New Irish Short Stories

by Joseph O'Connor

  I could feel the purse in my pocket and I knew the flowers were even more beautiful than I’d thought. People were friendly and interested to know my name and where I lived and if my mother was at home, and although the bunches with longer stems went first, nearly everyone found it hard to know which ones to choose.

  At one house a boy with pimples and a black T-shirt that had ‘So what?’ in pink writing on the front, came to the door with a cigarette in his hand.

  He looked at the two bunches I had left. ‘So how much money have you made?’

  ‘Four shillings and sixpence so far,’ I said.

  ‘Cool. Almost enough to buy yourself some wheels. Look here, my old lady’s out at the moment but if she wasn’t I reckon she’d buy.’

  In less than an hour I’d sold the ten bunches and went home with the purse full of money. I emptied it onto the kitchen table and made a little tower of each kind of coin. Five and sixpence: five shillings for the flowers, and the extra sixpence from the people who’d bought three bunches.

  I thought about boiling the kettle and setting out the cups. I’d make the tea when I heard the bus, and when we were settled at the table I’d casually show her the money. But I was too excited to stick to the plan so I washed my face and legs, changed into fresh shorts and my lace-collar blouse, ran down the road to the bus stop and sat on the verge, jiggling my leg against the fat purse in my pocket.

  The bus pulled in and my mother was sitting right at the front. As soon as she got up from her seat she saw me and waved, and hugged me against her when she came down the steps. ‘That blouse is lovely,’ she said. ‘You’re a good girl to come down to the bus in it.’ I took the shopping bag from her and saw there was milk and a packet of meat. ‘Are we having chops?’ I asked.

  ‘Chops?’ she said. ‘Where would the money come from for chops?’

  ‘I’ve got a present for you.’

  ‘A present?’ she said. ‘Have you really?’

  In the kitchen I opened the purse and emptied it onto the table. ‘It’s for you. It’s the present.’

  She looked at the money and then at me. ‘Where did this money come from?’

  ‘I got it from flowers, flowers like the ones I gave you.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Lucy?’

  I started to tell her about the peach box I’d found in the yard behind the supermarket, the daisy chains and the flowers, but before I could finish she slapped the table hard with both hands. ‘Are you telling me, are you really telling me that you went around the neighbourhood selling bits of flowers you got from the bush?’ She sat down like an old woman and put her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. A big sob came out of her, and when she looked up her face was twisted and wet. ‘People will think I sent you, they’ll think I dressed you up and sent you out to sell flowers from the bush.’

  ‘I didn’t dress up,’ I said. ‘I dressed up for you.’

  ‘Look at you!’ She pressed her fingers against her eyes and shook her head. ‘I want you to go back. Go and give the money back. Tell them your mother won’t let you keep it.’

  ‘I don’t want to keep it,’ I said. ‘It’s for you.’

  ‘Listen to what I am saying, Lucy. You are to say your mother will not allow you to keep the money. That’s what you must say.’

  I went back with my purse to each of the houses and told the people I had to give back the money. ‘Well, if that’s what your mother wants,’ some said. Others asked why I had to give it back but I wasn’t able to tell them. The man and his wife who had bought the three bunches weren’t at home so I left the money on the mat in front of their door.

  The last person I went to was the woman who’d bought the first bunch and given me the toffees. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what all this is about but you can tell your mother I will not give back the flowers. If she’s not happy with that, she can come up here to me and we’ll talk about it.’ I walked home thinking about how everyone else had taken back their money as though it had nothing to do with the flowers.

  ‘Well,’ said my mother, ‘What did they say? Did you tell them your mother wouldn’t let you keep the money?’

  I put the sixpence on the table. ‘One woman wouldn’t take it. She said you can go and see her about it.’

  ‘What woman?’

  ‘I don’t know. She lives in the big yellow house near the shop.’

  My mother reached across the table for her handbag. ‘I have nothing to say to her, or to any of them,’ she said. She put the coin in her purse and then went over to the sink. Her knife was sharp and fast against the potatoes, and the water splashed when she threw them into the pot.

