Ride On

by Stephen J. Martin

  He grabbed the drinks and started to make his way back, noticing another furtive glance from the two boys at the pool table. Aesop nodded again and kept going. Something was definitely up with this pair of muckers. Fuck it, he had other things on his mind. Back at the table he put down the drinks and sat beside Norman.

  ‘That tall enough for you?’ he said to Helen.

  ‘That’s grand, thanks. I like the extra Coke.’

  ‘Ah right. C’mere, do you know those two lads playing pool?’

  The two girls looked over and then quickly took up their glasses.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jessie. ‘They’re from around here.’

  That was all they said. Aesop nodded and finished his old pint. There was some history there. Did he have to sort that out too?

  ‘Hey Aesop,’ said Helen. ‘Do you think you might play with the band for a bit? They’re setting up over there, look. They’d be delighted for you to join in.’

  Aesop turned around. There were about five guys setting up for a trad session.

  ‘Ah, to be honest Helen, I don’t really play that kind of stuff.’

  ‘You could sing a song, sure.’

  ‘Jaysis, no. I’m a shite singer. If Jimmy was here he’d get up all right, but you don’t want me up there spoiling it for everyone.’

  ‘Do you not do backing vocals? You do on the telly.’

  ‘Nah. That’s all Jimmy and Shiggy singing. My mike is just for show, I’m telling you. I do a bit in a few songs when we’re playing live but, I swear, if I tried to do lead vocals on me own we’d all be asked to leave.’

  ‘Norman, will you get up?’

  ‘Ah sure I might in another few pints.’

  Aesop looked around. Norman was worse than he was.

  ‘What? Are you going to sing?’

  ‘Not at all. I’ll just play with the lads for a couple of songs.’

  ‘Play what?’

  Norman went red.

  ‘Ah, I play a bit of oul’ bones.’

  ‘The bones? Are you serious? Since when?’

  ‘I’ve always played them. Sure, it’s only a laugh. It’s nothing.’

  ‘How come I never knew that?’

  ‘Sure Christ, I’m hardly going to take them out when you and Jimmy are playing, am I? I’d look a right langer.’

  ‘But … have you got them there?’

  ‘In me pocket.’

  ‘Give us a look.’

  ‘Ah Aesop, don’t start slagging me now.’

  ‘I’m not slagging you. Take them out there.’

  Norman reached into his coat and pulled out two flat sticks about six inches long and handed them to Aesop.

  ‘How do you hold them?’

  Norman showed him and Aesop gave them a quick shake. One of them immediately slipped loose and described a big arc over them before splashing off the top of his pint and skidding around the table. The girls roared laughing.

  ‘Bollocks.’

  He dried it on the seat and handed both of them to Norman.

  ‘Here, you show me.’

  Norman took the bones and demonstrated again how to hold them. Then he raised up his right hand to shoulder height and rattled off a rhythm to the Paul Brady song that was coming over the house system. Aesop clapped his hands together.

  ‘That’s brilliant! Jesus, when did you learn how to do that?’

  ‘Ah, will you fuck off taking the piss Aesop,’ said Norman. He put the bones down on the table and picked up his drink.

  ‘I’m serious, man. Tell him girls. Jesus, you’ve been able to play all these years and you never said anything.’

  ‘You should see him with two sets,’ said Helen.

  ‘Ah Helen, don’t,’ said Norman. ‘He’s only winding me up.’

  ‘Do you have another set with you?’ said Helen. She reached over into his pocket and found them. ‘Here, show him.’

  ‘He doesn’t really want to see.’

  ‘He does.’

  ‘Ah …’

  Norman took two bones in each hand and doubled up on the beat, one hand playing off the other for about five seconds. People started to look over. He put all the bones in his breast pocket and sat there with a head on him like a beetroot.

  Aesop shook his head.

  ‘I can’t believe you never showed us that before. That was fucking deadly! Jaysis, it was like you had two tap dancers in your hands.’

