Bibliofemme: Extras

He held her and she eased gently into him and they swayed together as though belonging to a hushed wind. He often thought of this moment and it seemed something remote, something that had occurred in a dream or another life, in another world even, in a time long passed or yet to come. And as he held her he caught a glimpse of a future and so he didn't want to let go.

'Come away with me,' she whispered and she held him more and shuddered, and they held each other more and it was all he or she could take.

It had taken him a long time to come around. But there was no going back now. After all the talk, months and months of it until it seemed that the talk of it alone would be enough. After all the scrimping and saving, and how to cover absent debts and change the bank lady's sceptical look. After language lessons that thought how to mumble in other ways. After last minute packing that turned up an out-of-date passport. After all the reasons why not to.

Finally, he could come up with no more ways to put it off. His fate was sealed.

'Why are we going?' he asks for the one hundredth time.

'Will you stop asking that question. Take yourself off to a movie; have a last pint of muck; just get out for a while.'

His friend Frank had an answer. 'You're free spirits, Enda. You can do whatever you want.'

What's playing at the Palace tonight, he wonders, one place he'll definitely miss. They'll probably tear it down soon. Peeling mould walls; dank musty air; shapeless splotches on the screen.

And moths that struggle in the flickering contours of dust webs painstakingly put together by quiet busy spiders.

There's not many out tonight. He can hear a playful couple in the balcony above but he has the stalls all to himself. However, it doesn't stop a late-comer sit right in front him two rows down. He didn't notice her walk in. Maybe she didn't notice him either.

The lights dim for the start of the movie. The projector whirs and a colourless vortex of slow swirling dust expands from the square gap in the black back wall. The splotches gather form and come to life.

Half way through she gets up out of her seat and leaves. It's not that bad he says to himself and he strains for a glimpse as her face briefly interrupts the shaft of dust light cast from the projector. She has a restless look. It reminds him of Niamh and he smiles and slumps back into his seat. He can picture her back at the house. She'll be flapping from one room to the next, cramming her backpack with clothes she has never worn; rummaging all night in the nook beneath the stairs for things that could come in useful. A Swiss army knife. A mag-lite. A pair of binoculars. Things that will never see the light of day.

He realises he's not paying attention to the movie. When he catches up with the plot, the finish credits appear along with the caption Inspired by True Events. That's why it was so far fetched he says to himself, rising from his seat to leave now.

The playful couple are reaching the bottom of the balcony stairs as he passes through the foyer.

'What was that all about,' the girl asks dismissively.

'I need a drink,' the boy answers.

He allows them pass out the exit door. They dawdle on the steps and face each other and kiss. Then they wrap arms around each other front and back and march quickly away. He also lingers on the steps. The foyer lights go out and someone clanks down the metal staircase to the side. He turns away from the old building. It breezes with a taste of ocean. In the night a new moon begins. Ahead, the couple tease each other. He follows quickly behind. He has a pint of muck to drink.

Three men, suited and silent, prop the bar. Three men he knows well. In a line at half cock, Henry Joyce, Bill Maher and Tom Egan each stare into a near empty froth glass as though willing it full again without having to bother Gerry who leans opposite them turning pages of a science fiction novel. I could set my watch by them, he thinks, and takes a stool himself.

The playful couple sit backs-to-the-wall at a corner table below a chipped mirror. They quietly canoodle and stroke one another on the face and from time to time sip from a shared glass.

A throaty grunt scuffs the silence. Without lowering his book Gerry raises an arm and plucks a glass from an overhead shelf. 'Pour it straight,' Joyce barks.

Gerry rests the glass beneath the tap and draws the handle, releasing it again as the brown slush reaches the rim of the glass. He hasn't once averted his eyes from the page he is reading.

'I'd say that book is a bit far fetched,' Joyce offers as he receives his pint.

'Freedom is at the bottom of the tenth glass, Henry,' Gerry replies, 'and in other places too.'

Egan sits up ruler straight as though witness to a vile treachery.

'What would you know about far fetched?'

His voice combines gurgle and shriek and spits of drink, and his small wizened face seems about to disappear inside two drawn in cheeks, an eventuality postponed by a mouthful of drink. Joyce shuffles in his seat and looks around and up and under the bar counter like one in a futile search for misplaced treasure. Then he brings an ear to the counter top. And with hovering fingers, plays it like a piano.

'Do you know, Maher, I must be going soft in the head,' he concludes nudging the man beside him, 'I could have sworn this rickety slab of wood chip just squeaked. And it sounded just like that fool Rusty Egan with the shrivelled up head.'

Egan tuts extravagantly and spits more drink. In between these two, Maher sits unperturbed by the exchange, unaware that he has just been spoken to. Gerry notices him, sets his book down and moves down the bar.

'One pint of muck, Enda?'

'Make it a large pint, Gerry. The day has finally come. Tomorrow, first thing, I leave.'

'The first time I've heard you say it before a tonic.'

They all watch as he raises his glass.

'Well men, to the good in you and the good in me. I'm packed and ready to go.'

'So you're really going through with it,' says Egan.

'After all the talk,' says Joyce.

'We'll never seen him again,' says Egan.

'They'll have to put up a statue,' says Joyce.

Gerry bats an eye at him.

'She finally talked you around then, good on her,' he says and returns to his book.

Yes, he reflects, she finally talked me around and he replays in his mind a tired conversation.

