I Hear the Sirens in the Street

it was next week.”
    “We had to change the plans. She’s been trying to call you all day. We’re going to take the ferry over with her car on Tuesday and she’s going by plane tonight to get everything sorted.”
    “She tried to call me?”
    “Yes – where were you this afternoon?”
    “Working.”
    “On a Saturday?”
    “Aye, on a Saturday. The crooks don’t take the weekends off.”
    “I’m sure she’ll try you again at the airport. The plane doesn’t leave until seven.”
    “Okay, I better get off the line then,” I said.
    I hung up and childishly punched the wall.
    “Fucking lying bitch!” I yelled, which wouldn’t be the last time such edifying dialogue would be heard in Victoria Estate on a wet Saturday night.
    I made myself another pint of vodka and lime juice, walked out the back to the garden shed, opened an old can marked “Screws” and found the stash of high-grade Turkish hashish I’d liberated from the evidence locker before they’d torched it and a couple of bags of brown tar heroin in a ceremony for the Carrickfergus Advertiser .
    I got a Rizla King Size, made myself a joint and smoked it as I walked back to the house.
    The phone was ringing and I almost slipped and broke my neck as I sprinted for the bastard.
    “Sean! At last!” she said.
    Laura. She was calling from Aldergrove Airport. Her plane left in five minutes.
    I don’t remember any of the rest of it.
    It was a story. A fairy story.
    And promises neither of us would keep.
    Five minutes?
    It didn’t last two.
    Her words were frozen birds fallen from the telegraph wires.
    I responded with a vacuum of lies and banality, sick of my own material.
    She finally took mercy on us and said goodbye and hung up the phone.
    I sat in the living room and relit my joint. The Turkish was the shit and it wasn’t ten minutes before I was as high as a fucking weather balloon floating over Roswell, New Mexico.
    I expectorated in the back yard and watched The Great Bear’s snout bend down and touch the lough. Spacing, I was. “Bear mother, watch over us,” I said. “Like you watched the old ones …”
    There was a good quarter inch left but I tossed the joint, went back inside, put on Hunky Dory. Hunky Dory became Joan Armatrading became Dusty in Memphis .
    At eleven o’clock there was a knock at the door.
    I got my revolver from the hall table and said “Who is it?”
    “Deirdre,” I think she said.
    “Deirdre who?”
    “From next door.”
    I opened the door. It was Mrs Bridewell. She was holding a pie. It had got wet in the rain. She was wet. Mrs Bridewell with her cheekbones and bobbed black hair and husband over the water looking for work …
    “Oh, hello,” I said. “Come in.”
    “No. I wont stop over. I’ve left Thomas with the weans and a bigger eejit never stuck his arm through a coat.”
    “Come in out of the rain, woman.”
    She took a cautious step into the house. She looked at my picture of Our Lady of Knock and suppressed a skewer of polemic against the Papists.
    “I only wanted to leave this off. I made it for the church bake sale tomorrow but it’s been cancelled because of the war.”
    “What war?”
    “Argentina’s invaded the Falkland Islands!”
    “Oh, that war.”
    “None of my lot can eat a rhubarb tart. But I know you like it.”
    I turned on the hall light. She’d put on lipstick for this little sally next door and she was beautiful standing there with her wet fringe and puzzled green eyes, tubercular pallor, dark eyelids and thin, anxious red lips.
    “Mr Duffy?” she said.
    There was no one in the street. Her kids would be abed. The air was electric. Dangerous. It was fifty-fifty whether we’d roo like rabbits right here on the welcome mat. She could feel it too.
    “Sean?” she whispered.
    Christ almighty. I took a literal step back and breathed out.
    “Yes … Yes, a rhubarb tart. Love them.”
    She swallowed hard.
    “M-make sure you eat it with cream,” she said, left it on thehall table and scurried back to her house.
    I left the pie where it was and broke out the bottle of Jura instead. At midnight I put on the news to see if there had been any plane crashes but all the telly wanted to talk about was Argentina and I had to sit through several angles on that story before it became obvious that there hadn’t been any airline disasters and that Laura was completely safe.

8: VETERANS OF FOREIGN WARS
    On Sunday an Atlantic storm parked itself over Ireland and it was raining so