Stanley succeeded in eking out his lemonade for a full sixty minutes, despite Jamesie’s several attempts to remove his near-empty glass. Sorry, is that not finished? Only it looked like it was finished. Each time the door opened he straightened up expectantly, and each time hunched forward again and looked at his watch. He put the watch to his ear a couple of times too and at one point took it off altogether and wound it. He smoked two more cigarettes out of his pack of ten, holding on to the smoke, as it seemed to me, longer with every drag. In between cigarettes he flexed his fingers repeatedly, a tic I had marked on his previous visits to the bar, though now grown so alarming that his hands at times appeared to be in heated discussion with one another, more than once, I could have sworn, to the accompaniment of stifled yelps. Even Hugh, who was not normally given to passing judgement on customers’ foibles, couldn’t resist commenting out the corner of his mouth:
‘They’re coming to take me away, ha-ha, hee-hee …’
And then, a little after ten past twelve, a young woman dressed smartly – if unusually, for Belfast – in black slacks and polo neck came in and crossed the floor to where Stanley sat. They talked briefly, the woman handed Stanley a note. Stanley appeared from his expression to ask a question. The woman shrugged and turned on her heel. As she passed me again on her way to the door I recognised how completely bored she was by the whole business. I set up my drinks and took the money and when I lifted my eyes from the till Stanley was disappearing up the steps to the street.
If you want to know the truth, part of me was not sorry to see him go, or maybe I was just not sorry that whoever it was he was to have met, whoever sent the note with the bored postgirl, had failed to show. Aside from anything else his presence had become just too distracting, especially with Jamesie hovering (once or twice I worried that he had noticed me looking too long and not hard enough in Stanleys direction); but I was panicked as well, for there was no telling when, or even if, I would see him again.
Fitz’s friend, Councillor Noades, was hailing me from the other side of the room. I was halfway to the table when he shouted his order:
‘Another couple of Paddys, there’s a good lad.’
Returning to the bar I picked up Stanley’s glass and ashtray and I thought, people pass through your life and away and all you are left with are lip-rings and butts and a number, if you are lucky, scrawled on a beer mat. Remnants. I hardly had to strain at all for the tears I blinked back.
A soap moment, Hugh would have said.
(There was a night, during the summer, we had been run off our feet, but were too wide awake to go home; Jamesie and I stayed on talking to Hugh, and Jamesie, being Jamesie, asked him right out why he had never married.
‘Oh, don’t worry, I had my chances. Engaged and everything, I was.’
‘So what happened?’
Hugh gestured with his impeccable hands to the darkened room.
‘She said I was spending too much time in bars.’
‘Bars? Bitch. I hope you decked her.’
I thought for a moment Hugh was going to deck Jamesie, but all he did was fetch the coats, ‘You know what the doctor said to the man who thought he was a bar of soap? That’s Lifebuoy.’)
As it happened, for the next couple of hours there were too many other glasses to fill and ashtrays to empty for me to give Stanley more than a passing thought. The usual Saturday lunchtime glut. Customers coming in today with little bits of ash clinging to their clothes and hair. At least it made for conversation.
‘Did you see what happened to Brand’s?’
‘What?’
‘A fire.’
‘A fire?’
‘Huge one.’
‘At Brand’s?’
‘Yes.’
‘No?’
Bangor Ron had come down to help with the lunches. He was still Bangor, even though the other Ron – ‘Bessbrook’ – had been gone from the hotel years before half the people working there now had even started.
The soup of the day was chicken; I hated the fatty smell of it, the separated beige-gold look of it. Needless to say we sold gallons of the stuff.
‘Cheer up,’ a woman told me as I dunked the ladle into the urn for the umpteenth time. ‘It might never happen.’
‘It just did,’ I said, handing her the bowl.
Len Gray, the bar manager, stuck his head round the door once or twice to see how we were getting on.
‘Yous are busting today, fellas.’
Busting wasn’t the word for it. The punters just kept on coming. Jamesie, Hugh and I worked around one another, ducking, sidestepping, keeping an eye out for each other’s pints of stout. We made a good team when we didn’t think too hard, and bar tending at such times had about it a sort of art and grace.
A pint of Export.
A soup and a salad sandwich.
