Moving on - Margaret Cahill

I was living in Jason’s flat above Malone’s Butchers in Gort when I first met Kevin. I’d dropped out of college in Galway and had lasted a month at home before my mother’s fussing and my father’s stony silences drove me out of the place. No matter how hard my father tried to convince me otherwise, there was no way I could stomach another three years of Mechanical Engineering or any other sort of engineering he kept suggesting I transfer into.

Jason shared the place with Brendan, the barman from The Pure Drop, and a Polish painter whose name no one could pronounce so they just called him Polish. It was a drop-in centre of sorts for all the lads from town who still lived at home too. I only had a mattress in the living room at the start but I didn’t mind. Having a bunch of lads to hang out with like that was like being back at college but without all the brain-melting maths to deal with. The landlord didn’t know I was there so I couldn’t claim rent allowance but the dole was just about enough to keep me going in beer, cornflakes and pizza, and to throw the lads a few quid a week for letting me stay. I’d never really spent much time in the town before that. Being stuck out in the sticks meant a lifetime of being collected by my parents all the time and no chance to just hang around.

Living in the flat was like being on constant holidays. I’d sleep until the afternoon, watch a few soaps and chat shows, then stroll up town for a roll from the Spar deli. If the weather was any way fine, I’d eat it sitting on a bench in the square and wash it down with a coffee and cigarette.

Looking at it from the outside, Gort had always seemed like a sleepy, half-dead town to me but if you stayed still and watched the comings and goings for a while you could see that it had a character all of its own. There’d be dark skinned Brazilians stopping for loud chats on the streets, farmers smelling of shit on their way back from the mart, school kids gobbling down chips from greasy brown bags, the Galway- or Limerick-bound tourists who’d pull in off the motorway to ‘Ooh’ and ‘Aah’ over the old weigh house before disappointingly realising there was little else to see, and the Yeats’ groupies reverently huddled around the map in the square that marked his connections to the area.

We were all a bit skint so we stayed in most nights with a few cans. We had Xbox tournaments that lasted for weeks (I was the Call of Duty: Back Ops II champion), poker nights with the tabs from Lidl beer cans as betting chips and all-night movie marathons that didn’t end until the sun was sneaking in through the flimsy curtains the next morning.

It was only fifteen miles away but I didn’t go home for months. I couldn’t bare the look of disappointment on my father’s face and worry on my mother’s. She rang and texted me loads the first few weeks, begging me to come home, and when she realised that wasn’t going to happen, she arrived at the door one evening with a bag full of dinners she’d made for the freezer. “Keep you going for a couple of weeks,” she said. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the freezer was already fully occupied with a solid square-foot block of ice. The lads slagged me about being a Mammy’s boy but they had no trouble devouring the stack of shepherd’s pies and lasagnes all the same.

Over time, the lads’ ability to make it in to work, hungover or not, started to make me feel like a bit of a waster and it eventually made me look for a job. I applied for a few around the town but it was the same answer everywhere I went – they needed someone with experience. It was pure fluke that I got the job with Keegan’s. The son that ran the place was in having a few pints with Brendan one night and moaning about the fact that he couldn’t get anyone to work on installations out in people’s houses. He’d had a string of fellas quit on him because they couldn’t stick the travel involved and Kevin Delaney, his main man, had been trying to do the job single-handed for weeks but they were falling way behind on orders. I was starting to get a bit fed up of doing the same old thing every day so getting out of town a bit didn’t sound like a bad idea. I called down to Keegan’s the next day and couldn’t believe my luck when he gave me a trial run and I was made full-time after a week.

I spent my days in the passenger seat of the transit van as Kevin and I drove around every country road in Galway and up and down the west coast. Keegan’s custom made curtain rails so they’d a fair bit of the market cornered for the big new houses with double-height entrance halls and awkward-shaped bay windows that had sprung up all over the countryside, as well as the likes of hotels and pubs. We’d jobs as far away as Donegal some days.

Kevin drove me mad at times but I don’t think I’d have stuck being in a confined space for so long with anyone else. He was one of those fellas that liked to be the centre of attention, not in a bad way though. He seemed to have a story about everything and had thought about things enough to have opinions of his own, rather than just repeating other people’s ideas. Some of it was mad old stuff altogether but he was fierce clever at the same time. You’d be talking to him about the Man United’s latest signing saga and he’d compare it to the shady negotiations that went on at Russian-Ottoman peace talks of the eighteenth century. I learned more from him than from any teacher.

