Cold Eye of Heaven, The (6 page)

He stretches up to open a window, glancing around as he does so, as if he should be asking someone's permission. A squirt of clean, sharp air quenches his face. The woman sitting in front runs her hand over the back of her neck, gives a little shudder and tuts. Farley pretends not to notice. He sits down again, rubs a viewing screen into the steam on the window and looks out. He wants the bus to slow down a bit so he can look at the gardens. But the bus, too full to stop, is barrelling along. All he can see is
rows of houses jigging loosely by, like old-fashioned freight trains; flat green, dirty white, brown.

In the seat just behind him, a man and a woman are talking, voices pitched secretively low: ‘Look at them, just look at them,' the woman is saying, ‘make you sick, it would. There must be a shipment in or something – I mean, you can just feel the buzz in the air. Make you sick they would.'

And that's when it comes to him – the pension – did he collect it or not? He just can't remember. He has an image of himself standing in the post office queue, surrounded by people lumpy in winter clothes, shuffling one by one to the top. He has a memory of the recurrent thump of a rubber stamp, and he can remember too, turning around to see a woman fresh in from the cold, going, ‘O Jaysus, I'm blinded,' as her glasses clouded up from the sudden heat. But he doesn't know was that today or another winter's day? Last week, the week before? Years ago, even? He takes off his gloves and puts them in the Clery's bag, then slips his hand into his inside pocket. He can feel the pension book there, the wallet stuck in behind it. At least he wasn't dipped. At least, that much. He's getting ready to pull them out to have a look, when he hears the pair behind him again.

She says, ‘Scumbags is all they are. Look at them, rob the hair out of your head for a hit, they would.'

Farley looks around and sees what she means – junkies all over the bus. Better wait till he's somewhere safe before he goes opening his wallet. There's one squirming in his seat across the way; another with a twitchy face further down the aisle. Two more of them are whingeing to each other with their underdog eyes, like everyone else is to blame for their great misfortune. Ghosts, that's what they're like. Ghosts in purgatory. He feels nervous now – worse than nervous – afraid. Of being on this bus full of ghosts. He has the sense that if he doesn't get off quick, he might not get off at all. That he'll snuff it here on this very seat. He raises himself, begins to gather his bag and gloves. Then he sees a woman's head appearing at the top of the stairwell. A big heap rising slow and full like a genie
coming out of a bottle. He sees her eye wandering down the aisle and stop at the space beside him. Farley sits back.

It's alright, it's alright. Everything is going to be alright. Hasn't his headache gone, his eyesight cleared? Hasn't he enough money left over from last week's pension, thanks to the snow and no opportunity to spend it? Enough to keep him going till tomorrow because that's when he'll really need it, that's when he'll want to haul out his wallet, open it up for all to see – ‘No, no, this one's mine now, I insist, I insist' – stuffed with you-can-all-go-fuck-right-off money. Everything is grand. No headache, clear vision, money in wallet. And a big fat woman squeezing down the aisle towards his seat to protect him from all the ghosts. He flattens himself in against the window.

Downstairs, the bus driver is as black as Foley. Farley asks him if he knows of a shoemaker's shop in Thomas Street. He doesn't. ‘Not even when you'd be driving by, like?' he asks and the man gives an apologetic shrug. Farley stays near the door, keeping an eye out for his stop. The traffic is brutal, budging for a couple of seconds then halting for ages. He wonders who Foley was; where the expression came from, and if it's a racist one. Because as far as he can tell, the only way not to be racist is to pretend you don't notice if a chap is black. Or pretend you don't notice him at all. Coloured people – that used be the polite way to describe it, but now, as a woman at the bus stop recently told him, that's the height of racism. The height of racism? Surely there must be worse than that. His mother used to have a coat she called nigger brown. And a barman in the Four Courts Inn had a dog one time called Nig-nog. You could call that racist alright. Or what about that Spencer and his mates, giving out stink about ‘them blackies stealing our jobs'?

‘What jobs?' Farley had said to him. ‘Sure you haven't worked since you were twenty.' Spencer, not a bit pleased, had kept a coolness between them ever since.

