The Carnival at Bray (8 page)

“But I liked the name Selfish Fetus,” Maggie said weakly.

Kevin crumpled up his bag of fries and smiled at her sadly.

“I know you did, honey. But you're blinded by familial loyalty. It's the
world
that needs to love me—and it's got to happen on my own terms.”

He counted out the money, slowly, examining the new coins and bills, and got up to pay the cashier. They walked back to the
house in the falling light, talking music, with Bray Head at their backs.

With Nanny Ei and Kevin around, Christmas Eve at Colm's house almost felt like home. The women cooked a big dinner, bumping into each other in the tiny kitchen, and the whole house filled with the rich smells of stewed turnips and roasting meat. Colm played a Johnny Cash album on his old record player, and since it was the only kind of music everyone could agree on, they listened to the same songs again and again—“Folsom Prison Blues,” “I Walk the Line,” “A Boy Named Sue.” Maggie watched the interactions between Colm and Kevin carefully, remembering how her mom had said there was “no love lost between those two,” but they acted civilly to each other, if a little stiff. They drank bottles of Heineken kept cold outside while Laura and Nanny Ei sipped hot whiskeys. The air thickened with cooking smells, and the television, a staple of the sitting room most evenings, stood mute and forgotten, drowned out by the chatter and the laughter. The Christmas tree was lit, shining with cheap glass ornaments purchased in a hurry from Dunne's.

It was the happiest Maggie had been in months.

After the plates were cleared and the dishes sat drying in the rack, they all piled into Colm's truck and headed down to the Quayside to hear some Irish music. The pub was packed with families, sleepy and content after their Christmas Eve dinners. A small band occupied the corner near the windows, made up of a guitarist, a bodhran player, and an old man with a tin whistle. They took over the last empty table, and Colm went off to order drinks for everybody.

Maggie had been thinking about Eoin so much that when she saw him ducking through the crowd bussing tables, it took her a moment to recognize that it was really him. He wore the same outfit he had on when she met him coming back from Dan
Sean's: tracksuit pants and a faded red Liverpool hoodie, and he was even more handsome than she remembered, with his close-cropped dark hair and pale blue eyes. He moved from table to table, picking up ashtrays and dumping them into a large metal bucket under his arm. He didn't rush, but he didn't stop to talk to anybody, either. He was unobtrusive, subtle, his movements flowing like a dancer's, as if dumping ashtrays was an art form that only he had perfected. Maggie watched him as he wove through the bar, finally making his way over in her direction. He picked up the tin tray in the middle of their table where Nanny Ei had just crushed out one of her Capris, dumped it, and, setting it back on the table, he looked up and met her eyes with a start. He was seeing her for the first time, she could tell. He smiled a little smile that was meant only for her, a smile that said, “I remember you,” and then he was gone, carrying his bucket of butts out through the back door and into the alley.

Kevin leaned across to her.

“Who was
that?”

“Oh, I don't know,” Maggie said quickly. “Just some guy I met a while back.” She could feel the color flaring in her cheeks and was grateful for the dimness of the bar.

“You want me to get the lowdown on him or what?”

“No! Please don't say anything to him.”

“Mags! I'm disappointed in you. Of course I won't say anything to
him.
I'll just sniff around a little, find out if anyone knows his name.”

Maggie, unable to control her smile, said, “I
know
his name. It's Eoin.”

“Oh. I see. What a name. Like something from a Sir Walter Scott novel.”

“A
what
?”

“Does this Eoin have a girlfriend?”

“I don't know!”

“Well, let's find out, shall we?”

Before she could stop him, he was sauntering up to the bar. First, he ordered a drink from the middle-aged lady behind the counter, then, he convinced her to take a shot with him, and soon enough the two of them were leaning elbow to elbow across the bar, talking like old friends. This was the magic of Uncle Kevin: he always knew exactly what to say to make people fall in love with him.

Ten minutes later, he returned to the table.

