“Tell them what you like,” he says. “Whatever you like.”
“If I don’t tell them something, they’ll be on at me to come out again,” she says.
“You would not be unwelcome,” he says, “or averse, I am sure, to a cup of tea.” And gravely he tips that big head homeward, towards his brownstone basement on the far side of the Circle.
“Fine,” she says, “but I’ll come on my own when I do and not as a messenger. Good afternoon to you, Mr. Terry.”
He lifts an invisible hat. “It was a great pleasure to talk with you again, Katey.”
She’s forgotten how that little smile of his so frequently cheers her up.
3
“Okay, Katey, so what’s the story?” says Father McQueeny wearing his professional cheer like an old shroud, as ill-smelling and threadbare as his clerical black. The only life on him is his sweat, his winking veins. The best the regulars have for him these days is their pity, the occasional drink. He has no standing at all with the Church or the community. But, since Father Walsh died, that secret little smirk of his always chills her. Knowing that he can still frighten her is probably all that keeps the old shit alive. And since that knowledge actually informs the expression which causes her fear, she is directly feeding him what he wants. She has yet to work out a way to break the cycle. Years before, in her fiercest attempt, she almost succeeded.
To the others, the priest remains inaudible, invisible. “Did he come out with it, Katey?” says Corny Doyle, his black eyes and hair glinting like pitch, his near-fleshless body and head looking as artificially weathered as those shiny, smoked hams in Belladonna’s. “Come on, Kate. There’s real money riding on this now.”
“He did not tell me,” she says. She turns her back on Father McQueeny but she cannot control a shudder as she smiles from behind the bar where she has been helping out since Christmas, because of Bridget’s pneumonia. She takes hold of the decorated china pump-handle and turns to her patient customer. “Two pints of Mooney’s was it, Mr. Gold?”
“You’re an angel,” says Mr. Gold. “Well, Corny, the book, now how’s it running?” He is such a plump, jolly man. You would never take him for a pawnbroker. And it must be admitted he is not a natural profiteer. Mr. Gold carries his pints carefully to the little table in the alcove, where Becky, his secretary, waits for him. Ageless, she is her own work of art. He dotes on her. If it wasn’t for her he would be a ruined man. They’ll be going out this evening. You can smell her perm and her Chantilly from here. A little less noise and you could probably hear her mascara flake.
“Radio aerial’s still number one, Mr. Gold,” says Katey. Her father’s attention has gone elsewhere, to some fine moment of sport on the box. He shares his rowdy triumph with his fellow aficionados. He turns back to her, panting. “That was amazing,” he says.
Kate Doyle calls him over with her finger. He knows better than to hesitate. “What?” he blusters. “What? There’s nothing wrong with those glasses. I told you it’s the dishwasher.”
Her whisper is sharp as a needle in his wincing ear. She asks him why, after all she’s spoken perfectly plainly to him, he is still letting that nasty old man into the pub?
“Oh, come on, Katey,” he says, “where else can the poor devil go? He’s a stranger in his own church these days.”
“He deserves nothing less,” she says. “And I’ll remind you, Dad, of my original terms. I’m off for a walk now and you can run the bloody pub yourself.”
“Oh, no!” He is mortified. He casts yearning eyes back towards the television. He looks like some benighted sinner in the picture books who has lost the salvation of Christ. “Don’t do this to me, Kate.”
“I might be back when he’s gone,” she says. “But I’m not making any promises.”
Every so often she has to let him know he is going too far. Getting her father to work was a full-time job for her mother but she’s not going to waste her own life on that non-starter. He’s already lost the hotel next door to his debts. Most of the money Kate allows him goes in some form of gambling. Those customers who lend him money soon discover how she refuses to honour his IOUs. He’s lucky these days to be able to coax an extra dollar or two out of the till, usually by short-changing a stranger.
“We’ll lose business if you go, Kate,” he hisses. “Why cut off your nose to spite your face?”
