There Are Little Kingdoms Read Online Free PDF Page B

surprise. He had a quick look through the paper: odd, as if he knew things and at the same time, did not know. The way that a cow looks at you in the moonlight. A cow will incline its head to one side, and it’ll stare at you with big wet eyes, as if it is sure it has seen you somewhere before but can’t quite place you. This is the way he was reading the paper. Captains of industry, streels of girls at dinner dances, young lads hurling, planning applications, weddings, births, deaths. All of it was strange but familiar.
    According to a notice on the door, the Uptown closed early on week nights, at eleven bells, and stayed late the weekends. He wasn’t going to argue with that and at eleven o’clock, he closed up and took to the quiet streets for a breath of fresh air. There was a spit of misty rain falling, which was nice after the heat of the fryer, and even at eleven o’clock there were still some flecks of daylight in the far western sky. It was May, alright, he’d been bang on the money there. He stood smoking outside a department store, cool as a breeze but when he looked in at the window display, he was hit by another tremor, and this one nearly laid him out. It was the mannequin of a lady that did it, she was got up in the latest gear, some kind of suede outfit, and the way the mannequin’s face was set was kind of… off, kind of twisted. It was set in a kind of drunken leer. The brown, wavy hair falling to the shoulders just so, the green belligerent eyes, the suede jacket, the leer—he had seen this look before. It was the mother.
    They are walking down College Road. It’s the night-time. She is still a young woman, with a child on either side of her. He would be the younger by a year or two, he might be seven years old. He has her by one hand and the other child, it has to be Denis, he has her by the other. She can barely get along the street, she lurches, drags them towards the railings. It’s late, on a summer’s night, and he has a bag of groceries in his hand. They mustn’t have had the tea yet. The woman can’t walk, she’s crying, then she’s laughing. She has a large brown bag with chips wedged under her arm, the vinegar is oiling the paper, and she almost drops it on the pavement as she misses her step.
    ‘Mam,’ he says, ‘would you m-mind the chips, would yuh?’
    The tremor passed on its way—down over the terraces of the town it went, away into the melancholy hills—and he bolted for the first pub he could find. By luck, it was quite a pleasant lounge bar and a hand-written notice on the door shakily announced that a pass-the-mike session was in progress. Pint bottle of Bulmers, b-b-b-baby Powers, times two, times three, and suddenly it was past midnight, and he was in flying form. There was a chap had a Casio keyboard and he was playing accompaniment to anybody who’d sing. A mike was passed around the dim-lit lounge, left and right, left and right, now who has the bar of a song for us? A woman called Mairead got up and smoothed down her good blouse and did an outstanding version of ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’. The landlord, a man called Johnny—big sentimental face on him—came out over the bar and launched into ‘The Day Billie Joe McAllister Jumped Off The Tallahatchie Bridge’.
    ‘You’ll learn a new one yet, Johnny!’ somebody shouted, and everybody laughed.
    Pint b-bottle, please. Someone called Bob sang ‘The Black Hills Of Dakota’, and wasn’t asked to do another. After a while it got maudlin. A lad called Michael Russell was asked to sing, and he sang ‘The Summer Wind’, because that was some man called Coughlan’s song and half of the place couldn’t handle this at all, the man of the Coughlans was only a month in the ground.
    ‘Fifty-two years of age!’ cried Mairead.
    Left and right, left and right, pass the mike.
    ‘What about this gentleman here? What’s your own name, sir?’
    ‘Am… R-R-Richard,’ he said.
    ‘Will you sing one for us,