Free Cold Eye of Heaven, The by Christine Dwyer Hickey

of going home – there’d always been someone. In a room somewhere. The sisters in the top-floor flat. The mad tailor. The parrot. Or that time with young Slowey.
    He feels a bit spooked. The silent, dusky house around him. The long hallway. A sense of something or other prowling the empty rooms of the flat upstairs. He half expects to see Jane’s painted face rise like a Venetian mask over the bannister: ‘O there you are, Mister Slowey, I wonder if I might inveigle upon you…?’ No insult that she called him Slowey – whether fixing a plug or shifting a piece of furniture – they were all Mister Sloweys to Jane. He thinks now of the day she retired – how old she’d seemed to him then – a drama teacher in a secondary school. Her two elder sisters already dead and Chrissy in a home down in Meath. The loneliness of Jane after. You could see it trailing up the stairs behind her, hear it in the way she pounced on the phone the minute it rang. For a whileshe’d taken to giving elocution classes to kids after school. The bored chant on winter afternoons through the floorboards: ub awb eeb; how
now
brown cow.
    He opens his jacket and snuffles each armpit, worried now that it may have been a mistake to walk into work, what with the long day ahead, the retirement party after – by which time he could be stinking. But he’d enjoyed these past few days, walking into work, even though he’d never have done it but for the bus strike. And he’d enjoyed too the fact that he was fit enough to do it; fitter than most of them in here, young Slowey included. And the further fact, that after all the giving out about the carry-on of the taxi men on New Year’s Eve, all the swearing to give the greedy bastards no more business, he’d been the one, the
only
one, to stick to his guns. All that aside. Walking the route he had so mindlessly made, first by car, later by bus, for near on to forty years, it had been sort of like doing it all in a slow-motion rewind, so that he’d remembered all sorts of odd things, like the names of shops that used to be, or the colour of doors on houses that once stood on this or that pile of rubble. People too; the old man in the dust coat who used sit on the bench at Wolfe Tone Park shooting at birds with his invisible rifle. Or the youngfella in the bright yellow sou’wester who used to sell newspapers at Sarah’s Bridge – whatever happened to him? What he’d liked best though was the moment he came onto the quays and the first sight of the river, sturdy and dirty and looking at it,
really
looking at it, the way he used to do when he was a boy; noticing things. Like the blind-eyed river heads or the loose scabs of algae hanging off the walls. And the feeling then as he got further along, of being pulled into the machine of a city just as it was about to take off. Footsteps and purpose all around him. And the skyline all the way down to the sea where skeletons of cranes and half-constructed buildings rose up, reminding him of an exhibition in the Natural History Museum.
    He stands in the doorway of the main office, looking through. The cleaners have been – wax polish over the dry, musted aroma of paper. Above all that a taint of lavender. The lavender not real of course, but from one of Noreen’s plug-in contraptions: Ocean Breeze, Highland Heather,Malaysian Mist or some such. She’ll often make him guess and he’ll play along to please her – although they all stink the same to him. He likes this vantage point – one room blending into the next; the feeling of space and possibility. The opposite to his own little house – like living in a snackbox, as he overheard some snide bitch say the day of Martina’s funeral. It appeals to him too, the sense of past lives that have been lived in here; first as reception room for a family of merchants. Later a tenement flat for God knows how many. Later