Sam Thompson - Communion Town

‘Why did you come, then, you little sneak? You big girl’s blouse. Go on!’

Before he could explain himself, he found that he was retreating, running all the way back through the short cut, with the grey water below and the wet twigs flicking at his eyes. His shoulders crawled. He blurred his vision on purpose and urged himself towards the green wire fence, but the foliage sprung back, not letting him through. He pried the branches apart, pushed deeper and twisted his body through the gap in the fence. Seconds later he was back on the road, already forgetting how the vindictive trees had fixed their fingers in his clothes and tried to drag him backwards into a world of damp wood and foul water.

Springing from the towpath to the boat, the upstairs boy hooted with an invader’s triumph. This was what he had come for. He stood at the stern and jumped up and down, doing his best, without success, to make the boat rock in the water, then yanked on the unmoving tiller before scrambling up to the roof and kicking things into the canal. Empty cider cans and shards of plywood began to drift towards the opposite bank.

The upstairs boy motioned for him to jump across as well, and, when he failed to do so, shrugged and slid down into the cockpit, to rattle at the hatch leading into the cabin.

He looked at the boat and at the towpath. It was the same scene he remembered from that time, so long ago, but he was disoriented by having approached from the opposite direction: it was as if the upstairs boy had brought him through a back door to visit the vacant stage set of an old dream. The spot was deserted. The canvas chair stood just off the path, empty and cockeyed. The once-white dressing gown lay thrown across it. Even the paper figure was still there, lying flattened but intact on the ground.

What he did next would be a puzzle to him later, and already, as he reached out to take the paper man, he could not have explained why he wanted it so badly. He shrank from the memory of the man’s blotched fingers folding the figure into existence, but he reached out. As he picked it up he noticed the tabby cat crouching in the long grass, watching the trespassers with flattened ears and bottle-glass eyes.

At the same moment the upstairs boy yelped and tumbled back to the bank. The hatch had been flung open from the inside and the man was clambering into view, supporting his weight on the frame and on the metal crutch. The upstairs boy was already crashing and giggling away into the distance, but he stood there, slow to react, with the stolen figure in his hands.

‘You could have listened.’ The man did not sound angry. ‘I only wanted to tell you.’

He used the crutch to swing himself, clumsily but fast, to the bank. He took a step forward, moving with an unbalanced, three-legged gait, and there was nothing to do but run.

And now, with the theft complete, he has crept down the corridor and into the City Room.

Ramifications knit in his head as he examines the stolen figure. The limbs and the head move slightly as the screwed paper eases. The face has dents for its eyes and mouth, but he can’t tell what the expression is.

He wishes there was some way to give it back, but he knows he can never confess what he has done. Discovery is unthinkable. He can only imagine the world would burst into flames and vanish like paper in the grate. He sees now how events have unfolded: how, unrecognised, the choice has been made and the action taken, and how all he can do now is follow the consequences through. Obeying the logic in which he has netted himself, he picks his way across the floor to the very heart of his city. In the central plaza, he stands the figure on its feet.

It is only now, as he places the figure and steps back to judge the effect, that he fathoms what he has done. He doesn’t know how, but the presence of the tiny paper man has changed the whole meaning of the city, to the smallest house and the farthest street. All that secret joy has gone, and all that possible magic, gone in an instant and replaced by another kind of secret. It would be useless to remove the man: far too late for that. He may have made the city, but the laws that govern it are not his to alter.

In the corridor the doorbell rings. He hears his grandmother run the kitchen tap, then begin to climb the stairs. He lies down, presses his cheek into the carpet, shuts an eye and sights through one of the gates, along a boulevard towards the centre of the city. Glimpsed like this, the paper man seems to be on his way somewhere, absorbed in some errand of his own.

He can hear grown-up voices above. His grandmother and someone.

He notices, as he often does, the clumped, near-transparent strings that seem to float inside his eyeballs, tumbling and darting around when his attention shifts. He wonders why they are there and whether he can get rid of them one day. He knows he must not let himself be found like this. The time is coming soon when he’ll take it all apart, knock over the walls, bulldoze the wooden bricks with his palm and heap handfuls back into the box, and his grandmother will come in to find a clear, spacious floor. But it’s not that time yet.

He hears the feet descending the staircase and moving along the corridor. His grandmother’s familiar tread, and another tread too, heavy and halting, which he can easily imagine as the sound of someone walking not on two legs but on three. But it is too early for him to be sure of that, and perhaps he sees already that it makes no difference. He lies there, looking with a narrowed eye into the city, until the door opens.

Let’s try this one more time, kid. Let’s get this straight.

Why did you do it?

1. Breakfast with Violence

That day, the day the Cherub boys came looking for me, I was down at Meaney’s. It was summer: hard summer. The city was chafing in its sweat and had been for weeks now. Nights, the poor devils of the Liberties slept on the roofs of their apartment blocks. Daytime, you ventured into the street, your necktie wilted and your shirt glued itself into your armpits. Walk as far as the corner and you were coated with grit. Dust hung in the air like it had no place else to go. Come mid-afternoon, heat thickened, fell in slabs out of a purplish sky. Shadows scored themselves into the pavements behind every lamp post and railing. The alleyways were heaped. They buzzed. No one had seen a refuse truck in a month. Down at the quays there was nothing but dried mud and the reek of hot rotting bladderwrack. You had the needful, you were out of town until things improved.

In Meaney’s it could have been any afternoon, any joint. Overhead the fan stirred the air like a listless cook. The starch was oozing out of my collar. The bouncer, his belly straining his braces, studied a newspaper: some psycho was carving people up nightly down in Glory Part so we all had to have the details. The potboy, propped like an elderly broom, had no custom but a gaggle of doxies perched at the end of the bar. They were leaning in close, clucking, their heads together, passing round some secret recipe. As I came into the place they all went still for a moment, then broke up in giggles. Dolly leant away from the others and called over to me.

‘Hey Hal,’ she said, ‘ain’t you hot in that wrinkly old suit?’

The rest of them giggled again. I tweaked the knot of my tie, rapped on the bar to wake up the potboy, and slid into one of the curtained booths along the back wall. My hangover was the kind where your mouth’s a bandolier of spent cartridges and your skull’s filled full of dull lead. It wanted all my attention.