The Carnival at Bray Read online

  It was the happiest Maggie had been in months.

  After the plates were cleared and the dishes sat drying in the rack, they all piled into Colm’s truck and headed down to the Quayside to hear some Irish music. The pub was packed with families, sleepy and content after their Christmas Eve dinners. A small band occupied the corner near the windows, made up of a guitarist, a bodhran player, and an old man with a tin whistle. They took over the last empty table, and Colm went off to order drinks for everybody.

  Maggie had been thinking about Eoin so much that when she saw him ducking through the crowd bussing tables, it took her a moment to recognize that it was really him. He wore the same outfit he had on when she met him coming back from Dan Sean’s: tracksuit pants and a faded red Liverpool hoodie, and he was even more handsome than she remembered, with his close-cropped dark hair and pale blue eyes. He moved from table to table, picking up ashtrays and dumping them into a large metal bucket under his arm. He didn’t rush, but he didn’t stop to talk to anybody, either. He was unobtrusive, subtle, his movements flowing like a dancer’s, as if dumping ashtrays was an art form that only he had perfected. Maggie watched him as he wove through the bar, finally making his way over in her direction. He picked up the tin tray in the middle of their table where Nanny Ei had just crushed out one of her Capris, dumped it, and, setting it back on the table, he looked up and met her eyes with a start. He was seeing her for the first time, she could tell. He smiled a little smile that was meant only for her, a smile that said, “I remember you,” and then he was gone, carrying his bucket of butts out through the back door and into the alley.

  Kevin leaned across to her.

  “Who was that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Maggie said quickly. “Just some guy I met a while back.” She could feel the color flaring in her cheeks and was grateful for the dimness of the bar.

  “You want me to get the lowdown on him or what?”

  “No! Please don’t say anything to him.”

  “Mags! I’m disappointed in you. Of course I won’t say anything to him. I’ll just sniff around a little, find out if anyone knows his name.”

  Maggie, unable to control her smile, said, “I know his name. It’s Eoin.”

  “Oh. I see. What a name. Like something from a Sir Walter Scott novel.”

  “A what?”

  “Does this Eoin have a girlfriend?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Well, let’s find out, shall we?”

  Before she could stop him, he was sauntering up to the bar. First, he ordered a drink from the middle-aged lady behind the counter, then, he convinced her to take a shot with him, and soon enough the two of them were leaning elbow to elbow across the bar, talking like old friends. This was the magic of Uncle Kevin: he always knew exactly what to say to make people fall in love with him.

  Ten minutes later, he returned to the table.

  “That lovely woman I was just chatting with is none other than Rosie Horan, owner and proprietor of the Quayside bar, aunt and caretaker of one Eoin Brennan, aged seventeen, star forward on the Saint Brendan’s football team, Liverpool supporter, astrological sign Taurus, marital status, single. I did not ask whether he was circumcised: I leave that, dear niece, for you to find out for yourself.”

  This was all too much to process at once—months of speculation had now given way to a ticking off of actual facts—she even knew his last name! Maggie immediately began gnawing at her fingernails.

  “Please don’t tell me you told her you were asking for me?” she begged.

  “Are you kidding?” Kevin slugged back his pint. “I was a master of subtlety. You can thank me by buying me my next beer.”

  In fact, the adults drank many more beers as the night spun on. Ronnie, bored, sat at the table and quietly built a structure of bar napkins and straws. Maggie drank her Club Orange and only pretended to look bored. She felt horribly self-conscious about her clothing, her posture, her hair, and her bitten nails, beset with the knowledge that at any moment, Eoin might be looking at her.

  Around midnight, Kevin successfully cajoled the guitar player, a sylphish, crop-haired girl with shredded jeans and combat boots, to let him play a song. He slipped the girl’s guitar strap around his shoulder, and the effect of this—the hollow wood nestled against his heart—was immediate. He stood up straighter, he grew taller, a pink urgency flickered into his cheeks. He began to sing “Fairytale of New York,” one of the few Irish songs he knew, his lips brushing the microphone, his voice strong and gravelly and full of that strange holiday sadness of twinkling lights hanging in freezing windows.

