When Stephen Griffin walked in the doorway of The Falls Hotel on Friday evening, his breath scented with parsley and his head
clear from the chewing of lemon balm, Maurice Harty was not on the door. And neither was anyone else. The front hallway was
deserted and only a young girl clicked the keys of a computer at the reception desk. At first he thought he was early. He
had been waiting all week for this moment and now imagined that his watch had moved ahead of Time in rhythm with his mind
and that perhaps it was not yet eight o'clock. He walked over to where a wood fire was burning low and mimed the warming of
his warm hands to hold off for an instant his gathering sense of foolishness. Then he went to the receptionist and asked what
time it was. When she told him it was eight o'clock, he nodded as if in exact agreement with her. He was like a lost traveller,
having voyaged on long uncertain seas towards a land he presumed was there, but now, checking the coordinates, was vanished.
Nothing was happening. He was there, clean-shaven and freshly scented, his eyes already glossily enlivened with the week of
herbs and his head high, just above the sinking feeling of despair. But in a moment he might drown.
“I was wondering,” he said to the girl, his voice so low in his throat that the words were marshmallowy lumps of nothing,
“if there was …” He raised a large one with a small cough. “A concert here.” It was as though he had declared the New World
begins here and the men rushed to the side to see only the boundless watery horizon.
“Oh yes,” the girl sighed, “there is. That's why I'm not gone to the bingo. Don't say you haven't heard? It's with your Man
Who Releases the Balls, you know, on the lotto, on Ty he's here tonight, down in the hall. For the football team. They're
raising for a pitch.” And as if he could not already tell, she added, “It'll be brilliant.”
Stephen was trying to contain the shaking that had started in his legs.
“There is a concert, then.”
“Yes, in the O'Connell Room. Five pounds. I'd say it's just starting.”
He paid her the money with the butterflies of his hands and swallowed the air-apples that gagged him as he walked along the
carpeted hallway to where the New World was and O'CONNELL ROOM was written in gold leaf above an oak door.
It squeaked when he opened it. No music was playing yet, he was in time, and it was only when he had turned to close the door
that he felt the emptiness of the room at his back.
There were twenty-seven rows of chairs, fifteen chairs wide, and only seventeen people who had not gone to watch the Man Who
Releases the Balls.
He walked into the middle of the room and sat down. Then Peter Sheils and Gabriella Castoldi entered, took their places, and
began to play.