Portobello Notebook E-Book

Adrian Kenny

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

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

This collection of stories is set in Portobello, on the edge of Dublin city centre, just inside the canal. The stories reflect on characters on the edge of life, personalities that do not quite fit in: Michael, the country boy who drowns himself; Harry, the old Jewish dealer living alone; Liam, the crude but jovial emigrant returning to Ireland for a visit. Through the author's eyes, and through the eyes of his other characters, we follow his progress from the first story, 'Settling In', to the final one, 'Mr Pock'. Old friends are met, in loss or renewal, making or trying to make fresh starts, or looking back though the glass of time. Disappointment, happiness, uncertainty lead to the realization that this place has become – what the author had always thought was elsewhere – his home. Written over the past thirty years, these earnest and deeply human anecdotes form a greater story – of one man's life in one place.

Leseprobe

To Charlie and Dympna, good neighbours

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Settling In

Harry

Going Back

Mistress

The Tea Cloth

Saturday Evening Mass

The Cricket Match

The Lower Deck

The Mermaid

In New York

Kestrel and Starlings

Mister Pock

Copyright

Settling In

SPRING AGAIN. I’m out jogging in the mornings along the canal bank, under the poplar trees opening green and gold, watching my step on the crushed fallen catkins, a purple smear all the way down to the Eveready factory fence. I get my breath, looking across at the Taylor Signs clock – 8.30, the rush-hour traffic just beginning – and I think of Michael sometimes as I jog back home.

THE FIRST TIME I saw him was in the local shop. I was getting the evening paper, to see if my review was in.

He said, ‘What’s this?’ He had a west of Ireland voice, and I looked up. He was holding up a cauliflower. His left side was deformed. Cathy, behind the counter, cutting open the newspaper bundles, said, ‘My God, where have you been?’ She handed out Presses and Heralds to people in a hurry, then she said, ‘That’s a cauliflower.’

He had a long, open smile. ‘How do you cook it?’ he said, and I said, ‘You just boil it,’ and he put it down. He was with a girl, I noticed then. She blushed and muttered something to him, and he said, ‘Have you rashers?’ Cathy said, ‘We have surely,’ and she wiped the knife clean.

Cathy was from the North, a newcomer like myself, but already she seemed in charge. It was probably her idea that the shopkeeper give him a job. His left arm bent as if he was carrying a bundle, his left leg bent so that his toe just touched the ground; he used to hang around the door chatting to her. I didn’t see him with his girl again. Anyway, he was part of the scene in our street that autumn and winter, pushing the trolley with his good right hand, delivering coal and briquettes. Michael was his name. I got to know him when I bought a piano.

HOW TO HANDLE the enforced idleness small children bring? One of my answers was going to the auction room in Rathmines, as good as a museum to them, and I could lie back on an old sofa, watching paintings, swords, books, mirrors and clocks held up and knocked down: a huge facade, I thought sometimes – when my daughters grew restless and I had to leave – behind which bishops, artists, businessmen and politicians could hide, leaving the rest to do the real, the dirty work, minding children.

‘Anyone?’ The auctioneer came to a piano, a Victorian box of brass fittings and inlay. There was silence even when he ran his biro down the keys, playing a scale to show that it worked. ‘Ah come on. A fiver?’ He raised his eyebrows and looked around. Still in the first glow of home-making, and in gratitude for the hour of peace, I put up my hand. He rapped the end of the biro on Middle C. ‘Sold!’

When I said, ‘Does that include delivery?’ he laughed and moved on to the next lot. I stopped at the shop on my way home to ask for a hand.

THAT’S WHAT I think of sometimes in the morning, as I get my breath at the Eveready factory fence: the struggle up to the hall door with that piano, its castors grating on the granite, our hands scrabbling for a hold on the slippery walnut veneer; resting on each step, our backs to the brute, to stop it falling down again.

‘Can you play it?’ the shopkeeper asked, and when I said No, he said, ‘What do you want it for?’

The door opened and my daughters appeared, tiny, remote, staring down at the grotesque thing coming up backwards. Michael said, ‘Won’t it be nice for the children.’ He got a grip with his powerful right hand. ‘Let it back to me.’

‘I shouldn’t have asked you. It must weigh a quarter-ton.’

‘You’re all right …’ He turned as a handsome girl went by, his own handsome face lighting up like a firefly, fading as she turned the corner.

‘You picked a good spot here.’ The shopkeeper looked at his watch. ‘Come on again.’

‘You’re settling in?’ A neighbour stopped, took off his jacket and hung it on a railing spearhead. A duck and a drake came flying down the street from the canal, quacking courting, six feet above the ground. It was spring. A priest went by. The sun came out and we rested again, backs to the brute.

‘Bill’s the name,’ the neighbour said.

‘Adrian.’

‘Frank.’

‘You have the shop now, Frank?’

‘That’s me. This is Michael.’

It was like a small party as Michael lifted the lid and slammed a chord.

‘And what brought you to Dublin, Michael?’

