Selected Stories

The bus lurched and juddered through the empty Sunday-evening streets. Idling at bus stops, its engine vibrated, and between his knees Liam Pat’s hand repeatedly reached down to seize the handles of the sports bag, steadying it further. He wanted to get off, to hurry down the stairs that were beside where he was sitting, to jump off the bus while it was still moving, to leave the sports bag where it was. He sensed what he did not understand: that all this had happened before, that his terror had come so suddenly because he was experiencing, again, what he had experienced already.

Two girls came chattering up the stairs and walked down the length of the bus. They laughed as they sat down, one of them bending forward, unable to control herself. The other went on with what she was saying, laughing too, but Liam Pat couldn’t hear what she said. The conductor came for their fares and when he’d gone they found they didn’t have a light for their cigarettes. The one who’d laughed so much was on the inside, next to the window. The other one got up. ‘Ta,’ she said when she had asked Liam Pat if he had a lighter and he handed her his box of matches. He didn’t strike one because of the shaking in his hands, but even so she must have seen it. ‘Ta,’ she said again.

It could have been in a dream. He could have dreamed he was on a bus with the bag. He could have had a dream and forgotten it, like you sometimes did. The night he’d seen Feeny for the last time, it could have been he had a dream of being on a bus, and he tried to remember waking up the next morning, but he couldn’t.

The girl next to the window looked over her shoulder, as if she’d just been told that he’d handed her friend the box instead of striking a match for her. They’d remember him because of that. The one who’d approached him would remember the sports bag. ‘Cheers,’ the same one said when they both left the bus a couple of stops later.

It wasn’t a dream. It was the Examiner

spread out on the kitchen table a few months ago and his father shaking his head over the funeral, sourly demanding why those people couldn’t have been left to their grief, why there were strangers there, wanting to carry the coffin. ‘My God! My God!’ his father savagely exclaimed.

It hadn’t worked the first time. A Sunday night then too, another boy, another bus. Liam Pat tried to remember that boy’s name, but he couldn’t. ‘Poor bloody hero,’ his father said.

Another Dessie Coglan had done the big fella, fixing it, in touch with another Gaughan, in touch with the lads, who came to parade at the funeral. Another Huxter was specially picked. Another Feeny said there’d be time to spare to get to Euston afterwards, no harm to life or limb, ten exactly the train was. The bits and pieces had been scraped up from the pavement and the street, skin and bone, part of a wallet fifty yards away.

Big Ben was chiming eight when he got off the bus, carrying the sports bag slightly away from his body, although he knew that was a pointless precaution. His hands weren’t shaking any more, the sickness in his stomach had passed, but still he was afraid, the same fear that had begun on the bus, cold in him now.

Not far from where Big Ben had sounded there was a bridge over the river. He’d crossed it with Rafferty and Noonan, his first weekend in London, when they’d thought they were going to Fulham only they got it all wrong. He knew which way to go, but when he reached the river wall he had to wait because there were people around, and cars going by. And when the moment came, when he had the bag on the curved top of the wall, another car went by and he thought it would stop and come back, that the people in it would know. But that car went on, and the bag fell with hardly a splash into the river, and nothing happened.

O’Dwyer had work for him, only he’d have to wait until March, until old Hoyne reached the month of his retirement. Working the mixer it would be again, tarring roofs, sweeping the yard at the end of the day. He’d get on grand, O’Dwyer said. Wait a while and you’d never know; wait a while and Liam Pat could be his right-hand man. There were no hard feelings because Liam Pat had taken himself off for a while.

‘Keep your tongue to yourself,’ Mrs Brogan had warned her husband in a quiet moment the evening Liam Pat so unexpectedly returned. It surprised them that he had come the way he had, a roundabout route when he might have come the way he went, the Wexford crossing. ‘I missed the seven train,’ he lied, and Mrs Brogan knew he was lying because she had that instinct with her children. Maybe something to do with a girl, she imagined, his suddenly coming back. But she left that uninvestigated, too.