New Irish Short Stories

by Joseph O'Connor

  What did happen, though, was a second recounting of the story Fergal had told me at the cooker, only undertaken this time by his Noreen as she parcelled out the fruit meringue and handed round a bowl of freshly whipped cream, on which, in the sorry, health-obsessed age we inhabit, half of the table passed. And here, too, I can imagine the spirited exchange Detta and I might have had, once home, had she been there to hear me shortly take over the story from Noreen. But I honestly don’t think it was chauvinism that spurred me to take up the thread, unless it was possibly Fergal’s own, seated there like a lump as Noreen handed round the coffees, plus a camomile tea for Grainne in finance, all the while trying to do her best with what she had heard from Fergal, who, to give him credit, had finally bestirred himself to fetch and uncork what I seriously hoped would prove the last bottle of Rioja.

  In any event, after Noreen had interrupted herself yet again to fetch a mint tea for Maurice the sociologist, who had decided against coffee after all, I – whose table it was not, whose story it was not; I, who have never fathered a child, never mind a daughter – suddenly found myself now telling the end of it. Telling how Fergal and Noreen’s old friend Seamus had heard a few weeks previously that Henry and Mary’s now grown-up daughter – Claudia let’s call her – was coming back to Ireland to give a talk at an international conference here. And so Seamus had gone along to the Burlington Hotel, and after Claudia had finished speaking, had gone up to her. ‘You won’t remember me,’ he introduced himself, ‘but I knew you as a child. And I want to say the only thing wrong with your wonderful talk tonight is that your father couldn’t have been here to hear it.’ To which Claudia had replied, ‘Oh, hold me. Hold me, please!’ which Seamus did, putting his arms around her as she laid her head on his shoulder and quietly sobbed her heart out in the crowded function room.

  And then I told the final bit of it, just as Fergal had done earlier at the cooker, where he gave her name for the first time, revealed who the seven-year-old daughter, now thirty-nine-year-old woman, was. A name I knew – not Claudia, which I made up – but the name of somebody whom the others around the table now also recognised: not a film star, singer or so-called TV celebrity, but somebody in public affairs who had been briefly in the news earlier in the year. But suddenly realising, even as I gave it, that I wouldn’t tell that part of it again, suddenly seeing how Claudia’s real name makes it another story altogether, and one that by all rights belongs to her alone.

  That part of it still makes sense, but I puzzled afterwards how my not having known any of the principals – Henry, Mary, Claudia, Seamus – had not appeared to particularly matter, and since I wasn’t making a mess of it, and since Noreen was by now handing round the cheese platter, and Fergal refilling our wine glasses, the story apparently could be as easily finished off by me. I also have found myself wondering since what might have happened to Claudia’s brother, or whether their mother stayed with her American lover. Or, for that matter, what Mary went through herself to pull up stakes like that, seeing as she does not get a chance to tell her side in any of this. But all of that is, as they say, another story.

  Yet what struck me most, I guess, is the impact the story had on all of us around the table. I can only speak for myself of course, and admittedly not all that clearly. The fact that I lost my father around the same age as Claudia did hers is perhaps part of it, though mine scarcely drank himself towards death, but was rather knocked down by a car while walking back from a late evening stroll on our summer holidays in Connemara when I was twelve. Still, I don’t think it’s so simple as some kind of identification or transference either, given that, as I already mentioned, Detta and I never managed to have a child – daughter or son – a shortfall, as it were, which underlay a good deal of the unhappiness that ate into us. But whatever our various stories around the table that night, each of us seemed to feel that sudden surge of Claudia’s grief upon hearing her father summoned forth out of the blue like that, nearly thirty years on; felt the palpable heartache that had me, too, wanting to hold her in that hotel function room, along with Seamus, only that way lies sentimentality, and this was harder, truer, more adamantine than that. Not sentiment so much as some class of cathartic, subterranean sorrow – what have you – as if words are ever of any use.

