This All Happened(87)

            It came out well.

            Did you notice the back?

            No.

            It’s all one piece of cloth.

            Tony snatches the jacket from my hands and holds it to the light.

            I’ve seen that before.

            It was my father’s jacket, I say. He wore it when he was my age. Before he had me. I used to think he got married in it, but my mother said no.

            That’s the difference, Tony says, between men and women.

            26 I walk down to the Fat Cat with Max. Earl Quigley makes his way to me. So how are you, he says. Never mind, dont answer can of worms, I know. Look, call me and I’ll buy the coffee.

            Yes, I said. A confessor would be nice.

            Earl went out with Lydia for four years. And now I’ve seen him with Maisie.

            Then Max. Max is such an affable man. He is the word affable. But then I am just another man and we have no obligation. So the freedom to be easy and drink and tell all.

            Wilf asks Lydia to get up and they whisper and they sing the song I thought was our song, Wilf on guitar. Lydia sings with her thumbs hooked through her belt loops.

            Earl Quigley wins the door prize. I never know where I’ve put my ticket. The pints are cheap until eleven. And I want to get plastered. I point to my empty glass.

            27 For the first time, the black roof below is covered in white. I wake up to the branches, sparrows hurrying for seeds, their claws wrapped tight against bare trees mostly white. Bunches of dogberries slivers of red under caps of white. And I think of the first time I held Lydia, bowled her over in the snow when she came back for Christmas. Our first Christmas after a fall of courting, of letters, of plane flights. And now she is not here. Our first snowfall apart.

            It’s not that I return to the past; rather, the snow makes the past hurtle forward.

            There is not much new to say about snow, or broken love. Lorca: I am thirsty for odours and laughs, I am thirsty for new poems, poems with no lilies or moons, and no love affairs about to fail.

            28 At the Ship with Max. It’s 2 a.m. When Max lived in Merasheen they had no electricity. He salted fish, he caught fish, he killed cattle and chickens, the whole thing. And now, in a few days, he’ll be a father.

            29 The ground covered in torn leaves, mainly green, the violence of rain and wind. Dogberry leaves are stuck to the wet door frames. Already people are wearing their poppies. This bugs me.

            The city has been ploughing in the public swimming pools.

            I hear from Daphne that the police have found lots of evidence. Boyd Coady used seven houses in the neighbourhood. He’d break in, find a spare key, make a copy, and then study the patterns of the people who lived there. When he knew they were gone, he’d go in.

            He left the television at Lydia’s because she didnt have one, and he liked to watch TV while his laundry was on.

            The underwear fit him.

            He admitted he took small things. He liked the things. Sentencing is next month.

            30 Walking Alex home from badminton. As always the night has grown calmer and a little warmer, as if heat is coming off the earth.

            I’m having a conversation about everyone knowing everything. This is my belief, that instinct over body language is a sophisticated, primitive knowledge, as old as sharks. Our new found intellect thinks it can hide true feeling through omissions in language, but it forgets the body is talking the entire time. Anything we hide we are hiding only from ourselves. As long as someone is not practising obliviousness, he will know how you feel and what you feel about him.