There was a spit of misty rain falling, which was nice after the heat of the fryer, and even at eleven o’clock there were still some flecks of daylight in the far western sky. It was May, alright, he’d been bang on the money there. He stood smoking outside a department store, cool as a breeze but when he looked in at the window display, he was hit by another tremor, and this one nearly laid him out. It was the mannequin of a lady that did it, she was got up in the latest gear, some kind of suede outfit, and the way the mannequin’s face was set was kind of… off, kind of twisted. It was set in a kind of drunken leer. The brown, wavy hair falling to the shoulders just so, the green belligerent eyes, the suede jacket, the leer—he had seen this look before. It was the mother.
They are walking down College Road. It’s the night-time. She is still a young woman, with a child on either side of her. He would be the younger by a year or two, he might be seven years old. He has her by one hand and the other child, it has to be Denis, he has her by the other. She can barely get along the street, she lurches, drags them towards the railings. It’s late, on a summer’s night, and he has a bag of groceries in his hand. They mustn’t have had the tea yet. The woman can’t walk, she’s crying, then she’s laughing. She has a large brown bag with chips wedged under her arm, the vinegar is oiling the paper, and she almost drops it on the pavement as she misses her step.
‘Mam,’ he says, ‘would you m-mind the chips, would yuh?’
The tremor passed on its way—down over the terraces of the town it went, away into the melancholy hills—and he bolted for the first pub he could find. By luck, it was quite a pleasant lounge bar and a hand-written notice on the door shakily announced that a pass-the-mike session was in progress. Pint bottle of Bulmers, b-b-b-baby Powers, times two, times three, and suddenly it was past midnight, and he was in flying form. There was a chap had a Casio keyboard and he was playing accompaniment to anybody who’d sing. A mike was passed around the dim-lit lounge, left and right, left and right, now who has the bar of a song for us? A woman called Mairead got up and smoothed down her good blouse and did an outstanding version of ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’. The landlord, a man called Johnny—big sentimental face on him—came out over the bar and launched into ‘The Day Billie Joe McAllister Jumped Off The Tallahatchie Bridge’.
‘You’ll learn a new one yet, Johnny!’ somebody shouted, and everybody laughed.
Pint b-bottle, please. Someone called Bob sang ‘The Black Hills Of Dakota’, and wasn’t asked to do another. After a while it got maudlin. A lad called Michael Russell was asked to sing, and he sang ‘The Summer Wind’, because that was some man called Coughlan’s song and half of the place couldn’t handle this at all, the man of the Coughlans was only a month in the ground.
‘Fifty-two years of age!’ cried Mairead.
Left and right, left and right, pass the mike.
‘What about this gentleman here? What’s your own name, sir?’
‘Am… R-R-Richard,’ he said.
‘Will you sing one for us, Rich?’
‘Ah stop!’
‘Ah come on now, Richie!’
Where it came from, he did not know but he took that mike and he stood up square and he closed his eyes. He wasn’t sweet—you couldn’t say that—or melodic, no, but he was as big-voiced as they come, pure loud, a most powerful set of lungs. He sang ‘Eternal Flame’ by The Bangles.
‘… cloh-ose yur eyes… gimme yur hand… darlin’… do you feel mah heart beat-iin’… do you unnerstan’… do you feel the PAAIIINN… am I own-lee dreeeamin’… or is this BURNIN’… an ee-ternal FLAME…’
There were people up off their stools howling for more. He pulled out a big one and let it rip—‘Crying’ by Roy Orbison. He made a fair reach for the high notes even. From the corner of his good eye, he threw a shine in the direction of the lady Mairead. There didn’t seem to be a husband in tow.
‘It’s hard to unnn-erstan’… how the touuuuccch of yur haaan’… can star’ me cryin’… cry-aye-ah-han… an’ now ahm ohhh-furrrr yuh-hooooooo…’
There was no doubt about it but he had a big future ahead of him at the pass-the-mike session in Keogh’s Lounge Bar on Clancy Street of a Tuesday night. They asked him to do a third one, but he said no, no, firmly. You got to know when to hold ’em, and know when to fold ’em.
And yes, one good eye. He was only walking away from Keogh’s when it struck him that he was half-blind. Leftie was firing blanks. He had a look up at the moon to be sure and he realised that the peripheries were indeed mightily skewed. So. The clues were starting to come in. He was an R.K. Tobin, call him Richie. He had the lease of a chipper in Clonmel. He’d had a mother a demon drunk, and a brother by the name of Denis. He was half blind, and something told him there had been an accident, and he had got money from it, which was now down to less than six hundred euro. He knew his way around the inside of a deep-fat fryer and home, for now, was a small unkempt room with a couch and a sink.
When he got there, he unscrewed the bottle of Cork gin and got good and familiar with it. He had the broad strokes of things and he knew that he had been drunk many thousands of times, mostly on account of the heebie jeebies. It was through no fault of his own but he was simply not the sort of man who was comfortable in the night-time. He was familiar with the motions of alcohol. The elevations of mood were no news to him, nor the sudden dips. He knew what it was like to drink big in small towns—it was hard work sometimes, you had to have the same good time over and over again.
He picked up a golf magazine, then another, then noticed a magazine near the bottom of the pile that did not seem to be in any way, shape or form about golf. It was in fact a pornographic title and as he flicked through it, sipping at the gin, he discovered its theme. It was about women who dressed up by wearing animal tails. There was mail order, even, where you could send off for a horse’s tail attached to a belt. Now maybe he was an innocent man for fifty, but this was news to him and there in the grim room, at two in the morning, it became an intense agitation. He got up off the couch and began to pace.
‘Is this what it’s all about now?’ he shouted. ‘Is that what’s supposed to be going on around the place? Somebody’s mother or somebody’s daughter? Hah? Going around a kitchen in a horse’s tail? Stood over a pan of sausages? Hah?’
He caught sight of the old quarehawk reflected in the window, pacing and ranting, and that shut him up lively. He turned off the light and lay down on the couch. He drew the malodorous anorak over his head. An unquiet sleep came. There were images full of dark portent, images of mountains and still water. It was an enormous relief when he woke to grey light in the window. He went immediately downstairs—though it was just gone five in the morning—and he got busy sorting out the grease traps. He looked out onto the street and it was familiar but odd, as if streets were running into the wrong streets, as if the hills were wrong, and the sky at a crooked slant, it was the amalgam place of a dream out there. A tremor arrived with the rise of the morning.
This student has been coming around Wednesdays for three or four weeks now. He is doing a project about low-income families. Richie think it’s a disgrace, this fella is just a snoop, but his mother and father put up with it because they’re bored, is what it is, because they’re on the wagon, and they’ll talk to just about anybody to escape the monotony. The student has all these daft bloody questions. Tonight it’s about God and Mass and all that.
‘Do you go to Mass yourself, Mrs Tobin?’
‘Sometimes,’ she says. ‘Not that I