He glances at the driver; skin like a soft black chamois leather,
beautiful really. All the different faces you'd see now around the place: Asian, Chinese, African – like this chap. Takes the pasty look off the general popu lation. Foley now was probably a coalman. Someone is watching him. Farley tightens himself up, pulling his coat in closer to his chest so he can feel his pension book and wallet, tucking the bag further under his arm, turning his body towards the driver. He feels a tap on the arm. It's a man with a face he knows from the Thomas House pub, also waiting to get off the bus. But he doesn't know his name. This doesn't bother him because he knows he never knew his name in the first place. He's just one of those blokes who presume a friendship.

‘Just on the way back from the hospital,' the man says.

‘Is that right?'

He takes out his tablets and starts to show Farley. ‘This is for the water-works, this is for the blood pressure, them yellow there's for the arthuritis, and these here, you see, is for
before
all the rest of them, to protect the stomach – are you with me now?'

Farley nods politely at each brown plastic bottle. ‘Would you know if there's a shoemaker's near abouts?' he asks.

‘Nah.' The man shakes his head. ‘No shoemaker's, no bootmender's, no any kind of shops in the Liberties any more except those all-night jobs selling overpriced rubbish, rubbish, rubbish. That's Baker's pub gone – remember Baker's? Yea gone. And Roger's, that was a grand pub, for a quiet pint like when you'd wouldn't want to run into anyone. And of course Frawley's. Did we ever think we'd see
that
day? And what are we left with now – kips like that one across the road.' The man ducks to look at a pub on the far side of the street and Farley follows his example. ‘A venue – it's called. Or so I was told when I went in to chance a pint there. Do you know what that is – a venue?'

‘Emm?' Farley says.

‘Well, I'll tell you. It's where you go to listen to people singing who can't sing and eejits tell jokes that aren't funny and for fools that'll pay to hear them doing it. And as for them three yokes on the path out the front of it – would you mind telling me now what they are?' He says this with a
tone of accusation. Farley frowns out the window at three big multi-coloured sculptures.

‘Would they be puppets, maybe?' he finally suggests.

The man's eyes open wider: ‘
Puppets
– is that what you call them now? I see. Is that it now?'

The man's voice is raised; angry. Farley looks away in case people think he's responsible for the puppets. He looks at his watch, then pretends to root for something in his bag. The man takes a step nearer to him, lowering his voice and tapping him on the arm, speaking confidentially. ‘Your best bet now would be stay on the bus right into town and be the back of Clery's shop near Cassidy's pub – if that's still there of course. You'll find a little place'll do the job for you.'

‘The job for me?'

‘On your shoes like.'

Farley gets off in Westmoreland Street; dank, cold and greasy. Junkies to the left and right of him, slithering off the bus, slipping around corners, melting into the inner shadows of this already shadowy street. The clash and wallop of noise; Irish-flavoured music from gaudy interiors of souvenir shops; buses wheezing and squawking like wounded animals. Motor cars. His head starts hopping again. Two foreign gypsies, long skirts and shawls, come sidling up to him, whimpering a begging prayer. A long thin hand comes out of a doorway asking for change. Another gypsy is changing a child's shitty nappy on the step of an office. She folds it over and just fucks it there on the ground before hauling the child back up on her hip and moving away. He reaches the corner where yet another junkie, hood pulled over his head, is whining into a mobile phone. Farley stands a few feet away from him. From the side of the hood, an eye surveys him. Farley moves further away. Twenty years ago he'd have planted the bastard. Ten years ago he might have even tried.

He puts his head down and keeps his walk brisk until, in a step that passes from shadow to light, he finds himself in the centre of the bridge.
The sky clear and broad, the river air cold and sweet, the light sitting on water like cut glass. The ghosts all departed now, Farley sighs through his teeth and squares back his shoulders; stronger now, renewed. He has walked through his fear. He's alright.

It just goes to show you, Farley says to himself as he comes out of the shoemaker's with an hour to kill. It just goes to show you, he says it again, while he tries to shape and capture the end of the sentence into whatever it is that it just goes to show you. Ah yes – the way you'd be worrying. Worrying about things like the business with the shoe and being thought of as a skinflint and after all that, there was no need to explain himself or make up a story about a one-legged brother. ‘Can you fix that shoe?' he'd asked and been told then to come back in an hour. Bang, deal done and no more about it The shame of poverty, Farley wonders, does it ever really leave us, no matter how distant or dim?

