by John Brady
Kathleen sat back and folded her arms. He heard his own laboured breathing.
“What are you planning to do so,” she asked in a tight voice.
“I’m going to buy a goat and a donkey. And go down to that nephew of mine, tell him to cut out an acre of land off the farm for me so’s I can rule the goddamned world.”
“From your palace on a heap of rocks in the Burren. Is that it?”
“That’s the style. I’ll build a beehive hut with them. Like the monks.”
“With the goat and the donkey helping out.”
“They’ll keep people away. I’ll train them to be a bit mad. The goat will keep his horns and I’ll remind the donkey how to kick.”
“You won’t have far to look for a bloody goat, I can tell you.”
“I’m going to call the goat Jim.”
“And what’ll you call the donkey?”
“I’m not sure. I was leaning toward some fancy name. One that’d show how dangerous it could be if you went again it. But to show it had a good nature too, as long as it was treated with respect.”
“Matt, then.”
“That would probably be best. Yes.”
“And when’ll this be happening.”
“Tomorrow morning, first thing.”
Kathleen was the first to break away, her smile giving way suddenly to laughter. She turned and covered her face with her hands. He reached for the bottle, thought about the smokes, decided that would be asking too much.
He screwed the top back on the Jamesons and reached for her glass. She trapped his hands around it.
“You’ll only waste it,” he complained. “Only pretending to like it. With your Florence Nightingale goings-on here. ‘Denial.’ ‘Share your feelings.’ All that.”
“Oh yes, you have the donkey already,” she said. “You’re well on the way.”
“Youse Dublin crowd are all the same,” he said. “Ganging up, then hitting below the belt. A million and a half in the GPO Easter Sunday, was it, again?”
“Will you phone Tommy tomorrow then? He only wanted to help.”
He nodded, finally. She let go the glass.
“You’re lost, Matt,” she said, softly. “Aren’t you.”
He let the small mouthful under his tongue before swallowing it. Another day gone by, won’t come back.
“I am,” he said.
The cat’s yowl came from close by now. Minogue tilted his head to hear the scratching better.
“They must be up on the bloody shed,” said Kathleen, rising. “Honest to God, I’ll shoot them.”
Well, she hadn’t, had she. She’d gone in to the news. As if that hadn’t been an eventful enough evening already, he thought.
He had changed his mind about going down to Dwyer’s and stood by the window instead, half-listening to the news about the economy and the peace process. He’d finished Kathleen’s glass just when he spotted the dog move by the shrubs near the apple trees. It had stepped back then out of the light cast from the kitchen, its pupils reflecting the ghostly clarity of two rings. He remembered putting the glass down on the windowsill, knowing. He’d thought about calling Kathleen but had decided not to. He opened the door to the extension and found the short spade he kept for the potatoes.
He reached in and switched off the kitchen light and headed out the door to the garden. It might be the whiskey, he thought again, and he wasn’t thinking straight if it really was what he thought after he saw the tail.
He closed the back door quietly, waited until his eyes were a little used to the half-light. The shadows by the hedge were completely opaque now. He held the shovel across his chest and headed around by the peas. There was no sign of the mad cats now. The smell of the soil rose up to his nostrils along with the slightly bitter scent off the leaves on the potatoes. He stopped and listened. There was another smell out there. The damned cats, the bastards, doing their business in his garden. How could anyone like cats, it was well known and even allowed they were selfish little creatures.
The fox was watching him from beside the trunk of the Granny Smith. The high ears moved a little and the snout wobbled slightly. Minogue couldn’t see the brush. Whiskey aftertaste burning at the back of his throat, his chest thumping.
As though it doesn’t care, he had thought, and wants me to know that too.
But what about rabies and distemper, if foxes went mad and just attacked a person for the hell of it. Cats or dogs being eaten, foxes sniffing around the back doors of the houses at night, would a fox come right into the kitchen.
Off it went, turning and stepping out in one smooth curve. Minogue lowered the spade and stared into the gloom. He thought he heard a last soft scratch.
Kathleen wondering if they shouldn’t phone somebody, some outfit to tell them about the fox. Minogue with another glass of whiskey he knew he shouldn’t take, sat watching the telly while Kathleen phoned Costigans and O’Hares farther down the road. Someone arguing stridently about child-centred curriculum and a man with glasses and a tic talking about how boys were different.
Minogue had listened and followed none of it really, thought about the fox, how it seemed to be nonplussed. He kept up a half-hearted watch on the host, a man he had thought had recently died but hadn’t apparently, trying to hold back the child-centred woman. She continued with the bought-into and process and issues. Then he knew the whiskey had gotten ahead of him. He’d be sorry and stupid half the day tomorrow.
But no. That tomorrow was now, and here he was in unexpectedly good order, getting a good run of it over the canal and down to Camden Street and the city centre. Maybe, as he’d been told for years, the trick to not getting hangovers was to stay drinking, keep it topped up.
It wasn’t the remorse he knew from overdoing the gargle last night, or Kathleen’s quiet this morning. It was something else that he didn’t understand or even remember had changed him. Sitting at the edge of the bed, eyeing the pattern on the curtains for probably the hundred thousandth time, Minogue realized that there was no going back. First, he’d settle with Malone, and then he’d be phoning Fiona Hegarty.
