Colum McCann - Fishing the Sloe-Black River

* * *

Another fucking delay. It was pissing rain again tonight. Ofeelia went barmy with the sugar. Christ that girl’s definitely off her rocker. Now that Barney’s gone there’s twice as much bloody work around the bin.

* * *

Christ. I don’t know if a man can actually say what happens to him if he tries to drive through the stars. But it must be a fucking beautiful trip, that’s all I have to say.

Got up to the bin at five bells, like always, and got to mopping the corridors, almost clean fucking forgot about our trip to the caboose and all. But out she comes from the dining room and says can we go for our stroll tonight. None of the nurses looking and she sort of takes my hand. Thank you very much, she says, straightforward as can be, a look on her that’d melt you. Polished the place to a bloody shine I did all night, just leaning into the mop like a lunatic, scrubbing all the water spots off the mirrors, taking all the stuff out of the dustbins, fixing the towels, cleaning the toilets, mopping the floors so they sparkled just like in the telly ads. Could have shaved myself by looking in that floor, I swear to God. Was finished triple bloody quick.

Dolores had been on the piss the night before and looking no better than a burned-out saucepan. She was having a nap in the nurse’s station when out Ofeelia comes, all done up to the nines. Her hair was back from her eyes, six rhododendrons going hell for leather, and a bit of makeup here and there. She was wearing a long red dress and the biggest bloody hiking boots I’ve ever seen in my life. She had four Dunnes Stores bags in her hands, weighed down like mad so she was almost walking sideways. I whispered to her what the fuck is in the bags, Ofeelia. And she asks what did you call me. So I says nothing, just a nickname. But she nearly went barmy trying to get it out of me. So I told her what Barney called her and all, and she took out the flowers and trampled them on the bloody floor. I almost gave her a good box for messing up all my hard work, but there were all these tears in her eyes and all I did was get the sweeping brush and swept all the petals into the storeroom.

I said are we right, let’s go, and asked her again what was in the bags. I almost shit myself when I saw all that sugar, dumped out from the sachets, a huge mound of the stuff. The other bag was chock-full of the bloody syrup bottles. I asked her what she was bringing them for, but she just gave me a shrug and said right we are, we’re on our way. I had the cutters, the hammer, and the screwdriver in a red Man United bag with a picture of Paul McGrath on the side, even though he’s playing now for Villa. McGrath’s face was peeling a bit from where I put it in the washing machine by mistake years ago. We were bloody quiet getting out of there, taking off our shoes as we went across the gravel, then laced them up again and went toward the trees. She was humming something or other as we went down to the main gate. Every time we saw a few cars, in we ducked to the bushes and hid. Once she ran her fingers through my hair and I thought there and then about that Chris de Burgh song about the lady in red, which is a stupid fucking song but gets the women all horny. But there was no time for any of that. She did give me a goozer, though, a long slow one with her tongue almost halfway down my throat. I was wondering about the teeth but she didn’t say a thing. I could hardly walk straight after that one.

When we got down to the caboose road we could hear the sea. Ofeelia stopped and had a goo at the sky for a few minutes. There was all stone walls and grass around there, like in the Saw Doctors song. There was no moon out but I swear there was a rim of light around her hair from the stars, stupid and all as it sounds. I felt like singing her a verse or two. But we heard a badger scuttling away through the bushes, which frightened the shite out of both of us, and then we just lugged our stuff up the road. I was carrying the sugar and the Man United bag and it was heavy as all get-out. There was a light in the caboose window as normal. Four of the dozers were outside, yellow as could be. There were a few charred oil barrels, a cement churner, one of those huge roller machines and a blue Bedford Van with the mining company insignia on the side, the wheels all shiny. Not the way Bedford vans are supposed to be. Not in this neck of the woods anyway.

We circled on around the back, along the barbed wire fence, and stopped for a while in the heather. There was a fishing boat with lights on out in the sea. It wasn’t too cold at all. Trust me, she said. Don’t do anything stupid. Fair enough said I, and I knew we were up to a hell of a lot more than just touching that fucking caboose. But I didn’t care.

Down we scrambled, to the bottom of the hill, like Steve McQueen escaping from that prison. Christ, I never felt so good. Got a hole in the Dunnes Stores sugar bag and had to hold the fucker by both ends so it didn’t spill out. Out with the wire cutters and she’s watching me with those big green eyes like a cat as we go snippety-snip and in like rabbits through the fence. What the fuck we going to do now, I says to her. She just puts her finger to those big lips and waves her arms towards the bloody bulldozer. Along we crawl, just like in the films, that red dress of hers getting awful muddy.

The heart almost fucking leapt out of me when I saw the security guard’s shadow move in the caboose, but the wanker didn’t show. Under the bulldozer we got and I’ll be fucked if Ofeelia didn’t start reaching up into the huge bloody engine and start clipping every wire in sight. Christ the woman was around the bend and back again. I was getting a bit of a kick out of it, it must be said, and started to reach up into the engine too, thinking fuck you Barney me boy, see if you can make a few bob now, and where the hell is your three-piece suit anyway. Then, by Christ, there looks likes there’s a million fucking wires hanging down like bloody decorations.

I miss this place, she says to me. Used to be we had a great time up here. I nod my head. I know how you feel, says I. I had a bicycle once that got nicked when I was eight and the mother slapped me for crying. She starts whispering about her old man and how he was making a map of the sky out of Irish stories, like Cuchulainn and Diarmuid and Grainne and all. That’d be a funny fucking map, I says, the salmon of knowledge leaping out of your man’s hands. I pointed up at O’Ryan, who was lower in the sky than he was the other night. She was laughing until I told her to shut up, we’ll get caught. She smiled at me awful long until I says come on let’s get cracking.

Ofeelia never counted on me being a dab hand with a lock, though. Up she gets with a screwdriver and the hammer and stands at the back of the JCB, whispering to me to knock the fucking petrol cap off for some reason. I tell her she’s fucking nuts, we should just pick the thing, otherwise the security guard would think this was O’Connell Street with all the noise. I’ve been doing that sort of thing since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. So out comes the old trusty nail file that I carry everywhere, swear to God. Ofeelia’s happy as Larry. Those locks on the petrol tanks are a curse though and I had to use a little piece of metal that I filed down a long time ago but eventually she popped out good-oh. That was a fucking brand new JCB as well.

Ofeelia took out the sugar and started pouring the stuff in the tank like it was going out of fashion. I heard about that somewhere but forgot. Fucks up the engine no end, a bit of sugar. No wonder she’d been robbing it. Ofeelia had no end of tricks, the yellow boys and the sugar and all. Some of it spilled out on the ground, but most of it went down the gob of the machine.