Postcard from a Pigeon and Other Stories

By Dermott Hayes

This collection of 18 short stories charts the last 50 years of Irish history from a very human, frequently comic, often quirky, and always interesting perspective. The Cuban Missile Crisis is examined from the perspective of a gang of boys in a small, Irish village; the experience of Balkan immigrants in modern Ireland is told through the relationship of a young Albanian with an injured pigeon; three middle aged strangers meet on a train and reflect on their lives but almost as much can be told from what they hide, as much as what they say and then there's Touching Death, a young boy's first morbid encounter ends in farce.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dermott Hayes
• Release date: Feb 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9780957192904

Dermott Hayes

Since I can remember I’ve wanted to be a writer which might explain why I spent most of my life working as a journalist. I didn’t have the guts or the know how to pursue my dream. Then life got in the way. But before that I produced my first newspaper when I was nine (total readership: 12). I put together a project at school on the Cultural Revolution in China in 1968. I was 12. The Chinese embassy in London sent me a crate load of Mao Tse Tung’s ‘Little Red Book’ which aroused some ‘official’ curiosity! My interest in creative writing was first roused by an English teacher in St Flannan’s College, Ennis. It was subsequently doused by another English teacher in St Paul’s College in Dublin. At college in University College, Dublin I studied History and Politics with the intention of becoming a journalist. I worked for several national newspapers as a financial and news reporter, feature writer, sub-editor, music columnist and gossip columnist. I also worked as a freelance feature writer and sold my work to newspapers and magazines throughout the world including Mojo, Q, Select, New Musical Express, Rolling Stone, Washington Post, Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Telegraph. I published one book. So Different: an unauthorised biography of Sinead O’Connor (Omnibus Press 1992), an international bestseller that was translated and published in four languages. In my last ten years as a journalist I worked as a Social Diarist for the Evening Herald through the rise of the so called ‘Celtic Tiger.’ It was an exciting time in Ireland when Dublin became the cultural capital of Europe and an essential stopover for international celebrities doing the late 20th Century’s version of the Grand Tour. My last job in journalism was as Showbusiness Editor for Ireland on Sunday (now Ireland’s Mail on Sunday).

Book preview

POSTCARD

FROM A PIGEON

And other stories

by Dermott Hayes

From Postcard from a Pigeon, a story on the wave of immigration to Ireland in the ‘90s and it's impact; these stories look at change in Irish society in the last 50 years, from a very human perspective.

HANNIBALTHEHAT BOOKS©2012

Postcard from a Pigeon

and Other Storie

ISBN 978-0-9571929-0-4

Sole copyright for Postcard from a Pigeon and Other Stories belongs to author and publisher, Dermott Hayes (Hannibalthehat Books)

HANNIBALTHEHAT BOOKS©2012

Smashwords Edition

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Detour

Who's at the Door?

Touching Death

Be Prepared

The Russians are Coming

Clarence

The Contest

My Father was a Stranger

Commandos in the Dunes

Old for New, Bones

Postcard from a Pigeon

Same History

Glitch in the Matrix

Brown Bread

Eating Oysters

Round Trip

Donkey Race in Lixnaw

The Detour

Oh God, pre-wedding jitters; sweaty palms, itchy scalp, soggy crotch. Better change my underwear, dab on some eau de toilette; careful, you don’t want to traipse up the aisle with a honk of tart’s handbag. I’d have a fag only I haven’t put the last one out yet. This will be right. You haven’t rushed into it. There’s been plenty of time to pause and reflect. And, if you’ve a mind for it, run.

Three years you’ve been together; three, blissfully happy, years. Was that a question? Or a statement? Trying to reassure myself.

Soul mates. They wear open toed sandals, eat brown rice and lentils and talk about ley lines and karma, don’t they? We had common interests in music and cooking even though we met in a noisy club. I remember that night so well. I didn’t want to be there that night. Or any night. I was clubbed out, back then. Christ, it’s corny, tiny hairs rising on my neck with the memory. Jeez, our eyes met across a crowded room. Three years on and we’re laughing about that, still. We couldn’t hear each other talking so left for a quiet coffee shop where we sat and drank cappucino and espresso, nibbled almond biscotti and then a bottle of the Sicilian nero d’avola – since, our favourite wine – and talked and talked and talked. What a Gobshite. A grandparent, closer to 60 than fifty, walking up the aisle, like a giddy virgin? Am I mad? Is it the loneliness? We walk, we talk; we go to the pictures and the theatre shows. We dine out for a treat when we have the money. We have our garden. But where's the passion? Would you listen to me? Passion, at my age? We took it slowly, knowing, ironically, time was not on our side. But at our age there’s plenty of baggage.

My first marriage fell apart. We were in love. I’m pretty certain of that. I think. There’s no way to be sure, y’see. All that shite about preparing you for marriage, well, it’s all bollix, isn’t it? The fact is, you’re first love is about nature, isn’t it? Or is it? I mean, we were taught to find someone to make a home and raise a family with. And in marriage, of course. It became a war. Surrounded by an ever rising wall of interest rates, unemployment and soiled nappies, we imploded. We fell out over curtains in the end.

Well, things have changed since then.

Honking car horn, a ringing doorbell, a clenched fist beating the door. Christ, they’re here already. Have I everything? I scanned the room, stopped at the portraits of my beautiful daughters and grandsons. I’ve put them through so much. Am I such a selfish bastard, I’ll put them through it again? Do they know what love is? Do they know they’ll lose the love they began with and have to discover new ways to love within what they’ve built already? They saw and heard us fighting. What sort of start was that? What sort of nurture was that?

