New Irish Short Stories

by Joseph O'Connor

  Bleary-eyed, he makes for the kitchen, checking the clock over the cooker hood before starting to make coffee. It is 7 a.m. The clock makes a silent digital calculation. He still expects it to declare itself. He remembers the magnified announcements of the wall clock in his grandmother’s parlour, which measured the hours with a grinding wheeze and the minutes with a disapproving tick, as if every moment mattered. And every moment did – there was a time for the kettle to be boiled, for the cake of bread to be taken out of the oven, for incantation of the Angelus.

  The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary…

  *

  ‘You’ll love it,’ his father had said in that tone of false encouragement. Like when he wanted Tim to play football. Thwack!

  ‘Will Denis be there?’

  ‘Who?’ Dad barked.

  Mum glared at him and left without saying goodbye.

  The two weeks they were away – a package holiday to the sun; well, they’d sent men to the moon, hadn’t they? – seemed endless. He listened to the mournful bellowing of cows, the slap of their full fat udders swinging rudely from side to side, the splattery skeetering of hooves in the mud, the hup-hup of the boy who drove them. There was the racket of the tractor and the baler passing by the gate, the melancholy ripple of birdsong when he was put to bed even though it was still light outside.

  ‘Time for bye-byes,’ Gran would say. She still used baby talk though he was nearly seven.

  But mostly he was listening out for the scrunch of wheels on gravel and for Mum to come home.

  *

  To his shame he is persistently and sickeningly jealous. He has fantasies of throttling anybody who looks crooked at Reggie. He would use his bare hands, blacken eyes if needs be. Ker-pow! He has logged away all of the stray names she mentions – Jason, the steward who’s emphatically not gay; Ted, the divorced pilot; Marco, the great guy on the ground at Fiumicino – so that when she’s delayed he visualises her being with one of them simply because he knows their names. He has pressed her gently for details.

  ‘This guy, Jason, have I met him?’

  Reggie would shake her glorious hair. ‘No, he lives in Paris, with Kate,’ she would say evenly.

  ‘And Ted?’

  ‘We met him at check-in once, remember? Tall guy with epaulettes? Drives a plane.’

  ‘I’m only asking,’ he would say.

  ‘You’re not only asking, Tim, you’re checking up on me – there’s a big difference. Don’t you trust me?’

  No, no, no. He could see how clichéd it was, the jealous older man making inventories of possible betrayal. Even after a year with Reggie, he still felt like he was handling unstable explosives, except he was the one ready to go off at any moment.

  The last time you see the Man with the Quiet Voice is in Bradley’s. You remember the cold clammy feel of the gauge as the shop lady measures your bare feet for sandals and your mother kneading her fingers on the top of the clover pattern in the leather to make sure you have enough room to grow. Suddenly, he is upon you.

  This fella’s going to be big as a house, eh Timmy, me boy, he says loudly. He grips you on the shoulder and does a trick with his hand so that a florin suddenly appears at his fingertips.

  Denis, Mum hisses.

  Jesus, Rosemary …

  The two of them go off and huddle in a corner of the shop. And Mum says please, please. And the shop lady says Would Sir like to … ? You flex your feet in the new sandals with the blonde soles. You don’t want him here. You want it to be just you and Mum and the shop lady marvelling at what a big boy you are as she puts your old shoes in the cardboard box that is like a coffin for a hamster. And when the shop lady attaches the balloon that comes free with each purchase to your finger, you want that moment just for yourself too. And you want to wave to the lady and to reach up for Mum’s cool hand. You don’t want her saying don’t and please and not in front of the child or the shop lady saying is everything all right, Madam? or the man saying Jesus Christ and you can’t and please, please. Or Mum suddenly catching you and dragging you out of the shop so roughly that … Bang! It is all over.

  He burst my balloon, you yell.

  You are out on the street, and Mum is crying. And the Man with the Quiet Voice is standing in the doorway with his hands up as if he’s done something wrong.

  No, no, it was just an accident, Mum says, we’ll get you another one.

  Her tears keep coming. The string is still attached to your forefinger. It trails on the pavement behind you with the torn red scrap that was your balloon at the end of it.

