Shortlisted: ‘The Wine Bar’ by Leo Cullen

Those years growing up they’d run long-legged through the high grass fields at the back of their small farmhouse outside Trim, they’d run from a mother their father had already ran from. Then they ran to London.

They rented a room on Camden Crescent, within sound of Seven Sisters Road. Two double beds. Noreen and Marion, eldest and youngest, slept in one; Tess and Rose, the twins, slept in the other. But before that they stayed a night with me – one night with me and my girlfriend Delia Moyse in West Ken. I was working in Covent Garden market that summer – with Westminster Corporation, sweeping floors, hosing channels, pavements, trestle-tables, anything horizontal. I started as the eastern sun opened the gates of the market buildings and I knocked off early. By afternoon the market shut down. Only sparrows and finches remained, flitting about in the echoing buildings. Each afternoon I took the Northern Line to the girls and brought them grapes, apples, bananas – sometimes bruised, sometimes perfect – and always I felt happy because l was feeding them. They hadn’t jobs; they hadn’t money to buy food. They ate like horses. I then returned along the Piccadilly Line to meet Delia in our West Ken flat and when she’d freshened up after her work we went back again to Camden Crescent where Delia kissed all the girls in turn. One Saturday I made a picnic of my Covent Garden loot. We met in Hyde Park, me and Delia wandering around until suddenly we heard them shouting: there’s Delia, and they ran to meet us and kiss Delia. Over the trees and humps of Hyde Park that day came strange music carried in the breeze and people were moving in its direction so we followed them. It was a band, Pink Floyd, giving a free concert, on a high platform like a boxing ring with no ropes. Those Casey girls, they sat in the sun and ate grapes, their eyes, unnerved and cool, receiving all the sights. The sun was bright but clouds came over the green of the field and the trees darkened and swayed because thunder was on the way.

How I knew the Casey girls and Delia Moyse was because we all went to the same school, a co-ed. My father knew their father who’d run away and knew their mother who made the girls go to school but also made them work on that little farm where she eked a living. Mammy, they called her. When, after their father left, they ran first to Dublin, Mammy pursued them, getting off the bus and walking bandy-legged up to their flat in Rathmines with shopping-bags of hams and eggs and concerns and scolds. Rathmines, where the girls, Delia and I, had set up home. When the bell rang they peeped out the corner of the window. Don’t let her in, Tess said. They laughed when she went away and they took in the food she had left at the door. I wondered why Tess had wanted so much not to see her. They were all tall, the Casey girls, about the same height as me, had blue eyes and wore each other’s clothes. The hair was the thing made Tess stand out from the others. While the others had hair that fell long and straight, Tess’s was curly and grew out like an African girl’s.

A while after the day Mammy stood outside the flat Delia said to me, I’ve got a job in London, come there with me because something has to happen soon between you and me. So I went with her. What had to happen soon, I wasn’t sure? But after a few weeks there, before anything happened, Tess Casey wrote a letter to Delia asking could she come over and Delia wrote back saying she must. Were the others going to let Tess off alone though? No, they had to go too. The funny thing about those Caseys, while they kept secrets from one another, each of them told Delia things. The way Delia liked it. And how, I think, she got out of Tess something Tess didn’t tell me or any of her sisters.

The day they arrived from Ireland they were cranky and bickering. They had walked in bare feet from West Ken station, through all those little backstreets of sleepy houses and gardens in the hot sun. The soles of their feet were black with tar so I ran water in the bath and we sat, me and the Caseys – Delia was at work, on the rim of the bath with the water from the cold tap bouncing off the enamel. They shrieked and left tar stains on the bath and on the bar of soap and I breathed their excitement.

But that was quite enough for the landlord, who lived in the basement, owned a few other houses along the road, spent all day walking from one of the houses to the next, smoking, changing fuses and bulbs, carrying rolls of toilet paper. He came up to see what all the noise was about, walked straight into the bathroom. You’ll break the bath, he said. You, how many girlfriends have you, he asked me. Have them out of here first thing tomorrow. That night the Caseys slept on the bed while Delia and I slept on the floor. They kept whispering until dawn, talking and laughing to me, saying, we can’t get Delia into trouble. Next day they found Camden Crescent. And then, whatever it was, the call must have been too strong for Delia, because after about a week she was gone to them to share their beds. Nights as I’d be leaving them to catch my tube back to West Ken they’d be arguing, a wrestle of bodies in the beds, swapping about so as to give them all a chance of sleeping with Delia and she’d laugh and say, put me in the middle. And I’d go home alone.

