Selected Stories

On the bus to Dublin they did not say much. Carmel had spewed up a couple of mouthfuls, and in Gallagher’s nostrils the sour odour persisted. Marie in the end had been a nag, going on about Monday evening, making sure Mangan wouldn’t forget. What both of them were thinking was that Cohen, as usual, had done best out of the bit of business there’d been.

Then the lean features of Mr Livingston were recalled by Mangan, the angry eyes, the frown. They’d made a mess of it, letting him see them, they’d bollocksed the whole thing. That moment in the doorway when the old man’s glance had lighted on his face he had hardly been able to control his bowels. ‘I’m going back there,’ his own voice echoed from a later moment, but he’d known, even as he spoke, that if he returned he would do no more than he had done already.

Beside him, on the inside seat, Gallagher experienced similar recollections. He stared out into the summery night, thinking that if he’d hit the old man on the back of the skull he could have finished him. The thought of that had pleased him when they were with the girls. It made him shiver now.

‘God, she was great,’ Mangan said, dragging out of himself a single snigger.

His bravado obscured a longing to be still with the girls, ordering gins at the bar and talking fancy. He would have paid what remained in his pocket still to taste her lipstick on the seashore, or to hear her gasp as he touched her for the first time.

Gallagher tried for his dream of Mr Big, but it would not come to him. ‘Yeah,’ he said, replying to his friend’s observation.

The day was over; there was nowhere left to hide from the error that had been made. As they had at the time, they sensed the old man’s shame and the hurt to his pride, as animals sense fear or resolution. Privately, each calculated how long it would be before the danger they’d left behind in the house caught up with them.

They stepped off the bus on the quays. The crowds that had celebrated in the city during their absence had dwindled, but people who were on the streets spoke with a continuing excitement about the Pope’s presence in Ireland and the great Mass there had been in the sunshine. The two youths walked the way they’d come that morning, both of them wondering if the nerve to kill was something you acquired.

After Rain

In the dining-room of the Pensione Cesarina solitary diners are fitted in around the walls, where space does not permit a table large enough for two. These tables for one are in three of the room’s four corners, by the door of the pantry where the jugs of water keep cool, between one family table and another, on either side of the tall casement windows that rattle when they’re closed or opened. The dining-room is large, its ceiling high, its plain cream-coloured walls undecorated. It is noisy when the pensione’s guests are there, the tables for two that take up all the central space packed close together, edges touching. The solitary diners are well separated from this mass by the passage left for the waitresses, and have a better view of the dining-room’s activity and of the food before it’s placed in front of them – whether tonight it is brodo or pasta, beef or chicken, and what the dolce is.

‘Dieci,’ Harriet says, giving the number of her room when she is asked. The table she has occupied for the last eleven evenings has been joined to one that is too small for a party of five: she doesn’t know where to go. She stands a few more moments by the door, serving dishes busily going by her, wine bottles grabbed from the marble-topped sideboard by the rust-haired waitress, or the one with a wild look, or the one who is plump and pretty. It is the rust-haired waitress who eventually leads Harriet to the table by the door of the pantry where the water jugs keep cool. ‘Da here

?’ she asks and Harriet, still feeling shy although no one glanced in her direction when she stood alone by the door, orders the wine she has ordered on other nights, Santa Cristina.

Wearing a blue dress unadorned except for the shiny blue buckle of its belt, she has earrings that hardly show and a necklace of opaque white beads that isn’t valuable. Angular and thin, her dark hair cut short, her long face strikingly like the sharply chiselled faces of Modigliani, a month ago she passed out of her twenties. She is alone in the Pensione Cesarina because a love affair is over.

A holiday was cancelled, there was an empty fortnight. She wanted to be somewhere else then, not in England with time on her hands. ‘Io sola,’ she said on the telephone, hoping she had got that right, choosing the Cesarina because she’d known it in childhood, because she thought that being alone would be easier in familiar surroundings.

‘Va bene?’ the rust-haired waitress enquires, proffering the Santa Cristina.

‘Sì, sì.’