Excerpt
Ian buttoned his jacket, lit another cigarette and waited. His feet were sore and his calves ached. He shifted his position every couple of minutes. He thought: They can’t sit all this time on that concrete wall without their arses getting sore. He lit another cigarette. At his feet a litter of butts and grey ash messed the pavement.
The sky was darkening to sea-blue. A few stars twinkled.
At last they moved. While applause for the performance died to silence, and a low buzz of conversation replaced it, Nora and her friends slipped stiffly from the wall and stretched and put on cardigans. Ian saw Nora’s large bust below her blouse. She turned to the sallow man and said something. He replied and waved a long, skinny hand. The three girls walked away together along the path by the sea-wall and out on to the main road. They turned to the right in the direction of the Drumard Strand Hotel.
Ian followed until they had sauntered past his car. When he himself reached the car he climbed in and drove to the hotel by a side road that passed a row of private houses with gardens extending to the beach. It led him by the railway station and the bus terminus to the driveway of the hotel. He parked the car, combed his hair in the rear-view mirror, straightened his jacket and then walked casually into the plushy ambience of the hotel. It struck him as being somewhat old-world and serious but comfortable.
He entered the leathery den of the Slieve Corragh Room, where he had first met Nora and her friend. The bar was busy but not full. He stood in the doorway for a moment while the muted hubbub of voices and laughter and the warm smoky air drifted past him into the thickly carpeted lobby. He looked at the coffered, wooden ceiling, the white upper walls above dark, varnished wainscoting. A large painting of Slieve Corragh hung on the wall to his left. He felt at home here. This was his milieu. He strode across to the bar and sat on an empty stool beside a naval captain who had his back turned half towards him as he talked to a lady with a blue rinse in her hair.
‘Scotch and water, please. Glenfiddich.’
He waited. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the doorway. The anticipation and the Scotch and the aftermath of a mixed grill were teasing his stomach maliciously. He was acting like an adolescent, like a seventeen-year-old boy suffering his first unbearable love for the girl up the street, the skinny little girl in pigtails who had suddenly, without his noticing, grown into a woman. Ian’s knees were trembling. He gulped down the Scotch and ordered another.
