The sound of Pat’s swallowing seemed unnaturally loud to him. The solicitor, however, gave no indication whatever of noticing it.
“What?” Pat responded, with an urgency that was quite unnecessary. “Oh—she’s gone to America. She says the hot weather’ll be good for her veins.”
“I see,” the solicitor replied and went to the window to stand there staring out with his hands behind his back. “Ah yes,” he went on, contemplating the irregular-shaped roofs of the town, “memories. They can be a heavy burden sometimes.”
There was an unmistakable hint of melancholy in Pat’s eyes. He found himself suddenly declaring, “Sometimes, Mr. Kidwell, I think of us going out the road—down the lane from the house and off out the road to gather pussyfoots.”
The solicitor turned from the window. His countenance bore a look of puzzlement as he stroked his chin.
“Gather what, Pat?” he said.
“Pussyfoots,” his client replied. “That’s what she used to call them.”
A smile of recognition began to manifest itself on the young solicitor’s face.
“Ah yes!” he declared. “The catkins! The catkins of spring! Didn’t I used to collect the litde buggers myself!”
Pat lowered his head as though in disappointment.
“Don’t call them that, Mr. Kidwell,” Pat pleaded softly. “I’d rather you didn’t call them that.”
Mr. Kidwell knitted his brow.
“Call them what, Pat?” he asked earnestly. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Little buggers,” Pat replied. “It’s just that it sounds—well, disrespectful, quite frankly.”
The solicitor’s cheek jerked.
“What?” he gasped, then modified his tone to say: “Ha ha. Yes. Why, of course it does! I’m sorry, Pat.”
He rested his hand on his client’s shoulder.
“I shouldn’t have,” he murmured apologetically.
“It’s all right, Mr. Kidwell,” Pat said. “I suppose it doesn’t matter now anyway. Now that the memories are gone. And the house.”
The solicitor was seated once more.
“No matter, Pat!” he said, donning his spectacles. “I’m sure you’ll be able to start a new life for yourself. Start all over again with the money you get from Mr. McGaw. Who’s going to be pleased, don’t you think? Now that everything’s worked out so well. Don’t you think he’ll be pleased, Pat?”
It was as though Pat’s face had been mysteriously transmogrified into a blank sheet of canvas. As, without a single, identifiable trace of emotion, he responded, “Yes. I’m quite sure he’ll be delighted, Mr. Kidwell.”
There can be no doubt but that the chill wind which appeared to disturb the shutters of the solicitor’s office window found its source in the arctic stillness that formed the “inscape” of the gaze of Pat McNab.
At three o’clock exactly the following day, the telephone rang in the McNab residence and Pat removed the receiver from its cradle to hear a familiar voice uttering the following words in clearly delighted tones, “Absolutely over the moon, Pat! Sure the likes of you and me shouldn’t be fighting! Didn’t your mother know my mother! Jasus, Pat, this is great news! And do you know what—just for being so dacent, I’m prepared to throw in another fifty pound! What do you think of that, eh? Another fifty pound—free gratis and for nothing! What do you say, Pat? And I’ll bring it over this very evening—along with a bottle of the best phwishkey! What do you say to that, eh?”
In an unconscious gesture, Pat pressed his closed fist to his lips and coughed in a polite, almost feminine manner. “Bring the sheep too,” he said into the receiver.
There was a pause.
“What was that, Pat?” was Bat McGaw’s reply.
“Bring the sheep too, will you, Mr. McGaw?” continued Pat softly. “You might as well move in now as later. Sure, aren’t the sheds lying there idle? Especially the big haybarn.”
For a fraction of a second, Bat stammered a litde.
“What’s that, Pat?” he said. “Are you sure? God, but that’s very decent of you! And it just so happens I had two dozen come in this morning on the lorry! Thanks, Pat, I will! I’ll bring them over and the pair of us will drink till cock crow! Just like old pals! Like frigging old pals, you and me, Pat! Yes sir!”
Not a flicker of emotion registered itself on the face of Pat McNab as into the receiver he piped: “Like old pals, Mr. McGaw! Old frigging pals!”
