The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien Read Free Book Online Page A

a hostel in Dublin. The supervisor there got him the job in the hotel as she was a first cousin of the manager’s. He was called Mujo, short for Muhammad, and with his big sad eyes, kept his silence, always listening with wonder to what others said. His was the lowliest job of all, kitchen porter. His principal duties were to keep floors and surfaces spotlessly clean, to fill the dishwashers and clean all pots and pans separately. Sometimes he did not talk for days, but he could speak in an emergency. He spoke when he was interviewed for the joband Ivan, who shared a bedroom with him, said that he talked in his sleep and sometimes got very agitated, shouting and thrashing about.
His doves were his friends that he kept in the barn, going to them at all hours and all his wages went on them. They lived like royalty, their nests were terracotta pots, lined with straw, corn and maize for their grub. How quickly they had bred. Five pairs within half a year. He gave them names, names of people from his own country. In the very early mornings when they were let out, the yard was a cascade of white, wings fanning out, as they readied themselves to rise, then up and up towards the woods, where he followed, his tumblers, unerringly roaming and circumnavigating the upper air, long before the songbirds wakened, or the seagulls with their cold caws came swooping in from the seashore.
In a tin box was his most secret possession. It was to be opened in case he was ever taken to prison.
Earlier in the evening, the kitchen was bedlam, shouts and commands and arguments, Olive the assistant chef calling everyone ‘Shithead’. Shithead this and shithead that, staff going up and down the narrow stairs to the dining room, where all was elegance and candlelight, calling ‘Coming through, coming through’ to avoid a collision. Yet inevitably, the unwieldy metal trays kept grazing one another.
Hedda, the tall beautiful waitress from Lithuania, has turned twenty-five and has been crying on and off, at the misery of growing old. Now on the veranda, she has cheered up, demanding that everyone tell her a story. That is her birthday present, along with the Sachertorte, which Ivan the pastry chef has made for her and has arranged on a beautiful cake plate with an elaboratepink frilled ruff. Nobody is willing to start, they keep teasing each other and even Dara, normally a spinner of tales, can only remember as a kid three boys and one girl trying to make sleds out of cardboard boxes, to skate on the disused railway line.
‘Is that all … is that all?’ they tease him.
‘Ah, buying the first condoms and texting girls over in Galway,’ he says and suddenly baulks.
Tommy takes to the floor. Normally, he would be driving home by now, but has stayed to have a slice of the famous cake. They know all about Tommy, his one hundred and eighty acres of arable land, all along the coast, his expertise with dosing cattle, his Rouge French ram bought at a cost of eight hundred euros, the lambs he has delivered and later castrated so as to get more fat on them. Tommy’s motto is ‘Keep the money turning’. They also know he has a beautiful girlfriend, Camilla, half English, and they have seen pictures of her on his phone, dark-haired, teeth like pearls, always in very high heels and an off-the-shoulder black dress. They know that he’s a volatile man and that he once killed a sheep that was acting crazy because she wouldn’t go in the door of the outhouse and how he struck her with a blackthorn stick, several fierce blows and she fell down dead. Then the dogs and the foxes got her and soon after as he told it, the seagulls came for the guts and the contents of the stomach and how Camilla didn’t talk to him for three days.
‘It’s like this,’ he begins and waits till the sniggers died down, ‘I’m stressed out, I’m going crazy, I drive the whole fecking way to Mayo to get new aluminium wheels for the Volkswagen. I drive in Camilla’s car. I have the