Shade by Neil Jordan

Author:Neil Jordan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2010-07-12T21:00:00+00:00

23

THERE WAS A calm,” says Janie, “before the storm, wasn’t there, Gregory? The lengthened evenings as the last school year ended and the longest of them all, the dress dance in the tennis-club, when we could think of no-one to invite but each other. I decided, after endless reflection, to invite none other than you. Nina had options, she always had, but Buttsy Flanagan’s breath smelt, she told me, and Albert Tafife, she was certain, would step on her toes. So she decided to ask my dear brother George, whose breath didn’t smell, but who was equally certain to step on the toes of the red shoes she had bought from Quirk’s on Church Street.

“His preparations for the evening were careful, and immense. He scrubbed himself for days in the copper tub in the kitchen, as if multiple baths were necessary to clean off the grime of Keiling’s pea and potato fields. He used whatever earnings he had saved to rent a suit from Quirk’s. If there was to be a perfect evening, as perfect as the long lost ones in Mozambique, he wanted this to be it.

“He came home around six on his bike, took one final bath and presented himself to me in his rented suit, his shoulders almost bursting the seams. I was amazed to hear him ask me what I thought and I noticed one small detail amiss. His face scrubbed clean and raw, his hair slicked back with oil, his sleeves too short of course, but what ruined it were his nails, long, thick and uncut, coatings of earth underneath them that successive bathing hadn’t removed. I got out my scissors and clipped them and cleaned beneath the cuticles as much as I could, and he set ofif on his bike.

“ ‘Don’t be too early, Georgie,’ I pleaded, ‘there’s nothing worse than that,’ but he assured me he wanted to take the long road round.

“You arrived then, dressed in your father’s evening suit, as the sun was going down over the dunes. My father was sitting on the small wickerwork chair outside the front door and bawled at me, his pipe still stuck between his teeth. Time, Janie, he said. I could hear the scrip scrape of Garibaldi’s hooves on the shingle and remember thinking it should have been a clip clop. I was fixing the rose to my blouse in the tiny kitchen and my mother was fussing with my hair. She knew nothing of course would come of it, it was only the tennis-club dance, and was whispering to me, don’t get any ideas, but with the excitement of someone who couldn’t help but imagine them. Ideas, that is, of her youngest daughter being married to^ a son of Baltray House, questionable though his birth might be.

“And you shook my father’s hand, you exchanged pleasantries about the weather, grand evening for it, he said as if some ancient, untouchable rite was about to begin and you said, in your polite English vowels, grand indeed, Mr.

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