Seanie Flanagan pulled the duvet up around his ears and tried to ignore the niggling ache of his bladder. It kicked in at seven every morning like an alarm clock, which was handy during the week, but since today was Saturday, it was a nuisance. He didn’t need to leave the house for another two hours, when he’d head to his mother’s. Half-nine on Saturdays was shopping. Half-nine on Sundays was Mass. Seanie was thankful that every other morning of the week he was at Tom Malone’s beck and call at the farm supply shop instead. Tom was a much easier taskmaster to please than his mother, and more appreciative. When Seanie’s dad died, he’d inherited his role of chauffeur, general dog’s body, and chief listener to gripes.
Seanie had offered to bring her to the Tesco over in Ardcooney plenty of times but she wouldn’t hear of it. She wouldn’t go anywhere but O’Donnell’s shop in the village because that’s where she’d always gone. Then she’d moan about their prices the whole way home and rant about how Paddy O’Donnell was running the shop into the ground and that he wasn’t a patch on his father who he’d inherited the place from. Seanie liked Paddy. He was a decent sort. He sponsored the local under-age GAA teams and helped out with the Tidy Towns. There was no point in saying that to his mother though. When she had her mind made up about someone there was no changing it.
Seanie dragged himself out of bed and down the hall to the cold tiles of the bathroom floor. As he aimed his strong, steaming flow at the far side of the toilet bowl he sighed with relief. His moment of pleasure was short-lived as he heard his phone ring in the bedroom. He was nowhere near finished but he knew he wouldn’t reach it anyway before his mother gave up on the fifth ring. She never let a phone ring more than five times. Patience was not among her short list of virtues. It had to be her. No one else would ring him at this hour on a Saturday morning.
Seanie put off dealing with his mother until he saw her in person. Whatever it was could wait until he got there. He fried a couple of rashers and put the last of the soda bread in the pan to soak up the salty grease before sitting down at the cluttered kitchen table with the crossword from last week’s Farmer’s Journal. He took an old copy home from work now and then. The date on the top of the page caught his eye, 7th September 2008. That meant he’d been working in the farm shop for a full thirty years. He’d started there the September after he’d finished school. It was a tough job at times, hauling feed, timber and tools about the yard in all sorts of weather but there was a familiar pace of slow, steady work to the day that he enjoyed. He knew everyone who came in and liked the bit of chat you’d get.
His mother was disappointed he hadn’t make more of himself, hadn’t ventured outside of Ballybawn, hadn’t found a nice girl to settle down with. He suspected she was embarrassed to be stuck with an ageing bachelor of a son instead of a gaggle of grandchildren to spoil and a daughter-in-law to invite her to Sunday dinner like the rest of the women in her church group. But Seanie was happy enough with his lot. He liked where he works, had a few pints in Shanahan’s on Saturday nights, would watch a match on telly on Sundays and go along to the local games when they were on.
“You’re like your father,” his mother said to him one day. “You’re happy doing the same old thing day in, day out.”
He sometimes thought it would be nice to have a bit of company in the evenings, someone to run things by when he had decisions to make, someone to have his back. He’d probably have had a better chance of finding someone if he hadn’t lived in Ballybawn his whole life. There was no one around here he’d ever given a second glance. There were plenty of girls he considered nice when he was growing up but he never imagined anything more than a chat with them. That hadn’t changed as he and they had gotten older.
Maybe he was a creature of habit like his father but Seanie didn’t see what was so bad about that. He’d never felt the need to leave for Dublin or London or further afield like a lot of the lads he went to school with. He wasn’t one for living in cities, he knew that much. He couldn’t stand the constant noise and busyness and the way everyone was suspicious of you when you tried talking to them. Ballybawn was home and he couldn’t see himself anywhere else.
Seanie washed the dishes and had a quick wash and shave before sitting down to try to figure out the last of the crossword answers. There were three he was stuck on but he had to leave or he’d be late. He pulled on his shoes while trying to think of a valid excuse for not answering his mother’s call. He’d left his phone in the car was the most plausible he could come up with but that’s only give her more reason than usual to berate him like a child. He picked up his keys from the nail by the back door, pulled the door shut behind him, closed his eyes and paused for a minute in the warmth of the morning sun before getting into his car.
