The Auld Triangle

Charlie stood smack on the middle of the Cross Guns Bridge, his arse cocked against the iron wall, a mysterious hump on his back, the load wedged between his wide shoulders and the metal rim of the bridge wall. He was shifting and shuffling in that new fidgety way he had, something I'd noticed the few times I'd seen him since his release. His smirk widened the nearer I got, making me nervous. He started dipping and jabbing, sparring thin air. Thanks to the pull of the load on his back, his arms only reached so far, the sleeves of his vinyl Snorkeler riding almost to his elbows. I stopped beside him, and leaned over the bridge, my stomach pressing against the same hard steel as his arse.

"Howayeh?" I said, keeping my voice light.

"All right, yeah, never better, yerself?"

I shrugged. "Freezing."

He snorted.

I lit a Rothmans, and tossed the matchstick into the canal. The used stick joined dirt, feathers, bottles, cans, and even a dead pigeon. A snapshot of Dublin floating beneath our feet. The cigarette's fiery head dimmed, its two-tone tip reminding me of the frocks Charlie and I wore serving mass. I sometimes doubted we had ever been kids, never mind little boys in black and white altar gear. Charlie's Ma had made him serve mass to torment his Da (who said the Pope was a cowboy and women were evidence enough there wasn't a God), and my Ma had made me take part in the hopes that some day I'd do her proud, and we'd both be somehow saved.

Charlie stretched his arm sideways and used his cigarette as a sixth finger to point up the street. "Do yeh ever think about the name of that road?"

"Why the fuck would I think about the name of a road?"

"Well, did it ever strike yeh as funny?"

"Like maybe they should have called it No Prospect Road?"

He laughed, spitting smoke everywhere. "Exactly, Aidan, exactly." He pushed from the steel wall and walked toward Prospect Road, leaving me none the wiser of his antics. He turned left before Des Kelly Carpets, and started walking alongside the canal, an outline with a growth on his back, sleeves pulled to the middle of his forearms, and the wind lifting the open Snorkeler around him like a cape. I looked longingly back at Bushes pub.

I caught up with him, my face, hands, and feet numb, and wished I'd worn something warmer than my combat jacket. The sky looked about as cranky as I felt, like it would piss all over us, and the wind nipped at my skin like Jack Russells do ankles.

We passed the remains of Rank Flour Mills. Long empty and ugly, the ruin stood covered in graffiti and bird-shite, and most of the windows, thanks to gales and missiles, gaped from behind black bars. Charlie bent and picked some stones from the gravel path and in amongst the long grass on the bank. I glanced back, vexed at the sight of him crouching in the muck, the hidden bundle shifting on his back.

Charlie threw the stones he'd taken from the bank while we walked. Silent, we watched them skim the water before disappearing. Two swans steered well clear of his aim.
I'd once seen Charlie kill boredom with a swan. As youngfellas we'd often sit on the lock, right across from the park, our feet dangling above eels and rats, passing vodka or whiskey or the like. Charlie had drained the bottle and, calculating with his left eye squinted, hurled it at a swan on the water's edge. The bottle hit just below the bird's head. Its neck flopped.

By the time everyone else had finished hollering and clapping Charlie on the back, the bird had fallen on its side, the current carrying the corpse over the roaring lock. There was a funny silence amongst the rest of us then, like maybe we were wondering what we'd have to say or do to compete with an act like that.

A whole gang of us used to hang around there: Charlie, me, Decko, Abbo, Packie, others that came and went, I'd forgotten half of them, and the girls we were riding, or wanted to ride, or wouldn't ride even for the practice. It was like no man's land, our very own country for the taking, a miserable, perishing place that adults, and even the pigs, didn't disturb.

Most nights the rotting canal attacked every hole in my face and head, and I could feel the freeze in my chest, a claw tearing at my lungs, and if I wasn't wet from rain, I was damp from dew. But I coped. We all coped. We'd swill cider, smoke pot, drop acid, tell stories, the taller the better, and crawl between girls' legs.

