Free Emerald Germs of Ireland by Patrick McCabe Page B

me laugh is that according to them, I was out every night of the week! Well, excuse me but just how much do you think paraffin costs?” Pat shook his head as he sipped his drink. “Tsk! Tsk!” he sighed, adding, “Dear oh dear!”
    Coincidentally, the record he selected to place on the turntable of the radiogram was entitled “Old Flames.” It brought a wry smile to his face as he stood there in the middle of the parlor, its lilting words melting into the gloom:
    Downtown tonight I saw an old friend

Someone who I used to take comfort from

Long before I met you

I caught a spark from her eyes of forgotten desire

With a word or a touch, Lord,

I could have rekindled that fire.
    Pat’s eyes twinkled as he tilted the yellow meniscus and discerned within the shimmering depths of that viscous liquid a myriad of swirling memories. “Why yes,” he mused quietly, “according to them, I didn’t seem to have spent a single night at home in over three years! First, it was the Widow McGinn’s mattresses! Oh yes—Pat McNab did it! Pat McNab, certainly—who else!”
    It was so absurd Pat almost flung his drink—glass and all!—at the wall. It had even made the local papers—a photograph of the widow staring white-faced in her nightdress trying to explain how she had left some mattresses outside in the yard for airing and was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of their crackling and burning. Swearing, to boot, that she had caught sight of a “small black-faced figure” making good its escape into the night.
    Pat sighed as he refilled his glass. Eschewing the Bols Advocaat this time for some fine Glenfiddich whiskey. His eyes twinkled as the amber liquid made its warm journey through the sinuous tunnel of his esophagus. “Then there was the doctor’s car!” he chortled softly. “The famous doctor’s precious car! And it only a wreck!”
    Which wasn’t exactly how it was perceived in those very same famous local papers, of course. “Oh no!” laughed Pat. “Why, it was a forty-thousand-dollar BMW! Of course it was!”
    It was time for him to sit down again, thought Pat. He placed his glass on the arm of his chair and laced his fingers. “Yes—I did that, Hektor!” he said, with a smile. “Of course I did! I mean—I wasn’t at home doing my homework! How could I be? I was out setting fire to the doctor’s fine upholstery and beautiful bodywork! Just like I was supposed to have burned McGlinchey’s cat!”
    The discovery of the smoking corpse had caused an uproar. McGlinchey’s cat was well known and loved in the area.
    “Which is what you are accused of if you happen to be unlucky enough to live in Town of Liars, Hektor!” explained Pat. “Because, you see, if you live in a normal town, people have more to do with their time. They have more to do than go around blaming the wrong people. Not that they don’t have their reasons! Why, of course they do! O, if they don’t like you—if the inhabitants of Town of Liars don’t happen to like you—why, they’ll make up the most atrocious lies about you, won’t they?”
    Something which they learned early on, thought Pat, as he sipped his Glenfiddich (very tasty!)—at their mother’s knee, in fact. In an instant, he found himself transported back to a small schoolroom round about the year 1965. There was an ink cupboard and a giant wooden compass and, of course, the turnip-shaped figure of Master Butty Halpin with his feet up on the desk. Pat’s young eyes burned with resentment as the boy beside him stood poker-stiff and made his brazen declaration: “Sir—it was Pat McNab burned Mrs. McGinn’s mattresses. He told me, so he did. And I think it might have been him set fire to Artie McCrann’s haystack!”
    It was more than the nine-year-old Pat could bear.
    “Sir!” he cried aloud, his hand shooting sharply into the air. “Sir, he’s making that up! He’s making it up because he hates me!”
    The schoolmaster’s response was