An hour to kill, that's all he needs to remember. An hour. He looks at his watch, just gone eleven. Across the street a large group of men are standing at the wall smoking and talking; a look about them, slightly rundown, a shimmer of danger; eyes watching his every move. On this side of the road, just outside the pub, a girl in a red coat is smoking, hands mauve with the cold.

‘What's going on over there?' he asks her.

She gulps on her cigarette smoke. ‘Taxi men.'

‘On strike?'

‘Ah no. Just waiting.'

‘For what?'

‘Customers, I suppose.' She bites down on another blast of smoke.

Farley only notices then all the taxis parked along the road from top to bottom. A rush of yellow comes into his eye. He pats it with his glove, the yellow curdles, then disappears.

‘I used to know a taxi man owned a racehorse,' he says.

‘Yea?'

‘Yea. Are you not freezin standing there?' he asks.

‘Sure, what can I do?'

‘I gave them up meself, years ago.'

‘Still miss them?' she asks, not unfriendly.

‘Ah, not really, I was never much of a smoker. Did it more for show than anything else.'

‘I tried to give up a few times,' the girl says, ‘but I missed the company of them like?'

‘Why, do they talk to you or somethin?'

The girl smiles. ‘Going in for a drink?' she says, tilting her head towards the pub door,

‘I'm not much of a drinker either.'

‘Don't smoke. Don't drink, Jesus what must that be like in this country?'

Farley shrugs. ‘I tell you what it's like. It's like being a foreigner. It's like you don't belong here. Like everyone secretly hopes you'll shag off back to wherever it is you've come from. That's what it's like. Anyway, I'm off, mind yourself now, good girl.'

‘Girl! What age do you think I am in anyway?'

‘Ah, you're all girls to me,' Farley says and walks away.

There was a time he would have thought she was making a pass. A time, not that long ago, he would have been flattered by it. And a time, long before that, he would have been insulted that she'd think a bloke like him would be interested in someone like her. Now he knows she's just being nice.

He finds himself crossing back over O'Connell Street and turning onto the quays. Retracing the steps he would have taken every day, from the office to the Four Courts; forty years' worth, that's a lot of steps, a lot of miles. When he started he could do it in eight minutes flat. The week he retired it took ten. What would it be now? Not fair to challenge himself on a day like today, he decides, with the ground so uncertain and him not feeling the best. Next time. Maybe then.

He's halfway up the quay when he remembers that Slowey's son had finally got his way and relocated. Somewhere in Capel Street, a whole floor of offices in a brand-new block; barristers and solicitors below and above, only have to reach out your hand to get a bit of business. Suffering now though in the slump and even solicitors getting the boot every day. ‘I'd say now the Sloweys is feelin the pinch.' He can hear the voice in his head that said that; one of those voices that takes pleasure in a recession, but he can't find a matching face.

Farley stands for a moment on the first of the four granite steps. The railings, the door, the windows at the side – all the same. The brass plate is gone, leaving a bald square patch surrounded by dirtier brick. The company name is still etched in gold leaf on the ground-floor and firstfloor windows. He remembers the day it was painted, the office not long opened. A lad from the West slowly explaining the process and Farley torn between watching the liquid gold unfurl on the glass and attending to the screaming chorus of black phones behind him. Later, that evening they had come out onto the street to admire it; the painter, Slowey, himself, Brophy, that little blondie one who used to do the secretarial. They had crossed the road to stand at the quay wall; a warm dusky evening, the hum from the river. Slowey in shirtsleeves, the girl with her frock stuck to her legs. ‘Now,' Slowey had said, nodding his approval. ‘Now, what do you all think of that!' His voice had been shaky and for a minute Farley had thought he'd seen tears, actual tears, in his eyes. But then Slowey had turned round and started messing, pucking them on the arm, slapping them on the back of the head. Lifting the youngone up and swinging her around, her screaming like a seagull, while at the same time trying to hold down the hem of her dress. ‘Ah Mister Slow-eeey, Jaysus, Mister Slow-ee-eeey, will you stopit!'