Free Portobello Notebook by Adrian Kenny Page B

face.
    ‘Still playing. We have our own team now.’ The same reserved smile. ‘That was my son bowling. I’d better go over to him.’ Bill turned away and ran slowly across the field.
    It had been too small. He had been too young. He had hardly known her. It could never have worked out. He had been hiding from life. He would have died of boredom, drunk like Mr Porter. There had been many more years of travelling before he grew up enough to settle down. He could never have knitted the tangled sides of his life together if he had stayed … But seeing Bill run slowly back to a tall skinny young man in his twenties and embrace him, he felt a small stupid disappointment, as if he had arrived at a station just as the train pulled out.

The Lower Deck
    WE STOOD on the pavement as the coffin was taken from the house. It’s a time when you speak to those neighbours you usually just nod to. Mr Gray said, ‘What’s it all about at all?’ Miss Byrne said, ‘She knows now. She’s saying to herself – So that’s what it is.’ It’s a time when you realize that the past, which seemed so solid, was no different from this; that this is your home now, and these people will come to your funeral. We walked behind the hearse down to the church. Someone said, ‘It’s like Belfast.’ A dog trotted alongside. Afterwards I went for a drink with Alex. He didn’t want to go back to the house alone.
    A young woman came in, wearing a 1920s’ cloche hat, pink and black, flattened like a beret; black eyeshadow; a black thin sweater showing low, heavy breasts; black stockings and boots; about 5’8”. She was followed by a young man, about 3’8”, so small that he climbed onto the bar stool rung by rung. Sitting, they were equal. Eating crisps, he dropped one, climbed down and came upwith it in his mouth. She looked about coldly, rolling a cigarette, and saw me stare – for a moment I thought she was going to come over and slap my face. After one drink they left. The barman said, ‘She’s only going out with him for show.’
    The new bar girl – low-cut dress, intelligent face – was gazing out the window at the dark. The barman went over to the window and joined her. As he went back behind the counter he said, ‘A taxi driver riding the arse off a girl in his car.’
    Someone said, ‘The landscape’s changed since our day.’
    A lot has changed since I came here as a boy. It seemed a shabby, out-of-the-way place then, where no one would find me as I savoured bitter Guinness, a Bristol cigarette and the newspaper list of banned books. We were so oppressed then, we didn’t know we were oppressed. The titles were like gifts from a munificent ruler: Sins of Cynthia … Velvet-Tongued Suzi … Nurse’s Weakness … Wicked Work . Even when I came here to live, this pub was the same: bare walls and partitions, lino on the floor. I was in the bar the night the news of John Lennon’s murder came through. The car park was still a harbour then.
    I wanted to say to Alex, ‘I slept with her once.’ It would draw a circle around everything. But you can’t say that.
     
    SHE WAS COMING ALONG the canal bank. I hadn’t seen her for years. Her hair was dyed brown, she had some crazy brown lipstick on. She looked terrible. ‘Triona,’ I said, ‘how are you?’
    She said, ‘I’m fucking separated.’ She took a big scissors from her handbag, stooped and snipped at the grass. Her laugh was too loud.
    ‘Would you like a drink?’ She noticed my wedding ring. ‘Oh God, you’re married.’
    I was working in the language school. I had stepped out betweenclasses for a breath of air. I said I’d call to see her one evening. She was back home.
    We had hardly known each other, but growing up in the same suburban road, walking to Mass, seeing our parents nod to each other had made us part of one family. You heard things somehow. Her father was supposed to go through The Observer on Sunday morning with a scissors, cutting out unsuitable