  ‘Mind yourself, won’t you?’ Noreen said, kissing me good night on the cheek at their door, myself as always the last to leave. ‘Are you sure you don’t want us to call a taxi?’ But I always walk home from their house, a forty-minute trek from their end of Ranelagh to Rialto, and last Saturday night was clear, the blue moon overhead floating like a white dinner plate on the canal waters where my mobile had beeped twice: a text wishing me Safe home from Noreen.

  She’s sound, Noreen is; no longer pushes anywhere as hard about how am I doing as she did in the first months after Detta’s death, though still very much to the fore of the handful of friends who circled round, same as she, Fergal, Seamus and others had minded Henry years before. As I left the canal behind, I thought of how she had called by that February to insist I accompany her over to the Northside for a walk in St Anne’s Park. A day of bright sunshine, and mild enough for us to sit for a spell on some stone steps down where the park meets the Howth Road, a tiny waterfall at our backs, a small pond in front, and all of Dublin Bay stretched out beyond.

  Noreen had remarked on all the water when we sat down and had spoken something about its correspondence with the emotions when we left, the kind of spiritual-speak stuff that I’m not keen on but have learned to let go by unremarked the odd time I encounter it. But I won’t deny that I broke down entirely on those steps, after I had finished telling Noreen of the September weekend Detta and I had grabbed in Venice, between radium treatments, and before we knew which way her illness might be heading. Describing for her the small piazza across the Ponte di Rialto where we had sat for an hour on a bench by a narrow canal, watching the gondolas pass by at eye level, the pale yellow sunlight on the wall of an adjacent church like fresh paint on old stone.

  Yet the tears only came as I began to recount for her the dream I’d had of Detta just the night before, the pair of us searching everywhere for something we had mislaid, emptying out the cupboard under the stairs and then the garden shed, all of it slightly skewed the way dreams are, but the two of us together again, as low-key and ordinary as if she’d never left. Noreen was great anyhow, didn’t say much, mostly just listened as I tried and utterly failed to describe a loss that, when I finally lifted my head, seemed as if it were being stitched into the pale blue sky by three black chevrons of Brent geese passing overhead.

  At least I’d stopped crying by the time this other couple comes along, Polish maybe, or Eastern European anyhow, in their early thirties. I like the way the new Irish inhabit Dublin, flocking to the parks or Dollymount Strand on the weekends, fishing in the canals and, better yet, or maybe worse, eating what they catch. Anyhow, the guy, a strapping bloke in a bright yellow sweatshirt, comes up and holds out a tiny mobile phone in his big mitt. ‘You know to use this?’

  ‘I do,’ I agree, though I’m not entirely sure what he’s asking.

  ‘I want you take picture of wife and me please,’ he points at a woman in a brown anorak with frizzy blonde hair, who smiles awkwardly back at us. So Noreen tells them to stand in front of the tiny waterfall, after which I hold the phone up and shoot them posing there, arms around each other.

  ‘Who in God’s name scripts this stuff?’ I ask Noreen who just shakes her head as we walk back along the wooded path to her car. But I think maybe I’ve figured that much out by now. How we do that scripting bit ourselves, make our lives into stories as we stumble along. Not that we’re anyways aware of that – the way I thought last week, standing at Fergal’s cooker and later at the table, how that was Henry and Claudia’s story, which it is, of course, but which has oddly since also come to feel in a way like my own. Perhaps that’s the way certain stories work, the luck I mentioned at the start, reminding us that some, if n
ot all, of what we’ve lost and found has been known by others, and in the telling or listening life can come to feel a bit less like a game of solitaire. But I hadn’t that part of it until just now, certainly hadn’t it the other night when, finally reaching our place, I managed, despite the Rioja and abetted by the moonlight, to get the key into the lock on the second go, after which I walked into the empty house.

  Giant

  Julia Kelly

  DOT BROKE AWAY FROM THE rest of the group who were still loitering in the gift shop of the British Museum. She crossed the road at High Holborn, an untidy tourist, coat slung over arm, a plastic bag of souvenirs looped around and digging into her wrist, and hurried along Lincoln’s Inn Fields, eyes to the ground, trusting neither the uneven pavement nor her own increasingly unreliable feet.

