Cheating at Canasta

by William Trevor

  They reached the quiet streets, St Stephen’s Church at the corner of Goodchild Street, the shadowy sprawl of trees on either side of Sunderland Avenue ahead of them.

  ‘Who’re those geeks?’ Donovan suddenly exclaimed and they all stopped, not knowing where to look at first. But when Francie pointed they saw the red anorak.

  ‘It’s bloody Dalgety,’ Manning said.

  The two parted in Sunderland Avenue, Dalgety turning into Blenning Road. On his own, he went a little faster, but paused when he noticed that one of the garden gates he was passing was invitingly open. He went through it and crossed a lawn to a corner near the house where he couldn’t be seen from the windows. He urinated in the shadow of an eleagnus bush.

  Once or twice, making their way from the nightclub, they had been aware of voices behind them but, engrossed in conversation themselves, they hadn’t looked round to see whose they were. Dalgety couldn’t hear the voices now and imagined that whoever they belonged to had gone in some other direction. A light hadn’t come on in the house, which sometimes happened when you found a garden that was convenient for the purpose he had used it for. He unzipped his anorak because he’d noticed that the teeth of the zip hadn’t been properly aligned. While he was zipping it up again he was struck, a blow on the right side of his head. He thought that someone had come out of the house, and was thinking he hadn’t heard the front door opening when the next blow came. He stumbled and fell, and a foot smashed into his jaw when he was lying on the grass. He tried to stand up but couldn’t.

  Aisling had watched, not wanting to but she had. Francie had looked away when she saw what was happening. In the garden, standing back at first, not taking part, Donovan moved forward when the boy was lying on the grass. Kilroy stayed with the girl, calculating that he’d lose out with her if he joined in. Nobody spoke while the assault was taking place, not in the garden, not on the road. Nobody did when they all moved on, in a bunch again.

  Aisling wondered what the boy had done, what insults had been exchanged in the Star or before that, how the boy had offended. Something of the headiness of the nightclub seemed to be there again, something of the music’s energy, of the wildness that was often in a face as it went by on the dance-floor before it was sucked into the suffocating closeness of the crowd.

  ‘Oh, leave me be!’ Francie suddenly cried out. ‘Just leave me, would you!’

  ‘Behave yourself, cowboy.’ Manning’s rebuke came lightly, and for a moment Aisling saw the white gleam of his teeth.

  Kilroy muttered, and desisted for a few minutes before he tried again and was again shaken off. In Charleston Road Francie parted from them, scuttling off, not saying goodnight. Kilroy hesitated, but didn’t follow her.

  ‘Dalgety’s a tit,’ Manning said when Aisling asked why Dalgety had been duffed up. ‘Forget it,’ he said.

  ‘I never heard that name before,’ Aisling said. ‘Dalgety.’

  ‘Yeah, a nerd’s.’

  Conversation lapsed then, but passing the entrance to the Greenbanks Hotel Donovan began on a story about his sister, how she was going to a shrink, and hated it so much she often didn’t turn up for her weekly sessions.

  ‘Some guy comes on heavy,’ Donovan said. ‘You end up with a shrink.’

  Nobody commented. Donovan did not go on; the interrupted silence held. So that was it, Aisling thought, and felt relieved, aware of a relaxation in her body, as if her nerves had been strung up and no longer were. This Dalgety had upset Donovan’s sister, going too far when she didn’t want him to, whatever form his persistence took putting her in need of psychiatric care. And the anger Aisling had witnessed in the garden touched her, what had happened seeming different, less than it had been while she watched.

  ‘See you, Mano,’ Donovan said. ‘Cheers, Aisling.’

  She said goodnight. Donovan turned into Cambridge Road, and soon afterwards Kilroy turned off, too.

  ‘All right, was he?’ Aisling asked then.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Dalgety.’

  ‘Christ, of course he was.’

  They went to Spire View Lane, where they always went when it was as late as this. ‘You’re a dazzler tonight,’ Manning whispered, slipping his hands beneath her clothes.

