Once, through the grimy panes of an upstairs window, the younger brother saw the woman crouched over a dressing-table, her head on her arms as if she slept, or wept. She looked up while he watched, his curiosity beyond restraint, and her eyes stared back at him, but she did not avert her gaze.
That same day, just before the painters finished for the day, while they were scraping the last of the old paint from the kitchen window-frames, they saw that the crippled man was not in his chair by the range and realised that since they had returned after the rain they had not heard his voice.
*
She washed up their two cups and saucers, teaspoons with a residue of sugar on them because they’d been dipped into the bowl when they were wet with tea. She wiped the tray and dried it, and hung the damp tea towel on the line in the scullery. She didn’t want to think, even to know that they were there, that they had come. She didn’t want to see them, as all day yesterday she managed not to. She hung the cups up and put the saucers with the others, the sugar bowl in the cupboard under the sink.
The ladders clattered in the yard, pulled out of sight for the night in case they’d be a temptation for the tinkers. She couldn’t hear talking and doubted that there was any. A few evenings ago, when they were leaving, they had knocked on the back door and she hadn’t answered.
She listened for footsteps coming to the door again but none came. She heard the van being driven off. She heard the geese flying over, coming from the water at Dole: this was their time. Once the van had returned when something had been left behind and she’d been collecting the evening eggs, and she had gone into the fields until it was driven off again. In the kitchen she waited for another quarter of an hour, watching the hands of the dresser clock. Then she let the air into the house, the front door and the back door open, the kitchen windows.
*
The dwelling they had made for themselves at the ruins was complete. They had used the fallen stones and the few timber beams that were in good condition, a doorframe that had survived. They’d bought sheets of old galvanised iron for the roof and found girders on a tip. It wasn’t bad, they said to one another; in other places they’d known worse.
In the dark of the evening they talked about the crippled man, concerned – and worried as their conversation advanced – since the understanding about payment for the painting had been made with him and it could easily be that when the work was finished the woman would say she knew nothing about what had been agreed, that the sum they claimed as due to them was excessive. They wondered if the crippled man had been taken from the house, if he was in a home. They wondered why the woman still wasn’t as she’d been at first.
*
She backed the Dodge into the middle of the yard, opened the right-hand back door and left the engine running while she carried out the egg trays from the house and settled them one on top of another on the floor, all this as it always was on a Thursday. Hurrying because she wanted to leave before the men came, she locked the house and banged the car door she’d left open. But the engine, idling nicely, stopped before she got into the driver’s seat. And then the blue van was there.
They came towards her at once, the one with glasses making gestures she didn’t understand at first and then saw what he was on about. A rear tyre had lost some air; he appeared to be saying he would pump it up for her. She knew, she said; it would be all right. She dreaded what would happen now: the Dodge would let her down. But when she turned off the ignition and turned it on again, and tried the starter with the choke out, the engine fired at once.
‘Good morning.’ The older man had to bend at the car window, being so tall. ‘Good morning,’ he said again when she wound the window down although she hadn’t wanted to. She could hear the ladders going up. ‘Excuse me,’ the man who was delaying her said, and she let the car creep on, even though he was leaning on it.
‘He’s in another room,’ she said. ‘A room that’s better for him.’
She didn’t say she had eggs to deliver because they wouldn’t understand. She didn’t say when you got this old car going you didn’t take chances with it because they wouldn’t understand that either.
‘He’s quiet there,’ she said.
She drove slowly out of the yard and she stalled the engine again.
*
The painters waited until they could no longer hear the car. Then they moved the ladders, from one upstairs window to the next until they’d gone all the way round the house. They didn’t speak, only glancing at one another now and again, conversing in that way. When they had finished they lit cigarettes. Almost three-quarters of the work was done: they talked about that, and calculated how much paint was left unused and how much they would receive back on it. They did no work yet.
The younger brother left the yard, passing through a gateway in which a gate was propped open by its own weight where a hinge had given way. The older man remained, looking about, opening shed doors and closing them again, listening in case the Dodge returned. He leaned against one of the ladders, finishing his cigarette.
Cloudy to begin with, the sky had cleared. Bright sunlight caught the younger brother’s spectacles as he came round the side of the house, causing him to take them off and wipe them clean as he passed back through the gateway. His reconnoitre had led him, through a vegetable patch given up to weeds, into what had been a garden, its single remaining flowerbed marked with seed packets that told what its several rows contained. Returning to the yard, he had kept as close to the walls of the house as he could, pressing himself against the stucco surface each time he came to a window, more cautious than he guessed he had to be. The downstairs rooms revealed no more than those above them had, and when he listened he heard nothing. No dogs were kept. Cats watched him without interest.
In the yard he shook his head, dismissing his fruitless efforts. There was a paddock with sun on it, he said, and they sat there munching their stale sandwiches and drinking a tin of Pepsi Cola each.
‘The crippled man is dead.’ The older brother spoke softly and in English, nodding an affirmation of each word, as if to make his meaning clear in case it was not.
‘The woman is frightened.’ He nodded that into place also.
