Two Irish ladies in their high 70s sat drinking gin as they looked out to the great pall of winter: the drearier end of Kentish Town, late in the morning. There was a snap of rain on the wind, a lowering December sky.
“You’re takin’ your life in your hands with them things,” said Annie.
“With a curling tongs?” cried Tess.
“Syl Moriarty burned the top of her left ear off,” said Annie. “This is only last week I’m talkin’ about. She was getting ready for the funeral.”
“Funeral? Who’s gone and died off on poor Syl then?”
“Her brother… Cyril, was it? Charlie?”
“Poor Cyril!” cried Tess. “Didn’t know him. Chest, was it? The Moriartys were never great for chests.”
“Not the chest,” said Annie.
“Lungs?”
“Nor the lungs,” said Annie. “He were knocked down, actually. Tragic.”
“Knocked down!” cried Tess.
“He were decapitated by a Deliveroo on Dalston high street.”
“We don’t know the day nor the hour!”
“And wouldn’t mind but Charlie? He’s only gone out for a vape refill.”
“Better off stickin’ to the fags, wouldn’t he be? So they been sayin’ down Health Centre. At least to Siss Mangan they said it.”
“Too late for him now though, in’t it?”
“Poor Cyril,” Tess sighed. “The day nor the hour he did not know.”
They sat on the first floor of a terraced house. The terrace was a little more than halfways gentrified. The houses were three-storey-over-basement, each with a jaunty run of eight steps to the front door. Annie’s late husband, Gerry, a plasterer of local renown, had bought the house in 1974 for ten bob and a pickled egg. A last few houses on the terrace were in flats still but there was handsome potential in the brickwork. There were noodley young couples in fleeces along every other hour now, looking up with their haunted little faces, their eyes like hungry gulls. The ladies sipped Cork Dry with a splash and looked out –
“Here he comes,” said Annie. “You watchin’?”
“Oh, I am watchin’! Oh, he looks fabulous!” cried Tess.
“Thady always turns himself out correct,” said Annie proudly.
She spoke of her nephew, Thadeus, who lived on the ground floor of the house. Without children herself, she had more than had the space. Thady was high 50s now and the last of the Casanovas, with a slight limp to his westerly side. He was speaking to his phone in a right old peeve as he scratched his key in the front door.
“Where’s he been then?”
“I really wouldn’t like to say, Tess.”
“Twist your arm?”
“Oh, I couldn’t.”
“Go on …”
“Well … He been knockin’ off some old bird in Earl’s Court, hasn’t he?”
“Old birds in Earl’s Court!” Tess cried. “Never a good idea.”
They could hear him at it downstairs – Thadeus was in one of his situations, clearly. His voice was rising and shaky and he was all but shouting down the phone as he bashed into the kitchen beneath them …
“I can’t be your REALITY, Doreen!” he roared.
“Doreen?” said Tess. “I wouldn’t like the sound of her. What’s Thady workin’ at these days?”
“Workin’? Thady?” Annie lowered her eyes. “Now there’s two words in a sentence.”
Her nephew was on the stairs then, taking the steps in his slightly irregular pattern, the brushing little half-slap of the limp – you’d know it was Thady that was coming.
“What’s happened with his bitcoin, all that old gubbins?” said Tess.
“Don’t ask,” said Annie. “Here he’s into us …”
Thadeus, handsome yet, aquiline nose, entered the room and scrolled his phone bitterly. He had come over in ’83, with Echo and the Bunnymen hair, and he had never put any weight on. The nerves burned off the weight was Annie’s reckoning and nerves of jelly had Thady.
“How’s your love life, Thade?” said Tess brightly.
“Complex, Tessie,” he said. “What’re you two at then or need I ask?”
“Oh, you know,” said Annie. “Puttin’ the world to rights, in’t it?”
“Syl Moriarty burned the top of her left ear off,” said Tess.
“Uncalled for,” said Thadeus.
“Get any breakfast down there?” said Annie.
“Down where, exactly, aunt?”
“I’m only askin’, Thady.”
“All set for Crimbo, Thade?” Tess asked. “Lookin’ forward?”
“Can’t wait,” said Thady. He went anxiously to the window and peered for a thousand yards into the winter sky, as if all the answers he needed were contained within it. The women considered him sidelong and with learned glances.
“Anthony’s gone out then?” he said.
“Out?” Annie said. “Boy hasn’t even surfaced yet, has he?”
“Oh, the lazy little fuckwad!’ cried Thady. “He’s supposed to be down the Mandarin Duck since half past ten!”
“Down the Duck, Thade?”
