‘Well, at least this is a move in the right direction,’ Mulvey said as he raised his glass to his lips. I felt leaden with tiredness, the actual bar close to the enamelled memories of the morning. Everything around me looked like that dishevelled lilac bush, those milk bottles, granite steps …
The state was so close to dreaming that I stared in disbelief when I saw the first thistledown, its thin, pale parachute drifting so slowly across the open doorway that it seemed to move more in water than in air. A second came soon after the first had crossed out of sight, moving in the same unhurried way. A third. A fourth. There were three of the delicate parachutes moving together, at the same dreamlike pace across the doorway.
‘Do you see the thistles?’ I said. ‘It’s strange to see them in the middle of Grafton Street.’
‘There are backyards and dumps around Grafton Street too. You only see the fronts,’ Mulvey said. ‘Yes. There’s plenty of dumps.’
Several more arrived and passed on in the same slow dream. There was always one or several in the doorway. When at last there were none it seemed strange, but then one would appear when they seemed quite stopped, move slowly across, but the intervals were lengthening.
‘They seem to be coming from the direction of Duke Street,’ Claire Mulvey said. ‘There are no gardens or dumps that I can think of there.’
‘You think that because you can’t see any. There are dumps and yards and gardens, and everything bloody people do, but they’re at the back.’
‘They may have come from even farther away,’ I said. ‘I wonder how far they can travel.’
‘It’d be easy to look it up,’ Mulvey said. ‘That’s what books are for.’
‘They can’t come on many easy seed-beds in the environs of Grafton Street.’
‘There’s a dump near Mercer’s. And there’s another in Castle Street.’ Mulvey started to laugh at some private joke. ‘And nature will have provided her usual hundredfold overkill. For the hundred that fall on stone or pavement one will find its dump and grow up into a proud thistle and produce thousands of fresh new thistledowns.’
‘Hazlitt,’ Eamonn Kelly ventured.
‘Hazlitt’s far too refined,’ Mulvey said. ‘Just old boring rural Ireland strikes again. Even its principal city has one foot in a manure heap.’ The discussion had put Mulvey in extraordinary good humour.
Halloran and the boy appeared. Halloran was larger than I remembered, bald, wearing a dishevelled pinstripe suit, sweating profusely. He started to explain something in a very agitated manner even before he got to our table. The boy followed behind like a small dog, his black hair cropped very close to his skull, quiet and looking around, seemingly unafraid. As he came towards the table, a single thistledown appeared, and seemed to hang for a still moment beyond his shoulder in the doorway. A hand reached out, the small fresh hand of a girl or boy, but before it had time to close, the last pale parachute moved on out of sight as if breathed on by the hand’s own movement.
Lightly as they, we must have drifted to the dancehall a summer ago. The late daylight had shone through the glass dome above the dancefloor, strong as the light of the ballroom, the red and blue lights that started to sweep the floor as soon as the waltz began.
She’d been standing with a large blonde girl on the edge of the dancefloor. I could not take my eyes from her black hair, the pale curve of her throat. A man crossed to the pair of girls: it was the blonde girl he asked to dance.
I followed him across the ballroom and, as soon as I touched her elbow, she turned and came with me on to the floor.
‘Do you like waltzes?’ were the first words she spoke as we began to dance.
She did not speak again. As we kept turning to the music, we moved through the circle where the glass dome was still letting in daylight, and kept on after we’d passed the last of the pillars hung with the wire baskets of flowers, out beyond the draped curtains, until we seemed to be turning in nothing but air beneath the sky, a sky that was neither agate nor blue, just the anonymous sky of any and every day above our lives as we set out.
A Ballad
‘Do you think it will be late when Cronin tumbles in?’ Ryan asked sleepily.
‘It won’t be early. He went to a dance with O’Reilly and the two women.’
Pale light from the street lamp just outside the window shone on the varnished ceiling boards of the room. Cronin would have to cross the room to get to his bed by the window.
‘I don’t mind if he comes in near morning. What I hate is just to have got to sleep and then get woke up,’ Ryan said.
‘You can be sure he’ll wake us up. He’s bound to have some story to get off his chest.’
Ryan was large and gentle and worked as an inseminator at the AI station in the town, as did Cronin. The three of us shared this small room in the roof of the Bridge Restaurant. O’Reilly was the only other lodger Mrs McKinney kept, but he had a room of his own downstairs. He was the site engineer on the construction of the new bridge.
‘What do you think will happen between O’Reilly and Rachael when the bridge is finished?’
I was startled when Ryan spoke. The intervals of silence before we fell asleep seemed always deeper than sleep. ‘I don’t know. They’ve been going out a good while together. Maybe they’ll be married … What do you think?’
‘I don’t know. He’s had a good few other women here and there in the last few months. I doubt if he wants to get hitched.’
‘She’d have no trouble finding someone else.’
She had been the queen of one beauty competition the summer before and runner-up in another. She was fair-haired and tall.
‘She mightn’t want that,’ Ryan said. ‘The Bachelors’ Ball will be interesting on Friday night. Why don’t you change your mind and come? The dress suits are arriving on the bus Friday evening. All we’d have to do is ring in your measurements.’
‘No. I’ll not go. You know I’d go but I want to have the money for Christmas.’
An old bicycle went rattling down the hill and across the bridge, a voice shouting out, ‘Fàg à bealach.’
‘That’s Paddy Mick on his way home. He has no bell. It means the last of the after-hour houses are shut.’
‘It’s time to try to get to sleep — Cronin or no Cronin.’
It was very late when Cronin woke us, but daylight hadn’t yet started to thin the yellow light from the street lamp. We would have pretended to have gone on sleeping but he repeated, ‘Are yous awake?’
‘We are now.’
‘That O’Reilly should be run out of town,’ he said.
‘What’s wrong now?’ I had suspected for a while that his lean, intense good looks concealed a deep stupidity.
‘What he made that girl do tonight no poor girl should have to do, and in front of people too.’
‘What was it?’ Ryan raised himself on an elbow in the bed while Cronin slipped out of his clothes.
‘It was horrible.’
‘You can’t just wake us up like this and not tell us.’
‘It was too foul to put in words.’
‘What’s so suddenly sacred about words! Why didn’t you stop it if you felt so badly about it?’
‘What could you say once it was done? Once he made her do it. My woman was so upset that she didn’t talk for the rest of the night.’
Cronin had been going out casually with a hairdresser some years older than he was, who owned her own business in the town. He was taking her to the ball on Friday.
‘Are you going to tell us what happened? Or are you going to let us get back to sleep?’
‘I wouldn’t disgrace myself by telling it.’ He turned his back to us in the bed.
‘I hope you have nightmares.’ Ryan swore before pulling the clothes and pillow violently over his head.