“I’ll cut off your nose, you old fool, if you don’t set it to that grindstone right now,” she says. She hates sounding like her mother. Furiously, she snatches on her coat and scarf. “I’ll be back when you get him out of here.” She knows Father McQueeny’s horrible eyes are still feeding off her through the pub’s cultivated gloom.
“See you later, Katey, dear,” her father trills as he places professional fingers on his bar and a smile falls across his face. “Now, then, Mrs. Byrne, a half of Guinness, is it, darling?”
4
The Circle was going up. There were all kinds of well-heeled people coming in. You could tell by the brass door-knockers and the window-boxes, the dark green paint. With the odd boutique and croissanterie, these were the traditional signs of gentrification. Taking down the last pylons of the ugly elevated had helped, along with the hippies who in the ’60s and ’70s had made such a success of the little park, which now had a playground and somewhere for the dogs to go. It was lovely in the summer.
It was quiet, too, since they had put in the one-way system. Now the only strange vehicles were those which thought they could still make a short cut and wound up whining round until, defeated, they left the way they had entered. You had to go up to Canal Street to get a cab. They wouldn’t come any further than that. There were legends of drivers who had never returned.
This recent development had increased the sense of the Circle’s uniqueness, a zone of relative tranquillity in one of the noisiest parts of New York City. Up to now they had been protected from a full-scale yuppie invasion by the nearby federal housing. Yet nobody from the projects had ever bothered the Circle. They thought of the place as their own, something they aspired to, something to protect. It was astonishing the affection local people felt for the place, especially the park, which was the best-kept in the city.
She was on her brisk way, of course, to take Mr. Terry McLear up on his invitation but she was not going there directly for all to see. Neither was she sure what she’d have to say to him when she saw him. She simply felt it was time they had one of their old chats.
Under a chilly sky, she walked quickly along the central path of the park. Eight paths led to the middle these days, like the arms of a compass, and there had been some talk of putting a sundial on the knoll, where Mr. Terry had now laid his discreet foundations. She paused to look at the smooth concrete of his deep, narrow hole. A flag, perhaps? Something that simple? But this was not a man to fly a flag at the best of times. And even the heaviest banner did not need so sturdy a pole. However, she was beginning to get a notion. A bit of a memory from a conversation of theirs a good few years ago now. Ah, she thought, it’s about birds, I bet.
Certain some of her customers would still be watching her, she took the northern path and left the park to cross directly over to Houston Alley, where her uncle had his little toy-soldier shop where he painted everything himself and where, next door, the Italian shoe-repairer worked in his window. They would not be there much longer now that the real-estate people had christened the neighbourhood “Houston Village.” Already the pub had had a sniff from Starbucks. Up at the far end of the alley the street looked busy. She thought about going back, but told herself she was a fool.
The traffic in Canal Street was unusually dense and a crew-cut girl in big boots had to help her when she almost fell into the street, shoved aside by some thrusting Wall Street stockman in a vast raincoat which might have sheltered half the Australian outback. She thought she recognised him as the boy who had moved in to Number 91 a few weeks ago and she had been about to say hello.
She was glad to get ba
ck into the quietness of the Circle, going round into Church Street and then through Walker Street which would bring her out only a couple of houses from Mr. Terry’s place.
She was still a little shaken up but had collected herself by the time she reached the row of brownstones. Number 27 was in the middle and his flat was in the basement. She went carefully down the iron steps to his area. It was as smartly kept up as always, with the flower baskets properly stocked and his miniature greenhouse raising tomatoes in their gro-bags. And he was still neat and clean. No obvious slipping of standards, no signs of senile decay. She took hold of the old black lion knocker and rapped twice against the dented plate. That same vast echo came back, as if she stood at the door to infinity.
