Cold Eye of Heaven, The by Christine Dwyer Hickey Read Free Book Online Page B

like old-fashioned freight trains; flat green, dirty white, brown.
    In the seat just behind him, a man and a woman are talking, voices pitched secretively low: ‘Look at them, just look at them,’ the woman is saying, ‘make you sick, it would. There must be a shipment in or something – I mean, you can just feel the buzz in the air. Make you sick they would.’
    And that’s when it comes to him – the pension – did he collect it or not? He just can’t remember. He has an image of himself standing in the post office queue, surrounded by people lumpy in winter clothes, shuffling one by one to the top. He has a memory of the recurrent thump of a rubber stamp, and he can remember too, turning around to see a woman fresh in from the cold, going, ‘O Jaysus, I’m blinded,’ as her glasses clouded up from the sudden heat. But he doesn’t know was that today or another winter’s day? Last week, the week before? Years ago, even? He takes off his gloves and puts them in the Clery’s bag, then slips his hand into his inside pocket. He can feel the pension book there, the wallet stuck in behind it. At least he wasn’t dipped. At least, that much. He’s getting ready to pull them out to have a look, when he hears the pair behind him again.
    She says, ‘Scumbags is all they are. Look at them, rob the hair out of your head for a hit, they would.’
    Farley looks around and sees what she means – junkies all over the bus. Better wait till he’s somewhere safe before he goes opening his wallet. There’s one squirming in his seat across the way; another with a twitchy face further down the aisle. Two more of them are whingeing to each other with their underdog eyes, like everyone else is to blame for their great misfortune. Ghosts, that’s what they’re like. Ghosts in purgatory. He feels nervous now – worse than nervous – afraid. Of being on this bus full of ghosts. He has the sense that if he doesn’t get off quick, he might not get off at all. That he’ll snuff it here on this very seat. He raises himself, begins to gather his bag and gloves. Then he sees a woman’s head appearing at the top of the stairwell. A big heap rising slow and full like a geniecoming out of a bottle. He sees her eye wandering down the aisle and stop at the space beside him. Farley sits back.
    It’s alright, it’s alright. Everything is going to be alright. Hasn’t his headache gone, his eyesight cleared? Hasn’t he enough money left over from last week’s pension, thanks to the snow and no opportunity to spend it? Enough to keep him going till tomorrow because that’s when he’ll really need it, that’s when he’ll want to haul out his wallet, open it up for all to see – ‘No, no, this one’s mine now, I insist, I insist’ – stuffed with you-can-all-go-fuck-right-off money. Everything is grand. No headache, clear vision, money in wallet. And a big fat woman squeezing down the aisle towards his seat to protect him from all the ghosts. He flattens himself in against the window.
    Downstairs, the bus driver is as black as Foley. Farley asks him if he knows of a shoemaker’s shop in Thomas Street. He doesn’t. ‘Not even when you’d be driving by, like?’ he asks and the man gives an apologetic shrug. Farley stays near the door, keeping an eye out for his stop. The traffic is brutal, budging for a couple of seconds then halting for ages. He wonders who Foley was; where the expression came from, and if it’s a racist one. Because as far as he can tell, the only way not to be racist is to pretend you don’t notice if a chap is black. Or pretend you don’t notice him at all. Coloured people – that used be the polite way to describe it, but now, as a woman at the bus stop recently told him, that’s the height of racism. The height of racism? Surely there must be