‘Are you trying to get us fucking killed?’ he said.
Carty said, ‘We’ll fall like men.’
‘We’ll my hole … you will … I’m fucking starving.’ He looked at me and added, ‘Colin, come on and let’s go eat.’
I stamped on the burning flag, killing the growing flame with my heel. My eyes on Carty all the while; I was fearful of his reaction. He shook his head slowly. Tears welled in him and began to fall. The sight of this frightened the barman into backing away. I wasn’t sure if he had felt physically intimidated by Carty, but certainly the sight of the big man in emotional meltdown made an impact.
Carty put his hands to his face. When he brought them down, it was as though he had washed the colour from his complexion. Still, the tears poured. Barney stood transfixed, cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth. I saw in Carty all the disappointment he had in himself; all he wanted to be and was not; all he wanted to change about himself and could not.
‘Carty,’ I said quietly, handing him a paper napkin I’d taken from the closest table.
He blew his nose into it and said he was fine. Gesturing to the barman, he continued, ‘I’m fierce sorry, boy.’
I went over to the barman and told him to leave Carty alone and he’d go away. Or if he mentioned Jesus to him he could maybe make himself a friend for life. I think he left him alone. Carty went to the loo to wash off the appearance of tears. Barney and I went and joined Louis and Tommy. ‘Say nothing about what just happened,’ he said.
After the sun had settled it turned cold, but we liked it al fresco, watching the strangeness of this new city. We all smoked: Louis and Tommy on Czar cheroots, Barney his Major and Carty, after he joined us, brought out his pipe and stacked it with flakes of Old Clan and puffed moodily, which he probably thought looked contemplative.
‘My eggs were cold,’ he said.
‘You were told they were there,’ I said, ‘and you left them waiting.’
‘Will we go shake ourselves in a disco?’ Barney said.
Louis shook his head, ‘Ah, I think I’ll go back to the hotel and have a couple before I turn in for the night.’
‘Me too,’ Tommy said.
‘Colin?’ Barney said.
‘Okay,’ I said, though I wasn’t up for it. I couldn’t let him go alone.
Carty said, like God through cloud, ‘But ye’re married and should be abstaining …’.
Women were safe from us, as Tommy the Lure wasn’t coming. Cruel appraisal of us, Barney said as we sat into a table in Caesar’s Disco. Nightlife didn’t begin till after eleven p.m.; we bled shekels hard through our pockets for beer and a couple of shots. Women danced with us, it appeared, out of politeness, and others didn’t – they let us know with a withering look that they were Everest and we were merely foothill walkers. ‘The thing is,’ Barney said, ‘they’re all gorgeous … every fucking one of them. There has to be a disco someplace for ugly people … you know, a place where we’d be considered as really good-looking men.’
Tanned, slim, energetic, erotic. We knew the sun would fade their beauty and they’d look older than their years, by which time we would be in with a shout with them, but that was in the all-too-distant future.
‘We may carry our horns home with us,’ Barney said, ‘I’m bollixed anyway … shouldn’t have come out … can I ask you something personal, Colin?’
Not quite drunk, but almost. Our hotel was a block away, and we sauntered along in that direction. The skies were ripe with stars and not a cloud – a light breeze prickled our forearms and grew goosepimples, and in Barney an occasional chattering of his teeth.
‘But this is strictly between me and you. Right?’ he went on. ‘Right?’
‘Okay.’
‘Seriously now … I haven’t told anyone this before.’
‘I said I won’t open my mouth … what is it?’
‘I can’t come.’
‘I … everyone can come.’
‘Well, I can’t … I can ride for hours, no kidding, but something inside my head won’t let me … you know.’
The opposite of premature ejaculation, I thought – what do I say?
‘The missus is sick of it. She used to like quickies. A quickie with me takes two hours.’
‘See a doctor,’ I suggested.
‘I did … he asked me if I was masturbating, and if I was, to quit it … that’s the thing I used to, right, pretty heavily but … what? … why are you looking at me like? Everyone wanks, even my fucking greyhounds. Even you, I bet.’
