After Rain (10 page)

    ‘We seen it on the television,’ Mangan said. ‘Your man’s in great form.’

    ‘What line are you in?’ Carmel asked.

    ‘Gangsters,’ said Mangan, and everyone laughed.

    Gallagher wagged his head in admiration. Mangan always gave the same response when asked that question by girls. You might have thought he’d restrain himself today, but that was Mangan all over. Gallagher lit a cigarette, thinking he should have hit the old fellow before he had a chance to turn round. He should have rushed into the room and struck him a blow on the back of the skull with whatever there was to hand, hell take the consequences.

    ‘What’s it mean, gangsters?’ Marie asked, still giggling, glancing at Carmel and giggling even more.

    ‘Banks,’ Mangan said, ‘is our business.’

    The girls thought of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the adventures of Bonnie and Clyde, and laughed again. They knew that if they pressed their question it wouldn’t be any good. They knew it was a kind of flirtation, their asking and Mangan teasing with his replies. Mangan was a wag. Both girls were drawn to him.

    ‘Are the ices to our ladyships’ satisfaction?’ he enquired, causing a further outbreak of giggling.

    Gallagher had ordered a banana split. Years ago he used to think that if you filled a room with banana splits he could eat them all. He’d been about five then. He used to think the same thing about fruitcake.

    ‘Are the flicks on today?’ Mangan asked, and the girls said on account of the Pope they mightn’t be. It might be like Christmas Day, they didn’t know.

    ‘We seen what’s showing in Bray,’ Marie said. ‘In any case.’

    ‘We’ll go dancing later on,’ Mangan promised. He winked at Gallagher, and Gallagher thought the day they made a killing you wouldn’t see him for dust. The mail boat and Spain, posh Cockney girls who called you Mr. Big. Never lift a finger again.

    ‘Will we sport ourselves on the prom?’ Mangan suggested, and the girls laughed again. They said they didn’t mind. Each wanted to be Mangan’s. He sensed it, so he walked between them on the promenade, linking their arms. Gallagher walked on the outside, linking Carmel.

    ‘Spot of the ozone,’ Mangan said. He pressed his forearm against Marie’s breast. She was the one, he thought.

    ‘D’you like the nursing?’ Gallagher asked, and Carmel said it was all right. A sharp breeze was darting in from the sea, stinging their faces, blowing the girls’ hair about. Gallagher saw himself stretched out by a blue swimming-pool, smoking and sipping at a drink. There was a cherry in the drink, and a little stick with an umbrella on the end of it. A girl with one whole side of her bikini open was sharing it with him.

    ‘Bray’s a great place,’ Mangan said.

    ‘The pits,’ Carmel corrected.

    You could always tell by the feel of a girl on your arm, Mangan said to himself. Full of sauce the fat one was, no more a nurse than he was. Gallagher wondered if they had a flat, if there’d be anywhere to go when the moment came.

    ‘We could go into the bar of the hotel,’ the other one was saying, the way girls did when they wanted to extract their due.

    ‘What hotel’s this?’ he asked.

    ‘The International.’

    ‘Oh, listen to Miss Ritzy!’

    They turned and walked back along the promenade, guided by the girls to the bar in question. Gin and tonic the girls had. Gallagher and Mangan had Smithwick’s.

    ‘We could go into town later,’ Carmel casually suggested. ’There’ll be celebrations on.’

    ‘We’ll give the matter thought,’ Mangan said.

    Another couple of pulls of the tie, Mangan said to himself, and who’d have been the wiser? You get to that age, you’d had your life anyway. As it was, the old geezer had probably conked it on his own, tied up like that. Most likely he was stiffening already.

    ‘Isn’t there a disco on in Bray?’ he suggested. ‘What’s wrong with a slap-up meal and then the light fantastic?’

    The girls were again amused at his way of putting it. Gallagher was glad to hear the proposal that they should stay where they were. If they went into town the whole opportunity could fall asunder. If you didn’t end up near a mott’s accommodation you were back where you started.

    ‘You’d die of the pace of it in Bray,’ Marie said, and Mangan thought a couple more gins and a dollop of barley wine with their grill and chips. He edged his knee against Marie’s. She didn’t take hers away.

    ‘Have you a flat or rooms or something?’ Gallagher asked, and the girls said they hadn’t. They lived at home, they said. They’d give anything for a flat.

    A few minutes later, engaged at the urinals in the lavatory, the two youths discussed the implications of that. Mangan had stood up immediately on hearing the news. He’d given a jerk of his head when the girls weren’t looking.

