...more

‘Sorry,’ he said, still looking at the shoe, now rubbing itself inconsequentially against the back of the right leg of the heavy trousers. ‘A stream of near-unconsciousness, I’m afraid.’ His tongue curled comfortably around the words—it had been some time since he had spoken in polysyllables.

‘Think nothing of it. And you’re . . .?’

‘On the KLM,’ he said, deliberately offering the wrong answer. Concentrating on the one-handed disposal of the last drops, he had not yet looked at the face. The voice spoke of old-school ties. He glanced again at the greasy card in his right hand and saw that the man in the nightie, having apparently restored himself to perfect modesty, was looking at it too.

‘I almost wasn’t going to get off,’ he said to the man on the right, who was rezipping the heavy trousers as if inhuming a family treasure. ‘But you know how it is, anything to stretch the legs. And all those little men who invade you with dustpans and brushes, hands one way, eyes targeting valuables like . . .’ But he couldn't locate a simile.

‘. . . invaders from another time zone,’ said the man on the right, now combing sparse hair. ‘They’ve just had an early breakfast, whereas you . . . what have you just had?’

‘I skipped the last one, whatever it was. There were crossed-out pigs. For the Moslems. I didn’t fancy them, somehow.’



‘I know what you mean. I’m still ruminating on the black pudding, sausages and champagne. But haven’t we . . .?’

‘Oh, all the time in the world, I should imagine. They said an hour, but you can probably double that. What time is it?’

The other looked at his watch. ‘Two A.M. And you?’

‘About nine in the morning, I should think. But mine’s stopped. Automatic, don’t you know. I’m not sure what day. And here?’

‘God only knows. Shall we . . .?’

And there’s another thing, he thought, as they left more or less together, still unwilling to embark upon an intimacy that might be prolonged beyond reasonable expectation by the yellow cards. “Mine’s blue,” the man on the right had said, “but I suppose it means the same thing—gritty coffee and a goat sandwich.” And there’s another thing, he was still thinking, though a little late now to be apposite: here at least the jacks smell like jacks, good honest piss and that kind of disinfectant that, Jaysus, went out with the aerosols. Like the smell used to be out the back door of a bonafide.

‘Mine’s blue,’ the other had said, not even bothering to check it. ‘But I suppose it means the same thing. Gritty coffee and a . . .’

‘If indeed the restaurant, or whatever it is, is functioning. What time did you say it was?’

‘Here? I’ve no idea. I keep the watch on what used to be GMT until I get there. One short, sharp shock. Could be breakfast. Gritty coffee and a toasted goat sandwich. Where are we, anyway? I mean which of them? Not that it matters.’

They walked past gates 7, 6, 5, 4, bundles of nightied figures like laundry dumped outside hotel rooms. Isn’t this the one where you walk in a circle, past gates 6, 5, 4, the crumpled, snoring soldiers, the minimal duty-free, the soft drinks bar, the transfer desk, always untenanted, the bookstall (backward Arabic romances on jacks paper), gates 6, 5, 4, the crumpled, snoring soldiers, the minimal duty free, the soft . . .

They walked it twice, neither inclined to make the suggestion to seek the restaurant, possibly, possibly not, on the floor above, where they might have to sit and face one another, inaugurating something other than an ambulatory association.

‘At least it stretches the legs.’ From the careful banality of the remark he knew that the other was trying to place him, riffling through dusty card-indexes. ‘That’s the last Irishman left in College: we don’t know how he got in.’ No. ‘Wee Clow, an Ulster existentialist.’ No. ‘Clontarf Vikings versus Belgrove at Mount Prospect.’ Hardly. Were they even working on the same files?

On the third circuit they stopped, as if by mutual agreement, at the head of the stair—unregarded on the first two rounds—that led down to the passport, baggage and exit area. But at these stopovers nobody ever left. Perhaps if they were to try? A glacial refusal, an insistence on an unprocurable visa, a currency form to be completed in Amharic. They stood staring down at a lounging guard at the bottom of the stairs whose evident boredom seemed the more completely to compromise the freedom to walk through a door.

‘In Amsterdam, between planes,’ said the other, still looking down, ‘I sometimes take the train into town. The toy shop in the walking street, the girls behind the glass—though it always seems too early even were I that way inclined. The armchair is empty and she’s out the back ironing her . . .’

‘Amsterdam.’ Gratefully, he took it up. ‘My last time was very early in the morning—their time. I got caught up in the tide of commuters flooding out of Central Station. Pinched, resigned faces. I wanted to tell them I’d just lived through half the day they were facing and that it wasn’t going to be that bad. But of course . . .” he trailed off, embarrassed.