  That man … you begin again.

  And she turns, your mother, and strikes you – Wham! – across the face.

  There is no man, she says. Do you hear me? There is no man.

  To this day he cannot bear to be in a room full of balloons; too much imminence.

  *

  ‘A sound man?’ Dad is incredulous.

  His mother presses START. It is Maeve’s birthday, and she is baking a cake so their conversation is punctuated by the aggravated whirr of the Magimix.

  ‘He’d be an engineer, though,’ Mum counters, ‘a sound engineer. That’s what they call it.’

  ‘He’ll be gofer in a studio, more like. Making the tea.’

  ‘We all had to begin somewhere, Pat.’

  Patrick Shaw, self-made man, scrap-metal merchant, bristles. He is clutching his son’s exam results; Tim is sixteen and wants to leave school. He’s eavesdropping at the kitchen door, egging his mother on silently.

  ‘No son of mine …,’ his father starts. STOP.

  The no son of mine speech is well rehearsed. Tim can recite it by heart. His mother interrupts. ‘Your son has always answered the call of a different drum.’

  She is scraping the bottom of the bowl. Tim can hear the impatient slap of the rubber spatula.

  ‘You’ve always been a fool about that boy, Rosemary. Needs a good kick up the arse, if you ask me. Look at this – an F even in Geography!’

  ‘What does any of it matter, once he’s happy?’

  ‘Oh well, excuse me pardon! Once he’s happy! There’s a recession on out there, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  Rush of the tap as his mother fills the mixing bowl and sets it aside to steep.

  ‘He’ll be turning his back on everything I’ve built up.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Pat, isn’t it obvious he’s never going to follow you into the business?’

  ‘Not to me,’ Dad says, and for the first time Tim feels sorry for him.

  Dad used to take him along to the scrapyard on Saturday mornings. It was a hellish place even though his father sat in an elevated Portakabin high above it, doing business over the phone, looking down on the hillocks of twisted metal, the mountains of toothed machine parts, the crushed fangs of cars. Dad didn’t seem to register the sudden, calamitous vomiting of scrap from the buckets of the diggers, the hollow volcanic thud of empty skips being hoisted and dropped, the shattering waterfall of shards rushing down the chutes into huge containers. How could he bear all that deafening medieval clangour and still have appetite for battle when he got home? When he was little, Tim would put his hands to his ears to shut out their rows – his mother’s shrill defiance, his father’s querulous misapprehensions. Later, he used headphones. Heavy metal was best.

  Mum opens the oven door. The unoiled hinges protest.

  ‘Ah Pat, can you really see it?’ his mother says, all tempered reason. ‘Our Tim!’

  Our Tim. He can’t work out her tone.

  His father harrumphs.

  ‘Anyway, if it doesn’t work out, sure doesn’t he have the business to fall back on?’

  ‘Oh yes, good old dependable Pat, always good to fall back on.’

  ‘Don’t be like that, Pat,’ he hears Mum say.

  There is silence then. Is that a prelude to agreement, Tim wonders. His mother makes some move. Tim imagines her stroking his father’s temple with a floury hand.

  ‘D
o it for me,’ his mother wheedles, ‘for my sake.’

  Tim can hear her desperation now – not for him but for herself and for fear of the memory of the man with the quiet voice whose name cannot be spoken. His father is silent; somehow, she has bought his acquiescence.

  *

  ‘Reggie?’

  ‘Tim,’ she says.

  Oh relief. Thank God! He imagines her corpse reassembling itself into just-woken Reggie, like a roll of film rewound. As if his call has brought her back from the dead. There is a sound in the background. Like the movement of sheets, like a companion disengaging. His heart tightens with a familiar constriction. Dread giving way to something meaner and entirely more personal. Gone now the images of carnage, the blood-spattered pavement, the public calamity.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah …’ she says uncertainly. He imagines her blurred by sleep, hair comically askew, leaning on a plump elbow. Post-coital.

  ‘I just saw it on the TV, the bomb.’

  ‘Bomb – what bomb?’