  She closed her eyes, kissing him back, his early-morning stubble harsh on her chin. The first time she had experienced that roughness it had excited her, and every time since it had. ‘I’d best be getting back,’ she said, not that she wanted to get back anywhere.

  A dog came sniffing at them, some kind of small breed, black or grey, you couldn’t tell in the dark. Someone whistled for it and it ran off.

  ‘I’ll walk you over,’ Manning said, which he always did when she had to go. He lit a cigarette, as he always did too. The smoke would get into her clothes and she’d be asked about it if there was anyone still downstairs, although usually nobody was.

  ‘I looked back,’ Manning said. ‘He was up on his feet.’

  Bernadette rang, a note for her in the kitchen said, and Sister Teresa about knowing your part for Thursday.

  No one was still up or there wouldn’t be the note. Aisling made cocoa and had biscuits with it, sitting at the table with the Evening Herald, then pushing it away. She wished it hadn’t happened, but thought about Hazel Donovan so badly affected that she had to be taken to a shrink and before she finished her cocoa she wondered if she really wished it. She might have stopped him but she hadn’t, and she remembered now not wanting to. ‘The hard man,’ his friends said when they greeted him, knowing him well, knowing he took chances. ‘Aw, come on,’ he had urged, the time he gave her a lift on the bar of his bicycle, when they were caught by her father coming towards them on a bicycle too, his veterinary bag hanging on the handlebars. ‘Don’t ever let me see the like of that again,’ her father stormed at her when she returned to the house. Being his favourite made being caught all the worse, her mother explained. Neither of them approved of Martin Manning. They didn’t understand.

  She washed the mug she’d drunk her cocoa from at the sink and put the lid on the biscuit tin. She picked up Sister Teresa’s typed sheets and went upstairs. Scenes from Hamlet was Sister Teresa’s title for the monologues she had put together, the first time she had attempted something that wasn’t a conventional play. That’s fennel for you, Aisling murmured, half asleep already, and columbines…

  At Number 6 Blenning Road the elderly woman who had lived alone there since she was widowed seven months ago was roused from a dream in which she was a child again. She went to the top of her stairs, leaned over the banister, and shouted in the direction of the hall door, asking who was there. But all that happened was the ringing of the doorbell again. It would take more than that, she told herself, to get her to open her door at this hour.

  When the bell ceased there was a banging and a rapping, and a voice coming from far away because she hadn’t had time to put her deaf-aids in. Even when the letterbox rattled and the voice was louder she still couldn’t hear a word of what was said. She went back to her bedroom for her deaf-aids and then trudged down to the hall.

  ‘What d’you want?’ she shouted at the letterbox.

  Fingers appeared, pressing the flap open.

  ‘Excuse me, missus. Excuse me, but there’s someone lying down in your garden.’

  ‘It’s half past six in the morning.’

  ‘Could you phone up the guards, missus?’

  In the hall she shook her head, not answering that. She asked whereabouts in her garden the person was.

  ‘Just lying there on the grass. I’d call them up myself only my mobile’s run out.’

  She telephoned. No point in not, she thought. She was glad to be leaving this house, which for so long had been too big for two and was now ridiculously big for one. She had been glad before this, but now was more certain than ever that she had made the right decision. She thought so again while she watched from her dining-room window a Garda car arriving, and an ambulance soon after tha
t. She opened her hall door then, and saw a body taken away. A man came to speak to her, saying it was he who had talked to her through the letterbox. A guard told her the person they had found lying near her eleagnus was dead.

  On the news the address was not revealed. A front garden, it was reported, and gave the district. A milkman going by on his way to the depot had noticed. No more than that.

  When Aisling came down at five past eight they were talking about it in the kitchen. She knew at once.

  ‘You all right?’ her mother asked, and she said she was. She went back to her bedroom, saying she had forgotten something.

  It was all there on the front page of the Evening Herald’s early-afternoon edition. No charges had been laid, but it was expected that they would be later in the day. The deceased had not been known to the householder in whose garden the body had been discovered, who was reported as saying she had not been roused by anything unusual in the night. The identity of the deceased had not yet been established, but a few details were given, little more than that a boy of about sixteen had met his death following an assault. Witnesses were asked to come forward.