‘Do you think this would rate a beer?’ The other was peering dubiously at his blue ticket. ‘Or at least something not actively offensive to drink? I’d be willing to forego the sandwich.’

They had joined a group milling like disturbed woodlice at another stairs—ascending this time—amongst whom he recognised, and quickly tried to unrecognise, some formerly contiguous fellow-passengers. Not like the old days by sea. Straitjacket seats and high-chair meals, nursery talk with the boy next door. Maybe years ago a chance encounter, a snuggle under a blanket, a suspender . . . he flushed guiltily, dirty old man, remembering the old roll of undeveloped film he had found when packing up to go and handed to the lab boy, taking the risk it might have been anything, anyone, anywhere, someone with no clothes on. He looked at the man now mounting the steps in front of him: about his own age, balding ditto but less paunchy, going, as he had observed, the other way—thin, pale face and thick, dark trousers the testimony— government or semi-state, perhaps even in the same line of business. He’d been away too long. Wee Clow, the Ulster existentialist? The nickname came back without its validating substance. Long ago.

Whatever mealtime it was, the restaurant was less than prepared for it. A waiter who looked as if he had been recently exhumed from a downstairs pile of dirty washing thrust a detumescent card at them on which were listed half a dozen hazardous approximations of culinary reality: sope of the days; mustered shrump stick poms; garden pee. On being shown the yellow and blue cards, he shrugged indifferently: if they implied a subtle difference in status, nothing in his lack of demeanour betrayed it.

‘Drink,’ said the other, the hand assuming the long-radius curve appropriate to the encircling of a pint.

The waiter waved economically, a movement barely qualifying as a gesture, towards a corner in which a number of bottles stood on a table, the infiltered dust of the desert lending them what was almost certainly an undeserved patina of age.

‘Shall we investigate?’

He followed him without much enthusiasm over to what proved to be a minimal if eclectic wine-cellar. They agreed that, given the location, the most negotiable for a piece of blue or yellow cardboard was likely to be the Jordanian claret. He watched the other walk over with it to the sleepy cashier. Was everyone here sleepy all the time, like an undeveloped fairy tale—someday my prints? Did they all just drop where they stood when the last jumbo of the day or night or whatever lumbered into the sky? He watched him as he entered into negotiation with the air of a man who had done it all before, not quite putting the natives in their place, one didn’t think like that these bilateral days, or pretended not to, hoping for a clue that would enable him . . . That evening in College with the Pope in full spate in No. 28: ‘Brendan Bracken, Sir Sydney Luytens, Churchill, Patricia Hutchens, the editor of the Meath Chronicle.’ The unlikely names had lodged themselves into a litany over the years. But who else had been there? In the flesh? Your man?

No. Nothing reverberated. He was searching for a name for which he had forgotten the mnemonic. As the tall, slightly stooping figure turned, a small smile of triumph at having won something for nothing, he tried to invest him with identity of dim contemporaries cod-acting in Front Square, kicking Hoare’s loaf (whatever happened to the well-bred, pun-burdened Hoare?) into a tree. Still too far down the pile: all he came up with was the familiar random sequence of snapshots, fruit of too much travel to too many places in too little time—places he often had no recollection of ever having seen. He had often been perturbed by this apparently unassociated recall, but felt that to describe it to others would be to lay boastful claim to spatial conquests. That character it must have been ‘48 who came back from the long vacation with stories of having flown into Berlin with the airlift. Who was he?

But even if that name wouldn’t come he could see nothing in his present companion of the Portadown (he recalled, at least, the provenance) thin-faced chancer whose succeeding sexual anecdotes, when all the sensation had been milked out of the Berlin non-episode, aroused furtive longings in his recently-schoolboy hearers who had yet to touch the hem of a garment: and with the New Look that would not have got us very far. And as the bottle was placed between them, label turned in his direction, calling, he supposed, for some oenological observation that would stand in for the toast that neither of them was, he sensed, prepared to offer . . . But why? Surely the easiest thing in the world, and the most natural to say, pouring (‘I’ll be mammy’): it must be all of forty years but weren’t you around in my time? I certainly have the feeling we have met before though to be honest . . .

To be honest was the difficulty. Too many recent and less recent defensive deployments, covering up for colleagues unable to make the readjustment from foreign postings, Bonaire to Baldoyle, or for himself, delayed at the office dear with one hand clasping . . .