Two Guinness, a Vat 69, a vodka and white, a glass of lager and lime, a fizzy orange and a Castella.
Same again.
Put another wee one in there.
Jamesie – Hugh – Danny Boy – when you’re free …
Just as Grandstand was about to start, some wag hopped up on a chair and switched over to UTV. A guy on the screen held up a teacup and said something I couldn’t hear; subtitles appeared in what I thought might be Irish. A chorus of voices howled for the return of BBC. The wag stepped back on to the chair, his hand hovering over the tuner.
‘Are you sure, now?’
The chorus was sure: ‘Turn the fucking thing over!’
‘Have it your own way,’ he said. ‘But we’ll all have to learn to speak it one of these days.’
As Belfast bar banter went, this struck me as being a bit close to the bone, though nobody else seemed in the least put out. Only much later, chancing to read down the weekend listings, did I realise that the language I had seen on the television was Russian.
Like I said, sometimes I was a total wanker.
Slowly at first, and then with a sudden rush for the doors, the bar three-quarters emptied. Again, this was normal Saturday practice. I glanced at the clock already knowing where the hands were pointed: two-fifteen. All around Belfast at that time on a Saturday, football worked its purgative magic on the city’s clubs and bars. Every Saturday the Reds, the Whites, the Blues, the Crues and the Glens, the big five Belfast teams, drew men in bafflingly large numbers to freeze their balls off on open terraces, swearing never after this week to return, forgetting they had sworn the same thing last week, while countless hundreds others turned out themselves, their only warm-up a couple of pre-match hot whiskies, to huff and puff around the parks and sloping playing fields of the city. Football. You could nearly admire it if it wasn’t all so perfectly pointless.
Still, I suppose it gave the bar staff some respite.
Hugh was stuffing banknotes into grey cloth bags when I came back from the storeroom with my coat.
‘Half-three OK?’
It was longer than a normal lunch break, but then this was far from a normal day. I had come in expecting to work till six and would be lucky now to get away before midnight.
‘Half-three’s fine,’ Hugh said.
Jamesie was erecting a tower of dirty tumblers on the draining board.
‘Nurses,’ he said, as though that explained something.
I left the basement by the stairs next to the boiler room, emerging into an uncovered passageway behind the ground-floor cloaks and toilets. At the bottom of the passageway a gate opened on to Donegall Square Mews and just short of this was a door, currently ajar, into the bar of the Damask Room. I ducked inside. The tables were laid in readiness for the four o’clock reception – a big one by the looks of it, a hundred and twenty or thirty: three long rows running up the room, interrupted briefly by pillars, then carrying on to the far wall where they joined the top table, at which Michael and Janet were currently conferring while smoothing whipped egg-white over chips in the icing of an enormous wedding cake.
Michael said he didn’t know sometimes where people got the money. Michael, Janet said, had taken the words out of her mouth, a thing which Michael was forever doing to Janet, though she didn’t seem to mind in the slightest. Michael and Janet had been with the hotel since the Union days when receptions on this scale were unheard of. Both were married, happily so, as far as anyone could tell, but at work they were inseparable. They were each as shortsighted as the other and it was a toss-up which was the more forgetful, so that between the two of them they seemed only ever to have one pair of glasses, which they were always swapping back and forth. They inclined their heads now, talking low, enveloped in the wintry light from the back windows.
‘Ah, love’s young dream,’ I piped up, the sort of meaningless thing you do say when you work in a place with sixty other people. I don’t know what I expected – an exasperated smile, perhaps, certainly not the start that Michael and Janet gave. Their heads cracked, the glasses (I think Michael had been wearing them last) came off, I dived behind the bar.
‘Danny Boy?’ Janet said. ‘Is that you?’
‘Who do you think it is?’ said Michael, from a position close to the ground, and then I heard the Master’s voice.
‘Is there a problem?’
‘No, no problem,’ Michael said, and though I couldn’t see Janet I knew she would be nodding the head off her shoulders.
‘Good.’
The Master could stretch the word out so long there was scarcely a bit of good left in it by the time he was finished.
‘Yes,’ he said and I could picture him walking down the room checking on the place-settings. ‘Goo –’
I hugged my knees squeezing my eyes tight shut. His tread came nearer.
