5.
— … Hey, Margaret! … Do you hear me? … Why are ye not talking? What’s happened to yous lately? There’s not a pip or a squeak out of you since the Election. Breed Terry will get some peace now. I hope it does her no good! The little hag! Cursing is better than quiet, for all that …
You’re not disappointed that Toejam Nora was whipped in the Election, are you, Margaret? That’ll teach her not to be so nosy again. She’d go totally out of her tree if she was elected …
I voted for Peter the Publican, Margaret. Who else? You’d hardly think that I’d vote for Nora of the sailors, drinking on the QT. I have more respect for myself than that. Vote for a woman who was a sneaky drinker, is that it? …
And the Master is very angry with her these days, Margaret. You could hardly keep him under the ground since Breed Terry told him about his wife getting married. Do you know what he said the other day, Margaret, do you know what he said to prickly Nora the other day when she was pissed off he wouldn’t read her a bit of the novelette:
“Leave me alone, you piece of shit,” he said. “Leave me alone! You’re not fit company for a cunt, a cow, or a corpse …”
I swear as the day is holy, that’s what he said, Margaret … What’s the point in you saying anything, Margaret? Didn’t I hear him? …
But anyway, Margaret, something is bugging you all in that part of the graveyard, you’re not talking as much as you used to … Rotting away, is that it? … The writer’s tongue wearing away, is it? I doubt if that would bother Coley. He was driven nuts by him … Oh, Coley is rotting away nicely too. Don’t you see, Margaret, I don’t like it one bit. That was a great homely story he had about the hens. I made a packet from the hens, unlike that wretch I left after me: my daughter-in-law … It’s God’s justice, Margaret, to have a maggot in his windpipe, someone who drank forty-two pints …
Oh, he’s completely putrefied, is he, Margaret … They told you in the Half-Guinea Place that he had disintegrated. I didn’t think, Margaret, that you’d be bothered trying to chat to the Half-Guinea crowd. How else would they be, Margaret, how else would they be only totally manky? Nobody could be any other way in that place, a half-guinea hole in the ground. If I was you, Margaret, I wouldn’t bother my butt with them …
What kind of whooping is that, Margaret? … The Half-Guinea crowd … Celebrating and gloating that their man got in at the Election. They’ll deafen the graveyard. The wankers! The horde of rotten runts! Do you hear the way they are carrying on? Jesus, come down off the cross and let me up! It’s a terrible affliction to be stuck in the same graveyard as them at all … But, by Jaysus, I’d prefer the Half-Guinea guy to get in any day than Toejam Nora. If there was nobody else, I’d have voted for him out of spite …
— … There was a day like that, Peter the Publican. Don’t deny it …
— … The murdering bastard who gave me the poisoned bottle …
— … Whiteheaded mare. I bought her at the fair on St. Bartholomew’s Day …
— I remember it well. I twisted my ankle …
— … Hitler! Hitler! Hitler! Hitler! Hitler! Hitler! …
— … Isn’t it a disgrace they won’t bring my bag of bones …
— … True for you. She’s the gutsiest one in the graveyard until she starts up with that kind of rubbish …
— She always hoped to return to the Pleasant Plain …
— She knew that the cat had upped there already. Enough to crinkle the old man’s cranium beside the fire.
— Maybe he deserved it. She said herself that he didn’t give her a day’s peace since she married his son …
— … Let me talk! …
— … But that was only a gnat’s fart compared to when they were thatching his roof …
— … He had a big broad grin on his face …
— Will the two of you, himself and herself, go and shag yourselves! I hope the devil fucks you! What good was his big broad grin to me? You are just as nasty as the little prick of a poet. Big broad grin! Doesn’t that one, the daughter of Tim Top of the Road, doesn’t she have the same broad silly grin? The devil can fuck her too, isn’t she trying to bewitch my boy, my eldest boy. His eyes are glazed over. Glazed over, I’m telling you! She’s in the Freemasons or some fuckarse thing like that. Trying to get her claws on my house and land, my big house and land …
— … Wait ’til I tell you how I managed to sell the books to the Master …
— I went into Peter’s Pub. The Old Master hadn’t been in there that long. I asked him nicely how he was. He didn’t fancy Peter’s place much anyway. He only came along once in a blue moon. He was a bit of an awkward bollocks. But he wasn’t in any way fired up about the Schoolmistress.
“I know,” I said, “I have the bait that is going to trap you, my boyo …
“The Greatest Love Stories of the World,” I said to him. He was as hungry for them as a ravenous baby for the breast.
“Five guineas for a set,” I said.
“They’re very expensive,” he said.
“What do you mean, expensive?” I said. “A half a guinea now, and the rest in bits just as it suits. They’re a good-looking set. You won’t be ashamed to show them off on your bookshelves at home. Look at the paper! They are the best and brightest of our love stories. Look at the titles there: Helen of Troy; Tristan and Isolde; the Fall of the House of Uisneach; Dante and Beatrice … You’re not married? … You’re not … You’re that age and you have never read any of those stories: about Helen, ‘the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium,’ and ‘The Only Jealousy of Emer’:
‘Once when the Scottish nobles bold
And the Clan of Uisneach, often blessed,
To the Lord’s daughter of Dunatrone
Naoise gave a secret kiss …’
“Think of yourself, now … There you are down in some hollow beside the flowing tide, a young beauty as bright as the sun in your arms, and you can’t even tell her any one of the great love stories of the world! …”
He started humming and hawing. I moved in on him. But no good.
“They’re far too expensive for the likes of me,” he said, “Do you have any secondhand?”
“We are a respectable company,” I said. “We wouldn’t endanger the life or the health of our salesmen or our clients. Who is to say it wouldn’t affect you or your wife? …
“Oh, I get it. You’re not married. But, with the help of God, you will be. You’ll really know then what value this set would be. Those long nights at home with the storm howling outside and yourself and your wife sitting comfortably next to the warm fire …”
But it was like talking to the wall …
I took off to the barracks. The Foxy Cop was the only one there.
“As for books,” he said. “I have a room full of them up there. I’ll have to burn the lot if nobody comes around looking for waste paper.”
“What kind are they?” I asked.
“Novels,” he said. “Crap … rubbish … but they pass the time anyway in this back arse end of nowhere …”
We went upstairs. The place was full of them. Crap, as he said himself. The kind of sloppy romantic slush that young prepubescent girls devour. To tell you the truth, most of them had the name of a nurse whom I knew from the Fancy City scribbled on them. I took the best of them, the neatest, and I tore out the first page of my collection. I travelled the schools in the area, and I came back, in a few days to the Old Master. I was a bit cheesed off with myself that I had slagged off secondhand books a few days before.
“I am heading out into the country today, Master,” I said, “and I thought to myself that it would be a good idea to pay you another visit. I have a collection of love stories here. Secondhand. A friend of mine in the Fancy City was selling his library and I bought them deliberately, because I thought you might like them … They were disinfected, by the way.”