by John Brady
“Don’t be talking. The little one’s a divil. Tries to stay awake until I get home.”
Minogue cupped his hand more around the cigarette. Fitz held up his mug.
“They might ban this next,” he said, wagging it a little. “On account of, well Christ, who knows why. That it offends someone. Or allergic, like the perfume thing.”
Minogue offered a tight smile. There was no sign of Fitz moving on.
“You mind me asking, er, Matt, but does it make much difference to you?” “The tea?”
“No, I meant coming outside for a smoke. I often wondered. Like does it make a person cut down on them maybe?” Minogue took a slow drag before answering. “Not really.”
“Well there’s a thing,” Fitz said, and shuffled a bit, drawing his jacket tighter. Minogue took in the blotches forming on his nostrils, and the watering eyelids.
“Anyone I ask,” Fitz went on. “Anyone who smokes like, they never complain. None of them. Isn’t that something?”
Minogue took another drag. The quartz lights were gaining strength quickly. He tried not to scrutinize how the light caught Fitz’s errant hairs and put a shine to them.
“Plenty of other things to complain about,” he said to Fitz.
“True for you. But it does surprise me, how little hankering there is for the good old days. Remember the place full of smoke? The ashtrays? Smoking on the buses?” He gave Minogue a sly look.
“‘God be with the good old days,’ right? When men were men, and all that.”
Minogue wanted to be agreeable. Here in this yard at the close of a November day, with stuff sliding into the gloom the minute he looked at it, he wanted this state of agreeableness quite a lot. It wasn’t Fitz’s fault that the man in front of him was a middle-aged smoker, a man all too easy to peg as an adept of any so-called good old days.
“Ah it was a myth,” said Fitz, more to himself than to Minogue. “We’d find that out damned quick too, if only they’d hurry up and get a time machine into the shops.”
“There’s a thought now.”
“They’d fly off the shelves, I’ll bet. The way things are going…?” It was one phrase too many for Minogue. It drew his mind to the others that were getting on his nerves more and more: ‘We are where we are’ or ‘Pull together for the good of the country.’ “Well I’d be inclined to leave Dr. Who and his time machine on the shelf,” he said. “We can face the music the way we are.”
Fitz tugged the handle of the mug and then released it to dangle again. He nodded toward the station house looming behind.
“Good old days indeed,” he said and smiled a little. “Sure this place could be a museum itself, when you think about it.” “How long are you here in Dalkey, do you mind me asking?”
“Not a bit of it – six year. Promoted the 14th June, landed here on the 17th.” “Many changes?”
“You mean the coats of paint and the, ah, refurbishments?”
“In general, I meant. Someone was telling me that it was a model station.”
Fitz frowned, but then his features eased.
“I know what you mean now,” he said. “But you’re talking about a good while back. Twenty, thirty years – more, actually. Who told you anyway? Must be a veteran.”
Minogue thought for a moment of Pierce Condon and his jumbled mind.
“But that’s not to deny that we’re a model now,” said Fitz.
“Let’s say we’re a different model these days. How’s that for spin?”
“I’d give you the gold medal this very moment.” Fitz raised his mug as though to toast. He shook more than shivered this time.
He gestured toward the canteen. “You want a cup yourself?”
“No thanks,” Minogue replied. “I’ll head back upstairs now and get a few things done, and then I’ll probably head off for the day.”
Fitz raised his eyebrows and gave him a sly smile.
“You won’t get a look at the good old days here so,” he said. “Much is the pity.”
“What would I be missing?”
“Little enough, really – a few old pictures and clippings. They were up on the wall there for ages, but one day a few months after I got here, I said to myself – enough.”
He waited while Minogue stepped on his cigarette, and then picked it up. Fitz pushed open the door to the canteen.
Someone had left the radio on. Roadwatch was announcing the ritual tailbacks near Lucan. He watched Fitz fill the kettle and forage for tea bags.
“It’ll only take a minute,” said Fitz then. “Give you a bit of a laugh.”
He dropped to one knee by a tall built-in, and pulled open a drawer.
“If they haven’t been thrown out entirely already.”
Minogue looked around the canteen while Fitz rummaged. The draining board was full. A half-empty 7-Up bottle stood on the table. There was nary a sound from the gym a.k.a. exercise room next door. Fitz was talking to himself, drawing out what looked like old dishcloths that had been stuffed in the drawer and forgotten. He reached in again.
“We’re in luck,” said Fitz. He slid, and then levered out a cardboard box.
“Here you are now. Feast your eyes on these.” He laid the envelope on a chair, and opened another cupboard door. Plastic containers tumbled out, rolling and bouncing with hollow clunks across the floor.
“My God, look at the crap that’s piling up. No end to it.” He held up a lid with a melted edge.
“What’s the point of holding on to this? An heirloom?” He pointed at the cardboard box.