The silence between us was punctuated by a police siren.
‘All I can say is this to you: don’t make a big issue out of it … the problem will just get bigger … maybe you’re chucking yourself in your sleep.’
‘You think so?’
‘A possibility. It could be a deep-rooted subconscious thing.’
It gave him manna to ponder.
In the hotel, Tommy and Louis were sitting to the edge of the couches, drinking beers by the neck, smoking. Louis’s cigar rested in the ‘u’ of a glass ashtray. He was wringing his hands, his shoulders perched up the way they went when he had something to get off them.
But it was Tommy who spoke up.
‘Is he with you?’
‘Who?’ Barney said, in spite of it being plainly obvious.
I said, ‘No. He came back with youse, didn’t he?’
Louis said, ‘He did, and then he fecked off again, said he was going to keep an eye on youse. Did you ask him to do that, Colin?’
‘I didn’t. Me ask him keep an eye on us?’
Barney said, ‘Maybe he’s parked the bus and fecked off to bed.’
I said, half wondering if we’d walked past it, ‘We didn’t pass it on the way in.’
‘We tried his room,’ Louis said.
The situation: Tommy had signed the minibus out from the Transport NCO, and as such it was his responsibility to ensure it was returned in the same order as it’d left the yard in, while Louis was the senior NCO and in charge of us … as things stood, both looked to be deep in the mire.
Louis’s lips went thin and hard. He was thinking what to say to our commanding officer if Born Again Carty had slipped from his shiny pedestal. Barney mentioned the burning of the Union Flag, and immediately Louis said, ‘And you didn’t think to report his action to me or Tommy?’
‘I thought you did,’ Barney said, looking at me, knowing I hadn’t.
‘Jesus, you’re well able to come now, aren’t you?’ I said.
‘You knew about this?’ Tommy said, accusingly.
‘It was nothing,’ I said.
‘Burning a Union Flag, nothing?!’ Louis said, shaking his head and then rubbing his eyes with his fingers.
He was out of tune with his normal, mild self.
Tommy said, ‘It could be viewed as a major international incident.’
Barney said, ‘It’s only a fucking flag … the real thing is this: where is the unholy hoor?’
‘Looks like he’s done a runner,’ Tommy said in a low voice that pleaded to be contradicted.
I said, ‘Maybe he’s just gone for something to eat?’
‘He’s up to no good,’ Louis said. ‘If the bus comes back in one piece, that’ll be something … but if he’s had a few drinks, he’ll be liable to either crash or pawn it.’
We waited. And waited. Ate complimentary pecan nuts and took turns to read a week-old Jerusalem Post. Louis was asleep, his glasses low on his nose, his legs stretched, mouth open. Tommy paced the tiles up and down and sideways and across. Barney played patience with half a deck of cards.
The sun rose golden. Still, Carty hadn’t shown. Louis said we weren’t to leave the hotel until that stupid fucking wanker showed his face.
Tommy came in from the vestibule. He’d got fed up with the tiles and had walked the pavement, hoping to see his minibus appear around the corner. I doubted if a miracle had happened here since J.C. left town.
Barney said quietly, ‘Do you want to know something else?’
Tommy said distantly, ‘What?’
‘He hasn’t got a UN driver’s licence.’
Tommy threw his hands up in despair. ‘You never told us that, either.’
‘I thought ye knew,’ Barney said.
Choices. By late afternoon, it was time to make a crucial decision.
Louis said, ‘We may fucking ring the Adjutant and report this. That Carty … I’ll crucify him.’
Tommy said, ‘I’ll hammer the nails into his hands.’
Barney said, ‘I bags the spear into his side.’
I said, ‘Are we drawing lots for his clothes? His army-cum-civvies?’
The notion drew smiles. When the two senior ranks went to reception to make the call to headquarters, Barney said, ‘Guess what my missus said about the me-not-coming problem.’
‘Just tell me. I’m too tired to play guessing games … we’ve been at that all frigging night. Yeah?’
‘She fucking shouted at me that I was all hammer and no nail! In our local local! Can you imagine that?’
