Mint & Other Stories E-Book

Adrian Kenny

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 184

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Skilled portraits in miniature set in Dublin and London: masterful character sketches by one of Ireland's most observant writers. Although these are separate stories, they form chapters in a man's life. He knows the characters ‒ in Dublin, the West of Ireland, London, provincial England‒ and they know him. His descriptions are intimate, sympathetic but their lives are sharply drawn. A young Muslim woman moves to a Dublin Street; a married man meets a married woman to make up for a failed night of their youth; a London woman keeps a window open to remind herself that suicide is available. Through each story the overarching narrator also becomes clearer: we see the tension between who he is and the pull of what might have been. As conclusions bring opposites together, in this book, Time is the great character.    These are timeless, classic Irish short stories in the vein of William Trevor and Brian Friel, poised and carefully observed vignettes of the lives that compose modern Ireland.   

Leseprobe

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Mint & Other Stories

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Grateful acknowledgement to Cyphers, where most of these stories were first published.

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MINT & OTHER STORIES

Adrian Kenny

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

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First published 2025 by

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

62–63 Sitric Road,

Arbour Hill,

Dublin 7,

Ireland

www.lilliputpress.ie

Copyright © Adrian Kenny, 2025

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.

Stories from this collection first appeared in Cyphers

A CIP record for this title is available from The British Library.

Paperback ISBN 978 1 84351 956 0

Set in 11.5 pt on 16 pt Sabon LT Std by Compuscript

Printed and bound in Czechia by Finidr

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To Maurice Sheehan

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CONTENTS

Mint

Good Friday

English Pastoral

Weekends in Deptford

An Evening Prowl

Brothers

The Bathing Place

The Graveyard

A Fairy Tale

Mister Pock – Finale

Two Cousins

1

MINT

How will my house be remembered? As the one where mint grew out through the front garden railings? People pluck leaves as they pass and rub them between their fingers.

A bunch of fresh mint wrapped in damp newspaper with Arabic print: that was Fatima’s gift to me the evening she arrived. Crumbs of brown clay clung to the roots. Her sister said, ‘This is for your help with the immigration forms.’ Fatima stood silent in a black shawl. I thought, My grandmother must have looked like that when she arrived as a girl in New York.

Her sister was married and lived up the street. Fatima minded the children to earn her keep. She 2was pale, thin and hard-faced, with large dark eyes that gave her a staring look. Everything was new to her. She thought the black-and-gold bin at the corner was a post box. When I told her what Litter meant, she smiled. In a few months her face filled out. We used to chat whenever we met. She was learning English, and spoke a little French much better than mine.

One day she asked me to help her find a part-time job – she wanted a change from minding children. I asked a neighbour if she needed help with housework, and I asked in the restaurant. But her sister wanted her at home. They had an argument in front of me another day. Fatima cried and said she was ‘une esclave’. She wanted ‘liberté’. She wanted ‘la vie’. The next time we met she wanted ‘un homme’ to share ‘la vie’.

That was in July, when the sister and husband went back to Morocco for a family wedding. They planned to leave the children behind with Fatima, but at the last minute the children won and went with their parents. Fatima was left to mind the house.

I was in my front garden a few days later when I noticed a glamorous young woman in a red miniskirt, with a red velvet band on long black hair, coming up the street. It was Fatima. She stood to talk. I had planted the mint she had given me, and 3it had taken root. She reached through the railings and plucked a few leaves, then invited me to her house for tea.

When I called she was in the back yard, kneeling before a mirror, putting henna in her hair. She was barefoot, at home in the sun, her skirt turned up to her thighs. Beata, an old woman who had minded the children before Fatima arrived, was also there. She was a Czech refugee, sad and gentle, who used to whisper to our dog and give it crusts of bread she kept in her handbag. Now her job was chaperoning Fatima – not from me: I was married and middle-aged, of no concern, but of use maybe.

While Fatima made mint tea she told me how I could help. She wanted to find a man. With a husband she could leave her sister’s house and have a life of her own. She had only a month to do it, for when her sister returned she would be tied again to the children. There was someone at home who was interested. He wanted to ring her, but she had no phone. Could she give him my number to call? I agreed.

