New Irish Short Stories

by Joseph O'Connor

  Festus sat quietly in the morning chill. The place had a deserted feel, not a soul that he could see. Because of the mist flowing up from the water and draping the buildings, he thought the town could be wearing a veil. Not many important moments ever came to him in life, and though better people might see that strange moving stillness as an accidental beauty of nature, Festus Burke saw it as a sign. This was a town that should never be allowed to change, it was perfect the way it was with the ocean on one side and a mountain on the other, safe from what lay beyond. A wind in his ear blew the scent of a yellow flower. Then he lay on his side on a crush of leaves and red berries that fell from a starving tree. In the stillness he watched the spreading roots of the mist and tried to understand what it meant before heading down the slope and changing into his working clothes.

  He drove his small yellow Fiat with the practice of years along the road north to the fishing village on the coast, ten miles of tight bends and waving briars from stone walls, every gear change, every touch of the brake deep enough in him that he could daydream on the way. He passed the solitary police building with the blue lamp out front; once the town had its own police station, but it was shut down and moved north among scattered villages. Once a day a lone policeman drove through town vainly in search of crime before returning to the countryside and the building with the blue lamp.

  The fishing village was grey and silent as Festus approached. He parked the Fiat near a tangle of nets and barrels beside a red trawler with rows of wooden seats in the hull that ferried tourists and goods out to the island, an hour’s sail. He worked as a deckhand. It wasn’t a job people wanted, but it was all he could get. You don’t need a degree to fling or catch a mooring rope, to carry crates and bicycles and feed on and off board, to steer a hull to and from the same place sixty times a month.

  Before he could hoist the gangplank to the trawler, someone shouted his name from the end of the pier. He followed the sound to the dark pub, where Ned Madigan the trawler owner sat at the counter in front of two glasses of whiskey and two beers already poured. The fireplace burned and the smell of a toasted cheese sandwich lingered.

  ‘Listen,’ Madigan said, ‘there’s no sailing this morning with the weather. We’ll try this afternoon. Come, take off your coat and sit down.’

  To Festus the weather was no worse than other days they had sailed, but Madigan was already drinking, and he saw no one on the pier, no groceries set in boxes or building materials stacked ready for loading. What Festus saw out the pub window was an empty concrete enclosure with an opening to the sea on one side, not the busy place it used to be on a weekday morning. The red trawler was tied up and still, bobbing in slow water, no workers hovering around it like gulls to ready it for sea. He felt the flames at his back and relaxed.

  Fifteen years ago he got the job because Madigan was a friend of his father’s. At that time Festus had just finished with school and wanted to save up and then do what was next, whatever that was. He did not have the marks to get into the college, he was slow with numbers and reading and thinking in general, and didn’t want to do any more of it. The teacher took Festus aside and said that clever and intelligent were two different things and then told him his grades, Ds and Cs. He could learn a trade and travel the world. Remember that many famous people couldn’t spell, the teacher said, and slapped him on the back and took the next fellow into the corner of the yard. Festus remembered seeing the other fellow’s face fall at his results too, it was a bad day.

  So all that time ago he began what was meant to be a summer job in this little village out the road north of the town, hauling crates and bicycles and groceries aboard at the pier and off again on the island. The money was good when he had none before. But somehow it became a winter job, and before Festus knew it, the first Christmas passed and he was still sailing the rolling seas out of the mouth of the bay. No trade learned, no travels, still living with his parents. More Christmases came, more springs, more long summer days. He postponed his future until it made itself clear to him. Every day he went to sea; every day his former schoolmates went to college and good jobs. They ran into each other less and less, and with less and less to talk about there was no glue, and the friendships of the classroom fell away. The country was suddenly doing well, everyone was busy and had more money and somewhere else to be, but he had the same money as before. Sometimes a life creeps up on you and it isn’t the one you planned.

  When the money dried up, his friends lost their jobs. Two years ago Madigan put him on a three-day week because there weren’t enough tourists to even account for the fuel. The shorter week meant a little less money, since Festus owned the car he drove to work in and lived with his mother and did not have to pay rent. But then a two-day week tipped the scales: he had more time off work than on.

  And today he’d turned up for work and there wasn’t any, not one day.

  The television hummed above the counter, a news item about deep-sea fishermen reporting something in the deep outwaters. A reporter said they had not seen ocean currents like this, they could not describe what they’d been seeing, but that something was wrong with the ocean. The camera turned to a fisherman beside his boat: ‘The truth is I don’t want to go so far out now, even if the fish was still all there, and they’re not, and I don’t trust that water.’

  Festus and Madigan sat at the counter. Madigan said what a good man Festus’s father was, always a hard worker and a quiet man. He ordered another round before rustling a newspaper for the news while Festus stared suspiciously at his drink. Something was wrong. In all the years at this job, Madigan never had him in for drinks, he liked to drink on his own. The man behind the counter polished the rim of a glass. The flames were the loudest thing in the room.

  Madigan coughed and tilted the newspaper until half his face appeared, a lampshade of white hair circling the pink bulb of his bald head.

  ‘By the way, Festus, I have to let you go. I’m sorry, but the work isn’t there any more.’

