Selected Stories полностью

‘The kind of house you wouldn’t know about,’ he read out, imagining what was described: a place where theatre people lived, coffee always on the go, late mornings. Mr Gilfoyle found it hard to believe that Breda Maguire had been given accommodation there, but he supposed it could be true.

Justina, sitting on the edge of the bath, had no such difficulty. She accepted without demur all that was related. She saw her friend in the green-and-blue kimono that was described. ‘Like a dragon wrapped round me,’ Mr Gilfoyle had read out and explained that a kimono was Japanese. He felt what he believed to be a gallstone changing position inside him somewhere, a twitch of pain that was only to be expected at his age he’d been told by the doctor he visited regularly.

‘Davy Byrne’s you’d never see only it’s jammed to the doors. The racing crowd, all that kind of thing.’ Breda Maguire was on the streets, Mr Gilfoyle said to himself. She had money, you could tell she had, nothing made up about that. The house she said she was stopping in was out Island-bridge way and again there was an echo of the truth in that, handy for the quays. The quays were where you’d find them, a bricklayer told him once, maybe fifty years ago, and it could still be where a man would go to look for a street woman. ‘I have a friend takes me out,’ he read. ‘Billy.’

‘Will you listen to that!’ Justina whispered. The name of a hotel where there were dances was mentioned, shops, cinemas. A wrist bangle had been bought, and Justina saw her friend and Billy at a counter with a glass top like the one in Hennessy’s the Clock Shop, necklaces and bangles laid out for them. She saw them in a café, a waitress bringing grills, the same as Justina had seen people eating in Egan’s, a chop and chips, bacon, egg and sausage. Billy was like the air pilot in the film she and Breda had watched on the television only the day before Breda went off. ‘How’s tricks with yourself?’ Mr Gilfoyle’s voice continued.

It would be impossible for Justina to respond to that because her learning difficulty deprived her of any communication that involved writing words down. But Breda had remembered, as naturally she would. ‘I’ll maybe give you a call one of these days,’ Mr Gilfoyle read out. The pain had shifted, had gone round to the back, like a gallstone maybe would.

‘Isn’t Billy great, the way he’d give her things?’ Justina said.

‘He is, Justina.’

‘Isn’t Billy a great name?’

‘It is.’

Covering a multitude of sins, Mr Gilfoyle assumed, a stand-in name for names Breda didn’t know, the presents another way of putting it that money had changed hands in some quayside doorway.

‘I’ll dream about Breda and Billy,’ Justina said, slipping down from the edge of the bath.

Father Clohessy listened when Justina put it into her confession that Maeve was cross with her because Breda telephoned. She put it into her confession that she went into the kitchen to tell what Breda had said and Maeve wouldn’t listen; and the next thing was she let drop a cup she was drying. It was then that Maeve began to cry, tears streaming down her cheeks, down her neck into the collar of her dress. As if it wasn’t nuisance enough, an old man who didn’t know how to make his bed forever on about his ailments. As if it wasn’t enough, Micksie in and out of the pubs, a girl with learning trouble, the back garden a tip. Was there a woman in Ireland could put up with more, when on top of everything a hooer the like of Breda Maguire got going again after they thought they’d seen the back of her?

All that Justina put into her confession. She was bad, she said. One minute she was laughing with Breda on the phone; the next, Maeve was crying in the kitchen. Breda said come up to Dublin and they’d have great gas. Get the money however, Breda said. Get it off Mr Gilfoyle, anything at all. Take the half-two bus, the same as she’d got herself. Come up for the two days, what harm would it do anyone? ‘I’ll show you the whole works,’ Breda said.

The fingers of Father Clohessy’s hands were locked together as he listened, that being his usual pose in the confessional, head turned so that one ear could pick up the revelations that were coming through the gauze of the grille. Among his confessants, it was only Justina he ever interrupted and he did so now.

‘Ah no, Justina, no,’ he said.

‘Will I say a Hail Mary for Maeve, Father?’

‘You wouldn’t want to go up to Dublin, Justina. You wouldn’t want to upset your sister more.’