These conjectures were neither contradicted nor commented upon. In silence the two remained in the sun, and then they walked through the fields that neglect had impoverished, and in the garden. They looked down at the solitary flowerbed, at the brightly coloured seed packets marking the empty rows, each packet pierced with a stick. They did not say this was grave, or remark on how the rank grass, in a wide straight path from the gate, had been crushed and had recovered. They did not draw a finger through the earth in search of seeds where seeds should be, where flowers were promised.
‘She wears no ring.’ The older brother shrugged away that detail, depriving it of any interest it might have had, irrelevant now.
Again they listened for the chug of the car’s unreliable engine, but it did not come. Since the painting had made it necessary for the windows to be eased in their sashes, any one of them now permitted entry to the house. This was not taken advantage of, as yesterday it would have been, this morning too. Instead, without discussion, the painting began again.
Undisturbed, they worked until the light went. ‘She will be here tomorrow,’ the older brother said. ‘She will have found the courage, and know we are no threat.’
In the van on their way to their dwelling they talked again about the woman who was not as she had been, and the man who was not there. They guessed and wondered, supposed, surmised. They cooked their food and ate it in uncomfortable confinement, the shreds and crumbs of unreality giving the evening shape. At last impatient, anger had not allowed a woman who had waited too long to wait, again, until she was alone: they sensed enough of truth in that. They smoked slow cigarettes, instinct directing thought. The woman’s history was not theirs to know, even though they now were part of it themselves. Their circumstances made them that, as hers mad
e her what she’d become. She held the whip hand because it was there for her to seize, she’d see to it that still the pension came. No one would miss the crippled man, no one went to a lonely place. Tomorrow she would pay for the painting of the house. Tomorrow they would travel on.
Midnight Blue
Elaine Walsh
CON LOCKS THE DOOR AND turns the brass sign. With a damp cloth he wipes around the thick, raised letters, their edges worn with the years. He had paid a pound and six pence for that sign in Hayes’ Hardware Shop on Capel Street not long after his father died. He recalls the joyless relief he felt taking down the old wooden sign that had hung on the door all through his father’s life and part of his own – the name ‘Slattery & Sons, Tailors’ engraved deep into the varnished oak. Con had the shop front repainted too with what little his father had left him. Ever since, it was just called ‘Slattery’s Tailors’. That was the summer Senator Kennedy was shot and Con had turned twenty-eight. At the time, he had thought about walking up to the Dáil to sign the book of condolences but he never did.
He lowers himself into the corner chair. September is closing in but today was fine; cold and crisp with a bright sun and there’s still some stretch in the evening. As he shifts the chair nearer the window, stripes of weak sun creep in through the gaps in the Venetian blind and line his navy pants. A few late-night Thursday shoppers pass up Talbot Street carrying paper bags from Clery’s and Boyers and shops the names of which Con doesn’t recognise. The street is quieter of late – people hanging onto their cash with all the talk of doom and gloom. He has seen the ups and the downs before and is still here after all these years looking out at the world from the same corner. As a boy, he had used this very chair as a table, kneeling on the floor to do his homework. Underneath, he kept a neat stack of green and orange copybooks, one for each subject and a special one for maths with squares to put the numbers in. He had a knack for the sums back then, wearing pencils down to a stub from all the long divisions. It drove his father mad but that didn’t stop him bragging to all and sundry about it.
‘Do you see this young whippersnapper here?’ his father would ask one of his customers or GAA pals who dropped in for a chat. ‘He has all the makings of a top-class tailor if you could only keep him away from the sums for a solitary minute. He’d have your heart broken with the books.’
Con looks across at the counter. The big, round-shouldered figure of his father stooping over it never really left. There he is snipping away at a length of cloth, turning it this way and that, shaping arms and legs and torsos.
‘He got that from his mother, may the Lord have mercy on her poor soul,’ his father would continue. ‘Wants to be a maths teacher no less! My poor shop isn’t good enough for our young professor!’
Con pulls his chequered jacket over his shoulders. The shop feels colder, empty of the things that had made it a shop for so many years. Most of it he has sold or packed away except for a roll of wool-worsted cloth left out in case he has to make any adjustment to Barney Keogh’s suit when he calls in for his final fitting tomorrow. Whatever bits and bobs remain he’ll try to shift in tomorrow’s clearance.
A loud knock on the window stirs him. Con peers through the blind at a face peering back. His jacket slips off his shoulders as he rises to unlock the door. It opens to the low, mingled noise of the street and Paul, a lanky courier with a hungry look, who’s been making deliveries for him for years.
‘Sorry about the delay, Mr Slattery. The traffic on the quays was brutal.’
He looks at Paul’s pushbike and knows that traffic couldn’t have slowed him. It doesn’t matter.
‘Not to worry, Paul son. I was here anyway.’
His right knee cracks when he bends down and reaches under the counter for a parcel containing two white shirts for Mr Higgins SC. He had pressed and folded them in purple tissue paper earlier and put them under the counter out of the way. As he pulls out the parcel, the back of his hand meets something cold and hard. Con picks it up. It’s his father’s black-handled steel shears. He had been looking for it recently, and now his heart drops at the sight of the large, heavy tool. ‘My old, reliable friend,’ his father liked to call it. It had been a present to him from his own parents on his marriage to Con’s mother.