“That lovely woman I was just chatting with is none other than Rosie Horan, owner and proprietor of the Quayside bar, aunt and caretaker of one Eoin Brennan, aged seventeen, star forward on the Saint Brendan's football team, Liverpool supporter, astrological sign Taurus, marital status, single. I did not ask whether he was circumcised: I leave that, dear niece, for you to find out for yourself.”

This was all too much to process at once—months of speculation had now given way to a ticking off of actual facts—she even knew his last name! Maggie immediately began gnawing at her fingernails.

“Please
don't tell me you told her you were asking for me?” she begged.

“Are you kidding?” Kevin slugged back his pint. “I was a master of subtlety. You can thank me by buying me my next beer.”

In fact, the adults drank many more beers as the night spun on. Ronnie, bored, sat at the table and quietly built a structure of bar napkins and straws. Maggie drank her Club Orange and only pretended to look bored. She felt horribly self-conscious about her clothing, her posture, her hair, and her bitten nails, beset with the knowledge that at any moment, Eoin might be looking at her.

Around midnight, Kevin successfully cajoled the guitar player, a sylphish, crop-haired girl with shredded jeans and combat boots, to let him play a song. He slipped the girl's guitar
strap around his shoulder, and the effect of this—the hollow wood nestled against his heart—was immediate. He stood up straighter, he grew taller, a pink urgency flickered into his cheeks. He began to sing “Fairytale of New York,” one of the few Irish songs he knew, his lips brushing the microphone, his voice strong and gravelly and full of that strange holiday sadness of twinkling lights hanging in freezing windows.

Old couples began to pair off and spin each other around, and the younger ones lined the walls, clapping and stomping their feet and swishing their drinks. In that little pub, on that little stage by the windows, Kevin was a life force, a star. With the aid of an instrument, he could spend fours hours in a new country and fit in better than Maggie could after four months. He sang about drunk tanks and love and Christmas hopes, but in the spaces between the words of the song and in the cold shadows of his closed eyes rested all the things that he allowed to escape from himself only on the stage. Watching him, Maggie thought of their conversation earlier that day—how he had quit the band, quit his music, hadn't picked up a guitar in months. She could see the way he picked gingerly at the strings on his uncalloused fingers. His voice wasn't beautiful, but it had always contained a kind of arresting truth. Now, too, Maggie detected a new quality—a desperation that had not been there before. Looking around the table at her family, she knew that Nanny Ei heard it, too. Her grandmother was leaning forward, holding her cigarette aloft while the ash grew longer and longer, and she was not listening to her son like the rest of them were but watching him, the movements of his long, skeletal fingers, the closed bruises of his eyes.

He finished singing and handed the girl her guitar. The Quayside erupted into applause and whoops, and Kevin smiled and the men seated at the bar called him over, waving their money at him in a clamor of who could be the first to buy him a pint. Maggie got up to use the bathroom. In front of the sink she
smoothed her hair and wished she'd worn more makeup than the smudgy concealer she'd dabbed onto the broken-out skin at her jawline. When she crossed the room and returned to her seat, she felt that change in atmosphere, the quickening of her heart that told her Eoin was watching her. At first she thought maybe it was just wishful thinking, but then she caught him, twice, eyeing her as he wiped down tables with a bar rag, or carried towers of empty pint glasses behind the counter to be washed. The first two times, he looked away as soon as she made eye contact, but on the third, as he stood behind the counter dunking glasses in soapy water, when she looked at him, he held her gaze, steady and unashamed, a half smile, a dare, on his face.

Near closing time, Nanny Ei stamped out her final cigarette of the evening and helped a bleary-eyed Ronnie into her coat.

“It's getting late, Mags. Why don't you come home in the taxi with us?”

“I think I'll stay for a bit,” Maggie said, still dizzy from Eoin's lingering, inscrutable smile.

“Aren't you tired? Tomorrow's Christmas, remember.”

But Christmas was for children, and Maggie wasn't one of those anymore. How could she possibly go home when, all around her, life was
finally
starting to happen?

