On her way up to the Ballymurphy Credit Union to sort out the loan plan for Christmas, Kathleen stopped in at The Fiddlers at lunchtime and Aine begged to be allowed to stay, as there was no school.
‘Bring her back sober,’ she said from the door.
Aine was straight up on a stool at the bar with a lemonade and some crisps, treated like a queen, smiling when she couldn’t follow the joke. She sat with a pen and a beer mat, doodling, or playing hangman with one of the men, usually Fergal O’Hanlon, who was in there while it was open, going off labouring for the council when it wasn’t.
‘I see your gorgeous redhead’s back, Sean.’
The pub was a kinder place by far than school and a world without women, wives and mothers was a place without guilt or drudgery, drawing on ancient loyalties, brimfull of men with their red eyes sentimentally inclined, tobacco-stained skin, sagging mouths.
After closing, when the doors were shut, and a group of big-handed, slow-eyed men close by, Fergal took out his harmonica and played across the landscape of melancholy.
With his head on the tilt, the old loose skin on his hands falling back, one hand fluttering before the small instrument like a pigeon wing, he addressed himself to Aine. He had an eye closed, an eye open, and the eye that was open looked smeared with the dark but in the centre of it, there was light. The other men fell quiet and looked on; they had become a congregation. Occasionally as well-known chords surfaced, voices would step in with words and then fall away again.
She saw her father stand by Fergal, transported, his eyes closed; finding privacy. He put a hand softly, tenderly around Fergal’s back, resting it on his shoulder, and moved his chin to the harmony, marvelling.
Of a sudden, Fergal stopped, both eyes snapped open and he took the harmonica from his mouth and turned his head to look at Sean’s hand.
‘What?’
‘What?’ asked Sean. Then following the direction of Fergal’s stern look, he saw his own hand, reddened and removed it.
The group of men roared and hearing the sounds of each other encouraged them to hoot and wheeze all the more.
‘“What?” your man says.’
‘“What?” says the other.’
And Sean was grinning at himself and Fergal shook his head and put the harmonica to his mouth again.
Sean winked at his girl on the bar stool in the middle of it all, the girl with long red hair, who was beaming at him, more in love with Sean Moran than her mother had ever been.