“Gluck now! You’re a good one!” cried Bat chirpily as he hung up and the phone went dead.
“Gluck now,” repeated Pat to himself, impassively, his eyes fixed on the small hills outside the window, “gluck now, indeed! Gluck gluck gluck!”
There was a considerable amount of shoveling and cleaning up to be done in the haybarn but, paradoxically, rather than putting Pat in bad humor and causing him to mutter, “Ah to hell with this!” or “Will I ever be bloody well finished here!” it had the effect of actually putting him in quite good humor. Indeed, he was smiling as he swept up all the dirt and dust and manure, wiping his brow and saying, “Have to make sure we have the place nice and tidy for them, don’t we? After all, there was nobody liked sheep better than me and Mammy. We used to look in at them every day when we’d be coming home from gathering the pussyfoots!”
As he swept vigorously, every so often he would pause and lean his elbow on the top of the brush, staring out the window as if it were a small television, upon which was displayed the image of Pat’s younger self in his green knitted V-neck pullover and short trousers, standing holding his mammy’s hand as they stared in through the wire fence at the sheep masticating quietly in the afternoon sunshine.
“Look, Ma!” Pat heard his younger self say. “Aren’t they lovely? And the way they look at you!”
He shivered a litde as he saw his mother smile.
“Yes, Pat,” she said, squeezing his fingers a litde, “they are.”
She squeezed his fingers again and crinkled up her nose a litde.
“Little fluffies!” she said.
Pat giggled and placed his hand over his mouth.
“Little fluffies!” he repeated. “Ha ha!”
At about half past three, all the work was done, and Pat set about preparing himself inside the house, polishing drinking glasses, plumping armchair cushions, and what have you. When he had everything completed to his satisfaction, he decided to treat himself to a litde nip of Bols Advocaat and sat beneath the window puffing on a cigarette and reflecting on recent developments. On the third puff of his cigarette, he was disconcerted by a small wave of melancholy which, unexpectedly, swept past within him, and he found himself thinking, “It’s a pity all the same that it had to be spoiled. That he had to go and spoil it. Because that seems to be what has happened really, isn’t it? O, you can say, ‘No. No, it isn’t’—and the pain you have in your stomach all the time now doesn’t come from everything being spoiled, it comes from something else. You can say it and keep on saying it but that’s only because you want it to be true. Simply because that’s the way you want it to be.”
A wisp of smoke grew from each of Pat’s nostrils as he contemplated the glowing tip of his cigarette and said, softly, “But it isn’t true. And deep down, you know it. You know it more than anything in the world.”
The sun was still coming through the branches of the trees like small shoals of arrows as Bat McGaw flapped along the road in his Wellingtons, guiding his flock of sheep with a straight and narrow switch and, tucked under his arm, a brown paper bag containing his ten-ounce bottle of “phwishkey.” As he came past the creamery, Bat had never been in better form. “Haw haw!” he chortled to himself. “What a laugh! God, but there’s some suckers about this town! Hup back! Ho! Whoa, boy! Get out of there, you effing bocketly melt of a God’s own hoor, you!”
The chastened blackface ewe withdrew from the culvert and complied.
Bat was chuffed to find Pat awaiting him at the back gate leading into his garden.
; “Ah, there you are, Bat,” he said, extending his hand. “Isn’t it great to see such a stretch in the evenings?”
Bat had not expected such a display of friendliness and was somewhat flattered.
“It is indeed, Pat,” he replied brightly. “It’s always glad I am to see the back of that winter.”
“Oh now, don’t be talking!” replied Pat, taking his hands out of his pockets and rubbing them together. “Any how—let’s get these litde fellows into the pens over here in the haybarn so yourself and myself can sit down and have a right old natter!”
“Right you be, Pat!” answered Bat, now rubbing his hands together.
It took only twenty-five minutes before the rump of the last of the sheep disappeared through the door and into the haybarn. Bat wiped some perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand and said, “There we are now! Last leg of mutton all present and correct! Now you and me can have ourselfs a dacent drink—dealing man to dealing man! What do you say, Pat?”
