‘Beg pardon. The man with the concertina …’
The woman stopped cranking and glared at me.
‘Ah?’
‘The man with no cap in the rain.’
‘Ah, him!’ snapped the woman.
‘He’s not here today?’
‘Do you see him?’ cried the woman.
She started cranking the infernal device.
I put a penny in the tin cup.
She peered at me as if I’d spit in the cup.
I put in another penny. She stopped.
‘Do you know where he is?’ I asked.
‘Sick. In bed. The damn cold! We heard him go off, coughing.’
‘Do you know where he lives?’
‘No!’
‘Do you know his name?’
‘Now, who would know that!’
I stood there, feeling directionless, thinking of the man somewhere off in the town, alone. I looked at the new cap foolishly.
The two old people were watching me uneasily.
I put a last shilling in the cup.
‘He’ll be all right,’ I said, not to them, but to someone, hopefully, myself.
The woman heaved the crank. The bucketing machine let loose a fall of glass and junk in its hideous interior.
‘The tune,’ I said, numbly. ‘What is it?’
‘You’re deaf!’ snapped the woman. ‘It’s the national anthem! Do you mind removing your cap?’
I showed her the new cap in my hand.
She glared up. ‘Your cap, man, your cap!’
‘Oh!’ Flushing, I seized the old cap from my head.
Now I had a cap in each hand.
The woman cranked. The ‘music’ played. The rain hit my brow, my eyelids, my mouth.
On the far side of the bridge I stopped for the hard, the slow decision: which cap to try on my drenched skull?
During the next week I passed the bridge often, but there was always just the old couple there with their pandemonium device, or no one there at all.
On the last day of our visit, my wife started to pack the new tweed cap away with my others, in the suitcase.
‘Thanks, no.’ I took it from her. ‘Let’s keep it out, on the mantel, please. There.’
That night the hotel manager brought a farewell bottle to our room. The talk was long and good, the hour grew late, there was a fire like an orange lion on the hearth, big and lively, and brandy in the glasses, and silence for a moment in the room, perhaps because quite suddenly we found silence falling in great soft flakes past our high windows.
The manager, glass in hand, watched the continual lace, then looked down at the midnight stones and at last said, under his breath, ‘“There’s only a few of us left.”’
I glanced at my wife, and she at me.
The manager caught us.
‘Do you know him, then? Has he said it to you?’
‘Yes. But what does the phrase mean?’
The manager watched all those figures down there standing in the shadows and sipped his drink.
‘Once I thought he meant he fought in the Troubles and there’s just a few of the I.R.A. left. But no. Or maybe he means in a richer world the begging population is melting away. But no to that also. So maybe, perhaps, he means there aren’t many “human beings” left who look, see what they look at, and understand well enough for one to ask and one to give. Everyone busy, running here, jumping there, there’s no time to study one another. But I guess that’s bilge and hogwash, slop and sentiment.’
He half turned from the window.
‘So you know There’s Only a Few of Us Left, do you?’
My wife and I nodded.
‘Then do you know the woman with the baby?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And the one with the cancer?’
‘Yes,’ said my wife.
‘And the man who needs train fare to Cork?’
‘Belfast,’ said I.
‘Galway,’ said my wife.
The manager smiled sadly and turned back to the window.
‘What about the couple with the piano that plays no tune?’
‘Has it ever?’ I asked.
‘Not since I was a boy.’
The manager’s face was shadowed now.
‘Do you know the beggar on O’Connell Bridge?’
‘Which one?’ I said.
But I knew which one, for I was looking at the cap there on the mantel.
‘Did you see the paper today?’ asked the manager.
‘No.’
‘There’s just the item, bottom half of pagefive, Irish Times. It seems he just got tired. And he threw his concertina over into the River Liffey. And he jumped after it.’
He was back, then, yesterday! I thought. And I didn’t pass by!
‘The poor bastard.’ The manager laughed with a hollow exhalation. ‘What a funny, horrid way to die. That damn silly concertina – I hate them, don’t you? – wheezing on its way down, like a sick cat, and the man falling after. I laugh and I’m ashamed of laughing. Well. They didn’t find the body. They’re still looking.’
‘Oh, God!’ I cried, getting up. ‘Oh, damn!’
The manager watched me carefully now, surprised at my concern.
‘You couldn’t help it.’
‘I could! I never gave him a penny, not one, ever! Did you?’
‘Come to think of it, no.’
‘But
