B looked in the mirror to check the equilibrium of his tie knot. Removing a comb from his right pocket, he ploughed its teeth through his auburn hair, thick and shiny with brylcreem. The strands of orange hair yielded narrow rows. “Come on, Johnny. Let’s go,” he hollered at the ceiling. Johnny, a boy of ten or eleven with a halo of blonde curls, bounded down the stairs. “There you are, now,” B said, satisfied. “Didja go before ya go?” Johnny nodded. “Ok, then.” B opened the door and the two spilled onto the footpath. Johnny ran ahead, skipping toward the gate. B walked past him to let them both through.
They headed down toward Cabra Road. “Where we going?” Johnny asked as he took two steps for every one of B's. “For a walk,” B said. They swung right at Anamoe. Johnny strained to see whether a boy in his class was home as they went by, but the house showed no signs of life. He ran to catch up. B nodded to the neighbour, Mrs. Brady, who swayed toward them from side to side. “Lovely day, what, Mrs. Brady?” She looked at the sky. “Rain tomorrow, though,” she said without breaking the beat of her pace. “Her ankles are thicker than her feet!” Johnny whisper-yelled when they’d only barely passed her by. “Did you see that?” he asked.
“Quiet yourself,” B said. He walked on. He could feel tiny beads of sweat starting to crawl out of his pores, so he slowed his pace slightly. By the time they reached Grangegorman, Johnny was officially bored. “What do the crazy people do all day, anyways? Do they get their own rooms? Do they tie the people up? Have you ever been in there? Podger’s granda was in there but he never said antin about it to Podger.” He picked up rocks along the way and tried to throw them at birds. “Do you think he was shell shocked?”
B cleared his throat. It made a hut huh sound. “It was just a nervy kind of thing,” he said. “He wasn’t himself.” Johnny wondered what that meant: he wasn’t himself. “If he wasn’t himself, who was he?”
“You know what I mean,” B said as he exhaled the air from his lungs. They turned onto North King Street and walked the length of it to Church Street, where B stood on the corner and looked around while trying not to look like he was looking around. When it appeared no one took notice, he turned around and headed the way they’d just come along North King Street. Johnny followed.
Their mother’s words echoed in B's head: “You won’t meet a girl in the Homestead!” His eyes roamed the footpaths, front gardens, and windows for P L. P L. She had Greta Garbo looks and a way of laughing with her right hand outstretched that could make you weep with desire. A few weeks before, he was in town, having cycled in after a particularly pointless wander around the Botanic Gardens. He looked up from his feet to see her smiling at him, as if she’d noticed him for a good long while and was amused at his distractedness and attention to the ground. She told him she’d just gotten off work. She looked at him conspiratorially from underneath her tilted hat. “Where are you headed?”
“Oh, just...home.” B was headed nowhere whatsoever, but he didn’t want to highlight his unemployment, his aimlessness.
“Let’s stop off for a drink. Come on!” But he knew he had to say no. “I’m sorry P -- my pockets are empty.” He put his hands in his pockets and felt around, as though a coin might magically appear. He hadn’t got a pound to his name. “Nonsense, B!” P grabbed his arm. “I got paid today. What’s mine is yours!” And with that, she stuffed a note into his pocket. He thought he might die from shame, but he wanted to be with her more than he wanted his pride. She slid next to him in a booth at Edwards’ Café. They drank two cokes each. He walked her home as slowly as possible. Her voice bounced against the buildings of Bolton Street like bells at Christmas mass. But then, they lost touch. That was nearly six weeks ago. Six long weeks.
When B and Johnny reached the opposite end of the street at Blackhall Place, they stood on the corner once again. “I’m hungry,” Johnny said.
“We’ll go down the street again and I’ll buy you a sweet at Prendervilles, ok?” Johnny ran ahead in reply, jumping and skipping down the crumbling footpath. B wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. He never saw P L again.
As so many did in those days, P made her way to Wales. There, she would meet a man from Malta, marry him, move to Valletta, and have two children. “You know, she probably thought Johnny was your son,” Dolores, the neighbour, would say. He pictured little Johnny, sprinting up the road ahead of him. Perhaps it was true. It didn’t stop Johnny dying of pancreatic cancer before either of them got to old age. B continued to walk the same streets of Dublin. The faces of the shop fronts declined, closed, got renovated, re-opened, changed names, or became another sort of building altogether. B's hair turned blonde, then white. And one day, on his way to mass, he would find himself in front of Mrs. Lennon, P’ mother. She would steady herself, her arms shaking from the weight of her messages. “B P! B P, why didn’t you marry my lovely daughter, P?” Dark lines would punctuate her pursed mouth and wet eyes. “Awful, awful people they were. Jim had to borrow money from the credit union to go over and see what the story was. A fight, someone said, but we’ll never know how she fell down the stairs.” Mrs. Lennon closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she looked right through him. “They didn’t even have the decency to tell us she was dead until she was three weeks in the grave. Oh, B P. Why didn’t you marry my lovely daughter, P? If you’d married P, she would still be alive today!”
Angela Coraccio
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