He loved a good slag too and he gave me an awful time for the first few weeks about my haircut. I tried to explain that it was my complete lack of DIY knowledge that was the reason I couldn’t tell the difference between one drill bit and another and not the fact that my fringe was getting in the way, but he was having none of it. I didn’t mind too much though, he was funny and he’d never go too far, like some fellas who would needle away at you if they sensed a weak spot.

For a scrawny man in his fifties Kevin was fitter and stronger than he looked, and than me. He’d be up and down ladders carrying heavy loads all day long and he never seemed to tire. I had a job keeping up with him, or even being any use at all those first couple of months. It seemed like an eternity of “hand me that yoke there” before I got the hang of things. When he was on the job, he took it seriously. He’d no time for messing there but he always had me howling in laughter in the van.

I bumped into him a few times in O’Brien’s pub in town at the weekends. He always had a gang of people gathered around him where he’d be playing a role of half-preacher, half stand-up comedian, from his perch at the bar. He seemed to know everyone in the town. We couldn’t drive through the place without someone saluting him or beeping the horn at him.

When Polish moved out of the flat to go live with his girlfriend, I got his room. I kind of felt like a real person for the first time since I’d left home to go to college. I had a job that paid okay, a proper home with a bedroom of my own and lads around to drink with. It was around then that we’d started to limit the hard drinking to the weekends. No one said anything, it just kind of happened that way but I think we were all a bit relieved. I even started going home for Sunday dinners now that I didn’t feel so useless around my father. My mother kicked him under the table whenever things got too heavy and he started asking me about my plans for the future.

I think that was one of the reasons Kevin was one of the few adults I didn’t feel weird around. He didn’t go on at you about stuff and just let you be. All he expected was for you to turn up for work, listen to his stories and laugh at the appropriate point, which wasn’t hard as he was a funny fucker.

He was decent to me too, even when I messed up. I wasn’t used to that. He said nothing to me the morning after the Ireland match when I must have been still reeking of drink as I climbed into the van. Me and the lads had gone back to our place after the pub shut and I vaguely remembered opening my last can at four in the morning. I hadn’t had time for a shower and grabbed two pastries and a pint of milk from the Centra at the corner where Kevin picked me up in the mornings. He knew it was more than a dodgy stomach that was bothering me when we were eating lunch in the Supermac’s car park in Tuam.

“You can’t trust your mind on a day like this,” he said unprompted. “It’d have you believing the world is a hopeless place and that there’s no point to anything. That’s The Fear talking.”

My stomach cramped on the greasy burger I had sent its way.

“You’ve got to ignore it and trust that after a dinner and a good night’s sleep you’ll be back to yourself tomorrow. It’s like Kris Kristofferson says…”

“Kris who?”

“Jaysus, you young ones have no fucking musical education in ye at all. Kris Kristofferson, only one of the finest songwriters the world has ever seen…”

He never finished what he was saying but he rooted around in the pocket of the van door and slipped a CD into the stereo. Some maudlin song about being hungover and lonely on a Sunday morning and watching everyone else who had a life came on, so I kind of got what he meant anyway. He dropped me off home early that evening and unloaded the van at the shop on his own.

He was a bit of a softie too, though he’d never let on. There was this one time we had just finished up a job on the lake front in Oughterard and just as we had the van packed up he said, “Hang on a minute. I want to check this tree before we head off.”

“Check it for what?” I asked, wondering why I was only now hearing about his interest in horticulture.

“For conkers boyo, for conkers.”

Of course I hadn’t even noticed the tree, let alone that it was a Horse Chestnut. I’d been watching the clock and working out how long it would take us to get home with the evening traffic.

“Aren’t you a bit old for playing conkers?” I called after him.

“I don’t want to play with them,” he said. “Just pop them. There are few greater pleasures in life than standing on a ripe chestnut and getting a feel for just the exact amount of pressure needed to pop it open, like…that,” he said, leaning his weight on the spiky husk that lay under his heavy boot.

The glistening brown chestnut rolled out onto the gravel drive and he went searching the grass for more fallen pods to pop.

We had pulled in at a petrol station just outside Galway for food one Saturday on our way back from fitting out a new pub. The radio was on as it always was when we were in the van and Larry Gogan’s Just-a-Minute Quiz came on. We’d stopped a bit early for lunch on account of the early start we’d had that day. We’d usually be on the road on the way home when the radio show was on and Kevin was always brilliant at the quiz. I might get the odd modern music or film question right but Kevin’d be shouting out all the right answers at the radio as if Larry could hear him.

“You should give it a go,” I said, grabbing another potato wedge from the box on the dashboard.

“Give what a go?”

“Larry Gogan. The quiz.”

“Would you go ‘way out a’ that,” was his immediate reply.

