Emerald Germs of Ireland (33 page)

With that, the heavy, cut-glass ashtray fell to the floor, disgorging its contents and breaking into two neat halves. As he abstractedly gathered
up the scattered ash with the aid of a cigarette packet, Pat repeated to himself, “But most of all—telling lies. Most of all, coming round to a person’s house and telling lies, Sergeant!”

A light rain had begun to fall as Pat positioned himself behind some whinbushes, at a distance from the squat concrete bunker that was the police station—perplexingly, totally intact. The words of the sergeant echoing anew in Pat’s ears. “Burned to a cinder, I’m afraid. An absolute cinder.” A clamminess like a second skin wrapped itself tautly about Pat, as a few pearly drops of rain landed musically on a tin in front of him. It was a tin—or once had been—of Bachelor’s processed peas.

Quite how many whiskeys Pat had consumed some hours later as he reclined in the library armchair beneath the sergeant’s cap which was placed precariously upon his head it is difficult to calculate. In any case, for him it was irrelevant, the passage of time being of no importance whatever in the world of the imagination which he now decided to permit himself to inhabit as he chuckled into his hands, “Yeah! That’s right! I got McClarkey twenty-one years for robbing the poor box! Sure I did! Because I’m all the big fellow! Oh yes, Sergeant! Sure I am!”

But Pat never completed the sentence, for just then there came a crunching of boots on the gravel outside as he feverishly endeavored to return the officer’s cap to its rightful place—squashed in behind the lavatory cistern, invisible to the naked eye. Unlike the pimples of perspiration on Pat’s forehead which were very visible as he arrived back in time to greet the sergeant who announced that he would “do jail” for a “smidgeen of toast.”

“Coming right up,” Pat had replied, generously.

It was some hours later that the sergeant declared that it was his intention to “retire to Sullivan’s” for a bit, spending some moments searching fruitlessly about the kitchen and library. Before, at something of a loss announcing to Pat, who was now busy with the following day’s dinner (peeling potatoes), “Pat, do you know what it is, I can’t seem to find my cap—my good Sunday police cap, that is.”

“Your good Sunday cap?” replied Pat.

“Aye,” the sergeant nodded, “my good Sunday cap that I wear on special occasions. Like when the superintendent comes, for example.”

Pat shook his head and scratched his chin.

“God, that’s funny,” he replied, “but wait—let me have a look!”

Within moments he had arrived back, exclaiming, “There! I knew I’d seen it behind the chair.”

The sergeant dusted down his hat of harp-badged blue and settled it on his head, remarking, “Sometimes I think you should be the guard, Pat, not me. Sometimes I don’t seem to know whether I’m coming or going.”

Pat smiled and did his best to reassure his policeman lodger.

“Ah, sure, anyone can forget where they put things, Sergeant. We’re all only human, after all.”

The sergeant, gratified, replied, “We are surely! And I suppose you’re more likely to forget it if someone goes and hides it on you, the way a rascal of a youngster might!”

Pat, swallowing, jerked his head back and smiled, a litde uncomfortably.

“Oh now, Sergeant!” he laughed.

“Sure a fellow’d do the like of that, stuff a man’s cap in behind a cistern—who knows where the hell he’d stop?”

“Aye, Sergeant!” Pat fulsomely agreed. “Who’s to know!”

“A fellow’d do that—sure he’d as quick turn around and kill all belonging to him!”

Pat’s reply seemed more distant now.

“I suppose he would,” he ventured, “I expect so, Sergeant.”

“Oh, he would surely!” insisted the sergeant. “His mother even! Mother, neighbors, strangers! All the same to him! Dispatch them into eternity like they were the shite of fleas! The lowest form of life in the world—a sack of good-for-nothing germs! Lives snuffed out without so much as a by your leave!”

Pat chewed his bottom lip for a moment or two before saying, “Without even so much as a good-bye, even, Sergeant!”

The sergeant smacked his fist into his palm.

“Good-bye? Ha! You’d be waiting! But then, of course—a fella like that—there’d have to be something wrong with him, wouldn’t there? There’d have to be a want in him!”

Pat frowned and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“Something wrong with him?” he said. “A want?”

There was a dryness consuming the back of his throat.

“Aye. A bit of trouble up top. You know? I read a book one time. About a fellow—begod if he didn’t go round the house in his mother’s apron. Now, I don’t know much about these things, Pat. But do you know what it said in the book?”

“What? What did it say?”