“Just for a little longer, Nanny,” she said. She kissed her grandmother's talcum cheek and watched her lead Ronnie out by the hand. Rosie Horan closed the velvet curtains and a singsong began among the local men: minor key ballads, mostly, about Ireland's sad past. By now, every adult in the place was drunk, but Laura was loudly so. Maggie wasn't bothered by the men who lurched quietly and watched the singing with glassy-eyed reverence, but her mother, whose low-cut sweater revealed cleavage that was just beginning to crack into faint wrinkles at the surface, and who was slugging down Bulmers glass by watery glass, dribbling condensation onto the lap of her jeans, was another matter.

When a potbellied old farmer began to sing in the Sean nós style, a form of Gaelic singing unaccompanied by instruments, his rich voice lingered over the high notes and the foreign words in a way that was so hauntingly beautiful the whole pub fell into a reverential silence. He finished the last trembling note, and the place shattered with cheers and applause. Then Laura stood up, wobbly and hippy, and cleared her throat.

No.
Maggie said silently.
No no no no.

But before she could run across the room, put a hand over her mother's mouth and drag her out of the bar, Laura was belting out, with tone-deaf joyfulness, the first verse of “Dancing Queen,” destroying the magic spell the farmer's traditional singing had cast over the dark pub.

Maggie sat in the booth, horrified, as her mom leaned her head back, waving two pint glasses above her head like a pair of castanets, and bellowed the first verse of the song while the locals rolled their eyes and drifted toward the door.

“You think that's bad?” Eoin was suddenly next to her, drying a glass with a dirty towel. “You should get a load of my old lady sometime.”

He smelled like stale smoke and clean laundry, and the Christmas lights hanging from the ceiling glinted off his blacklashed eyes. Maggie could feel her nerves begin to tremble.

“She's not usually like this,” she apologized. “She's usually more … normal.”

“Hey, you don't have to explain it to me.” He put his towel down and sat across from her at the empty table. “So, do you know how to find your way home now?”

“Yeah. Thanks.” She smiled down at the table. “I wish I was there right now so I wouldn't have to witness this.”

“Ah, this is nothin'.” He waved a hand. “This bar's seen much worse. Besides, I'm glad you're still here.”

Before she could let this comment sink in and begin
dissecting it for meaning, her mom began to strut around in her tight, stained sweater, eyes closed, red mouth wailing the chorus into the Bulmers bottle she was using for a microphone. Colm stood near the door with his arms crossed, his lips tight with disapproval. The rows of older men standing at the bar with Kevin ogled Maggie's mother with the kind of detached fascination they might display watching strippers, wondering what it would be like to screw her while at the same time being thankful that she wasn't
their
wife. They nudged each other as she sashayed around the bar grinding into their backs, stumbling into the counter until finally Kevin got up, yanked her arm, and whispered something fiercely into her ear. Her singing stopped abruptly.

“Get your fuckin' hands off me,” Laura screeched, shaking her arm from Kevin's grasp. He said something in a low voice, his forehead creased with fury.

“Like you should talk!” she screamed, and flung the contents of her pint glass in his face. The pub fell into a different kind of silence now. Kevin wiped his eyes slowly with the back of his sleeve.

“Get your drunk ass out of this bar and into the truck,” he said, jabbing a finger centimeters from her nose.

“I'd appreciate it if you took your fuckin' finger out of my wife's face.” Colm had put down his own drink now and placed himself between Laura and Kevin, inches from Kevin's face. “And watch how you talk to her while you're at it.”

“I'll talk to her however I want when she acts like a drunk fuckin' slob,” Kevin said. “What are you gonna say about it?”

“You've been warned now,” Colm said slowly. “You've been warned.”

Kevin stepped away from Colm and turned his back. A sigh was felt in the room, half relief and half disappointment—it didn't look like there would be a fight after all. Kevin stood still, his shoulders tensing. He seemed to be considering something.
Then, suddenly, he extended a long, white arm and swung. He connected with Colm's jaw with a clean smack that sent Colm's head snapping back. He stumbled backward and crashed against the counter, his arm breaking glasses. A thread of blood pooled beneath his nostril. He wiped it away and grinned at Kevin, a grin tinged with relief, because all was out in the open now. They could finally hate each other freely.

The two men squared up.