled large at John.

  ‘She looks like your Tasha, don’t she John? Just like you want to bundle her up in your arms and take her home.’

  ‘Tasha wouldn’t like that,’ John guessed.

  ‘We can go to my place,’ Hetty decided.

  ‘What would we do there?’ I asked.

  Hetty stroked her finger along my left hand. ‘You’re cold,’ she said. ‘We could warm you up.’

  ‘It is too late,’ I said. I hunched my shoulders in, then I said:

  ‘The last time I did this, I was in Florence.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Hetty said with her big, bright smile, and her teeth flashed with clean saliva.

  ‘His name was Matthias. He was Swiss-German. He was very polite.’

  John and Hetty didn’t say anything.

  I took out my phone and switched it on.

  Hetty took it from me and ran through its call list. ‘Who’s Peter?’

  ‘Turn it off,’ John told Hetty and held his hand out for it.

  ‘I don’t do threesomes,’ I said.

  Hetty went back to stroking my hand. John smiled.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Hetty said. ‘We can just talk.’ She touched the side of my face. ‘Maybe we could give you a bath, we could clean you up.’

  I kept on eating. Hetty got impatient. She sucked her tongue against her teeth and hummed. John was waiting for me to say something. I stared at his face. This close he looked old and too soft, the sort of softness that I didn’t want to touch. I thought of my father and the skin beneath his eyes.

  So I said, ‘I paid a ten-year-old boy to beat me up today.’

  My jaw clicked on a tiny chicken bone. John stared at my bruises and the faint colour of blood over my face. I stared right into his eyes.

  ‘A ten-year-old,’ I insisted.

  Hetty growled at me. ‘What kind of game are you playing?’ She kicked John underneath the table. He coughed and sloshed his coffee. I was tired. The pain was fading except for the headache at the back of my skull, and I pressed the top of my spine hard against the back of my seat.

  ‘Hey,’ John barked.

  I looked at him. I saw him trying to screw some kind of threat into his eyes but I didn’t want to play after all. I yawned and stretched my jaw, and the pain rose like nails into the back of my skull.

  ‘He liked my colouring pencils,’ I explained.

  Hetty’s face went slack under her make-up. ‘What the … ?’

  John warned her: ‘I don’t have time for this.’

  He put my phone back down on the table. Hetty shifted to the edge of her seat, fluffed out her hair over her forehead then took away my knife and fork.

  I glanced from John’s face to hers. ‘And I paid him ten dollars,’ I told them.

  John rubbed his watch against his chin. He was too old to react the way Peter had done. He didn’t admire the perverse romance of it all.

  Peter had stayed. Peter had promised to make me new again but failed. Peter who sat at a table in Florence and said he didn’t want this game anymore.

  Peter looked at me. ‘I don’t think you want love, Frankie. I don’t think you’re built for it.’ He poured some wine. ‘Maybe you should just leave me one day. Maybe I could take it.’

  John slapped his hand on the table top. He stood up.

  ‘No psychos,’ he said. ‘Not anymore.’

  ‘But she’s pretty,’ Hetty started to negotiate yet she was half-standing and her toes were crawling for her shoes.

  John gave her a look so she stood up, cracked her towel against the edge of the table and lowered her face close to mine.

  ‘I never liked bitches like you.’

  I looked up at her. I could see holes in her skin where the make-up had dripped off from the heat of her grill.

  ‘All waiting to be patched up like dogs,’ she spat. She sucked up the dribble on her lips, and I put my hand over my coffee cup when she grabbed my plate.

  John was talking to the old man. Hetty went back behind the diner bar and began wiping it. I watched everyone’s movements in slow motion.

  John walked out of the diner.
r />   Hetty turned up the radio.

  The old man winked at me. I glanced at his hands inside his fly. The old man laughed, and Hetty flicked out the newspaper into the air before shaping it edge to edge on the diner counter. The comic-book kids got up and walked out.

  I rang Peter. Then I remained in place, watching the dark night outside the diner’s windows and the car lights looping backwards and forwards like mad eyes with nothing to hold them.

  The last time my father hit me I was twenty-one years old. He stood back and waited a few seconds before he fixed my hair behind my ears.

