off every word he spoke, making him laugh with stories about my father’s boss. But I shied away from any reference to my home, ashamed of it suddenly as I envied his freedom, his experience, his accepted adultness. Two girls sat at a nearby table. Occasionally one glanced across at him.
‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Will we give it a lash? It’s up to yourself.’
I got frightened of being caught out. I was not a virgin but was terrified of the direct approach. My few successes had been scored hurriedly after dances, brought to a messy climax, before bolting as though from the scene of a crime. If we approached I knew I would be tongue-tied. I hesitated and, trying to feign an experienced air, suggested they might not be the type. He grinned at them and gave a mock wave of his hand.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Cute country girls in their bedsits. They may have lost their virginity but they’ll probably still have the box it came in.’
But it was obvious I was nervous and when they rose to leave he blew a kiss after them and suggested we play snooker instead.
The hall was a converted warehouse with no sign outside. The old man behind the counter was watching a black-and-white television. He greeted Shay like a son and asked him to mind the gaff while he slipped out to the pub. The walls had been whitewashed once but only vaguely remembered the event. We chose the least ragged of the vacant tables. Shay broke, then leaned on his cue to look around the semi-derelict room.
‘I used to live here after I was expelled from school. Old Joe had great hopes for me but I knew I hadn’t got it. The place is in tatters now but no wankers come in. I tried a few of the new ones. Deposits, video cameras, and toss-artists who think a deep screw is a mot with a BA. Fuck this, I said, I must be getting old.’
It was ten o’clock when we left. The old man still hadn’t returned but occasionally men left a few quid behind the counter as they wandered out. ‘Is it cool?’ Shay asked. ‘You sure you don’t have to head home?’ I lied again and followed him through the feverish weekend crowds beneath the neon lights, then down towards a warren of cobbled laneways off Thomas Street. The pub we came to looked shut, the only hint of life being a fine grain of light beneath the closed shutters. A tramp passed, stumbling towards the night shelter. He mumbled a few incomprehensible words, one hand held out as though his fingers were cupping a tiny bird. Two children sleeping rough watched us from the doorway of a boarded-up bakery. Shay tapped three times on the steel shutter and I had the sensation of being watched before it swung open. A middle-aged Monaghan man with an old-fashioned bar apron beckoned and welcomed Shay by name. The downstairs bar was thick with smoke, countrymen nursing pints, a figure with a black beard gesturing drunkenly in the centre of the floor. Two old women sang in a corner, one lifting her hand with perfect timing at regular intervals to straighten the man beside her who was tilting on his bar stool. Nobody there was under fifty, no one born in the city that was kept out by the steel door.
‘Gas, isn’t it?’ Shay said. ‘Knocknagow on a Friday evening.’
He gazed in amusement, then headed downstairs to the cellar. Here the owner’s son reigned, the father never coming closer than shouting down from the top step at closing time. Four women with sharp, hardened faces sat in one corner drinking shorts. The dozen people at the long table shouted assorted abuse and greetings at Shay as he grinned and waved two fingers back to them. He called for drink and introduced me to his friends. I began to suss how the locked door kept more than the industrial revolution out. The girl across from me was rolling a joint; the bloke beside Shay passing one in his hands. He took three drags and handed it on to me. The pints arrived. I dipped into the white froth, my head afloat. Two of the women in the corner rose and ascended the stairs, bored looking, stubbing their cigarettes out.
‘The massaging hand never stops,’ Shay said. ‘Pauline there left her bag behind one night so I brought it over to her across the road in the Clean World Health Studio. She was clad in a leather outfit after skelping the arse off some businessman who was looking decidedly green in the face as if he’d got more for his forty quid than he bargained for.’
‘Forty quid?’ I joked as the next joint reached me. ‘Well fuck Father Riley and his bar of chocolate.’
It was to be the first of numerous nights with Shay in haunts like that, always tucked away down crooked lanes. I think he had a phobia about streets that were straight. But that night in Murtagh’s stands out because everything was so new and spinning faster and faster. It had all reached a blur when the young man in the check suit appeared, with features so familiar I drove myself crazy trying to place them. As he spoke he clapped his hands like an American basketball player, his body perpetually jiving as if linked to an inaudible disco rhythm. Shay frowned slightly when he saw him approach. He was the first person there Shay seemed to tolerate more than like. The young man slapped Shay’s shoulder and shook hands with me with a polished over-firm grip.
‘My main man Seamus. A drink for you and your friend.’
He returned with three tequilas. I copied Shay in licking the salt, drained the glass in one gulp and sank my teeth into the lemon. It was like electricity shooting through my body. I slammed my fist on the table and shook my head. The young man laughed so much he insisted on buying another round. Shay grinned sardonically as he watched me trying to place him.
‘Add thirty years,’ he said, ‘four stone of fat and a bog accent. You’ve already mentioned him twice tonight.’
I studied the figure arguing animatedly with the two women left in the corner. My brain slowly reconciled the two opposites.
‘Plunkett,’ I said. ‘My da’s boss. He’s something like him, but Pascal’s a bachelor.’
‘Fuck your da’s boss. He’s chicken shit. Who’s his famous brother?’
His face had stared at me from lamp-posts at every election time, his eyes gazing from cards dropped into the hallway with fake handwriting underneath. I tried to match the features in front of me now with the image of Patrick Plunkett I had last seen, repeating rhetorical phrases on a current affairs show as he refused to answer the interviewer’s questions.
‘Your future, smiling local TD,’ Shay said. ‘A genuine chip off the old bollox. Justin. So christened because of his one-inch penis. I see he’s dispatching the last of his troupe. Would make a great newspaper headline for any editor wanting to go out of business fast.’
The two women in the corner were about to leave.
‘Surely the cops know,’ I said.
‘What fucking country do you live in Hano? You know any guard wants to get transferred to Inisbofin? It may be an embarrassment to the government to have it open; it would be an even greater embarrassment for the fuckers to have to close it down. Youth must have its fling. The party knows he’ll drop it when the old bastard expires and he’s called upon to inherit the seat. He’s being groomed already, two or three funerals a week.’
For the first time I detected bitterness in Shay’s voice. But to be angry would be to admit he was a part of their world. Shay shrugged his shoulders and suggested we go upstairs. When I closed my eyes I felt like a boat being rocked from side to side. At the doorway Justin Plunkett pushed a glass into my hand. I heard Shay slagging him about the suit, his good humour returned. Shay’s hand was on my shoulder, steering me upstairs, past the country men in their bar, up two more flights and into a tiny room in darkness except for a blazing fire and a single blue spotlight. It shone down on a long-haired figure on a pallet strumming a guitar. A man crouched beside him, keeping up a rhythm on a hand drum. I found a seat among the stoned crowd and tried to follow the singer’s drug-ridden fantasies.
