The New Policeman (2 page)

Larry O’Dwyer sighed and took a step toward the narrow double doors. He’d had a good reason for becoming a policeman, but sometimes it was difficult to remember what it was. It wasn’t this; he was sure of that much. He hadn’t become a policeman to curtail the enjoyment of musicians and their audiences. A few miles away, in Galway city, violent crime was escalating dramatically. Street gangs were engaged in all kinds of thuggery and muggery. He would be of far more use to society there. But that, as far as he could remember, was not why he had become a policeman either. There were times, like now, when he suspected that the reason, whatever it was, might not have been a particularly good one.

The tune changed again. The light inside the squad car came on as Garda Treacy opened his door. Larry stilled his tapping foot and rapped with his knuckles on Mary Green’s door.

Inside the pub throats closed, conversations
collapsed, the drone of voices faltered and died. One by one the musicians dropped out of the tune, leaving, for a while, an oblivious fiddler tearing away enthusiastically on her own. Someone got through to her finally, and the music stopped mid-bar. The only sound that followed was Mary Green’s light footsteps crossing the concrete floor.

One of the narrow doors opened a crack. Mary’s anxious face appeared. Behind her, Larry could see Anne Korff perched on a bar stool. She was one of the few people in the village that he had already met. He hoped he would not be required to take her name.

“I’m sorry, now,” he said to Mary Green. “It’s a quarter to one.”

“They’re just finishing up,” said Mary earnestly. “They’ll be gone in five minutes.”

“I hope so,” said Larry. “That would be the best thing for everyone.”

As he returned to the car, the first drops of rain were beginning to fall onto the surface of the sea.

THE NEW POLICEMAN

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3

They were falling, as well, on J.J. Liddy—or J.J. Byrne, as he now called himself. They were falling on his father, Ciaran, and on the last few bales of hay that they were loading on to the flatbed trailer in the Ring Field, the highest meadow on their land.

“How’s that for timing?” said Ciaran. J.J. didn’t answer. He was too tired to answer. Inside his gloves his fingers were red raw from the hundreds of bale strings that had been through his hands that evening. He threw up the last bale. Ciaran stacked it neatly and dropped down into the tractor seat. J.J. helped Bosco up into the cab beside him. The dog was too old and stiff now to jump up on his own, but he wasn’t too old to want to be part of everything that was happening on the farm. Wherever there was work being done, there was Bosco.

Ciaran let in the clutch and the old tractor began to rumble and clunk across the new-mown meadow. J.J. climbed up on top of the bales. The rain was falling more heavily now. Drops slanted across the headlight beam as they skirted the ring fort and emerged onto the rutted track that led down to the farmyard.

Ciaran was right. It was good timing. The hay they had just saved was a late crop, almost an afterthought. The summer had been wet, and their previous attempts at hay making had been disastrous. In the end they had brought in contractors to wrap what was left of their crop in round black bales. It had been too wet to be hay but not fresh enough to be silage. They called the resulting hybrid haylage, but it was optimistic. Even if the stock were hungry enough to eat it, they wouldn’t get a great deal of nutrition from it. This crop was good, and it would make up some of the fodder shortfall, but by no means all of it. Farming was a tough station.

The trailer lurched. In the cab ahead of him, J.J. could see Bosco’s tail waving about as he was thrown from side to side. To their right, on the other side of the electric fence, was Molly’s Place, the field behind the house that the Liddys had called after some long-forgotten donkey. A stream of mottled shapes was
moving across it now, like a school of fish gliding through the black depths of the sea. The goats—white Saanens and brown-and-white Toggenburgs—were heading for their shelter at the edge of the yard.

Goats hated rain. So did J.J. Now that he had stopped working, his body temperature had plummeted. Drops were rolling out of his hair and stinging his eyes. He longed for his bed.

Ciaran swung the tractor round in the yard. “We’ll unload in the morning.”

J.J. nodded, hopped down from the bales, and semaphored to Ciaran as he reversed the trailer into the empty bay of the hay shed. His mother, Helen, emerged from the back door and came over.

“Brilliant timing,” she said. “Tea’s just made.”

But J.J. walked straight past the pot, which steamed on the range in the kitchen, and the plates of fresh scones on the table. Upstairs in his room, his schoolbag lay open on his bed, leaking overdue homework. He glanced at the clock. If he got up half an hour early the next morning he could get a bit of it done.

He spilled the bag and its contents onto the floor, and as he set the alarm he wondered, as he wondered every day, where on earth all the time went.