“He’s supposed to be collaboratin’ on a sausage roll.”
“Oh,” said Annie. “That was today?”
It was Thady’s son they spoke of, Anthony, 23, who lived in the basement, or Anton Thy Advocate, as he was known in the Chalk Farm hip-hop community.
“Oh, the idle little arsewipe,” Thady muttered, and he was out the door again and aimed at pace for the basement digs. Annie winced. Tess inquired –
“How do you collaborate on a sausage roll?”
“Artisanal, in’t it?” Annie said. “Down the Duck? ‘Sausage roll of the day’ they do. Local creatives put their oar in on the sausage roll front. Collaborations, in’t it.”
“What way’s Anthony thinkin’?”
“Pomengranite and molasses,” said Annie.
“Fuck me,” said Tess.
“Duck used to be quite a nice old pub,” said Annie. “Now it’s all these natty little Herberts with tashers.”
“You wouldn’t get me off the loo for a month of Sundays,” said Tess.
Three fierce blows resounded then above their heads and they made faces and raised eyebrows and sipped their gins.
“Uh-oh,” said Annie.
“Uh-oh,” said Tess.
The blows were made on the boards of the third floor with a stoutly wielded cane by Mary Kate, Annie’s mother, who was 97 and that bit closer to heaven up there at the top of the house. The blows signalled for a bit of peace, a bit of quiet, a bit of respect if you don’t mind? She had just come out of a very lovely dream had Mary Kate. Now she was on one of these brief visits back to herself. She was awed by the experience. She had been dreaming a lot of Ballyvaughan lately. Of Ballyvaughan and environs. Sea-spray, that kind of thing. Dreams of sheep and field and rock and crow. Low sunlight over the field in the winter. Old neighbours. She came over in ’46. She wasn’t three weeks nursing the newborns at the Royal Free when she saw Pat Jackson from Ennistymon breastfeeding a shovel on Stroud Green Road. She was just off the bus from work that day. She was just walking down the street, innocent as a lamb, but Pat Jackson stood there and turned a fruity little smile on her and such a beautiful singer he turned out to be – that man could make five syllables out of the word “dreamer” at a certain hour of a Saturday night. You’d have to have been there to have heard it done.
Meantime, down the basement, Anton Thy Advocate had greeted the day by bunnin’ a zoot – a cheeky one-skinner – and he was a little bit high already when his old dad came tearing down the stairs with his tits on fire, all agitated.
“You know what bloody time it is, Anthony!?”
“Calm yourself down, Dad.”
“You’re suppose’ to be away the Mandarin Duck since half past ten!”
“Gettin’ worked up ain’t doin’ squat for your stomach juices, bruv.”
“This was a valuable marketin’ opportunity, Anthony! They’re down the street for sausage rolls outside the Duck these days! It’s been a very popular initiative!”
“Yeah but the world goes on, don’t it, pops? Sit yerself down, have a kombucha, live in the moment.”
“I get headaches, Anthony!”
“I know you do, old bean. So just sit yourself down and concentrate on your breathin’ … I want to hear some nice big deep belly breaths goin’ down the hatch.”
“I’m under a lot of duress! This whole business with the house …”
“Oh, I know it, Dad. I know it, my sweet.”
Two floors north, Annie and Tess agreed that they’d take a last taste of the Cork Dry because all told it was unlikely to put them in the ground. A particular slant of half-light came through the noonday sky just then and it sent Annie memorious and here she was talking about her Gerry again, her poor husband, his slow and final decline, the way it had all started off with the eyes.
“Oh, he really wasn’t great in the finish, Tess, was he? I mean in terms of the eyes department?”
“The eyes,” sighed Tess.
“Here’s one,” said Annie, smiling now. “A story he told? Late on? There’s this afternoon, he’s away over Tufnell Park, he’s on foreign ground, something about a car battery, and he don’t know the place from Adam. Hour to kill. Walks down the street. Walks into a premises. Walks up to the counter, puts his elbows down, goes … ‘I’ll take a gin ’n’ tonic, slice o’ lime if you have it’. And the bloke behind the counter, he goes?”
“Go on?’ said Tess.
“This is a bank, sir. You may need to try two doors down.”
“Poor Gerry. The eyes, wan’t it?”
“The eyes,” Annie agreed. “He really shouldn’t have been driving at all at that stage.”
“Not as if we don’t have enough to be worryin’ about on the roads,” Tess whispered. “I mean, with the Deliveroos?”