None of the Caseys worked at anything for any more than a week or so. Delia worked for a newspaper with an Irish readership. She was the only one with money. She had to go to work that afternoon, right in the middle of Pink Floyd. Why, I asked. Things happen here, she said, not like at home. I thought she was saying it to me but it was Tess Casey she was looking at. So she left us and after the concert the Caseys and I walked along Pall Mall looking into all the hotels. It had begun to spit rain. The pavement was turning sticky and I could hear the clack of the girls’ flip-flops coming unstuck with each step they made. My brain was affected by the sound, like it was unpeeling. Until Tess got left behind the rest of us and looking around we saw her standing there on the wide pavement and her face, I thought anyway, gone a bit white and thoughtful. Come on, her twin, Rose, said. Tess shook away her thoughts and laughed and said, wouldn’t it be gas to visit the toilets of a posh hotel. She did too. The Dorchester. Through the swing doors she skipped, like she was in a playground, her sisters after her. The doorman looked at me and stood with his stomach swelled out the way those doormen stood, so I didn’t follow. While they were in there, others who’d been at the concert walked past along the street; hippies these ones were – tinted glasses, beads and bell-ends – like we wanted to be but weren’t yet. One fellow was eating a bag of chips and it was when I got the smell of those chips that I had my idea.

The girls returned, saying, did you see this and did you see that? Did you see the golden gong on the desk, said Rose. I gonged it! And Tess came out last, still pulling her dress around her and shouting at Rose, why did you bang the bell, Rose, you bitch, they ran me out. We’ll go to the Wimpy Bar for chips, I said.

It was a long walk to the top of Pall Mall, the girls saying they’d never seen so much style and me saying this is Mayfair as though it all belonged to me. Look, Tess said, her face lit up like a lightbulb. Wine Bar, it says. Let’s look in the window. It was a dark cosy place inside the window with the maroon-painted sashes, people sitting around lit candles in corners. I’d love to go in, Tess said. Too dear, I said. Ah Jim, we’re always running, we could just sit and talk like them in there. No, Tess, Rose said. And Tess said: you’re a spoilsport, Rose.

Eventually we turned into Oxford Street where I knew there was a Wimpy Bar. I’d pay for the chips, I felt generous. But when they saw the menu on the wall behind the counter they said they wanted other things too. Noreen wanted tomatoes for her diet. Tess wanted chicken for her protein. I have an idea, she said, we can all share everything; Rose, you order the sausages, Marion, you order chicken, Noreen, the egg and Jim, you can order the burger. I told them I hadn’t money to pay for all that. But, if they wanted, I had a plan how to get it. Eat here, I said. That will be much dearer, Noreen said, being the eldest. She pointed up at the glossy price lists, the ‘Eat on the Premises’ and the ‘Takeaway’ price lists. We don’t pay, I whispered and told them my plan. The only one not happy with my plan was Noreen – because of being the eldest of course. She went all clucky for a minute, like a hen bristling her wing feathers, like her mother actually except her mother had a moustache, but then the others were saying, ah Noreen, their pleas pulling at her. So we sat down and ordered and shared out the sausages and tomatoes and everything and I’ve never seen such sharing, cut into exact fifths. We were gorging, piling on the ketchup, our eyes on the door, and as for me, I was sickening with fear. The girls were whispering: When will we leave, hurry on, the waiter is looking at us. Are you sure you haven’t enough money, Jim? This is the plan, I said. You’ll casually get up to go. I’ll stay seated. They’ll think I’m paying, and as soon as you’ve got out the door I’ll make my dash. But that didn’t work because Marion jumped up, probably being the youngest; it could have been that once when she was smaller, when she had the shortest legs, she’d got caught in the long grass running away from some trouble. But if she jumped up, her feet got tangled against the table. And the table wouldn’t stir, screwed into the ground, and it nearly knocked her over and of course as soon as that happened she had to keep going and all the others after her, and me too who’d been waiting last to leave like I’d said I would until I saw the big waiter bearing down on me. So that we all pushed through the door together, almost coming stuck in the process. Then, four Casey girls in flip-flops, me in Corporation boots, we did the best we knew how... we ran.

