The Salesman

by Joseph O'Connor

  The seagulls screamed in the air.

  ‘So I’d like to cause a few for him,’ I said.

  He lit his own cigarette and exhaled a mouthful of smoke. ‘Is he what? One of them perverts or something?’

  I nodded. He pursed his lips and whistled.

  ‘Christ,’ he said, quietly, ‘I couldn’t get involved in that, pal. Tell you the truth now’m under probation at the moment. I’ve a good bit of previous, y’know?’

  The wind rushed in fresh and crisp off the water. Out by a line of grey–green, flat seaweedy rocks two of the women were efficiently swimming. A third, the youngest, was up to her waist, splashing her shoulders and face.

  ‘I’d be willing to pay good money,’ I told him. ‘Believe me, I’d make it very well worth your while. If you could see your way clear to doing me a favour.’

  ‘How much?’ he went.

  ‘Well, how much would you need? To give a fella a good fright?’

  He took a deep drag on his cigarette and peered up behind me in the direction of the Martello tower. High on the parapet a faded Irish tricolour was wrapped hard around the mast. He put his hand over his eyes and stared out at the horizon.

  ‘Are you serious now, or messin’ with me?’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘Because I don’t like people pullin’ me wire about this kind of thing.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  He nodded. ‘If I was able to find someone to help y’out, it’d cost.’

  ‘Well, amn’t I asking you what’d be needed?’

  He walked up and down for a few moments sucking on the cigarette, then came back to me.

  ‘Five,’ he said. He moved very close to me and lowered his voice. ‘I know a fella drinks up my way might be interested, but he’d need five ton. To hurt him like.’

  ‘To hurt him.’

  He sniffed. ‘For five,’ he said, ‘this bloke’d plaster the walls of a jacks with him. Yeah. If that’s what y’wanted. Now he couldn’t do much more than that. If y’wanted more than that done, this head couldn’t help y’himself. But he’d know a few that could.’

  ‘What does that mean exactly?’

  By now the three women were drying themselves on the beach. ‘Well, put it this way. If y’wanted to be sure y’wouldn’t hear from yer friend again, this fella could introduce y’to a few lads he knows in town. Mad lads, y’know? Fuckin’ space cadets. They’d fix him good and final like. If it’s more than a few good digs y’want him to get.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t want anything more than that. To hurt him is all I’d want.’

  He chuckled. ‘So he wouldn’t exactly be goin’ out linedancin’ for a while?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Well five, so. I b’lieve he always looks for five.’

  ‘I could manage that,’ I told him. ‘I could definitely manage five.’

  ‘He’d need it in cash. I b’lieve his rate’s half beforehand and the other half when the job’s done. Cash on delivery, I suppose you’d say.’

  ‘I understand that,’ I said. ‘Like I told you before, I’m in sales.’

  He laughed. ‘Sales. That’s lovely. This fucker’s some salesman, right enough.’

  That was when I turned to look at the three women again, I was startled to see that they were wearing long black habits and cream-coloured veils.

  ‘Look, there’s one other thing,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’d have to come with him when he does it. I wouldn’t get involved but I’d have to be there to see it. I don’t know if he’d’ve a problem with that.’

  He nodded his head. ‘They nearly always want t’come with him. Watch whoever it is gettin’ the dig. Sometimes give a dig themselves. And check they’re gettin’ value for money, wha’?’

  I felt myself laughing a little too loud. ‘That’d do me good, all right. That’d make it a good summer for me, I can tell you.’

  ‘That’s gameball so,’ he said. ‘I’m playin’ pool up his way tonight. I’ll see what’s the story.’

  He held out his hand. ‘The name’s Nap,’ he said.

  ‘Nap, right,’ I said. ‘I’m Lawrence. Lawrence Grace.’

  ‘As in Larry?’

  ‘As in Larry, yes. If you like.’

  He wanted me to meet him next morning with half the money. Then, he told me, we could make a proper arrangement.