‘– oo –’
The anticipation was more than I could bear. I leaped to my feet.
‘Michael, that’s you OK for mixers … Mr Rogan.’
The Master had stopped with one foot still shy of the ground. I focused on a point a little to the left of his ear. Michael was handing the glasses to Janet.
‘Mixers,’ I repeated. ‘I was just counting: big wedding.’
The Master swayed slightly, taking in my duffel coat. I cast about for an explanation, found none; I felt a burning urge to pee.
‘Oh please, God,’ I prayed, in defiance of my parents, ‘make him look away.’
God, or whoever it was controlled the wind, obliged by causing the door behind me to slam shut. The Master glanced aside, I saw my chance and scooted across the room to the main door. ‘Got to run.’
His voice reached me as I gained the corridor beyond – ‘Danny, I wanted a word!’ – but I decided I was far enough away to pretend not to have heard.
The kitchens were doing their usual Saturday afternoon field-hospital impersonation, all boiling water and blood and blades on bone. Lunch was barely over in the dining room, the remains binned and carted off, and upwards of four hundred wedding guests would be landing in looking fed between now and the commencement of dinner at half past four. How the chefs coped, let alone catered, was beyond me. There were feats performed in hotel kitchens day and daily that would have had John Wayne pushing back his hat and whistling in awe.
Barney was sitting on a stool by the cold store in his woolly hat and scarf, nursing his foot with gloved hands.
‘Marian?’ I asked him. Barney nodded.
‘Came up behind me in the still room. Didn’t spot her till it was too late.’
He stamped the air with his uninjured foot.
‘Nasty.’
‘I’m sure it’s broke.’
‘I’m sure it’s not.’
He attempted to stand and sat straight back down again.
‘No?’ he said. ‘Well, it’s dislocated or something.’
‘You shouldn’t provoke her.’
‘I know, but I can’t help myself.’
At last he felt able to venture a few steps.
‘Were you cold,’ I said, ‘or were you heading out?’
‘Both,’ said Barney.
We walked back through the kitchens. ‘Master’s on the prowl,’ I said.
Barney peeked out from the service door to check that the Damask Room was clear, then we crossed the dance floor in front of the touched-up wedding cake and finding the gate on to the mews unlocked left by way of it.
‘How much time do you have?’ I asked Barney.
‘About half a fag’s worth.’
We were only occasional smokers, Barney and I. Well, it got us out and about.
A nylon curtain was flapping from the open window of one of the rooms on the second floor. A hand reached out and pulled the curtain back inside. The window shut. Behind the condensation a man appeared indistinctly, naked to the waist. Barney had started into some story about a Difficult Customer and a Steak Sent Back.
‘God,’ I said. I was still thinking about the man at the window. ‘You’re kidding me.’
Out on Linen Hall Street the commercial day was already on the wane. The solicitors and insurers who occupied the old linen warehouses had shut up shop for the weekend and traffic here was sparse and bound for out of town. A couple of streetlights burned with a pinkish glow, though whether they had recently come on or had not switched off from the night before I couldn’t tell. We stood on the pavement, passing a cigarette between us. Barney’s story ground on.
‘ “Not well done?” Chef said. “Tell him you don’t get any more well done without a congratulations card.” ’
‘Amazing,’ I said. ‘Unbelievable.’
Three boys, the youngest no more than five or six, hurtled up James Street South from Bedford Street, panting, glancing over their shoulders as they cut across the road between cars and carried on, guttied-feet pounding, up the mews. I looked down the way they had come. Half a minute passed, nobody appeared. Still the damp slap of their feet echoed. Still Barney talked. On the other side of the street a woman dressed all in pink took a photograph of the back of the City Hall, the gates of which stood closed to traffic. She looked about her, winding the film on, and at the same moment that I recognised her as the photographer from Brand’s Arcade, she latched on to Barney and me, raised the camera, snapped, then calmly turned the corner and was gone. Even Barney paused at this.
‘What was that about?’
‘Search me.’
We walked to the end of the street. Through the curved colonnade of the cenotaph next to the City Hall, I thought I glimpsed a pink hat on the west of Donegall Square, but the traffic here was heavier, the pedestrians more numerous, I might have been mistaken.
