Element of Doubt by A. L. Barker

Author:A. L. Barker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2023-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

The Parrot

An eye for an eye,’ said the man who sat in the corner of the bar.

I said, talking about Ireland, ‘These people are poking out their own.’

‘An eye for an eye if the Lord requires it. In the matter of the Ark of the Covenant he was very fussy about the way it was made – I often wonder how Moses remembered everything. He had no shorthand. Of course he was up the Mount forty days and nights, time enough to memorise it. But there are eyes and eyes. If the eye of a needle rates the eye of a potato and the eye of a beast rates the eye of another beast, the eye of man shouldn’t go for less.’

I went to get a beer, and when I returned he leaned out of his corner.

‘The Bible’s full of double talk. Look at my friend Billy Bligh, a man unlike other men, and went for next to nothing.’

We were knee to knee and I could see he wasn’t going to talk about Ireland, I recognised the appetite of the teller for his tale.

‘He had a workshop behind the old Alhambra, he was a toymaker, known in the trade as a craftsman and perfectionist. His regiments of wooden soldiers were accurate in every detail. You could count the bullets in their belts. He built his dolls’ houses, every one different, modelled on a real house; if he knew the child it was going to, he modelled it on the child’s own home. His houses had lights that lit and bells that rang. He even installed a little tank so that real water came out of the taps. He was so clever with his hands he could cut the Lord’s Prayer on an apple pip.’

I had heard that one before, and was about to counter with the story of the man who could get the Koran on a mustard seed, but when I opened my lips he held up his hand like a policeman on traffic duty.

‘Billy was an artist. That’s why he never made any money. He barely charged enough to cover the cost of his materials. It was the work he cared about, not what he got for it. He never married, and he used to go every evening to a pub called the May Garland, in Commercial Road. It was pulled down long ago. In his day it was a cosy little place with plenty of brass and plush to cheer the eye and warm the fundament. Billy would sit in a corner and make his solitary pint last the evening. He didn’t talk, he was a man of few words, just a smile and a nod when he went in, and the same when he went out.

‘Nobody noticed him much. He was one of those people who aren’t missed till they’ve been gone a month. And in the May Garland there was no lack of talkers. Even if everyone in the public was to fall silent there was one ready to fill the pause.

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