The Salesman

by Joseph O'Connor

  She shook her head and said nothing. I saw the whiteness of her knuckles as she gripped on to the seat.

  Outside on the steps Seánie was reading out the statement we had written together during the lunch break. The reporters clamoured around pushing their microphones and lenses into his face. The statement said that we wanted to be left alone now, that there was absolutely no point in the press following us or contacting us at home because we would not be saying anything else. We had taken enough, we wanted some peace. We had nothing at all to say.

  It was a cold dark afternoon and a light rain was falling steadily. Across the river, crowds of people were streaming out of the offices and going home for the night. Lizzie and Franklin left straight away, along with Dominic and his parents. Seánie and I walked up to the Quill Bar with Duignan and a few of the guards. The pub was dark and warm. There was a football match on the television. Seánie and I sat in one of the alcoves by the window; the guards all stood talking quietly in a semicircle by the bar. I saw Duignan pull a few banknotes from his wallet and hand them to one of the older policemen, nodding across in my direction.

  The guard came over and took off his cap.

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Sweeney, do you take a drink at all?’

  I thought about this. If there’s one thing I would have liked that evening it was a drink.

  ‘I don’t, thanks,’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘I’ll be in fierce trouble with the boss if you don’t. I’m under orders here.’

  ‘I’ll have a tonic water and ice if you insist.’

  He nodded. ‘And yourself, Father. Would you have something to keep the cold winter away?’

  Seánie said he’d have a mineral water. The guard left us, returning a few minutes later with the drinks, also a pot of tea and a plate of ham sandwiches on a tray. The three of us ate and drank in silence; I could think of nothing to say. After a time some of the other guards came over and sat down.

  I suppose we must have stayed there for half an hour, the guards and Seánie attempting conversation about the football match on the television. There was a studied casualness to what they were saying and this annoyed me. I did not want to be given a reassuring hug or a kiss exactly, but I did not want them to pretend that this was all normal either, and that any evening of the week myself and Father Seán Ronan could be found sat in a pub on the quays talking football with a squad of policemen. Duignan walked over and announced it was time to get back to the station. The guards all stood up and shook hands with us. Duignan asked if he could have a private word so we went down the back of the bar together.

  ‘Listen, I’m sorry we didn’t nail the other fella,’ he sighed. ‘There’ll be another day, though. That’s one little gouger can’t stay away from mischief long. Next time his arse won’t touch the ground before he’s up in the Joy.’

  ‘That’d make my day right enough,’ I said.

  He took out his wallet and gave me a card. ‘If there’s anything we can do for you in the meantime, that’s where we are.’

  I think I might actually have laughed here. ‘Like what?’ I said. ‘What exactly do you think you could do for me, Superintendent?’

  Something flickered in his dark eyes. ‘Occasionally people find counselling a help, that’s all I meant. We’ve leaflets about Victim Support above in the station. I could drop a few of them out to you one of the nights if you like. I’m often out your way at night.’

  ‘I don’t have much time for that type of thing,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘Well, you know where we are anyway.’

  We went back up to the front, then Duignan left along with the last of the guards.

  After they had gone, Seánie realised that he was late for an appointment so he went upstairs to make a phone call. It was the first time all day that I had been completely alone. The barman lit the fire in the grate. I took off my tie and unbuttoned my collar. It felt good not to have to make conversation any more. I watched the office workers rushing in out of the rain and shaking their wet hair and ordering drinks. The television was switched off and a jukebox started to play Frank Sinatra. ‘I’m Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter’. A girl came in selling raffle tickets. I watched her move around the bar. She would have been about your age. I put my hand in my pocket to get some change, in case she came near me. I wanted to have the change at the ready, so that I would not have to talk to her. I thought I would break down if I had to talk to her.

