All the Old Haunts

by Chris Lynch

  “Mother called. Won’t even tell me where they are. Afraid. Everyone’s doing fine, though.

  “Funny, huh? Everyone’s doing fine.

  “He’s downstairs cooking again. For me. That’s all he does. Cooks, and cleans, and shops with the cash that comes in the mail every couple of weeks. No return address. They won’t even risk sending checks, in case they’re traced back somehow.

  “Cooks, cleans, and shops. Cooks, cleans, and shops. For me. It’s all for me.

  “He keeps an amazing house. Truly. Nobody ever knew this, because he never did anything for anybody before. He does everything now. He never stops. He never, ever, ever stops. “I’m not going to graduate. You have to go to school to graduate, so I’m not going to graduate.”

  “What is this?” Stanley snaps, sitting down to breakfast. Satan has prepared every meal for months now, since their mother left.

  “It’s breakfast,” Satan says flatly.

  “It isn’t breakfast. Breakfast is eggs, and cereal, and toast, and stuff like that. This isn’t anything like that.”

  Satan stands there, the half-empty pot in one hand, a ladle in the other.

  “It’s soup. Stan. It’s soup, that I made out of things that we had around. The money is just enough, you know, so I have to stretch it. They’re doing that on purpose, you know, to get me back. But I can do this, it’s just there’s not a lot around right now. I have to think of something. But it’s pretty close to a recipe from one of the books I found ….”

  Stanley slowly slides the bowl away.

  “Soup isn’t breakfast.”

  Satan puts the ladle back in the pot, slides the bowl back again toward his brother.

  “I told you, we don’t have any breakfast stuff. There’s a lot of good food in here. Tomatoes and onions and celery and fish stock—”

  Each has a hand on the bowl now, applying pressure. They could just as easily be pulling as pushing it, because it remains frozen in position between them. Two dogs, equal might, struggling over a scrap of tough meat.

  They stare.

  “No, thank you,” Stanley says.

  “You have to. You’re disappearing on me,” Satan says. “You can’t do that.”

  “Hallelujah,” Stanley says. “You guessed. Bye-bye, Satan.”

  As they talk, the bowl makes tiny incremental shifts, toward the one, toward the other, and small slurps of red-green soup escape.

  “Don’t call me that, anymore. Call me Stuart. Call me Stuart now, and that will be better, now.”

  “Sorry,” Stanley says, sneering, “don’t think so. Don’t think it could work now, Satan. Don’t think we could go back.”

  With this, Satan stops resisting. He takes back the bowl of soup. Or what’s left of it. The table is covered, like a child’s monochrome finger painting.

  There is silence, except for the slurpy sound of Satan pouring from the bowl back into the pot. Then he drops the bowl in with it.

  “You’re wasted as it is, Stan. You can’t not eat anymore.”

  Stanley grunts.

  “So, that’s it, is it?” Satan asks, pointing the ladle at Stanley.

  “That’s it.”

  “You’re just going to starve, right? I’m supposed to believe you’re going to sit here and just, like, rot right here, in front of me, and that’s going to be the end of it? The end of everything?”

  Stanley smiles at his brother. He stands up, slowly, unsteadily. He shrugs, before heading for his couch harbor.

  Satan stands there, glaring at him, motherly almost. A lot of things, almost.

  “You think I’m going to just let you do it, just, leave me like that, Brother?” Satan says.

  “You think I need your permission? Brother?”

  Satan slams the ladle into the pot, turns, and goes crashing into the kitchen. Stanley turns on the TV with the remote. Satan starts throwing—dishes, utensils, pans and glasses and everything else—around in the well-kept kitchen. He screams as he does it, no words, no point, just sound, walls and walls of wailing sound accompanied by all the breakage and clatter.

  Stanley turns the volume up on the television.

  They only used the one audiotape. They just went on taping, taping over whatever was on there before, getting to the end of the tape, then turning it over again.

