Green Glowing Skull. Gavin Corbett

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      ‘He’s not normally so forward and confident,’ said the first man, Denny, leaning now with ladsy familiarity towards Rickard. ‘The club makes him feel very secure. In the street he’s a lamb.’

      Well, he would have to be out with it. He told the men his name – established that Denny was from Dublin, Clive from south Donegal (‘though I went off to Dublin as soon as I could escape’). Both had been in New York a long time.

      ‘And so they’ve given you that attic room, aye?’ said Denny. ‘They gave me that room when I first came here. But they boot you out once you find your way again. I wonder if they’ll ever give it back to me. What do you think you’ll do with yourself here in this city?’

      ‘I’m not sure,’ said Rickard. ‘Perhaps I’ll stay with the newspapers.’

      ‘You look like a print-room boy, all right. Do you know about the hierarchy of aprons? You won’t get anywhere in that game unless you have the right length of apron.’

      ‘But,’ Rickard cut back in, ‘I’ve a bit of an old hankering to become a singer, that’s what I’ve set my sights on.’

      ‘Nothing in that game either. I knew a “rock and roller” in Dublin called Pádraigín O’Clock. You’ve never heard of him because he never amounted to anything.’

      ‘I don’t want to be a rock-and-roll singer, sir. I want to be a tenor.’

      ‘A tenor!’ Denny guffawed, clapping his hands together as a log exploded in the grate and hissed in its half-life. ‘Clive, would you listen to this! And how is your voice?’

      ‘Untested. Untrained,’ said Rickard. ‘But it’s all there, I think.’

      ‘You must try and coax it out so. Have you thought about getting lessons?’

      ‘Yes, this eventually would have been the plan.’

      Denny sat back into his seat and turned to his companion. ‘Well, Clive, what do you think?’

      Clive, to Rickard, said, ‘Denny here is a tenor of note.’

      ‘And better known than Pádraigín O’Clock I was in my day, too!’

      ‘He was,’ nodded Clive, ‘I can vouch. Sure Pádraigín never made it to acetate, and you made it to America.’

      ‘True enough! True enough! Did you know that Pádraigín’s real name was Pádraigín Cruise? They always give themselves these jazzy names, these “rock and rollers”.’ When Denny had finished laughing, he said to Rickard, ‘If it’s lessons you want, come to me, and we’ll see what you’re about.’

      He took a notepad – personalised with his initials – from the pocket of his cardigan, and scribbled his home address.

      ‘We’ll say this time tomorrow, at my apartment. What do you think?’

      Before Rickard had time to answer, Denny, to Clive, said, ‘New blood, what did I tell you?’

2

      The corners of the piece of notepaper were decorated with feathers and swirls; taking a cue – Rickard fancied, as he made his way from the subway station – from the built character of Manhattan’s Morningside Heights. Leafy friezes and arabesques on building facades spoke of high ambitions, but the impression of the area now was of neglect and decay. Bread husks dissolved to pap and fish heads putrefied in neon-pink pools; discarded plumbing technology cluttered pavements and front lots; in the air distant sirens mingled with a nearer synthesised racket; on the avenue cars hurtled south to brighter lights. Rickard hurried down a side street, found the door he was looking for, and pushed its heavy iron grille.

      Upstairs he followed a corridor that turned three corners to Denny Kennedy-Logan’s door. Immediately it opened the guilt crashed over him again: Denny Kennedy-Logan was very old; Rickard’s very old parents remained abandoned in Ireland. Denny was wearing a bulky dressing gown, tightly tied, which suggested to Rickard age-related illness, and he became a little angry, thinking of how he’d been manipulated. The old man would have him, before he knew it, wiping his bottom.

      But he had a surprising bounce, Denny, to his walk; a combative bustle and energy, as he led the way into his apartment. He was forward-angled rather than forward-leaning or forward-stooped. Rickard could picture him in leathers, in a garage, at three in the morning, failing to kick-start a Triumph motorcycle; on his way to a confrontation or to playing a mean prank on someone; unwittingly and unknowingly kneeing a child in the skull in the course of a purposeful stroll.

      A darkened passageway brought them to an inner room, softly lit and warm in colour. A brass or bronze arm projected from a wall and held a barely luminous globe. Rickard perched on the edge of the seat he was offered, under the arm. An upright piano created an obstruction in the middle of the room. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves flanked a chimney breast and the space on the shelves in front of the books was cluttered with trinkets and ornaments, as was a mantelpiece, a wake table, a whatnot and a small chest of drawers. Larger ornaments – slim glazed pots and a couple of wooden figures such as might have been prised off the front of a medieval guildhall or from the alcoves of a reredos – sat on the floor against the wall behind him. The place smelt either of dog or popcorn, Rickard could not decide which. As if in answer, a ginger-and-white dog with a squidgy pink-and-black face came skittering into the room and rolled on its back by its owner’s feet. The old man pulled up a chair so that he could sit down and tickle the dog’s belly. After a minute he turned the animal over and toggled the flesh on its head until its eyes watered. ‘My little poopy frootkin, my little poopy frootkin,’ he said, and continued to jerk the dog’s head.

      ‘You found me all right,’ he said, still looking at the dog.

      It took Rickard a moment to realise that the old man was talking to him. ‘Your directions were very good,’ he said.

      He sat back into the seat, warily, expecting broken springs and plumes of dust, but discovered a plump and yielding easy chair that smelt most definitely of dog; for split seconds he remembered the two dogs of his childhood, Jumpy and Kenneth. This was a comfortable, lived-in sort of place, he admitted to himself. Something about the randomness of the clutter and the softness of the light reminded him of the living room of a wealthy Irish country home or townhouse. It would be nice to live in this way in this city, he soon found himself imagining; in a dim few rooms near the service core of an old apartment building surrounded by the stuff of a lifetime. He spotted high on the bookshelves a cherrywood radio set like the one in his father’s clubhouse in Dublin. He remembered seeing it on Spring Open Day. A man called Wally had said, ‘That is just like the one in my grandfather’s country kitchen. My grandfather was a great man for the ideas and one day he had the idea that there was a little man inside that radio and he smashed it up with a hammer.’ He chuckled gently at the memory, forgetting himself.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ said Denny, ‘would you like some shaved ice?’

      ‘No, thank you,’ said Rickard. ‘I haven’t long finished my dinner.’

      ‘I have a machine inside for it.’

      ‘I’m fine, really.’

      ‘I don’t drink alcohol any more, so I’ve nothing to offer you in the way of СКАЧАТЬ