‘It’s just a different way of tying knots,’ she said. ‘That’s all knitting is when you come to think of it.’
Mr Keogh wiped the sweat from his forehead where the rim of his hat made contact.
‘You look like you’re melting,’ said Mrs O’Hagan. He looked across at the shadowed side of the street. Up at his flautist’s window. She was there for a moment. Next thing he knew she was skipping across the road towards him. There was something very different about her. It was her hair. She stopped at the gate.
‘Can I have a light?’ She held up her cigarette.
‘Sure thing.’ Mr Keogh leaned his bulk in the chair to get at his pocket and took out a box of Swan matches. She came through the gate and nodded to Mrs O’Hagan. Mr Keogh’s fat fingers probed the box and some of the matches fell to the ground. The girl stooped to lift them. She struck one on the tiled path, lit her cigarette and tossed the match away. Mrs O’Hagan followed its direction with her eyes. Mr Keogh offered her a little sprig of matches in case she should need them later but she refused them.
‘You’ve had your hair done,’ he said.
‘Yes.’ The girl reached up and touched it as if she couldn’t believe. It was done in an Afro style, a halo frizzed out round her face. ‘I need something to keep me going.’ She laughed and it was the first time Mr Keogh had seen her do so. He saw too much of her gums.
‘Have a seat,’ said Mr Keogh. He was struggling to rise from his chair but the girl put out a hand and touched him lightly.
‘I’ll sit on the step.’ She sat down and drew her knees up to her chin. She was wearing a loose white summer skirt which she held behind her knees to keep herself decent. She was in her bare feet and Mr Keogh noticed that they were big and tendony. It was as if they were painted brown. Her arms were also deeply tanned.
‘Do you like it?’
‘Yes.’ Mr Keogh put his head to one side. ‘It makes you look like a dandelion clock.’ He inhaled and blew out in her direction saying, ‘One o’clock, two o’clock.’ She held her springy curled hair with both hands as if to keep it from blowing away and laughed again.
She tilted her face up to the sun and sighed, ‘You certainly picked the right side of the street to live on.’
‘I can never see’, said Mrs O’Hagan ‘why people want to smoke in heat like this. In the winter I can understand it.’
Mr Keogh took out his pipe and began to fill it from his pouch. Mrs O’Hagan looked away from him to the girl.
‘What’s your name, dear?’
‘Una.’
Mrs O’Hagan repeated the name as if she had never heard it before. The girl raised the cigarette to her mouth and Mr Keogh noticed how closely bitten her nails were, little half moons embedded on the ends of her fingers, the skin bulbous around them.
‘I’m Mrs O’Hagan and this is Mr Keogh from County Roscommon.’
‘We’ve met.’
‘So I gather.’
Mr Keogh lit his pipe with two matches held together. Just as he was about to set them on the arm of his chair Mrs O’Hagan got up and said, ‘I’ll get you both an ashtray.’ She disappeared into the darkness of the hallway, stepping over the girl’s feet.
Between puffs Mr Keogh said, ‘Do you play the flute just for fun?’
She nodded.
‘With anybody else?’
She shook her head.
‘I used to play in a band,’ he said. ‘We had the best of crack. The paradiddles and the flam-paradiddles.’
‘In the name of God what are they?’ said Mrs O’Hagan, coming back with an ashtray, a Present from Bundoran. The girl immediately tapped the ash from her cigarette into it.
‘They’re part and parcel of the whole thing,’ said Mr Keogh.
‘I play music for the music,’ Una said, ‘but I can never play it well enough to please myself.’ She spoke rapidly, her eyes staring, inhaling her cigarette deeply and taking little bites of the smoke as she let it out. A different girl entirely from the one he had met in the Gardens. ‘If I could play as well as I want I would be overcome and then I couldn’t go on.’
‘We had to march and play at the same time. To get the notes right and the feet. No time for sentiment there, eh?’
‘Maybe that’s why I don’t like brass bands,’ said Una. There was a long silence. Mrs O’Hagan’s hands still zigzagged around her half-made doily.
‘Where are you from?’
