Eight Ball Boogie - Declan Burke [6]
“Sorry, I’m Katie. Katie Donnelly.”
“And I’m Harry-Harry Rigby.”
“I know.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. She said: “Want to grab a coffee?”
“Always.”
We bypassed Midtown, crawling through the one-way system of the Old Quarter, the narrow streets looming three storeys high. Gaudy shop-fronts below, flaking paint and crumbling plaster above.
“Is the traffic always this bad?” she asked.
“It’s Christmas week, the woolly-backs are in town for the annual exfoliation. The rest of us are here because we lack the imagination to realise the rest of the world isn’t just another TV channel. What’s your excuse?”
“I’m freelance, doing a piece on Imelda Sheridan for Woman Now! Full colour glossy, you know the score, she’s the overachieving charity hound for the February issue. I did the interview yesterday, got shots of the house, her in the glad rags looking out over the lake, the full nine yards.” She sighed. “And now this.”
“This didn’t happen until this morning. How come you’re still around?”
She nudged the car forward, knocked it out of gear. Fiddled with the thermostat, the windows misting up.
“It’s a nice town,” she said. “It’s Christmas. I thought I’d stick around and pick up some local colour.”
“Try grey, we have forty shades.”
We edged around the corner and discovered the source of the traffic jam. He was short and squat, pushing seventy, the curly white hair topped by a WW1 leather flying helmet, complete with goggles. His face was full, moon-shaped and flushed. Standing in the middle of the road, windmilling arms issuing contradictory orders every time he turned around. His shabby overcoat billowed in the breeze.
“You should do a piece on him. He’s local, he’s colour.”
“He’s not really what our focus groups tell us our demographic wants. Mind you, that changes every week. Who is he?”
“The local nutcase, Baluba Joe. They say he hasn’t been sober in living memory. Directs the traffic when the mood takes him and then goes and gets rattlers when everything’s snarled up. Harmless bugger, though.”
“I can see how our readers would be fascinated.”
She sounded smug. The car was too warm. I needed a smoke, coffee and fresh air, in that order.
“He’s an old soldier.” She heard the edge in my voice, looked across for the first time since I’d sat into the car. “He’s mad, clinically insane. You can see it in his eyes but if you miss it he’ll tell you himself. Says he spent three days wandering the Congo jungle after his platoon was wiped out in a Baluba ambush. Jungle’s no place to be at the best of times, he reckons. But when you’re eighteen years old, and your mates have been butchered with machetes and you’re still wearing the spray, the screeching of a jungle at night is as close to hell as makes no odds.”
We inched past Joe. Froth flecked his lips. Horns tooted, engines revved. His eyes were haunted.
“Hold on a minute,” she said. “I wasn’t –”
“That was back in the sixties, so he’s been forty years drinking anything that won’t kill him outright and not really giving a fuck if it does. He told me, one night, that he knows everyone pities him. Asked me if I knew why.”
She parked with the minimum of fuss, turned off the engine.
“Harry –”
“They gave him a medal a couple of years back but he handed it back when the top brass wouldn’t look him in the eye. Kind of took the gloss off it, he said. I told him he should have taken the medal, just to piss the brass off. Know what he said? ‘No one ever made officer got pissed off that easy.’”
She stared straight ahead, stony-faced. I said: “I’d never have made officer material. You didn’t need that grief.”
She peeked at me from under an angled eyebrow.
“Was that an apology?”
“Women apologise. Men explain.”
“But we’re finished now?”
“Yeah. Who gets to keep the Barry White CDs?”
The coffee shop, Early ‘Til Latte, was run by a couple of gay hippies and sold more grass under the counter than coffee over it. We ducked through an archway into the tiny back room. Second-hand books lined the shelves. Posters on the wall advertised Feng Shui courses, Feiseanna,