  ‘It’s nothing, sure. It’s only the bones.’

  ‘It’s percussion, Norman. Did you honestly think I’d have no interest in learning how to do that? Selfish bastard.’

  Norman went even more red. He couldn’t even count the times he’d have loved to whip them out when the lads were around jamming, but he’d been way too embarrassed. They were so cool and brilliant at their instruments, and it wasn’t as though he didn’t get enough slagging without producing something like the bones in the middle of the kind of stuff they played.

  ‘If you want, I’ll show you a bit.’

  ‘Norman, I want you to show me everything you know.’

  ‘It’s not much.’

  ‘You big modest gobshite, I know what I heard. You can really play them fuckers. We’ll start tomorrow. No messing. First thing.’

  ‘First thing? Now I know you’re taking the piss.’

  ‘We’ll see about that. Now, your round I believe. My pint is wrecked from the little accident earlier.’

  Norman looked around the table to see what the round was and then stood up.

  ‘Helen likes a nice tall glass,’ said Aesop, all kinds of images sprinting into his brain and firing memos off down to his underpants.

  ‘I know, yeah,’ said Norman, moving off to the bar.

  Screams of laughter from Helen and Jessie followed him up there before the barman had even started pulling the first pint. He looked around and saw Aesop with his hand on Jessie’s knee as he was telling them some story. As long as it was Jessie’s feckin’ knee there’d be no problems, he thought. The lads at the pool table didn’t seem to know him, but he knew them. The tall one, Davey, and Helen had been engaged for a few months last year. That was why he didn’t want to play pool. He wanted to stay away from them. That Davey bloke was a bit highly strung and a terrible prick on top of it with drink in him. If Aesop started in on Helen, you never knew what might happen. Norman didn’t know the full story, but apparently Helen hadn’t been with another guy since they broke up and the murmurs around the family were that it was because she was hoping Davey would find someone first and leave her alone. The whole thing annoyed Norman. He could deal with the situation in about five fucking minutes if he was let, but another one of the cousins told him he was better off out of it. Mikey Pat had apparently said something to Davey once and Helen got all upset and told him to just leave it. It wasn’t Norman’s place to get involved. And anyway, the last thing they needed was a scene down here.

  His hands full of booze, he started to make his way over to the others. Just then the band started up and went into ‘Fisherman’s Blues’.

  *

  Aesop had been steering his attentions carefully away from Jessie and onto Helen for about an hour when he suddenly found himself back where he started.

  ‘I see we have a couple of Kellys in the house,’ he heard one of the guys in the corner say over the sound system. All eyes turned to their table. It been happening all night actually, but for the most part they were looking at Aesop. Word had gotten around that he was there and everyone in the place had been doing their best to have a good gander without getting caught. Now, though, it was Norman that was getting the looks as he got to his feet to a big cheer.

  ‘Come on Helen,’ he said. ‘We’ll do a couple.’

  ‘What?’ said Aesop, looking at her. ‘You as well?’

  ‘Helen’s the best singer in the place tonight, wait till you see,’ said Norman.

  ‘Really?’

  Helen just blushed a beautiful shade of cerise and stood up, leaving Jess
ie and Aesop on their own clapping at the table.

  Once she got over to a mike and turned around, still lovely and rosy about the face, she took a guitar off one of the guys and did a quick run on it as the guy adjusted the height of the mike stand for her. Ten seconds later she had the guitar in dropped D tuning and was strumming away on it. Aesop sat forward. This was getting fucking interesting.

  ‘Thanks very much,’ she said, into the mike. The crowd shut up cheering to let her sing. ‘Here’s a little song for a friend of mine.’

  She looked out around the crowd and Aesop followed her eyes to see who the cunt was. Then she looked full at him and he copped on. Jesus. She was reeling him in, the slapper, and he was falling for it!