  Festus thought it was some joke for the morning. But no one was laughing, and the man cleaning the glass fit it carefully with a clink into a line of other glasses. Madigan had swung his axe, and the basket received a head. Briefly laid again on his shoulders, Festus heard that head speak:

  ‘But I’ve worked here all my life so far.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Festus, but that’s it now.’

  ‘You knew my father.’

  ‘I’m very sorry.’

  The newspaper covered Madigan’s face again, the man behind the counter picked up another glass and held it to the light, twisting it in his fingers. Festus took the whiskey and finished it in one tilt, then walked down the pier and drove back home, swerving to avoid the drops that filled the hollows of the road under the bandage of low cloud. As the mountain took up more of his windscreen he refused to look at it. The mechanical action he’d performed countless times took over, every twist and turn of a familiar journey, and all for nothing, all for the last time.

  Outside his house in town he parked the yellow Fiat and walked to the pub in the hotel and sat at the table nearest the fire.

  He swung ropes at his thoughts to grapple them together, to fit them into his small panic. A drink appeared in a waitress’s hand and he placed money into that hand. He stared out the window at the street, emptying his glass and getting another, drinking to a freedom he did not want. The rich sour taste that made a fish of his tongue did not remove the taste of his loss. Madigan could have let Festus work a single day a week, even for appearances, at least he’d still have the job when the tourists came back and the work was there again, he’d have kept something if not the job. Even if it meant no money. Something should be done. Festus raised the glass to his lips and did not know what should be done, but someone should do something.

  Animals

  Roddy Doyle

  HE REMEMBERS CARRYING THE WATER tank into the house, trying to make sure he didn’t trip over a step or a child. The boys were tiny. And the gir
ls – the twins – must have been so small he can’t even imagine them anymore. He can’t remember filling the tank or dumping the fish into the water, but he sat cross-legged in front of it while the boys gave each fish a name and the eldest, Ben, wrote them in a list with a fat red marker. There were seven fish, seven names – Goldy, Speckly, Big Eyes, and four others. They taped the list to the side of the tank and by the end of the day there were black lines through three of the names and four fish still alive in the tank. The tank stayed in the room – in fact, George left it there when they moved house two years later – long after the last of the fish had been buried.

  The animals always had decent, elaborate burials. Christian, Hindu, Humanist – whatever bits of knowledge and shite the kids brought home from school went into the funerals. George changed mobile phones, not because he really wanted to but because he knew the

  boxes would come in handy – it was always wise to have a coffin ready for the next dead bird or fish.

  He came home one Saturday morning. He’d been away, in England. The house was empty. Sandra, his wife, had taken the kids to visit her mother in Wexford. George put his bag down, went across to the kettle, and saw the brand new cage – and the canary. And the note, red marker again: ‘Feed it.’ And he would have, happily, if the canary hadn’t been dead. He had a shower, phoned for a taxi, waited an hour for it to arrive and told the driver to bring him to Wacker’s pet shop in Donaghmede.

  – Are yeh serious? said the driver.

  – Yeah, said George.

  – What’s in Wacker’s that’s so special?

  George waited till the driver had started the taxi.

  – Pets, he said.

  He was pleased with his answer.

  – All right, said the driver.

  He went through the gears like he was pulling the heads off orphans.

  Wacker – or whoever he was – had no canaries. Neither did the guy beside Woodie’s. Or the shop on Parnell Street. When the kids got home the next day they found that the canary had turned into two finches. George explained it to them, although they weren’t that curious; two of anything was better than one.

  – A fella on the plane told me that finches were much better than canaries. So I swapped the canary for these lads here. A boy and a girl.

  – Cool.

  He’d no idea at the time if that was true – the male and the female – but it must have been, because they made themselves a nest, and an egg was laid. But nothing hatched. Sandra bought a book and a bigger cage and better nesting material, and the two finches became three, then five, then back to four, three and two. More funerals, more dead bodies in the garden. They got an even bigger cage, a huge thing on wheels. The finches, Pete and Amy – he knows the names, as solidly as his kids’ names – built a nest in the top corner, a beehive of a thing. Amy stayed in there while Pete came out, hung on the bars of the cage and looked intelligent.

  George went to his mother’s house one day, to change a few light bulbs and put some old crap up into the attic for her. He made a morning of it, smuggled the book he was reading out of the house, bought a takeaway coffee, drove to the seafront and stayed there for an hour after he’d finished at his mother’s, parked facing Europe, reading, until he got to the end of a chapter – The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love – and needed to go for a piss. He drove home and walked into the end of the world. Sandra had decided that the morning needed a project, so herself and the kids had wheeled the cage outside and had started to go at it with soapy brushes and cloths. A child opened the hatch, Pete flew out, and George found four hysterical children in the kitchen, long past tears and snot, and a woman outside in the back garden, talking to the hedge.

  – I can hear him, she said.

  – Where?

  – In there, she said.

  She was pointing into the hedge, which stretched from the house to the end wall. It was a long garden, a grand hedge.

  – I can hear him.