“Go on, open it up a look. I was going to feck the whole lot of them out, in actual fact, but I thought there might be a jinx on them. So I sort of pushed them to the back.”
There was a stale, citrusy smell from the box. His fingertips registered the matte finish on the 8×10s as he drew them out. They were professional, posed and staged, with a well-diffused flash and good depth of field. Flipping one, he saw the Garda Press Office stamp, its original blue faded to purple: 1971. Did anything momentous happen in the world in 1971? He couldn’t think of any. Bad clothes, maybe?
There were photocopies of newspaper articles in the box too. What did they call them then? Photostats, yes. These ones were from the evening papers. There was a greying copy of a page from the Garda Review too, something with a soccer team. These young fellas were not in their teens yet. Their brand-new jerseys stood out from the mismatched shorts and the varying shades and heights of socks. Flanking the back row of boys were two men. The one standing with his arms folded and smiling broadly, a whistle on a white cord dangling over his forearm, had to be the ‘Father Peter Murphy CC, Our Lady of Victories, Sallynoggin.’ Who else could the other man opposite be, complete with collar and tie and tweed jacket and standing next to a frowning boy in the middle row, but the ‘Sergeant Ferg Twomey’? “This is the one I wanted you to see.”
Fitz was holding up an 8×10 that he had plucked from the pile. He read something from the back of the photo with ironic gravity.
“Public Office, Dalkey Garda Station 1973.”
“Sure enough,” said Minogue, taking in the details. “The Real Thing.”
“Look at the radio there – state-of-the-art. Two ashtrays on the counter. See the fag actually burning in that one? Stack of cigarette butts in it too? The new lads have no idea. They can’t imagine working in an office that was full of smoke all day long.”
He caught Minogue’s eye then. “Ever smoke a pipe, did you?”
“Not knowingly, or sober, I suppose I should say.” Fitz began fingering through the photos again.
“Well this one will top it for you then. Unless I’m mistaken now, and somebody dragged it off to the Garda Museum maybe …” His finger stopped flipping and nudging, and drew out one.
“Now,” he said. “You can’t best this one. This fella here is in other ones, but the one I’m going to show you, it says it all. You ready?”
Minogue let his eye find details. With a dull gleam from the belt and its
shining buttons, the uniform had to be parade dress. This Twomey character again. The face was by no means thin, but the unfocussed eyes had a hawkish intensity. Maybe the photographer had sensed it too, and told him to look away from the lens.
“That’s upstairs,” said Fitz. “I took him for an RIC man when I saw it first.”
Minogue eyed the photo again. That parting in the hair, and the gloss of hair-oil palmed into it had a timeless look to it. Was it possible the man still used Brylcreem? He began to notice how the photo had been set up: hands splayed on the desktop as though their owner was about to rise. The angle of the pipe resting in the ashtray inclined in toward him. The fountain pen resting on a blank pad of paper, the same old beige-covered Stationery Office issue that had always creaked when it was opened.
“That’s somebody Twomey, a Sergeant Twomey, I believe?”
“How well you knew that now.”
“He’s in a clipping there with some football team. He’s in civvies there.”
Minogue let the photo fall back into the box. The kettle was beginning to sigh. Fitz ran the tap and slid his thumb around the rim of the mug.
“Oh them was the days,” he said over the sound of the water. “It didn’t matter if you smoked or not. That’s the way things were done. Whether you liked it or not.”
He turned off the tap, and shook his mug, and turned to Minogue.
Something in Fitz’s rueful smile struck a note with Minogue. A hint, he suspected, that as affable as Fitz had been trying to be, he couldn’t always hide the fact that he had been stung by the parachute arrival of one Matthew Minogue.
Chapter 26
Minogue closed two of the flaps on the cardboard box and headed to the cupboard with it. He heard more than felt a shift, or maybe it was the sound of a page turning, and then the photographs were cascading around his feet. One made a quivering sound like a long saw.
“Doesn’t surprise me that,” Fitz declared. “Some days, you have only to pick something up around here and it falls apart.”
Minogue gingerly turned over the box and examined where the bottom had given way. It was well past rehabilitation. He let it down on the floor next to the table leg. The law of falling objects dumped most of the snapshots face down. The few face-up had that tint that lay over them like weak tea, relics of the film chemistry of their time.
He hunkered, began sliding photos together. Down on one knee beside him came Fitz.
“That was a sign,” Fitz said. “Might as well turf them for good.”
He handed Minogue a sheaf of photos. The same Sergeant Twomey was in the top photo. The face bore the same thinking-his-own-thoughts look, as though he was keen to get this picture-taking over with. Behind him was a sliver of sea, and a gently sloping cut-stone wall, a section of what Minogue took to be a harbour wall.
The nun in the photo was half-smiling, and her rimless glasses had caught some of the sky. Her veil reached not much below her shoulders. There was no trace of hair peeping out from the coif. One hand held the other, fingers modestly entwined.