  “I love my brother,” says the voice over the growing hiss of the taped-over taped-over tape. “Not fair. I love my brother. Not fair. I love my brother. So scared. I love my brother.

  “Not fair.

  “I love my brother …”

  OFF YA GO, SO

  I DON’T UNDERSTAND.

  What’s with all the music everywhere? Does everyone, I mean everyone, think he can sing in this country? Everyone thinks he can sing in this country. Why do they do it? Why would they want to?

  It rains every damn day here. Not like, a little rain. Not like, most days. It rains buckets and damn buckets every damn day.

  Postcards. Traffic jam, Ireland. Blackface sheep standing in the middle of a road that wouldn’t get you anyplace fast even if it wasn’t blocked with blackface sheep. Sunsets gold and orange over Inis Mor or the Burren across Galway Bay. Great, but doesn’t the sun have to come up before it can set?

  Guinness. You are more likely to locate a shorty leprechaun with a pot of gold than you are to locate a travel guide without a picture of some old geezer sitting in front of or under a pint of motor oil. Creamy rich warming is what they will have you believe, but if you are looking for what the rest of the world thinks of as beer and decide to do the local economy a favor by buying one of these mothers, which, by the way, take about as long to pour as it takes the average Irishman to whip off his version of “Carrickfergus,” then you are going to receive a quick first lesson in Irish language: Creamy rich warming means, in English, flat soapy burnt.

  And while we’re at it. How do you say nine o’clock sharp, in Irish? Eleven thirty. Doesn’t anybody have anyplace to get to?

  “Where you been? I been standing here forever, and those jugglers and mimes won’t quit juggling and miming. This is the arts festival, right? Like, the world-famous …”

  “I’ve something to tell you, O’Brien.”

  She had never been serious before this. I mean, never. As relentless as the miserable weather had been through that entire alleged summer, that is how persistent Cait’s cheeriness was. And it wasn’t like that crap Celt sweetness from the Irish Spring commercials that make you want to puke and change your name from O’Brien to Stanislaus and never, ever use the soap or any other green products ever again. But this was real, she was real. I know, because I tested it every chance I got because, to be honest, I couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t see why a person should be so sunny in a place where the sun refused to shine.

  She was like those palm trees and tropical plants popping up all over the west. What’s a nice flower like you doing on a rock like this? She stood out, Cait did. Maybe that was the thing. Maybe that was the why of it. Why maybe I did some things that possibly I shouldn’t ought to have been doing.

  So anyway, I took notice, when she got serious.

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “You have something to tell me.”

  I was supposed to be getting away from my “element” for the summer. Better things, you know, on the Emerald Isle. As if maybe it was sunlight that had been turning me to the dark side of the force. Ireland’s basic goodness was supposed to right me. Noplace is that good.

  Cait was, is, near as I can figure, my second cousin. Something like that. I never was any good at the math. For sure, she is a relative of a relative. I know that because I met her at a clannish gathering of about a hundred people gathered at what I guess was a farm even though it didn’t appear to be growing anything much besides little stone buildings with no roofs. My arrival in Galway was an excuse for these folks to get together and have what they call a hooley. And holy hooley they did. I don’t believe any one of them even noticed when I left after a couple of
hours with Cait as my guide to the fun side. And for sure, Galway had a fun side.

  The festival was a new thing then. Galway was a new thing. Fastest-growing city in Europe, was the word all over the radio, all over the Advertiser. For the first few days that was a trip, was fun, was electric. Even when the caller to the Gerry Ryan show pointed out that Calcutta was generally considered to be the fastest-growing city in the world, but did that make it a good thing? I didn’t care. What did I know about Calcutta? I had never been to Calcutta.

  I had never been to San Francisco either, so I wasn’t about to differ the first few times I heard Galway called the San Francisco of Europe. It was all fine with me. Might as well have been Calcutta, since I was with Cait and Cait was choice in every way. We waded through the jugglers and the clowns and the big German tourists on the tiny little sidewalks of Shop Street and Market Street and the street that crossed them, Cross Street, and if I did get the temptation to make fun of the creative effort that went into naming the streets, and if I did act on that impulse, it didn’t matter because Cait could smile through whatever I did. I think she liked to hear somebody takin’ the mick out of the place.

