Selected Stories

Busy with his thoughts, Billie Carew didn’t reply. He had a thing about Ingrid Bergman. Whenever Casablanca was shown on the television nothing would get him out of the house. For the purpose he put her to it didn’t matter that she was dead.

‘God, man!’ Billie Carew muttered, and Milton could tell from the urgency of his intonation that the last of the Kissane girl’s garments had been removed.

At ten to one the marchers reached the green corrugated-iron sheds of McCourt’s Hardware and Agricultural Supplies. They passed a roadside water pump and the first four cottages of the village. They were in Catholic country now: no one was about, no face appeared at a window. The village was a single wide street, at one end Vogan’s stores and public house, at the other Tiernan’s grocery and filling station, where newspapers could be obtained. Next door was O’Hanlon’s public house and then the road widened, so that cars could turn in front of the Church of the Holy Rosary and the school. The houses of the village were colour-washed different colours, green and pink and blue. They were modest houses, none of more than two storeys.

As the marchers melodiously advanced upon the blank stare of so many windows, the stride of the men acquired an extra fervour. Arms were swung with fresh intent, jaws were more firmly set. The men passed the Church of the Holy Rosary, then halted abruptly. There was a moment of natural disarray as ranks were broken so that the march might be reversed. The Reverend Herbert Cutcheon’s voice briefly intoned, a few glances were directed at, and over, the nearby church. Then the march returned the way it had come, the music different, as though a variation were the hidden villagers’ due. At the corrugated sheds of McCourt’s Hardware and Agricultural Supplies the men swung off to the left, marching back to Mr Leeson’s field by another route.

The picnic was the reward for duty done, faith kept. Bottles appeared. There were sandwiches, chicken legs, sliced beef and ham, potato crisps and tomatoes. The men urinated in twos, against a hedge that never suffered from its annual acidic dousing – this, too, was said to be a sign. Jackets were thrown off, bowler hats thrown down, sashes temporarily laid aside. News was exchanged; the details of a funeral or a wedding passed on; prices for livestock deplored. The Reverend Herbert Cutcheon passed among the men who sat easily on the grass, greeting those from outside his parish whom he hadn’t managed to greet already, enquiring after womenfolk. By five o’clock necks and faces were redder than they had earlier been, hair less tidy, beads of perspiration catching the slanting sunlight. There was euphoria in the field, some drunkenness, and an occasional awareness of the presence of God.

‘Are you sick?’ Billie Carew asked Milton. ‘What’s up with you?’

Milton didn’t answer. He was maybe sick, he thought. He was sick or going round the bend. Since he had woken up this morning she had been there, but not as before, not as a tranquil presence. Since he’d woken she had been agitating and nagging at him.

‘I’m OK,’ he said.

He couldn’t tell Billie Carew any more than he could tell his mother, or anyone in the family, yet all the time on the march he had felt himself being pressed to tell, all the time in the deadened village while the music played, when they turned and marched back again and the tune was different. Now, at the picnic, he felt himself being pressed more than ever.

‘You’re bloody not OK,’ Billie Carew said.

Milton looked at him and found himself thinking that Billie Carew would be eating food in this field when he was as old as Old Knipe. Billie Carew with his acne and his teeth would be satisfied for life when he got the Kissane girl’s knickers off. ‘Here,’ Billie Carew said, offering him his half-bottle of Bushmills.

‘I want to tell you something,’ Milton said, finding the Reverend Herbert Cutcheon at the hedge where the urinating took place.

‘Tell away, Milton.’ The clergyman’s edgy face was warm with the pleasure the day had brought. He adjusted his trousers. Another day to remember, he said.

‘I was out in the orchards a while back,’ Milton said. ‘September it was. I was seeing how the apples were doing when a woman came in the top gate.’

‘A woman?’

‘The next day she was there again. She said she was St Rosa.’

‘What d’you mean, St Rosa, Milton?’

The Reverend Cutcheon had halted in his stroll back to the assembled men. He stood still, frowning at the grass by his feet. Then he lifted his head and Milton saw bewilderment, and astonishment, in his opaque brown eyes.

‘What d’you mean, St Rosa?’ he repeated.

Milton told him, and then confessed that the woman had kissed him twice on the lips, a holy kiss, as she’d called it.

‘No kiss is holy, boy. Now, listen to me, Milton. Listen to this carefully, boy.’