  Aisling didn’t; the girl who had tagged along did. The victim’s companion on the walk from the Star nightclub gave the time they left it, and the approximate time of their parting from one another. The nightclub bouncers were helpful but could add little to what was already known. The girl who had come forward was detained for several hours at the Garda station from which enquiries were being made. She was complimented on the clarity of her evidence and pressed to recall the names of the four people she had been with. But she had never known those names, only that the red-haired boy was called Mano and had himself addressed two of his companions as ‘cowboy’. Arrests were made just before midnight.

  Aisling read all that the next morning in the Irish Independent, which was the newspaper that came to the house. Later in the day she read an almost identical account in the Irish Times, which she bought in a newsagent’s where she wasn’t known. Both reports referred to her, describing her as ‘the second girl’, whom the gardaí´ were keen to locate. There was a photograph, a coat thrown over the head and shoulders of a figure being led away, a wrist handcuffed to that of a uniformed Garda. The second arrest, at a house in Ranelagh, told no more. No names were released at first.

  When they were, Aisling made a statement, confessing that she was the second girl, and in doing so she became part of what had happened. People didn’t attempt to talk to her about it, and at the convent it was forbidden that they should do so; but it was sometimes difficult, even for strangers, to constrain the curiosity that too often was evident in their features. When more time passed there was the trial, and then the verdict: acquitted of murder, the two who had been apprehended were sent to gaol for eleven years, their previous good conduct taken into account, together with the consideration, undenied by the court, that there was an accidental element in what had befallen them: neither had known of their victim’s frail, imperfect heart.

  Aisling’s father did not repeat his castigation of her for making a friendship he had never liked: what had happened was too terrible for petty blame. And her father, beneath an intolerant surface, could draw on gentleness, daily offering comfort to the animals he tended. ‘We have to live with this,’ he said, as if accepting that the violence of the incident reached out for him too, that guilt was indiscriminately scattered.

  For Aisling, time passing was stranger than she had ever known days and nights to be before. Nothing was unaffected. In conveying the poetry of Shakespeare on the hastily assembled convent stage she perfectly knew her lines, and the audience was kind. But there was pity in that applause, because she had unfairly suffered in the aftermath of the tragedy she had witnessed. She knew there was, and in the depths of her consciousness it felt like mockery and she did not know why.

  A letter came, long afterwards, flamboyant handwriting bringing back the excitement of surreptitious notes in the past. No claim was made on her, nor were there protestations of devotion, as once, so often, there had been. He would go away. He would bother no one. He was a different person now. A priest was being helpful.

  The letter was long enough for contrition, but still was short. Missing from its single page was what had been missing, also, during the court hearing: that the victim had been a nuisance to Donovan’s sister. In the newspaper photograph—the same one many times—Dalgety had been dark-haired, smiling only slightly, his features regular, almost nondescript except for a mole on his chin. And seeing it so often, Aisling had each time imagined his unwanted advances pressed on Hazel Donovan, and had read the innocence in those features as a lie. It was extraordinary that this, as the reason for the assault, had not been brought forward in the court; and more extraordinary that it wasn’t touched upon in a letter where, with remorse and regret, it surely belonged. ‘Some guy comes on heavy,’ Donovan, that night, had said.

  There had been a lingering silence and he broke it to mention this trouble in his family, as if he thought that someone should say something. The conversational tone of his voice seemed to indicate he would go on, but he didn’t. Hungry for mercy, she too eagerly wove into his clumsy effort at distraction an identity he had not supplied, allowing it to be the truth, until time wore the deception out.

  After the convent, Aisling acquired a qualification that led to a post in the general office of educational publishers. She had come to like being alone and often in the evenings went on her own to the cinema, and at weekends walked at Howth or by the sea at Dalkey. One afternoon she visited the grave, then went back often. A stone had been put there, its freshly incised words brief: the name, the dates. People came and went among the graves but did not come to this one, although flowers were left from time to time.