Louis and Tommy came toward us, a lift in their step, seemingly not laden with bollockings in their ears, but with good news.
Louis said, relief brightening his features, ‘He drove back across the border.’
‘The fucking tool,’ Barney said, ‘we’re stranded …’.
My expression asked for further information.
‘He’s guilt-stricken over the flag burning,’ Tommy said. ‘He reported himself for doing it, and told the Colonel he’d have wrecked our holiday if he’d stayed with us.’
A sort of a Jesus disappearance? I thought.
‘Death and Resurrection,’ Tommy said.
Louis, now totally devoid of worry about looking bad in front of his superiors, laughed too loudly.
‘You can only be who you are,’ Barney said.
Sometimes, he could surprise us.
Doll Woman
Strawberry blond from a pack or bottle, whatever. Petite. Fifty-four, or thereabouts. You’d find more meat on a kebab. She wore make-up, but this did not stop the haunting of wrinkles coming through, like the lines of ancient trails shown up by aerial photography. I was back in town for the funeral of an old army colleague – these days I seem to have increasing reason for coming back to Kildare. To pay respects to people who I’d never imagined ever dying. And in general, death was snatching those who had always taken care of themselves, not good advertising for the advocates of the eat well and exercise brigade.
Because it was a military funeral, they brought out the band and used a gun carriage instead of a hearse. The police band had on black stylish uniforms with red piping down their trousers. In my day they wore green and greener capes. Johnny Magee wasn’t top brass, or any rank close to it, but the army like to give their dead a good send-off, to herald the news with drum and trumpet.
I waited outside for the bearers to lower and slide the flag-draped coffin onto the carriage, to screw in the bolts to keep the coffin from sliding off. A lot can go wrong at a service funeral: the coffin being lowered into the wrong grave; a body falling out through the bottom of a cheap casket. None of this risk for me: when I go it’ll be to the furnace, and my ashes will be spread on the mountains. I don’t want my sons and daughters traipsing out to a cemetery, not that they would, mind. At least, not often. And not unless they were stuck for something, and wanted to see if I could dig deep in my pockets like I had done for them in life. Who’d want people looking down on them? Shit, I’ve had enough of that throughout my life.
Nancy, not her real name, we used to call her that because she bore a strong resemblance to the Drew TV character, ranged alongside me at a point along the two-kilometre walk to the cemetery. Looking back, I’m sure she’d seen me earlier on and had been thinking about what she should do: she was never one to act on impulse.
‘Hi, Mick,’ she said, looking up at me.
She wore a black coat with a wide collar.
‘Dee,’ I said, taking her hand in a brief shake, ‘Jesus, good to see you … sad, huh?’
‘Terrible. I only cut his hair the day before he died.’
‘Still hairdressing … it’s been years since … when is the last time we met?’
‘Years.’
All around us, the trudging of feet, muttered conversations. Under the railway bridge, echoed voices, chestnut trees to the immediate left, behind a wall where I banged Dee’s sister on our eighteenth shared birthday. Louise. We used to call her Loose.
‘Oh, not as much hairdressing as I used to. And you, what are you doing with yourself these days?’
I said I worked as a private investigator down south in Waterford. Part-time. Full-time would mean I’d be working for the taxman. There was no sense in telling her too much: about the marriage break-up, about how the cops, my colleagues, had come calling to our door on the verge of dawn and turned my whole life upside down and inside fucking out. She probably knew all that, and besides, it was too detailed to push out on a graveyard walk. More than the dead listen in to conversations.
She had bad teeth. Rotten, like leaves turned brown. It was the one thing about herself she had let go, and it could only be because she was terrified of dentists – she had a dread of pain, and no kids either, which pointed in that direction. Still, in spite of the teeth, she looked well. And I had physical flaws too: overweight leaning to fat, wore glasses, looked older than I was, and had whiskey trails burning my cheeks. Devils can’t be choosers.
A few in the crowd recognised me and pretended not to, not because of anything I’d done, but it was in their nature to make a snide comment to those on the fringe of their company, just to rise a snigger from a putdown.