‘Maybe she fancied us,’ Barney said, though the notion clearly baffled him.
‘Maybe she’d nothing better to photograph.’
‘More likely,’ Barney said.
We had stopped beside the Windsor Café. A warm buttery smell rose from the basement windows with the sound of women’s voices. And I says … – You didn’t – I did – Good for you – Here’s me to him, do you think I was born yesterday?
Across the city, church bells rang their first warning to hotel workers. Not long now. Not long now. A dog trotted by, looking purposeful.
Barney returned to work by the front door, which was asking for it I told him, though he wouldn’t listen, and I decided to take a turn around the town. I suppose I was searching for Stanley and, while I didn’t admit as much to myself at the time, every street I walked down without finding him at the end of it was a disappointment.
(And what would I have done if I had met him? Mumbled and blushed and hurried on, of course.)
Fire engines were still in attendance at Brand’s, though fewer than earlier, their hoses dead skins cast on the footpath. The morning’s crowd too had diminished to a few onlookers held by the arcade’s aspect of smouldering inside-outness. The excitement over, it was just another January Saturday afternoon. Sale signs in store windows further along the street urged shoppers to hurry, hurry, hurry: last few days … Must end soon … but nobody I saw was in any great rush.
I wish I could describe for you Belfast as it was then, before it was brought shaking, quaking and laying about it with batons and stones on to the world’s small screens, but I’m afraid I was not in the habit of noticing it much myself. What reason was there to, after all? It was simply The Town. I could give you the statistics you might find in any book – population, industry, numbers of churches and bars – or I could tell you that a week before the events I am describing I had woken in a room not a quarter of a mile from the City Hall to the sound of chickens fussing in the yard below. Only in recent years had the journey on foot from southern tip to northern fringe – from extreme east to far west – ceased to be a comfortable stroll; even now few people I knew missing their last bus home would have dreamed of taking a taxi. The B.U.M. was to change all that, of course. The B.U.M. was to give us four-lane, six-lane carriageways in the sky, primary distributor routes, ring roads – inner, outer and intermediate – with flats where there used to be ratty houses, growth centres where now there were small outlying towns. We were going to be modern tomorrow, but for today the city was little different from the city I had been born into. Ask me then did I like it and I don’t know that I would have understood the question; you might as well have asked me did I like breathing. If I had seen other cities I would have understood that Belfast was in its way beautiful, as it was I reckoned there were probably better places to live and probably places a whole lot worse.
I spent forty-five minutes on its streets, too broke, two days after pay day, to spend much of anything else. Once in a while I said hello to someone I knew from the estate or the hotel, I made eye contact with a man looking in the window of Mullan’s bookshop, but his wife joined him before I could tell whether there was anything to it. I bought a fruit scone in Inglis’s and because the girl at the till was attractive in a kind of boyish way, I went back and bought another one. I did what I often did in the break between shifts, I killed time. The afternoon wasn’t getting any warmer; a quarter of an hour early, I went back to the International.
The Blue Bar was quiet, less than a dozen customers. Horses paraded through fog on the TV screen. Nobody paid them much attention. Jamesie was on his own behind the bar, standing, when I came in, with his arms hanging loose by his side. He didn’t move a muscle as I lifted the hatch and took up position beside him.
‘Cold enough out there,’ I said.
‘Uh.’
‘Been like this since I left?’
‘Uh.’
‘When’s Hugh back?’
‘Uh-uh.’
I looked at his face. The light didn’t appear to be on.
‘Jamesie, are you all right?’
He smiled, at no one in particular, then grabbed my upper arm and pulled me to the corner of the counter nearest the door.
‘Sted.’
‘What?’
He grimaced at me to keep my voice down.
‘The first table,’ he said. ‘It’s Ted Connolly. Bap.’
‘The Roker Wank –’
Jamesie showed me his fist, then, smiling, turned and walked back along the bar. I followed him, hands clasped behind me. At a table four feet from the counter two men were talking about butter; at least, one of them, a gaunt fifty-year-old in a neat but unmistakable chestnut wig, was moving half a pound of the stuff backwards and forwards on the tabletop while the other tossed a pound block from hand to hand. The wrappers were cream with green lettering. Dairy Pride. Sitting across and a little aloof from these two was, I now recognised, the mystery Racing Post reader I had seen this morning in the lobby. I jerked my head and Jamesie returned with me to the other end of the bar.