  Off she went on the guitar, her hand going a mile a minute on the intro. A fiddle player came in after a bar or two and then a bodhrán and finally Norman, standing at the back so everyone would be able to see the rest of the band, started up with the bones. It was the Luka Bloom song, ‘You Couldn’t Have Come at a Better Time’and as Helen sang it she kept catching his eye. She didn’t hang about staring at him though. She wasn’t some hoor. She was being dead cool, pulling her face away from the mike and closing her eyes, her head cocked down as if to hear the bodhrán properly, for any of the short instrumental breaks. When she got to the ‘me and you and me and you and me …’ line, up came those eyes again like searchlights to pick him out and nail him to his seat. Fuck sake! Aesop had watched Jimmy do this a thousand times. He’d done it himself sure, from behind the drums when he spotted some honey out among the punters, and here he was now grinning up at her like a fuckin’ eejit and feeling special. He felt Jessie’s hand on his arm and her voice in his ear as she leaned in to him.

  ‘I think someone’s got the hots for someone,’ she said.

  ‘She’s great up there, isn’t she?’

  ‘She’s been doing it for years. Everyone knows Helen Kelly around here.’

  He nodded and turned back to the stage so she’d shut her hole and stop distracting him. This was great stuff. Everyone in the pub was clapping and singing along, punctuating the song with ye-hoo’s and calling her name out. She got to the end of the last chorus and stopped singing so that Norman could step up and do a bones solo. Aesop roared laughing. He was fucking brilliant, the head down, the hands up and the bones flicking and bouncing off each other like he had one toe stuck in a socket behind him. Aesop had known Norman for over twenty years and he’d never seen him do anything like this. Trying to get him to sing at a party was like pulling teeth, and yet here he was up on a stage in front of a hundred people and standing next to a cracking bird while rattling out a percussion solo that Aesop knew you didn’t just pull out of your arse. He was really good at those fuckers.

  Helen took a bow and grinned.

  ‘Thanks very much everyone.’

  But she didn’t look at Aesop this time and he felt a small jealous kick inside his belly. There were a few calls for another song and Helen nodded as she took off the guitar and handed it back to the guy behind her.

  ‘Maybe one more,’ she said, as they began to simmer down. One hand went into her back pocket and the other held the stand just in front of her with long slender fingers. The eyes closed, the hair got swept out of her face, and then she somehow shifted her body so that it glided right in, bringing the mike to her mouth and the rest of her a few inches closer to a rapt Aesop who was by now fit to mount the pint glass in front of him.

  ‘Need a bit of hush for this one,’ said Helen with an apologetic grin, and every gob in the place immediately snapped shut. One tool was on the phone, but his mate gave him a dig and a dirty look and the next thing the phone was back in his pocket.

  The song was in Irish, and Aesop was hopeless at Irish, but it was sad and slow and full of heart-rending wretchedness the way any decent Irish ballad ought to be if it had any respect for itself. Her voice was low and full now, and the couple of people humming softly along with her lent it a resonance that was like a pulse that gently throbbed around the pub.

  ‘What’s the song?’ Aesop whispered to Jessie next to him.

  ‘It’s called “An Cailín Álainn”. The Beautiful Girl.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘It’s about being in love with a beautiful girl. But she’s gone and all that’s left is heartbreak and pain. If she ever came back, the singer would make music for her like a harp or the song of a bird in the dewy fog and never be sad again.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘It’s gorgeous isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  It was better than gorgeous. It was perfect. Helen. She was … she was just perfect. For fuck sake, she was up there singing a love song to another girl! Whatever lusty aspirations he had a minute ago, now she was playing right into his lesbian fantasies as well. Aesop held his pint glass to his mouth, gazing up at her. He wondered if she had a shaved minge too. That’d be fuckin’ brilliant, so it would. He turned to Jessie.

  ‘Yeah?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t s’pose … eh … ah, it doesn’t matter.’

  Jessie probably didn’t know anyway.

