New Irish Short Stories

by Joseph O'Connor

  Night falls. A dance floor has been designated on the flagstones of the terrace, and dancing begins. Here the wedding’s weakness shows itself: the disc jockey is an Italian, and the one flaw in the Italian race – Robert knows this because of his failed attempts, when driving down from Milan, to find a not-shit radio station – is its tin ear for pop music. The dancers must struggle with a weird mix of lesser eighties hits and hyperbolic Italian ballads. But everybody has fun. The clergyman twirls in a kilt. Robert, who is not much of a dancer, is happy to hold a constantly replenished drink and look on. Mark joins him and puts an arm on his shoulder. Robert tells Mark how good he’s looking. Bob, I feel good, Mark replies. Man, I feel good. Then he bounds onto the dance floor and shimmies up to his wife. The new Mrs Mark Walters, Robert sees, is a quite remarkable mover. That bodes well, he theorises, for the bedroom. How did Jane dance? He tries to remember but cannot. He didn’t really get to know Jane. She parachuted into Mark’s life and then disappeared with him to England and then never came back, because she was buried there, in England, even though her family was back in Massachusetts.

  On his way to the bar, Robert trips and almost falls. The Indian currency expert approaches him like the oldest of friends and refines a point he made earlier about the euro versus the dollar. Roger/Robert nods and nods. Then, interrupting, he says, Cambio. This draws a silence from his interlocutor. Italian for change, Robert says. Maybe it’s Spanish, too. Anyhow – cambio. Remember that word. And bureau de change. Very useful. Fully obnoxious, he pats the expert on the back and goes toward the action. Now he will dance.

  Robert dances.

  When he is done, he picks up a chair and drags it one-handed beyond some bushes until he comes to the edge of the hilltop. He accomplishes this barefoot. He has kicked off his painful new loafers, which lie somewhere on the lawn behind him. He crashes down on the chair and drinks from a beer bottle. An incline is detectable a few feet away, and beyond that is some kind of drop. Further out there’s a single road curving between hills. Every other place is free of human activity and thus free of human lighting. The hills are very black. There’s the matter of the moon, however. The moon is big, circular, ablaze. Robert thinks, This wedding is a masterpiece. They’ve roped in the fucking moon.

  He turns to see if he can catch a glimpse of the newlyweds through the bushes. There is no sign of them, indeed almost no sign of the wedding: it seems to have drifted away. He is conscious of the grass under his feet, and he shuffles his feet to feel the grass more intensely. His tactile faculty, at least, is fully operational, so much so that he becomes aware of the bones in his right foot and, phantasmally, of the foot-thumb his most distant ancestors possessed but which vast ages have gradually amputated. He stamps his foot to get rid of the sensation, which is not a new one to him. He thinks, Jane was buried in England, far from home, because she expected that Mark would be buried with her.

  He has company. It is the goose. The goose is white, with an orange beak. Robert catches the goose’s eye and the goose looks right back. He is all set to dislike the goose but finds he cannot. Actually, he takes a shine to the goose. Hey there, buddy, he says. The goose is still looking at him. The name’s Roger.

  Robert looks out in the direction of the hills, the valleys, whatever out there has blackened. Well, old buddy, Robert says to the goose.

  He looks at the goose. The goose is purely there. Back at dinner, somebody said that the goose thinks it’s a dog. No it doesn’t. It doesn’t think it’s a dog. The goose doesn’t think. The goose just is. And what the goose is is goose. But goose is not goose, Robert dizzily thinks. The goose isn’t goose.

  Robert cannot look at the goose any more. The goose is nauseating. He looks away from the goose but he finds he cannot look at anything without thinking that it is all goose, that he is goose, everything is a burying ground of goose out of which nothing can ever be unburied, he was born buried, the air is just a material of burial, the universe is itself buried, his child is buried in Martha and will come out buried.

  Presently the goose is gone.