On the terrace outside Thadeus paced and vaped and he was coatless in the bone-grey chill and once again he was in urgent conference with his phone. His knit cheekbones showed the keening of anxiety. He looked back over his shoulder, repeatedly, at the looming old house …
… and he was watched, too, from the top floor, by Mary Kate, who by an act of God had managed to raise herself up to a sitting position. Oh and he was definitely one to watch, she thought, wasn’t he, that Thady? There was something about his shoulder blades, something unreliable. Now she tasted buttercups in her mouth – as if she was chewing on them, and knowing that she’s not supposed to be – and her father was above her like a quick shadow, reaching down to lift her up, and there was a great lightness as her feet left the ground, and a sense of gliding, and here came a snapping of rain on the window, like a handful of nails flung, and again she looked out but that slim bloke Thadeus Cullinane had disappeared from view.
A floor below, Tess made her tiny hand into a fist and beat it three times firmly on her breastbone, as if she was taking vows of some kind.
“I think the gin is startin’ to repeat on me,” she confided. “This is a thing I’ve noticed lately. With the boggin’ gin.”
“Going down … the wrong way?” said Annie.
“Yes!” cried Tess. “And then comin’ back up some other channel to haunt me!”
“You could always switch to the vodkas but … you do know what they say about the vodkas, Tess?”
“Go on?”
“Vodka makes a girl frisky, don’t it?”
“Frisky? Oh, it’s late in the day for frisky, Annie, I mean really.”
Down in the basement? Developments: Anton Thy Advocate had dragged himself from the scratcher, scoffed a fancy French yoghurt, bolted a few Nespressos, and he was now engaging his creativity like a motherfucker out of control. He was laying down some slow ’n’ low beats on his laptop and rapping in pidgin Irish about the potato famine. Really getting into it, actually. He’d bunned another zoot and he was a little bit high and yeah he was really getting into the track now. Quite emotional in fact. Fat little tears rolling down the boy’s jaws, wasn’t it? Hashtag emosh in fact. Black ’47? That was some proper tragic shit, bruv. He’d recorded a snatch of Mary Kate on his Voice Memos the other day and he was thinking of layering it into the track. Somehow. Whatever it was she’d been on about. Something about a rock and a crow. But now his old dad was gimpin’ it down the stairs again and he slid his old card-player nose in the door and by the mad twitching of the nose Anton could tell that he was still agitated.
“That’s the valuer that’s been on,” said Thadeus, all hush-hush in tone, meaning drama. “He’s got a number now and all. Definitive, he says.”
“What’s he sayin’ definitive?”
“He’s reckonin’ for this street? One-point-three. Even without the refurb.”
“Fuck me,” said Anton Thy Advocate. “One-point-three? As is?”
“As is,” Thady said.
The sky turned. There was a fresh assault of rain. It blew over again as quickly. Long rays of sunlight came across the brickwork then and showed the earthy colours warmly. For half a moment all the windows burned in the gold fire of the winter sun. It was to be the last December on this old terrace of Kentish Town. Half a century of it they’d been through, this extended family: Maguires and Cullinanes and O’Sheas, marry-ins and random add-ons, friends and acquaintances, fresh-off-the-boat jobs, sundry old-stagers. There had been some rough weather, some late nights. Some queer turns in the mornings. Midnight visitations, also. Laughs, of course, singsongs, lovemaking. Roasted birds and bottles of fizz. Any amount of telly. All the glorious rest of it. Yes it would be over soon but for a while yet it roiled on –
In the kitchen, Thadeus was back on his phone and tender-spoken now as he asked Doreen what she was wearing under the jumpsuit. In the basement, Anton Thy Advocate was rehearsing a guest appearance for a track on his mate Iguana Jack’s first cassette release on Urgent Bastard ReKordz and he was going to blow Iguana Jack the fuck out of the water was Anton’s considered opinion. It was going to be obscene, bruv – a clean kill. On the top floor, as the angels hovered and the waves crashed down on the shores of North Clare, the eyeballs of Mary Kate Maguire rolled into the top of her head and all to be seen was the whites of her eyes – like a tiny old porcelain doll she lay back against the pillows – but after a strange and tantalising absence her eyes rolled back down again and she barked like a seal at a sudden happy thought: the spring would soon be in and all the fields as green as money again. A floor below, after lengthy negotiations, after talks about talks, Tess conceded that she would – OK, go on then – take a last nip of the Cork gin and Annie threw in a splash of tonic after. They clinked.
“Think I’ll cook something for meself tonight,” said Tess.
“Go all out, Tess,” said Annie.
“Maybe something out of Mr Ottolenghi’s book.”
“Oh, what that man can’t do with a chickpea,” said Annie.
“Immense,” said Tess.
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