  I felt Duignan’s card in my pocket and took it out. Just at that moment the sound of wild laughter filled the bar. On the back of the card I noticed some words scribbled in red biro:

  Christ Jesus, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

  With best regards and prayers from a brother in recovery,

  Detective John Duignan, Store Street

  Chapter Six

  Some weeks after the end of the trial, Lizzie wrote me a long letter from Sydney to say that she and Franklin had finally made up their minds. They were coming to Ireland in the summer, and for good this time. She had missed home more than she thought. She did not like living in Australia any more. (‘Try as I might, Billy, I just can’t learn to say Hawaii-yah instead of hello.’) Franklin understood and was ready to make the move.

  It would be better for Conal and Erin too, they felt, to grow up in Ireland. I suppose that this news should have been a source of happiness, but to be absolutely honest with you, I had other things to think about. I don’t think I even finished reading the letter.

  I knew by then where he was staying, a small deserted-looking corporation house in a cul-de-sac parallel to the sea front, to which I had followed him one cold night in early February. I had some idea of certain of his haunts. I knew that there was a pub near the harbour which he frequented, and sometimes I would park the car there and wait for him. It was often a long wait. Some nights he would not show up at all. I got into the habit of trying somehow to slow down my mind so that I could deal with the tedium of waiting. I would think about work or the garden, some small thing – one of the many – that needed to be done in the house. I would watch the sea birds and try to remember what they were called. Other birds, too, I would try to name. I began to keep a notebook in which I would write down the names of whatever species of birds I saw on those nights in Bray. I would compose long letters to famous people in history on my dictaphone machine. (‘Dear Lee Harvey Oswald, I wonder if you remember where you were when JFK was shot?’) I would listen to the car radio. And often, to occupy myself during those endless hours, I would find myself thinking about your mother.

  About three years after I had gone to London to try and find her, I was walking one hot afternoon through Stephen’s Green with a girl called Bernadette French who I was seeing at the time, a nice girl from Donegal town who was a stewardess with Aer Lingus.

  We had been strolling along by the duck pond when suddenly I saw a beautiful young woman crossing the little hump-back bridge, pushing a stroller which contained a laughing toddler. She stopped just a few feet from me and got down on her hunkers beside the child. Then she took a bag of breadcrumbs from her pocket and began tossing them into the water, cooing into the stroller and stroking the child’s head.

  ‘Hello, stranger,’ I said.

  She looked up at me as though she did not know who I was. Then she shaded her eyes with her palm.

  ‘My God, is it Billy Sweeney?’ she said.

  She held out her hand, which surprised me a little, and felt strange, but we shook hands anyway. She appeared well and happy, older beyond the years which had passed since I had last seen her. She looked like an adult now. Her face was fuller and she was wearing dark lipstick. Her hair was cut into a boyish bob style; I had the idea that she might have dyed it. She was dressed fashionably – I can’t remember how, exactly – but there was a touch of Jackie Kennedy about her smartly tailored clothes. She had on a pillbox hat. S
he certainly stood out from the crowd.

  I introduced Bernadette and they shook hands. I noticed that Grace was wearing black leather gloves. Bernadette looked down at the stroller, where the baby was clucking with mirth and waving its arms. She laughed at the baby and stroked its plump face.

  ‘Oh, yes, and this is Lizzie,’ Grace said. ‘Elizabeth the First. Always looking for attention, aren’t you, pet? Always wants to be the centre of everything.’ She grinned at me. ‘Just like her auldwan,’ she said.

  The baby opened her mouth and yawned. When your mother took off the glove on her left hand, I noticed that she was not wearing a wedding band, and in fact still had on a silver claddagh ring I had once given her as a birthday present.

  ‘Oh, isn’t she a little dote?’ Bernadette said.

  ‘Not always,’ Grace laughed, and she changed the subject back to me.

  She asked me about work. I told her it was going all right, I was still in the shop, but had started studying at night for the UCD entrance exams. A few months earlier I had applied for a Dublin Corporation scholarship to go to college and won it. I was going to study English and History, if I could.

  Her face lit up. ‘Billy,’ she said, ‘oh, that’s wonderful. Really, I’m so pleased for you.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘well, I haven’t got in yet.’

