A Slanting of the Sun

by Donal Ryan

  Retirement Do

  I BOUGHT TWENTY Benson from a woman with a shaking hand. She hardly looked at me. Her shop was small and musty, cornered by an empty square. Not long left in either of them, I’d say. I could have done it there, I suppose, but a voice inside said Wait, stick to the plan. I can still see her open shop door from where I’m standing now, spilling darkness onto the bright footpath. There’s a stone man above me, someone once heroic or great whose plinth I rest against, and a weeping willow across from me, its branches draped out over a low wall. Caressing the ground, mourning noiseless in the breeze. Lazy, those people, that they wouldn’t cut it back. Waiting for the council maybe. There’s no cloud at all. Only a fingernail of morning moon interrupts the blue, ragged, like it was bitten off and spat there.

  Four cars turned off the main street and parked in the square in the last few minutes. Faces of misery on the people in them. Maybe they’ve all a funeral to go to. They were all dickied up to the nines, but no colour nor smiles. There’s a church there below the road behind the hill I’m nearly sure. There’s one somewhere nearby, anyway. I see no spire, but my aspect is low. A woman across the aisle from me on the early bus had a missal and a rosary beads and she tramped off with purpose that way once we got off. This town has a smell about it, like stale milk. A warm breeze sweeps it into my nose. The one smell I hate, I don’t know why. I might gag if I had any bit in my stomach. It was the Bensons or something to eat. No contest. Fags take the edge off of hunger anyway.

  THERE’S ONLY THE one shade in this town it looks like. Saw him earlier, scratching on the station steps. Fine sugary chops on him. No full-time squad car even, I’d say. Cutbacks. I’d bet he’s not the fastest runner, either. He finishes up at five in the evening according to a notice posted on the station door. After that it’s your own lookout. You have to tell your troubles into an intercom and a peeler miles distant will sympathize.

  I lifted these boots lovely yesterday evening from a gearbag flung down at the edge of a hurling pitch. The lowering sun’s dying glare covered me. Old lads training. Junior A or B, jogging red-faced around, short pucks, laughing at each other. I remembered that craic from years ago. Funny how the senior players when too senior get called junior again. It must rankle. Signs on they paste one another vicious. Wallop younger lads for having the cheek to exist. I have the nearly new desert boots of one of them anyway. I was away up the road miles before he panted back to his bag. I left him my old tackies as consolation.

  I’m baking now all the same. I might cool myself among that willow’s strands. I’m prone to sunburn. My whole head swelled one time so burnt it got, filled with fluid. A tasty little she-doctor lanced it for me free. They have to, you know, if you turn up empty-pocketed. First, do no harm. Harm it would have been to run me unseen to. Foul pus from my roasted crown oozed onto her floor. Not to worry, she said, and smiled, swooping deftly to wipe up. Lord, she was a dinger. Then she read me kindly: melanoma, lotion, stay out of it altogether, cap, and I nodded dumbly, eyes down her front, like a plastic dog on a dingbat’s dashboard, placating her.

  THIS TYPE OF a town polices itself. Squinty eyes in every window. Widow women, risen early, long days to fill with looking; housewives watching for returning children, listening for the squeak of bicycles home safe; well-fed merchantmen protecting their shimmering shopfronts, their patches of footpath swept white. Farms of land outside town, cuteness. Hollow-cheeked tooth-lost wasters at pub doors sucking needle-thin rollups, watching for someone worse or worse off to balm themselves with generous comparison. I have them all well clocked the same way they have me clocked. All I need do now is watch and wait, smoke my fags slowly, each one to the very stub, to the burnt lip. How many will be left when I’m lifted, I wonder?

  A swallow hurls itself sunward. High flies, is that a good omen or bad? Small-talk is all omens are. I’ll repair to the willow’s shade.

  I’VE BEEN HERE now, seen and unseen, for a half a morning and most of a deathly afternoon. One slow pass of the timeshared squad is all I’ve under my belt. Narrow eyes atop a wide face, regarding me darkly. A thick neck bulging over a collar of policeman grey-blue. Working up to it. Those funereal people shuffled back to their cars a good while ago and drove off again stop-starting, rolling slow to join the end of a cortège coming over from behind the hill. I was right, so. Wreaths in the hearse window propped against the coffin sides, twisted into words. Saying: MAM.

