Small Things Like These(18)
Furlong found himself not joining in the talk so much as keeping it at bay while thinking over and imagining other things. At one point, after more customers had come in and Furlong had shifted across the bench, before the mirror, he looked directly at his reflection, searching for a resemblance to Ned, which he both could and could not see. Maybe the woman out at Wilson’s had been mistaken and had simply imagined the likeness, assuming they were kin. But this did not seem likely and he could not help thinking over how down-hearted Ned had been in himself after Furlong’s mother had passed away, and how they had always gone to Mass and eaten together, the way they stayed up talking at the fire at night, what sense it made. And if this was truth, hadn’t it been an act of daily grace, on Ned’s part, to make Furlong believe that he had come from finer stock, while watching steadfastly over him, through the years. This was the man who had polished his shoes and tied the laces, who’d bought him his first razor and taught him how to shave. Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see?
His mind was freeing up now, given pause to stray and roam, and he couldn’t say that he at all minded sitting there, waiting his turn with the year’s work over for him – and by the time his hair was cut and the cut was paid for and he stepped out, the snow was building so that the footprints of people who had gone before and after him in both directions stood out plainly and not so plainly, too, on the footpath.
In Charles Street, he stopped at Hanrahan’s to collect the patent leather shoes he’d ordered for Eileen, which had been set aside. The well-dressed woman behind the counter, the wife of one of his good customers, didn’t seem overly eager to serve him, but she brought out the box of shoes.
‘It was the sixes you wanted?’
‘Sixes,’ Furlong said. ‘Aye.’
‘Would you like them wrapped?’
She was putting them side by side, folding the tissue paper over, and closing the lid on the box.
‘Aye,’ Furlong said. ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’
He watched her wrapping it, pulling the sellotape from the reel and creasing the corners of the holly-patterned paper before sliding the box into a plastic bag and telling him how much he owed.
When Furlong paid and went out, it was well past dark and he was more than ready to climb the hill towards home, but he caught the smell of hot oil from the chipper’s, whose door had opened, and stopped in to buy a can of 7UP which he drank thirstily at the counter before he found himself walking back down to the river and on towards the bridge, where a surge of cold and tiredness passed through him. The snow was still coming down, although timidly, dropping from the sky on all that was there, and he wondered why he had not gone back to the comforts and safety of his own home – Eileen would already be preparing for midnight Mass and would be wondering where he was – but his day was filling up now, with something else.
Crossing the bridge, he looked down at the river, at the water flowing past. People said that a curse had been placed on the Barrow. Furlong couldn’t remember the half of it but it had to do with an order of monks who’d built an abbey there, in the old days, and were given the right to levy tolls on the river. As time went on, they grew covetous and the people had rebelled and driven them from the town. When they were leaving, the abbot put a curse on the town, so that every year it would take three lives, neither more nor fewer. His mother herself had believed there was some truth in it, had told him of a cattle-dealer she’d known whose lorry had gone off the road one New Year’s Eve and how he’d lost his life, the third drowning that year. She used to sometimes hold him in her strong, freckled arm while she turned the handle of the churn with the other; used to lay her head against the cow’s side and sing a song or two while she was milking with Ned in the evenings, to ease the milk coming down. And she had slapped him too, sometimes, for being bold or talking out of turn or leaving the lid off the butter-dish, but those things were only small.
Furlong carried on uneasily, thinking back over the Dublin girl who’d asked him to take her here so she could drown, and how he had refused her; of how he had afterwards lost his way along the back roads, and of the queer old man out slashing the thistles in the fog that evening with the puckaun, and what he’d said about how the road would take him wherever he wanted to go.
When he reached the far bank of the river, he walked on, up the hill, passing other types of houses with lighted candles and handsome, red poinsettias in the front rooms, houses he’d never before looked into, only from outside the back door. In one, a young boy, wearing a blazer, was seated at a piano while a beautifully dressed woman, holding a long-stemmed glass, stood at his side, listening. In another house, a worried-looking man was bent over a desk, writing things down as though he was making difficult calculations, trying to balance the books. In yet another, a small boy on a rocking horse was riding across a deep, wool rug. A girl in a St Margaret’s uniform was seated on a velvet settee, and Furlong wondered over her wearing it outside of schooldays but maybe she had come from choir practice.
On he walked, up the hill, past the reach of the lighted houses and the streetlights. In the dark and quiet he there took a turn around the outside of the convent, taking stock of the place. The huge, high walls all around the back were also topped with broken glass, still visible, at points, under the snow. It was not possible to see in, and the third-storey windows were blackened over and fitted with metal grilles. He went on feeling not unlike a nocturnal animal on the prowl and hunting, with a current of something close to excitement running through his blood. Turning a corner, he came across a black cat eating from the carcass of a crow, licking her lips. On seeing him, she froze, then fled through the hedge.