pet since he was a child growing up on the Georgetown Road, when he’d won a goldfish at the town fair, and on his return from the fair his brother Dennis – son number six to Davey’s number seven – had promptly flushed the fish down the outside toilet. When Davey Senior had protested, Dennis had fought with him and forced his head into the toilet bowl, to allow little Davey to try to save the poor fish, a fish which Davey had decided to call Lucky. Even now, fifty years later, when he drove past the sewage plant up past the ring road Davey found himself wondering about the fate of that fish: he wondered if maybe it had made it out into open seas.* Davey’s brother Dennis had eventually ended up in prison and he remained altogether a bad lot, and Davey had therefore a rather pessimistic view about the relationship between man and beasts: he believed that Mr Donelly’s rehabilitation scheme was probably unworkable. But a pet was still an unequivocal good, according to Mr Donelly, and a doddle.
‘She’s easier to keep than your mother,’ he liked to joke, sometimes, to his children.
She’s called Rusty, the dog – Mrs Donelly is Mary – and she’s sixteen and her eyesight’s gone, more or less, so Mr Donelly lets her watch TV with him in the evenings, with the Ceefax subtitles on, and he gives her a hot-water bottle in winter. She’s part of the family, part Airedale and part Irish Terrier, which is a cute combination, and a few years ago she won a rosette in our town dog show, in the category The Dog With The Kindliest Expression, and rightly so. Her expression is, in fact, much kinder than a lot of the people in our town, so she may not just be The Dog With The Kindliest Expression, she may, in fact, be in possession of our town’s Kindliest Expression, full stop – quite an achievement for a mongrel. Mrs Donelly wonders sometimes if Mr Donelly loves that dog more than he loves his own children. It’s possible.
When he arrived back home from their customary walk – down to Bridge Street and Main Street, past the Quality Hotel, then up High Street and into the People’s Park – Mr Donelly settled the dog into its basket in the corner of the garage, a basket tucked in underneath all the jars and the tins and the tools and the wood offcuts of a lifetime, which might come in handy one day, squeezed in tight between a workbench that used to be the Donelly kitchen table, and Mr Donelly’s little Honda 50 with its grey and white trim and its seat bound with masking tape. Mr Donelly hasn’t been out on the Honda for nearly two years, since he’d taken a tumble on Gilbey’s roundabout. ‘The Nicest Things,’ they used to say, ‘Happen on a Honda,’ which may have been true thirty or forty years ago, but now there was so much traffic, even on the ring road, you were lucky if you made it unscathed up to the DIY stores or the Plough and the Stars, and then made it back home again safely.
‘I’m not identifying your body when you fall off that thing again and end up dead in hospital, all squashed,’ said Mrs Donelly. ‘It’s time to hang up your helmet, mister.’ You didn’t argue with Mrs Donelly.
The helmet hung on a nail over the dog basket.
Saying goodnight to the dog and locking up the garage, Mr Donelly made his way towards the house, his childless, empty house. He squeezed past the wheelie bin with its stick-on number – another ridiculous council regulation, as if anyone would want to steal it – and past the pile of flagstones that he’d borrowed, or requisitioned, in an act of defiance, from the council when they’d been doing the road-widening scheme at the bottom of Main Street, and he peered in at his kitchen window. The kitchen was spotless, as always, the way Mrs Donelly liked to leave it, almost as if no one lived there. The blue washing-up bowl was upended on the drainer, next to the sink, a residue of water and suds on the stainless steel the only sign of recent human activity.
He then went round to the front of the house, to put the car up on the drive. The headlights lit up the windows – new windows, bay windows, which were uPVC and which he’d put in himself when they bought the place from the council. He hasn’t yet made good around the brickwork, but the windows look OK: they fit the hole. There’s a carriage lamp, and a few shrubs in pots but apart from that the place looks pretty much the same as when they’d moved in as a young family thirty years ago. He can still remember the day as if it were yesterday: their first house after all the flats. He remembered Mrs Donelly marching up and down the stairs with Tim and Jackie – they were babies then – laughing and singing. Their own staircase: that was something.
He locked up the car and went to look through the front window, at his own front room, where hardly anything had changed in all that time: there were the same old ornaments on the windowsill and on the mantelpiece over the gas fire: a small mahogany elephant; a crystal vase; a miniature teapot; a Smurf; the ‘May Our Lady Watch Over Your Marriage’ imitation-mahogany-veneer plaque with a very attractive-looking BVM in gilt relief on the wall; the same three-piece suite, too big for the room; the same imitation Christmas tree.
He noticed a curtain twitch next door: the new neighbours. For a moment he thought it was old Mrs Nesbit but Mrs Nesbit no longer lived next door – she’d gone first to live with her daughter and then on to the big sheltered accommodation in the sky. They hadn’t really got to know the new lot: they kept themselves to themselves. They’d let the garden go.
He decided not to go into the house. Mrs Donelly wouldn’t be back from her meeting for another half an hour or so. He didn’t want to be in an empty house on Christmas Eve.
So he walked on, down to the end of the road, and turned left.
The Church of the Cross and the Passion is a big, ugly, modern building with an untended patch of scrubland out back and a social club with a car park with a wire fence and empty kegs piled up outside. It would have had a nice view of the People’s Park, if you could see out of any of the windows, but the stained glass gets in the way.
Inside the church Mr Donelly sat down at a pew near the altar rail, where the crib was all set up, and there they were, the Holy Family, in that celebrated post-partum pose.
Mr Donelly has lived all his life in our town. He was taught at the Assumption junior school – a tiny little Victorian building down Cromac Street, off High Street, with outside toilets and two demountables, a building which has only added graffiti since Mr Donelly attended. He was taught at the school that Jesus was born in a stable at the inn, and that oxen and asses dropped to their knees in worship, and that there were Three Wise Men, and shepherds – the traditional Christmas story with all the trimmings. His teacher at the Assumption was a nun called Sister Hughes and he loved her, as all the children loved her – a dear old lady telling wonderful stories to boys and girls who didn’t yet know the difference between fantasy and belief. Sister Hughes was a good person, a woman who knitted at break times and lunchtimes, making ecumenical woolly hats, mostly, for our town’s famous ecumenical charity, the Mission to Seamen, a charity founded by a Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Thomas MacGeagh, and a Catholic priest, Father Thomas Barre, known locally as the Two Toms, who in 1912, after the sinking of the Titanic, had decided to found a charity which would minister to seamen of many denominations and faiths and of none, and which would demonstrate to them God’s care and love at a time when He Himself seemed to be absent from the high seas.*
Our town is thirty miles from the sea, far enough for us to think of ourselves as landlocked, but close enough for seagulls to make it into the dump for scavenging, and for most of us to enjoy at least one day trip in the summer. Sister Hughes had died mid-hat, when Mr Donelly was eight years old, and he was terribly upset. You might ask, what is death to an eight-year-old – what can he possibly understand about it? Well, death is presumably exactly the same for an eight-year-old as it is for the rest of us, nothing more and nothing less: it’s a complete shock.
One of the other big shocks in Mr Donelly’s life was later to be told at secondary school that it wasn’t a stable at all and it may not even have been an inn, and that there is, in fact, no
