Selected Stories

‘I’ll walk you over,’ Manning said, which he always did when she had to go. He lit a cigarette, as he always did too. The smoke would get into her clothes and she’d be asked about it if there was anyone still downstairs, although usually nobody was.

‘I looked back,’ Manning said. ‘He was up on his feet.’

Bernadette rang, a note for her in the kitchen said, and Sister Teresa about knowing your part for Thursday

.

No one was still up or there wouldn’t be the note. Aisling made cocoa and had biscuits with it, sitting at the table with the Evening Herald, then pushing it away. She wished it hadn’t happened, but thought about Hazel Donovan so badly affected that she had to be taken to a shrink and before she finished her cocoa she wondered if she really wished it. She might have stopped him but she hadn’t, and she remembered now not wanting to. ‘The hard man,’ his friends said when they greeted him, knowing him well, knowing he took chances. ‘Aw, come on,’ he had urged, the time he gave her a lift on the bar of his bicycle, when they were caught by her father coming towards them on a bicycle too, his veterinary bag hanging on the handlebars. ‘Don’t ever let me see the like of that again,’ her father stormed at her when she returned to the house. Being his favourite made being caught all the worse, her mother explained. Neither of them approved of Martin Manning. They didn’t understand.

She washed the mug she’d drunk her cocoa from at the sink and put the lid on the biscuit tin. She picked up Sister Teresa’s typed sheets and went upstairs. Scenes from Hamlet was Sister Teresa’s title for the monologues she had put together, the first time she had attempted something that wasn’t a conventional play. That’s fennel for you, Aisling murmured, half asleep already, and columbines . . .

At Number 6 Blenning Road the elderly woman who had lived alone there since she was widowed seven months ago was roused from a dream in which she was a child again. She went to the top of her stairs, leaned over the banister, and shouted in the direction of the hall door, asking who was there. But all that happened was the ringing of the doorbell again. It would take more than that, she told herself, to get her to open her door at this hour.

When the bell ceased there was a banging and a rapping, and a voice coming from far away because she hadn’t had time to put her deaf-aids in. Even when the letterbox rattled and the voice was louder she still couldn’t hear a word of what was said. She went back to her bedroom for her deaf-aids and then trudged down to the hall.

‘What d’you want?’ she shouted at the letterbox.

Fingers appeared, pressing the flap open.

‘Excuse me, missus. Excuse me, but there’s someone lying down in your garden.’

‘It’s half past six in the morning.’

‘Could you phone up the guards, missus?’

In the hall she shook her head, not answering that. She asked whereabouts in her garden the person was.

‘Just lying there on the grass. I’d call them up myself only my mobile’s run out.’

She telephoned. No point in not, she thought. She was glad to be leaving this house, which for so long had been too big for two and was now ridiculously big for one. She had been glad before this, but now was more certain than ever that she had made the right decision. She thought so again while she watched from her dining-room window a Garda car arriving, and an ambulance soon after that. She opened her hall door then, and saw a body taken away. A man came to speak to her, saying it was he who had talked to her through the letterbox. A guard told her the person they had found lying near her eleagnus was dead.

On the news the address was not revealed. A front garden, it was reported, and gave the district. A milkman going by on his way to the depot had noticed. No more than that.

When Aisling came down at five past eight they were talking about it in the kitchen. She knew at once.

‘You all right?’ her mother asked, and she said she was. She went back to her bedroom, saying she had forgotten something.

It was all there on the front page of the Evening Herald’s early-afternoon edition. No charges had been laid, but it was expected that they would be later in the day. The deceased had not been known to the householder in whose garden the body had been discovered, who was reported as saying she had not been roused by anything unusual in the night. The identity of the deceased had not yet been established, but a few details were given, little more than that a boy of about sixteen had met his death following an assault. Witnesses were asked to come forward.