Pat grinned from ear to ear.
“A drop of drink for the dealing man!”
Bat shook his head and a merry light danced inside his eyes.
“Now you’re talking, Pat!” he said, as he started walking. “Now you’re fecking well talking!”
It was now 3:00 A.M. and Bat was still talking. Pat stared at his own reflection floating across the surface of the brandy and felt a cold shudder ripple through him. He sighed. And what the cause of that sigh was, he knew. Because somehow deep inside, he had been hoping that—irrationally, perhaps—Bat McGaw would defy expectations and turn out not to be like himself at all. That he and Pat would indeed enjoy a “dacent drink” and that, somehow—inexplicably—thereby would be revealed a side of him so kind and sweet that Pat would no longer have to contemplate proceeding with the course of action he had decided upon. And that, against all the odds, he and his new neighbor would be—triumphantly!—confirmed friends for life.
“But it was not to be,” murmured Pat to himself as he raised his glass to his lips. “Sadly.”
“Eh?” roared Bat McGaw, reaching for another bottle of Macardles Ale and elevating a corduroy-clad buttock to expel some wind. “Phwat did ye say, Pat?”
It was well past five o’clock in the morning when a smiling, bleary-eyed Bat McGaw announced that it was his intention to leave and make for home. Or, “Hit the high road!” as he termed it. “You’re the besht man in the town!” he declared, as he made his way toward the hallway. “I really enjoyed the ayvenin’!”
A flicker of a smile passed across Pat’s face.
“Yes, Bat,” he replied, “so did I.”
The visitor raised his hand in the air as he negotiated his way past a basket of turf adjacent to the door.
“I’ll see you soon again then, Pat!” he cried.
The figure standing in the center of the kitchen staring after him might have been a statue carved from the most ungiving stone. A figure thinking, “But it isn’t going to happen like that, is it, Bat? That’s not the way it’s going to happen. You’ve gone and made sure of that, haven’t you?”
There was no mistaking the distaste etched on the face of Pat McNab as he recalled some snippets from the earlier part of the night’s conversation. He considered momentarily that Bat McGaw might benefit from a rechristening. That it might be apposite for his mother to bear him along to the nearest baptismal font and have the clergyman announce, “I now rechristen you: The Living Mouth.”
“For that’s what the experience of the past six hours has been like,” reflected Pat, “trapped in a kitchen with a mouth that cannot close. The biggest mouth in human history.”
An acidic taste came into Pat’s own mouth then as he saw Bat McGaw join his hands behind his head and continue—as no doubt he would have even if the room had been entirely empty—”You see the ting is—the ting is, Pat! Bat McGaw had to pull himself up by his bootstraps, you see! You know what we used to have to ate, Pat? Gristle! That’s what the mam used to give us! Gristle sandwiches! What do you think of that? Sure I’ll bet you even your mad mother didn’t give you the like of that! Oops, sorry, Pat! But no, seriously—I’ll bet she didn’t! Even the worst raving old witch would have more respect for her children than to give them that! But that’s what we got! Gristle sandwiches—and glad to get them! Pat—is there any more drink?”
Which there had been, Pat reflected, and plenty of it. He had seen to that. Crates and crates of it, Mr. McGaw, he had said. As much Macardles Ale as you can drink.
“I suppose you’ll be sorry to go all the same! To layve the house, I mane!” Pat’s visitor had observed somewhere in the vicinity of 4:00 A.M. “Them auld memories you were talking about, eh?”
“That’s right,” Pat had smiled thinly, “me and my memories, Bat!”
“Oh now—memories! Don’t be talking!”
Bat shook his head and wiped his strawberry like nose with his forearm.
“They’d break your heart, wouldn’t they?” replied Pat, with the sick feeling coming into his stomach again.
Bat McGaw slapped the arm of the chair with his open palm.
“Oh indeed and they would surely! They would surely, Pat!”
“Every time I think of her singing,” said Pat. With a wistful tone in his voice.
“A good singer, was she, Pat?” asked Bat McGaw. “Was she a good singer?”
