Donal Ryan: A Slanting of the Sun

She wasn’t from land, or from anything. She had no right swanning about the place the way she did. She had no right going up near the tennis club or into the dramatic society, dragging trouble after her. She had no right going with Felim Hackett to Junior Chamber meetings, and sitting up at the front smiling at all the men. What commerce was ever done in the Villas? The quare kind, that’s all. She had no right getting cast as Pegeen Mike by the professional director the dramatic society brought in to make a right good job of The Playboy of the Western World for their centenary. They couldn’t dissuade him. Oh, the money that was spent on that man and that’s what he did to them! That’s the thanks they got.

It was a given thing Noreen Keogh would play Pegeen Mike in the centenary year. It was her great-grandfather, a doctor, who had started the society. Her grandfather had taken the mantle of it, and both her parents had trodden those worn and hallowed boards, and they used to be beautiful together. Wasn’t it a fright to God the way that one blew in and wagged her chest in that Dublin fella’s face and stole the part off of poor Noreen? But it was the great-granddad had done the damage. It was he drafted the society’s constitution and the rules laid down there had been adhered to for a century and a person given casting power in a properly constituted meeting of the society by a majority of members could not be overruled. And they had that power given to the fancy-pants director from Dublin they as good as emptied their coffers for the way their centenary production would be something special, to be remembered across the ages. But it had been unspoken yet agreed by all that Noreen Keogh would play Pegeen Mike. It had been made clear. It had, it had.

They did their damnedest to get out of the contract with the director. The Foxes even took it to the owner of the chip-shop franchise they’d bought into. He’s a great man for contracts. And advice. Like never pay a person the same wages two weeks in a row. Put fuck-all in writing bar what’s laid down by law. Don’t mind that public holiday bollocksology. Always pay in cash. Let nobody ever get cosy on you.

HERE’S MERYL STREEP! someone shouted in here on opening night, as she walked through the door, and that was it. It went from a compliment to a jibe even before that night was over. Meryl , Noreen Keogh’s crowd would sneer, and laugh without mirth. It stuck. Within weeks her transcendent performance was forgotten and Meryl was stuck on her as a tag of ridicule. Is that her real name? outsiders would ask. No, someone would say, she was gave a part in a play one time and it went to her head! Hahaha! And that was how they took back from her what they believed she’d had no right to. That was the revenge they exacted. She was never again known by her God-given name, only by Meryl, and it wounded her, I knew by her eyes, because of the way it was said, and the feeling of foolishness that became attached to it, and the strong hint of spite that was always there in the saying of it.

Paddy came in with her to the bar on that opening night. It wasn’t too long after the smoking ban came in. Between that and the fact that he’d never before strayed from Collins’s snug, he wasn’t in the full of his comfort. He must have got carried away with his pride in her, the sudden break in his fallings of rain. I watched him from behind the taps, smiling, nodding at people, letting on to be grand. I could see the redness rising slowly up his neck, the beads of sweat on his brow, the way he scratched himself without knowing he was doing it. I watched him try to stand a round of drinks for his daughter and her new friends. I saw the shake in his hand, the fifty tight inside in it. But she was busy being congratulated, and Felim Hackett who played Christy Mahon opposite her didn’t hear him asking, and the director fella with the paisley waistcoat and the roundy glasses didn’t hear him either, so close in conversation were they, and he put his hand on the arm of a man I didn’t know too well, an accountant with an office near the castle demesne, and asked him what was he having, and the man just looked down at Paddy’s hand, and muttered he was in a round, thanks. And old Paddy reached for his fags, and caught himself, and took the excuse to slip out the back door and keep going, across to Collins’s where he belonged. I heard her asking Felim Hackett where her dad was gone a while later. Felim only looked at her and turned down the corners of his mouth and shook his head.

Paddy never heard Jack Matt-And’s recounting of the play. Paddy never felt the change in the air after it, the thickening, the seeping hate.

And on she came. And Lord she was lovely. And she made those oul lights seem like sunshine. And not even a breath could you hear. And never before did I see such a thing, the way the whole hall fell away. And there was only that girl on the stage there before me, and only her voice could I hear. And that now I know is what’s meant by transported, for she took me right out of that place. And never before in one hundred years was there beauty like hers on that stage.

And on he went, eyes closed, in a rapture. Ah shut the fuck up, Noreen Keogh’s first cousin said, and a few laughed and a few more sighed. But there was nothing now could be done. She gave Jack Matt-And a kiss when he’d finished his recital and she stepped outside of herself and became Pegeen Mike, every night for a week. This was no amateur dramatics, she could have been on Broadway. Bofty had put up a right dinky smoking shed in the back yard, open-sided but still cosy, with a free-standing stove in the centre of it. I went out there one night not long after the play finished up and saw Felim Hackett talking to her in an angry whisper, jabbing a lit cigarette towards her face, and she was saying nothing back, just sitting straight-backed on her stool, her eyes bright with tears, an unlit fag in her right hand, her left hand out towards him, palm up, as if in surrender. I saw them shifting that night in the doorway of Bridgeton’s Hardware, one of his hands clamped tight to her arse, the other on the back of her neck, curls of her blonde hair entwined in his fingers. He gave her the road not long after and got engaged to a farmer’s daughter from up around Lackanavea side that had a job in the Galway Clinic as a radiographer or radiologist or something starting with radio.

She took up with a fella from Limerick for a finish, rough-looking enough, shaven-headed, cocky. He had a swanky car. One of them lads. She moved away, to God-knows-where, somewhere she could have her name back, and she was only seen back for Paddy Screwballs’s funeral. And the air in the bar was normal again, even without the smoke.

I GOT THE IDEA off a big fat tinker. He took the council for millions. I wanted no millions, only enough, and a bit more for a cushion. I walked up to Walter’s Lane the same night I seen his story in an Evening Herald I lifted off a café table. I wanted to see a king in the flesh. The campsite was at the end of acre after acre of horses and scrapped cars. He was staggering around like a man on a ship’s deck in a rolling sea; there was drink glopping out of a bottle in his massive hand, there was a bonfire behind him, a halo all round him. He was the same as Our Lord to them people, what he done for them, the riches he brought them, the salvation. They danced around him in a ragged ring, screaming and roaring and laughing. He got them a home, too, that they didn’t even want. He was drowning in glory. He eyeballed me as I stood at the entrance staring in; he bared his yellow crooked tinker’s teeth and I turned and ran as his people’s quick eyes fell on me. My ma was an Amazonian, or something. I run wicked fast.