By the time Emmet gets back from the cliffs he can barely hold his bones. Fists pocketed, he drags along the main street of a town he no longer knows with the effervescence of a muck-sunk cow with pink eye, looking like a wistful convict in his navy blue, brass buttoned boiler suit. He is of grotesque pubescent length, with the shoulders of a gym rat and the acrid face of a bricklayer. Dull blonde hair hangs just above his grey, pink-rimmed eyes. He limps with the memory of a past injury. He is a man of 50. Tears strike the dam of his better nature in erratic bursts and will get through yet; he has the eyes of a scolded pup.
He senses a pungent death in the monochromatic clouds and rising numbness of the cold. He wonders if it is his death.
The pub is a door. Snug in the skinny unlit alcove of a derelict side street, it has no front or labelled awning – you either know it or you don’t. It is the only place not yet riddled with coke rats or the prurient youth. It is here that the old town endures – in the eyes of ghosts: longing dazes, caustic hatreds, lost love. Cynicism and disillusionment is the entry fee; Emmet has buckets to spare.
It is a pub for ghosts, and this man is such one that he is the bar’s most loyal patron. He is glad to see young Kelly manning the tap inside. A proper vintage young fellah Kelly is – despite he only below in NUIG still. Kelly understands the nature of the place – its role as a haunting ground for the people time forgot. Kelly doesn’t hold their belligerence against them. He enjoys the world-weariness of such characters. There’s a play in them yet, he reckons.
Familiar shapes shadow separate booths, having started their separate pints and met their separate demons. Eyes are raised from drinks to observe him. In maudlin spirit, I Know It’s Over by The Smiths plays from the speaker in low sounds.
"If you're so very entertaining
Then why are you on your own tonight?
If you're so very good-looking
Why do you sleep alone tonight?"
Emmet takes his stool at the end of the bar. “There’s a badness about,” he sighs.
Kelly grins cutely, grabs a glass. “Thou seest the heavens, as troubled with man’s act.”
He can’t make soup of what Kelly is saying, but he enjoys him regardless. He hasn’t the head for such riddles. He reckons if he had grown up in the now he’d have had a few long words and a medical card for his troubles.
He takes his Guinness from Kelly and an immediate nibble at the foam. With a pint dwarfed between his beaten palms he feels himself softening up. He stops thinking about death, about his father. The memories come in like the tide, and he finds himself drifting away, grinning ruefully, expectantly, blinking the wet from his overladen eyes.
He would’ve ended up in Castlerea without her, the ape. Back in the days when he’d get ruined on four pints and bate a fellah outside the door of a crowded pub, and people were saying, He’s no better than his father … and isn’t he with the uncle now? She found him down an alleyway after a fight, sniffling on the curb. He sucked up when he saw her coming, and who was coming but Gráinne Maloney, the petite ginger who lived in the big house by the Quays – the Protestant who lived in the big house by the Quays. You’d have known she was from money. You’d have better odds sifting through slurry for gold than look for white smiles round Ramelton in the 80s. She sat next to him, and caressed his bruising knuckles, and he broke down into her shoulder. She held him until he stopped, and he pulled away then, looked the other way, mortified with himself. She grabbed his hand, shook her head and it was the way she looked at him – like she knew everything and didn’t care. It would’ve sent an asthmatic to the ICU. And when she rubbed his hand the memories tremored up again and the tears came back. But she was there with him, whispering, It’s okay, Emmet, it’s okay.
They’d go out to Malin in his father’s red Corolla to see the cliffs. Grass dashed by wind, goosebumps on the flesh, they’d watch the coast. Everything is eating away, she said, pulling him in even though he was twice her size. He could stand on the very edge with her; there were no tremor in the knees, no fear. It was all her. He clutched the back of her T-shirt, held it tight, and they looked out over the waves into the finite infinity; out, never down.
She’d sing U2 in the car as they flew along the country roads and she was singing Where the Streets Have No Name, and she couldn’t hold a note for her life and he had never smiled and laughed so much in his life and he had the ring in his pocket and he knew it was true and maybe it wasn’t in his blood, the badness, the death, the drunk.
This was before the cancer.
He swims in memories until Kelly clears his throat and jingles his keys.
“Time, Emmet.”
They step out into the night and make their separate ways. Kelly walks; Emmet stumbles. His gangly legs waver beneath him like circus stilts. He drifts off the footstep and a pair of headlights blast by his shoulder, blows the horn …
She’s a tired old bitch that one, his father spat. He was in the back seat, staring at his snotty reflection in the dark of the window. There were sharp bends, and near-collisions and his father raging withal. By the time he killed the engine, his father was gentle again – himself again – and he took a melancholic look at his son before cracking open the door. Wait here, buddy, he said. Be only a minute.
Now he was driving, and she was in the passenger seat, calm as April with birdsong on her breath. Grá, he said, but it went right through her. She continued whistling and stared out at the sky. He thought about driving the car off the wharf. He thought about screaming at her, to cry, to act normal, to stop fucking whistling! Grá, he said again, and his mind was racing, thinking: six months, six months, six months.
They spent most days crying into each other. Big wailing sobs. He could see the guilt on her face and he couldn’t tell her enough how much he loved her. He said it till she was deafened from the words but it was no use. They’d quell their sobbing and she’d wipe her eyes and, sniffling, she’d say, Not long now, hon, don’t worry. I’ll be off soon.
He heads straight for bed. The stairs are tough. His legs fizz up and melt beneath him. He grips the banister and it’s like lukewarm flesh and here’s the surge of tears again but they never come. He squeezes the banister.
“Baby, I’m here, baby.”
He sheds his shoes and the bed cringes beneath him. He palms the cold linen before lying down. Another day, and for what? The sleep comes easy with drink, and not a minute later he is far away …
… on the hood of a Corolla, watching her run along the cliff edge with her arms out like a schoolboy. The hair, orange, flailing left and right at her back. Looking back then, Cheshire grin, eyes that had read few pages ahead. Pure gorgeous. She teased back at him, called him a baby. Why bother at all if you’re gonna stand a mile away! And he asked her could she see his father and she dropped her arms then, took a step back. He knew he loved her when she didn’t apologise; he knew despite it all he’d follow her off the highest cliff, and one day when the money ran out, he would.
A red ’78 Corolla still sits on the the edge of the place the locals will later call McNulty’s Fall. It stands steely in the wind, the rain, the sleet and snow. If you see it from the front, it resembles a face. The circular white lamps on the front are like eyes between the black rectangular grills, and they look out across the ocean interminably; Out, not down.
