An Extract - Novel In Progress

 
Chapter One

Just a couple of strides away from the main entrance to The Irish Times - the sight of which made her gut tighten - Myra Dillon turned to see that her man had stopped and splayed himself up against a large metal lamppost. His face shone as crimson as the beetroot that she’d earlier diced up for lunch and then wept over. She would’ve gone to him to make him lean forward, so he could find his breath again and stop his wheezing, but she was too distracted by the fierce hope that his discomfort might make him change his mind about his two o’clock appointment.

‘Could you not be slowing yourself down?’ he growled at her, ‘rushing away in front of me like a thievin’ gypsy.’ He coughed like it were a murderous yell, spitting a mix of beer and bile onto the pavement. ‘You’ll be the bleedin’ death of me, Myra.’ He cut the air with his turnip fingers.

She kept her face still, just so, gently reaching up to check that her scarf – bought for €1.99 the day before – hadn’t twisted itself around. She fastened the top button on her cardigan of baby-blue, and then caught sight of herself in a pub window. She decided she wouldn’t answer him. She would seek refuge there in her reflection, imagining that she had her knotted hair done, and the cardigan could at last be given to the Sisters of Mercy.

She leant down to scratch the back of her leg through her stocking, the whole time watching how her movement looked in the window. Sadly, she saw there was no going back on the dropping of the shoulders and her mouth had a sour twist to it. A nice cold glass of scotch came out through the window and poured itself down into her panting chest.

‘For the sake of heaven,’ he blurted. ‘Myra!’

She looked back towards him and smiled. ‘We’ll be late, Selwyn, and then you’ll go blaming me. Pick yourself up now.’ She nodded slightly between the smiles, a simple but effective way to reassure him, to ensure he didn’t kick a real wobbly. ‘We’re almost there now.’

He managed the rest of the distance awkwardly, the weight of his stomach pulling him forward, almost making him jog, his feet hitting the pavement at hilarious angles.

Dublin was doing its best to hold on to its miserly ration of September warmth, but a bitterness was reaching across the tin-foil sky, trying to rally a wind or a bucketing rain. Everyone knew it, even the birds. Dash about and get everything done while things are still clear and dry. The cheerful colour of the passing buses – vanilla yellow and two shades of lolly blue - just weren’t working.

Myra said, ‘There Selwyn. We’re there now.’

‘You’ll be the bloody death of me.’

He put a shaking hand on her shoulder, which unsettled a sleeping memory: the gesture used to be something affectionate, but now it was just to make sure he didn’t tip himself over in public. He looked at the people bustling past, racing for their buses at the other end of D’Olier Street. His dark, frightened eyes grew wider, as though he saw a street full of noisy convoys of invading troops. She could tell he was trying to make out if anyone was staring at him, chuckling at his laughable state. ‘No one’s interested in you, Selwyn. Let’s get you onto a seat inside.’

A springy, chatty man, who introduced himself as Tiny Sung Sue - or so it sounded -, came out to meet Myra and Selwyn at the reception desk. He kept sticking out his chin and raising it up like a bucking horse, apparently trying to free his irritated neck from the noose-like grip of his collar and tie. Between mouthfuls of his collapsing tuna and mayonnaise Sandwich (Myra could smell the ingredients) he laughed awkwardly, shared hard-to-understand anecdotes, looked at his watch.

'I was in Hong Kong before I came here,' he tweeted, looking disappointed that Selwyn had taken more interest in the fancy water cooler by the door. 'I really love this city. Something's really going off here.'

Myra worried that Selwyn might not answer. 'They say Dublin’s multi-culture now,' she said gingerly. 'Good for the young ones, I suppose.' She didn't quite know why she joined up those two thoughts, but it certainly did the trick in making Selwyn snap back into focus.

'I just want to know why I wasn’t given a bleedin interview, let alone a letter or call,' he snapped. 'That's all. A man deserves a bloody explanation.'

'I see,' said Sung Sue. 'Best we all go through to where we can talk.' He took them down a long corridor, past chaotic rooms where trendy young people hugged phones under their chins or peered into computer screens, looking bewildered or bored. Myra wondered if she might see someone famous, perhaps even the nice young fellow who wrote the gardening column.

Sung Sue said, 'I think there's been a misunderstanding, but we're happy to put things straight.' He biffed the crust of his sandwich into a bin and picked up a large tray of bulky mail left on a crowded desk.