  ‘And listen, pal, y’better understand, if anyone else heard about this, there’d be consequences. Big problems, Larry, y’know?’

  ‘Oh yes, I know. It’s strictly between us. I wouldn’t cause your pal any problems.’

  He sneered. ‘I wasn’t talkin’ about him, Larry. I was talking about you. Anyone else heard about this, believe you me, you’d end up singin’ soprano pretty fuckin’ fast.’

  The three nuns passed us by in the lane, the youngest one now carrying her veil in her hand. Her hair was still wet and stuck in long strands to her lovely face. She glanced at me and smiled.

  ‘Nobody’s going to hear,’ I said. ‘That’s a promise.’

  ‘Sound,’ he said. ‘Now I better make tracks.’

  Later that day in Kildare town I was having lunch in a hotel after making a delivery when a short, stocky young man in a black leather jacket strolled into the dining-room. And I was convinced it was him, totally sure of it. I actually burnt my mouth on the soup, I was so shocked. But when he turned in my direction it was not him after all.

  Out in the street a sudden hard shower of rain started. Everyone in the room stopped eating.

  We all looked out at the rain.

  On Hallowe’en night 1967, a couple of months after I had run into your mother in St Stephen’s Green, I had a date with Bernadette French. She and I had planned to go to a blues session in some coffee bar in town with two other couples she knew from her work. Instead, when she arrived outside Trinity still in her Aer Lingus uniform to meet me I told her that I wanted to go and have a drink, even though we were already ten minutes late for her friends.

  She looked at her watch. ‘The others’ll wonder what’s up,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I’m going for a drink anyway,’ I told her. ‘You needn’t come if don’t want.’

  Her face took on an expression of surprise.

  ‘That’s a bit bloody sharp, Billy,’ she said.

  I told her I was sorry. She stared at me.

  ‘You’ve no call to talk to me like that,’ she said. ‘I just thought it’d be nice for us not to go to the pub for one night, that’s all. We spend half our lives in bloody old pubs.’

  I stood there saying nothing, but feeling my face throb with embarrassment.

  ‘Is there something up with you tonight?’ she asked me, and I nodded and said there was.

  ‘Jesus, all right,’ she sighed. ‘Come on then. The other thing wasn’t definite anyway.’

  We walked up Grafton Street and around to O’Donoghue’s pub on Merrion Row. I ordered a large whiskey for myself, a vodka and orange for Bernadette.

  ‘And so,’ she said, when I got back with the drinks, ‘what’s eating you then?’

  I told her that I reckoned we had been getting too serious about each other and thought we should take a break. She raised her eyebrows and opened her mouth a little. She looked far more shocked than I had anticipated as she slowly placed her glass back on the table.

  ‘I thought that was what you wanted, Billy.’

  ‘No, I think we need to cool things off a bit. We could see how we both feel after a while.’

  She laughed lightly, though I could see now that she was upset. ‘You needn’t bother saying that to me, Mac. You’re not going to dangle a sword over my head, thanks very much.’

  We drank in silence for a while. I remember the barman came around and handed out cardboard witches’ hats for Hallowe’en, winking and leaving two on our table.

  ‘So when did this terrific revelation come to you, so? About how we’re too serious?’

&n
bsp; ‘I don’t know,’ I told her.

  She nodded.

  ‘It’s to do with that girl we met in the Green that day, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Although I suppose that’s part of it, yes.’

  She hung her head for a moment. ‘I knew it was. Have you been with her, Billy?’

  ‘What do you mean, with her?’

  ‘You know well what I mean, don’t play the baby. Have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you’ve been seeing her, though?’

  ‘I told you before, we used to pal around years ago.’

  ‘Billy, I know well by your manner you’ve been seeing her. Don’t lie to me.’

  ‘I might have met her for a drink. So what?’

  ‘Are you in love with her, then?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said. ‘What does that mean, anyway? In love?’

