Carn Read Online Free PDF Page A

on time, nine-thirty, five minutes after his ejection from the Railway Hotel where he had been drinking all day having slipped in for a quiet beer, leaving the Sunday dinner strapped
to the carrier of his Humber bicycle which would lie against the gable end of the pub until Monday when his wife would beat him in to retrieve it, or what was left of it after the tinkers and the
dogs had finished with it. He brought the girls out of their trance and gave the men a cosy smirk for themselves as they lit fresh cigarettes and prepared to enjoy to the full what they had heard a
hundred times. Francie raised a single unsteady hand and demanded attention from one and all.
    “In nineteen twenty-two they shot Matt Dolan. The scum of British jails with a ticket from the king to kill all before them, and that’s what they did to poor Matt, left him lying
above at the railway in his own red blood.
    “But now there’s no more of that, no sir. They took the boat, aye one and all and it was Fermanagh the rebel county that put the run on them. They showed Perfidious Albion where to
get off. So now they’ve gone lock stock and barrel only for the six wee counties up the road and we’ll get them back any day now. The Fenian can hold his head up with the best of them.
Now he can look the world full square in the teeth. I have two buck goats, four walls of my own two miles outside this town, what more do I want? Isn’t that right, lads?”
    He twirled a Players and looked through one end of it like a telescope. “Never got nothing by lying down, isn’t that right, lads? How much is a bag of chips?”
    “One and six small, two and six large,” said Sergio of the blue nylon coat tiredly and looked away as he dug deeper in the churning grease.
    One eye went into a slit and Francie fumbled for the imaginary revolver that had served him well in the troubled times. “What? What? Two and what? Robbers! Rogues and robbers! Where are
you from? Roma? Roma! Three coins in the fountain! You’ll not rob Francie! Francie can put it up to the eyeties! Any ten of you!”
    Then he went down like a sack of potatoes, snug as a bug on the grease-caked tiles. Men in green uniforms and bandoliers pack-drilled through his dreams.
    And after all was over, Sadie Rooney the single girl walked home alone, deep in her handbag an arc of hearts curling from the supine head of a blonde who swooned into the arms of the rugged MG
driver who momentarily removed his pipe to kiss her. For a brief moment she saw her own features on the face of the girl. As she passed the abattoir on the square, she conjured up swaying palms for
herself but the broken fence rattling in the ditch shook her out of her reverie. A stray terrier sniffed at her ankle and she cursed bitterly as she asked herself why oh why was she born at the
back end of the world to hook the anaemic legs of chickens and turkeys for the likes of Farrell the foreman with his bloodstained clipboard and his beady eye, to spend her evenings in Jubilee
Terrace elbow deep in stewed washing, her scowling mother hovering over her with a pocketful of clothes pegs and a barb for every occasion, tales by the score of possibility thwarted. It’s
all right for Sandy Posey, she sings of the single girl all alone in the bedsits of London but she knows that outside her window any time she wants the yellow lights will wink with promise, radios
play through the night and the odd sports car stop outside. But here—Carn? The howl of dogs, the rattle of tin and a crabbed mother rotting in the chimney corner with fingers like sticks.
    She looked up to see her neighbour Mr Galvin doffing his cap as he wheeled his bicycle past.
    “Not too bad of a night,” he said. “I thought it was going to turn out a bit colder.”
    “Yes Mr Galvin,” replied Sadie, “warm enough now.”
    Mr Galvin lived in number four and ever since her days of cut knees her prevailing image of him had been that of a cocked backside above a pile