Young Skins (18 page)

When the last of the procession had passed, the door behind Eli opened. He felt something against his shoulder blade. It was Doran, grinding his forehead against Eli as zealously as a cat. Doran lifted his face, and turning around Eli saw that it was blotched.

‘Ah, fuck it,’ Doran said. ‘Let’s do this.’

‘You’re coming?’

‘I always was. But if I start bawling, it’s cos I’m three-quarters cut.’

Doran had brought his pint glass with him. He drained what was left and proffered the glass to the barman. The barman took it. Addressing Eli, he indicated with his smoking hand towards the receding procession.

‘This is yours?’

‘This is ours,’ said Eli, dropping his cigarette onto the pavement and administering a summary stamp of his brogue as he stepped out into the lane. Doran followed. They soon caught up, and by the time the procession reached the cemetery entrance, the barman, still smoking and watching for nothing better to do, could barely distinguish the pair from the rest of the party, save for the substantial orange dot of the fat one’s head.

The tall man and the fat man and the rest of the group passed through the gates and out of sight. The barman killed the cigarette and stowed the remainder in his pocket; no sense in wasting. When he went back inside he saw that the tall one had left his coat, lumped and dripping on a stool. It was a good coat, three-quarter length and nicely tailored, expensive, the barman saw once he unheaped it and wrung it out. He checked the pockets for identification, but found nothing. He hung the coat on a rack in the back room, scrolled up a couple of sections from an old Sunday paper, and stuffed the scrolls into each arm, dropping additional sheets of the paper on the floor beneath the coat to sop up any residual drippage, and waited for the man to return. An hour or so later a small band of mourners did drop in, but neither of the two men. The next morning the coat was still there, unclaimed.
Soon
, the barman thought, holding up another polished glass to the teeming, grained light that every day coursed through the Tavern’s dirty front windows,
the man will come back for it
. But the man never did.

Acknowledgments

Thanks go to:

Declan Meade, Jonathan Dykes, Thomas Morris, Sean O’Reilly

and Fergal Condon;

James Ryan, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Harry Clifton, Frank McGuinness, Susan Stairs, Claire Coughlan and Jamie O’Connell;

the Arts Council;

Lucy Luck;

Lucy Perrem;

the family.