Myra was resentful that Selwyn had kept his hand on her shoulder, pushing her forward as though she were the leader of the delegation. She knew very well what the nice Tiny Sung Sue was going to say; she'd been able to figure it out right from the start. She felt an overwhelming desire to take a risk and turn on Selwyn there and then, tell him that he was a fool and once again he was going to cause a scene at which people could snigger. This latest spectacle, to make things worse, was going to be performed in the fine corridors of a fine newspaper, and the young people there on the phone might even be forced to write something about it. The whole of Dublin would belly-laugh collectively at the latest shinnanigans of Selwyn Dillon. She dropped her shoulder so his hand fell away from her, but that only made him dig her in the middle of the back with his other hand.

Once they were sitting on the posh leather sofa in a room that had Assistant Editor on the door, Sung Sue said, 'What did you think we meant by the term “crime correspondent” when you saw it in the paper, Mr Dillon?' He played with his watch.

Myra offered Sung Sue a knowing smirk, very discreetly, in the hope that he wouldn't think she was a halfwit as well. She took in his perfect dimples, his pearl-coated teeth, his appealing long fringe and green eyes. She normally didn’t find Asian men appealing, yet there were the odd exceptions. She pulled on a small curl of hair that loitered down in front of her face. She crossed her legs and then bounced her suspended foot up and down, marking the seconds during which Selwyn was saying a big fat nothing. She folded her arms and then tried to communicate to Sung Sue with her eyebrows: she was on his side, not Selwyn’s. If she hadn't agreed to come along and sit there with her husband, she wanted to tell Sung Sue, then there would’ve been a scene - and it wouldn't have been pleasant.

'Are you having me on?' blurted Selwyn, standing up. His arms rose at the sides, like he might take off for an aerial attack. 'I'm not a bloody idiot.'

He was doing his best to stop making idiot sound like eejit, having read somewhere that foreign language students were struggling to understand the locals. He still hoped he may be able to cash in on the idea of giving conversation lessons to Asian students, just as his friend Tom was doing for a kidney-warming nine euros an hour.

Myra squeezed her arms tighter into her chest and looked down at the carpet. 'Don't get angry now, Selwyn.'

'He's making out I'm a bloody eejit - idiot!'

'Don’t be daft. He is not.'

'He bloody is. Him and his bloody yobs. It's just a rag, this is. Nothing bloody special about this outfit.'

'I tried to tell you.' Myra kept looking down at the carpet.

'What did you say?'

'I tried to tell you what it was. That's all.'

Selwyn was silent for a moment and then said, 'Crime correspondent? Course I know what that bloody well means.'

Sung Sue carefully slipped in behind his desk, creating more space between himself and Selwyn. 'You needed to have a journalism background. We wanted a journalist ... to write articles.'

'I knew that,' said Selwyn, suddenly looking vacant.

Myra wanted to yell out that he was lying. He hadn’t known that at all.

'You don't have a journalism background,' said Sung Sue, quietly, finally looking at Myra for backup.

She could see that Sung Sue was looking upon her with pity. He was looking at her gloomy-coloured scarf; the thick, plain dress that looked like carpet underlay; her shoes made famous by Catholic nuns; the cardigan and its tiny balls of overuse, which were now too numerous to be successfully culled.

The last time Selwyn had given her money for an item of clothing he'd insisted on choosing it himself, from the op shop at the end of their street. She'd pleaded with him to let her go to Arnotts, but he'd told her he wouldn't let his money be used to ‘prop up the big conglomerates’ (that was one of the many things he’d heard on talkback, and he repeated it to whoever would listen). She hated the way she looked. She dreamed of the day she could pay for some colour through her hair, or wear an outfit that hadn't been cleaned out of a dead widow's closet.

She decided to take a risk, to win back some of her dignity in front of this nice young man from Hong Kong, who might just be thinking they were both losers. 'Selwyn thought you wanted someone who grasses on crims,’ she said with conviction, but then wondered whether it might’ve been too informal to use the words grasses and crims. ‘He thought you were advertising for someone who gets paid for tips and things.'

'I thought no such thing,' Selwyn protested, his eyes bulging to bursting point. 'You can shut it, right?'

She whispered. 'A correspondent’s not the same as a rat, Selwyn. I tried to tell you. Papers don't go advertising that as a job.'

'No, we don't,' said Sung Sue.

She went all warm on hearing that, confirmation that he hadn’t jumbled her up with her husband. Selwyn was standing out on the stage on his own, his costume coming unstuck, everything revealed. The warm feeling lasted only a matter of seconds though; Selwyn's hand came down on the back of her chair, causing her to jolt forward. It wasn't a hard slap. It never was. It was the usual warning that boundaries had been stepped over.