Life takes us down some strange paths. Perhaps that’s what my first marriage was, just a detour. But where does that put my children? If I’d ignored that detour, they wouldn’t be here. That’s the long and the short of it.

I slammed the door of the taxi shut, louder and harder than I intended. ‘Sorry,’ I said to the taxi driver. He waved my apology away. ‘It’s the nerves, is it?’ Oh great. A philosopher. ‘Do you know where you’re going?’ ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get you there on time.’

My phone rang and I answered, welcoming the intrusion.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m in a taxi. I’ll be there in five minutes.’

Right, I’m here. And so’s everyone else. Even the ex-wife.

‘You can run, if ye want but it’s now or never, bud.’ Jean Paul Sartre and Elvis, on another day I'd love it. I handed him 10 Euro, waving the change away. It’s only two Euro, the mouthy bollix.

‘You’re late,’ someone said.‘You’re up next,’ someone else said.

I was rushed through the front hall crowded with families and friends, the gathered support groups. I don’t know, I thought in terror. The Registrar speaks. Her lips move. I strain to hear.

‘Do you John, take James, to be your lawfully wedded partner?’

Who’s at the Door?

Mummy won’t get out of bed.

There's ice inside the kitchen window. The curtains are closed.

I soaked some crusts of bread and old biscuits in the last of the lumpy milk. It softened them. Kitty cried while she ate it. She said it made her feel sick. She said it smelled like cat pee and old socks. She giggled when she said that. Then she cried harder.

The wind rattling the window frames and whistling through the holes where the putty cracked, scares Kitty.She clutches my hand. A branch from the old tree in the yard scuffing against the glass makes her jump. It makes the same sound as the rats skitting and scurrying in the pipes.'It's only the wind and the tree,' I tell her.

Kitty’s my little sister. She whispers to me when she speaks. Her brown eyes look twice their size in her little face. She stares around her when she whispers as though she’s waiting from something to jump from the shadows.

Mummy can’t get out of bed. Occasionally, we hear her coughing like someone’s kicked her stomach. She reaches under the bed to scrabble for the tin can. Then she hacks, splutters. Then there’s silence.

Things were better before she got sick. She brought me to school. It was my first day and she walked me down there, wheeling Kitty in her buggy. She handed me a paper bag with two slices of crustless bread smeared with strawberry jam and peanut butter. She kissed me and ruffled my hair. ‘Be a good boy,’ she said to me ‘and do everything the teacher tells you.’

I watched her and Kitty walk away. I smiled because I could see she was talking to Kitty. I couldn’t hear what she said but I could see her crouch over the top of the buggy and shake her shiny black hair.

I scrabble around in the cupboards for something to light a fire. I rip out old newspapers lining the drawers and bunch them in the grate. There's a few sticks left of the kindling I’d gathered in the yard and three coals at the bottom of the bag.

Kitty’s clothes are ragged and dirty. I put everything she owns on her; her ribbed black tights with the holes, a pair of dungaree shorts, an old ‘My Little Pony’ teeshirt and two skirts. She watches me from the tatty armchair next the fireplace. Her teeth rattle. She tucks her hands inside her armpits.

We used to walk through the park on our way home after Mummy picked me up from school. Kitty gurgled or girned in her buggy while I played on the swing or mummy bounced me on the seesaw.

She met her friend there, the same time, same place, every day. I pushed Kitty’s buggy down to the edge of the park pond where I skimmed flat stones and Kitty waved and giggled at the ducks. Some days, if mummy’s friend was late or didn’t show, she’d march us home, silent. Then she’d send us to our room while she smoked a cigarette and chewed her nails.

We didn’t mind. Kitty made a fort in her bed to play house with her doll, Moll and Bruno, the one eyed bear while I flicked through a book of pictures and made up stories about other lives and places. We knew there’d be a fight when Daddy got home. The shouting started after the front door closed and we heard the ‘phhssshhhh’ as he opened his first can of beer.

The match lights at the first strike. I'm glad of that. There are only three left in the box. I light the crumpled newspaper, dry as dust, and wait for the kindling to catch. From upstairs we hear the sloshing sound of the tin as it's dragged from under the bed. This is followed by another hacking fit of coughing. Then it stops.

We wait in silence. I can feel Kitty’s slow breathing close to my face and her big eyes, hollow in her baby face, staring at the flames. The fire flickers there in those sorrowful peepers.

Daddy left five days ago. They had another fight. We sang songs in our room. The crashing was the loudest yet. Mummy was asleep on the living room floor when he came home. He told us to get out, go to our room. There was no fresh food or beer just a stale loaf, half a litre of milk, two tubs of yoghurt, some biscuits and a bag of frozen peas. He gave her money but it was gone. She met her friend in the park that day.

The door slammed shut. He was gone. He never came back.

I didn’t go to school the next day or the day after that. We heard Mummy climb into bed that night. The next morning she didn’t wake up until lunchtime. She shuffled downstairs in her old dressing gown and floppy slippers. Her eyes had sunk in her head. They looked red and angry. She hadn’t combed her hair and it was matted and flattened on one side. She didn’t speak as she slouched to the fridge. Her shoulders slumped.

‘Where’s the fuckin’ yoghurt?’ she snarled. Kitty picked up her bear and stood behind me. I could feel her little hands clasp the leg of my pants.

‘There was nothing else to eat,’ I said.

She looked at me as though she’d just noticed I was there. Then