‘Tyrone-among-the-bushes. Near Omagh.’ Una said it as if she was tired of answering the question.
‘And what are you working at?’
‘I’m not. I was slung out of University two years ago and I’ve applied for jobs until I’m sick.’
‘Would you not be far better off at home if you have no job to go to?’
The girl gave a snort as if that was the stupidest thing imaginable. She stubbed out her cigarette and turned to Mr Keogh.
‘You’re the first policeman I’ve ever talked to. It gives me a funny feeling.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It was a long time ago.’
‘I just don’t like cops – usually.’ She smiled at him and he adjusted his sunhat so as to see her better.
‘Do you – did you not find that people were very wary of you?’
‘No – and maybe, yes. Most of my friends tended to be in the Force.’
‘That’s what I mean.’
‘We tended to be outside things.’
‘Like football grounds.’ They both laughed.
Mrs O’Hagan rose from her chair and said, ‘Cup of tea Mr Keogh?’ He nodded. ‘And you?’
‘Yes, please.’
When Mrs O’Hagan had passed, the girl propped her bare feet high on the jamb of the door and clutched her dress to the undersides of her thighs.
‘Mr Keogh from County Roscommon,’ she said quietly and began to gnaw the side of her thumb-nail.
‘I hated it. But then what else could I do?’
The girl shrugged and switched to gnawing her index finger.
‘It’s a pity you didn’t come from County Mayo.’
‘Why?’
‘Mr Keogh from the County Mayo sounds better.’
‘I wouldn’t be seen dead coming from there.’ He adjusted his hat to let some air in underneath, then he sighed, ‘Una from Omagh.’
Mrs O’Hagan came out with a tray, lifting it exaggeratedly high to clear the girl’s head as she sat on the step. They had tea and talked and Una borrowed two more matches and smoked two more cigarettes one after the other. Then she was away as quickly as she had come, skipping on her big bare feet across the hot street.
The conversation with the girl that day had disturbed him. He rarely thought of his days in the police now. Before going to bed he opened his cupboard and had a cup from the brandy bottle left over from Christmas. As a policeman he had been timid and useless. The only way he had survived was to hide behind the formulae of words they had taught him. If he got the words right, that combined with his awesome size and weight – in those days he was sixteen stones of muscle – would generally be enough to make people come quietly. But every time he arrested someone his knees would shake.
In drinking to forget he constantly remembered. He knew there were more important and awful things which had happened to him but one in particular stuck out. It was in Belfast shortly after he’d arrived. He had been called to a house where a man was threatening to commit suicide and he’d been met by a trembling neighbour.
‘He’s up in his room,’ she said.
When he’d gone up and opened the bedroom door there was an old man, the sinews standing out on his neck, sitting naked on the bed with a cut-throat razor in one hand and his balls clutched in the other. There were pigeons perched along the iron bedstead, cooing and burbling. The place was white with birdshit, dressing-table, drawers, wardrobe.
‘I’m gonna cut them off,’ the old man had screamed. The window was wide open and the pigeons came and went with a clat
tering of wings.
‘Suit yourself,’ Keogh had said and had begun to move gently towards him. He had taken the razor from him and had intended to wrap him in the quilt but it was so congealed it had come off the bed stiff in the shape of a rectangle. He had taken a coat from the wardrobe, the shoulders of which were streaked with white.
Mr Keogh poured himself another cupful of brandy and wondered why that memory, more than all the others, frightened him so much.
He saw the girl Una several more times and each time she had changed. Once she was so excited and in such a hurry going to an interview for a job that she rushed past him giving the last part of the information walking backwards. The next time, in the supermarket, when he asked her about the job she barely acknowledged his presence and walked past him with a single item elongating her string bag. Her hair had lost some of its bushiness and had begun to lie on each side of a middle parting. She had cold sores on her upper lip which made her mouth look swollen and ugly. But from a distance it was not noticeable – like the spit and breathy sounds. Perhaps this was the reason she stopped playing the flute. Nevertheless Mr Keogh continued to watch her moving about her room. As winter approached it got dark earlier and she would turn on her light at about six. She did not bother to pull the curtains and Mr Keogh would sit in his chair and look across the street at her as she did her ironing or sat reading a magazine. Once she dodged into the room wearing only her underwear but by the time he had straightened up in the seat she was away. It wasn’t that he wanted a peepshow, to be part of her privacy was enough. It gave him as much pleasure to watch her ironing as it did to see her half-dressed.
