The New Policeman (7 page)

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There was only one hairy patch in the whole glorious evening of tunes. They’d been playing for about half an hour when an old man came into the pub and sat on a high stool at the bar. He was vaguely familiar to Larry, but age did strange things to people’s faces and besides, since Larry could barely remember his own name at times, he was unlikely to remember anyone else’s.

The piper launched into a set of hornpipes and Larry forgot everything except the music, but when he next looked up the old man was still there, and was staring straight at him. After the next set of tunes, he got down from the stool and tacked across the pub to where the musicians were sitting. He declined the low stool that was offered to him by one of the nearest
listeners. Nothing would do him but to push his way through and squeeze into the corner of the padded bench beside Larry O’Dwyer.

“How’re you doing?” he said.

“Great,” said Larry. “And yourself?”

“Very good as well,” said the old man. He pulled a well-worn tin whistle out of his pocket and waited politely until someone started a tune, then joined in. More tunes followed, and the old man said nothing else to Larry, or to anyone else either, until the piper’s early departure caused a mild distraction among the company. Then, while everyone else’s attention was elsewhere, he leaned in close to Larry and said, “What name are you going by this weather?”

After a few panic-stricken moments Larry remembered. “O’Dwyer,” he said, in an unnecessarily conspiratorial whisper. “Larry O’Dwyer.”

The old man extended a large paw and grasped Larry’s hand. “Patrick O’Hare,” he said. “Even after all these years. Still Patrick O’Hare.”

“Of course you are,” said Larry, still failing to remember the man. “And why wouldn’t you be?”

But Patrick O’Hare had already retrieved his hand and was starting off a lovely old reel on the whistle. One by one, the other musicians joined in.

J.J. Byrne had not enjoyed a very long existence. J.J. was all Liddy again, after what his mother had told him, and he was bursting to play tunes and fill the old house with music again.

“You’re not to move, now, you hear me?” he said. “I don’t care what needs doing. This is the first installment of your birthday present.”

She followed his instructions and stayed where she was while he made more tea and brought in the instruments. He brought in his flute as well, even though he rarely played it these days. It made him feel closer to his maligned namesake.

J.J. learned his great-grandfather’s jig on it, and the other tune that Helen wanted to teach him, then he changed to the fiddle while they ran through some of the tunes they wanted to play the following evening. There was no more question in J.J.’s mind of going clubbing. One day, perhaps, but not tomorrow.

Time flew by as usual, but they carried on playing, just for the pleasure of being together and giving some of their favorite tunes an airing. When they finally wound down, too tired to play anymore, J.J. picked up the photo again.

“Who are the children?”

Helen looked over his shoulder. “That’s my mother, with the concertina, and her two brothers. They both died young, which is how she came to inherit the farm. She was the only one who survived. They were hard times.”

There were more photographs lying facedown on top of their shabby envelope. Helen reached out to stop him, but J.J.’s hand got there first. He checked with her eyes, saw acceptance in them, understood that he had not yet learned the last of the Liddy secrets. He turned the photos over, not at all sure that he was ready for any more surprises. But the first one was innocent enough. A woman, standing at the head of a gray donkey. In the cart behind it was a barefooted child, a girl.

“My mother and my grandmother,” said Helen.

The next photo was more formal: a studio shot of a young couple, he standing with his cap in his hands, she sitting in a straight-backed chair. Both of them stared stiffly into the camera lens.

“My grandparents again,” said Helen. “J.J. and Helen.”

J.J. grinned at the correspondence and turned over the final photograph. It had been taken in a hay meadow in midsummer. On the left was a neat, new
haycock. Others were spread across the field behind it. To the right of the frame were two musicians: a young woman with a concertina, sitting on the tail of an empty hay wagon, and, standing behind her, a young man holding a fiddle. The woman’s hair was dark and wild; most of it had escaped from its ponytail. Her face was either flushed or sunburned, and wore a bright smile. But the fiddler’s face was turned away from the camera, revealing nothing other than the graceful curve of his brow and cheekbone beneath a mop of sandy hair.

“My mother,” said Helen. “She was a great player.”

“And who’s the man?”

Helen hesitated. In the silence the reddened briquettes collapsed in on themselves and began to blaze again.

“My father,” Helen said at last, and J.J. realized he had already guessed it. He leaned back in the chair, the photo in one hand, his fiddle in the other.

“That was the only photograph that was ever taken of him,” Helen went on. “My mother never spoke about him. At least, not until she was dying and then…well…she used to ramble. Her mind, you know…” She tore herself away from memories that were clearly
disturbing. “Anyway, I was pregnant with you before she gave me that photo. She was still madly in love with him, even then.”

“Who was he?” said J.J.

His mother smiled and shrugged. “Bit of a wild man from what I can make out. A wandering musician. For a year or two he used to come and go. Lad, they called him. If he had another name my mother never heard it. Just Lad. A great fiddler, though. The best my grandparents ever heard. And handsome enough to charm the birds out of the trees.”

She took the photo from J.J. and gazed at it wistfully. “I wish he hadn’t turned away just at that moment,” she said. “I dream about him, you know. I’d give anything to know what he looked like.”