Pat unconsciously curled the string of his apron around his index Finger.

“It said he wanted to
be
his mother! Can you believe the like of that? I mean for the love of God—his own mother! There’s only one thing you could say about a fellow that would do the like of that. And do you know what that is?”

Pat found himself swallowing again.

“What, Sergeant?” he said.

There was no mistaking the sergeant’s buoyant grin.

“He has his trousers on the wrong way round!”

The words seemed to leapfrog from Pat’s lips.

“Shut up! “he
cried abruptly.

It was as though the sergeant hadn’t heard a word as he proceeded.

“A fellow’d do the like of that, I know how many years he’d spend cooling his heels in the chokey! And it wouldn’t be just twenty-one either! Twenty-one’d be nothing for that!”

“Shut up!” snapped Pat again, with renewed venom. “What do I care how many years he’d spend in the chokey! I don’t care! What do I care how many years he’d spend in the ch—”

“Forty! Or fifty years maybe!” the sergeant cried, almost triumphantly.

“No!” snapped Pat.

“Not twenty-one!” cried the sergeant. “Not twenty-one! Forty! Or fifty! Sixty at the least!”

“Stop saying that! Stop it!” demanded Pat.

The sergeant placed his large hand on his shoulder and said, “Ah, sure, I’m only joking! I’m not that bad, really! A fellow that wants to be his mammy—what he’d want is pity. It’s no good locking a specimen like him away in chokey. It’s a complete waste of time!”

“Yes,” Pat murmured, awkwardly, “I expect it is.”

“For he wouldn’t be worth it!” cried the sergeant. “Far better off giving him a few wee dolls to play with and letting him get on with it!”

The sergeant sighed and said, “Well—I’d best get back. I have a report to write. There was a break-in down at O’Higgins’s sweetshop this morning. Oh, by the way—”

His large hand disappeared into his jacket pocket. When it reappeared, it was clutching a small, foot-high female doll. “I found this behind the chair this morning.”

Before Pat had time to reply, it had landed, as though high-kicking, in his lap, the tail of the sergeant’s coat already disappearing out the front door.

The large hand upon the clock approaching twelve, at any moment now it will be nine o’clock but within the parlor a world which seems timelessly gray pertains. The only audible sound that of the chair which intermittently rocks as Pat in his apron slowly draws a comb through the long smooth and sparkly tresses of the small doll’s hair, repeating hypnotically to himself, “What does he know, Mammy? Sure he knows nothing! Hello! I’m Columbo! Everybody freeze! After all—Sergeant Foley is in town!”

A silence slowly descending then as Pat whispers, “All I wanted was some peace, Mammy. That was all I wanted. To be allowed sit here with you. But he couldn’t let me do it. They wouldn’t let me do it, Mammy.”

It is as if the tiny figure’s head and jet-black eyelashes are about to droop in affirmation.

It is late evening now and the sergeant is humming merrily as he knots his tie in the mirror.

“Are you going out, Sergeant?” asks Pat good-humoredly.

“Aye, Pat,” the sergeant replies. “I was thinking of going down to Sullivan’s for a few. Would you like to come? There’s karaoke tonight, unless I’m mistaken!”

Pat was slightly taken aback.

“There’s what?” he asked.

“Karaoke, Pat,” the sergeant replied. “Lord, but you’re not with the times at all. You get up and they have the words and all written out for you. All you have to do is lift out the microphone and—”

Without warning, the sergeant whirled—surprisingly nimble on his toes—and, spreading his hands, began to sing, “I’ve counted the raindrops, I’ve counted the stars! I’ve counted a million of these prison bars!”

The effect on Pat was instantaneous.

“Shut up! Shut up! Don’t start that again! Go on to Sullivan’s, then! Go on to hell!” he rasped.

The sergeant took a step backward and raised his outspread palms in mock defense.

“Jeekers, Pat,” he said, “you don’t have to attack me! Just because you never heard of karaoke, you know! That’s no shame!”

There was no mistaking Pat’s high color and the vibrations of his right hand.

“It’s nothing to do with karaoke!”

The sergeant tossed back his head, removed his cap, and said, “Ah, to hell with it! I think I’ll stay in. Sure I’m far too old for karaoke!”

“What—,” began Pat, puzzled.

But the sergeant had already vanished into the library.