“Now ladies and gentlemen,” the voice from the radio called out. “We’re looking for people from Galway county today. Anyone in Galway county think they can beat Tracy’s score of four? Phone us now on 54178.”

“Ah Jesus Kevin, you have to, go on. When will we ever be parked up again at the right time and in the county he’s looking for?”

“Nah, it’s not my kind of thing.”

“But sure you’re brilliant at it. You’re better than ninety, ninety-five percent of people on it and yer one before only got four. That’s useless. Imagine how it would go down in O’Brien’s if you won. They’d be buying you drink for the night. You’d be the talk of the town.”

“Go ‘way, them feckers would expect you to buy them the drink if you won anything.”

Kevin silently finished his ham roll and tea and I thought that was the end of it, but then he asked, “How would I get on it?”

“Here, give me your phone and I’ll ring in and give it to you when I get through,” I said.

I waited while the call queued and gave them Kevin’s name and number when it was finally answered. I handed him back the phone.

“She said they’d call you back. You might be on next or you might not be on at all today. Luck of the draw.”

I pulled my earphones out of my bag, connected them to my phone and tuned in the radio station just in case. They were always telling people to turn off the radio in the background because it interfered with the sound and I wasn’t going to miss this. Kevin kept looking at the phone. The ads were still playing on the radio when it rang. He stared at it for ages before putting it to his ear and answering it.

“Right, yeah…Okay, yeah…yeah,” was the conversation I heard him have with the producer of the show.

“Now, on the line we have Kevin,” Larry’s chirpy voice sang out. “Welcome to 2fm, Kevin. You’re on the Just-a-Minute quiz.”

I turned off the radio in the van and put my earphones in.

“Hello, Kevin. Are you there Kevin?”

“Yes, hello Larry,” Kevin finally answered.

“And where are you from, Kevin?”

Gort.

“Cork, great stuff. There’s nowhere like Cork by my own lovely Lee, isn’t that right, Kevin? “

“No, Gort!” Kevin almost shouted back at him.

“Right, Gort, County Galway. And what’s the weather like in Gort today, Kevin?”

I don’t know, I’m not actually in Gort today.

“You’re not? Well where are you calling from, Kevin?”

The painfully stilted conversation carried on for what seemed like ages and I was relieved when Larry moved past the small-talk and on to the questions. I’d never known Kevin to be so wooden.

I looked out the side window of the van, so I wouldn’t distract him. He got the first question wrong, then completely misheard the second and gave a really stupid answer. Twelve times sixteen, was the third question, and though Kevin was usually quick as lightening at measurements and calculations, now he was flustered and got that wrong too. By the time the clock had ticked down the sixty seconds, he had passed on four and only gotten two right.

“Well, thanks for playing Kevin. The questions didn’t suit you today, did they?”

“No, I suppose they didn’t,” Kevin answered dryly.

“Okay, take care travelling now. Kevin got two, so Tracy’s still in the lead on four. We’re looking for people from County Galway, if you think you can beat four…”

I pulled my earphones out and tried to tell Kevin that he didn’t do that badly, that the questions were really hard but the look on his flushed face told me he’d know I was lying and that it’d was only make things worse. He didn’t turn the radio back on and I didn’t dare touch it so we ended up driving home in silence. The quietness freaked me out but with every mile we travelled it seemed harder to break its.

“See you Monday so,” I said when he dropped me off at the shop in town.

“Yeah, see you Monday,” was all he said.

We wouldn’t usually go into O’Brien’s on a Saturday night but Jason’s older cousin was having a meetup there before he went off to Australia so we went up for a while at the start of the night. There was a good gang of them there already there when we arrived and they’d taken over the big table inside the door. I knew it was Kevin’s pub and was planning to buy him a pint if he came in later to try to smooth things over.

“Here, is it you that works with Kevin Delaney in Keegan’s?” one of the lads asked me from across the table.

“Yep, been with them a year or so now.”

“Jesus, he was pure woeful today on the radio. Did you hear it Jason?”

Jason hadn’t but yer man took out his phone and skipped through the show until it came to Kevin’s bit. The lads were all howling with laughter at it. I glanced up at the bar nervously but there was no sign of him yet. If I’d known the lads better I might have told them to lay off but I didn’t.

“What’s twelve times sixteen?” one of them asked.

“A hundred and forty two,” another replied, renacting the recording they’d just played.

“Who is the current President of France?” someone else shouted out.

“Eh…Eh…pass,” they all sang in unison.

“What famous coastal resort town in Spain begins with the letter B?”

“Bundoran,” they shouted, erupting into howls of laughter.