THE NEW-MOWN MEADOW

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It wasn’t that Mary Green didn’t want her customers to leave. The bar was firmly closed and she had been pleading with them all to go since the new policeman had knocked. Most of her regulars had drunk up and gone, but not all. Some of the musicians were from out of town, and this was one of the best sessions they had played in years. Their fingers, their bows, their breath—the instruments themselves, it seemed—had all been taken over by the spirit of that wild, anarchic music. They wanted to oblige Mary, who was pacing the floor and wringing her hands in anxiety, but they just couldn’t. Tunes they hadn’t heard for years kept popping into their heads and demanding to be played. It was always like that in Green’s. There was just something about the place.

It was 1:30
A.M
. Outside in the street, Garda Larry O’Dwyer was standing in the pouring rain, paralyzed by the beauty of the music behind Mary’s blackout curtains. But this time Garda Treacy was at his side and ready to go in.

“Bad luck to stop them in the middle of a tune,” said Larry, but Treacy was already pounding on the door.

Mary opened it. “They’re going,” she said. “They’re packed up and all.”

The two guards edged past her just in time to catch a glimpse of a pair of heels and a fiddle case disappearing out of the back door. Larry knew he’d seen them before. He also knew how pointless it would be to try and remember where. Before anyone else could slip out the same way, Garda Treacy crossed the pub floor and stood beside the back door, taking out his notebook on the way. All the tables, even the ones surrounded by musicians, were clear and tidy. It was music, not drink, that had kept the crowd where they were. Nonetheless, they were all breaking the law.

Garda Treacy began to take the names of the musicians. Larry pulled out his notebook.

“There’s no need,” said Mary Green helplessly. “They’re all going now.”

Anne Korff was sitting where Larry had last seen her, on a bar stool beside the street door. He opened the notebook and took the lid off his pen.

“Name?”

“Er…Lucy Campbell,” said Anne Korff in a distinct German accent.

“Lucy Campbell,” said Larry, fixing her with what he intended to be a hard stare.

She subdued the smile still wriggling at the corners of her mouth. “That’s right. Lucy. L, U, C—”

Larry sighed. “I know how to spell it.” He wrote it down. There was little else he could do. He knew what her real name was. But then, she knew what his real name was as well.

LUCY CAMPBELL

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5

Helen was already out milking when J.J. got up. There was a pot of tea on the table. He drank a cup as he tackled the homework. By the time Helen came in again, he had battled his way through the math questions and was trying to get to grips with a history essay. Helen tiptoed around him, making fresh tea, putting out cereals and milk, slicing bread for the toaster, but he was aware of her eyes resting on the cover of his new math workbook. He thought for a moment that she might ignore it. She didn’t.

“How come you’re J.J. Byrne all of a sudden?”

He put down his pen a bit too hard. “Everyone in school uses their father’s name. Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because you’re a Liddy,” said Helen. “That’s why.”

He could hear the tension in her voice. She didn’t
need to remind him of how important the name was to her, but she did it anyway. “There have always been Liddys in this house. You know that. You know it’s one of the reasons Ciaran and I didn’t get married. So you and Marian would have my name. You’re a Liddy, J.J. Ciaran doesn’t mind, so why should you?” J.J. shrugged. “I just want Dad’s name, that’s all.”

He knew she hadn’t accepted it. She wouldn’t, either. She left it, though, for the moment; put toast out on the table, spread butter on it while it was hot. There were other things she was due to find out about J.J. and his relationship with the Liddy tradition, but he was in no hurry to cause more trouble. She would find out soon enough.

Ciaran came down, closely followed by J.J.’s younger sister, Marian. They were both appallingly bright and bubbly in the mornings, unlike him and his mother, who each took at least an hour to warm to the new day. Their breezy greetings were met with moody responses.

“Anything on after school today?” said Ciaran.

“Hurling training,” said J.J. “Till half six.”

“I’ll pick you up afterward,” said Ciaran. “I’ll get the beer while I’m at it.”

J.J. said nothing. The beer was for the céilí that the
Liddys held on the second Saturday of every month; had held every second Saturday for generations. Helen played the concertina for the dancers and Phil Daly, a guitarist from the village, backed the tunes. For the last two years J.J. had played with them, usually on the fiddle, sometimes on the flute as well.

“We never went over those tunes,” Helen was saying. “I can’t believe it’s Friday already. Maybe we’ll get a chance this evening?”

J.J. reached for toast. He didn’t need to say anything. They wouldn’t go over the tunes that evening because that evening would be like every other; a mad race to pack in all the things that needed to be done.

“Is that the time?” said Ciaran.

They all turned to look at the clock. Ten minutes to eat breakfast and get to the bus. J.J. snatched a mouthful of toast and began to stuff his schoolbag.

THE CUP OF TEA

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