“That’s him,” said Fitz, in a put-on Cork accent. “Garda Sergeant Twomey.”
Minogue glanced up again to find Fitz now leaning against the counter and craning his neck to see the photo. Steam was rising from the kettle behind him.
“You wouldn’t mistake him now,” Fitz added. “Would you?”
“Who’s the nun?”
“No idea. One of the locals, I’d be willing to bet. There used to be plenty of convents and homes for the nuns out here. They’re empty now – any ones they haven’t sold. A sign of the times, as they say? That’s Coliemore harbour there behind, I think. Dalkey Island behind, but you can’t see it in that picture. Something is written on the back there, did you know?” Minogue turned over the photo. “‘En route to St…’ Saint who?”
“Begnet,” said Fitz. “Saint Begnet’s. It’s that old ruin of a church out there on Dalkey Island. Saint Begnet is the patron saint of Dalkey.”
“Dalkey has a patron saint? Is it in need of one, all to itself?”
“I only know from one of mine at home, Aoife. She did a project on this Begnet one. A fierce good-looking one, goes the story, and she had tons of offers, even the king of Norway. But things went sideways one night, when she got a visit from an angel. That’s when she got her marching orders from The Man Above.” “Happens the best of us,” Minogue said.
“The angel gave her a bracelet, with a cross on it. And up she got, left everything and headed across the sea. A missionary, like the monks. She ended up in England somewhere, whatever it was called back then. She started up a convent there. Soon enough she was an abbess. ‘The Golden Age.’ Well before them Vikings gangsters.”
“I hope that young one of yours one got top marks for that. Aoife, you said?”
“That’s her. Loves her history. She had all the history of Dalkey laid out there.”
He leaned in to see the snapshot better.
“You can’t see the church in this picture,” he said. “But you’ve seen it before?” “I have, I think,” Minogue replied.
It had been years really since he had walked down that part of the coast, and sat for a few minutes above the tiny harbour there. It had been winter too, he remembered, because he had been thinking how bleak the island looked across the sound.
“And the Martello Tower there of course, waiting for the French?”
“Indeed,” said Minogue. He began sorting through the photos again.
“A lot of history to Dalkey,” Fitz went on. The daughter hadn’t picked up her interest off the side of the road, Minogue decided. “It used to be the port of Dublin.”
There were two nuns in this photo now, no Guard. And there was a bit of Dalkey Island in the background too, the church ruin in the corner. Both nuns had their rosaries out, and one held a pamphlet. The pair looked happy enough. A day out?
“It looks like a prayer thing going on,” Minogue said. “A feast day for that saint, or a pilgrimage maybe?”
“I haven’t heard of one now,” Fitz said. “And I don’t remember her writing anything about that. There was some old King of Dalkey Island thing way back though. It was only a spoof, a fair day, with people going over for the day for a dance and so forth. An excuse for carry-on I suppose.”
He pulled the plug and the bubbling began to die down. Minogue heard the kettle’s spout ring dully against the rim of the cup. The smell of tea began to fill the room.
More pictures, the same camera. Several people kneeling in prayer; a stone wall filling the background; a slice of the Martello Tower visible through a window. Rain?
“These ones would hardly have been hanging up on the wall here,” Minogue said, turning to Fitz again. “Were they?”
“No Those newspaper clippings were, and the photocopies – the 8×10s.”
“So where did these snapshots come from?”
“I think they turned up when the place was being rewired with the telecom stuff and proper heating. They had slipped down the back of an old cabinet, someone told me.”
Minogue took up the photo of the two nuns again. The taller one was leaning in a little, perhaps to be sure to get in the frame. Her smile was genuine. The other’s looked formal, as though in response to a prompt from whoever had taken the photo.
“It looks like the nuns had started to lighten up with the regalia by then anyway.” Fitz held up his tea bag as he spoke.
“Can you imagine having to wear the other stuff? Straightjackets. Worse than those things, I always get the names mixed up, the muslim things… Burqua?” The opening door drew Fitz’s glance. “Corky,” he said. “How’s the man?”
“Not bad at all. And how’s, er?”
“Matt. Grand thanks.”
Minogue wondered where Corcoran had hung up his uniform.
“Time for a drop of tea?”
“No thanks, Sarge. The clock’s working for me this shift. I’m off – but I’m actually here to save me marriage. If
I can find me lunch boxes here, I stand a fair to middling chance of being let back into the house.”
Fitz pointed a magisterial finger at the jumble of Tupperware on the table.
“Well take a long hard look through that so,” he said. Corcoran began plucking his from the pile. He paused then and looked over at Minogue.
“Is that your Escort parked out on the road?” asked Corcoran. “The red one?”
“The one that looks like a heap of shite?”
“That’d be it, I suppose.”
“Very much not mine, thank God. It belongs to Tommy Malone. The other fella.”