  More came, parked up, shopped, filled boots, away; no one giving too much regard to the man half veiled by willow tree. I’ll have to throw a shape if this keeps up, unplanned for. I’ll think on my feet, don’t worry. The old one sold me the fags. I’ve a pain starting in the low part of my back, a hot ache, spreading upwards. I’m getting into bad humour. This footpath unwalked on all day. My sweating fly-bothered holdall unheeded.

  I GAVE A GOOD share of my life in England. I never drew social, there nor here. No numbers to my names. Never had a need. Invisible men can’t very well appear looking for pensions, though. All a man needs is energy. Once you’re careful you’re free as the wind. Some people clock for work now with the prints of their fingers. Clockwork people. That’s a slippery slope. Pickpocketing at a race meeting: sweets from babies. Confidence tricks: a copybook full of them I had once, scrawled, words and diagrams, unreadable to others. Never go too deep though. Open windows on summer nights in redbrick mansions in silent suburbs. I floated in and out gently with the breeze. Watches, bracelets, necklaces, rings, unlaundered silky things, crisp banknotes. Barely any weight on me. All things easily jettisoned. I slunk unseen like a rat. Watching always for cameras lately, though. They’re going to start putting chips into people soon, into their flesh, to track them from space satellites. Plenty old lags already have them over there, clamped to their ankles. Sitting chipped, filling their faces, watching their programmes.

  I used to pal about with a few ringdings beyond, when I was very young. We’d smoke on the kerb of the street and watch the respectable people pass. The others would snigger and smirk, I’d only look, and remember. We’d pull a job here and there, nothing major, nothing you’d be remembered for. Day labourers would give us a dark eye passing home, weak with tiredness and hunger, pierced by thirst. Money made for other men with the sweat they dripped into foreign soil. Soaked with it that land, the blood and sweat of Irish sons. Nothing gave to them in return only black livers and rattling chests. Standing bent-backed for their finishes at the thresholds of the giving, pleading for succour with their hangdog eyes and pillowcases of belongings. All pride gone, worked out of them. Living ghosts, looking for a deathbed and a cardboard council coffin. Cap-doffing at heaven’s gatepost. Spent.

  I lived with an English one for a small while. A bird. Handy. Met her at a bingo hall. I needed a place to lie low and gather myself, and she wanted a clean pet. One of them ones that always needs a fella around, just for the saying of it. Shapely. Rough, though. Council bungalow in a cul-de-sac. Loved television, forever shushing me. One damp day I lamped her close-fisted into the mouth so hard her chin hung swinging from her jaw. Sloppy really, weak, to let that out of me over a bit of shushing, but it fair seared into me for a finish. I took what bit of jewellery she had and forty-nine pounds sterling from a jar in her kitchen cupboard and stepped lightly out of there. I hardly remember now what name I had in that place. Still and all I remember to the pound the amount I lifted from her. Funny the things you log. I often thought to straighten those names I used in my mind. Or am I as well off forgetting them? What’s in a name?

  A savage slap I gave her, straight out of the blue, blindside. Swelled knuckles after it: stupid carry-on. She had a Superking on the go, halfway to her mouth, her lips pursed for the drag, eyes fixed on the borebox, a shush just finished. She had no notion what hit her. She’d only ever seen the bare smiling shell of me. As she slumped there stupid on the plastic-covered couch, conked, mouth slack, I whispered to her: Now. Fucking shush me now.

  I fleeced the lamb,
gave her unfeeling tits a grope goodbye and slung my narrow hook. Her Superking’s lit end lay smouldering a hole in her shell suit. Cremation. No tracks left. That’s no way to behave, though. I’m not proud.

  A CURTAIN OF homebound crows draws itself west to east across the sky. Stragglers flap and reel, caw-cawing madly, heavy with corn. Winging I’ll bet to that unseen churchyard where they’ll roost in trees that hulk darkly, layers of them top to bottom in ancient evergreens, a ranked parliament. Crows everywhere act the same. I wish they’d dip down to me here and pluck the lean corners of me in their black beaks, and carry me skyward. Some sight that would be for the flabby shade, a wing-beaten procession eclipsing his evening.

  I’m looking forward to my rest. Thirty-seven years of country lanes behind me; dead weights dragged up soaked and rocky hillsides; slow dissolution of flesh and bones in stinking bubbling limepits; numberless shovelfuls of stony clay dug from sodden wind-wailing moors. I’m crooked from it. Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales. France once. Cursed we are with health, my family, stout unfailing hearts, years to go till death for me. I had a grand-uncle saw a hundred and three. Fell in his garden and the dunt he got killed him. Pink with life till his very last day on earth, rotten with it.