  In a bleak cemetery Aisling begged forgiveness of the dead for the falsity she had embraced when what there was had been too ugly to accept. Silent, she had watched an act committed to impress her, to deserve her love, as other acts had been. And watching, there was pleasure. If only for a moment, but still there had been.

  She might go away herself, and often thought she would: in the calm of another time and place to flee the shadows of bravado. Instead she stayed, a different person too, belonging where the thing had happened.

  An Afternoon

  Jasmin knew he was going to be different, no way he couldn’t be, no way he’d be wearing a baseball cap backwards over a number-one cut, or be gawky like Lukie Giggs, or make the clucking noise that Darren Finn made when he was trying to get a word out. She couldn’t have guessed; all she knew was he wouldn’t be like them. Could be he’d put you in mind of the Rawdeal drummer, whatever his name was, or of Al in Doc Martin. But the boy at the bus station wasn’t like either. And he wasn’t a boy, not for a minute.

  He was the only person waiting who was alone apart from herself, and he didn’t seem interested in the announcements about which buses were arriving or about to go. He didn’t look up when people came in. He hadn’t glanced once in her direction.

  In the end, if nothing happened, Jasmin knew she would have to be brazen. She called it that to herself because it was what it amounted to, because you didn’t get anywhere if you weren’t. All your life you’d be carrying teas to the lorrymen in the diner, wiping down the tables and clearing away plastic plates, doing yourself an injury because you were soaking up the lorrymen’s cigarette smoke. ‘Now, you don’t be brazen, Angie,’ her mother used to scold her when she was no more than five or six and used to reach up for the cooking dates or a chocolate bar in Pricerite, opening whatever it was before her mother saw.

  ‘You carry that to a woman doing the shelves. You say a mistake, you tell her that. Brazen you are,’ her mother always ended up. ‘You just watch it, girl.’ She kept quiet herself. She never approached a woman who was arranging the shelves, just put whatever she’d taken behind the cornflakes or the kitchen rolls.

  Jasmin was her own choice of name, since she’d always
detested Angie and considered it common when she was older. ‘Oh, la-di-da!’ her mother’s riposte had been to this further evidence of brazenness. ‘Listen to our madam!’ she would urge Holby, trying to draw the husband she had now into it, but Holby had become fly about things like that, having learned a lesson when he’d been drawn into a no-go marriage. It wasn’t even the way you spelled it, her mother witheringly commented, no ‘e’ at the end was your bloody Muslim way. But when her mother wasn’t there Holby said all that was a load of rubbish. ‘You spell your name like it suits you,’ he advised. ‘You stick to how you want it.’ Her mother was a violent woman, Jasmin considered, and knew that Holby did too.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, crossing to where the man was waiting. ‘I’m Jasmin.’

  He smiled at her. He had a peaky face, his teeth crowded at the front, light-coloured hair left long. He was wearing flannel trousers and a jacket, and that surprised her. A kind of speckled navy-blue the jacket was, with a grey tie. And shoes, not trainers, all very tidy. What surprised her more than anything was that he could have been mid-thirties, maybe a few years older. From his voice on the chat line, she’d thought more like nineteen.

  ‘You fancy a coffee, Jasmin?’ he said.

  She felt excited when he spoke. The first time, on the chat line, she’d felt it when he’d called her Jasmin. Then again yesterday, when he’d said why don’t they meet up?

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ she said.

  All the time he kept his smile going. He was the happy sort, he’d told her on the chat line, not the first time, maybe the third or fourth. He’d asked her if she was the happy sort herself and she’d said yes, even though she knew she wasn’t. Droopy was what she was, she’d heard her mother saying when Holby first came to live in the house; and later on, when her mother wasn’t there, Holby asked her what the trouble was and she said nothing. ‘Missing your dad?’ Holby suggested. Seven she’d been then.

  ‘You like to go in here?’ the man suggested when they came to a McDonald’s. ‘You all right with a McDonald’s, Jasmin?’