  She joined the queue for the cloakroom at the Hunterian Museum, rooting in her bag for her reading glasses and crowding the person in front of her, the way the elderly do, impatient and anxious to be rid of her baggage, unable to stand back and wait her turn.

  She climbed the marble staircase to the first floor and entered a hushed, carpeted room. Still a little out of breath from the stairs, she gave the security guard standing in an empty corner a cursory nod and was then immediately preoccupied by the exhibit she wanted to find.

  The room was stuffed floor to ceiling with medical curiosities of a Victorian past: images of tuberous leprosy, a foldable and adjustable birthing chair made of walnut, phallic amulets worn as symbols of fertility, illustrations of syphilitic malformations of teeth, gangrene of the foot … warts and all. Her satisfaction at quickly and easily finding what she had come to see caused her to exclaim aloud. An art student sketching foetal abnormalities looked up, tired of being interrupted, then went back to her rendering, tongue in cheek with intent.

  Tilting slightly back on her heels to take all eight foot, two inches of him in, Dot surveyed the extraordinary size of the skeleton. She took her glasses from their coffin-like case and stooped to read the information plaque near his metatarsal bones:

  Charles Byrne (1761–1783) was one of a few famous 18th-century Irish giants who were among the group of human curiosities who had celebrity status in London theatres, making fortunes from people who would pay just to see them on stage. He is believed to be originally from Cork, but emigrated to London to earn a living. He was found dead in his apartment on Cockspur Street, Charing Cross at the age of just twenty-two following a bout of excessive drinking shortly after having his life savings stolen from him.

  Dot stood there for a few seconds longer. She had read somewhere that the giant’s dying wish had been to be buried at sea, as he did not want to become a specimen for anatomists or to remain an eternal freak show after death. Yet here he was, all his sadness contained behind glass, and here she was staring at him, now with an odd sense of remorse.

  She felt for her wristwatch, calculated how long she could remain where she stood before she would need to get back to her group: a nomadic assortment of octogenarians, gay men and always the one unfathomable (no one was sure why she was there), all partaking in a frantic ticking off of antiquities and places and events, from the Mona Lisa to the tomb of Tutankhamen, that they felt were essential to a life fully lived.

  *

  Soft rainfall had left the air freshly wet that Sunday evening, petrichor, perfect running weather. Joe no longer felt that burn at the back of his throat – a sure sign that he was once again fit. He had drunk no alcohol for a month and was on a fruit-only diet for breakfast and lunch each day.

  In the Liberties, at the top of Meath Street, where it intersects with Thomas Street, a red light had allowed him brief respite. He had stood, head bowed, hands on knees, catching his breath, and when he looked up again, he was met with a close-up of his own face on a billboard on a hoarding opposite. He appeared moodily handsome, as he had hoped he might, in profile in a black polo neck, intelligence in his eyes, just the right amount of stubble. It had been twenty years since he’d seen his face on a poster. The brief sensation of celebrity it had given him made him run further and faster than he was fit for. He reached that sweet spot, where running felt as effortless and as natural as walking. He could have pounded the pavements forever.

  In the shower, suffused by the mild euphoria that follows exercise, he turned his face directly into the powerful stream of hot water, endorphins smothering the pain of a blister on his heel brought on by the five-mile run in new Nikes.

  Two local radio stations had added his latest song to their playlists. Its lyrics had come to him, perfectly formed, in the bath, where all his best ideas were born. At their zenith, The Tribe could fill the National Stadium to capacity; Joe was a gifted songwriter and a natural front man: on stage he had been captivating. At the end of gigs he would stand, sweat-drenched and proud, beaming at the cheering audience and their rousing chants of ‘More! More! More!’

  They appeared on the nation’s biggest chat shows, heard their songs played in record stores around the city. They could smell success, could very nearly touch it. They were where it was at. Then two things happened: creative differences in the band and a fickle change of fashion. The drummer wanted to be heard better, the bass player seen more. The ego that had brought them together was the same ego that broke them up.