  She clicked her tongue. ‘Sure why wouldn’t you get in?’ she said, and she smiled at Bernadette. ‘This fella’s trippin’ over himself with brains. He’s wasted in that old shop.’

  ‘I know,’ laughed Bernadette. ‘He’s more interested in books than real life. That’s what I’m always telling him.’

  ‘And your mother must be so thrilled, Billy,’ said Grace.

  ‘You’d want to see her,’ I said. ‘You’d swear I was master of Trinity College the way she goes on. But I suppose we wouldn’t get too many scholars down Ringsend way.’

  All the time this conversation was going on I could scarcely take my eyes off the child. At first I was not absolutely sure whether or not she was Grace’s, and because Bernadette was there I did not want to ask straight out. Lizzie was an unusual name for a baby at that time in Ireland. I wondered if she might be a niece from England, where I knew your mother had relations, or even the child of some friend. But when the baby started to cry and your mother sighed softly and lifted her out of the stroller I could see by the way she held her and kissed her that this was her daughter. I think I might even have persuaded myself that I saw a resemblance.

  We talked for a few minutes more. She was back in Dublin, living at her parents’ house. Things were good, though looking after Lizzie was sometimes a handful. She’d had ups and downs but she was happy to be home. Her mother and father were a great help, they had the baby spoilt, they were completely in love with her. No, she wasn’t intending to go back and finish her degree, that was all in the past now. She was doing a secretarial course and had a part-time office job at the Abbey Theatre, which meant she often got free tickets for plays and poetry readings. ‘If you ever need passes for anything,’ she said, and glanced at Bernadette, ‘you must give me a shout and I’ll fix you up.’ We spoke about my sisters and various mutual friends. No, she hadn’t seen much of the old crowd since she’d got back. She’d lost touch with most of them and to be honest was not that upset to let them go. She seemed shocked when I told her the news about Seánie.

  ‘Seánie Ronan gone into a seminary?’ she laughed. ‘Well good God, I’ve heard everything now.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he surprised us all. My mother was delighted as you can imagine. Insisted she’d always known, of course. Offering up novenas for him by the day.’

  The baby was getting bored and restless by now and had managed to work off one of her tiny woollen mittens. She threw it on the ground with a squeak of delight.

  ‘Oh, she’ll be trouble in a few years, won’t she?’ Bernadette laughed, as she picked up the glove and handed it to Grace.

  ‘If she’s like her mother she will,’ Grace agreed. ‘You’re a little madam, aren’t you, pet? A right little vixen.’

  Lizzie put the mitten into her mouth and started to chew it. Your mother took it and put it in her pocket.

  ‘She has me tormented,’ she laughed. ‘She’d eat the leg of the Lamb of God, wouldn’t you, sweetheart? Wouldn’t you now? Yes, that’s right, you would, you’d eat the fingernails off my hand.’

  Bernadette looked at her watch and said she didn’t mean to be rude but she was late getting back for work. Your mother shrugged and said that it had been nice to see me again after all this time. She added, with a smile, that Bernadette was obviously looking after me very well. We said our goodbyes and shook hands again. Then she headed away towards Grafton Street, and myself and Bernadette set off in the other direction, towards the bandstand. I wanted to turn around and look at your mother once more but I did not dare.

  ‘Who’s your friend?’ Bernadette asked me.

  ‘Just someone I used to know,’ I said.

  She squeezed my arm and laughed.

  ‘Aren’t you a great man for the ladies right enough? I don’t know how I’m going to hang on to you at all.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ I told her. ‘I used to knock about with her a bit years ago. It was only a kids’ thing. She used to sometimes come and see the band play when I was in it.’

  ‘She’s lovely looking, isn’t she?’ Bernadette said. ‘She’s the spit of Audrey Hepburn.’