  Chicago Here We Come

  Belinda McKeon

  STANDING IN THE PLANE AISLE at O’Hare, elbows prodding her and shoulders jostling her and asses backing into her, Alice looked at the two words on her phone screen and wondered why she felt so sad. They were the words of a worried mother. Of an abandoned lover. Of a baby trapped at the bottom of a well, except that a baby trapped at the bottom of a well could never send a text message saying ‘Please call’, for reasons to do with infant intelligence and hand-to-eye coordination and phone network coverage below ground.

  They were none of these things, Alice knew. They were the words of her Chicago relations – some of her Chicago relations, one of her Chicago relations, just looking at the number she could not tell which one – asking her to call when her flight landed. They were the words of someone who was polite, so they put the word ‘please’ in front of the word ‘call’. That was all. But still they were words that made her feel wretched. She leaned forward and showed the message to Joe. He was standing in front of her, watching the long queue nudge its way towards the cabin door, holding the bulky black form of her laptop bag in his arms.

  ‘Huh,’ Joe nodded, as he read the message. ‘That’s interesting. That’s the first time I’ve ever actually seen someone use one of those.’

  Alice stared at the screen. ‘One of what?’ she said, more sharply than she had intended.

  ‘One of those templates,’ Joe said. ‘For texts. There’s a set of them already stored in your phone when you get it. You just send them off ready-made. They’re for people who don’t want to be bothered typing an actual message.’ He shrugged. ‘Or for people who can’t.’

  Joe shifted his hold on Alice’s bag, moving it into the crook of his opposite arm. ‘This thing weighs a bloody ton,’ he said. ‘Why d’you have to bring it everywhere with you? It’s not like you’re going to get any chance to use it here.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you to carry it for me,’ Alice said, but a space had opened up in the aisle ahead of Joe, and he was gone quickly on.

  *

  With every phone call and every email from home, Alice’s mother had pinned the idea of taking a trip to Chicago deeper and deeper into her mind, closer and closer to the raw stuff of conscience until finally, with a passing comment the previous month, it had found its grip. While there’s time, an email had said, before moving on to a matter completely unrelated; While there’s time, it would be nice to do.

  It would be nice to do. Bill and Ellen: her mother’s uncle and the Leitrim woman he had married within six months of arriving in Chicago. The wedding photograph had been the most precious of all the precious things in her grandmother’s good sitting room. The heavy silver frame. The tint like a tea stain to the paper. The train of Ellen’s satin dress pooled wide around her, the lace of her sleeves dipping low and close over her hands. Bill looked like Frank Sinatra, or Perry Como, or one of those guys: a face like a boy and dark hair side-parted into a bump, the flower on his dark suit pinned almost level with his narrow white bow tie. On their visits home, during a handful of the summers of Alice’s childhood, they had been celebrities. New white paint and pebbledash on her grandmother’s house, on her own house. New glass-fronted presses in the kitchen one year, a new leather suite with little squares of wood on the armrests. The squares of wood
came up if you slid your fingers under them. You weren’t meant to. You weren’t meant, either, to eat any of the small salad sandwiches, or pick at the pieces of bacon on top of the quiche. That meant trouble.

  One thing it enabled you to do, having the Americans home on holiday, was to go into the overstocked gift shop on Cashel Street without being chased off the premises by the owner. He only wanted Americans in his shop. He smiled at them and talked to them and stared at them. His shop sold Irish souvenirs, and you would never imagine it was possible to make so many Irish souvenirs, that it was possible for them to come in so many configurations, that there was a way to fill a shop with them in a town in the Irish midlands in the middle of the 1980s that got no tourists, but there was, and they did. Most of them seemed to be made from some kind of twisted, blackened branches glossed over with varnish. He sold toys, as well, but if you tried to go in there by yourself to look at the toys he would shout at you to get out. Everyone was a knacker to McGorty. Until you came in with your American great-aunt and great-uncle. Then he looked at you as though you were adorable. Then he laughed when you put on the gorilla mask and as you got a plastic egg out of the machine and opened it to find a tiny bundle of tiny parts to put together to make a tiny car. Maybe, if you didn’t open your mouth, he thought you were also American. Maybe, for a while, you thought that too.