    ‘No bloody go,’ Gallagher said.

    ‘The fat one’s on for it.’

    ‘Where though, man?’

    Mangan reminded his companion of other occasions, in car parks and derelict buildings, of the time they propped up the bar of the emergency exit of the Adelphi cinema and went back in afterwards, of the time in the garden shed in Drumcondra.

    Gallagher laughed, feeling more optimistic when he remembered all that. He winked to himself, the way he did when he was beginning to feel drunk. He spat into the urinal, another habit at this particular juncture. The seashore was the place; he’d forgotten about the seashore.

    ‘Game ball,’ Mangan said.

    The memory of the day that had passed seemed rosy now — the empty streets they had hurried through, the quiet houses where their business had been, the red blotchiness in the old man’s face and neck, the processions on the television screen. Get a couple more gins into them, Mangan thought again, and then the barley wine. Stretch the fat one out on the soft bloody sand.

    ‘Oh, lovely,’ the fat one said when more drinks were offered.

    Gallagher imagined the wife of a businessman pleading down a telephone, reporting that her captors intended to slice off the tips of her little fingers unless the money was forthcoming. The money was a package in a telephone booth, stashed under the seat. The pictures of Spain began again.

    ‘Hi,’ Carmel said.

    She’d been to put her lipstick on, but she didn’t look any different.

    ‘What d’you do really?’ she asked on the promenade.

    ‘Unemployed.’

    ‘You’re loaded for an unemployed.’ Her tone was suspicious. He watched her trying to focus her eyes. Vaguely, he wondered if she liked him.

    ‘A man’s car needed an overhaul,’ he said.

    Ahead of them, Mangan and Marie were laughing, the sound drifting lightly back above the swish of the sea.

    ‘He’s great sport, isn’t he?’ Carmel said.

    ‘Oh, great all right.’

    Mangan turned round before they went down the steps to the shingle. Gallagher imagined his fancy talk and the fat one giggling at it. He wished he was good at talk like that.

    ‘We had plans made to go into town,’ Carmel said. ‘There’ll be great gas in town tonight.’

    When they began to cross the shingle she said it hurt her feet, so Gallagher led her back to the concrete wall of the promenade and they sat down with their backs to it. It wasn’t quite dark. Cigarette packets and chocolate wrappings were scattered on the sand and pebbles. Gallagher put his arm round Carmel’s shoulders. She let him kiss her. She didn’t mind when he twisted her sideways so that she no longer had her back to the wall. She felt limp in his arms, and for a moment Gallagher thought she’d passed out, but then she kissed him back. She murmured something and her arms pulled him down on top of her. He realized it didn’t matter about the fancy talk.

    ‘When then?’ Marie whispered, pulling down her clothes. Five minutes ago Mangan had promised they would meet again; he’d sworn there was nothing he wanted more; the sooner the better, he’d said.

    ‘Monday night,’ he added now. ‘Outside the railway station. Six.’ It was where they’d picked the two girls up. Mangan could think of nowhere else and it didn’t matter anyway since he had no intention of being anywhere near Bray on Monday night.

    ‘Geez, you’re great,’ Marie said.

    On the bus to Dublin they did not say much. Carmel had spewed up a couple of mouthfuls, and in Gallagher’s nostrils the sour odour persisted. Marie in the end had been a nag, going on about Monday evening, making sure Mangan wouldn’t forget. What both of them were thinking was that Cohen, as usual, had done best out of the bit of business there’d been.

    Then the lean features of Mr. Livingston were recalled by Mangan, the angry eyes, the frown. They’d made a mess of it, letting him see them, they’d bollocksed the whole thing. That moment in the doorway when the old man’s glance had lighted on his face he had hardly been able to control his bowels. ‘I’m going back there,’ his own voice echoed from a later moment, but he’d known, even as he spoke, that if he returned he would do no more than he had done already.

    Beside him, on the inside seat, Gallagher experienced similar recollections. He stared out into the summery night, thinking that if he’d hit the old man on the back of the skull he could have finished him. The thought of that had pleased him when they were with the girls. It made him shiver now.

    ‘God, she was great,’ Mangan said, dragging out of himself a single snigger.

    His bravado obscured a longing to be still with the girls, ordering gins at the bar and talking fancy. He would have paid what remained in his pocket still to taste her lipstick on the seashore, or to hear her gasp as he touched her for the first time.