“What happened to him?”

Helen shrugged. “He came and went for a while. He and my mother started courting; became lovers, eventually. Then one day he went away and he didn’t come back.”

“Another disappearing act,” said J.J.

“Yes. Not such an unusual one, though. When the priest—a different one, obviously—found out that my mother was pregnant, he tried to persuade my
parents to send her away and have the baby put up for adoption. Single mothers weren’t acceptable in those days.”

J.J. nodded. The Magdalene Laundries had been all over the news recently. A lot of innocent girls had been locked up to keep them hidden away from society.

“My grandparents wouldn’t hear of it, thank God,” said Helen. “So there was another reason for the Liddys to be scorned by some of the locals. An unmarried mother in the family.”

“Two in a row now,” said J.J.

Helen laughed. “The thing was,” she said, “they were all convinced that Lad would come back. The last time he went away, he left something behind at the house. It was the only thing he owned, and they couldn’t believe he wouldn’t come back for it.”

“What was it?” said J.J.

“His fiddle,” said Helen. “You have it there in your hand.”

THE FAIR-HAIRED BOY

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Mary Green had never, to her knowledge, been in the position of having to throw a policeman out of her pub. She felt obliged to do it all the same. Larry didn’t look as though he was about to jump up and arrest everyone, but you could never be sure.

She waited for a break in the music. “I’m going to have to ask you to finish up now,” she said.

Phil Daly stopped tuning his guitar and looked up. “You’re joking,” he said. “It can’t be that time already?”

Everyone turned to look at the clock behind the bar. It was a new one, with hands that were designed so that the observer thought they were suffering from double vision. It meant that it took awhile for everyone to figure out what it was actually reading.

“I don’t know what happens to the time these days,” said Laura, the flute player.

“It’s mad,” said Jim, letting the air out of his melodeon’s bellows and fixing the strap.

“It’s mad, all right,” said Larry. “It never used to be like this.”

“True for you,” said Patrick O’Hare.

“What started it all?” said Larry. “When did time start disappearing so fast?”

“It’s just because we’re getting older,” said Laura.

“It isn’t,” said Phil. “Even the kids are running round like headless chickens these days.”

“’Twas the EU started it,” said Patrick. “There was all the time in the world before we joined Europe and started getting all the subsidies.”

“What have subsidies got to do with it?” said Laura.

“All the time-saving devices we bought with the new money,” said Patrick. “Big fast tractors and bale wrappers and washing machines. And do we have more time on account of them all?”

“I think it was the Celtic Tiger,” said Jim. “We sold our souls to the stock market.”

Larry plucked his strings and adjusted his tuning. The conversation, as far as he could see, was going nowhere. “One for the road,” he said.

Mary Green was hovering. “Please, lads,” she said. “Come on now.”

“They’ll hardly arrest him,” said Jim, unfastening his bellows again.

“They might,” said Laura.

Larry was already starting a tune. “Let ’em try,” he said, and unleashed the power of his bowing arm.

J.J. lay in bed. He had a hurling match the following day, and he had to be up early to get a few things done before it. He needed all the sleep he could get, but it wouldn’t come to him.

How was it that in his fifteen years of life his mother had never spoken to him about her father? Even more amazing was that he had never thought to ask her; never even been curious. Did it happen in other families as well? Did all parents construct a mental map for their children, with huge areas of their lives outside its borders? Did every family have hidden territories, so cleverly concealed that they became completely invisible?

As if disappearing fathers and priests weren’t enough, J.J. was worried about his friendship with Jimmy as well. They had been pals since primary school. He had forgiven Jimmy for what he had said
about his great-grandfather. Sometime in the future he might even talk to him about it; tell him the Liddy side of the story. But in the meantime there was the problem of the club. Jimmy had swallowed his pride to invite him. It was a peace offering, and if J.J. rejected it by not turning up, there might never be another chance to mend the friendship.

He turned over in bed. A heavy, windblown shower galloped across the roof, paused, then galloped back again. He’d have to come up with an excuse for Jimmy. Maybe he could pretend to be ill? No. It wouldn’t work. Too many people would see him playing at the céilí. What if he just said his parents wouldn’t allow him to go? Blame them? Complain about them?

He couldn’t do it. Another time, perhaps, but not just now. He couldn’t betray the trust his mother had placed in him that evening. He could see her face now, the vulnerability in it as she talked about her father. She had never, ever seen him. There was a hole in her life where he ought to have been.

J.J. would make it up to her. He would be there beside her tomorrow, playing for the house dance; honoring all the Liddys that had gone before him. He was determined to do something else for her as well. He would get her what she wanted for her birthday.
He didn’t know how he would do it, but one way or another he was going to buy her some time.

It was three o’clock in the morning when the new policeman finally rolled out of the pub. His memory was never his strongest feature, but he had an uneasy feeling that at some point during the last three hours he had threatened Mary Green with arrest if she didn’t bring the musicians another drink. And then another.

He had danced as well. Patrick O’Hare had been responsible for that, announcing it to the whole room and calling for a clear space without even warning him first. Sergeant Early would not be impressed. With luck, the event would not come to his notice. There was nothing he could do about it now, anyway.