For several nights after that our phone would ring, a man would say, ‘Fatima, s’il vous plait?’ then I would walk up to Fatima, she would run down, and for ten or fifteen minutes our hall was filled with laughter and love-whisperings in Arabic. To give her privacy, my wife turned up the TV.

4It was a fine summer. She must have thought all our summers were like that. In the evenings she used to sit at the open front door on a chair set backwards, leaning over its rail, while old Beata dozed inside. I was walking our dog round the block when she invited me again for tea. I went down to my garden, plucked a few more leaves and brought them up to her house. A tape was playing, there was a basin of millet and a sieve on the floor, a scent of charcoal smoke. She swayed to the music, singing the words, ‘Je suis seule comme un arbre …’

Over tea she told me the latest. She had gone down one night to the phone box at Kelly’s Corner and rung her boyfriend in Morocco. She called him ‘Numero un’.

I said, ‘Good.’

She shook her head. It was too slow, remote, and besides he hadn’t a visa. But as she had left the phone box a man had smiled at her, then offered to walk her home. By the time they reached her door he had made a date.

‘Did you go?’

She looked across the hall to the sitting room, then nodded.

‘What happened?’

‘Everything!’ She clapped her hands and laughed, waking old Beata, who hurried in. He was a 5doctor, and a Moslem – her face was serious again – so they had a lot to talk about. But it didn’t mean anything. He was engaged – he had a fiancée in Pakistan. She still needed my help.

She wanted to marry; she had to. A single woman couldn’t live on her own, and anyhow she couldn’t afford a flat. Over other cups of tea that month I heard of her attempts. She went for walks in St Stephen’s Green, carrying a camera, pretending she was a tourist, asking men to take her photo, then chatting them up. One man gave her his phone number, but nothing came of it. Time was passing, soon her sister would be back, and Fatima would be at home again with the children. She wanted to live, her life was going – she tilted the tea pot to show me the green sodden mint leaves at the bottom – ‘like that’.

She seemed to lose spirit that last week of her freedom. She stopped sitting in the evening at her door. One day I saw her drifting past my house. I should have known better. There was no room for drifting in her life. The day before her sister returned, Fatima disappeared.

Her sister was shocked, worried for Fatima’s safety, but more worried by losing her childminder. She was an ambitious practical woman, busy shouldering her family into prosperity. I was used 6to seeing her car drive past, with a new carpet, a TV satellite dish or a china cabinet in the back seat. Now her children were piled in the back seat, and her face had a frown as she searched the streets. She called to our house at eight o’clock one morning, and another night at ten, hoping to catch Fatima there. But I had no more idea than she where Fatima was.

Our phone rang one evening and the plaintive, faint voice from Morocco said, ‘Fatima, s’il vous plait?’ I said she wasn’t at home. He clicked his tongue and hung up.

A few days later, the phone rang again. It was Fatima.

‘Are you all right?’ I said. ‘Where are you?’

‘I’m with Beata. I’m OK. I met someone.’

‘How?’

‘La chance!’ She laughed like a girl. She had met a young man in the refugee office. His name was Kamal. They were getting married. She needed my help. She brought him to visit that night when it was dark.

He was a serious, balding, not-so-young man with a bewildered look, as if things were going too fast. They were getting married next week, she said. Her sister and brother-in-law refused to attend. Would I drive her to the mosque? Kamal wiped his forehead and asked if he could use the bathroom. While he was gone Fatima asked in a whisper if there had been any 7phone call from Numero un? I nodded. She pressed a finger to her lips as Kamal returned.

She wore a long cream dress on her wedding day. She looked the part. She was the pianist who knew the music by heart. Three young men passed as she was getting out of the car, and at once she got back inside, drawing her veil down over her eyes. The women sat apart from the men at the ceremony, and afterwards at the wedding meal. I sat with a Tunisian boy who stopped eating, raised a finger and smiled each time an Ul-lu-lu cry came across the corridor from the women’s room. As I was leaving I met Kamal walking up and down the mosque yard, smoking a cigarette. When I congratulated him he nodded and, as if repeating some wise old Arab proverb, said, ‘It completes something.’

The mint spread in my front garden. A neighbour admired it and asked for a slip. When I set a slip in my back garden, it sent up green leaves the following spring, and then in August the pale purple flowers appeared. It must have been a year before I saw Fatima again.

