“Miami Vice. Liam Neeson was in it.”
“Oh don’t tell me anything about it! Me dad’s taping it for me. Did you like the cars? Now that they’ve gotten rid of the kit cars the cars are pretty cool. Cool clothes, too. I wish you’d let me wear a jacket and T-shirt. It’s much more practical if you think about it, sir.”
“Goodnight, Lawson,” I said and hung up.
I went out to the shed, lit a joint and put Robert Plant’s Now and Zen in the tape player. On one of the songs there was a sample of Kylie Minogue’s “I Should Be So Lucky”. Was that co-opting or surrender?
I called up Kenny Dalziel at his house but the phone just rang and rang. I’d apologise to the useless cunt tomorrow.
I switched the music off and looked at the stars. The Great Bear rotating slowly and comfortingly across the winter sky.
Joint finished I walked back in.
Beth was upstairs getting ready for bed.
She had left her handbag on the kitchen table and neatly folded away inside it was an ordnance survey map of the Ballypollard Road in the townland behind Magheramorne. I knew that road and that townland.
Beth had circled a field on the Ballypollard Road for reasons best known to herself. What could this be about? Something to do with her father’s visit? It was mysterious but there was no percentage in asking her about it because she would know I’d gone into her bag and looked at her stuff. If I recalled correctly the Ballypollard Road had nothing on it at all except for the Ballypollard Wool Shop, which was something of a local landmark because of the giant sheep statue out the front. “The biggest sheep statue in all of Ireland”, they claimed. The circle Beth had drawn on the map was about half a mile up the road from the Big Sheep itself, so it wasn’t a wool-buying expedition.
I looked at the map until Beth called down to me to ask if I was ever “coming up to bed?”
It had been a long day but I couldn’t sleep and although it wasn’t my shift I got up to feed Emma at just after two. She fell asleep at the half-bottle mark and I burped her over my shoulder.
Jet the cat was sleeping in front of the paraffin heater but when he saw that I was awake he jumped onto the baby’s changing table and rubbed himself against me.
“You’re awake too, eh, cat? The two men can’t sleep and the two women are out for the count. What’s their secret, do you think?”
Jet kept his own counsel while the 9th-century Irish poem Pangur Bán floated into my consciousness; I extemporised a translation that would, I think, have pleased Sedulius Scottus himself, even if not my literal-minded fifth-form Irish teacher, Dr Monroe.
How happy we are together, scholar and cat, Each has his own work, be it study or stalking a rat.
Your shining eyes watch the ratholes, my failing eyes read verse, I rejoice over logic problems, you over besting your rodent adversaries.
We are pleased with our own methods and neither hinders the other, Thus we live without tedium or envy, Pangur my brother.
And yes I was pleased with my method. It had been a good day professionally and otherwise, but I knew that the good days were the exception and as Noel Coward wisely reminds us, bad times are just around the corner …
4: A PRETTY SHITTY MORNING ON THE BALLYPOLLARD ROAD
Voices and meows downstairs. “Sssshhh the pair of you. Daddy is still up there sleeping.” So I’m the father of the cat now too, am I?
Yeah, I supposed I was. Rescued that cat from almost certain death in England.
I opened my eyes, embraced the light of day.
What a day. Friday the 4th of March 1988.
When I was twelve years old a gypsy boy cursed me when I stopped him from stealing my bike parked outside the pet shop in Buncrana. Nothing had happened at the time, but at the end of Friday the 4th of March 1988 when I put my head down on the pillow at two in the morning I suddenly remembered that evil-faced kid and wondered if maybe his spell had merely been delayed for twenty-five years or so.
But I didn’t know that then, snuggled up in the blanket with footsteps coming along the landing.
Beth had brought me a mug of coffee and marmalade on toast.
“What’s this in aid of?” I asked suspiciously.
“God, you’re so cynical,” she said and flounced off making me even more suspicious but also affording me a view of her fantastic bum.
Bum. Coffee. Toast. Not the worst way to start the morning.
I flipped on the clock radio.
The nurses were on strike, the ferry workers were on strike and the Birmingham Six had lost another appeal against their convictions even though it was obvious to every peeler in the British Isles that they had been fitted up by the West Midlands Constabulary.
Coffee and toast done I got out of bed and looked through the window across Coronation Road to the Antrim Hills where it appeared to be flurrying.
“Was there snow in the forecast?” I shouted downstairs.
“It’s only a light dusting. We’ll still be able to drive,” she shouted back up.
“We? Are we going somewhere?”