With the library meeting still ahead of him, Conor spent half the day imagining disasters. What if hundreds of people turned up and they started to riot? What if his mind went blank? What if Miss Casey kept the library open and no one turned up at all? To make things worse, the tractor was still giving him trouble and Joe pointed out pretty sharply that this was the second night in a row that he’d disappeared for the evening.
To give himself confidence, Conor took great care over his appearance, which didn’t help the mood as he set off. Joe made his usual sniffy remark about hair product, and, feeling pressured, Conor couldn’t laugh it off. Instead he aimed a smack at Joe’s head and his dad let out a roar at him. So the last thing he heard as he went to start the Vespa was his mum’s anxious voice trying to keep the peace.
When he arrived the library was empty except for Oliver the dog man and Aideen, who was setting out chairs. Apparently Miss Casey had rung over to the council offices and arranged to borrow some more so, dumping his crash helmet in the kitchen, Conor crossed the courtyard to collect them. The door was locked but he rapped on the window and the guy let him in. Conor recognized him as Liam Ryan, whose people kept a garage on the outskirts of Lissbeg. The entrance hall still felt a bit convent-like with its dark paneling, tiled floor, and gloomy holy pictures that had never got taken down. Liam led him through to a waiting area between two offices.
“Miss Casey said you’d want about eight chairs.”
Conor had no idea how many they’d want. At one stage he’d been feverishly imagining sixty or even six hundred. But he nodded and began to stack them.
Liam gave him a hand. “I’ll be here for a while yet, so I’ll drop over and collect them when you’re done.”
By the time Dan arrived with Bríd, Miss Casey had set up a lectern and Aideen and Conor had arranged the chairs in a semicircle by the Biography section. At seven o’clock the gathering consisted of Conor himself, Dan, Bríd, Aideen, two of Dan’s friends, a girl chewing gum, Miss Casey, and Oliver the dog man. As soon as Dan’s crowd arrived they spread out across six seats, and one of the lads put his arm round the girl and his feet on the chair in front of him. Within seconds Miss Casey had pounced, fixing him with a cold eye till his feet were on the floor and pointedly offering the waste bin and a box of tissues to his girlfriend. Chewing gum was not permitted in the library, she said, and they all looked away discreetly while the girl took a lump of pink gum out of her mouth, wrapped it in a tissue, and dropped it in the bin. This was followed by an excruciating few minutes when nothing happened at all, after which Fury O’Shea drifted in and went to lean against the wall. Then Miss Casey went to the lectern and told them all they were welcome. At the back of his mind Conor had vaguely hoped that at the last minute she might run the event herself. Instead she introduced him to the audience as their chairman for the evening and walked back to her desk. So, with his tie feeling strangely tight and his feet feeling way too big, Conor went up to the lectern and started to talk.
Looking back later, it all felt like a dream. He did exactly as Miss Casey had advised, waving his hand at the poster on the wall and saying that the purpose of the gathering was to alert the people of the peninsula to the upcoming consultation meeting. Then he busked his way through a few generalizations while Aideen sat at the front looking encouraging, Bríd surreptitiously checked the photos on Dan’s phone, and a lanky guy in a leather jacket repeatedly interrupted to say that the council and all who worked there were a shower of mangy chancers.
“Don’t the dogs in the street know that it’s just a case of brown envelopes? Cozy backhanders! You’d never get a word of truth out of that lot if they talked from here to next year!”
Conor threw a series of increasingly anguished glances at Miss Casey, but it was clear from the look on her face that he was on his own. So, grasping the lectern with both hands, he announced that this was neither the time nor the place for unsubstantiated allegations. What was needed, he said, was public engagement in a democratic process established for the express purpose of information-sharing and feedback. He, for one, was glad of an opportunity not just to hold his elected representatives accountable for their expenditure of taxpayers’ money, but also to work with them responsibly for the benefit of the whole community. Aideen clapped but the guy in the leather jacket flipped a crumpled ball of paper across the room at him, mouthing “brown envelopes.” Fortunately, though, Conor didn’t need to come up with any more gobbledygook because, before anything else could happen, the girl with the chewing gum thumped her boyfriend and told him not to be a bore. At that point the door opened and The Divil shot into the room barking, followed by Liam Ryan. Fury immediately scooped the dog up and closed a fist round his muzzle but, seizing the moment, Conor announced that he wanted to thank everyone for coming, Miss Casey for the use of the library, and the council for the chairs they were sitting on, which Liam had now come to collect. Then, ignoring Liam’s mild protest, he leapt from the lectern, grabbed a chair, and started to stack them. As people began to stand up and help, he could still hear the guy in the leather jacket spouting out stuff about brown envelopes. But at least the meeting was over and no one had started a riot.