It was one of those grey winter Sunday afternoons when everybody was inside, when Dublin seemed a place where man was never meant to live. A seagull glided between the bare trees. The low sky strained, 8as if trying to rain, then the clouds lightened for a minute, as if the sun might crawl through, then the greyness thickened again. I had to get out.

Going down the street I saw Kamal coming up, and Fatima pushing a go-cart behind. They’d had a baby but didn’t speak of that, though they interrupted each other in their eagerness to talk. She yawned as he discussed democracy in Morocco. When I complained about the weather, Kamal shrugged. ‘It won’t do you any harm.’

‘You sound like an Irishman,’ I said.

‘I am an Irishman,’ he said. He had Irish citizenship now, and a job in a cardboard box factory in Tallaght. Fatima rolled her large dark eyes.

‘He’s not my sort of man,’ she said, when I met her next. She was alone with their baby son, who was already starting to walk. She looked thin again. She said she had pains all the time. It was the weather. When the child cried, she slapped him hard on the face.

The weather suited the mint, and it spread. I was thinning it one day when Fatima called and told me the news. She and Kamal had divorced. Their son was going to a playschool. A boy had snatched old Beata’s handbag, dragged her along the pavement when she wouldn’t let go her precious crusts; she had died in hospital. Then Fatima came to the 9point: she was applying for Irish citizenship, and wanted my help with the forms.

The mint died every winter, the frost burned it black, but by now I knew that the roots were alive and fresh leaves would return in the spring. I was walking by the canal one evening, looking at a clutch of ducklings that had just hatched − little brown balls of down darting through the reeds, running onto the lily pads, pecking at flies. A serious voice behind me said, ‘Hello.’ It was Kamal.

He was sitting on a bench with a woman, sharing a bag of sunflower seeds. She came from Ukraine, he said, but had worked in Istanbul for several years. When I asked what her job had been, she looked down. The red varnish on her fingernails was chipped. She hadn’t good English, he explained. He said Fatima was living in Parnell Street with another man.

I was in the front garden when she passed by the other day. She looked old and tired. She was pregnant again, and leaned against the railings to rest as we talked. Her son was with his father. She was going to see her sister. She had Irish citizenship at last. She looked at the green mint, growing luxuriant, three feet high, and gave her sad, hard smile and said, ‘Oh. La nature.’

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GOOD FRIDAY

Around the quarter everyone’s wife seemed to have lost interest in sex. That was the talk in the pub. Mick said she said it was her back. Roddy said she said it didn’t do anything for her now. He said he said, ‘What’s this? What do I do?’ He said she said, ‘Do what you like but don’t be telling me.’

Mick said he missed the time when they used to sit up watching the late-night film, even if it was boring, all the more if it was boring, building up the pleasure of going to bed. And then it all stopped; the tap was turned off.

Roddy said he had smiled at a girl in the bus. She had stood up and offered him her seat.

11Mick said, ‘Ah well, we’ve served our purpose. Nature doesn’t need us anymore.’

Roddy said, ‘Well I need nature.’

He said there was a woman he had gone out with as a student, and met sometimes for coffee when she was back in town. The last time they met she complained about her husband. He asked would she like to go away some weekend, and she agreed.

They planned it carefully. She was coming over at Easter to visit her mother, who was in a home. He was going fishing to Galway, where they could meet. His office closed on Thursday, he went down that evening, found a hotel and booked a room. ‘A double,’ – he looked at the ceiling – ‘the other half’s coming tomorrow.’

The receptionist was indifferent to his private life. She looked at a computer screen. ‘We have a single for tonight, and tomorrow there’ll be a double free.’ She gave him a form that took five minutes to fill.

The night they had first slept together, he had written Mr and Mrs in the register. It was that long ago, another time. He had chosen the hotel, the only one he could think of, where his parents had once gone on holiday. It had ended there; in fact it had never begun. They had been shy and innocent. She had cried when, ashamed, he had gone downstairs to the bar. But that night had brought them together 12in another way: it was from there they had each set out into the world.

He went for a walk after dinner, exploring the small city streets: he hadn’t been there for years. He had forgotten the blue-grey limestone, the bridges, the sense of water everywhere, the sound of Irish − ‘Ól suas é, is fada ó chonaigh mé thú’ − an old woman’s voice in a bar. It was strange, and it was home. It was like an image of his life, and of hers. Rooted in different countries, they had no intention of uprooting now; they were meeting for a weekend, no more. Standing on a bridge, watching the river flood down to the sea, he remembered his pretext and rang his wife. Three days of fishing, he said, and he’d be back, refreshed. She laughed and said she’d be refreshed as well, sleeping without his snoring.