  She scoffed. ‘Funny how men always say that when they want the easy way out.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about men. I was talking about myself.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a new development all right,’ she said.

  She looked at me for a while.

  ‘And do you really not know what being in love means, no?’

  ‘No,’ I told her.

  Tears welled up in her eyes. ‘That’s very hurtful, Billy,’ she said. ‘That’s a really lousy thing to say. I thought you did know, from the way you spoke to me sometimes. Did you not mean all those things you’d say to me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry if I led you on.’

  ‘Led me on,’ she laughed. ‘Listen to it, you sound like a Reverend Mother.’ She shook her head and stared in front of herself. ‘Well, don’t be sorry, anyway. It’s me that’s sorry for you, Billy, truly, if you don’t know what it is to be in love. You that’s never done reading about it in books.’

  ‘I’ll live,’ I told her.

  ‘And are you going to marry her then? That girl.’

  ‘No,’ I scoffed, ‘of course not.’

  She peered into her glass. I remember she put her finger into it and stirred the ice-cubes around. ‘I sometimes thought that you and me might have been headed that way. I used to think about it and imagine it. That we’d have a life together, Billy. Isn’t that funny?’

  A gang of cackling boisterous students in fancy dress came bustling into the pub. Bernadette looked up at them and tried to smile, though her face was pale and trembling.

  ‘So that’s it then?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I suppose you’d better give me back the key, so. To the flat.’

  I took it out of my pocket and put it on the table. She nodded, fingering the key for a moment before putting it into her purse.

  ‘And do I get an invite to the wedding?’ she asked me.

  ‘I told you already there’s no wedding. And if it comes to it, how do you know she isn’t married already?’

  ‘Sure it’s a small town, Billy. One of the girls in work knows her. Or knows her brother. I think she was doing a line with him for a while.’

  ‘You’ve little enough to talk about in work,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, her name came up one day over coffee, that’s all, Billy. I know all about her, thank you very much.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Just I know all about her, that’s all. She’s quite the reputation, your little girlfriend.’

  ‘She isn’t that,’ I said.

  Bernadette picked up one of the paper hats and played with the orange crépe frill around the brim.

  ‘Anyways, it doesn’t much matter now, does it?’

  ‘No. I suppose not.’

  ‘No. Still, I can’t help wishing you’d’ve let me know how you felt before this. I don’t think you’ve been very fair to me, Billy.’

  When I told her I didn’t know what she meant, she laughed.

  ‘You know damn well. Don’t play the gom.’

  I did know. Bernadette and I had been sleeping together for some time. She had a small flat just off the South Circular Road where we had taken to spending whole weekends. On a Friday afternoon when lectures were over I would walk out from town and let myself in. Sometimes I would be so tired that I would get straight into her single bed and sleep for a few hours before she came home. It was a strange time in my life. What I remember most about those days is the sensation of being tired always. This had started in the months after your mother went away to England, a constant crushing physical tiredness, a frightening feeling of utter listlessness, punctuated only by flickers of terrible anxiety and a kind of resounding guilt. When I met Bernadette I suppose things improved. For a while I had thrown myself into studying for the university entrance exams but after I had passed, and particularly after I had left work and started attending college, the old feeling of exhaustion and depression quickly began to return.

  In university I often felt stupid and gauche. I found it difficult to make conversation with my tutors and the other students. I was a few years older than everyone else in the class, painfully conscious of my accent and my address; even my clothes, which were those I had worn to work in the shop, old-fashioned and ill-fitting, I felt marked me out. I hated being asked questions in seminars and lectures; to read an essay aloud filled me with terror. There were times when I would become almost speechless with embarrassment. I coped with all this by cracking jokes and being as self-consciously shocking as possible, Jimmy Porter meets Brendan Behan, the working-class fool playing to the court, bitterly mocking the courtiers as a means of begging to be accepted by them.