  Takin’ the mick. Is that a phrase, or is that a phrase? Never heard nothin’ like that before. I was taking that one home with me.

  And I never held a girl’s hand before. No kidding, I never ever did. I laughed for real the first ten twenty thirty minutes of it because it was just so nuts. I looked at Cait’s little china-white hand inside my kind of gray-beige one, and I was just made to laugh, as she led me through the streets. She looked back, laughed at it too, but didn’t let go.

  Did plenty of other things with girls and hands before that. Never did the holding before. Lovely. That’s a word too, isn’t it? Lovely. They use it a lot. I knew of the word, but had never had occasion to use it, not one time in my life, before Galway and arts festival and Cait. Go figure.

  “You are lovely, you know?” I blurted, and blurted that very first evening in fact.

  “Where ya goin’ with that?” she asked. Amused. Surprised. But not really. “Enough of that carry-on, O’Brien.”

  We passed either the same spot, or a spot that looked a helluva lot like other spots, for the fifth time before I snapped a picture of a fiddler in front of a sweater shop. There are loads of fiddlers and sweater shops, but this guy had a beard like a full sheep was clamped onto his chin. So I snapped his picture with my disposable panoramic camera.

  With his foot, he started pawing hard at his cap on the ground. Like a fiddle-playing trick donkey.

  “He wants money,” Cait said.

  “Who doesn’t? For what? For taking his picture?”

  She shrugged.

  I had never heard of such a thing in my life. Back home me and my boys would have resined his bow for him if he wanted to play that shit with us.

  We crossed to his side of the street. I pulled a gigantic deer’s-head coin out of my pocket and tossed it in.

  “Athlone? Where is Athlone? And why Athlone?”

  “Where,” she said calmly, “is noplace. Athlone is noplace. Why, is because. Because I’m related to about a million people around here, and so are you, I might point out. If I’m seen going into the local place I make all manner of trouble for meself.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right. Right, of course.”

  “I hitched. Not that you’re asking.”

  “I’m asking, of course I’m asking, if you give me a chance.”

  We were sitting in one of the many dark cavelike coffee spots of the city at ten A.M. midweek. Not a great buzz in the city at that hour. Which was fine with us.

  Cait slid a small pamphlet across the rough wooden table at me. I took it without looking.

  “Have a scone, will you?” I said.

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t. Couldn’t eat a thing. Sick.”

  “Right,” I said, and picked up the pamphlet. I heard the flint of her lighter spark, followed by the deep intake of smoky breath. At night in this same place there is no need to light a cigarette to accomplish the same thing.

  “I don’t have any money,” she said.

  I looked up. She was smoking hard and fast now, in a way I had never seen her, or anybody, smoke. She was blowing out old smoke as hard as she could, sticking the butt back in her mouth as fast as she could to get the lungs refilled with new smoke.

  “Please smile,” I said. “Or at least unfrown. It’s unnatural, and scary, to see you all puckered up like that. Please …”

  “And I have no access to any money,” she said.

  The grim atmosphere, the smoke, the darkness, combined to give this the feel of some World War II spy scene, rather than the pointless and artless nonstop fun we had been enjoying for weeks now.

  “Okay, so don’t worry about the money, Cait. I wouldn’t ask you for the money. How much can these things cost anyway? It can’t be …”

  She came at me like an accountant. An angry accountant. “In addition to these things,” she spat, “there is the ferry, or plane fare, the overnight in the …”

  “Excuse?”

  She sighed, a large, dramatic smoke-dense angry sigh. “England,” she said.

  “England,” I repeated, afraid to do anything more.

  “England, O’Brien, is where one has to go.”

  “England. England? Why? Why not here?”

  “’Tisn’t done here.”

  “Dublin. Dublin then, right? We can go there.”