  ‘You didn’t hear it? In a night-club, some kind of explosion.’

  ‘I was fast asleep. What time is it?’ She is waking now, coming into focus.

  ‘I was worried – I thought you might have been caught up in it.’

  She rises, he can hear her. He imagines her, mobile in hand, with the sheets draped around her, stumbling towards the window, parting the nets and looking out onto a Parisian street, narrow, cobbled, slimed with rain. He hears her opening a window. He imagines her sticking her blowsy head and goose-pimpled shoulders out over the sill.

  ‘Ugh, wet!’

  A siren wails.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asks as he hears the latch closing.

  ‘Nothing,’ she says.

  ‘There’s someone else there, isn’t there?’

  ‘Oh Tim, don’t start …’

  An ambulance, Tim guesses, listening to the Doppler effect, the off-tune coming and going of it. Maybe one he has seen earlier on the TV? Maybe on its way back from the scene? The immediacy of connection startles him – images he has just seen translated to a bowl of sound at his ear.

  Dah, dee-da-da-dah, dee-da-da-dah, Dah, dee-da-da-dah, dee-da-da-dah.

  Each city had its own tonic sol-fa and Tim recognised them all. He’d never told Reggie; it seemed too anoraky even for him, or maybe it was something he was keeping in reserve. For a moment just like this …

  Dah, dee-da-da-dah, dee-da-da-dah …

  That wasn’t Paris; that was Rome.

  ‘You’re lying, Reggie,’ he says simply.

  There is silence at the other end of the phone.

  ‘How do you know?’ Her voice has lost its penny-bright insistence.

  Pooof! All over.

  Like someone letting the air out of a balloon.

  You’d had to walk all the way home, your feet hurting in the new sandals. You’d reached the Green when you heard the first explosion. All you remember is the funny smell, a strange silence as Mum halts and listens as if to some soft aftershock. Then the banshee wails begin as fire engines pass blaring importantly, ambulances cluck and pock. It is a symphony of distress as if the world has been agitated by your private tempest. That day of all days, no one takes any notice of a pregnant woman trailing along the street weeping silently and a boy still smarting with hurt, holding onto his fury by a string and blaming the Man with the Quiet Voice for all of it.

  Dad is frantic.

  Jesus Ro, where have you been, I’ve rung every hospital in the city.

  He catches you by the lapels and examines you like the doctor in a temper. He pauses at your reddened cheek.

  Haven’t you heard? Three bombs, all at the same time, I was out of my mind with worry. In your condition! What were you doing in town, anyway?

  Shoes, Mum says dully.

  You often think of him afterwards, Denis, imagine him blundering down Nassau Street straight into the fiery red maw of it …

  He goes to his parents for Sunday lunch, roast beef with all the trimmings. Something else Reggie sneered at. Tied to your parents’ apron strings, she would say. But she was at an age where she was still rebelling against hers; he has gone beyond that. Age has chastened his mother, or is it the longevity of her deception? His father has mellowed, too; a bad hip has softened his cough. His sister Maeve – conceived on that holiday in Majorca, Tim supposes, which his mother bashfully referred to afterwards as their second honeymoon – has taken over the family business, rebranding Dad’s scrap metal as architectural salvage.

  ‘Where’s Reggie?’ Mum asks as she clatters round the kitchen tidying up after lunch.

  ‘In Paris,’ he says.

  No, he corrects himself silently, Rome. In Rome with bloody Marco.

  ‘How do you keep up with her?’ Mum says as she scrapes the gravied remains of the plates into the bin. ‘All that gadding about! Wasn’t like that in our day. You put up and shut up.’

  This is for his father’s benefit, like much of what she says these days.

  Over coffee, his parents fall into musing about the past. When Reggie was around, they retold all of Tim’s baby stories, but he realises they don’t need an audience to retreat into reminiscence.

  ‘Remember when Tim said his first word?’ his father starts.

  ‘He was slow to talk,’ Mum chips in with that old reflex of contradiction.

  ‘I was absolutely convinced you’d said Daddy,’ his father goes on. ‘I heard you say it. Clear as a bell. But would your mother believe me? And would you say it again? On demand?’