  The wedding has been coming to an end. A while ago the bus started ferrying people back to Siena; now somebody is laughing and shouting, Last bus, everybody, last bus. Robert stands up. For a few seconds, he goes nowhere. Then he walks toward the laughter and the shouts. Somewhere up there are his shoes.

  Footnote

  Glenn Patterson

  BACK IN THE DAYS WHEN that was the sort of thing that did happen, Maurice McStay passed on details of his neighbour’s car to another man he knew as a result of which the neighbour wound up dead. No one ever suspected Maurice. He had gone to the funeral with the rest of the street. He had puts his arms around his neighbour’s wife, shaken the children’s awkwardly offered hands. The youngest boy looked Maurice in the eye. I wish it had been you and not my daddy, he said. The boy’s mother was appalled, forgetting for the moment in her rush to apologise her own grief. God forgive you, she said, and to Maurice, he doesn’t understand what any of it means. Maurice was nursing the hand he had with difficulty wrested back. There’s no need to apologise, he said. The boy had buried his face in his mother’s skirts. She tried to get him to turn round. Really, Maurice said, no need.

  The afters was in a hotel on the road into town from the cemetery. Maurice left as soon as was decent and stopped in at a bar he knew for a drink. When he reached out for the glass his hand shook so badly he had to pull it back below the counter out of sight. He tried another two or three times, but it was no use. I know how you feel, the barman said as Maurice got up to go, his drink still untouched. Maurice’s neighbour had used to drink in the bar the odd time too. Once the two of them had gone in together on their way from a match. They had been at opposite ends of the ground and had laughed about it. Here …, the barman wanted to give Maurice his money back. Maurice didn’t trust his hand out of his pocket. Put it in the charity box, he said. The hand carried on shaking for a week after that. Then it stopped. Maurice went over again the claims made by the man who had asked him for the details of his neighbour’s car. Kill or be killed was what it came down to. Nobody ever said these weren’t tough times.

  Later that year the neighbour’s wife and her children moved away. The boy who had wished Maurice dead at the funeral waved as the car pulled away from the kerb for the last time. He had grown about six inches in as many months. You would hardly have recognised him as the same wee boy at all.

  The new people only stayed in the house a year, the people after them eighteen months, after which it lay empty for a time. A landlord bought the house and broke it up into flats. The woman, Jane, who moved into the bottom one was divorced. She had two teenage children, a boy and a girl, who had her heart broke, effing and blinding, staying out to all hours, getting up to God knows what. She took to calling at Maurice’s door in the evenings the worse for drink. He would stand there and listen to the day’s litany while she wiped at her eyes, spreading the sorrow. I’m sorry, she said every time, I’ve nobody else. One night in winter Maurice just said to her come in ahead out of the cold and that was it. Jane kept the flat next door – she didn’t want Maurice thinking he had to take on responsibility for the children too – but she was there when he closed his eyes at night and there when he opened them again in the morning.

  He helped her to stop drinking. He had never taken that much himself so it was no hardship for him to stop with her. The teenage children straightened up and in time moved out. Jane tried to persuade Maurice to sell his house and move next door. Prices in that part of town had been rocketing since the ceasefires and it wasn’t as if they needed the room. But, no, Maurice said, he wasn’t ready for a flat yet. Maybe when he was seventy-two, not fifty-two. Admit it, Jane said, you’re too comfortable where you are. Maurice said nothing, which for Jane was admission enough. I knew it, she said. I just knew it.

  Jane had been in catering before she met her husband and had her life almost ruined. It had been her dream then to have a p
lace of her own. Now that she was sober and the children were away she started looking around for a little café she could run. She and Maurice drove all over the city viewing properties. In the end it came down to a choice of two: a Copper Kettle in the east and the well-named Nothing Fancy at the back of the university. They sat at the dining-room table over cups of camomile tea discussing the pros and cons. The east was up and coming; the east was still the east. You would be hard pressed not to make money within a mile of the university in term time; you would be standing looking out the window the other half of the year wondering where the next customer was coming from.