  When Alice went to college, where, until the year when they all stopped coming, the American tourists piled in and lined up to see the Book of Kells, she realised that the sight of their white shoes was making her nostalgic. That she would see a tour bus full of American pensioners and want, suddenly, inexplicably, to be on it. It would be a crushing bore, she knew. They would talk the head off her. But still, she started to feel a pang of wishing, something, every time she saw a bus. It made no sense. Bill and Ellen had never taken a tour bus. Bill and Ellen had always hired a car.

  *

  As they waited for their baggage, Alice noticed again how strange Joe’s clothes looked, the way he had put them together. He only ever wore that shirt with jeans, but it was with a jumper now, a jumper he only ever wore over a T-shirt, and the trousers of his dark suit didn’t look right without the jacket, and they needed to be pressed. She had not said anything to Joe, as they had packed that morning, about his trousers needing to be pressed. They had not said very much to one another at all. It was the morning after Thanksgiving, and on Thanksgiving there had been a dinner in Williamsburg, and after dinner there had been a bar, and between the cab home from the bar and the cab to JFK there had been maybe two hours. And Joe had remembered to wear his suit pants, and not to wear his Converse, and in the airport toilets he could have a shave, and that was good enough.

  Where are you going to be, they wanted to know when she called the Chicago number. What exit are you going to come out at? Let us know, so that Mary can bring the car right up to the door and pick you up.

  She thought they said Mary. Or maybe they said Maureen. Maureen was their daughter. No, the daughter’s name was Maura, and Maureen was the neighbour who sometimes helped them out with things. She couldn’t remember. She texted her mother in Ireland again to ask her about the daughters’ names.

  The photographs from her mother’s trip to Chicago were all Polaroids, pasted into a fat album covered in what looked like velvet flock wallpaper. In them, her mother was thin and long-haired and twenty-three. She sunbathed in a garden with her American cousins and posed with Bill and Ellen in front of a fountain and up at the top of Sears Tower. The colours were bleached, as though everything had been left sitting in a window too long. Bill and Ellen and their children were tanned and her mother was big-eyed and pale. The houses in the photographs were wooden; they had porches. The cars were long and low and brown. Bill smoked a cigar and Ellen and her mother and the daughters wore paisley skirts that hit far above their knees. There was a boy, with thick dark hair, in flares. Alice and her sisters looked at the album over and over again. The first photograph was taken from inside the plane. It was of a plane window and of the grey air outside that plane window. Whatever else had been outside the plane window had not come out in the photo. CHICAGO HERE WE COME, her mother had written with a blue biro, in big slanted capital letters, on the inside of the album’s front cover.

  Her mother texted her straight back. She must have been waiting to hear something. Their names were Maura, and Alma, and Agnes, her mother texted her, and only Maura was unmarried, and Alice was to call as soon as she got the chance with news of how they were getting on.

  Whichever of the daughters it was, she pulled up opposite the door in a black SUV and waved over to them. By the time they had crossed to her, Bill was out of the car too, standing very still by the open passenger door, watching. He was smiling; he lifted one hand high in greeting and began to walk towards them as they lifted their bags into the trunk.

  ‘Daddy, it’s freezing,’ the daughter said, and he shook his head and laughed, and as he reached her he lifted his hand again, as if to hit her, and clasped her instead by the shoulder. Everyone laughed.

  ‘She’s always telling me what the weather is like,’ Bill said, and he hugged Alice and shook Joe’s hand. They all said some sentences to one another over and over, and then they got in the car, Bill wanting Joe to sit in the front, and Joe insisting that Bill sit there, and the daughter telling Bill to get into the car out of the cold, and then it turned out there was a child sitting in the back of the car, a girl of about eight, strapped in and smiling, and on the whole long drive home from the airport they were all able to keep talking to one another because the child was there, because nothing makes it easier to talk to other adults than the presence of a child. Send every word through the child, open every subject up through them. The child will smile and nod and say sweet, high-pitched things, and the adults will laugh and look each other in the eye and jump off from the springboard of the child into other, suddenly possible things.

