On the west side of the street opposite the old club, Burton Road leads up towards Queens Park. On the corner is a pub called the Kingdom. The clown walks in and pulls up a stool by the bar. No kingdom for him, just a dark infinity, the not knowing and not being for an eternity, an end, a final point in time where the beat of his footfalls will cease. While a meat-faced youth with badly cut hair pours him a double shot of Bells, Musicians from a ceilidh band assemble a drumkit on a low stage. Nearby, two men, one in a cap and the other in a leather jacket sip pints of strong lager at separate tables. Cap reads a paper, the Leitrim Observer; jacket stares ahead of him, a ghost. An older woman appears behind the bar from a back room and regards the clown, though not with any joy. He beckons to her and she leans forward, nodding as he whispers. He sips the whisky and the ball of fire rides down to his belly as Cap begins a coughing fit. The man is almost choking and his face turns vermilion. Jacket doesn’t look up. Who would miss him? Who even knows he’s here? Yet one day, decades earlier, he placed a cap on his head, looked in a mirror and thought, “that’ll do.” In the same way the other man will have tried on the jacket, turned this way then that, considered the cut, the width it leant to his shoulders; who knows when it was, but the blood beat faster, keener. Now they’re two shells beached on the shore of the Kingdom, stuck. The clown downs another slug and, lips still burning, walks back onto the street. North, across Burton Road, past the handbag shop, past the discount store where Bianca Yidefonso is on the phone to Emily Savage for the third time today. Yidefonso trying to sound cheerful but she’s worn out. Savage’s brother won’t take his sister’s calls. Every so often he just stops picking up, and there’s no way Emily Savage is getting a train and two buses all the way to Luton to try and find him. Not with her hip. And then there is all the fish from the man who came round last Tuesday. She still doesn’t know what she’s going to do with it; her freezer is full and it won’t keep. If she can’t get rid of it, it’ll start to smell.
“Why did you buy the fish?” Yidefonso asked her.
“Because it was cheap”.
Today it’s Domino, the Bassett Hound who Savage has struggled to walk since the operation. He’s scratching the paint off the door and whining. Yidefonso yes yesses, promising she’ll be round later to walk Domino, but Savage doesn’t thank her, warning her that she’ll be watching the news at six, so to come before then.
“And bring some bags to take away the fish.”
Yidefonso with a child of her own and a job, who offered to help her neighbour as an act of charity, not knowing that there are as many people to leech on kindness and hoover up generosity as there are those ready to help them; Savage the parasite and Yidefonso the host. A pox on all of them. A fire. Let it burn.