He was slow as Christmas unbolting it all and opening up. Then everything happened at once. Pulling back the door he embraced her and kicked it shut at the same time. The apartment was suddenly very silent. “Well,” he said, “it has been such a long time. All my fault, too. I have had a chance to pull myself together and here I am.”
“That sounds like a point for God for a change.” She knew all the teachers had been anarchists or pagans or something equally silly in that school of his. She stared around at the familiar things, the copper and the oak and the big ornamental iron stove which once heated the whole building. “You’re still dusting better than a woman. And polishing.”
“She had high standards,” he says. “I could not rise to them when she was alive, but now it seems only fair to try to live up to them. You would not believe what a slob I used to be.”
“You never told me,” she says.
“That is right. There is quite a bit I have not told you,” he says.
“And us so close once,” she says.
“We were good friends,” he agreed. “The best of company. I am an idiot, Kate. But I do not think either of us realised I was in a sort of shock for years. I was afraid of our closeness, do you see? In the end.”
“I believe I might have mentioned that.” She went to put the kettle on. Filling it from his deep old-fashioned stone sink with its great brass faucets she carried it with both hands to the stove while he got out the teacakes and the toasting forks. He must have bought them only today from Van Beek’s Bakery on Canal, the knowing old devil, and put them in the icebox. They were still almost warm. She fitted one to the fork. “It doesn’t exactly take Sigmund Freud to work that out. But you made your decisions, Mr. Terry. And it is my general rule to abide by such decisions until the party involved decides to change. Which in my experience generally happens at the proper time.”
“Oh, so you have had lots of these relationships, have you, Kate?”
She laughed.
5
“I was sixteen when I first saw her. In the Circle there she was, coming out of Number 10, where the dry-cleaners is now. I said to myself, that is whom I am going to marry. And that was what I did. We used to sing quite a bit, duets together. She was a much better and sweeter singer than I, and she was smarter, as well.” Mr. Terry looks into the fire and slowly turns his teacake against the glare. “What a little old snob I was in those days, thinking myself better than anyone, coming back from Dublin with an education. But she liked me anyway and was what I needed to take me down a peg or two. My father thought she was an angel. He spoke often of the grandchildren he would care for. But both he and she died before that event could become any sort of reality. And I grew very sorry for myself, Kate. In those first days, when we were having our chats, I was selfish.”
“Oh, yes,” she says, “but you were more than that. You couldn’t help being more than that. That’s one of the things hardest to realise about ourselves sometimes. Even in your morbid moments you often showed me how to get a grip on things. By example, you might say. You cannot help but be a good man, Mr. Terry. A protector, I think, rather than a predator.”
“I do not know about that.”
“But I do,” she says.
“Anyway,” he flips a teacake onto the warming plate, “we had no children and so the McLears have no heirs.”
“It’s a shame,” she says, “but not a tragedy, surely?” For an instant it flashes through her head, Oh, no, he doesn’t want me to have his bloody babies, does he?
“Not in any ordinary sense, I quite agree. But you see there is an inheritance that goes along with that. Something which must be remembered accurately and passed down by word of mouth. It is our family tradition and has been so for quite a time.”
“My goodness,” she says. “You’re Brian Boru’s rightful successor to the high throne of Erin, is that it?” With deft economy she butters their teacakes.
He takes some jelly from the dish and lays it lightly on top. “Oh, these are good, eh?”
When they are drinking their last possible cup of Assam he says very soberly: “Would you let me share this secret, Kate? I have no one else.”
“Not a crime, is it, or something nasty?” she begs.
“Certainly not!” He falls silent. She can sense him withdrawing and laughs at his response. He sighs.
“Then get on with it,” she says. “Give me a taste of it, for I’m a busy woman.”
“The story does not involve the Irish much,” he says. “Most of the Celts involved were from southern England, which was called Britannia in those days, by the Romans.”
“Ancient history!” she cries. “How long, Mr. Terry, is your story?”
“Not very long,” he says.