  *

  The little boy had said, ‘If it hurts, will you cry?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  He shifted on his heels and looked towards the far end of the playground.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ he said.

  ‘No, just sometimes I feel better when I’m hurt.’ I smiled up at the sky. It was drained of sun. ‘And my boyfriend gets tired sometimes.’

  ‘Oh, okay,’ said the boy.

  So I lay on the ground to make it easy for him. I could hear his feet slip in the mush of snow then his fist bounced into my face. The shock lifted my chest.

  ‘Harder,’ I said.

  The boy’s fists punched into my face. I breathed each time, and when I tasted too much blood I pushed him away.

  He fell back and snarled.

  I sat up and watched the world slide in and out of focus. I could hear the cars growl on the street beyond the park’s wall. Someone yelled for someone, and I knew if it was Peter yelling for me then it would be too early. I needed the pain first.

  ‘You okay?’ the boy said. He danced on his feet.

  I said nothing for seconds. The boy kicked about and glanced towards a group of adults at the far end of the play area. Then he shoved his fists into his coat pockets and looked at me.

  ‘Where’s my money?’

  I took my purse from my coat pocket and handed him ten dollars. He rolled the note between his fingers.

  ‘You’ll have to hide it,’ I warned.

  He spat out phlegm. ‘I have places Mom will never find.’

  I gazed at my blood in the snow.

  ‘Like candyfloss,’ I said out loud to no one.

  One of Those Stories

  Anthony Glavin

  THERE ARE STORIES YOU HEAR once in a blue moon if you’re lucky – lucky, I think, in that life can still stop you in your tracks – though that’s two clichés already, and, whatever else, the stories I’m on about do not traffic in cliché. Instead, something in their configuration – in how they work themselves out – seems to speak, however briefly, to the heart of the matter. To stuff like loss, longing, love, or mortality. But for this story, blue moon is maybe okay, as there was actually one up there the night I heard it.

  Painting is my game, not narrative, but I remember thinking as I walked home that night how where you hear certain stories – and from whom – invariably becomes a part of them. And marks them out, I suppose, from stories you merely read, unless of course, like Coleridge, you happen to fall asleep over one to dream of something seeded by it – only for your mobile phone to ring and leave you haunted by what you might otherwise have had: a story of your own. But the story I’m talking about, the one I heard last week and haven’t been able to get out of my head since, I heard at a dinner party.

  Or before the dinner party started, seeing that Fergal, our host and my solicitor, told it to me at the cooker where we had started on the first bottle of Rioja. As he added the butter beans to the paella, Noreen, our hostess, chatted with the first of the two couples to arrive, handing them the tomato and basil starter to place around the table. ‘Please don’t!’ I had pleaded a few months earlier, after Fergal and Noreen had asked another single guest to dinner, a very pleasant journalist, Meredith, whom they thought I might like to meet. ‘Or only if you’ll otherwise end up some night with thirteen at table,’ I lamely quipped, making Noreen, who had loved my Detta, wince and turn away.

  Fergal had only heard the story himself that morning, from Seamus, a friend who has known him far longer than I, part of a circle he and Noreen used to drink with years ago, four or so couples who met up in Birchall’s of a weekday night or the odd weekend afternoon, after a rugby match or some exhibit maybe. Not all of the gang were solicitors like Fergal and Noreen; Seamus works for a design agency, while Henry and Mary, whose story I suppose this really is, were a civil servant and clinical psychologist respectively.

  I had that much from Fergal by the time the sliced red peppers went into the big paella pan and the remainder of the story before we all repaired to table and a third bottle of Rioja was shortly uncorked. How Mary had fallen in love some thirty years ago with an American anaesthetist practising here in Dublin, for whom she left both Henry and their two small children when her lover returned to his native Tennessee.

  ‘She left the kids?’ I said, only to hear Detta in my head, interrogating me in turn whether I’d have bothered asking that, had it been Henry who’d bailed out instead? I don’t doubt Fergal’s Noreen might have challenged me too, but seeing it was just we two at the cooker Fergal merely nodded, ‘They were lovely kids, a girl seven and a boy a year or two younger.’