  Old couples began to pair off and spin each other around, and the younger ones lined the walls, clapping and stomping their feet and swishing their drinks. In that little pub, on that little stage by the windows, Kevin was a life force, a star. With the aid of an instrument, he could spend fours hours in a new country and fit in better than Maggie could after four months. He sang about drunk tanks and love and Christmas hopes, but in the spaces between the words of the song and in the cold shadows of his closed eyes rested all the things that he allowed to escape from himself only on the stage. Watching him, Maggie thought of their conversation earlier that day—how he had quit the band, quit his music, hadn’t picked up a guitar in months. She could see the way he picked gingerly at the strings on his uncalloused fingers. His voice wasn’t beautiful, but it had always contained a kind of arresting truth. Now, too, Maggie detected a new quality—a desperation that had not been there before. Looking around the table at her family, she knew that Nanny Ei heard it, too. Her grandmother was leaning forward, holding her cigarette aloft while the ash grew longer and longer, and she was not listening to her son like the rest of them were but watching him, the movements of his long, skeletal fingers, the closed bruises of his eyes.

  He finished singing and handed the girl her guitar. The Quayside erupted into applause and whoops, and Kevin smiled and the men seated at the bar called him over, waving their money at him in a clamor of who could be the first to buy him a pint. Maggie got up to use the bathroom. In front of the sink she smoothed her hair and wished she’d worn more makeup than the smudgy concealer she’d dabbed onto the broken-out skin at her jawline. When she crossed the room and returned to her seat, she felt that change in atmosphere, the quickening of her heart that told her Eoin was watching her. At first she thought maybe it was just wishful thinking, but then she caught him, twice, eyeing her as he wiped down tables with a bar rag, or carried towers of empty pint glasses behind the counter to be washed. The first two times, he looked away as soon as she made eye contact, but on the third, as he stood behind the counter dunking glasses in soapy water, when she looked at him, he held her gaze, steady and unashamed, a half smile, a dare, on his face.

  Near closing time, Nanny Ei stamped out her final cigarette of the evening and helped a bleary-eyed Ronnie into her coat.

  “It’s getting late, Mags. Why don’t you come home in the taxi with us?”

  “I think I’ll stay for a bit,” Maggie said, still dizzy from Eoin’s lingering, inscrutable smile.

  “Aren’t you tired? Tomorrow’s Christmas, remember.”

  But Christmas was for children, and Maggie wasn’t one of those anymore. How could she possibly go home when, all around her, life was finally starting to happen?

  “Just for a little longer, Nanny,” she said. She kissed her grandmother’s talcum cheek and watched her lead Ronnie out by the hand. Rosie Horan closed the velvet curtains and a singsong began among the local men: minor key ballads, mostly, about Ireland’s sad past. By now, every adult in the place was drunk, but Laura was loudly so. Maggie wasn’t bothered by the men who lurched quietly and watched the singing with glassy-eyed reverence, but her mother, whose low-cut sweater revealed cleavage that was just beginning to crack into faint wrinkles at the surface, and who was slugging down Bulmers glass by watery glass, dribbling condensation onto the lap of her jeans, was another matter.
r />   When a potbellied old farmer began to sing in the Sean nós style, a form of Gaelic singing unaccompanied by instruments, his rich voice lingered over the high notes and the foreign words in a way that was so hauntingly beautiful the whole pub fell into a reverential silence. He finished the last trembling note, and the place shattered with cheers and applause. Then Laura stood up, wobbly and hippy, and cleared her throat.

  No. Maggie said silently. No no no no.

  But before she could run across the room, put a hand over her mother’s mouth and drag her out of the bar, Laura was belting out, with tone-deaf joyfulness, the first verse of “Dancing Queen,” destroying the magic spell the farmer’s traditional singing had cast over the dark pub.

  Maggie sat in the booth, horrified, as her mom leaned her head back, waving two pint glasses above her head like a pair of castanets, and bellowed the first verse of the song while the locals rolled their eyes and drifted toward the door.

  “You think that’s bad?” Eoin was suddenly next to her, drying a glass with a dirty towel. “You should get a load of my old lady sometime.”

  He smelled like stale smoke and clean laundry, and the Christmas lights hanging from the ceiling glinted off his blacklashed eyes. Maggie could feel her nerves begin to tremble.