    Gallagher tried for his dream of Mr. Big, but it would not come to him. ‘Yeah,’ he said, replying to his friend’s observation.

    The day was over; there was nowhere left to hide from the error that had been made. As they had at the time, they sensed the old man’s shame and the hurt to his pride, as animals sense fear or resolution. Privately, each calculated how long it would be before the danger they’d left behind in the house caught up with them.

    They stepped off the bus on the quays. The crowds that had celebrated in the city during their absence had dwindled, but people who were on the streets spoke with a continuing excitement about the Pope’s presence in Ireland and the great Mass there had been in the sunshine. The two youths walked the way they’d come that morning, both of them wondering if the nerve to kill was something you acquired.

After Rain

    In the dining-room of the Pensione Cesarina solitary diners are fitted in around the walls, where space does not permit a table large enough for two. These tables for one are in three of the room’s four corners, by the door of the pantry where the jugs of water keep cool, between one family table and another, on either side of the tall casement windows that rattle when they’re closed or opened. The dining-room is large, its ceiling high, its plain cream-coloured walls undecorated. It is noisy when the pensione’s guests are there, the tables for two that take up all the central space packed close together, edges touching. The solitary diners are well separated from this mass by the passage left for the waitresses, and have a better view of the dining-room’s activity and of the food before it’s placed in front of them — whether tonight it is
brodo
or pasta, beef or chicken, and what the
dolce
is.

    
‘Dieci,’
Harriet says, giving the number of her room when she is asked. The table she has occupied for the last eleven evenings has been joined to one that is too small for a party of five: she doesn’t know where to go. She stands a few more moments by the door, serving dishes busily going by her, wine bottles grabbed from the marble-topped sideboard by the rust-haired waitress, or the one with a wild look, or the one who is plump and pretty. It is the rust-haired waitress who eventually leads Harriet to the table by the door of the pantry where the water jugs keep cool.
’Da bere?’
she asks and Harriet, still feeling shy although no one glanced in her direction when she stood alone by the door, orders the wine she has ordered on other nights, Santa Cristina.

    Wearing a blue dress unadorned except for the shiny blue buckle of its belt, she has earrings that hardly show and a necklace of opaque white beads that isn’t valuable. Angular and thin, her dark hair cut short, her long face strikingly like the sharply chiselled faces of Modigliani, a month ago she passed out of her twenties. She is alone in the Pensione Cesarina because a love affair is over.

    A holiday was cancelled, there was an empty fortnight. She wanted to be somewhere else then, not in England with time on her hands.
’Io sola,’
she said on the telephone, hoping she had got that right, choosing the Cesarina because she’d known it in childhood, because she thought that being alone would be easier in familiar surroundings.

    
‘Va
bene?’ the rust-haired waitress enquires, proffering the Santa Cristina.

    ‘Sì, si.’

    The couples who mostly fill the dining-room are German, the guttural sound of their language drifting to Harriet from the tables that are closest to her. Middle-aged, the women more stylishly dressed than the men, they are enjoying the heat of August and the low-season tariff: demi-pensione at a hundred and ten thousand lire. The heat may be too much of a good thing for some, although it’s cooler by dinnertime, when the windows of the dining-room are all open, and the Cesarina is cooler anyway, being in the hills. ‘If there’s a breeze about,’ Harriet’s mother used to say, ‘it finds the Cesarina.’

    Twenty years ago Harriet first came here with her parents, when she was ten and her brother twelve. Before that she had heard about the pensione, how the terracotta floors were oiled every morning before the guests were up, and how the clean smell of oil lingered all day, how breakfast was a roll or two, with tea or coffee on the terrace, how dogs sometimes barked at night, from a farm across the hills. There were photographs of the parched garden and of the stately, ochre-washed exterior, and of the pensione’s vineyard, steeply sloping down to two enormous wells. And then she saw for herself, summer after summer in the low season: the vast dining-room at the bottom of a flight of stone steps from the hall, and the three salons where there is Stock or grappa after dinner, with tiny cups of harsh black coffee. In the one with the bookcases there are Giotto reproductions in a volume on the table lectern, and
My Brother Jonathan
and
Rebecca
among the detective novels by George Goodchild on the shelves. The guests spoke in murmurs when Harriet first knew these rooms, English mostly, for it was mostly English who came then. To this day, the Pensione Cesarina does not accept credit cards, but instead will take a Eurocheque for more than the guaranteed amount.