  The Copper Kettle shaded it. Jane signed the lease on her forty-eighth birthday and started in the day after that with the redecorating. A week before she was due to open a police car pulled up in front of Maurice’s work. He knew before the peelers inside had finished adjusting their hats that they had come for him, but still when one of them started talking about the Copper Kettle and some sort of fall he looked at them uncomprehending. Jane? was all he could say. He rode to the hospital in the back of the patrol car asking the questions he had not had the presence of mind to ask back at work. Hadn’t anyone been holding the stepladder steady? How high up had Jane been when it collapsed? What way had she landed? Only when the car drove past A&E did he realise his questions were all academic.

  The ladder had tipped backwards while she was stretching to reach a ceiling rose. The wee girl who had been lending her a hand had tried to describe for the police the sound of her head striking the tiled floor. It was like, I don’t know, you just knew that was her, you know? Jane, the doctors told Maurice, would not have felt another thing until she was pronounced dead five minutes before he was ushered into intensive care. He sat beside her for three-quarters of an hour holding her hand until the mortuary attendants arrived. She still had on the twisted scarf she had used to tie up her hair that morning. A look on her face like whatever it was was calling her she hadn’t quite heard it the first time. The police had already contacted the son – he was in England now, doing well – and the daughter, who was driving up from down south with her boyfriend.

  Later that night they sat, all four, in Maurice’s front room, strangers, unable to speak. Jane had been failed somehow, alone at the top of that ladder. To have said more would have been to apportion blame.

  Some time after nine Jane’s ex-husband arrived with his second wife, who waited in the car until he had gone in to check that she would be welcome. Maurice had only met the man once before, the new wife never at all. He felt seeing her for the first time something of Jane’s affront, often rehearsed in those drink-sodden laments on Maurice’s doorstep, that her husband could have chosen this sharp-nosed little creature over her, over his own children. But her arrival prevented the evening from descending still further into grief and unspoken recrimination. She had the knack of starting a conversation then, when she was confident it could carry on without her, withdrawing, disappearing from the room altogether. By the end of the night the children were in a clinch with their father while his wife rinsed glasses at the kitchen sink and the boyfriend dried. Maurice went out to stand on the front step. There was music coming from the bottom flat next door, folkish. He could not have told you any more who was living there, the tenants came and went that fast. He could hardly have told you who was living in any of the other houses. The street was changing. People didn’t bother the same way. He was aware that there was something perverse in this line of thought, but he felt it nevertheless to be true. They just didn’t bother.

  Five Entries from a Fictional Diary

  Angela Power

  THE WILDFLOWERS AROUND HERE ARE flourishing. I have four chickens from herself, and the lack of pleasure in their conception doesn’t seem to inhibit her as a mother. She bustles around full of importance and seems to look down on the others who have done none of the lying down and fussing that she did.

  Is Mrs M the grandmother of my lovely little fluffy ones? If so, God help them. They don’t take after her (well, maybe a little around the beak). The old tom is not impressed, he looks at them as if he remembers somewhere in his head that he is supposed to chase little fluffy things with two legs but by the time his legs get the message, his head has forgotten, and he flops back down again.

  Mrs M’ll have a bit of a wait for the spuds as they’re only about a foot tall and no sign of a flower. I suppose that’ll be another black mark for me.

  *

  The tinkers called today. I think they called to see what the new Mrs Mel was like. I don’t know if I passed the test. Old Mr H spent a long time staring at the clock over the fire, and, when I didn’t take the hint, he told me the eyesight was bad and could I ever read the time for him. This is a fine clock, one of Mel’s bargains from an auction in one of the big houses near here, so I don’t think it was Paddy’s sight that was the problem. I never wanted Mel to buy that clock in the first place. I’m a bit scared of its history. It is balanced very high over my head, and it is watchful. The dust that gathers on it does not seem to be my dust.

