I’d grown friendly with Jack Smoot ever since I’d started frequenting MacIntyre’s. He was about twenty years older than me and an intimidating presence with his shaven head, eyepatch and a walking stick that supported a lame left leg. Once, when I stayed late on a Friday night with a girl I was friendly with from work, he invited me to spend the night with him in his flat upstairs, but I declined and he seemed more upset by my rejection than I had expected him to be, for I assumed that he hit on his regulars frequently, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. I made sure to return the next night, hoping that things would not be awkward between us, and to my relief he behaved as if nothing untoward had happened. Now, he usually left me alone to enjoy my dinner but would sometimes join me for a drink before I left for home and it was on one such occasion that he surprised me by revealing himself to be Irish.
“Well, half Irish,” he said, correcting himself. “I was born there. But I got out of the place when I was twenty.”
“You’ve no trace of an accent,” I told him.
“I worked hard to get rid of it,” he said, tapping on the table nervously with badly chewed nails.
“Where are you from?”
“Out near Ballincollig,” he said, looking away, his tongue bulging in his cheek. I could feel his entire body tensing beside me.
“Where’s that? Kerry?”
“Cork.”
“Oh right,” I said. “I’ve never been there.”
“Well, you haven’t missed much.”
“And do you go back often?”
He laughed, as if I’d asked a ridiculous question, and shook his head. “I do not,” he said. “I haven’t set foot in Ireland in thirty-five years and it would take an army of mercenaries to drag me back there now. Awful country. Horrible people. Terrible memories.”
“And yet,” I said, a little unsettled by his bitterness, “you run an Irish bar.”
“I run an Irish bar because it makes money,” he told me. “This place is a little goldmine. I may hate the country, Cyril, but I don’t mind her people coming over here and putting money in my till. And once in a while someone comes in and there’s something in his voice or his expression that…” He trailed off and shook his head before closing his eyes, and I could tell that whatever scars lingered from his past, there was little chance of them ever healing.
“What?” I asked when he showed no signs of continuing. “Something that what?”
“Something that reminds me of a boy I used to know,” he said, looking up with a half-smile, and I decided to ask no more questions. Whatever his memories were, they were private ones and no business of mine.
“Anyway, I admire people like you, Cyril,” he said finally. “People who got away. It’s the ones who’ve stayed that I despise. The tourists who come over here on Friday mornings on the first Aer Lingus flight with no plans other than to drink themselves stupid, then make their way to the Rosse Buurt to get laid, although by then they’re usually too drunk to get it up anyway. Then they leave again on Sunday afternoon, back to their civil-service jobs with Monday-morning hangovers, convinced that the whores enjoyed the five minutes they spent with them just because they smiled through it all and gave them a kiss when they were leaving. I bet you never see a group of Irish tourists in the Anne Frank House.”
“Not often,” I admitted.
“That’s because they’re all in here. Or places like this.”
“You know, I worked for the civil service when I was younger,” I told him.
“I’m only half-surprised to hear you say it,” he said. “But you left, so you mustn’t have enjoyed it.”
“It was all right. The truth is I might be still there today if…well, there was an incident and there was no staying on after that. I didn’t care much, to be honest. I got a job in RTé and that was more interesting.”
Smoot took a sip from his drink and glanced out the window, watching as the bicycles went past, an occasional bell ringing in the air to warn a careless pedestrian. “Funnily enough,” he said, “I know someone who works in the Dáil.”
“A TD?”
“No, a woman.”
“There are women TDs,” I said.
“Are there?”
“Of course there are, you sexist pig. Well, a few of them anyway. Not many.”
“She isn’t a TD. She works behind the scenes. I didn’t like her very much when we first met. In fact, I hated her. I thought of her as a cuckoo in my nest. But then, as things worked out, she saved my life. I wouldn’t be sitting here today talking to you if it wasn’t for her.”
The bar, which was busy, felt quiet around us. “How?” I asked. “What happened?”
He said nothing, simply shook his head, and then breathed in very deeply, as if he was fighting off tears. When he looked up at me, all I saw was pain on his face.
“Are you still friends?” I asked. “Does she come over to see you?”
“She’s my best friend,” he said, rubbing the edge of his thumb against the corners of both eyes. “And, yes, she comes every year or two. Saves her money and flies to Amsterdam, and the pair of us sit right here at this table, crying like babies as we talk about the past. Here’s the thing you have to understand about Ireland,” he said, leaning forward now and pointing a finger at me. “Nothing will ever change in that fucking place. Ireland is a backward hole of a country run by vicious, evil-minded, sadistic priests and a government so in thrall to the collar that it’s practically led around on a leash. The Taoiseach does what the Archbishop of Dublin says and for his obeisance he’s given a treat, like a good puppy. The best thing that could happen to Ireland would be for a tsunami to rise up in the Atlantic Ocean and drown the place with all the vengeance of a biblical flood and for every man, woman and child to disappear forever.”
I sat back, startled by the vehemence in his tone. Smoot was generally a fairly benevolent presence; to hear such rage in his voice unsettled me. “Come on,” I said. “That might be going a bit far, don’t you think?”
“If anything, it’s not going far enough,” he said, betraying a little of the Cork accent in his voice now, and perhaps he heard it too, for he shuddered, as if the fact that it remained inside him somewhere, buried deep and inexorably within his soul, was upsetting to him. “Think yourself lucky, Cyril,” he added. “You got out. And you don’t ever have to go back.”
Bastiaan