  Chapter Twelve

  Jimmy wandered around his house, looking for things to do. But tonight all his clothes were washed and ironed, the place was spotless and there was half a lasagne in the fridge from yesterday so he didn’t even have to cook. A quick flick through the channels revealed nothing but the usual shite on the telly. He sat looking at it, but thinking of Susan, and then he walked over to his laptop to check on flights. Fuck it. He needed a holiday. He could have her in his arms by lunchtime tomorrow.

  He stood up and went out to the fridge to grab a can of Guinness and by the time it was in his belly he had his phone out, the contact list scrolled down to Susan’s name. An hour later there were three more empty cans on the coffee table in front of him and he was still fingering the phone. Four cans was the sweet spot. He decided that he was being a big fucking girl. It was time to sort this out. He’d go over. First thing in the morning. Spend the weekend with her at least and before he came back again he’d know what they both wanted.

  He pressed the green button, his heart hammering.

  *

  ‘Those two lads playing pool …’ said Aesop.

  It was some time after two and they were back in the cottage, sipping on a couple of fairly respectable Jamesons in front of the fire. They were both well oiled and there was no great urgency about sobering up.

  ‘What about them?’ said Norman.

  ‘Well, maybe I was just imagining things …’

  ‘You weren’t.’

  ‘So the big one fancied me then?’

  Norman looked over at him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, he kept looking at me. More than just the punters in the bar, like. They were just looking cos they knew I was in the band, but every time I saw yer man he was staring at me like he was on a promise.’

  ‘Aesop, he doesn’t fancy you. Langer. He’s a big oaf called Davey Molloy and he was looking at you because he had a thing with Helen and reckoned you were moving in on his territory.’

  ‘Ah. Right. Well that would’ve been me second guess.’

  ‘Nasty one, that fella. Keep away from him. He only left the place early because he’s got a match tomorrow and the manager of the team was in. I don’t know him that well, but I’ve heard that he’s a bit of an animal on the pitch and worse off it when he’s tanked up. Put a bloke in hospital last year with a bottle.’

  ‘Jaysis. So blowing him a kiss wasn’t a good idea?’

  ‘What? When did you do that?’

  ‘When you were up on the stage with Helen. I was swept up in all that gorgeous music and when I caught him eyeballing me, all the love just came out.’

  ‘You fucking eejit! What did he do?’

  ‘Well, for a minute I thought he was going to come over and lamp me, but his mate grabbed him and said something to him and then they headed off a bit after t
hat.’

  ‘Aesop, it’s no wonder everyone’s trying to kill you. Why do you have to be such a cheeky bastard all the time? Jesus, for someone who couldn’t box his way out of a paper bag, you’ve some knack for winding people up.’

  ‘Sure aren’t you here to protect me?’

  ‘Not like that I amn’t. Just because I’m here, that doesn’t mean you can go about the place taunting big fuckers like him. You think I want to get involved with anyone down here where I’m known?’

  ‘It was only a kiss. It’s not like I was passing him notes to meet me out in the jacks or anything. Can we change the music?’

  ‘No. Listen to me Aesop, it’s not funny. Helen and that bloke were nearly married and he’s having a hard time realising that it’s not going to happen. If you see him again, you bloody ignore him, okay?’

  ‘Do you not reckon you could take him?’

  Aesop was grinning at him now, the eyes all bloodshot and droopy.

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with it. I’m not getting into stupid situations down here just because you’re bored and feel like taking the piss.’

  ‘Sure you’re much bigger than him. I’d say you’d batter him. What is he … six foot? So in theory …’

  Norman sighed and looked into the fire.

  ‘He’s six-foot one. Weighs about ninety-two kilos. Favours the right leg from an old knee injury and he was holding his cue tonight like he was after getting a belt of a hurley on the thumb some time in the last week. I’d say his reach is seventy-six inches give or take, but he’s a southpaw. He leads with his right leg, so I’d stamp down on that, put the gammy knee out and that’d be the end of it. Two seconds. First round knockout. If he did try and get to his feet again he’d be a stupid bastard and it’d cost him the use of his shoulder for six months.’