Free All the Old Haunts by Chris Lynch

lovely, you know?” I blurted, and blurted that very first evening in fact.
    “Where ya goin’ with that?” she asked. Amused. Surprised. But not really. “Enough of that carry-on, O’Brien.”
    We passed either the same spot, or a spot that looked a helluva lot like other spots, for the fifth time before I snapped a picture of a fiddler in front of a sweater shop. There are loads of fiddlers and sweater shops, but this guy had a beard like a full sheep was clamped onto his chin. So I snapped his picture with my disposable panoramic camera.
    With his foot, he started pawing hard at his cap on the ground. Like a fiddle-playing trick donkey.
    “He wants money,” Cait said.
    “Who doesn’t? For what? For taking his picture?”
    She shrugged.
    I had never heard of such a thing in my life. Back home me and my boys would have resined his bow for him if he wanted to play that shit with us.
    We crossed to his side of the street. I pulled a gigantic deer’s-head coin out of my pocket and tossed it in.
    “Ath lone ? Where is Athlone? And why Athlone?”
    “Where,” she said calmly, “is noplace. Athlone is noplace. Why, is because. Because I’m related to about a million people around here, and so are you, I might point out. If I’m seen going into the local place I make all manner of trouble for meself.”
    “Oh,” I said. “Right. Right, of course.”
    “I hitched. Not that you’re asking.”
    “I’m asking, of course I’m asking, if you give me a chance.”
    We were sitting in one of the many dark cavelike coffee spots of the city at ten A.M. midweek. Not a great buzz in the city at that hour. Which was fine with us.
    Cait slid a small pamphlet across the rough wooden table at me. I took it without looking.
    “Have a scone, will you?” I said.
    She shook her head. “I couldn’t. Couldn’t eat a thing. Sick.”
    “Right,” I said, and picked up the pamphlet. I heard the flint of her lighter spark, followed by the deep intake of smoky breath. At night in this same place there is no need to light a cigarette to accomplish the same thing.
    “I don’t have any money,” she said.
    I looked up. She was smoking hard and fast now, in a way I had never seen her, or anybody, smoke. She was blowing out old smoke as hard as she could, sticking the butt back in her mouth as fast as she could to get the lungs refilled with new smoke.
    “Please smile,” I said. “Or at least unfrown. It’s unnatural, and scary, to see you all puckered up like that. Please …”
    “And I have no access to any money,” she said.
    The grim atmosphere, the smoke, the darkness, combined to give this the feel of some World War II spy scene, rather than the pointless and artless nonstop fun we had been enjoying for weeks now.
    “Okay, so don’t worry about the money, Cait. I wouldn’t ask you for the money. How much can these things cost anyway? It can’t be …”
    She came at me like an accountant. An angry accountant. “In addition to these things,” she spat, “there is the ferry, or plane fare, the overnight in the …”
    “Excuse?”
    She sighed, a large, dramatic smoke-dense angry sigh. “England,” she said.
    “England,” I repeated, afraid to do anything more.
    “England, O’Brien, is where one has to go.”
    “England. England? Why? Why not here?”
    “’Tisn’t done here.”
    “Dublin. Dublin then, right? We can go there.”
    “’Tisn’t done,” she said, somehow more intensely and more quietly. “In fact, they’re not even technically allowed to give ya that.” She pointed her quarter-inch stub of a cigarette at the pamphlet, which I now realized gave all the important wheres and hows. In England.
    “Christ,” I said, to the booklet, as if Cait were not still there. “I don’t want to go to England.”
    She smacked her hand down on top of the booklet hard enough to make me jump. “Nobody bloody wants to go to England, do they now?”
    I looked up, ready for the fight, but she was already