“Well,” she says, “I will come back another time to hear it.” She glances at her watch. “If I don’t go now I’ll miss my programme.”
As he helps her on with her coat she says: “I have a very low tolerance for history. It is hard for me to see how most of it relates to the here and now.”
“This will mean something to you, I think, Kate.”
They exchange light kisses upon the cheek. There is a new warmth between them which she welcomes.
“Make it scones tomorrow,” she says. “Those big juicy ones they do, with the raisins in them, and I will hear your secret. We’ll have Darjeeling, too. I’ll bring some if you don’t have any.”
“I have plenty,” he says.
“Bye, bye for now,” she says.
6
“All the goodness is in the marrow!” declares Mrs. Byrne, waving her bones at the other customers. “But these days the young people all turn their noses up at it.”
“That’s not the problem at all, Mavis. The plain truth is you’re a bloody noisy eater,” says Corny Doyle, backing up the other diners’ complaints. “And you’ve had one too many now. You had better go home.”
With her toothless mouth she sucks at her mutton.
“They don’t know what they’re missing, do they Mavis?” says Father McQueeny from where he sits panting in a booth.
“And you can fuck off, you old pervert.” Mavis rises with dignity and sails towards the ladies’. She has her standards.
“Well, Kate, how’s the weather out there?” says Father McQueeny.
“Oh, you are here at last, Kate. It seems Father McQueeny’s been locked out of his digs.” In other circumstances Corny’s expression of pleading anxiety would be funny.
“That doesn’t concern me,” she says, coming down the stairs. “I just popped in for something. I have told you what I want, Dad.” She is carrying her little bag.
He rushes after her, whispering and pleading. “What can I do?”
“I have told you what you can do.”
She looks back into the shadows. She knows he is staring at her. Often she thinks it is not exactly him that she fears, only what is in him. What sense does that make? Does she fear his memories and secrets? Of course Father Walsh, her confessor, had heard what had happened and what she had done and she had been absolved. What was more, the Church, by some means of its own, had discovered at least part of the truth and taken steps to curb him. They had sent Father Declan down to St. Mary’s. He was a tough old bugger but wholesome
as they come. McQueeny was supposed to assist Declan who had found no use for him. However, since Father Walsh died, McQueeny revelled in their hideous secret, constantly hanging around the pub even before she started working there, haunting her, threatening to tell the world how he had come by his horrid surgery.
She is not particularly desperate about it. Sooner or later she knows her father will knuckle down and ban the old devil. It must be only a matter of time before the priest’s liver kills him. She’s never wished anyone dead in her life, save him, and her hatred of him is such that she fears for her own soul over it.
This time she goes directly across the park to Mr. Terry McLear’s. It might look as if she plans to spend the night there but she does not care. Her true intention is to return eventually to her own flat in Delaware Court and wait until her father calls. She gives it twenty-four hours from the moment she stepped out of the pub.
But when she lifts the lion’s head and lets it fall there is no reply. She waits. She climbs back up the steps. She looks into the park. She is about to go down again when an old chequer cab pulls up and out of its yellow-and-black depths comes Mr. Terry McLear with various bags and bundles. “Oh what luck!” he declares. “Just when I needed you, Kate.”
She helps him get the stuff out of the cab and down into his den. He removes his coat. He opens the door into his workshop and switches on a light. “I was not expecting you back today.”
“Circumstances gave me the opportunity.” She squints at the bags. “Who is Happy the Hammer?”
“Look on the other side. It is Stadtler’s Hardware. Their mascot. Just the last bits I needed.”
“Is it a bird-house of some kind that you are building?” she asks.
“And so you are adding telepathy to your list of extraordinary qualities, are you, Katey?” He grins. “Did I ever mention this to you?”
“You might have done. Is it pigeons?”
“God bless you, Katey.” He pulls a bunch of small dowels out of a bag and puts it on top of some bits of plywood. “I must have told you the story.”
The Best of Michael Moorcock Page 29