The Visitors by Patrick O'Keeffe Read Free Book Online Page B

understand a word we said to each other, but I enjoyed hearing the sounds of her words, and I enjoyed watching her, and smelling the frying cod and chips. She would not be watching that match.
    I stood and went to the bar and ordered another Club Orange. The men’s faces transfixed by the game. I watched my reflection in the smoky mirror and wondered how I’d kill the dull minutes and the tedious hours until I’d see Una again next Sunday. There was the letter to write to my mother. (A cancer was growing in my mother then. She would be gone inside sixteen months.) I’d write to her tomorrow night after work. I’d sit at the table, write that I was fine. I hoped everything was fine there. I love my job. I’ll be down home soon. I missed everyone. And I did stop by Una’s flat after Mass. I rang the bell, but she wasn’t there. I might try her again some other Sunday. And I’d fold a twenty-pound note into the crease of the letter. That made my mother happy. She’d write back and say I was a good boy for sending it. God would reward me. And don’t forget to drop a line when I did talk to Una.
    The country barman was looking up at the television when he handed me the Club Orange. I put the exact change on the counter, thanked him, and sat back in the seat. The sun was gone. The seat had cooled.
    You’ll get tired of all that. Una was the one to say it. Day in, day out. Polishing mirrors, wiping dust from shelves, sweeping floors, cleaning up spills, stocking shelves, intervening badly in fights, mopping up the vomit and the shit in the jacks, filling endless pints of beer, small ones, vodka and red, vodka and orange, a drop of the cat, young man—but I liked chatting with the locals. They told you things. Their hatred of bosses and foremen. The factories closing. The need for stronger unions. Thatcher is less than a cunt because a cunt is of some use. The young ones and the drugs. The brazenness of robbers and criminals. The redundancy check will last only a few months. The missus and the fucking children wanting every fucking penny of it. Lucky if you get a few fucking pints out of it in the end. You’ll have to stand me a few pints, young fellow. You will. When there’s nothing left. You will.
    The men sitting on the barstools looked like the men I served in the pub. Most lived locally, or they once did, before their families were moved to housing estates beyond the city center, and on Sundays they returned to the old neighborhoods to drink with friends they played in the street with when they were children.
    A man I didn’t notice when I came in was sitting apart from the others at the very end of the bar. He was not looking at the match. He was reading the newspaper. He made me think of Nathan, who was a regular in my bar, but hadn’t visited in a while. Some regulars said Nathan had booked himself into a home. Others said he’d gone to live with relatives. Many said you never know with Nathan. A FOR SALE sign had gone up in Nathan’s yard that past week, and someone had gawked in the windows of the house and reported that the rooms were empty.
    Nathan visited the bar every evening from four until eight. He sat on the same stool at the end of the counter and read the
Evening Press
.Men read either the
Evening Press
or the
Evening Herald
. The men who bet on horses, which was most of them, also read the English tabloids: the
Mirror
, the
Sun
, the
News of the World
. Those papers had the horse-racing form at the back and on page three a color photo of a young woman whose breasts took up most of the page.
    Nathan was in his mid-sixties. He was retired from his desk job at the post office. He lived down the road from the bar. The wife was dead. The children were grown and gone. They visited only at Christmas. When Nathan was drunk, he’d tell me how sad it was that he never saw his children. He’d lament the loss of the wife. He drank three pints, and between 7:15 and 8:00, he drank two half Jameson’s with