  George could hear the kids in the house. He could hear lawnmowers and a couple of dogs and the gobshite three doors up who thought he was Barry White. He couldn’t hear Pete. But he did hear – he definitely heard it – the big whoop of a great idea going off in his head.

  – Listen, he said. I’m going to bring the kids to Wacker’s, to see if Pete flew back there. Are you with me?

  Sandra looked at him. And he knew: she was falling in love with him, all over again. Or maybe for the first time – he didn’t care. There was a woman in her dressing gown, looking attractively distraught, and she was staring at George like he was your man from ER.

  – While I’m doing that, said George, – you phone Wacker’s and tell him the story. You with me?

  – Brilliant.

  – It might work.

  – It’s genius.

  – Ah well.

  It did work, and it was George’s greatest achievement. The happiness he delivered, the legend he planted – his proudest moment.

  All of the gang in Wacker’s were waiting, pretending to be busy. George carried the girls up to the counter; the boys held onto him.

  – Dylan here’s finch flew away, said George. And he was thinking that maybe he flew back here.

  The lad behind the counter looked up from the pile of receipts he was wrapping with an elastic band.

  – Zebra finch?

  Dylan nodded.

  – He flew in twenty minutes ago.

  – Flaked, he was, said an older man who was piling little bales of straw and hay. Knackered. Come on over and pick him out, Dylan.

  There were thirty finches charging around a cage the size of a bedroom. Dylan was pointing before he got to the cage.

  – Him.

  – Him?

  – Yeah.

  The older man opened a small side door and put his hand in. He was holding a net and had the finch out and in his fist with a speed and grace that seemed rehearsed and brilliant.

  – This him?

  – Yeah.

  – What’s his name again?

  – Pete.

  The new Pete wasn’t a patch on the old Pete – he was a bit drugged looking. George liked the finches but they were a pain in the neck – the shit, the sandpaper, food, water. He was halfway to Galway one day when they had to turn back because they’d forgotten about the birds and who was going to look after them; they couldn’t come home – they were going for two weeks – to a stinking kitchen and a cage full of tiny, perfect skeletons. They found a neighbour willing to do the job and started off again, a day late. Sandra told George to stop gnashing his teeth; he hadn’t been aware that he’d been doing it. The fuckin’ birds. But then, another time, he was up earlier than usual – this was back home. He went into the kitchen and saw Dylan sitting in the dawn light, watching the cage, watching Pete and Amy. George stood there and watched Dylan. Another of those great moments. This is why I live.

  George is walking the new dog. A cavalier spaniel. A rescue dog. He looks down at it trotting beside him and wonders again what rescue means. The dog is perfect, but it had to be rescued from its previous owners. He’s walking the dog because he likes walking the dog and he has nothing else to do. His kids are reared and he’s unemployed. He’s getting used to that – to both those facts. The election posters are on every pole, buckled by rain and heat – it’s early June and the weather’s great.

  The guinea pigs stayed a day and a half and introduced the house to asthma. George came home from work – he remembers that feeling – and the boys showed him the Trousers Trick.

  – Look, they said, and brought him over to the new cage – another new cage. There were two guinea pigs inside, in under shredded pages of the Evening Herald. Ben, the eldest, opened the cage and grabbed one of the guinea pigs, and George’s objections – unsaid, unexplored – immediately broke up and became nothing. The confidence, the sureness of the movement, the hand, the arm into the cage – the kid was going to be a surgeon. He held the guinea pig in both hands.

>   – What’s his name?

  – Guinea Pig, said Ben.

  He got down on the kitchen floor. Dylan had grabbed the other pig and was down beside his brother.

  – Look.

  They sat, legs out and apart. It was summer and they were wearing shorts, and that was where the guinea pigs were sent – up one leg of each pair. George watched the guinea pigs struggling up the boys’ legs, heard the boys’ laughter and screams as they tried to keep their legs straight. Dylan sat up and pulled a leg down, to make room for his guinea pig to bridge the divide and travel down the other leg. It was a joy to watch – and Ben actually became a barman. That night, he started coughing and wheezing, and scratching his legs till they bled. His eyes went red and much too big for his face. They suddenly had a child with allergies and asthma and the guinea pigs were gone – replaced by the rabbits.

  The first dog ate one of the rabbits. George wasn’t sure anymore if it had been one of the first, original rabbits. He could go now, he could turn and walk to Ben’s place of work, the next pub after George’s local – a fifteen-minute walk – and ask him. It’s early afternoon, and the place will be quiet. He can leave the dog tied to the bike rack outside, have a quick pint or just a coffee – the coffee in a pub with a bike rack is bound to be drinkable. He could do that – he has the time. But he doesn’t want to seem desperate, because that’s how he feels.

  The Lost Decade – that was what the American economist called it, Paul Krugman, the fella who’d won the Nobel Prize, on the telly – a few weeks before. He hadn’t been talking about the last decade; it was the next one. It already had a name, and George knew he was fucked.

  The quick decision to get rid of the guinea pigs – George hadn’t a clue now what had happened to them; something else he could check with Ben – had brought biblical grief down on the house. Ben had actually torn his T-shirt off his own back.