Then one night she did what he was doing and he worried for her. He had come into his room and without turning on his light looked across at her window. The place was in darkness. He sat down in his chair and waited. Staring in the darkness he thought he saw her shape sitting in the window and he felt his eyes were playing tricks on him. It must have been half an hour later when the shape moved away and it was her. After a minute she came back and sat again for the rest of the evening, just a pale smudge of a face staring down into the street. How many girls of nineteen years of age pass a Saturday night like this?
He drew his curtains and went to bed feeling heavier than ever before. He was wakened by what sounded like the slamming of a car door in the street. The luminous hands of his alarm clock said half past one. A blue light flashed a wedge on and off against the ceiling. He pulled himself from the hollow of his bed and bunching the waist of his pyjama trousers with one hand parted the curtains a little more with the other. An ambulance sat outside, its rear doors open. Farther down the street, a police car. A neighbour had come into the street to see what was happening. The door of Una’s house was open. Mr Keogh put on his shoes and overcoat, took his stick and went down the stairs sideways one at a time as quickly as he dared. In the street he talked to the neighbour but he knew as little as himself. Their breath hung in the air like steam. Mr Keogh ventured up the pathway then into the lighted hall.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello?’ The landlady’s weak voice answered back.
‘What’s wrong?’ Mrs Payne came into the hallway. She was in her dressing-gown holding tightly on to her elbows. Her face was white. A police officer stood by the kitchen door writing something down on his pad. She rolled her eyes up at the ceiling. Heavy footsteps thumped about making the pendant light tremble.
‘The wee girl. She took a bath and . . .’ She drew her finger across one of her wrists. ‘If I hadn’t needed the toilet she’d have been there till the morning.’ Her mouth wobbled, about to cry. She leaned against the wall for support.
‘Is she dead?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not sure.’
The thumping from up the stairs increased and an ambulance man appeared carrying one end of a stretcher. Mr Keogh and Mrs Payne had to back out of the hallway to let them pass. Through the fanlight Mr Keogh saw the struggle the men had to get down the narrow stairs. On the stretcher between them was a roll of silver paper with Una’s blonde hair frizzed out of it at the top. What they were carrying looked like some awful wedding buttonhole. The silver paper glittered in the street lights as the men angled the stretcher into the ambulance. Her face was as white as a candle. A voice crackled from a radio in the police car. Mrs Payne stood with both hands over her mouth. The doors slammed shut and the ambulance took off in silence and at speed with its blue light flashing. The police officer came out of the house and they drove off after the ambulance.
He went in to see if Mrs Payne was all right. She was trembling and crying.
‘Sit down, sit down.’ She sat and rubbed her eyes and nose with the sleeve of her dressing-gown. ‘Is there anything I can do?’
‘Mr Keogh,’ she said, her voice still not steady. ‘You’ll have seen things like this before. Would you check the bathroom for me? I couldn’t. I just couldn’t face it.’ And she began to cry again.
