Colin Barrett: Young Skins: Stories

‘I thank you for the light,’ he said.

‘That’s alright,’ Eli muttered.

Eli looked up, and beyond the barman’s shoulder he saw them coming. The long-bodied, shining black hearse, flanked and pursued by its trail of mourners, all moving together at a stately crawl. The procession came down the lane. Eli stepped into the doorway of the Tavern as the hearse went by.

Maryanne’s father, a grim wisp in a suit and wheelchair was at the centre of the group in immediate train behind the hearse. A pouting kid in her late teens had been assigned chair-pushing duties. A foreign-looking woman was holding the old man’s hand and leaning over him with a health-care professional’s solicitous disinterest as she paced carefully in step with the chair. There was the brother, paunchy, middle-aged but retaining an indelible vestige of Maryanne in his face. There and gone, and after him came the husband; at least ten years older than Maryanne, a bushy-browed man with a genteelly dissolute look to him, his cheeks rucked, a grey stripe running through his sandy hair. With his hands he was steering the shoulders of a little six- or seven-year-old girl. Eli knew who she was. Her face was mercifully veiled. None paid the least attention to the two men standing by the Boatman’s entrance. The crowd’s obliviousness filled Eli with relief, and made all his trepidation seem silly — for all this, he realised, had nothing to do with him.

When the last of the procession had passed, the door behind Eli opened. He felt something against his shoulder blade. It was Doran, grinding his forehead against Eli as zealously as a cat. Doran lifted his face, and turning around Eli saw that it was blotched.

‘Ah, fuck it,’ Doran said. ‘Let’s do this.’

‘You’re coming?’

‘I always was. But if I start bawling, it’s cos I’m three-quarters cut.’

Doran had brought his pint glass with him. He drained what was left and proffered the glass to the barman. The barman took it. Addressing Eli, he indicated with his smoking hand towards the receding procession.

‘This is yours?’

‘This is ours,’ said Eli, dropping his cigarette onto the pavement and administering a summary stamp of his brogue as he stepped out into the lane. Doran followed. They soon caught up, and by the time the procession reached the cemetery entrance, the barman, still smoking and watching for nothing better to do, could barely distinguish the pair from the rest of the party, save for the substantial orange dot of the fat one’s head.

The tall man and the fat man and the rest of the group passed through the gates and out of sight. The barman killed the cigarette and stowed the remainder in his pocket; no sense in wasting. When he went back inside he saw that the tall one had left his coat, lumped and dripping on a stool. It was a good coat, three-quarter length and nicely tailored, expensive, the barman saw once he unheaped it and wrung it out. He checked the pockets for identification, but found nothing. He hung the coat on a rack in the back room, scrolled up a couple of sections from an old Sunday paper, and stuffed the scrolls into each arm, dropping additional sheets of the paper on the floor beneath the coat to sop up any residual drippage, and waited for the man to return. An hour or so later a small band of mourners did drop in, but neither of the two men. The next morning the coat was still there, unclaimed. Soon , the barman thought, holding up another polished glass to the teeming, grained light that every day coursed through the Tavern’s dirty front windows, the man will come back for it . But the man never did.

Thanks go to:

Declan Meade, Jonathan Dykes, Thomas Morris, Sean O’Reilly

and Fergal Condon;

James Ryan, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Harry Clifton, Frank McGuinness, Susan Stairs, Claire Coughlan and Jamie O’Connell;

the Arts Council;

Lucy Luck;

Lucy Perrem;

the family.