  I MADE A GRAB for a little girl a week and a bit ago. Had two small children with her at the entrance to an estate of detached houses. She was brownish, elegant, hair thick and dark. Au pair, I’d say. I had a van with a side-sliding door gaped open, idling obediently, waiting to receive her. Got it from a pavee in Carthy’s Cross, plates off a scrapper. She drew back her leg as I dragged her and kicked me full force into the shinbone. The sudden starburst of pain loosened the hold I had on her. The children screeched and shrieked with laughter at the game and ran pell-mell around. She squared up to me, teeth bared. I retreated sharpish, shocked, burnt the van in a woody lane. Standing watching the yellow flames and black smoke swallow it, I decided it was time to finish up. Bested by a slinky girl, my first fail, sore and sorry. I’ll do one more or maybe two, I thought, and retire to a concrete box, warm in winter, cool in summer. Three squares and two collations, an hour a day of open air. On my back alone: smoking, thinking, remembering. Desk, paper, biro, books. A television I’ll never use. Solitarily confined, the only way to go. Five star.

  I bussed it a few days around routes old and new, looping lazily west. I met a girl on a lonely road lined with overlooking trees, a young woman I suppose, walking. Salt in the air, a misty stinging rain blown from the ocean. I looked at her enquiringly and she smiled and stopped to see could she help. Out pounding the roads, minding her shape for her husband. Oh, the lightness in her eyes, the heart-fluttering goodness of her. Softness, shampoo smell, soap and sweat, blonde. I folded her into a ditch after, and sliced a dainty keepsake from her. It’s mouldering now in my lightless holdall. Tempted to land it up onto that cop-shop counter and be done. I prefer the wait, though, all considered, the gradual unfolding. To stay still, let circumstances circle me in a fast-decaying orbit till impact. Then a bit of a shemozzle, and I’ll rest. Sleep, write a book maybe. An instruction manual. Things will take their course. I hardly hid her at all. She’s surely found by now, out in the open, my secret love.

  HERE HE COMES at last, hoofing it. Squad’s probably gone for the night. Nuisance. I was looking forward to being helped into a soft seat, stretching my legs out before me. Oh, what odds. Sidling towards me now head back, squinting, lips pursed. Just by the way, like, all casual. Finishing out his shift, cleansing his conscience. He couldn’t leave me unspoken to, just in case. No preamble. I like his style. No breath wasted.

  What are you at there?

  Having my fucking retirement do.

  Are you now begod. What’s the name?

  Jack the Ripper.

  Is that right, now. What’s in the bag?

  Have a look for yourself.

  I toe it slowly forward. It grits across the path towards him. He lays a level stare on me, tuts, bends grunting and unzips my muddied holdall with sausage fingers, surprisingly deft. He roots for a few seconds through my tools and bits of clothes and stops suddenly dead, looks sickly, slowly up at me, white-yellow moocow eyes bulging. Her slender hand, cleaved cleanly at the wrist, tumbles indecorously from my bag’s gaping mouth and plops palm down on the unyielding concrete. Ah go easy, I tell him, not unkindly. Her solitaire splits the evening light into tiny rainbows. Her wedding band of naked gold looks forlorn and unburnished below it.

  He straightens, moaning softly, and stumbles backwards off the shallow kerb, clawing wildly behind himself for balance at the empty air. He lands on his arse with a whump. I turn one-eighty from him calmly, smiling, and stand straight and still, arms obligingly behind, wrists crossed neatly. He’ll need a moment or two to regain his feet and his composure. My breath as I speak sways the fronds gently of my weeping willow. A stifled yawn softens my words.

  Take me away, and look after me. I’m tired.

  Aisling

  I ALWAYS SEE something on my half-two fag break. It’s the way I have a view out the archway and onto the street. I got a hop there when my eye landed on her, walking in along with her new fella. My hands have pins and needles and I know from them that my heart skipped a beat. I don’t know exactly how new the new fella is, but he’s newer than me, that’s for sure. My oul fella said he spotted her in town during the week all right but I thought he was raving. They’re holding hands. The last time she seen me I’d have had a bit more hair and a smaller belly but definitely she would recognize me if I stood out in their path. I’ll step back a bit, and let the open door shield me. The new fella looks like a right langer. One of them lads that’s all gym muscles, never lifted a block or a keg nor done a proper day’s work. She has a summery-looking frock on her, shortish. She always used think she had flaking legs. She had in her hole. They were all right, like. Ah fuck it, they were perfect. They still are.