We ran around people, we ran into people, what bags we had fell from us. It was raining, coming off buildings in waterfalls. It must have started when we were inside. And I could see him after us, an apron stretched across his chest, he was enormous. So many people there were on the street, they were slowing us down. Get off the footpath, I shouted to the girls, run on the road. I could hear a moan coming from one of them, a sort of cry. Quick, into that side street, I called, dodging out of the traffic. Take off your flip-flops – the flip-flops had been impeding them, clacking and slapping against the wet ground. They took them off; it was then they raced and I saw bare feet passing me like silver. And knowing we now had a chance of getting away they were laughing and the waiter, heaving behind us, slowed down and stopped and then we slowed down too, in an alleyway, panting, whispering and then laughing out loud; me asking, can you feel your hearts pumping, I can!

The rainwater was pouring from a high-up broken drainpipe and they put their feet under it and the next thing their hair was wet and dripping, the rain rolling down off their eyelashes and noses, and their tie-dye t-shirts clinging to their breasts. The waiter’s gone home, Tess said. Men hate rain. What did you say, Rose asked, her eyes wide as if Tess had said something alarming, where did you hear that, Tess? From Mammy, Rose, Mammy said it. What are you talking about, Tess, I asked, why do men hate rain? They do, Jim, don’t they? She didn’t tell me why.

We were beneath the high buildings, water pelting down like from a hole in the sky, rushing with the noise of a torrent into gutters – I remember cardboard rubbish, soft and sodden - then the strangest thing, the water beneath our feet turned red. And what was it but blood. It had to be, what else could it be? It was like an abattoir, standing in an abattoir, and nobody knew where it was coming from until Tess stopped her laughing but only momentarily, long enough for her to say, it’s me, it’s my visitor, and then she was laughing again and the blood dripping down out of her skirt and clumping on the backs of her legs and on her feet. Then she bent to the ground and said she had a terrible pain. They all looked at me and said Tess had to be got home and after that and all the time while I was taking them home, I felt I was the best ever friend, the bosom friend, of those Casey girls. Even while Tess, between moans, was saying, I know: we’ll go to the wine Bar Jim said not to, her face one minute in pain and the next glowing, like Paradise was just around the corner.

But I was no longer the bosom friend of Delia. I knew it that very night when we all drank sweetened tea in Camden Crescent. Delia had come home from work. The three bars of the electric fire were on. Tess was lying on the floor, Delia kneeling behind her. With total concentration, and looking as far away from me as she could, she propped Tess’s head against her knees and fingered her hair and rubbed it with a towel until it stood out frizzy as a poodle’s. Coldness, that’s what I was feeling from Delia; she knew I’d gone to somewhere strange and elusive; I’d shared something with the Caseys she hadn’t shared.

Next day Delia came round to my flat, the flat she and I had shared, and told me she couldn’t have me around. Why, I asked. Things have happened here. And don’t come looking for us. She packed and left. The sun was shining into the little room as if ridding itself of me too. When I went to Camden Crescent that evening they were gone. Gone to a new flat, gone I didn’t know where.

I never saw any of them ever again after that. During the intervening years I’d sometimes think about the Caseys. As long as they had what they needed the world could take a running jump for itself. They’d needed me, and they’d needed Delia. They’d needed mostly, one another. I’d think back on what I’d needed - to be feeding them, then to be wrapped in their arms. If I couldn’t have been wrapped in Delia’s, I’d needed to be wrapped in theirs. No, never since did I see any of them, or see Delia Boyce either. But stronger than anything for me ever since, stronger than any realisation, any understanding, so strong I could smell it, was grass; girls running long-legged through wet grass; seeds of Timothy, Fescue, Ryegrass, Fog-grass clinging to their legs. Even though the grass and fields of their homestead had probably long disappeared into a dusty edge of town. And Delia: fallen to the wayside of a broken heart. That was my thought on Delia. A heart not broken by me of course, by Tess. All that losing, all that separation, maybe even the breakup of the sisters too, had it started back then? Things happen, as Delia told me they’d have to that day she closed me out of all their stories. The day Tess, pulse of what we were at that time, lost the baby; running from a woman (her mother) who a man (her father) had run from; running through high grass in fields behind a house outside a town called Trim at a time of a country of runners. And blood everywhere, running through my heart and mind, no comforting for the blood, no being comforted by it, rain sluicing it away.

And then last night I dreamed of Tess. And in the dream we were drinking wine in the maroon-painted wine bar at the corner near the turn into Oxford Street and I asked her why men hate rain. Delia looks after me now, she answered dreamily. Mammy told Delia to get rid of you like Mammy got rid of my father. Because men hate rain. I saw the furrows deepen in her face. God, where had her life taken her? And then darkness set in and was carrying her away. And I woke and I was looking at my own life and my own running.