No Hard Feelings
Quinn tried Beans Canning again just before he stepped out of the car by Irene’s.
The bastard had turned off his mobile on purpose. He tried to remember where Jacqueline was working now. Beans had said something about a shoe shop down in Henry Street.
He knocked twice. Avalon: Irene was educated, that’s why she called it that. She had tons of books all over the kip, but she never came over that way. But those things she had hanging in the windows, well, what could you do. Maybe people probably expected that. He’d had had a go at some of the books she’d left lying around in the front room, one on foods, and another on dreams.
Irene opened the door, gave him the business smile, and showed him into the front room. Five minutes she said: she had someone else
“I left something on the mantelpiece for you,” she said. “Go ahead.”
He took the stone off the mantelpiece and felt it. It was smooth like all the ones she left out, heavy. There were red, sort of pink bands along it. The sign said it was for courage. Why’d she put that one out? Did he sound that desperate on the bloody phone? The restless feeling was getting worse; he could hardly sit for two minutes.
He tried to remember what she’d told him from a while back.
Closing your eyes while you were holding it was good. Let it warm up, was what she’d told him too before. Think about when it was being made millions and millions of years ago, the fire, the sun, the volcano. Should he think about ape men running around in nip too, he’d asked her. She hadn't been amused.
He leaned on the windowsill and looked down the street. Fancy new apartments or not, Kevin Street and the Coombe could still be dog rough if you didn’t know who you were dealing with or where you were going. Tony Smith, McCarthy, Gears Delaney had taken on a lot of the doings here now. Delaney had been done for assault recently he knew, but the orders still
came through.
Here was a book: Angels Every Day. The angels were not like the angels he’d learned about; these were normal people with a glow around them. He flipped through a few pages with his free hand, let it close again.
He thought about Grogan. Johnnie Roe, a vampire, is what he is. Something had to be done, this was gone out of control. Things were happening around him and he couldn’t see them. He couldn’t get his head clear, he had no direction.
Another book was Past Lives, with hardly any pictures. There was one called Visits. He picked up Past Lives. Irene was letting someone else out the hall door. He got up and followed her to the room next to the kitchen.
“I wasn’t expecting to come, like,” he said.
“Oh, that’s no bother, Robert.”
Robert: how strange the sound of that, he thought. Grogan was the only other person who called him Robert. She had given him the once-over, he knew. Though he’d never admit it to anyone, he believed now that there were people who could see everything right away. People who could pick up on things instantly, like, no talking or anything needed. He wasn’t sure if Irene was one.
“Will we try the tarot?”
“I don’t know,” he said. She’d know he was nervous about a bad one turning up.
“We could have a look at your life map, then.”
He didn’t understand or remember, but he didn’t want to say that.
“The aspects,” she said, and sat at the table. “You know, how things are lining up.”
“Or not lining up,” he said.
She made a brief smile. He knew that he made her a bit nervous. That suited him most of the time. It was his guarantee she wouldn’t be trying to reef him, to hook him into the stuff.
“Do you want to take off your jacket,” she said.
He did stink then, the stale smell all around him in the car that he tried to ignore.
“No. No thanks.”
“You’re in a hurry?”
“Why’d you say that?”
She gave him a guarded look. He had put her at forty, not having a clue, and he still didn’t know.
“Well, you look like you’re in a rush.”
He was able to let that go. There was one time he left and he’d given the steering wheel such a whack. It was still confusing and he didn’t really trust her. It was more that he didn’t trust himself. She wasn’t stupid. She’d figured out he wasn’t a civil servant, but she’d copped on quick enough. She’d only suggested that other stuff, the staring into his eye and telling him what she saw there, the name he couldn’t remember, once. He’d tried to find out more, looking in the bookshop, but it was just a whole lot of bullshit. He had been annoyed at himself for returning, but that was only for the first few times.
He made an effort.
“Ah, you know,” he said. “There’s never time.”
“I have your chart here,” she said. “We can do that.”
He leaned in as she spread the paper. The weight of the gun pulled his jacket out.
He listened but didn’t really pay attention. She knew he wasn’t really into the details, but she went through them anyway. He didn’t mind. There was some strange comfort in hearing her talking about Venus and Jupiter and that stuff. It was a story, sort of. It was only a while ago that he realized he liked it because it reminded him of the good times he’d had in school, the few good times before things had taken over. The teenage thing, of course, too.
It was that birdlike Miss Heaney who used to tell stories about the constellations. He had actually loved it, and if he pushed himself and was honest, he loved her. It was because she was old—well, old was anything over thirty then, wasn’t it—and didn’t mind the kids being half-cracked a lot of them, like, she expected it. It was him knowing that she knew about him, and his family, and his oul lad in and out of jail, and she called him Robert still and expected him to be taken in by her stories. Which he was, because he wanted to.
“Can I ask a few questions there, Irene?”
She nodded.
“Like, I have important things to decide now, but it’s like I’m blind. It’s like I’m in the dark about what I should be doing.”
“Well, you can see that confusion on the map.”