When are we going away? When can we go?

Soon, soon. I promise.
How soon?
Not long, now. I swear.

You're always saying that. Every time I ask. Let's do it now, while we can. While…And then he'd interrupt, throw up his arms, appealing. …Don't think of it like that. You have lots of time. Lots of time.

The front door swings open and the girl from the Palace steps into the hazy bar room light. He can see her properly now. She is short with thick curling black hair straying wildly from its roots. Her cheeks are red and her lips full and blue. Her blackwater eyes ferry a restless dimension.

She sashays across to the bar. She glistens as she moves. She calls for a big dirty pint. She opens her blueberry lips and drinks it down like a man three times her size, removing with her tongue the froth from around her mouth.

'Same again please,' she calls out in a clear whimsical voice and Joyce and Egan look as if they want to kill her.

She takes her drink and passes the length of the bar, disappearing into the lounge through its door-less opening. She becomes a conversation. 'That one is a quiet breather,' says Egan.

'She could suck the ocean from a cave,' says Joyce.

'And whisper a mountain across the land, I suppose,' adds Gerry from behind his book.

'She's never a púca, is she?' wonders Egan.

'She dabbles in the black arts alright,' says Joyce, 'did you see her sink that pint?'

'I wouldn't mind dabbling with her arts,' says Egan.

'She'd turn you into a cabbage,' says Joyce.

'And boil me with a side of bacon, I suppose.'

'And feed you to her rabbit, God help it.'

They laugh at Gerry's comment and Egan keeps it going.

'Well if she is a spook, she's a spook with an excellent constitution.'

'Would you listen to it. She's no more a ghost than you or me or the man in the moon.'

'I have a reply for that comment.'

Joyce reels on his stool, a fleeting look of child wonder giving way to flurries of anticipation.

'Grip your glasses men, Bill Maher is about to speak.'

'We're all ghosts.'

'Thanks for that, Maher. Anything else?'

'Ghost riders in the sky. Like in the song.'

'I once saw a ghost,' says Egan.

'Oh, God. Here we go.'

'I used to think I was haunted.'

'This is your fault, Maher.'

'It was a vision a long dead girl I once knew. Scared me right out of my skin.'

'Looking at the cut of you these days, Egan, I can believe that. Anyway, go on about the monster.'

'I didn't say she was a monster.'

'She was probably afraid of you.'

'I'm not a monster either.'

'Try telling that to the mirrors in this place. They've more cracks than a nut house. Isn't that right Maher?'

'Yes indeed…ghostriders in the sky…chasing the devil's herd…riding forever…across endless skies.'

'What's Maher talking about Gerry?'

'He's suffering from a multitude of disarranged ideas, Henry.'

'Let's play cards.'

'Did you bring a deck?'

'I thought you did.'

'Ahh, Jesus.'

And that kills it. They return to their froth glass worlds.

'Good night everyone,' the playful couple call out at the bar door, 'and bon voyage to the traveller.' He waves at them and rises to go to the toilet.

He passes the lounge where the girl sits at a table with three empty glasses and a near empty fourth. By a hearth set into the wall and a coal fire with flames that flutter hither and thither in the spaces they find.

'Come inside,' she says without looking up.

He looks about, confused. He sees Gerry move outside his work area, into the lounge and place two shot glasses and a bottle on the table. The girl thanks him. 'She's buying you a drink, Enda.'

'Take it,' she says offering him one of the poured shot glasses, 'a distilled spirit for all time if ever there was such a thing.'

She watches him pass the shot glass under his nose and wince.

'And also an acquired taste,' he offers and guns the drink.

'Oh and here. For your friends at the bar.'

She takes his other arm and places a deck of cards in the palm of his hand. He turns to the bar and waves the deck in broad sweeps.

'Now be gone with you,' she purrs and he feels her brush by his side. When he turns back she is gone herself.

I suppose I should be getting back, he thinks, Niamh will wonder where I've got to; it's an early start and I don't want to miss the flight.

He guns the second shot and stands to leave.

'So long everyone,' he calls out to the bar.

'Adios amigo, hold on to the cards,' says Egan.

'Slán leat Enda, don't hurry back,' says Joyce.

'As a púca would say, be gone,' says Maher.

'And as they say in Iceland, bless,' says Gerry.

Outside, the dry languid night makes him curiously alert. He bounds home, the fizzing in his head impossible to get used to. Would she be up for a conversation, he wonders.

He lets himself inside. A swollen backpack lies on its back at the foot of the stairs. A tag that bears his name and address is looped through a shoulder strap. A passport peaks out of a side pouch. He walks over the pack and climbs the stairs quickly. By the open bedroom window he turns on a bedside lamp. A night wind whistles and the slim tubular chimes sway from the curtain pole and clink softly against each other. A framed photograph on his locker turns over. He shuts closed the window and rights the picture frame. He lies down on the bed, facing the photograph. He looks at it for a long time. And waits for her voice. As he has every night for one hundred nights. Sometimes he opens the window again. And the wind outside draws her nearer and seems to smile as she begins to speak. And he smiles and listens to her tell of where she has been, of things she has seen, things you wouldn't believe. A different country each night. A new face. A colour change. The photograph shudders in the wind. Her smile transcends illness. Her robe is a map of the world. She is pointing somewhere, her eyes just out of focus. Excited blue sea eyes. Restless. Be gone, they seem to say.

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