  *

  When they reached the house, Ellen was in a state of distress. She was sitting on the staircase with another of the daughters standing beside her. Her head was in her hands. Bill went to her immediately and put his hands on her shoulders, facing her. She shook her head, and she was half laughing, half crying. She had called the police again, she said. It was something she kept doing, because the area code was so close to the number for the police. She had tried to cancel, but, the daughter explained, you couldn’t cancel the police. They just came. They would think, said Ellen, that she was so foolish, so foolish. Ellen had always been very thin. She had a way of holding her shoulders, inside her chenille sweater, that made her look braced against the wind, even indoors, even sitting on the carpeted stairs of her home.

  The police turned up. Two young men. Both tall and thick-bodied, with brown hair cut tight to the skull and eyes that immediately read the room. They were understanding. It happened all the time, they said; the numbers were too much alike. Bill walked them to the door.

  ‘That was quick,’ said Joe, as they left.

  ‘Yeah, they’re good around here,’ said the daughter. ‘Come on, Mom, it’s not a big deal. You heard them. It happens all the time. It could happen to anyone.’

  ‘I’m so stupid, so stupid,’ said Ellen. She was still sitting on the first step of the staircase. When Bill came in from the porch she looked at him and shook her head. ‘I’m so foolish, so foolish,’ she said. She put her face in her hands again.

  ‘They were very nice young men,’ Bill said, and he held his hand out to Ellen to help her to her feet.

  *

  In the bedroom, Alice saw the photograph first, and she saw the neatness, and the sense of everything in the room being cared for, and being kept in just its right place, second. The black beads of a rosary hung over the mahogany frame. Someone had chosen that frame very carefully. Someone had decided against lesser frames, lighter frames, thinner frames and had taken just this one home. The photograph was on a bedside table, by a closed book, by a lamp with an
angled arm. In the photograph, the son was still a boy. He had no baseball bat, no leather mitt, no oblong brown ball, none of the props American children always seemed to have in photographs. He was, maybe, eight. The camera had been pointed down at him from a height. His smile was a child’s smile, two rows of teeth gleefully exposed, gleefully clenched; that they were perfectly white and straight, that was the American part. And the smooth brown skin, and the brightly printed T-shirt and the canvas runners like the children wore on Sesame Street; he was sitting on what looked like a park bench, and his knees were drawn up, and his arms were thrown wide.

  ‘This is all right for you?’ Bill was saying from behind her, and she heard Joe say that it certainly was. That it was a lovely room, a lovely size. When she turned around to say something similar to Bill – something about neatness, something about the many books in the room – she saw that he was only halfway into the room, that he was still standing in the doorway, and that he was reaching, once again, for her case. She shook her head. She had already tried, twice, to stop him carrying her case. It was too heavy. She had, as usual, overpacked. She had brought things like snow boots, even though the forecast had said only some snow, no accumulation, and anyway she had no intention of walking around in the snow, accumulated or otherwise. And Bill had insisted on carrying her case to the bedroom door, and now he was moving to lift it again, and bring it, she supposed, into the room for her, and she wanted to stop him. She went to him, quickly, and put her hand on the case, to let him know that she would take it, that she would bring it to wherever it would stand for the rest of the weekend; that she would take it from here. She did not say any of this but tried to communicate it with a smile and a slow shake of her head, with a pat on his hand as she lifted the case away from him and into the room. Bill looked at her a moment – strangely, she thought, sort of hesitantly, with an odd sort of slant – and then shrugged. He did not stop smiling, but the shape the smile put on his mouth had changed; the smile was pulling at his lips now, rather than pushing them. The smile was working out a way to stay.