WE're delighted to present an extract from Bells In Bright Air, a story from Trouble, the new collection from Philip Ó Ceallaigh, published by The Stinging Fly Press.
Down in the street a dog was barking and I lay in the dark for hours listening to it. I staged a dawn raid on the medicine chest and went back to bed. Apaches descended on me in in black and white, screaming, and I shot them off their horses.
When I woke the dog was still barking. The sound echoed in the concrete canyon of the street. I showered and drank a coffee and sat down at my desk and sharpened my pencils. When I could no longer bear the noise, I took my rifle from where it rests along the top of the bookcase, stepped out onto my balcony, took aim and fired. No more barking. An old man leaning on his balcony on the other side of the street had seen it happen. He gave me the thumbs up. I nodded to him in acknowledgement and went back inside. I returned the rifle to its place on top of the bookshelf.
I sat down at my desk. It was finally quiet but I found I was not ready for work after all. My desk faces the window and I get little done, now that the weather is warmer and the door is open to the little balcony. I was thinking about dogs. About the funny way they will gaze into your soul, like a lover or a newborn. The thoughts were starting to connect and I was about to get something done when I was disturbed again by noise, this time a rumble of what sounded like obscenities and threats being uttered by someone in the street. From his brutal diction, I knew what the man would look like. They come cutting through this way, slouching like Neanderthals, sometimes a worn-out woman trailing several paces behind. No jobs, these brutes, but they like to breed. You hear them on the radio going on about the low paid and the disadvantaged, but I can tell you, they are not all very nice people. Read about it in Solzhenitsyn, how in the camps the authorities let the criminal scum slit the throats of the bourgeois prisoners with impunity. The people with manners, you see, had lost the war. They had refined themselves into a state of helplessness.
I stood up, took the gun back down from the bookcase, checked my ammo and took up position on the balcony. I took aim for just a little longer than I did with the dog, at the base of the man's skull, and he fell face-forward onto the footpath. There was indeed a woman in tow, and she stopped and leaned over to inspect him—obviously he wasn’t getting up again—and then she turned and looked up and saw me. The gun was slung over my shoulder at this point, and I posed no immediate threat to anybody. She gave me a timid little wave and smiled. She was short a few teeth. I raised my hand in acknowledgement. A guy had just parked on the footpath opposite and he was looking up at me too. He stood beside his vehicle, keys dangling from one finger, unsure what would happen next. Hey, I boomed at him, Don’t park on the footpath, old people and kids need to use it!
In fact, other vehicles were already parked along the footpath and his van made no difference. But after I went back inside I heard his engine starting up and the van driving away. I put my gun back on top of the bookshelf.
So much for the dead guy, I thought, sitting down at my desk. So much for his muscles and so much for his big mouth. Maybe his mother would cry for him. Nobody born can’t make their mama cry. I still wanted to get some work done, but there was no longer any point. I’d just be warming up when it would be time to stop. I cut my fingernails instead. Ideally I should have steeped them in warm water first, and pushed the cuticles back. And why shouldn’t we take care of our hands, these sensitive instruments that have evolved for millions of years, to the point where we can do neurosurgery or play the Moonlight Sonata with our eyes gently closed. But I didn’t bother with the cuticles. I just clipped the nails. I gathered all the little bits off the floor and disposed of them. Then I finished cleaning up around the house, the usual stuff, and waited for her to come back.
She arrived home some hours later in her heels and office gear. I told her she was looking great. She asked what I’d been doing all day. Nothing much, I said, and she made a face, even though the house was gleaming and there was a pot of food in the fridge that just needed reheating. She’s gone a lot with work, sometimes days at a time, and I don’t even ask any more. We don’t always talk. Or we talk, and it’s not always what we’re saying. Or else we say things and it looks like the world is about to explode, then we pretend nothing was said and she puts on her make-up and heads out again. But that’s marriage, I suppose. Or maybe it isn’t. I don’t know. Then she was in the shower, I could hear the water going, I was gazing out the window and I could see by the shadows it was time to get the little girl. I didn’t have to look at the clock. I always know by the light. So I was out the door, and the woman was still having her big long shower. She thinks it’s funny, me scrubbing the floor while she’s running around, but she’s going to get a surprise one of these days.
I went down and they’d cleared the corpse from the street, no sign it had even happened.
Trouble by Philip Ó Ceallaigh, published by The Stinging Fly Press, is out now.