A wind picked up, distorting the priest’s words. Military Police undressed the coffin, ceremonially folding the Tricolour, and all the while Dee was linking my arm; I was certain we must have looked like a couple.
‘Are you going to the Silken for the refreshments?’ she’d said.
‘No … you?’
‘I think I’d prefer someplace quieter.’
‘Me too.’
So we ended up in a little corner café on Station Road, sitting across from each other. I wondered how a silence would sit between us, but she seemed anxious to keep away a lapse in the flow of conversation. We pitched names at each other to rouse a memory we could talk about, and in this way built up a bank of deaths, people who were dying, persons gaoled, failed marriages; the latter could have been a lead-in to talk of the rock on which my marriage had perished, but we allowed it a stretch of silence and moved on to discuss Louise, who was living in Canada.
‘She married a teacher,’ she said.
‘A teacher,’ I said, trying to keep the doubt from showing – I didn’t believe anyone could teach Loose anything.
‘Four kids, can you imagine?’
I could. My espresso and her latté arrived, delivered by a cheerless waitress who left behind part of her mood. Dee called her back and asked her for a sachet of brown sugar.
‘It must hurt her to smile,’ Dee said.
‘A bad day.’
‘So?’
‘So?’
‘How are you keeping … I mean really, really keeping? I heard that you and Siobhan split up. And you were such a long time married, too.’
‘I’m doing okay. You?’
‘Do you ever get lonely?’
‘Sometimes. How about yourself?’
/>
‘Yeah, yeah, now and then, but I have Ginger and my dolls and the TV is great, but …’.
‘But …’ I said. We’d once known each other well enough to talk dirty. ‘You can’t ride a telly.’
Her teeth killed a beautiful smile. Oral is out, I thought.
‘No, you can’t,’ she said, her lips narrowing to closure, instead beaming her smile through beautiful green eyes.
‘Did you ever marry?’ I said.
‘No … we won’t go there.’
I thought that was a good way of warning people off sensitive issues.
St Rita’s, Dee’s place, is mid-terrace in an old estate populated with young Poles and Nigerians, Brazilians, unmarried mothers, and a few elderly people intent on staying put and breathing in memories. Inside, in a glass cabinet, on the mantelpiece, on corner shelving, and in every room, were dolls – even on the sill in the loo, and hanging on walls in lieu of photographs and paintings. And each owned a name. I got the feeling that the eyes of the dolls were fixed on me.
‘They’re my family,’ she said, taking my jacket off the back of the couch to hang up.
From the hall she said, ‘Beer or a whiskey? I have Powers. It used to be Daddy’s, but he … you know yourself.’
I did? Then I remembered that he had stepped out in front of a train. Nobody could be sure if it had been a deliberate act.
‘Beer’s fine, thanks.’
Those dolls. Irises of every colour bore down on me. There were a few Sindy’s, baby dolls, a lot from other cultures: Irish, Dutch, Welsh, even Amish. When she came in with the beers, I said she must be widely travelled.
‘I’ve never left the country,’ she said, sitting into an armchair by the red-brick fireplace. Ashes and spent coals in the grate, a few sweet wrappers, the shells of cashew nuts.
‘I hate flying,’ she said, ‘and ships … dentists.’
She smiled. I smiled.
In bed, she was wild. Talked dirty, moaned, dug her heels into my buttocks. She threw the sex manual at me, but I wasn’t as flexible as she would have liked – and she wouldn’t let me see her naked. By touch I knew she’d shaved there: then she let me glimpse it and I said it was nice. I don’t like that sort of thing really. Lush is better. At evening’s end I was wrung out, and Dee too – she wouldn’t lie in against me, said she hated the feel of a sweaty body and didn’t want to brush against its stickiness. All the while the eyes of her dolls were upon us, and her cat was present too, but I didn’t find this out until I stepped on it by accident – it was lying at the side of the bed. Ginger hissed and lashed out a paw, drawing blood from my thumb. I went to kick the orange bastard, but he had hightailed out to the landing.
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