‘The Rehab. I was doing upholstering –’

‘She doesn’t need upholstering.’ Frank nodded at another girl going past, up to the Labour Exchange.

‘– But sure I wasn’t interested.’ Michael looked, and looked away.

‘You’ll find something. Come on – we’ll be here all day.’

Bill rolled up his sleeves and said, ‘We’ll walk her up.’

Woodworm dust spilled from the squat legs, smearing our hands as we waddled them over the threshold. ‘You won’t be moving again in a hurry!’ Michael smiled as the castors sank into the hall carpet and stopped.

‘AND YOU THINK you know someone,’ Cathy said, when they found him. She thought he had gone home, back to the west.

It was a week before he came to the surface, floated up swollen, and was seen in the morning rush hour. The blind man was going down Grove Road, beating his white stick along the wall; I was jogging along the other side of the canal as they lifted him out – just by the Taylor Signs clock. That’s how you settle in.

Harry

THEIR DAINTY doorknocker rattled, then banged louder. Ta-ta-ta!

‘That’s Harry,’ she said.

‘I’m going down to the shed.’

‘Shed. Bed. That’s all you do.’

‘I have to do my work.’

‘You’re just hiding from life.’ His wife’s footsteps banged down the hall.

He slipped out the back door and down the dark path to his study, a garden shed. From there he could see Harry come into the kitchen, his hat brushing the white paper lampshade, sending his shadow swinging against the walls. Paring a pencil, he watched him sit down, take off his shoes. He could guess what he was saying – his feet were killing him again. He set to work.

Ta-ta-ta. The Everest typewriter tapped as persistently as Harry, but no door opened. It was like digging granite with a teaspoon. It was like … he was moaning like Harry. He set to again.

Eight – nine – ten o’clock. For half a page. He didn’t dare to reread it. The rest of the book stretched before him like … He turned off the paraffin stove, switched off the light and went up to the house. Harry was on his third pot of tea, drinking it steaming from the saucer.

‘Well, Abraham.’ He called everyone Abraham.

‘Harry. How’s the foot?’

‘It’s both of them. Ooh! My God!’

‘You should try another doctor.’

‘I’ve tried every bloody doctor. What do you think it is, ma’am?’

‘I don’t know.’ Through her teeth she said to her husband, ‘I’m going to bed.’

‘Goodnight, ma’am!’

He took over. ‘Another cup of tea, Harry?’

‘No, no!’

‘I’m making it anyway.’

‘I’d love a cup of water if you have it.’

‘Is the doctor giving you anything?’

‘Everything. It’s no use.’

He lived around the corner. Everyone had run from him always. He was odd.

‘Not a bad old day, Abraham.’

‘Were you out?’

‘Just down Pleasants Street, selling a bit of old scrap. Ooh!’ He fingered his toes through his socks. ‘My God!’

‘Is Maurice not here?’

‘That fella’s never here. I don’t know why I took him in.’

He talked as loudly as ever, but he was nervous now. He had begun calling since he had been robbed – two tinkers had broken in, tied him to the bed, beaten him with an iron bar and taken everything.

When half past ten came, he said, ‘Are you walking round the corner, Abraham?’

And when they came to his gate: ‘Do you want to come in for a minute?’

‘No word from the guards?’ He stepped in.

‘A young fella was round to see me again. What were they like? he says. Like Mother Theresa! I said. What sort of damn fool question is that? Just have a look around, Abraham.’

He went into the sitting room first, as usual. Framed photos everywhere of Jewish men and women in 1920s’ clothes; a book – one God … unity of all things – a prayer book thrown open on an armchair; little ritual cups and bowls in a glass-fronted cabinet – its door still open since the robbery; a piano with rotten legs.

‘All right in there, Abraham?’

‘All right.’

They stood together in the hall. Maurice’s door had been fitted with a big new bolt and padlock. ‘Where is he tonight?’

‘Shelbourne Park. More trouble than he’s worth.’

Maurice was a bookie, but he had been a boxer once. Harry had given him a room, in exchange for protection.

‘He looks after himself, that fella. Look what he spent eight pounds on this morning.’ Harry led the way down to the kitchen, pointed to Maurice’s tins of sardines and jars of pickles on the filthy table. Everything was filthy except the new back door and its gleaming bolts.

‘Will I look upstairs?’

‘Mind yourself, Abraham.’

The stairs was almost falling down. He went up, close to the wall. On the landing, where the worst drips fell, the boards were sodden. He edged into Harry’s small back room.

From its window he could see the back of his own house. His wife was up again, in the kitchen, tidying after them. She seemed far away. She was right. Shed, bed – burrowing into his never-never memory, dream, imagination or whatever it was. He gave her no life. He felt suddenly as cold as Harry’s room.

‘All right in there, Abraham?’

A cheap brass ritual candlestick, a wax-splashed matchbox, an electric fire in an oven-roasting tray on the bedside locker. He returned to the landing. ‘All right.’

‘No harm to put that in.’ Harry came up with a light bulb. ‘In the front room.’