So many places to drink at this end of the High Road, and time for a few more before the drop. The clown crosses to the Ironworks, too recent a pub to have much of a story. An Irish bar when it opened, and always a bit of life to the place. A bunch of fiddlers or a guitar band seem like a good way to see this out. He walks down the stairs and the room is already sweating. On stage, a group of girls sing one of the old songs. The Irish are a mawkish bunch, he thinks, always sad at what they have lost, though to be fair, they’ve suffered more than most. He admires the spirit that does not die in absentia, and the unquantifiable love which the Irishman has for his sodden lump of land to the west; a fondness which grows the longer he is away. Perhaps it’s this love that has made so many people crowd into a small pub off a fume choked street on the first Saturday of spring, all the sadder to be here and not there, eyes filling with tears as three colleens sing The Fields of Athenry. The girls finish to furious applause and step back as a young boy no older than twelve years old appears on the stage. The clown can barely see through the shoulders of the people in front of him, and moves to the bar where he orders a Beamish from a skinny man with thin tattooed arms and a ring in his nose. The boy on stage remains poised and silent for a few moments, composing himself. He wears a black shirt and green tie and the clown expects him to sing but instead, he begins stamping his boots in rhythm as the girls behind join in, their feet the drums. The boy’s shoulders remain square, his head upright while shoes that the clown can hear but not see move in a frenzy.

“Go wee man!” screams a woman from the back of the bar and the clown pours the thick black milk down his throat. As feet stomp and stamp, he thinks back to those first days after Dunheld ran him through, how little he knew, how little he had lived. And now, he has seen centuries. He is older than trees; a man who walked these roads before Chaucer’s pilgrims set off for Canterbury, before the Confessor built his great church at Westminster. He was older than the Conquest. He has met the battle weary from Agincourt and Crecy, Trafalgar and Waterloo. He predates the independence of France and the Americas, and has seen the fall and rise of every empire from Byzantium to Islamic State. He needs a piss and the gents in the Ironworks are close enough to the road to not bounce him back with his bladder still full. At the trough, a large man with a beard and a hurling jersey looks over.

“What’s your story, big cunt?”

The clown grins.

“Roaming throughout the earth, and going back and forth on it.”

“Turn a man’s hair green, that could!” he grins. Then as the clown leaves, “Have a good Easter.”