By the time Seanie had put away his mother’s shopping, mowed the lawn for her and chopped firewood for the week, she had dinner made for the two of them. It was two o’clock by the time he left her place. When he got home he turned on the telly and watched some old black and white film that was on but dozed off and missed the ending of it. When he woke there was a repeat of some gardening programme on that he’d seen the other night but he watched it again anyway. He made a couple of sandwiches for his tea while the six o’clock news was on before heading to the pub. Mick Shanahan had died forty years before and the place had been owned by Tommy Mann for years but everyone still called it Shanahan’s.
“Seanie.” Christy Todd nodded a welcome at him from the bar.
There was no set arrangement when it came to Shanahan’s. Seanie would turn up every Saturday evening and take a stool at the bar counter and chat to whoever was around. On quiet nights, it’d be just himself and Tommy Mann for the first hour or two. Christy would be in early, like he was tonight, if his son was home from college to do the evening milking for him.
“Well Christy. How’s it goin’?”
“Not so bad now, not so bad.”
A quick nod in the direction of Tommy Mann behind the bar and Seanie’s first pint of the evening was being poured. He lowered himself onto the stool next to Christy’s. There was a crowd of young ones in the corner, gathered around a phone screeching with laughter. Seanie reckoned they were probably only in for one or two before heading to the nightclub in Ardcooney.
“Fucking YouTube,” Tommy Mann moaned, as he put Seanie’s pint in front of him. “Ye can’t take a shite these days without someone making a video of it.”
Seanie didn’t mind. They brought a bit of life back to the place. No one under forty usually came into Shanahan’s. The young crowd used to congregate in Cassidy’s up at the corner, until Sean Cassidy upped and left for Australia a few months ago. He’d no interest in running the place once his parents were gone. A For Sale sign appeared on it the previous week.
“Oh Jayzus. Here’s the nancy boys,” Christy said, looking towards Oliver Mooney and some other fella as they walked in the door. Their arrival was met by screeches from the girls in the corner and a thickening of Tommy Mann’s frown. The Mooney’s lived down the road from Seanie’s home place. His father used to pal around with Oliver’s grandfather back in the day. He didn’t recognise the other fella.
“You going to the match tomorrow?” Christy asked. “Seanie?”
“Hah?”
“I said, are you going to the match tomorrow?”
“Oh…yeah…probably.”
Seanie watched Oliver Mooney as he walked up to the bar and ordered a couple of gin and tonics. He was wearing make-up, not gaudy stuff like the girls wore but he had drawn thick black lines around his eyes and had painted his nails a shiny deep blue colour. Seanie thought there was something impressive about the way he just stood there at the bar like it was normal to wear nail polish and order gin and tonics in Shanahan’s on a Saturday night.
Brian Fleming’s arrival distracted Seanie and prompted Christy to order another round of pints.
“Well, how’s things?” Seanie asked Brian as he pulled up a stool to join them.
He already knew what the answer would be. Seanie had never known Brian to start any conversation without a long moan so it was best to let him get it out early. Besides, Seanie reckoned he might need a whinge himself if he’d four teenagers in the house.
Seanie slipped out the back for a smoke while the other two were complaining about their wives. He was sitting on a bench in the far corner of the smoking area, out of sight of the door, when Oliver Mooney and the other lad came out. He watched quietly as Oliver lit a cigarette then took it from his mouth and placed it between the lips of his friend before lighting a fresh one for himself. They were talking shite about someone called Aisling and whether she had or hadn’t ridden some Polish mechanic called Krzysztof. Their conversation dwindled and they stood silently, watching each other as they took long, slow drags of their cigarettes. Seanie couldn’t move. They hadn’t spotted him and they’d think he was a right creep if they discovered he was sitting in the corner all this time without saying a word.
“We better go back to the others,” Oliver said.
“Yeah,” his friend said.
But neither of them moved.
The other lad raised his hand and ran the tips of his fingers along Oliver’s cheek and into his tangle of black hair. Seanie knew he shouldn’t be watching but he couldn’t turn away. The other fella leaned in until his face was an inch from Oliver’s. Their lips met, briefly at first, testing the waters before their kisses grew longer and deeper. Seanie had never seen anything like it. Well maybe on the telly but not here, in real life, in Ballybawn. The two lads eventually parted. Oliver said something that made them both laugh, then they went inside as if nothing had happened.
