It was families and young ones mixed up in it now, it wasn't just single lads going round, and lassies maybe helping them.
Well, in spite of all that, he soon turned to kissing me again, in the quiet dunes, with the seagulls outraged but only them seeing us, and the sea bearing Tom's heroic record the other side of the sand. Strandhill's habitual breeze raged along the marram grasses minutely. It was bitter cold but kisses dealt with that.
And a few weeks later walking across the bridge by the Swan Hotel who should stop me but the fading figure of John Lavelle.
He was nearly a young man still but the fringe of something else had touched him. He looked hard beaten by his time in America, or wherever he had been, and I looked down and saw the soles of his shoes were well worn. I imagined him hopping trains like a hobo and gadding about futilely generally. He was handsome though, with his narrow grey face.
'Look at you,' he said. 'I hardly knew you.'
'Likewise,' I said. I was on my own, but wary, because Sligo was like a wretched family, everyone knew everyone and if they didn't know everything about everyone, they wanted to. I think John Lavelle noticed my furtive looking.
'What's up?' he said. 'You don't want to talk to me?'
'Ah, no,' I said. 'I do. How are you keeping? Were you away off in America then?'
'That was the idea,' he said. 'It didn't go just like that. The best laid plans.'
'Ah sure, yes,' I said.
'At least I can walk free in Ireland now,' he said.
'Oh?'
'What with Dev in now.' 'Oh, yes. Well, that's good anyhow.' 'Better than the fucking Curragh jail.' The curse word made me jump, but I thought he had the right to use it.
'Is that where you were?'
'That's it.'
'Well, John, I'll see you around the place.'
'I'm going down home a while to the islands, but yes, you'll see me back here all right. I'm going to be working for the council.'
'You're an elected man?'
'No, no,' he said. 'On the roads. Council work. Digging and the like.'
'That's good. It's work.'
'It is work. Work's hard to find. Even in America I'm told. You working yourself?'
'Cafe Cairo,' I said. 'Waitress.'
'Good for you. I'll come see you when I get back to Sligo.' 'Ah, do, yeh,' I said, suddenly uneasy with myself, and embarrassed, I knew not why hardly.
John Kane brings me my soup just now.
'This bloody job will kill me,' he says. 'I'd rather be a mole-catcher in Connaght.'
All the while with his unfortunate gobbling of the throat.
'But there are no moles in Connaght,' I said.
'In none of Ireland. Isn't it the perfect job for an old man? Them bloody stairs.'
And off he went.
The mother's bungalow was nice enough but it smelt of boiling lamb – in my vivid state of alarm, I might have said sacrificial lamb. Somewhere down the back of the house you sensed pots boiling, curly kale, cabbage, from Old Tom's garden, and a lamb, boiling, boiling, spewing its distinctive mild, damp smell into the corridors. That was my impression. I was only near that bungalow twice in my whole life and both times felt like dying just to be near it. In those days, the odour of cooking meat turned my stomach. But boiling meat took the biscuit. Why, I don't know, since my mother relished all forms of meat, even offal and innards that would frighten a surgeon. She would dine quite happily on a lamb's heart.
I was brought by Tom into the front sitting room. I felt like a farm animal in there, I felt like the cow and the calf and the pig must have felt in times past, when they'd be led into a cottage at night. People and animals slept in the same house one time in Ireland. That's why many a country kitchen still has a sloping floor, sloping down from the fire and the hag's bed and the upper bedroom, so obviously the shit and the piss of the animals couldn't flow that way. Human-wards. But I felt like that, awkward, bumping into the furniture in a fashion I never would have normally. The why of it was that I shouldn't have been there. I wasn't meant to be. It even took God by surprise that I was, I'd say.
She had her few chairs and a sofa covered in a dark, dark red velvet, and they were so old and lumpy it was like things had died in them under the velvet and had become cushions of a kind. And everywhere the stench of that lamb. I don't mean to write stench, I don't mean to describe all this in a bad way. God forgive me.
She gave me a very gentle look. It surprised me. But her voice was not so nice as her look. I think, at this distance, she was probably trying to be kind, to get off on the right foot. She was a tiny woman with what they used to call a widow's peak in her hair. She was dressed entirely in black, a miniature dress of black something, that material with the suspicious shine on it, like the elbows of a priest's jacket. Indeed she had a very beautiful gold cross about her neck. I knew she was the seamstress in the asylum up the town, just as her husband Old Tom was the tailor. Yes, yes, they had met there over the cutting table.
'She looked like an angel in the window-light,' said Old Tom to me once. I don't know apropos of what, or where. Maybe in the earlier, brighter times. His thoughts I think tended to meander. He was an immensely self-satisfied man, as I suppose he had the perfect right to be. But she didn't look like an angel now.
'You have no lap,' she said, staring now sternly at my legs.
'I have no what?' I said.
'No lap, no lap.'
'For to be sitting babies on,' said Tom helpfully, but it didn't help me at all.
'Oh,' I said.
There was a curious skein of whiteness on her features, like a sprinkle of halfhearted snow on a roadside. Perhaps it was a powder she used. The sunlight that the day outside virtually dumped into the room had betrayed it.
I must be careful to write of her fairly.
Then Old Tom sat me down on one of the lumpy chairs. Each arm had a little mat with flowers worked into it in simple threads. It was bare, neat work. Mrs McNulty put herself on the couch, where beside her rose a little mound of books, which I detected to be her scrapbooks. For the moment she left them severely alone, like a chocolate addict torturing herself near a chocolate bar. Old Tom pulled up a wooden chair in front of me. He was as jolly as you would like. In his hands he clasped a little flute or piccolo, and without further ado he began to play an Irish tune on it, with his famous mastery. Then he stopped, and laughed, and played another one.
'How are you on the cello?' he said. 'Do you like it?'
Of course piccolos and cellos were never played by him in the band, and it was as if, instead of conversation, he was talking to me through these more exotic instruments. But what he was trying to say eluded me. We had often spoken at the Plaza, but these exchanges seemed worthless here. I might as well have never met him in my life. It was very strange.
Mrs McNulty made a huh noise, and got up, and drifted away from the room. It might have meant anything, that noise, and I was hoping it was just a characteristic ejaculation, as the old novels used to say. Old Tom got through a little more of his repertoire, then he got up also, and left the room. Then Tom left the room. He didn't even look back at me.
So I sat in the room. It was just me and the room and the echo of Old Tom's music and the other echo that Mrs McNulty had left behind her, something quite as enigmatic as a scrap of O'Carolan.