The Temporary Gentleman Read Online Free PDF Page B

under his hat and, when we arranged ourselves again on the motorbike, smelling of some pungent, potent oil.
    A sort of grimness had descended on Tom as if he were burdened now with the responsibility to entertain me, and I did my best with scraps of sentences and little broken comments offered from the pillion to relieve him of it. Maybe he was reconsidering bringing this balding, ageing Irish ex-major into the night world of Osu, but if he was, he didn’t say. And when we reached the better stretch of road between our district and Osu, he opened up the throttle on the motorbike, and seemed to find a better, gayer gear in himself too. Under his breath he was singing as he usually did some little song to himself, this time in his own tongue of Ewe.
    Soon we were weaving and cutting through a great host of Saturday-night souls making a tremendous ruckus in the streets of Osu. We swept past the Regal cinema, which I was noticing for the first time – Mai would have clocked it long since. The sullen, sunken presence of the Atlantic shore, a vast silken darkness over to our left, framed this oddly neat back end of a place, with its tin houses and improvised lights, its Tilley lamps and generators, and suddenly my mind was filled with memories of Sligo nights, the traps with their big lamps taking the short cut to Strandhill across the wide expanse of tidal sand, if the moon was accommodating, my friends and acquaintance calling out to each other, driven almost mad by anticipation of the dancing. And the Fords and Austins taking to the sand like dimly shining animals, blinding the cold bands of walkers, trudging on, trudging on, after the long, long walk from the town, holding onto their wind-ravaged hats in the banging storm and the sleeting rain, the lovelier girls flagging down lifts that would rescue them from such torrents and sorrows. And Mai as alive as any living person ever was, radiating simple human joy.
    Tom steered us to a safe spot to leave the Indian, courteously gave me the keys, and we bumped and apologised our way into a premises glorying in the name of The Silver Slipper. I was mollified in my creeping worry about what I was doing there at all by the fact that ‘The Silver Slipper’, in the guise of ‘ An Slipear Airgid ’, was my father’s favourite jig tune on the flute, not to mention the name of a famous dancehall in Bundoran.
    Once in the door, and two tickets bought for pennies, the crowd oozed through a corridor and then, as if carried on floodwater, spread out into a big room with instantly confusing lights, and a band playing Tom’s Highlife music on a wide stage. What at first seemed a roaring whirlpool of dancers, when you got eyes for it resolved into men in loose white suits like Tom’s, and women in their bright summer dresses, the whole a sort of conspiracy to bamboozle and knock you senseless as you came in.
    Tom’s friends were there, in jubilant spirits. A friendly lot, though God knows what they really made of me. There was an extremely pretty woman among them, who leaned forward to greet me with a gentleness that shocked me. I realised I had been living the life of a virtual prisoner. But all I seemed to feel was panic. I accepted the first tin of palm wine offered to me, and drained it.
    Then the evening slipped into a new gear, so familiar to me from countless nights throughout my drinking days. My drinking days, had there been any other kind of days? In the last few years, yes, is my own answer to myself.
    New swirls and deluges of colour were added to the real motions and joys of the room. One hour roared after another. At some point my head must have stopped recording anything, I have a blurred memory of bits of dark road and things looming up, and that smell of Tom’s hair oil mixed up in the memory, like it was some crazy salad of odds and ends, of glimpses and shards. And then nothing, nothing, nothing, and a sudden, vague sense of horror at snatched-at recollections, who was