The next morning, the Jewish lady rang and Kathleen went over to
Eileen’s to get Jim to give her a lift up the Antrim Road.
‘It’s Boxing Day,’ she said. ‘We’re half dead round here.’
Jim came out to stand out behind Eileen, in his slippers, the mark of the sheets on his face, a piece of toast in his mouth.
Kathleen explained it to him in the cab. ‘My neighbour, Roisin, she said you’ve got to snap what’s left of the Jews up.’
‘I’ll try and get our Eileen one for next Christmas.’
He waited for her. She was only in there ten minutes and it was all settled, when she’d start, how many mornings and how much. She thought on her way back how Christmas Day was only the day before and since then they’d changed their jobs, the pair of them. Sean would be at the pub, sober, having handed in his notice. He would have to be the housewife until he found new work.
‘The housewife? That’ll surely get him off his arse and into something new in no time at all,’ said Mrs O’Sullivan when she came over to mind the children. She had her hair in curlers and a headscarf over them; she looked like a small thatched house.
‘Well now, I’m going to be giving him some moral support to get him through the night, and tomorrow as well. He’ll be on the lemonade both nights.’
‘It won’t be easy.’ Mrs O’Sullivan took a plate Kathleen had dried and gave it another going over with a dishcloth. ‘You know what useless gobshites men are. I had to get my Hugh to stop buying those magazines from your man up on the Springfield. What do they call them, top shelf is it? Tit magazines. Aye. Fifty pence here, seventy-five there. Going out of my purse! Upstairs ‘reading’ and the bed shaking the ceiling. He tried talking me into taking my bra off for a photo with his brother’s Polaroid camera. I spoke to Father Lanigan about it. He had a word with Hugh on the quiet and he’s never troubled with it since. Mind you, we’ve prayed over it and I think you have to.’
Mrs O’Sullivan carried on drying dishes, shaking her scarf and curlers.
‘Masturbation,’ she handed the plate to Kathleen, ‘that’s what they call it. There you go, love. Dry as a bone.’
Going out through Divismore Crescent on to the Springfield Road that afternoon, Kathleen saw the newsagent’s and started to laugh, and once she’d started she couldn’t stop. She walked into the bar with a real face-splitting grin. The bar was crowded, men mostly, still in a Christmas mood. An old woman had engaged Sean in an altercation and he was looking frustrated and virtuous in turns.
‘He’s a thief!’ She had a crop of hair on her lips and chin and she was red with rage and drink.
‘She’s been biting the face off him,’ said Fergal, a full glass in his hand. Sean came along to them passing behind the pumps, and the woman followed him. ‘I want my money, I want my money, you.’
‘What is it love?’ Kathleen put a hand on the old woman’s shoulder.
‘He’s got two pound of mine so he has and he won’t give it till me.’ Her husband leant across the bar. ‘She came in at dinnertime. She says, hold this two pound for me mister, and whatever happens don’t let me have it back until Friday or I’ll never have enough for the weekend. I says till her, I know you, missus, you’ll be up here come seven shouting for it and accusing me of being the worst son of a bitch has ever walked the earth.’
‘And that you are!’ piped up the woman, pointing at him, a longdead cigarette in her hand.
Sean leant back, hands on the bar. ‘You see what I have to put up with? I’m that glad that tomorrow is my last night, missus, and I’ll never have to go through this hell with you again.’
‘Last night?’ Her face trembled.
Flinty came over and nodded. ‘Aye, he’s abandoning us sinners to our thirst for ruination.’
Fergal raised his glass. ‘You’ll have to harass the landlord himself now, missus.’
The old girl started up again. ‘I want my two pound. He’s going to be off with it himself, I want it now.’
Sean shook his head and walked off. Flinty looked after him and said to the others conspiratorially, ‘I’ll never find a barman with as hard a heart as he has, God love him. You can’t do the job soft. Mind you, he’s got no head for business.’ He went to the small cream jug on the shelf.
‘Here’s your two pound love. Now what can I get you?’
‘Gin and bitter lemon.’
Kathleen saw Coogan come in and she gave him a small nod of the head. She looked over at her husband; he was working out change. Behind her, a few people back, she could hear two men, drunken, voices raised, and one was saying, ‘Anything I want,’ and they were laughing. She turned to take a quick look, saw a man with a bulbous nose and curly hair doing the talking.
‘She’s got the poor wee lad upstairs so we do it on the floor downstairs; quiet, quiet she says and she puts her chin on the settee and covers her face with a cushion, so she does, to keep the noise down like. So as him upstairs doesn’t hear. She’s what you call a moaner.’
Another man was wiping his eyes, laughing. ‘You’d better not have another one.’
‘Aye. I’d best away.’
He put his glass down, gave a wave up and down the bar. When he went to leave, Kathleen put her foot out. He fell heavily, his hands out ahead of him, catching a blow to the side of his head off the bar but stopping himself by clinging to a bar stool. He looked around, puzzled, angry, fearful; his happiness gone.
‘. . . make me sick,’ said Kathleen under her breath.
Brendan Coogan asked Sean for a Guinness. Sean Moran went to fill the glass, looking wretched. He put it down and asked for the money, his hands flat on the counter, his face away.
‘Did you tell him about me?’ Coogan asked, moving alongside her.
‘No, I’ve not told him about you.’
‘It would be stupid, you know. To tell him or anyone. I think in the circumstances it’s best that we’re bringing all of this to a close.’
‘Och don’t be so pompous.’
When he was gone, she looked at his half-empty glass, the traces of foam suspended at the sides, slipping slower than time back towards the dark.
Her husband took her glass away.
‘I’ll fill it for you.’
He came back with it full and said in a whisper, ‘I feel sick inside when I see you talking to him, I feel grey with jealousy.’
‘It’s green with envy.’
‘No it’s not,’ he said, going to serve someone else.