He had forgotten too the pleasure of sleeping alone: spreading his arms and legs like a starfish across the bed; getting up in the night – he had reached that age − looking out the window and seeing how the stars had moved; lying down again, thinking, Into the arms of Lethe and trying to remember as he drifted back to sleep who or what Lethe was. He wasn’t anxious or guilty. Their pleasure would simply make good that innocent, unhappy night long ago.

13Her skin was still soft, without make-up, and her fine hair was a beautiful grey. He kissed her lips when she stepped from the train. She smiled and put her tongue in his mouth. Their room wasn’t ready; the receptionist took her suitcase, then they went out into the morning sun. The streets were empty, everywhere was closed − the shops and pubs, the small museum − for Good Friday.

He had come by car, and they drove out along the coast, where already the weather was changing. Silvery walls of mist were moving in from the sea. They walked down by a stream clotted with brown foam, among sheep sheltering in hollows worn into the slope, down to where green waves washed over black decks of rock. She stood and held her arms open to the spray, the wild elements, but it seemed to him a youthful gesture that was not natural. As if she sensed his thought she fell behind, picking strands of sheep wool from the heather.

It was easier back in the car, in the warmth of the heater. Wiping the steamed windscreen, smoothing the sheep wool on her lap, she talked as they drove further. Her husband had a girlfriend now, a neighbour he visited every weekend on his bicycle. He said you didn’t stop doing something you liked just because someone else didn’t like it – he had that sort of blunt English honesty. But otherwise he was a good 14husband, and there was the house to think of, and the children. She would stay with him, though she missed the warmth of someone close, nothing fixed, nothing special, somebody you could turn to now and then. He reached across and touched her cheek.

They came to a village, another empty street, the pub and the shop both closed; but as she wiped the windscreen again she looked out. She remembered this place: she had been here as a girl; her grandfather had come from these parts. She talked of him as they crossed the flat bogland towards the mountains that changed shade under high, sailing clouds. He had been a shopkeeper, undertaker, emigration agent, farmer − a sort of gombeen man. When the Troubles came, he had sold up and retired with his money to a safer part of the country. She told it with the plain humour of someone worn by life.

The land grew wilder, the bare beauty broken by squares of forestry, a large factory that looked abandoned. Cars pulled out of farm bungalow gates and passed at speed, their suspension sinking, rising with the uneven road; and five or ten miles on they saw the same cars parked outside other bungalows. As they reached a headland the sun came through and they saw a beach below light up slowly. By the time he had driven down a steep winding track, the dark wet sand had dried as bright as gold dust. 15When she stepped from the car, the strands of sheep wool fell from her lap but she didn’t notice; she was looking about, smiling. He thought she was going to run down the beach and wade into the sea, her arms outspread again to the elements. But she was looking at a small graveyard enclosed by a stone wall a few yards up from the shore.

Her grandfather’s sister was buried there, she said. She had a vague memory of coming here as a girl; or maybe she had simply been told of this place, and imagined the visit. They were at ease together now, looking for the gate, not finding it and laughing as they climbed over ivy that bushed wild on top of the wall. Inside was so overgrown that only the tops of the headstones showed, but crushing down briars and bracken they waded from grave to grave, peeling moss from the slabs, rubbing in grass to bring out faded lettering. Her legs were scratched, their faces bright with sweat – now the sun was warm; but they called to each other, urging each other on, and continued searching. Just as they were about to give up, he found it.

She stood beside him, looking down at the name cut in a flat tombstone whitened by time and weather. He heard skylarks singing, the sea falling on the shore as he was silent with her. He thought of that body vanished into the sandy earth they were 16standing on, and that this woman with the same name would be sleeping with him that night. Again, as if she read his thought, she asked if he believed in another life. He said there might be, in some way – as the bracken grew from the sandy earth. But dead was dead, she said; alive and dead were different. But imagine, he said, if it was more like a spectrum or like sound waves; with the colours and sounds we could see and hear extending into something finer. Imagine if life and death were both part of something far greater?