  “She’s not usually like this,” she apologized. “She’s usually more … normal.”

  “Hey, you don’t have to explain it to me.” He put his towel down and sat across from her at the empty table. “So, do you know how to find your way home now?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” She smiled down at the table. “I wish I was there right now so I wouldn’t have to witness this.”

  “Ah, this is nothin’.” He waved a hand. “This bar’s seen much worse. Besides, I’m glad you’re still here.”

  Before she could let this comment sink in and begin dissecting it for meaning, her mom began to strut around in her tight, stained sweater, eyes closed, red mouth wailing the chorus into the Bulmers bottle she was using for a microphone. Colm stood near the door with his arms crossed, his lips tight with disapproval. The rows of older men standing at the bar with Kevin ogled Maggie’s mother with the kind of detached fascination they might display watching strippers, wondering what it would be like to screw her while at the same time being thankful that she wasn’t their wife. They nudged each other as she sashayed around the bar grinding into their backs, stumbling into the counter until finally Kevin got up, yanked her arm, and whispered something fiercely into her ear. Her singing stopped abruptly.

  “Get your fuckin’ hands off me,” Laura screeched, shaking her arm from Kevin’s grasp. He said something in a low voice, his forehead creased with fury.

  “Like you should talk!” she screamed, and flung the contents of her pint glass in his face. The pub fell into a different kind of silence now. Kevin wiped his eyes slowly with the back of his sleeve.

  “Get your drunk ass out of this bar and into the truck,” he said, jabbing a finger centimeters from her nose.

  “I’d appreciate it if you took your fuckin’ finger out of my wife’s face.” Colm had put down his own drink now and placed himself between Laura and Kevin, inches from Kevin’s face. “And watch how you talk to her while you’re at it.”

  “I’ll talk to her however I want when she acts like a drunk fuckin’ slob,” Kevin said. “What are you gonna say about it?”

  “You’ve been warned now,” Colm said slowly. “You’ve been warned.”

  Kevin stepped away from Colm and turned his back. A sigh was felt in the room, half relief and half disappointment—it didn’t look like there would be a fight after all. Kevin stood still, his shoulders tensing. He seemed to be considering something. Then, suddenly, he extended a long, white arm and swung. He connected with Colm’s jaw with a clean smack that sent Colm’s head snapping back. He stumbled backward and crashed against the counter, his arm breaking glasses. A thread of blood pooled beneath his nostril. He wiped it away and grinned at Kevin, a grin tinged with relief, because all was out in the open now. They could finally hate each other freely.

  The two men squared up.

  “Take it outside if you’re gonna fight,” Rosie Horan yelled, flapping her bar rag at them. But they were already upon each other. Kevin swung again and Colm ducked, barreling into Kevin’s chest with his bulldog head, and both men fell to the ground, kicking down stools and sending bottles skittering and shattering across the stone floor. The men at the counter yelled encouragement while the women shrieked at them to stop. Kevin was sallow and skinny to the point of emaciation, and Colm outweighed him by at least fifty pounds of thick muscle. It would have been a quick fight, except for the fact that Kevin was as vicious and tenacious as a rat. They grappled and rolled across the floor until finally, Colm was able to knock Kevin to the ground and straddle him, his big thighs clenching Kevin’s ribs, while Kevin’s legs thrashed beneath him. Blood poured from his crumpled nose, his knuckles scraped against the rough floor, and still he flailed and swung, clawing long, pink scratches across the pale, hairless meat of Colm’s inner forearms.

  “Are you finished?” Colm yelled, ducking the weak punches easily and holding Kevin’s face down with a splayed hand. “Give up, will you, before I fuckin’ kill you!” He lifted his hand away. Kevin was panting and silent. The rest of the bar began to relax. But Maggie knew better. Kevin never would give up, not until he or Colm was dead. She heard a gurgling in his throat, and then he bucked his hips forward and hocked a white wad of spit into Colm’s face. It hung from Colm’s eyelid and swung there while Kevin managed to squirm free, get back on swaying feet, and pull Colm into a headlock that sent the two men bursting out the front door of the pub, tangling themselves in Christmas lights that snapped and popped under their feet. They kicked and tripped across the wet road until they were on the sandy ground before the tarp-covered carnival and the Ferris wheel, which sat creaking in the wind in silent judgment, snow dusting its highest carriages. The bar emptied out into the street and Kevin, as if the salty air had awakened him, began to scream a maniac’s scream, the kind Maggie had heard in the Selfish Fetus song “Nightstick,” a scream that filled the sky and made the crowd glance at each other warily, until it was silenced, finally, by Colm’s decisive fist to his face, and Kevin fell, finally defeated, in the sand. In the darkness, his thin body looked like a piece of washed-up kelp.