Sung Sue didn't say anything. He stayed behind his desk and kept his hands together, clearly at a loss to know what to do. Myra didn't want a scene. Already she'd seen a few faces popping up in the small glass window in the door, eagerly curious about the raised voices. She decided she would do her best to get Selwyn to leave. The point about the advert had been made - albeit repeated. Selwyn wouldn't want to be humiliated with further questions and explanations. The charade had gone on long enough. Like with all of these situations - when Selwyn embarrassed her and made her despise him because of his behaviour - it wasn’t long before she was overcome with an enormous feeling of compassion for him.

As they hobbled towards the reception in silence, she wanted to tell him she loved him and that he shouldn’t let himself get upset. She genuinely felt sorry for him as she watched him stumble into the walls. He muttered to himself as he tried to right himself.

Out in the street, as they both looked up to see how the sky had now completely closed over with purple clouds, Selwyn said he wanted to get a taxi home instead of getting a bus. She knew he was seriously dejected; he rarely suggested getting a cab.

‘I just want to be at home,’ he mumbled.

Myra went into automatic mode, wanting to make things easier for him and jolly him out of the black mood he was falling into. Out of the corner of her eye though, just as she was saying something light and irrelevent, she spotted a sign on a window over the road. Letting Selwyn move off down the street a bit, she read the words to herself several times, to make sure she’d understood the meaning of it. The more she read the words, the stronger her feeling that the sign was speaking to her. She took in the whole window and the building, making a mental note of the street number. She turned to see that Selwyn had already flagged down a taxi. As she hurried to catch him up, she couldn’t help but let the words repeat themselves in her head. They seemed to dance at the front of her mind, everything else in there forced to shut up, sit down and let the exciting new performance continue without interruption.

* * *

In the customs hall at Dublin Airport, Father Xavier Duval reset his watch, in exact synchronisation with the large electronic clock on the wall. He felt ropy after his easyJet flight from France, but prepared himself for another big effort, pumping up his chest with the soggy, conditioned air that he wasn’t used to. He headed for the baggage carousel, all of a sudden nervous about what he was doing and why he was doing it.

He was also anxious to avoid a very loud girl from Galway, named Pinky, who’d sat next to him on the plane. She’d talked non-stop in frightening decibels about her summer escapade with a ‘beefy’ Frenchman on the shore of the big lake at Annecy. Father Xavier regretted that he’d taken off his white collar, black shirt and pants at the airport in Lyon. He figured that if she’d known she was talking to a priest she might’ve tamed herself; then he wondered if that might’ve just made her worse. Her nose studs and exposed beer belly had troubled him, to say the least.

‘Hope you have a grand time in Dublin,’ she yelled out from behind her backpack. ‘Be sure to climb the Guiness Storehouse, over there on the wall.’ She pointed to a large tourist photo.

‘Thank you very much,’ he said. He knew his spoken English was too forced, too controlled. He hadn’t spoken it for such along time, and he worried the words wouldn’t come out in the right order. ‘Good bye. Enchanted to meet you.’

She offered him a warrior’s roar, as her rugged Celtic ancestors had probably done in many a battle, and made exaggerated OK signs with both of her chubby hands. He saw then that a g-string rose up above the back of her baggy trousers. He worried about where Pinky had come from and where she was headed.

After flashing his passport under the nose of a disinterested customs officer, he was out in front of the airport trying to find a cab. He was advised by a man with a black cap to take what sounded like ‘an irreparable carrier’, and make his way to the official taxi rank. It was only after a few minutes, standing in a breeze full of dust and fumes from passing buses, that he realised he’d misheard the word ‘reputable’.

Father Xavier put his bag onto the back seat of a large London-style cab and said, ‘Would it please be possible to be taken to the centre of the city.’ He knew he sounded uptight.

‘I’ll take ya whereever ya fuckin well like.’

In the awkward silence that followed, Father Xavier thought about the madness of the past few days, the ducking and diving to avoid members of his parish at Fregny, near Saint Etienne, and the attempt to pretend that everything had been as it should be. His housekeeper would arrive at the presbytery the following day and discover his absence. She would know something was amiss; he’d always informed her of his small trips to visit family in Paris, or down to the coast for short stays at the church retreat at Cassis.

He sighed heavily, a colossal feeling of tiredness pushing down on his shoulders and a sharp headache pressing into the back of his eyes. He thought about the massive number of trips he’d been forced to make to neighbouring villages and towns over the previous months, becoming the sole priest in a forever expanding diocese of sinners and needy people. Paris kept saying that new recruits were on the way; no one would swear to it on the bible though. Priests were being taken out of small towns to go elsewhere, with parishes in a constant state of merging, and those who’d become used to small flocks that could be easily managed were suddenly the leaders of thousands of people who were hostile to the loss of intimacy. He thought it no wonder that the pews were starting to ring with increasing silence. No cook in kitchen, no restaurant.