  The only person I felt easy around was Bernadette. Our weekends together became the only sources of anything like happiness in my life. When she would arrive back at the flat, I’d get up feeling dazed with tiredness. She would change out of her uniform and take a bath – sometimes we would bathe together – then we would go down to Rathmines or Ranelagh for a few drinks and something to eat. More often we just had the drinks. I was already in very serious trouble with my drinking if the truth be told, but it was relatively easy for a young man in Ireland to dress up serious trouble as joie de vivre, and I imagine it is still easy enough to do this now. At closing time I would insist on buying as many bottles of beer or cheap wine as we could afford. We would stagger back to the flat where we would drink for hours and furiously argue and dance to Radio Luxembourg as a prelude to drunkenly making love.

  On a Saturday morning we would wake up wrapped in each other’s arms. I would get out of bed and stack up her record player with five or six discs. Then I would make breakfast, light the fire, get back into bed for the whole day, we’d only get up when it was getting dark and it was time to think about going out again. I remember the colours of that time as a black and amber blur of night and streetlights. They had been happy and comfortable enough times, I thought, and if I am honest, which I want to be now, they were little more than that for me. I had been inconsolable when your mother left. All lives have periods of radical and absolutely fundamental change which are not at all obvious as that while being endured. Thinking back now, I believe that I became a different person in those months, a person who talked endlessly about the importance of good times and fun and laughed a lot: every single photograph of me taken in those days shows me laughing. I fell in love with gaiety, which any drunk can tell you is only the shape grief takes on the good day, the day you don’t want to scream with pain. Most alcoholics I have met have been wonderful company. It is because they have to be. They’ve built themselves that way, it is like putting on a coat for them. Outside his house, my father was the funniest man in Ringsend. Only at home would he become the shaking fulminating wreck I have sometimes seen when I have glanced in mirrors. He was a great actor; I have often thought he would have made one hell of a salesman.

  At the age of twenty-three I already thought I had his act down to a fine art. I had convinced myself so thoroughly, it simply would neve
r have occurred to me that somebody who cared for me might not have been fooled also. Looking at Bernadette in the pub that Hallowe’en night I suppose I must have been able to sense something of how wrong I was. Is it actually possible that I did not know those times had been more than a distraction to her? Certainly, I do not remember any such realisation. She was the first person in my life that I ever truly hurt, yet, to this day, all I really remember about her hurt is how inconvenient it was to me. I’m not proud of it. But it’s true.

  She sat beside me in the pub that evening looking limp with disbelief. Around us young people were laughing. Music was playing. Everyone was happy, just the way I liked the people around me to be in those days.

  ‘All those things you’d say to me when we were together at the flat, Billy. Good God, you must have thought you’d found a right little fool. And you weren’t wrong, were you?’

  ‘I never told you a lie, Bernadette,’ I said.

  There were fresh tears in her eyes but she blinked them away. She put her finger into her glass once more and stirred the ice-cubes around. ‘You never told me anything else, Billy,’ she said.

  Up at the bar, the students started to sing a loud rebel song. One of them, a plump, gleeful girl who was dressed as a squaw, threw a torn white eiderdown over her head and flapped her arms like a ghost while the others howled and laughed and clapped along with the singing.

  So wrap the green flag round me boys;

  To die were far more sweet,

  With Erin’s noble emblem boys,

  To be my winding sheet.

  ‘Well, you’re free to go, Mac,’ Bernadette said. ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘If you’re upset I’ll see you home,’ I said.

  ‘No, no, I’d better get on and meet the others.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘They’ll think I’m after running away somewhere.’

  ‘I could get you a taxi,’ I said. ‘If you’re upset.’

  ‘Don’t bloody flatter yourself,’ she told me.

  She put her cigarettes into her handbag. I went to touch her arm but she pulled away. The last thing she ever said to me, I have never forgotten. She turned – I can still see her dusty blue eyes, the dry flesh of her lips – and looked right into my face.