  Maggie ran to him and knelt next to his body. His eyes were puffed into black slits; his nose and lips ran with blood. He reached up a hand, brushed sand into her hair.

  “ ’M fine,” he slurred through thickening lips. A siren blared, and the guards arrived in a whirl of flashing blue light, scattering the crowd back. Dizzy with the lights and the wailing sirens and an all-powerful relief that that he wasn’t dead, Maggie hiccupped, and the four Club Oranges she’d drunk throughout the night reappeared in a fizzy torrent of tangerine vomit in the sand.

  Eoin retreated to the bar to help his aunt clean up the overturned tables and broken glasses while Maggie walked home with Kevin, who said nothing but leaned into her, breathed noisily from his mouth, and dabbed at his broken nose with a red-soaked sleeve. She was in bed by the time Colm and Laura arrived home, and she fell asleep, at last, lulled into nightmares by the persistent murmur of their arguing through the wall.

  She was awoken in the predawn darkness by a shaking of her toe. She nearly screamed out when she saw the hideous clown face hovering at the end of the bed. Her eyes adjusted, and she realized that the clown was Kevin, his pale blue eyes swallowed up in mushroom bruises, his nose cracked at an obscene angle. He had his bags with him.

  “Just wanted to say Merry Christmas, Mags,” he whispered. “I’m taking off a bit earlier than expected.”

  Maggie sat up.

  “But I thought you were staying until New Years?”

  He found her hand and held it. It was freezing and clammy, as if he’d just been in water.

  “Plans have changed. I can’t be under the same roof as yo
ur mother and that dude.”

  “They didn’t kick you out, did they?” She felt hatred and a wild loyalty rise within her.

  “Oh no. Not this time. This time, it’s my decision. I gotta get back anyway, got some things with this new band I’m starting that I gotta take care of.”

  “But—what about us? What about spending Christmas with us?” She was aware that she was whining, that her lip was trembling and she was close to tears. But she couldn’t help it. She was so sick of everything being decided by the adults in her life, who only acted like adults when they felt like it.

  “Next year, honey,” he said. “You really think this marriage is gonna last? This time next year, you’ll be back home in Chicago, and we’ll have Christmas like normal people.” He smiled at her then, his teeth a broken row of tombstones, kissed her forehead, and left the room.

  The front door opened and closed, and she watched her uncle limp out to the street, a short-brimmed hat his only defense against the wind. He hitched his backpack on his shoulder, turned once to wave at Maggie’s window, then disappeared down the hill and was gone.

  Maggie lay awake for a long time after Kevin left. She thought about him, about the demise of Selfish Fetus, about her messed-up family. But mostly she thought of Eoin. What was the meaning behind the inscrutable way he smiled at her as he cleared ashtrays and wiped down tables? Around eight she heard Ronnie’s quiet footsteps, the static click of the television. An hour later, Nanny Ei’s lungs hacked into consciousness, a toilet flushed, and then there was the snap of a lighter and the sighing inhalation of the morning cigarette. The murmur of conversation between Ronnie and Nanny Ei, the sizzle of eggs in a pan. Then, on the other side of the wall, the awful creaking of Laura and Colm. If they were loud when they were drinking, they were almost as bad when they were hungover. Maggie could hear her mom loudest of all, the moaning, the panting. She yanked her pillow over ears. You’d think that after last night, they wouldn’t be in the mood. The headboard banged one final time, so hard that the pile of CDs on Maggie’s dresser trembled. Why can’t Mom be discreet about anything? She wondered. Why is it that everything she feels, she has to make everybody else feel, too?