Night by Edna O’Brien Read Free Book Online Page A

loquacious in our cups, bent over the embers, bemoaning our limestone kilns, our lineage and so forth. Moriarty’s family had a walnut tree, a genus Juglans from Persia. He used to say, “If it weren’t for a thing called love, I’d love you .”Thank you. Abdul Abulbul Abee. Moriarty had freckles on his balls which goes to show what a mandarin he was. I used to cart him to his bed. We never consummated it. It was about the best there was, I mean the most rending, apart from the bloodknots. It was more of a boneknot. Down with bloodknots, boneknots, Minoan knots, Tristram knots, Druidic knots and Lil’s spittled-on speciality, the truelove’s knot.
    He came to dwell for a bit. Worked on a building site, immunised himself to the noise. He used to bring four bottles of stout and station them on the kitchen table, two each. We used to imagine scaffolds for each other, places where we would scale and occasionally meet. It probably got too much for him, it probably got to be a bit of a rope around his neck.
    He left without saying farewell. He went out to get cigarettes from a machine when the shades of night were down, and lo and behold, he did not come back. He might have met someone or else he hijacked himself to the desert. He was always on about the desert, the scorching, the nomads and so forth. I would say he met someone, a girl, bleached, straw-like, his type. Maybe Sharon, the one that came here. Couldn’t tell the difference between swallowing and chewing, or rather, she was unable to fix the delineating moment and to decidewhen to desist from one and commence upon the other. It deluded her so that from her earliest years she chewed and swallowed indiscriminately, and knew the correctness of her actions only as it was registered by others who in their turn praised, scolded or pounded her for what she had just unwittingly done. I was addled with her, what with her reminiscence and her cooing and her eating habits. When eating a chocolate biscuit she grazed the chocolate off the biscuit, grazed it, then licked it, then dived into the biscuit proper. She had beautiful features but no beauty, it is often the case. One day she brought me a present of nougat, nice of her. Moriarty used to employ his time drawing stars, blue-black, very jagged stars, done in ink and though he never looked at her, they were meant for her. She thought they were scrumptious.
    Ah well, the Moriartys of this world are on some bier.
     

Of course other people do come here…
    Of course other people do come here and for the most motley and comical reasons; to deliver a pamphlet or a psalter, to collect the church dues, to put the wickerwork back in the chairs, to sharpen the knives, to maintenance the carpets, or to inform me that I have won a mystery prize of twopence, frequently to beg. I have no bloodhounds to set upon them, so I vary the means by which I can get rid of them. I feign deaf and dumb. I slam the door. I palliate. I shout down from an upstairs window that I have a curling tongs to my hair. A very nice man came to mend a gas leak and because of having to strike matches to relight the pilot lights,he put the four used matches back into his own box so as not to defile my kitchen, their kitchen. Now I call that thoughtful, don’t you? I wouldn’t have minded a walk with him, in the twilight, a bit of handholding, fingers plaiting, all that. He looked like a star gazer, absorbed and remote.
    â€œHave a sherry,” I said. We drank it standing up. He was shy, not like most of those gadflies who try to get a foot in if you’re in a negligée or a shift, keep peering at you around the pap region. One such felon snapped at my dressing-gown braid and said “Hi. Freckles.” Freckles! I am as white as calico and have only been exposed to extreme sunshine twice in my life. I’m wary of beggars, being mindful of the Coose saw about vagrants who die leaving fortunes in their scapulars. Some I bring in, for