I couldn’t help myself laughing at that one too.

The expressions across the table from me changed suddenly and the lads started elbowing each other. I glanced behind to see what they were looking at. It was Kevin. He’s just come in the door. I don’t know how much he had heard but the expression on his face said enough.

“Fair play, Kevin, that was great craic today,” one of the lads said, raising his glass in Kevin’s direction.

Kevin said nothing and continued on to his usual spot at the far side of the bar. I felt like a real shithead.

Next time I went up for a print, I called one for Kevin. There was a big square pillar blocking my view of him but as I waited for the Guinness to settle, I could hear that he was getting a good ribbing from his usual gang of cronies at the bar. The barman finally topped off the pint I’d ordered him and I took a breath before heading around the corner to give it to Kevin. He wore a wide smile forced into his face but it was clear that he was not enjoying being the butt of the jokes instead of the one telling them. His eye caught mine but he looked embarrassed and turned away to order himself another pint. I chickened out of talking to him and headed back to the lads. I gave Jason my pint. He was the only one of us who drank Guinness.

I was dreading going that Monday. There was no talking about anything other that jobs we had to do in the van that day, no Kevin telling stories, just the radio set to some god awful country and western station that he knew I hated. I wasn’t used to being the one starting conversations. I tried talking about the news and the GAA results from the weekend. He answered me back alright but there wasn’t the usual banter. When he pulled in to let me off at the shop that evening, I tried saying something.

“Look Kevin, about the radio thing…”

“Can we just forget about that shagging quiz and stop going on about it?” he barked.

“Right, yeah, sure,” I said, not knowing if that meant I was forgiven for making him go on the radio in the first place or for being caught laughing about him in the pub.

It wasn’t mentioned again and I thought things would get back to normal eventually but they didn’t. The work was the same: measuring windows, climbing up and down ladders screwing in rails, taking mugs of tea from auld ones to humour them, but the banter between us was that had made all that bearable was gone. Things between us had changed and I didn’t how to fix them and get it back to the way it used to be. I started to hate work. The journeys in the van seemed longer every day, the jobs more awkward and boring, and the money barely worth the hassle of it all any more.

When Jason and a couple of the lads he knew started talking about heading to Australia for a year, I decided to go with them. It sounded like it would be easy enough to pick up something out there and the head man in Keegan’s said he’d give me a reference no problem. The lads all came back after a year but I ended up getting work with a home decorating crowd that sponsored my visa. The money was good and I loved the weather and the outdoor life there, so I stayed on.

I went home for a visit at Christmas. It was only my second time home since I’d left. I nearly ran into Kevin while walking down Bridge Street and I suppose that’s what got me thinking about him and the old days again. I was on my way to collect the turkey and ham for my Ma when he came out of the bookie’s right in front of me, a bit grayer but with that unmistakeable hunched over walk of his. I stopped in my tracks and looked around for somewhere to duck into. I wouldn’t have known what to say to him and it would have been really awkward to get stuck talking to him. He turned and crossed the road and I swung round so he wouldn’t spot me. It’s a pathetic way of carrying on, I know. There was a time when I used to think he was the coolest fella ever and loved hanging out with him. Now, he’s just someone that I used to know. I suppose that’s just the way life goes. You do or say something stupid without meaning to but it changes everything for good.

When I got to the butcher’s shop, I stopped for a minute before going in. I couldn’t help but look up at the windows of our old flat above. It gave me flashbacks of all the nights we had there drinking cheap cans, playing video games and watching films. It was the best time ever. I only realised then how long it had been since I’d spoken to any of the lads, at least a few years. I thought about texting Jason and the others to try to arrange a meet-up before I came back to Auz but I couldn’t get out of my head how weird it felt seeing Kevin and it put me off the idea. Jason has a house, girlfriend, baby, dog, the lot now, if his Instagram is anything to go by. He’d moved on. We all had. As much as I’d have liked to turn back time, I knew things just wouldn’t be the same. I went on into the butcher’s to pick up the meat and had a low-key Christmas with my parents. I’ve no plans to go back any time soon. It’s kind of sad to say it but there’s nothing there for me anymore.

Originally published in The Honest Ulsterman, Oct 2020.

Margaret Cahill is a short story writer from Limerick, Ireland. Her fiction has featured in The Milk House, époque press é-zine, Ogham Stone, Honest Ulsterman, HeadStuff, Silver Apples, Autonomy anthology, Incubator, Crannog, Galway Review, Limerick Magazine, Boyne Berries and The Linnet’s Wings. She also dabbles in writing about music and art, with publications on HeadStuff.org and in Circa Arts Magazine.