‘His days are numbered …’ said a voice, and Mrs Hanratty listened to her blood quicken. ‘That fella’s days are numbered.’ There was a middle-aged man standing to order like a returned Yank in a shabby suit with a fat wallet. He was drunk and proud of it.
‘I’ve seen his kind before,’ he counted out the change in his pocket carefully in 10s and 2s and 5s, and the barman scooped all the coins into one mess and scattered them into the till. Mrs Hanratty took more than her usual sip of vodka and orange.
‘None of us, of course,’ he commented, though the barman had moved to the other end of the counter, ‘are exempt.’
It was 2 weeks before he made his way over to their table, parked his drink and would not sit until he was asked. ‘I’ve been all over,’ he told them. ‘You name it, I’ve done it. All over,’ and he started to sing something about Alaska. It had to be a lie.
‘Canada,’ he started. ‘There’s a town in the Rockies called Hope. Just like that. And a more miserable stretch of hamburger joints and shacks you’ve never seen. Lift your eyes 30 degrees and you have the dawn coming over the mountains and air so thin it makes you feel the world is full of … well what? I was going to say “lovely ladies” but look at the two I have at my side.’ She could feel Mrs Power’s desire to leave as big and physical as a horse standing beside her on the carpet.
He rubbed his thigh with his hand, and, as if reminded slapped the tables with 3 extended fingers. There was no 4th. ‘Look at that,’ he said, and Mrs Power gave a small whinny. ‘There should be a story there about how I lost it, but do you know something? It was the simplest thing in the County Meath where I was as a boy. The simplest thing. A dirty cut and it swelled so bad I was lucky I kept the hand. Isn’t that a good one? I worked a combine harvester on the great plains in Iowa and you wouldn’t believe the fights I got into as a young fella as far away as … Singapore — believe that or not. But a dirty cut in the County Meath.’ And he wrapped the 3 fingers around his glass and toasted them silently. That night, for the first time in her life, Maeve Hanratty lost count of the vodkas she drank.
She wanted him. It was as simple as that. A woman of 55, a woman with 5 children and 1 husband, who had had sexual intercourse 1,332 times in her life and was in possession of 14 coal-scuttles, wanted the 3-fingered man, because he had 3 fingers and not 4.
It was a commonplace sickness and one she did not indulge. Her daughter came in crying from the dance-hall, her husband (and not, in fact, her father) spent the bingo money on the horses. The house was full of torn betting slips and the stubs of old lipstick. Mrs Hanratty went to bingo and won and won and won.
Although she had done nothing, she said to him silently, ‘Well it’s your move now, I’m through with all that,’ and for 3 weeks in a row he sat at the end of the bar and talked to Pauline, who laughed too much. ‘If that’s what he wants, he can have it,’ said Mrs Hanratty, who believed in dignity, as well as numbers.
But even the numbers were letting her down. Her daily walk to the shops became a confusion of damaged registration plates, the digits swung sideways or strokes were lopped off. 6 became 0, 7 turned into 1. She added up what was left, 555, 666, 616, 707, 906, 888, the numbers for parting, for grief, for the beginning of grief, forgetting, for accidents and for the hate that comes from money.
On the next Wednesday night he was wide open and roaring. He talked about his luck, that had abandoned him one day in Ottawa when he promised everything to a widow in the timber trade. The whole bar listened and Mrs Hanratty felt their knowledge of her as keen as a son on drugs or the front of the house in a state. He went to the box of plastic plants and ransacked it for violets which were presented to her with a mock bow. How many were there? 3 perhaps, or 4 — but the bunch loosened out before her and all Mrs Hanratty could see were the purple plastic shapes and his smile.
She took to her bed with shame, while a zillion a trillion a billion a million numbers opened up before her and wouldn’t be pinned down at 6 or 7 or 8. She felt how fragile the world was with so much in it and confined herself to Primes, that were out on their own except for 1.
‘The great thing about bingo is that no one loses,’ Mrs Power had told him about their Tuesday and Thursday nights. Mrs Hanratty felt flayed in the corner, listening to him and his pride. Her luck was leaking into the seat as he invited himself along, to keep himself away from the drink, he said. He had nothing else to do.
The number of the coach was NIE 133. Mrs Maguire, Mrs Power and Mrs Hanratty climbed on board and took their places with the 33 women and 1 man who made up this Thursday run. He sat at the back and shouted for them to come and join him, and there was hooting from the gang at the front. He came up the aisle instead and fell into the seat beside Mrs Hanratty with a bend in the road. She was squeezed over double, paddling her hand on the floor in search of 1 ear-ring which she may have lost before she got on at all.
He crossed his arms with great ceremony, and not even the violence with which the coach turned corners could convince Mrs Hanratty that he was not rubbing her hand, strangely, with his 3 fingers, around and around.
‘I am a 55-year-old woman who has had sex 1,332 times in my life and I am being molested by a man I should never have spoken to in the first place.’ The action of his hand was polite and undemanding and Mrs Hanratty resented beyond anger the assurance of its tone.
All the numbers were broken off the car parked outside the hall, except 0, which was fine — it was the only 1 she knew anymore. Mrs Hanratty felt the justice of it, though it made her feel so lonely. She had betrayed her own mind and her friends were strange to her. Her luck was gone.
The 3-fingered man was last out of the coach and he called her back. ‘I have your ear-ring! Maeve!’ She listened. She let the others walk through. She turned.
His face was a jumble of numbers as he brought his hand up in mock salute. Out of the mess she took: his 3 fingers; the arching 3 of his eyebrows, which was laughing; the tender 3 of his upper lip and the 1 of his mouth, which opened into 0 as he spoke.
‘You thought you’d lost it!’ and he dropped the black jet into her hand.
‘I thought I had.’
He smiled and the numbers of his face scattered and disappeared. His laughter multiplied out around her like a net.
‘So what are you going to win tonight then?’
‘Nothing. You.’
‘O.’
REVENGE
I work for a firm which manufactures rubber gloves. There are many kinds of protective gloves, from the surgical and veterinary (arm-length) to industrial, gardening and domestic. They have in common a niceness. They all imply revulsion. You might not handle a dead mouse without a pair of rubber gloves, someone else might not handle a baby. I need not tell you that shops in Soho sell nuns’ outfits made of rubber, that some grown men long for the rubber under-blanket of their infancies, that rubber might save the human race. Rubber is a morally, as well as a sexually, exciting material. It provides us all with an elastic amnesty, to piss the bed, to pick up dead things, to engage in sexual practices, to not touch whomsoever we please.
I work with and sell an everyday material, I answer everyday questions about expansion ratios, tearing, petrifaction. I moved from market research to quality control. I have snapped more elastic in my day etcetera etcetera.