‘There was a big distillery here once,’ he said as he led me through a district where alleys between massive walls opened onto tracts of waste ground. ‘See? Workers’ housing,’ he pointed at a terrace of redbrick houses isolated at the edge of a derelict square. ‘They had bathrooms,’ he said. ‘There was full employment in Dublin at the time and they had to make the houses good to attract workers.’ High gates hung open and grass grew between the uneven paving stones of the wide yards. ‘The horses were brought over from Lincolnshire. I often wondered whether they were buried at the end of their working lives. People grow very fond of horses. Have you been to the Royal Hospital, where the old soldiers used to live? We’ll go soon. Wonderful topiary, and there’s a horse buried there. Upright. The officer who owned him wrote a poem that’s on his gravestone. At the end it says that there are men who believe that:
Dumb creatures we have cherished here below Will come to greet us when we pass the pearly gates. Is it folly that I wish it may be so
Markey stood in the weeds in front of what must have been a warehouse while he recited the lines. I’d never before heard a poem recited outside school.
Then he took me to an ornate pub and bought one mulled port between us. ‘These old drinks are dying out so it’s our duty to drink them,’ he said, before showing me how to tell original Victorian tiles from replicas. He then told me that a crowd came over from Hollywood and made a spy film in this district, pretending it was Soviet Berlin. ‘This is the only total backwater in Ireland that ever got a premiere in Beverly Hills,’ he said.
It was dizzying, being with him. I already loved The Hut, but apart from when I was there I was hardly conscious of place. But from the day I started walking with Markey, place has mattered more to me than I am able to explain even to myself.
By Spring Street I’d fallen to the rear like an Arab wife and the gap between us was exactly the same length as when we were young. But he then waited for me on the corner to show me where the seventeenth-century spring had been.
‘Did you know that Kafka knew what Manhattan looked like from watching newsreels?’ I told him between shivers from the cold.
‘Really?’ He looked at me with respect, then absentmindedly unwound the scarf from his neck and tucked it around my neck. ‘That’s interesting.’
We hurried on, side-by-side now, but he still didn’t match his step to mine. He never had. I used to think that was one of the ways he was always trying to prevent me from saying anything personal, just as I was always trying to trap him into saying something – anything – about me or about us.
‘Min can’t make up her mind whether Sister Cecilia is a bad influence or not,’ I’d once said, for example, about the nun who’d come to teach music in my school. ‘Well, she knows for sure she’s a bad influence, but then again she can’t be, because she’s a nun.’
‘Do you know what that’s called?’ Markey said over his shoulder.
‘What what’s called?’
‘Having to believe things that contradict each other.’
‘What?’
‘Cognitive dissonance,’ he said, turning around again.
‘I suffer that at you and me going around together,’ I said, would-be playfully. The kind of heavy hint I used to give.
He said nothing, of course.
‘Seriously,’ I said. ‘What’s a girl like me doing with a boy like you? I mean, you’re brilliant and you’ll be at college in the autumn and I’m going into the Pillar Department Store.’
Silence.
I tried to back-pedal. ‘What did the Martian say to the jukebox?’ I said to his hunched shoulders.
Still nothing.
‘Do you give up? “What’s a slick chick like you doing in a joint like this?” ’
I saw in the bathroom of Soho’s Moondance Diner that apart from a purple nose I looked normal enough, though I neatened my eyebrows with a wet finger. There’d been a lot of water under the bridge since I’d wiped off my precious PanStik because Markey said he didn’t like makeup on women, though I was by no means sure at the time that in women he included me.
I used to push open the heavy door of the church near the Pillar, and feeling my way past the leatherette curtain and into the warm air the congregation had left behind, I would pray to Our Lady, ‘Make Markey love me the way I love him!’
But She never did pull it off. When we went to the pictures in daytime cinemas that smelt of smoke and disinfectant, I’d hear breathing and swallowing and lips un-sticking from each other when the soundtrack went unexpectedly quiet. But Markey would be sprawled at ease, his knees on the back of the seat in front, and his face bright and mobile at the thought of something inside his head. As soon as the lights went up, he was talking again.
And the truth was that though I pined for him romantically for years, it was all in my head. A boy came to work in Despatch in the Pillar who I fancied so much my legs could hardly carry me when he was near. I loved being with Markey, even if there wasn’t a word for what our relationship was. But my body didn’t want him.
I wiped my breath from the mirror in the diner bathroom. Don’t forget that, Rosie Barry. Don’t start that oul’ pining all over again.
Back in the present, Markey was talking business.
‘I did some calling around, Rosie. A fascinating field you’ve got us into! I found there’s one company that supplies news-stands and supermarkets and gift shops all over the Midwest with booklets – nothing literary, of course – just humour, home decoration, health issues, and cookery. Louisbooks & Collectibles it’s called. Google it. It’s huge.’
Somebody must have told him once that people should smile even when they were in earnest. Either way I smiled at his smile. Even the waitress, an agile, hefty blonde, was smiling. She even took back the eggs on my corned beef hash when I grimaced at how runny they were and got them fried on both sides. She plied us with coffee every time she passed us in her patrol of her lively patch, calling out to the men behind the counter and dealing out great plates of food to the talking, laughing customers. In fact the diner was such a scene of sparkle and abundance that anything seemed possible.
‘Then I realised that I know the CEO,’ Markey continued, ‘though I’ve never met him. His name is Louis Austen and he buys books from us. He’s a real connoisseur, too. I have great respect for him: he turned down a Galen notebook that even the specialists believed in, and he was right. But I called him about your idea and he said that sure, his company is in the market for inspirational topics and he’d be glad to have his inspirational guy take a look at anything we send him. I told him you wanted to do something on the mid-life crisis and he said—’
‘The mid-life crisis isn’t really what I had in mind. That’s a glib way of looking at it.’
‘Get glib, Rosie. He told me Chico – Chico’s his guy on the inspirational side – says the Celtic thing is over, but Wise Women are still very in.’
The waitress was back with the coffee. ‘Where you from?’ she asked.
I’m sure she meant Markey, but he said, ‘She’s from Dublin. Do you not hear the lovely accent?’
Ha! Same old Markey: he doesn’t even notice she’s trying to flirt.
Elvis was singing ‘Hound Dog’ on the jukebox and by now I had a whole pile of French toast swimming in maple syrup and everyone in the diner seemed to be laughing. Was it only an hour since we’d shivered on the empty streets of a different Manhattan? A grave, lonely place it had been, in the cool dawn.
We ran with the fantasy. I’d be the writer and Markey’d be the agent. He’d edit what I wrote and pass it on to Chico. Why not try it? Someone wrote