  Joe pulled over the shaving mirror, rubbed away some condensation and, holding his hand as still as possible, ran a kohl eyeliner pencil along his lower lids. He patted a little of his wife’s concealer over the pronounced bags beneath them and, wincing, tried to force a stud earring into the long-neglected piercing in his left earlobe.

  He stood on the scales: a happy ten pounds lighter than he’d been a month before. He had developed a solid, Easter-egg-shaped paunch that no amount of deprivation could dispel but that comfortably accommodated his guitar. All black would be best: T-shirt with witty maxim, black jeans and Day-Glo yellow trainers, giving him the look less of a rock star, more of a squat snorkeler, but no one was going to go there.

  He looked over the guest list as he ate a light dinner – pasta with tomato and chilli. His stomach was churning, he was nervous, but ready to go. He saw the night ahead: the room busy with bodies, hushed and smiling or nodding as they identified with, or suddenly remembered, the brilliance of his lyrics, written in his head on runs, in the bath, in the staffroom between lessons, even sometimes during sex. A former female backing singer from The Tribe was going to join him on stage for two songs, to give him a bit of relief, in case his voice couldn’t sustain him on his first night as a solo artist, his comeback gig.

  *

  Dot was home from London, at her dressing table, deliberating about what to wear. She hummed tunelessly as she rooted through a small china bowl containing hair clips, miscellaneous buttons, a torn theatre stub – all soft with dust – for a suitable pair of earrings. She provided her own soundtrack to whatever she was doing: when she ran her morning bath, threading fingers through water to check its temperature, on her way to answer the front door, to let whoever it was know that she had heard them and that all was as it should be, in the evenings as she waited for the milk in the saucepan to warm, practising what she’d learnt at ballroom dancing that week with her invisible partner, slippered feet moving lightly across the kitchen floor.

  ‘Ah, Dot,’ she quietly goaded herself when she spilt face powder on the bedroom carpet. She had talked to herself since her husband died fifteen years earlier and probably even while he was alive, in the room beside her, but not listening. He smiled at her now from a framed photograph near her hand, a memory in miniature, his angular glasses, paisley tie and side-parted hair existing for eternity in the past and so far away from his animated, life-sized wife.

  It would be hot; it was always so hot in those places, so something light, and comfortable shoes because there might not be somewhere to sit. She had spread three possibilities on the bed behind her. She eyed them now, in their mirror image, as she cleansed, toned and moisturised her face, vag
uely alarmed to see an elderly woman looking back at her. She wanted to wear something ‘with it’ but didn’t know quite what with it could be. Perhaps the purple dress she bought in the little French shop on the high street? Or the flirty lemon-coloured skirt, that kicked out as she moved? She had worn it one evening in London but it travelled well – all her clothes were made from fabrics that were practical. But what top would be best with that? And what necklace? No, not a necklace. Maybe a scarf? She opened the drawer below her and felt around for an emery board.

  *

  The evening began late. The support act were delayed in traffic coming up from Limerick; there had been some trouble with the acoustics and the organisers wanted to wait until the venue was a bit fuller. It had seen better days – the small, sweaty room looked as jaded as some of the acts that had passed through it.

  Finally, lights were dimmed, and there was a herd movement towards the stage. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, would you please welcome, after far too long in exile, Joooooe McCann!’

  Joe took his place centre stage under the spotlight, a pint of Carlsberg by his feet, his guitar strapped round his shoulders. He opened the set with a few old favourites: feet began tapping, a hippy girl swayed, a Beaker-like man in glasses with not much hair nodded, eyes closed, to concentrate on the songwriter’s words. There were a few bum notes, broken strings, false starts, but that was always a given. Joe gulped his pint between songs and told stories that made people smile.

  Dot McCann’s feet were tired, she couldn’t make out the lyrics, couldn’t see her son clearly from where she stood, beside some noisy girls who seemed to be quite tight. She wondered why they had bothered paying in, standing there with their backs to the stage. She had arrived when the doors opened at eight o’clock, had chatted to a few of her son’s pals, had had two mineral waters, and now she wanted to sit.