  The tinkers are used to being treated with great respect around here and don’t spare the name of those who do them down. I hope they go and say that the new missus isn’t too bad. I bought a few mothballs and managed not to laugh when Mrs H produced the ‘last of the cracked Holy Marys’. For some reason Mel laughed till he cried about this and kept repeating it under his breath for the evening and going off into fits like a small boy. It is lovely to see him laugh and to see the strain in his face just flow away.

  I think I am getting the hang of the delicate social relationships around here. A good day, thank God.

  *

  There was a funeral in the old graveyard today. The sound of the ‘Last Post’ and the gun salutes clung to the air like the touches of frost to the turnip pile in the yard. I didn’t really expect that. They were paying homage to an Old IRA man gone to God from the safety of his armchair.

  I hated him.

  He went off to fight with his passion for the land and forgot the woman on her knees by the fire, shivering with every footfall and brush of a branch on her window. He did his duty by his country and climbed over his children to get there. I’m tired and cold, and my face hurts from smiling and agreeing with everyone that he was a good man I had been unfortunate not to meet.

  I never want to meet his like.

  The sound of empty chatter and gunshots will never persuade me that he was a hero. Heroes don’t die of old age. It was past midnight when the last person left. I stayed to do the washing up, alone.

  *

  I don’t think words can paint a picture of today, but it deserves to be recorded anyway. The tabby had four kittens yesterday, four tiny, blind little scraps. How like big mice they are when they are born! Mother Cat looked up at me with a mixture of pride and delight. I felt as if I was looking at tiny little miracles. The little ones sucked away with the fury of staying alive. You should see the nest they were in, an old barrel with hay and a meal sack in it. I thought she chose it to protect the little ones from rats. I was wrong. The enemy was much nearer home.

  When I told Mel, he said the kittens would have to go. We would be overrun otherwise. I thought of the proud, content little mother, snuggled in her warm bed after a night of exertion, and I pleaded, but to no avail.

  Mel went out, picked up the tiny, warm little parcels and thrust them into the cold, rain barrel by the shed. I held the mother, who had murderous intent in every sinew of her body. The little ones never even cried out, and the little balls of wet fur were cast under the bushes where the mother spent a futile, frantic few hours trying to lick them back to life. Her cries, coupled with coaxing purrs, tore at something in me. Is it because I am female? Is it because I am unable to cope with the dark side of this bloody awful business of farming? Maybe it is because I know the primitive pain of being a female deprived of the object of her love. I think Mel was shaken by the whole thing too even though he kept saying that I
couldn’t afford to be sentimental about cats. He went off for a walk by himself and didn’t eat any supper. He was quiet all night and went to bed early without reading. The cat is still howling pitifully around the yard, and I am sick to my soul.

  *

  April 10th

  A dress in the wardrobe. Red with white polka dots. Did I wear it? The perfume of that evening still sticks to it as the memory does to my mind. No amount of washing will wipe them away. Vera Lynn on the radio and a clear polished floor to dance on. He was home on two days’ leave. We never slept. Sleep was for the unloved and the alone. We had nowhere to go. Nowhere open after dark and a red dress that had to be seen. It was, briefly. No air-raid shelter for us. The thud of bombs jumping ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ on the gramophone. Vera repeating herself, over and over. Impossible, desperate love by the light of a gas fire and flickering, faraway buildings. Now the dress hangs in a country wardrobe on a bright spring morning only a shadow of its greatest hour when it lay crumpled on a Hammersmith floor.

  The Old Regime

  Kevin Power

  1

  LET ME TELL YOU HOW I BEGAN my career as a fixer. It happened in college, as these things do. I can give you the exact moment, if you like. It was a February morning, very early, eight or nine. The campus was quiet, like an airport at dawn. The concourse was deserted. Dew glittered in the shadowy grass. And Francis Mulligan came over to me and asked me for a favour.

  But wait – wait. This is the end of the story, more or less, and I haven’t even told you the beginning.