Rule of Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

domestic activity. Although she spends, on average, an hour a day cleaning the house, the rooms never lose that appearance of shabbiness and untidiness which characterises certain working class homes. There are always crumbs on the table, newspapers on the floor and pieces of coal in the hearth, and the pattern on the wallpaper has been worn away in a faint streak where the backs of chairs have rubbed against it. When things get broken they stay broken until they’re eventually thrown out, because Jimmy hasn’t lifted a finger in the household for the last fifteen years.
    â€˜Dale went down again.’
    â€˜Yeh.’
    â€˜Did you go, then?’
    â€˜Yeh.’
    â€˜Good game?’
    â€˜Not bad.’
    â€˜Big crowd?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Who scored?’
    Kenny doesn’t know. He was groping Janice behind the Sandy Lane stand when they scored. He shifts awkwardly on the lumpy chair in his groin-tight trousers, trying to quell the memory. She’s all right, Janice: a good laugh and a good grope, though he hasn’t plonked it yet. He could plonk it right now though; if she was here, Christ could he plonk it.
    â€˜How’s your mam?’ Doll asks, smiling. (She would smile, Doll, were the heavens to erupt in chaos and the hydrogen bomb to fall on number 18 Rudyard Grove.)
    Kenny can’t be bothered to reply to this question. He up-ends the bottle into his glass and blinks once: that’s the only answer she’s going to get. He likes Doll but she’s a woman and therefore of no account.
    Jimmy puts the empty glass in the cracked hearth and asks what time is it? The pubs shut at half-past ten on Sundays which means less time to sleep off the afternoon binge before preparing for the final mind-blinding bevvy – all that separates him from the chilling black vacuum of Monday morning with its raw air and stiff greasy overalls scraping the skin and the upper deck choking on Park Drive. If he didn’t have to work what a fine life Jimmy Mangan would have. As it is, he exists from pint to pint, hopeless, cheerful, indefatigably defeated: a human sponge with glassy eyes and a good body gone to pot.
    â€˜And where do you think you’re going?’ Doll asks. Jimmy is staggering about the kitchen looking for shoes and socks, tucking his collarless shirt into his trousers with one hand while supportinghimself with the other. He cracks his toes on the leg of a chair and comes out with a mouthful. His previous good humour vanishes and he snarls and curses, pushing things out of his way, knocking stuff onto the floor. The house is a prison now; he gets into a blind rage and hates Doll and wants to harm her physically. She retreats into a corner, adopting a defensive posture (the smile gone for the moment) as Jimmy swings around the kitchen, colliding with the furniture. Once he attacked her with the bread knife and she retaliated by breaking his collarbone with a chair.
    Kenny sits drinking his Bass, not unduly perturbed. He hasn’t many illusions so far as people are concerned and very little they do surprises or alarms him. His own mother and father have a barney at least once a week, usually on a Friday night; it’s the way folk live.
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    Jimmy is wonderful at the bar of the Dicken Green. The ale makes him quick-witted and hilarious, standing there unshaven in his collarless working shirt with a jacket draped across his shoulders. Andy, a mate of Kenny’s, comes through the tables in the L-shaped tap-room. A wreath of smoke hugs the ceiling, slow streamers of it trickling down the walls. Although Kenny can’t stand coloureds in general and Pakis at any price he doesn’t mind Andy, who is West Indian.
    â€˜Hey up,’ says Kenny.
    Jimmy Mangan stops. Then he stares. Then before tipping the pint into his mouth he says, ‘I always call a Spade a Spade’, to the crowd clustering the bar,