  I seen her cousin a small while ago all right, mooching around in Reception. A big fat yoke she was one time, and she fallen away to nothing. I got a right hop when I recognized her. She’s not looking too bad, all the same, tightened up the finest, nothing flapping that I could see anyway. Some of them ones that go right skinny after being mud fat for years do have a fierce sad and sorry look about them. Lonesome after the grub, I suppose. And bits hanging that used to bounce lovely. All the life gone from them. They’re waiting now at the front corner near the brasserie side door, her and the fella she’s going with a fair old time that won’t marry her because he can’t decide is he definitely not queer and wants to keep his options open till the very crunch.

  They’re after clocking each other. I may as well have been a fuckin flowerpot. Squealing and kissing and holding one another out at arm’s length like you would a child with a shitty nappy, sizing one another up and letting on they’re so fuckin happy to see one another they’re having a fuckin orgasm apiece. Every cunt’s getting told who’s who. The formerly fat cousin’s fella is standing with his hands in his pockets, probably keeping a good hold of his langer. No awareness of protocol. Shake the new cunt’s hand, you mope. You never seen him before. Ye have been thrown together by the gods of riding. Make the fuckin most of it, you miserable prick. That’s all any of us can do.

  I hope they don’t come into the bar once they’ve their faces filled. They probably fuckin will, though. She’ll be mad for a nose, to see to know am I still here, after all these years. Well, all seven of these years. That’s a tenth of a life, or an eleventh, anyway. A twelfth for some long-living cunts. Who’d want to? Looking at telly, dribbling. Thank fuck oul Mossy Bradley got me a grand rectangular badge, solid-golden, with MANAGER wrote across it. I fuckin insisted. Tight prick would have let me write it across my shirt in marker otherwise. I’m going to go handy now with my fag. See can the black lad inside go more than five minutes without making a hames of something.

  I can hear it already, and see it, and I know how it’s going to go. Matty, she’ll say, oh my God
, how are you? And God and you will be stretched to fuckin breaking point. The new fella will stand behind her, smiling, thinking to himself Who’s this prick? The cunt’ll bristle, like a fuckin Jack Russell, but in that way only men can see. I might come out from behind the bar and give her a kiss and all, and have a grand feel of her, and a smell of her hair, just to spite him. It’s great to see you, I’ll say, all posh. You look great. Great, great. She’ll tell me I look great. Ask how are things. Great, I’ll say. Great, great. You’re still here, she’ll say, and I’ll say Sure am, shur where else would I fuckin be? Hahaha! Formerly-Fatarse will smile all fakely and let on she hasn’t a clue who I am. I probably won’t mention all the nights I seen her in the nightclub here, flubbing around the place, hoping some poor drunken cunt might take her away and try and ride her or rape her or something. Ah, howaya, I’ll say, I haven’t seen you in years, Jaysus there’s fuck-all left of you! Or maybe I’ll throw a smart dig. I’ll see how it goes. The new fella will be told This is an old friend of mine, and I’ll think to myself, Ya, old friend, sure. Old friend.

  She only got cuntish on me the once. I went for my dinner one day in her parents’ house. Mossy gave me the night off especially. I was only gave short notice about the invitation. She picked out what shirt and pants I should wear and all. I arrived a small bit early. I brang you flowers, I told her mother at the door. Oh, the mother says, they’re lovely. No smile had she for me. She left the lovely flowers in my hand. I had awful trouble swallowing my food. Not enough gravy, wouldn’t please them ask for more. She cornered me after as I came back from the flowery downstairs jacks. I thought for a second she was going to tell me how I was playing a fucking blinder, that the old pair were mad for me. Brang? she said, and a right wicked puss on her. Brang is not the past tense of bring. Brought is. I got a fair old hop. I just remember going What the fuck? Thanks for the fuckin grammar lesson. And deciding there and then she was getting her cards once I’d one more ride got off her. One to remember me by. And something weird happening to my eyes for a second or two. A blurriness, or something, and a stabbing and burning pain in my stomach. But I recovered well and talked away to her oul lad about football the rest of the evening – a grand skin he was – and her mother staying in the kitchen cleaning up, and saying Nice to meet you as I fucked off, and leaving on her sudsy Marigolds the way she wouldn’t have to touch off me again.