‘Tall fella?’ I asked.
‘Blond one.’
‘He’s not blond.’
‘Not blond? Course he’s blond.’
I stole a glance. The butter juggler (who to my mind was more fair than blond) set down the Dairy Pride and raised his glass to show us it was empty.
‘Order,’ I said. Jamesie’s arms went limp again.
‘Jamesie,’ I hissed, then took over myself.
‘A pint of Bass,’ Ted Connolly said. ‘And …?’
His companions looked at their glasses without enthusiasm. The great man arched his eyebrows. They were sandy and, when he raised them like that, seemed almost to disappear into his freckled forehead. He waved a hand.
‘Just the Bass.’
Jamesie, passing behind me, said with some admiration, ‘Four in an hour.’
I drew the pint and carried it to the table on a tray. Ted Connolly made no attempt to pay. The aloof man showed me his room key at the same moment as he leaned into the conversation.
‘Look at George Best.’
‘Charlie has a point,’ said the third man. ‘Look at George.’
(I can tell you, from where I was standing, peering down on him, that when he nodded his wig remained perfectly still.)
Whatever it was Ted did look at, wrinkling his eyes, it produced a smirk. Besides the butter, there were a few bedraggled sheets of paper on the table and a twenty-deck of Cadets, wet at one corner. I picked the cigarettes up to wipe underneath. Ted took the box from me and popped it in his jacket pocket. The ashtray was full. I set it on the tray and left an empty one in its place.
‘Did he smoke all them himself?’ I whispered. Jamesie nodded and I began to understand his change of heart had nothing to do with football.
I washed glasses. Jamesie sliced lemons. On the TV the horses ran from thick fog into thicker fog. I watched for a moment to see would they come out, but they never did. A result flashed up. For all I knew the jockeys had dismounted and drawn straws. A Tele Boy came in from the street, tugging a newspaper from the pile under his arm and folding it in a single movement. They were all Tele Boys, no matter what their age. This one was pushing forty. He clocked Ted Connolly straight off. No, he seemed to say beneath his breath and then glanced about as if for confirmation that this was some sort of joke, but he went on standing anyway, a yard in from the door, furled newspaper poised between forefinger and thumb like a knife about to be thrown.
‘Tele,’ he said, going through the motions. ‘Sixth. Late. Tele.’
Ted was juggling butter again. The Wig set his elbows square on the table and with his hands traced a shape in the air that might have been a football or might have been the whole world.
‘It’s the way of the future.’
‘Doran’s right,’ Charlie said. ‘At least give it some more thought.’
Ted contemplated his glass, swallowed a third of his pint. The Tele Boy pointed the paper as if to ask, Is it you? Ted Connolly shook his head. The Tele Boy smiled. I didn’t think so. He had started for the door when Ted snatched up a pound of Dairy Pride, raising it above his head like a trophy.
‘Moo taste Dairy Pride. Try it, you’ll never put another butter …’ Charlie and Doran had begun a kind of rhythmic nodding which they broke off suddenly as Ted jabbed his own head forward. ‘… on your bap.’
The two men exchanged glances and smiled. The Roker Wonder looked from one to the other, then threw his head back laughing.
‘It’s rubbish,’ he said.
‘Of course,’ the Tele Boy said from the door. ‘It all is.’
Charlie and Doran shifted in their chairs. Ted drank down the rest of his pint and, still laughing, exited the bar towards the inside staircase. No sooner was he gone than a clatter of footsteps descended the street stairs. The door thumped back against the wall and half a dozen men sporting red carnations in their lapels laid claim to one end of the bar. A few moments later half a dozen more, distinguishable only by the colour of their flower, arrived and crowded at the other end. Each influx was followed by an equal number of women who distributed themselves in smaller groups around the tables. The McAdam/O’Brien wedding party had arrived. Someone slapped a fiver on the bar.
‘Six Guinness, four Bacardi, two cokes, a gin, a vodka and a split tonic.’
‘Here we go,’ Jamesie said, and I approached the group at the other end.
‘Gentlemen. What can I get you?’