Con returns to the door, the shears in one hand, shirts in the other.
‘Big day for you tomorrow, Mr Slattery,’ says Paul, stuffing the brown paper parcel into his satchel.
Con wants to tell him not to crush it like that, that it contains two shirts that have been pressed, but he says nothing.
‘You’ll have all the time in the world to spend that money of yours!’
Paul puts his hand on Con’s shoulder. Con feels the cold fingers through his shirt and tenses.
‘Ah, I’m only having you on, Mr Slattery.’ He takes his hand away. ‘Best of luck with it anyhow and sure, we might see you around.’
‘Thanks very much for everything Paul,’ says Con, and awkwardly hands him a tenner.
Con follows the black and yellow lycra-clad figure zip up Talbot Street towards the Spire and turn left onto O’Connell Street. He stands a while against the door watching the last of the evening crowd pass. The steel warms in his hand as he holds it. Black fellas, white fellas, yellow fellas. How times have changed. He bends down and rubs his right knee. The racket that had earlier been blaring from the music shop opposite is silent now, and a young girl sporting an earful of metal piercing is on her hunkers locking the shutters. Her companion stands above her, pulling cockily from a cigarette, white belly flesh falling loosely out over low-cut jeans. They move in Con’s direction. He turns away.
‘Nice evening, Con,’ says Nancy Murphy, walking towards him from Nolan’s bakery where she has served behind the counter for almost as long Con has in the shop.
‘It is, thank God, Nancy.’
Three loaves of white bread jut out of the gingham bag she carries. There had been talk long ago that she had her sights set on Con. There was a time right enough when she dropped into him – almost every evening when his father got sick and after he passed away too. Once, she told Con that his father had terrified her – pounding the shop floor with his metal-toe shoes, swinging his scissors and ordering Con about in a loud, deep voice. The thing with Nancy all came to nothing in the end, thank God, and soon after she married Jimmy O’Brien from Pearse Street. She stopped calling after that, but Jimmy was dead now, and she sometimes dropped by again with some leftover bread from Nolan’s or a corner of tea brack. A nice woman, thinks Con, but he is relieved to see her march by. He doesn’t feel up to a long chat this evening.
‘Important day tomorrow, Con!’ shouts Billy O’Connor from the electrical shop up the way. ‘I’ll drop in when things are quiet.’
‘Grand so, Billy. Thanks,’ says Con and steps back inside.
The shop is darker now. Con turns on the light switch and rests the shears on the counter. A few scraps of navy cloth from Barney Keogh’s suit lie scattered on the floor around it. He sweeps them up with a dustpan and brush. Standing up he regards the suit hanging lonely on a rail behind the counter, covered in plastic. It is made from the finest blend of wool – midnight blue Super 180 – a strong seller, imported from Thailand and good quality too, no matter what his father might say. His father had no time for anything foreign unless he wanted it himself – then he found plenty of excuses for having it. It’s difficult to believe looking at the suit, cut in the low, wide shape of Barney, that it is Con’s last. The process is so familiar, such a part of Con, that he doesn’t think himself so much director of it as him and his fingers just another element of it. The methodology and repetition of it calms him, not unlike the sums long ago – taking the first measurements with white tape, rolling and smoothing out the fresh material, chalking out a pattern, patiently stitching, fusing, steaming, pressing, but most of all the soft, hollow sound of the shears cutting through cloth.
Con tips the dirt into the bin and puts the pan and
brush away. The electric light bounces off the big shears and catches Con’s eye. He is tired now, and his knee is at him. He forgot to take his tablets again. He goes into the darkness of the back room.
*
The back room was small, and the top of the boy’s head knocked against the skirting board with the force of each thrust. It was faster and harder now, and the boy’s eyeballs felt like they were going to pop out of their sockets and smash against the wall with the pain. It was over when his da let out a big shivery sigh like someone had thrown a bucket of cold water over his head. And then his da flopped down on top of him like a dead elephant squashing him into the floorboards. As he gulped, the boy tried to think of Dastardly Dan being flattened like a pancake by a big roller truck in Tommy O’Connor’s cartoon book.
Afterwards, the boy lay still while his da fixed himself. When the front door slammed, the boy got up and wiped the white stuff off his leg with some old newspapers he kept hidden behind the broom cupboard. He zipped up his pants and walked into the front shop. There he snooped with only the lamplight from the street, opening and closing drawers and presses. He found a spool of brown thread and slipped it into his pocket to show Tommy. Then he took hold of his da’s huge scissors and tried to cut a straight line down the roll of material standing against the back wall. Outside, a man shouted ‘Up the Republic. Out with the Brits at last!’ The boy wasn’t scared. He was learning about the new republic in school. A woman laughed, and a bottle rattled across the pavement.
*
Con pours two capfuls of Jameson into a glass and tops it up with musty tap water. He pulls the string on the overhead light and goes back out front carrying the glass and the bottle with him. He puts the bottle down on the counter beside the shears and sits back down into the chair and takes a sip. The sharp taste of whiskey tingles in his mouth. It runs through him, heating his chest.