  Spring came, and in those awful sleepless months after the end of the trial one of the few things that gave me comfort was to go swimming in the mornings. I would park the car in the narrow lane beside Sandycove beach and stare out at the scene like a dead man. That early the bay would be almost empty, except for the gulls and herons, the graceful cormorants, perhaps the odd smoke plume from a steamer chugging out towards Howth. I found the emptiness comforting.

  The coldness of the water would envelop me with a stinging shock; there would be an icy explosion and a roar in my ears. I loved the sensation of utter weightlessness which followed – it brought to mind the way I flew in my dreams. Apart from that and the intense raw physicality of the aching cold, I would feel nothing at all, and in those days feeling nothing was a relief.

  I would swim out hard past the rocks, then dog-paddle around so that I faced the shore. I would watch the pink streetlights go out one by one, the long trucks trundling along the sea front in the direction of the port, the frumpy old town beginning to shake itself awake. It became a small routine to me.

  A salesman finds routine comforting.

  Sometimes I felt so alone that it frightened me. Other times I thought – I was certain – that I was going mad with despair. But going mad would not have been the end of the world. The way I felt around that time, even the end of the world would not have been the end of the world.

  One morning, while swimming, I began to feel very ill. I had not been sleeping properly for weeks, nor had I been eating much. The night before, in the car out in Bray, I had smoked almost a whole packet of cigarettes – perhaps that was what did it. I do not know. But suddenly I felt as I swam that I was going to pass out. I managed to make it back to the shore and clamber out on to the rocks, where I vomited. My head seemed to howl with pain and my hands were trembling.

  On my way back up to the car I saw a milk float clinking slowly along the lane, its engine surging and gently whining. The van stopped and a milkman got out. I had noticed him before, a well-built, muscular youngfella, maybe late twenties, with a skinhead haircut and a goatee beard. He had on dirty-looking black leather trousers under the white coat of his uniform. When I got closer to him I could see that he had a Swiss Army knife dangling from his belt; also, that his face was a mass of eczema scars.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, and he turned.

  ‘Ah,’ he went, like he knew me. ‘How’s the hard man?’

  ‘Any chance I could buy a bottle of milk off you?’

  He eyed me as though I had
said something strange.

  ‘I’m not supposed to,’ he replied. ‘I’m not allowed deal with cash.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Cash is a different department,’ he told me.

  I looked at his pock-marked face. Another wave of silvery dizziness hit me. Everything shimmered.

  ‘Are y’all right there, scout?’ he asked.

  I told him that I was feeling faint. ‘And thirsty. I don’t know. I might have eaten something off.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he nodded. ‘Y’look a bit green around the aul’ gills right enough.’

  I sat down on the path and put my head in my hands. My stomach felt like it was twisted into a knot, I quickly became nauseous again and unbelievably hot. I remember breathing deeply through my nose to try and prevent myself vomiting. When I looked up he was staring at me. On the front of his torn green T-shirt was a cartoon of a naked woman with huge feathered wings.

  ‘Ah here,’ he sighed. ‘Sure, we’ll be a long time dead, wha’?’

  He reached into a crate and took out a small carton of milk which he threw to me. From another crate he pulled a bottle of orange juice for himself. I got to my feet. We stood beside the van, the two of us, me swigging from the milk carton and your man throwing back the juice.

  ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Are you feelin’ better?’

  ‘Yes,’ I told him.

  ‘Musta been out on the gargle last night,’ he laughed. ‘Musta got a bad pint, did yeh?’

  ‘Maybe that’s it,’ I said. I did not like his laugh. I did not like his broken teeth. He had a mouth like a thunderstruck graveyard.

  He looked out at the sea and went quiet. I felt that I should say something to him. The silence between us was making me nervous.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘y’don’t have much power there.’

  ‘How d’y’mean?’

  ‘In your van, I’m saying. They’re slow old things, I know. My father was a coalman for years in Dublin. I didn’t know those old things were still on the road. What kind of power would she have anyway?’

  He shook his head and spat on the ground. ‘Don’t make me laugh,’ he said. I certainly was not going to do that. I had seen it before and did not want to see it again.