Seanie downed the end of his pint, which was warm from holding it. His chest was tight. It was a feeling Seanie knew well from his childhood, like the time he’d pulled all the petals off his mother’s precious roses or the day he lied about leaving the gate open behind him when the Kelly’s cattle got out onto the road. He used to think it was God squeezing his heart to remind him what was right and wrong, to teach him a lesson. Seanie hadn’t felt it in years. He shouldn’t have been spying on the two lads but he hadn’t meant to. He’d gotten stuck there in the corner and couldn’t escape. An uneasiness continued to niggle at him as he went for a piss on his way back to the bar. As he washed his hands, he caught sight of his reflection in the mirror and for an instant he was surprised at the sight of the middle-aged man with the sagging wrinkles around the eyes and weather-beaten spider-veined cheeks that looked back at him.
“Where were you?” Brian Fleming asked as Seanie eventually edged himself back onto his stool.
“What?”
Seanie looked over to where the two young men sat in the corner.
“You were gone ages.”
He could feel his face reddening and he turned back towards Brian and Christy.
“My mother rang,” he said.
“Jesus, she’s worse than any wife,” Brian said. “And none of the benefits either!”
He laughed proudly at his own joke.
“You ready for another?” Christy interjected, sensing Seanie’s annoyance at Brian’s crass joke.
“Aye, but sure it’s my round,” Seanie said and he signalled to Tommy Mann to get another three pints going.
Seanie didn’t join in with the debate over whether it was John or Jim Hogan that had scored the first point in the game against the Ardcooney seniors last year, even though he knew full well it was Jim. He sat and listened to Christy and Brian argue about it for ages.
The sound of beeping taxis outside brought the young crowd in the corner to their feet as they emptied their glasses and gathered their coats and bags. In Seanie’s day Maguire’s Coaches ran a bus that picked them up in Ballybawn. The trip home at two in the morning was carnage, between lads vomiting, acting the maggot and pleading with the bus driver to let them stop for a piss along the way.
“Night now,” Tommy Mann called out as the gang herded towards the door.
Oliver Mooney looked towards the bar and silently nodded back at him on his way out.
Seanie supped his pint as the other two continued on with an in-depth analysis of the Junior B team’s disastrous performance in last year’s club championships. When Tommy Mann came to see if they were in need of re-fills, Seanie said he’d have a few cans for the road instead.
“Where are you going?” Brian demanded to know.
“Ah, I’m goin’ on home,” Seanie said. “I’m not feeling the best…must be coming down with something.”
“Aye, you’ve been fierce quiet tonight,” Christy said.
Seanie opened a can and turned on the telly when he got home and though he wasn’t really in the mood for either, he flicked through the channels and downed three cans before eventually giving up and heading to bed just before midnight. He usually conked out as soon as he turned out the light, especially when he’d had a few pints, but he couldn’t get to sleep that night. He turned to check the time on the clock-radio on the bedside locker: 01:00, 01:25, 02:12, 02:33… It was just gone three when he flicked on the radio, hoping it would send him to sleep or at least make the time go faster. That soppy Olivia Newton John song from Grease was on. It reminded him of that night he asked some young one with blonde hair out to dance at The High Five in Ardcooney. It was the song playing as she leaned in to him and rested her head on his shoulder. It was a big hit at the time and was a mainstay of the slow sets that summer. He only danced with her to shut the lads up. They were always slagging him on the minibus home for being useless with girls. He pretended he’d kissed her after walking her to her bus just to get them off his back. But he hadn’t. He’d never kissed a girl, or a woman, or… An image of the two lads kissing in Shanahan’s backyard flashed into his mind and wouldn’t leave.
Seanie was boiling in the bed now and threw the duvet off, leaving only the light sheet across him. It wasn’t an option when he was young. Times were different then. Would things have turned out differently for him if it had been? Or if he’s been born ten or twenty years ago instead of fifty?
Turning over again, he thought of Mass in the morning and of Oliver Mooney sitting with his family in their usual spot on the right hand aisle of the church. Did his parents know about him? Who he was? What he was? They must. He wasn’t hiding it and even Tommy Mann knew.
Seanie thought of his own mother, who would be waiting for him in her good Sunday clothes at her front door in just a few hours time. She would never understand such a thing.
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(Photo: byronv2/ flickr.com/ CC BY-ND 2.0)
- Stirring by Margaret Cahill - January 19, 2023