Mr Keogh climbed the stairs as if his whole body was made of lead. Back in his room Mr Keogh sat down on the bed until his breathing returned to normal. He listened and could faintly hear Mrs O’Hagan’s rhythmic snoring. He tried to toe off his shoes but without socks the soles of his feet had stuck. Grunting with effort he reached down and pushed them off. The alarm clock said ten past three. He got to his feet and poured himself a half cup of brandy and drank it quickly. He poured himself another and sat down. The ambulance men had let the bath out. He knew that the water would have looked like wine. But they hadn’t taken time to clean up. Liver-coloured clots had smeared the white enamel and these Mr Keogh had hosed away with the shower attachment. The razor-blade he threw in the waste basket. Her clothes, the kaftan and blouse, had been neatly folded on the bathroom chair. Her Dr Scholls stood hen-toed beneath it. The brandy warmed him and fumed in his chest. He held his head between his hands and prayed to God that she wasn’t dead. If he had ever married and had children she would have been the age of his grandchild. He drank off the second cup, closing his eyes. Whether she was dead or not, the fact remained that she didn’t want to live. If it had been him, he could have understood it. Except that they would never have been able to lift him out of the bath. He snorted a kind of laugh and got off the bed to pour himself another drink. He took off his overcoat and hung it on the hook behind the door. She must have been suffering in her mind. He wondered why it had so affected him – he had seen much worse things. A mush of head after a shotgun suicide, parts of a child under a tram. He couldn’t say it was because he knew her, because he didn’t really. Was it guilt because he had intruded on her privacy by watching her? The brandy was beginning to make his lips numb. He rolled into his bed, propped himself up on his pillows and took the brandy in sips. It was not having the effect he wanted. Instead of consoling him he was becoming more and more depressed. He remembered her at the window with her elbows high and the mellow flute sounds coming across to his room.
‘It’s like everything else,’ he said aloud. He turned to the clock and asked, ‘What time is it?’ A quarter to four. Fuck it anyway. What’s the difference between a paradiddle and a flam-paradiddle? A flam? Very few of the drummers he had actually liked. They were a breed apart. Why? Why? Why did she do it? She had so much going for her.
‘Jesus Christ the night,’ he said and rolled out of bed. The floor seesawed beneath him and he had to hold on to the armchair. He established where the wall cupboard was, reached out and grasped the handles. He opened both doors and began to look through the contents stacked inside. He knelt down in case he fell down and allowed his eyes to explore the contents. A tea-tray and Phillips Stik-a-Sole advertisement were in the way and he threw them out. But when he pulled them some other stuff fell down with a crash.
Behind a wireless with a cloth and fretwork front he found the small black case. He took it out and skimmed a beard of dust from the top of it with his hand. He blew on it as well but the dust was stuck. He stood up and fell back on the bed. He opened th
e catches and lifted the lid. It was so long since he had seen it. The silver shine of it had gone – it looked dull like pot aluminium.
‘Stop. Stop everything.’ He lay across the bed and had another drink from the cup on his bedside table. He turned back to the cornet and picked it out of its purple plush. He hawed on it and tried to rub it with the sleeve of his pyjamas. The valves were a bit stiff, but what comfort to get his little finger into that hook. It felt right. It balanced. He raised it to his lips and only then realised that the mouthpiece wasn’t fitted. Fuck it. In the purple plush there were three. He selected his favourite and slotted it into the tube. He wiggled the valves up and down with his fingers trying to free them. A march came into his head and his foot began tapping to it. He cleared his throat, thought better of it and had another drink of brandy, then raised the cornet to his lips. What came out sounded like a fart.
‘Who did that?’ he said and laughed. He raised the instrument again and this time it was better. He got the tune and it was loud and clear. He knew it so well he couldn’t remember the name of it. He didn’t tap his bare foot but stamped it up and down to the rhythm of the march. He found he was short of puff very quickly.
‘What else?’ he said. Occasionally they used to have jazz sessions after band practice and Brian Goodall would sing. He began to play, hearing the voice, knowing the words. His foot stamped to the slow beat and his heel hurt and the notes, now harsh, rang out.
With a crash his bedroom door burst open and Mrs O’Hagan stood there in her nightdress.
‘In the name of God Mr Keogh what are you up to?’ He smiled and turned slowly to face her.
‘A late hour,’ he said and laughed.
‘Do you know what time it is? Some of us have to be up for Mass in the morning.’
‘Sorry. But that wee girl across the street . . .’ It came out slurred. Mrs O’Hagan sniffed the air and looked at the almost empty brandy bottle.
‘If this ever happens again, Mr Keogh, you can find yourself another place to live.’ She slammed the door as hard as she could.
‘The boy done bad – the boy done very bad,’ he said and rolled over on to the bed. He fell asleep almost immediately.
Collected Stories Page 37