Pat nodded.
“The best in the town, Bat. No matter what lies they tell. Sing till she’d drop, my mother.”
Bat McGaw winked appreciatively and took a slug of his ale.
“God love her, Pat. And what did she sing?”
“She sang this,” Pat replied as he made his way to the radiogram, “she sang this, so she did.”
A melody that was the color of liquid amber filled the room and Bat McGaw closed his eyes as he digested the words:
But old flames can’t hold a candle to you
No one can light up the night like you do
Flickering embers of love I’ve known one or two
But old flames can’t hold a candle to you.
“Boys oh dear,” said Bat, “man but that’s a good one. Memories! Don’t be talking to me! I mind the time me and the brother were above in Mullingar—!”
It was as though the words which followed were carried across some vast cowboy-style canyon or valley.
What disappointed Pat most was that McGaw was incapable of seeing that he was trying to tell him something. Hoping against hope that he might understand him, even the tiniest litde bit, so that he might be spared the inevitable. For, in truth, Pat had no real appetite for what it was he knew he had to do, and would have dearly welcomed a way out. But McGaw ensured that it became impossible. Eventually, making it hopelessly, irrevocably impossible. By uttering the following words:
“Ah would you shut up out of that, Pat, you and your effing memories! You’d put a body astray in the head! Have ye any more drink there, have ye?”
With this statement—the veracity of which was, in its directness, a blessed relief—the die was cast. It was as though, as Pat sat there in those last few dwindling hours before dawn, he was staring across the room at what was nothing other than a living pile of human mud.
There can be litde denying that the bleats of the poor unfortunate animals were anything but pitiful. They were cries for assistance which would have melted the hardest of hearts. And, in truth, Pat’s heart as he stood there with his hands in his pockets observing the enormous sweeping sheet of orange flame that wound its way upward from the hay barn and into the pale clear light of dawn, can only be accurately described by the use of the following word—broken. Or, as Bat McGaw might have said—”bruk!” Bruk in any number of places, with the only sentence audible to his ears now that which repeated, “If only somehow it could have been different. If only it could have been some other way!”
The blackened corpse of Bat McGaw lay prone and silent now as the last roof beam fell to earth. Had he been alive,
his choking words might have been, as he leaned over to inspect a hay-filled crate, “There’s no fecking drink here! Pat, you said there was drink here—and there’s not! There’s not a drop! Just what is going on—aaaaagh?’
But that would have been all, for the cascade of Esso Blue paraffin which descended upon him within some seconds after that ended all further rumination, as did the flaring ball of heat that enveloped him.
Some days later, Pat was reclining in the chimney corner, sipping a “phwishkey” and thinking over the events of recent times. There actually was a fire inside the grate this time, some turf briquettes surrounded by interlocking twists of the Irish Independent and the Irish Press. He sipped his Bols Advocaat and smiled as he thought of what his mother had said about the fire in the old days: “If you stare into it for long enough, Pat, you can see all sorts of things.” One night she had cried out, stabbing the air with her index finger: “Look, Pat! A ship! There’s a ship gone by just now!” Pat chuckled a litde. Chuckled because he remembered nearly having wet himself when she had said it, it took him by surprise so much! But, as always, she had been right. Why, you could see things in there you had never dreamed of, or even begun to dream of! Sometimes it could seem for all the world like a tiny dancing carnival! One night, long after “the end,” as Pat had come to think of it, he could have sworn he saw a tiny shrunken Bat McGaw large (well, not quite) as life and waving out from the flames as if to say “Hey, Pat! It’s me! No hard feelings! I understand your predicament!” And did that make Pat McNab happy! It was as if Bat was now making a supreme effort to ensure that relations between them could be as they ought to have been all along! A Bat transformed who would sit in the armchair swirling his ale in his glass and with big eyes say, warm as toast, “There was no one like her, you know—your mother. The yarns she used to tell. There was no one in town could touch her when it came to telling the stories. Isn’t that right, Pat?”
“I have great memories of her, Bat,” Pat heard himself say—smiling all over his face—”I have to say it.”