William Trevor - Cheating at Canasta

‘I’d give a thousand bucks for a snort,’ he was saying now, his voice slightly raised, a laugh in it again. ‘Where’d we get ourselves a snort, cowboy?’

Donovan said maybe Dirty Doyle’s, Kilroy suggested Capel Street. It was a kind of play; Martin Manning doing the big fellow, her father would have said. Aisling had become used to it ages ago.

They reached the quiet streets, St Stephen’s Church at the corner of Goodchild Street, the shadowy sprawl of trees on either side of Sunderland Avenue ahead of them.

‘Who’re those geeks?’ Donovan suddenly exclaimed and they all stopped, not knowing where to look at first. But when Francie pointed they saw the red anorak.

‘It’s bloody Dalgety,’ Manning said.

The two parted in Sunderland Avenue, Dalgety turning into Blenning Road. On his own, he went a little faster, but paused when he noticed that one of the garden gates he was passing was invitingly open. He went through it and crossed a lawn to a corner near the house where he couldn’t be seen from the windows. He urinated in the shadow of an eleagnus bush.

Once or twice, making their way from the nightclub, they had been aware of voices behind them but, engrossed in conversation themselves, they hadn’t looked round to see whose they were. Dalgety couldn’t hear the voices now and imagined that whoever they belonged to had gone in some other direction. A light hadn’t come on in the house, which sometimes happened when you found a garden that was convenient for the purpose he had used it for. He unzipped his anorak because he’d noticed that the teeth of the zip hadn’t been properly aligned. While he was zipping it up again he was struck, a blow on the right side of his head. He thought that someone had come out of the house, and was thinking he hadn’t heard the front door opening when the next blow came. He stumbled and fell, and a foot smashed into his jaw when he was lying on the grass. He tried to stand up but couldn’t.

Aisling had watched, not wanting to but she had. Francie had looked away when she saw what was happening. In the garden, standing back at first, not taking part, Donovan moved forward when the boy was lying on the grass. Kilroy stayed with the girl, calculating that he’d lose out with her if he joined in. Nobody spoke while the assault was taking place, not in the garden, not on the road. Nobody did when they all moved on, in a bunch again.

Aisling wondered what the boy had done, what insults had been exchanged in the Star or before that, how the boy had offended. Something of the headiness of the nightclub seemed to be there again, something of the music’s energy, of the wildness that was often in a face as it went by on the dance-floor before it was sucked into the suffocating closeness of the crowd.

‘Oh, leave me be!’ Francie suddenly cried out. ‘Just leave me, would you!’

‘Behave yourself, cowboy.’ Manning’s rebuke came lightly, and for a moment Aisling saw the white gleam of his teeth.

Kilroy muttered, and desisted for a few minutes before he tried again and was again shaken off. In Charleston Road Francie parted from them, scuttling off, not saying goodnight. Kilroy hesitated, but didn’t follow her.

‘Dalgety’s a tit,’ Manning said when Aisling asked why Dalgety had been duffed up. ‘Forget it,’ he said.

‘I never heard that name before,’ Aisling said. ‘Dalgety.’

‘Yeah, a nerd’s.’

Conversation lapsed then, but passing the entrance to the Greenbanks Hotel Donovan began on a story about his sister, how she was going to a shrink, and hated it so much she often didn’t turn up for her weekly sessions.

‘Some guy comes on heavy,’ Donovan said. ‘You end up with a shrink.’

Nobody commented. Donovan did not go on; the interrupted silence held. So that was it, Aisling thought, and felt relieved, aware of a relaxation in her body, as if her nerves had been strung up and no longer were. This Dalgety had upset Donovan’s sister, going too far when she didn’t want him to, whatever form his persistence took putting her in need of psychiatric care. And the anger Aisling had witnessed in the garden touched her, what had happened seeming different, less than it had been while she watched.

‘See you, Mano,’ Donovan said. ‘Cheers, Aisling.’

She said goodnight. Donovan turned into Cambridge Road, and soon afterwards Kilroy turned off, too.

‘All right, was he?’ Aisling asked then.

‘Who’s this?’

‘Dalgety.’

‘Christ, of course he was.’

They went to Spire View Lane, where they always went when it was as late as this. ‘You’re a dazzler tonight,’ Manning whispered, slipping his hands beneath her clothes.

She closed her eyes, kissing him back, his early-morning stubble harsh on her chin. The first time she had experienced that roughness it had excited her, and every time since it had. ‘I’d best be getting back,’ she said, not that she wanted to get back anywhere.

A dog came sniffing at them, some kind of small breed, black or grey, you couldn’t tell in the dark. Someone whistled for it and it ran off.

‘I’ll walk you over,’ Manning said, which he always did when she had to go. He lit a cigarette, as he always did too. The smoke would get into her clothes and she’d be asked about it if there was anyone still downstairs, although usually nobody was.

‘I looked back,’ Manning said. ‘He was up on his feet.’

Bernadette rang , a note for her in the kitchen said, and Sister Teresa about knowing your part for Thursday .

No one was still up or there wouldn’t be the note. Aisling made cocoa and had biscuits with it, sitting at the table with the Evening Herald , then pushing it away. She wished it hadn’t happened, but thought about Hazel Donovan so badly affected that she had to be taken to a shrink and before she finished her cocoa she wondered if she really wished it. She might have stopped him but she hadn’t, and she remembered now not wanting to. ‘The hard man,’ his friends said when they greeted him, knowing him well, knowing he took chances. ‘Aw, come on,’ he had urged, the time he gave her a lift on the bar of his bicycle, when they were caught by her father coming towards them on a bicycle too, his veterinary bag hanging on the handlebars. ‘Don’t ever let me see the like of that again,’ her father stormed at her when she returned to the house. Being his favourite made being caught all the worse, her mother explained. Neither of them approved of Martin Manning. They didn’t understand.

She washed the mug she’d drunk her cocoa from at the sink and put the lid on the biscuit tin. She picked up Sister Teresa’s typed sheets and went upstairs. Scenes from Hamlet was Sister Teresa’s title for the monologues she had put together, the first time she had attempted something that wasn’t a conventional play. That’s fennel for you , Aisling murmured, half asleep already, and columbines …

At Number 6 Blenning Road the elderly woman who had lived alone there since she was widowed seven months ago was roused from a dream in which she was a child again. She went to the top of her stairs, leaned over the banister, and shouted in the direction of the hall door, asking who was there. But all that happened was the ringing of the doorbell again. It would take more than that, she told herself, to get her to open her door at this hour.

When the bell ceased there was a banging and a rapping, and a voice coming from far away because she hadn’t had time to put her deaf-aids in. Even when the letterbox rattled and the voice was louder she still couldn’t hear a word of what was said. She went back to her bedroom for her deaf-aids and then trudged down to the hall.