The cab driver came to life, his grey eyes searching in the rear vision mirror, a suspicious and mean look about him.‘Are ya one a these bleedin foreigners comin in ta take Irish jobs?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘We got loads a you lot coming in an pushing up the prices.’

Father Xavier saw that the man’s neck was purple and his voice shaky. ‘I’m just visiting,’ he said, hoping to end the conversation there and then.

‘Loads a them eastern Europeans here now.’ He turned off the radio that had been playing pleasantly in the background. ‘Romanians, Poles, Turks, Hungarians. You name it, we got em. We’ll be speaking their fuckin lingo before ya know it.’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t know too much about that.’

The driver grunted and then looked dreamily at the way ahead. Father Xavier imagined the driver thinking back to his happier times on those streets, when he used to laugh and kick cans with his friends, and perhaps make a few bob selling broken eggs in a wooden cart. He probably never imagined he would be driving so many foreigners around the streets of his beloved city.

About 20 minutes later the driver swung his cab over to theside of the road and said, ’Can’t get more fuckin central than this.’

Father Xavier walked around for a while with his duffle bag over his shoulder and tried to get his bearings. The last time he’d walked the streets of Dublin had been in 1990, just before he’d gone into the seminary. Instead of looking for all the likely changes though, he decided he would find a hotel for the night, sleep himself into a state of fitness, and then set his mind to finding his dear friend Soloman. That thought made him nervous. It’d been such a long time, and there’d been no correspondence between them for years. Would he still be there? Would he accept his explanation for why he was just turning up, and once again lend the sympathetic ear that he’d offered all of those years earlier?

After looking up to admire the tall, needle-like Monument of Light in O’Connell Street, which looked sinister against the backdrop of the brooding sky, he made his way towards O’Connell bridge, struggling to avoid the mighty rush of Friday shoppers and people keen to get home. Things weren’t made easier by the renovation work being carried out on the sidewalks, with everything fenced off in a chaotic manner, mud and dust spread everywhere. A couple of times, to avoid the pushing and shoving, he took a risk and walked on the road.

He eventually stood in front of the main entrance to Trinity College, wondering which part of town would be best for finding a cheap hotel. He doubled back slightly and headed down College Street, in the direction of Pearse Station, with the distant memory of there being a couple of cheap and friendly hotels in that area. He knew there was no use walking up Grafton Street or towards Temple Bar; he’d read in Le Monde how those areas had boomed in recent years and a tourist had to have a good wad of euros to even get a look in.

He walked fast, anxious about the build up of clotted cream-looking clouds. He wondered if he’d ever seen Ireland under brilliant sunshine, in those student days when he used to enjoy travelling there on a night bus from London. He’d once had romantic visions of actually living there, perhaps not in Dublin itself, but in a stony cottage in some little fishing village in the west, where even just the lilt of the language would be enough to sustain him. Life had always taken him elsewhere though, throwing up safe and more illuminated paths.

He turned into a road with a name that looked surprisingly French – D’Olier Street – and it wasn’t long before he found a small hotel that looked cosy and inviting. It was called The Barker and Conrad, a slim and chic-looking establishment, stuck in between what looked like a cheap place for backpackers and a traditional pub on the corner that offered “divinity” steaks.

There were three stars above the hotel entrance, and a board that advertised rooms at €75 a night. He felt attracted to the warm orange of the walls he could see inside (it reminded him of the colour of his own room back at his parents’ old house in Mulhouse) and he thought the reception area looked tidy enough. As he pushed open the door he read another more prominant sign on one of the windows:

CLEANER/COOK WANTED. FULL BOARD AND GOOD WAGE.
MUST BE NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKER. APPLY WITHIN.

In another wave of pessimism, which he was trying hard to keep his head above, he wondered if the advertisement meant that breakfast would be lousy and the shower would remain uncleaned until the vacancy was filled. He also wondered if local Irish people would hesitate about applying for the job, given that they were calling for native English speakers. Did the Irish consider themselves to be native English speakers? Would they be happy with such a title?

He stepped inside and was instantly calmed by the musical, log-fire welcome of the receptionist. He was a bald man the size of a wafer, but his voice seemed to make the wooden walls vibrate. ‘A very good evening to you, sir. You’re very welcome here at The Barker and Conrad.’


Copyright, 2007. Seamus Kearney.