Fussbuckets

Rain came on as I walked.  Naturally.  If only I’d had that emergency umbrella I purchased the other day, the one now sitting in my hallway unused, that anomaly.  Truth be told, umbrellas were in their essence anomalies in this country.  There was no point in owning one.  Precipitation may well have been a consistent affair, but its stay and power was obstinately not, and the wind was frankly so intense that such devices rarely survived in their original form.  Unless you had the money to get one of those spectacular ones so wide and sturdy it was amazing the pavements weren’t every rainy day rolling with severed heads.    

 

I was imagining how hard it would be to break into The Martlet and steal the probable Montescu.  I knew the back door of the building well, how its latch was reachable from the side window, if broken or removed stealthily.  How Lavery used only a dummy alarm for the building in his unrivalled cheapskatery.  Yes.  Could be done.  Surely.

 

The Saltyman was packed.  I didn’t know what time it was but I imagined about nine.  The laughing and belting was deafening.  It was as close to an age-old bacchanal as you’d get around here.  At the bar there were Gullivers, the same ones I’d seen here before, and at the vigil. 

‘I’ll have a pint and a glass of BlackBush if you have it.’

Some other fella was behind the bar.  It must have been Patsy’s night off.

‘Oh, I have it,’ he said.  ‘But are you sure you’re able for it?  You’re looking awful wobbly there, bud.’

I must have been drunker than I thought.  How much had I had back at the Berrills?  About half a Cabernet.  Wait, no, the lot.

‘I’m grand.  No need to worry.  I’m just in for the one.’

‘You just ordered more than one.’

‘One combination, I meant.  I swear. Don’t worry, I’m well.’

He went and got my drinks.   

 

Then I saw them.  The Colreavys.  And beside them a whole gaggle I’d rather have avoided.  Rita Gilgan, the angry sister.  And her pal, the reliably terrifying Sue Ellen Deane. 

I looked around to see if I had a support group myself, knowing right well I didn’t really have a faction.  I thought if I belonged to any faction in the town it was the job.  But The Martlet was coming to pieces.  There was next to no camaraderie anymore considering the place could go under any minute.  Truly, if there was a faction for me at all, it was probably back in the Berrills house.  The Billy Wilder Society.

 

I went to the wall at the end of the lounge where there was a small resting shelf and some stools.  A TV set was mounted high in the corner, always with the sound off, and perfectly placed so that those at the shelf could sit with their backs turned to the rest of the bar and stare numbly at whatever sitcom or game show or horse-race was on.  Only the bookie runners or recently jilted sat on these stools, reserved as they were for the ne’er do wells, single-filers, long-discarded local disappointments.  If Oran was one to visit the public houses, this was where he would be, surely.  So I knew I was bringing attention to myself by sitting there.  But I was so heavily irrigated that, well, I couldn’t give a flying fuck.  I pretended to look at the TV (Only Fools) but the corner of my eye sought to capture tiny bits of Caitríona as she reclined with a mellow, uncommunicative bearing.  She looked a little tipsy, but absolutely the playfulness she’d displayed when last we were all here had disappeared, and I’d like to think she was missing terribly my unique and considerable charms.  And there beside her, that dog-abusing dirtbird of a husband, who was mostly gobbing off to Rita.  A right pair they were.  Made for each other.  What a shame!

 

My seething hadn’t gone away.  I felt let down by the Berrills.  Just like everyone else, I kept saying to myself.  (Not the first time I’d said that to myself.)  In my heart I imagined it was a mere overreaction on Oran’s part, made understandable following the trauma he’d suffered the last few weeks, and tomorrow it would be like nothing ever happened and away back to normal.  How could I be sure of that though?  In a world full of aggrieved parties and fussbuckets.  I thought I knew Oran and Phyllis quite well now, but in all honesty, what could merely time knowing do about it?  People could call things a day whenever they wanted.  There was no stopping them. 

 

None had noticed me come in, it seemed, and even if they had, I didn’t think they’d have the notion to bother me.  But after fifteen minutes in the place, I felt a tap on the shoulder, and there went my anonymity.  I turned to see Rita Gilgan: a window model of passive aggression.    

‘You work at The Martlet, don’t you?’ she said, chiseller smile on her face.

‘I do,’ I said, taking a sip of the stout.  ‘So does your friend over there,’ I added, acknowledging Caitríona at her table and thus revealing that I had been keeping an eye on them since coming in.

‘Oh, been scoping us out, have you?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Why?’

I took from the BlackBush now, swallowed enough to knock a regular man off these stools.

‘For my own safety.’

‘Ah,’ she laughed.  You think we’re going to batter you, is that it?’

‘I wouldn’t put it past yous.’

‘Why would that be?’

‘You know . . .’

I took another drink and for a second realised I was speaking to the bereaved and aimed for some decorum.

‘My association with the Berrills.  It was dreadful what happened to your brother.    But I feel everyone is out to get them and it is just not on, if you ask me.’

‘Really?’

‘By all medical and legal accounts, it was an accident.’

‘There are no accidents,’ she said, angrily.  'Someone is always to blame.  Someone always did something.  And they’ll lie through their teeth about it.’

‘Like the fire.’

‘What fire?’

‘You know which fire.’

‘What are you talking about?  Are you blaming me for something?  I started no fire.  Fucking cheek of ya.  My poor brother, a brilliant young man with his whole life ahead of him, was killed all because of the crap published in your newspaper.  What do you say to that, ye prick?’

‘Jesus, the way yous go on about him, anyone would think the whole lot of ye were in love with him.’

‘Pardon me?’

‘Ah, you know what I mean.  You’ve been hassling the poor Berrills for years about their – to you unorthodox – living arrangement.  Nobody’s had a look behind your closed doors, no?’

I was too drunk and fresh from seething to realise how horrendous this sounded.  It was a smear on the lad’s name.  A boy just.  Only twenty.  I’d apologise in the morning.  To the Lord above.

There was visible rage in her.  Probably justified.  She might have hit me a thump if someone hadn’t called her away to the bar at that juncture and I walked out to the little beer garden to get away.  Now I’d happily forgone the smoking of cigarettes some years ago, but now it became something I might be happily capable of doing again.  The few people there in the soup didn’t look awfully friendly.  So I picked out the friendliest-looking among them, a man with a thick green jumper on and a long, soft beard. 

‘I couldn’t borrow a smoke from you, could I?’

The man said No problem and produced a cigarette for me.  He lit me up and I started smoking my first nicotine stick in what seemed like an age.

‘Nice out here,’ I said to my benefactor.

‘Yap.’

It wasn’t that nice.  It was dark.  The ashtrays were like abandoned autopsies.  And phlegm bubbled nastily on the porcelain.

‘Good to have a smoke, I said.

‘Yap.’

Not long into the smoke, Colreavy appeared.  And Sue Ellen Deane.  And one of the Gullivers from the bar.  They sparked up cigarettes – the Gulliver a halfway point King Edward he had in his pocket – but Colreavy’s eyes were on me the whole time so it was clear he was going to say something.  Eventually, as I was about three drags from the butt, he approached. 

‘You had something to say to Rita in there, did ya?’ he said, knowingly amplifying that old menace of his.

‘I might have said something,’ I replied, too drunk to deny the earlier engagement, or to shit myself.