A hand appeared from somewhere over his right shoulder holding what appeared to be an offensive weapon—well at least, he thought irrationally, it’s not a hijack—but which resolved itself (he had taken off his glasses the better not to see his opposite number) into a corkscrew. The waiter, having observed the transaction with the blue ticket, clearly now regarded them both as bonafide. This time he mentally enunciated it, out of its pub context, with the Latin inflexion: oculi omnium in te sperant Domine, to das ifs escam eorum.

‘In tempore opportune,’ he said aloud, wishing now that he had his glasses on, but the other made no marginally-visible response. If Trinity, then living out of College, or a graceless medical.

‘It’s one of those things that transports you back in time, as Bernadette Comerford said the other morning about the singing of Kirsten Flagstad.’

‘Sorry, I’m not with you.’

‘No, of course, I suppose you haven’t been home for some time. A morning radio programme.’

‘Oh yes. But I wouldn’t have thought that Jordanian claret . . .’

‘No, not the wine. This encounter.’ Through the myopia he could sense the eyes piercing him. ‘It must be all of forty years but weren’t you around in my time? I certainly have the feeling that we . . .’

A loudspeaker on the wall above them came alive with a crack like a burst from a pump-action corkscrew ATTENTION PASSENGERS, ATTENTION PASSENGERS. THIS IS AN IMPORTANT ANNOU and subsided, prematurely, with a corroded-terminal rattle. They waited in silence, as did the scattering of fellow-travellers, for a resumption. None was forthcoming.

‘Anyway, your good health. Slainte.’ As if the question had been satisfactorily settled between them. His sip of cautious appraisal was almost turned into total immersion by the sudden immanence of the waiter, face this time grinning, teeth like the old piano in No. 4, and a plateful, tastelessly arranged, of the goat sandwiches.

‘Should we tip him?’

‘With what?’ In the wallet in the overnight bag there were, possibly, a few stray American dollars, an Irish pound, old green Kathleen Mavourneen style, that he had carried since College. Maybe a birr or two.

‘You know Ethiopia?’

The other nodded, as if being accused of ignorance of the Rubrics.

‘I always wanted to try and buy a pint with one in County Offaly, just for pig-iron. Birrs, don't you know.’

‘I did. Once. A pub in the back of beyond—Kilcormac or somewhere out that way, buried in the bog. Thought I was the great fellow, but as I was about to hand it over, accidentally on purpose, didn’t I see the boss had one pinned up over the bar together with the usual concatenation of francs, lire, pesetas and so forth. Everyone’s been everywhere these days.’

‘And yourself?’ It could go either way.

‘Oh yes, off again, probably the last stint, and in a way I won’t be sorry. Only I will, you know. It’s the parochialism that gets to me—not the parochialism of Ireland, that’s endemic—but that of our particular corner of the globe. Over-cosy. Something to do, I suppose, with always having Christmas in winter.’

‘Well, bon voyage anyway. Wherever it is.’

‘And safe home. Presuming that either of us is ever permitted to get up and go. How long are we here?’

The restaurant clock was stopped at two something, the big hand missing. Time was calibrated only by the level of the wine, an unreliable red shift. The hand opposite him was running quavers up and down the glass.

‘Do you play?’ He nodded at the uncompleted cadenza.

‘That’s a funny thing. The only time I was picked for the first eleven it was too late to include my name on the list. So I appeared under the common mantle. A N Other. It wasn’t that I was any great shakes—never, in fact, played again at that level. But for some reason it stuck. For a couple of terms I was known just as Other. We were still the next best thing to schoolboys after all.’

‘It was the style, of course. Surnames. Or as you were listed in the Calendar, all embarrassing middle names revealed. Dillon, Barbara Agnes; Smythe, Basil Courtney . . . marmoreal, chisellers’ stuff. Then again you sometimes never knew the Christian name, whereas nowadays . . . Al, meet Col. Col, meet . . .’

The bottle was nearly empty. ‘I wonder. My yellow ticket?’

‘Worth a try. It's wojous, but what else is one to do. Go and wave it at your man while I attend, if you will excuse me, to a call of . . .’

He was halfway to the wine counter, moving, he noted with rather indignant surprise, somewhat unsteadily. The remaining labels were a blur, only marginally resolving themselves when he put on his glasses. It seemed safest, bureaucratically speaking, to stick to the Jordanian, of which there remained two or three bottles. He selected one—they were all of the same unilluminating year—and carried it over to the waiter who was now doubling as cashier. He was proffering the yellow card when he felt a hand on his shoulder. It was A N Other, his face . . .