  He and Noreen had seen something of the kids too, for Henry used to bring them into Birchall’s the odd Saturday or Sunday, buy them a mineral and crisps, after which they would play with whatever other children in the circle had accompanied their parents there, including, on occasion, Fergal and Noreen’s two young daughters, both married now with kids of their own.

  But then, two years later, Mary had come over to Ireland for a visit and taken both children back with her to Nashville when she left. I didn’t think to ask Fergal about custody, nor does it really matter, I think. What mattered at the time, however, was Henry’s by now twice-broken heart and how heavily he had begun to drink. Already shaken by the dissolution of his and Mary’s marriage, his friends now circled ever more protectively around Henry, mounting various interventions to get him to cut down on the drink: invitations to dinner, various outings or offers of cottages in Connemara and Kerry. But nothing they could do impacted in any real way on his decline, which sadly ended two years later when he died from a pernicious dose of viral pneumonia.

  The talk at table, after the other couple had arrived and we all sat down to eat, was not surprisingly of lighter stuff, the usual blather about house prices or giving out about the government of the day, which threatens to become the government of yet another decade after being again returned to power in a dispiriting general election last month. But none of that truly matters to this story; nor do the names of the other guests, though, for the record, they were Maurice and Anne, a pair of academics, Trinity College sociology and University College Dublin geography I think, and Peter and Grainne, both in finance.

  I doubt that kind of tandem vocational act would have worked for me and Detta, who undoubtedly felt one taciturn, moody painter under her roof was more than enough, thanks very much. Nor would I in a million years ever have the patience for her primary-school charges – though the fact I make most of my bread from teaching at the National College of Art and Design arguably made us a pair of pedagogues after all.

  In any event, the dinner table chat was okay – nothing memorable, but certainly pleasant. Nobody asked me what kind of paintings I do, which invariably makes me want to reply, ‘Acrylics, unless it’s a good summer and oils will dry.’ Mindful, I suppose, of what Matisse advised, ‘If you want to make art, cut off your tongue,’ though Edward Hopper once chanced saying how all he wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house. Nor did I feel that evening too much like a spare among the company either – unpartnered, the odd man out. Or, for that matter, like I was once again seated in the Mexican Ambassador’s chair. We’d had a good laugh about that, Detta and I, comparing conversational notes over a nightcap in our own kitchen after a dinner party thrown by somebody we hardly knew – a publisher for whom I had d
one some line drawings for a poetry book – and deducing how we had only been invited, more or less at the last minute, after the Ambassador, their neighbour, had rung the publisher to say his wife was not feeling well.

  That was all on an early spring night two years ago, a couple of months before Detta herself took ill. Our laughter, before we took ourselves up to bed that night, suggests how much better we were doing that year, having decided the previous Christmas that we would not walk away from our marriage, not yet anyhow. Would give it and ourselves another chance instead. Would work on our relationship as a Yank might say, though I can see Detta making that gagging gesture she loved, forefinger thrust down her throat, at the very sound of such. We still fought plenty, but fact is we were on an upswing, even if all that were happening, or so it seemed afterwards, in a universe parallel to the one in which Detta went off to our GP that June to see about a mole on her neck. A small, scabby mole that would do for her before November was out. And while part of me knows that I’m blessed we were doing so much better before Detta died, another part still resents her for dying just as we’d maybe finally figured our way forward out – as if this time she had slipped out of the house altogether, not just disappeared behind our loudly slammed bedroom door as she sometimes would in the middle of a row, to put on Loudon Wainwright, whom she knew I couldn’t abide, at full volume.

  Anyhow, there was nothing strange or startling about last week’s dinner party, no diplomats in absentia, nor hostess upending the entire contents of a cutlery drawer in an ear-splitting, silvery waterfall onto the hardwood dining-room floor, as the unfortunate wife of a department head at the art college, a sorry, secret drinker, had managed to do while rummaging for a cake slice some years ago. Nor had a lecherous guest chanced his arm, or hand rather, beneath the table, moving it slowly up the leg of the woman seated next to him, as happened once to Caroline, a friend of Detta’s, who described with great glee her happy anticipation as your man’s hand eventually encountered the strapping of her prosthesis, and then the successive expressions that flitted across his face, like a film on fast forward: befuddlement, horror, mortification.