  ‘Curse of the firstborn. Poor Tim wasn’t allowed childish babble,’ Mum says ruefully. ‘Every sound had to have a meaning.’

  Tim enjoys these archival squabbles. It gives his parents a chance to be softer with one another which they weren’t in the original versions of these stories. And he hasn’t the heart to correct them. His first word was not for either of them. Even then it was the song of the sirens he heard.

  The Blacklight Ballroom

  Peter Murphy

  NEARLY A YEAR INTO THE civil war that no one cared to declare a civil war, they grew tired of hatching their fires and waiting to die in their dressing gowns, and blitz spirit drove the first ones out like animals after hibernation to smell the air and test the inclination of the wind.

  Then, as if privy to the twitchings of antennae or some hive-mind transmission, somebody got word from somebody who heard of a place to congregate on Saturday night – the Blacklight Ballroom in the basement of the old Bailey Hotel. That was three years ago. If not for the weekly militia tribute, those black armband boys might have shut it down on the grounds of illegal assembly or breach of curfew or whatever. But come fetor or freeze, snipers or shelling, the show goes on. It’s been postponed only once, on account of August’s epizootic.

  From all over the county they come, huddled like wetbacks or cattle in the trailers of tarped artics, in four-wheel drives and SUVs, in dented Zetors canopied with asbestos and three-inch Plexiglas, in pocked or perforated coaches customised with great plates of tin or aluminium nail-gunned to the panels.

  Some come singly and some in fleet. Headlights streak like tracer fire all down the N11. When the hotel’s desk clerk sees the convoy reach Three Mile Lane he flips a switch that triggers automatic gates ivied with barbed wire coils. Wheels bump over cattle-grids. Diesel engines roar towards a courtyard swept by searchlights. There they dock in ad-hoc formation under a bullet-proof dome and discharge their human freight in ones and twos, in dozens and in scores, like squads of stiff-backed astronauts set down upon a shanty moon.

  No one tarries in the parking dock, just the odd ‘G’mora’ or mutter about the night’s bombardment. Shotguns and side arms, picks and pikes, hatchets and slash-hooks – all surrendered at the sentry booth, tagged and bagged and stored in barrels called the Blood Buckets. They’ll get them back when the show is over.

  Some shower they are, cursing in the dark as they pick their st
eps across panes of frost like the crocked fearing a slip or sprain – except on sniper nights, that is, when they hide beneath corrugated-iron shields and hell-for-leather it towards the hotel’s double doors.

  Every soul among their number has lost a loved one or a limb. There’s Mary Ellen Cash, a beauty in her day, cheeks now drawn from long hours’ labours in those polytunnel silos down the Ballo road. Naeem Hammoud, stocious with grief, a photo of his late wife Rita pinned to the lapel of his greatcoat. Susannah Codd, cute as you like in her flak jacket and para boots, that gloved prosthetic like a circus bird-girl’s claw: two years ago a Salamander landmine mixed her fingers with the turnip crop.

  And here comes Long John Donegan, still scatty from nerve-gas shock, lips blistered after a week of sucking fuel from Hummers junked or sunk in mud. And, of course, the legendary Evelyn Brown, five foot four in her boots: Christmas Eve she heard a thief at her peacocks, tore out there and took skull and all off his shoulders with a forty-pound Steel War sledge.

  Here they come then, them and the other regulars, bearing their woes like full pails of water, sorrows individual and sorrows common. Up the steps and through the lobby, past the check-in desk into the basement lift. A succession of metal detectors, then an airlock, then the decontamination chamber where they tug off gloves and coveralls and rubber boots and hobnail boots and dump them in plastic fruit trays to be hosed and sprayed with anti-pathogen.

  Quickly they hit the showers and submit to the jets, and when the live grime is blasted from scalp and pelt they’re brighter-eyed and more inclined to chatter. Now they towel off and from assigned drawers take embroidered shirts, gaudy western suits, tuxedo jackets, satin elbow gloves, high-heeled shoes and strappy little numbers, and they fix their hair and snap on costume jewellery and preen a bit and praise God this night is Saturday.