  “’Tisn’t done,” she said, somehow more intensely and more quietly. “In fact, they’re not even technically allowed to give ya that.” She pointed her quarter-inch stub of a cigarette at the pamphlet, which I now realized gave all the important wheres and hows. In England.

  “Christ,” I said, to the booklet, as if Cait were not still there. “I don’t want to go to England.”

  She smacked her hand down on top of the booklet hard enough to make me jump. “Nobody bloody wants to go to England, do they now?”

  I looked up, ready for the fight, but she was already done. Done with me, anyway. She was fumbling around in her raggedy bag, looking for the lighter again, shaking, cigarette clinging to her lips, tears emptying into her bag while she cried, cried, cried, cried.

  I slid my hand flat across the splintery table, reaching for her, for her to take it. She slapped it. I left it there. She found the lighter, looked up at me. I wasn’t going anywhere. She slapped my hand harder.

  Westport, County Mayo. Westport House, this great old Georgian mansionlike thing surrounded by hills and gardens and its own pond with cute paddleboats, and inside, world-famous artworks and things you were definitely not supposed to touch but that were right there so of course somebody like me was going to touch them. I was always touching things I wasn’t supposed to be touching.

  “I’m just after tellin’ ya …” Cait said when I had once again slid up behind her as she studied an oil painting of dogs about to shred a fox. I had my hands around her waist. She scolded me. I liked it. She did not move away, and she did not make me stop.

  Down in the basement of wonderful Westport House, home of generations of folks with style and class and money and nice woodwork, they had installed a collection of stupid geegaws like the faucet that ran backward and a how-sexy-are-you machine that probably would have made the previous owners puke. As we stood there, side by side, unable to step any further into the place, Cait turned to me. “You may now proceed to take the mick,” she said.

  Which would have been perfect, and right up my alley. Only I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop looking at her, and I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  This was my sweaters-and-poteen money. It wasn’t even mine. I was supposed to bring back sweaters and poteen for the boys. We even had a sweaters-and-poteen night arranged, first Saturday night after Labor Day. The boys were going to kick my ass when I got home. Unless I told them the story of how I got myself into this fix. Then they’d pat my back instead.

  Th
e boys were going to kick my ass when I got home.

  My job was transportation and accommodation. Cait had already done the heavy sweating of making the clinic appointments. The pamphlet actually even had a section at the back with information on the most convenient and cheap places to stay in the area of the clinic, so that was what I was to work from.

  “Right. And where did you hear about us then?”

  I stammered, stumbled, leafed through the booklet that I had been so happy to close once I heard the man say that yes he did have vacancies.

  When he couldn’t wait any longer he worked it out himself. “You’re calling from the Republic then, are ya?”

  I nodded, sighed. He had heard this response before.

  “Right, so what times are you scheduled for at the clinic, and when does your plane come in? We’ll meet you. We’ll take you around. We’ll get you sorted.”

  Knock. I wanted to go to Knock, and see the famous crying statue of Mary. Cait, suspicious of my motives of wanting to make Mary cry, wouldn’t do it. She took me to the coast at Sligo where instead we saw sleek little bobbing black heads of seals. They popped up, here, there, silently big-eyed watching us. Bloop, back under the dark water. We would walk a ways, through cow fields that reached almost right down to the sea. After a minute the seals reappeared, watching us. Following us. We hopped a small wire fence, Cait first, then me. I got mildly electrocuted. Cait laughed. Electrified cattle fence. The seals popped their heads up to see. I could not believe there was nobody there but us and the seals. Nobody.

  There were probably about a zillion people at Knock.

  Liverpool. Birthplace of the Beatles. That was what I knew about Liverpool. That was what everybody everywhere knew about Liverpool. Birthplace of the Beatles.

  The man, Martin, picked us up at the airport like he said. Cait and I hadn’t spoken during the whole flight, and we still weren’t talking when Martin walked right up and picked us out of the small group disembarking.

  “Mr. O’Brien?” he said.