The open log fire dispatched large, irregular-shaped shadows onto the walls and ceiling of the library. Pat, fidgeting and seemingly very uncomfortable in his large, wingbacked armchair, appeared as someone bearing a great weight, regarding the composed, thumb-tapping sergeant from beneath heavy lidded, almost sullen eyes. The sergeant turned the pages of
Gardener’s Monthly
and continued to whistle a very familiar tune softly before saying, “Sure that auld karaoke’s only for the young ones, eh, Pat?”

His low euphonious ejaculations were resumed once more.

“Will you stop that, please!” demanded Pat smartly.

The sergeant raised his head and said, quite taken aback, “Stop what?”

Pat’s knees slid together and his back became poker stiff.

“Whistling!”

The sergeant smiled and returned to his magazine.

“Sure, Pat,” he replied, with just the tiniest hint of a smirk.

The slow, heavy ticks of the grandfather clock seemed to issue from some forgotten, entombed, and cobwebbed basement. In the grate, the flames flapped like flags afire on ships of oak. The filigree of music as it left the sergeant’s lips and came drifting through the silence might have been borne upon the wings of moths as yet so very far away.

“Will you shut up!” cried Pat, leaping up in his chair.

The sergeant slapped his knees with his large, foot-sized hands.

“Jesus Mary and Joseph, Pat! You gave me a fright! God bless us sure it’s only a little bit of a song!”

“Well, I don’t like it, you hear? I don’t like it!”

The sergeant lowered his head and said softly, “Ah, Pat, but that’d make your mother sad. She used to love dancing to it below in the—”

“Leave my mother out of it!” snapped Pat.

The sergeant approached with outstretched arms.

“Jeekers, Pat,” he went on, “sure I’m only saying. All the boys used to be saying: ‘Would you look at Mrs. McNab! Boys, but wouldn’t you like to—’#x201D;

Without realizing it, Pat had risen to his feet.

“Who said that?” he demanded. “Who said it? They did not say it!”

The sergeant lowered his head, his voice a mere whisper now.

“They did, Pat. Sure didn’t I hear them myself?”

Pat moved quite close to the sergeant.

“Who said it!” he demanded to know. “Who did?”

The sergeant tossed back his head, dismissively.

“Och, sure don’t you know! The same boys who said you have your trousers on the wrong way round! Pat—would you let go of my cardigan, please?”

Pat was in fact horrified to realize he had been holding the sergeant’s cardigan for quite some time. He brushed the oatmeal-colored arm gently and slowly moved backward, a trifle light-headed.

The sergeant gave him a big, unexpected smile.

“It’s not that I mind, Pat, but you see—it was a present from my mother.”

The muscle in Pat’s cheek jerked as he replied, “Yes, Sergeant.”

“Who’s still alive, thank God! Süll walking the roads of Gullytown and not so much as a bother on her!”

Dusting down his trousers, he rose and stretched, adding blithely, “Which is more than I can say for some mothers! Or other innocent folk who once upon a time were free to take the air about our litde town! Well—good luck now, Pat!”

The sergeant did not turn as he crossed the road to see the orange flames in the grate performing a strange sort of Japanese Kabuki-type dance on Pat’s white-mask face where he stood alone in the gloom, as if about to cry out or hurl himself into the fire but actually doing neither.

There can be litde doubt but that the effect of this small contretemps between the sergeant and Pat, plus, indubitably, the intense heat of the open log fire—and such was the level of his preoccupation
that it never occurred to Pat to dampen it even slightly—was to establish within him a sense of great unease, of feverish uncertainty and unreasonable sensitivity, such as might be experienced in the tropics. Evident now as he stood by the window of his bedroom, attired only in his pajamas, clamping his hands over his ears in order that he might not hear the constant, piercingly taut strains of “Twenty-one Years” as the indomitable melody persisted, as though whistled from afar.

“Stop it!” Pat cried, stumbling as his eyes snapped shut and in that very instant he was no longer in a room complete with sideboard, bedside locker, and portrait of Mother but there beneath a rotating mirror ball—God it was so hot!—in a dancehall of the 1950s (“Welcome to the Merryland!” ran the neon) as he watched spellbound while his mother—the young Mrs. McNab!—glided along in a wide-skirted floral dress, smiling as she mimed the words of a familiar song—”Twenty-one Years“!! And, standing close by, dredging her flesh hungrily, the red-cheeked figure that was Sergeant Foley, sinking his hands deep in his pockets as he moaned lasciviously, “Would you look at that! Boys, wouldn’t you like to slip that the budgeen one dark night or another!”