Читать книгу Future Popes of Ireland - Darragh Martin - Страница 16

Danny Doyle lit another cigarette. He’d had to blow the smoke out the window, back when he was a teenager. Now it didn’t matter if the little room filled with smoke, with his Da dead and Granny Doyle too worn out to shout at him. She was busy with the babbies, leaving Danny to his old box room and its sad yellow aura, the source of which it was hard to locate. It couldn’t be the amber on the window from his smoking; the curtains were always drawn, especially in the day. The yellow of the curtains had faded to a pale primrose, hardly enough to explain the aura. So, it might just be the jaundice about his heart; what else was sad and yellow?

Another fag. Something to keep his hands busy. He wished there were cigarettes for the brain, something that his thoughts could wrap around and find distraction in. Brain cigarettes? He was going mad, he had to be. Sure you’re not high? That’s what she would have said, with an arch of her eyebrow – he could hear her voice clear as anything in the room – and Danny Doyle felt a sharp pain in his chest at the thought that the only place Catherine Doyle was in the room was trapped in a tiny rectangle.

There she was, smiling at him from a plastic memorial card. Her name (Catherine Doyle), her dates (1951–1979), some prayers and platitudes (May She Rest in Peace; Oh My Jesus, Forgive Us Our Sins and Save Us From the Fires of Hell). He’d let Granny Doyle pick the photo for the memorial card, and the sensible photo she’d chosen would not have been out of place in a Legion of Mary newsletter: this was not a Catherine Doyle he recognized. Surrounded by prayers and a pastel background, this woman was not the type to let toast crumbs fall onto a bed or push her face into silly shapes when Peg was taking a bath; this was not a woman who could quack. Staring at the memorial card, it was hard to remember the tone that she had used to tell the stories that put Peg to sleep or to admonish him when he’d forgotten to pick up milk, harder to imagine how ‘Danny’ might have sounded from her mouth, what shades of affection and exasperation might have coloured it.

Danny picked up the roll of film instead of another cigarette. Where could you take it? Not Brennan’s chemist. Nowhere on the Northside. Maybe some shop in town, some alley off O’Connell Street. But then, the thought of it, a stranger staring at her naked body, looking at him like he was some sort of pervert: he couldn’t do it.

Danny Doyle turned the capsule over and over in his hand, the single bed in his old box room already sagging with sadness underneath him.

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