“Where?”
She pointed at two pencil lines she’d drawn between Jupiter and Venus. He wanted to sweep the god damned map off the table. When had she last visited frigging Jupiter?
“You see there,” she said, holding her thumb and forefinger on the lines.
“That angle,” she went on. “It’s nearly one hundred eighty degrees. That’s a Jupiter Venus transit. That’s what you might be feeling.”
“What? I mean, what does that tell you?”
She looked up. His eyes were burning from the lousy sleep. He didn’t want to eat. He wanted Canning to be waiting for him to prove that what Grogan had said was a load of bullshit. He wanted Grogan to tell him that they’d just been screwing around, or got it wrong, or were pulling stunts for spite. He wanted Julie to be wrong about the fella who had phoned looking for Canning.
“I’m not asking for bleedings guarantees. Just make sense, you know. Okay?”
She blinked slowly, stared down at the map, and sat back. No way was he sorry. He’d paid enough over the last year.
“Have I ever asked you to, you know, get to the point before? Black and white?”
“I told you, like I tell everyone,” she murmured. “This is about possibilities. Opportunities. Some people forget that. We don’t pretend to be fortune tellers here.”
“Well, why am I paying fifty quid for an hour of whatsit, ‘possibilities,’ then?”
She looked up again. She was scared all right.
“This isn’t working out,” she said, and swallowed.
“You think I don’t know,” he said. “That time you read the cards there. You left bits out, didn’t you?”
There was a catch in her voice now.
“We should stop now. It’s no good if there’s so much stress and an—”
“This isn’t a psycho session,” he said. “What I’m saying is that I know a bit and I think you can do a damn sight better that talking about ‘conflicts’ and that. Yeah?”
“The map says you’re in a place where there’s a lot of opposition to the things you value. Jupiter’s for growth and expansion. Travel maybe, I can’t say.”
He sat forward again. She wouldn’t look up from the chart. He wondered if she was going to cry.
“So what do I do,” he said.
She shook her head.
“I found out about that Tower card, you know. You kept that out of the picture, didn’t you? The last time? Catastrophe, it says.”
“It depends on the situation,” she said.
“Why didn’t you tell me, then I wouldn’t—”
She wouldn’t look at him.
“Do you want to go on with this?”
Quinn wondered, but now didn’t care, how mad he looked. Here he was in the middle of all this incense and glass and rocks and books and shite.
He thought about Roe after he’d finished with Doyler; the ironed shirt, the hands scrubbed clean, the faint smile. Face it: they were basically animals up there, that’s what they were. Maybe Grogan had something left in him up there, but the others didn’t.
“We better finish,” he said. “I have to go.”
He remembered her saying something about the domestic things. She meant the home. He didn’t really think about whether it could be done or not if it mattered now. He kept an eye on her hands over the cards, how they shook, how she tried to hide it.
He didn’t ask her any questions. He wondered if he’d be back, after this.
“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks, Irene.”
She nodded but wouldn’t look him in the eye. He sat back, looked at the half moon thing in the window. He wondered if he’d ever come back.
“The Tower isn’t just bad,” she said.
“Well, getti
ng hit with a dose of lightning can’t be good for you, can it.”
“It’s a symbol,” she said in a soft voice.
He tucked his arm tight over the gun when he went for his wallet.
“There’s still time,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“You have a quarter of an hour still.”
He’d had the fifty ready anyway. He placed it on the table. She didn’t want it?
“You’re okay,” he said. “Really. No hard feelings.”
So It’s Nobody’s Fault, See?
Malone offered Minogue a pick at his second breakfast. Minogue declined.
“You’re still annoyed, are you.”
Minogue said nothing.
Malone made short work of it. Minogue watched a couple humouring a man with Down’s Syndrome. A man in black, wearing sunglasses, arrived at the cashier. Minogue was sure he was someone famous. Sting? No. Jeremy whatshisname, the actor fella who looked like he’d died: no.
“There was no plan,” Malone said then. “I says to her, I says, Kathleen, you just want me to make sure he doesn’t run off with a brasser. The midlife crisis routine.”
“No need to spare my feelings there.”
“So get over it then? Your missus knows coppers. She knows the story.”
“Is that it, then?”
“Well, if you’re asking . . .”
“Go ahead. Give me your considered opinion.”
“My, em, considered opinion is you’re holding yourself back. You want to stay a culchie. That you’d be caught being an iijit if you sat down next to them continentals at a meeting in Brussels or Berlin or Rome. My, um, considered opinion is that you’re, um, suffering from an inferiority complex. So there.”
Minogue raised his eyebrows.
Malone finished the fried potatoes. Minogue returned to his survey. The newspaper fiends, the quiet ones, he saw; the shoppers, the meeters and laughers; the fellas taking a break; the watchers who didn’t read, even.
A watcher himself, of course. The city was basically roaring and racing. It paused only to rear up with the latest thrill or trend or happening, then plunge madly down the course at top speed again. What course, had been his question for a good number of years now, and what was waiting around the turn, a clear flat. Or was this a mad steeplechase with the horses spooked, where you daren’t even try to slow down or dismount?