I screwed my first girl at fourteen right there on the wasteland behind Shandon Gardens. Claire. Yeah, Claire Long. She'd lain on the grass grinning back at me, her eyes glazed like two fairy cakes, the buttons on her jacket calling up to me, and our breaths waving in the air like two ghostly flags.

I was just about to say we'd go back to Bushes when Charlie wandered off the path and stood at the stone wall that ran alongside the walk-way. He stared across at Shandon Park where a handful of boys bullied a football. I joined my hands and blew between my thumbs. The bit of warmth only tormented me more, and my Ma's kitchen, never mind Bushes, held far more appeal than standing there fast becoming a human icicle.

I slapped my palms against my arms, and scowled at Charlie. He laughed. Grinning like a prizewinner, he shouldered his Snorkeler off him, and tossed a green backpack to the ground. Back inside his anorak, he dropped to the bag. I sat down next to him. The damp immediately seeped into the denim at my arse and I told myself this better be good.

Charlie pulled four flagons of Bulmers from the bag. Half his arm disappeared again, and he dragged out two packets of Tayto, a roll of toilet paper, and what I guessed were sandwiches wrapped in Brennan's paper. I lifted the toilet roll, eyeing Charlie.

"Grass blades are a bitch on the arse," he said.

I munched a sandwich, egg and scallion with a dose of salt and cider. "Shirley spoiling yeh again?"

Charlie drank in gulps. The cider fizzed every time he snapped the plastic neck from his mouth, especially when I mentioned the wife. "Stop, will yeh. The only thing she'd spoil is an appetite."

"When did yeh decide on the picnic?"

He laughed. "I like the outdoors."

"And we couldn't go somewhere else?"

He sloshed his near-empty bottle at me, using it to point around us. "What more could yeh want?"

I hugged the Bulmers. "Heating."

"Ah, all shriveled up, are yeh?"

"Not as shriveled as yer imagination. I'd have thought you'd have had enough of this place?"

"Enough? Are yeh mad? I miss the bloody place."

"Yeh miss it?"

"I was king here," he said quietly, and then laughed. "Charlie Deadly Owens, remember?" He looked around us. "Why wouldn't I miss it?"

The only thing left was the toiler paper and a hint of feeling in our hands, faces, and feet. "I'm out of here." I told Charlie. His finger stopped picking the Tayto from his back teeth and he struggled to standing: first on his knees, then all fours, and finally upright. I shook out my hands and legs, readying to join him. His hand squeezed inside the front pocket of his Wranglers and reappeared. "Not before this, yer not." Between his thumb and finger he held a round of tin-foil not much bigger than a penny. He threw the stash at me. "Be sure and roll a right one."

I passed the last of the joint back to Charlie, all the color going out of the day, and the kids across the way winding up the football match. Sometimes their voices carried over, but otherwise the only noise came from falling water, barking dogs, and the odd airplane overhead. We'd gone from leaning against the wall, to lying on our backs, our heels at our arses. I followed each plane long after its smoky trail faded. The quiet must have gotten to Charlie. That's all I could put it down to. I'd never have believed it meself if I hadn't been there. "And the auld triangle," Charlie began to sing, putting as much into it as he did an argument, "went jingle-jan-gle, All a-long the ba-nks of the Roy-al Can-al." He elbowed me in the ribs. "Sing up."

"Like fuck I will."

"In the ear-ly mor-ning, the screw was bal-ling, get up yis bow-sies, and clean out your cells."

"Jaysis, Charlie." I didn't know Charlie could sing, and I certainly didn't know he could sing that badly.

"They sing in the Joy, Aidan. Did I tell yeh tha?"

"Jailhouse Rock, wha?"

"Stop. I used to lie on me bunk at night, fighting the smell from the canal, like a kick in the head it was, and staring up at nothing, just counting off the months, and some nights some silly wanker would start belting out a song, and then sure enough another ballocks, and another ballocks, would join along. I mean, what the fuck?"

I laughed hard.

"Easy for you to laugh, but it got to me, that bleeding jingle-jangle playing in my head till I thought I'd burst. Yeh know when yeh know yeh can't do something and it's the only bloody thing yeh want to do? Eating, trying to sleep, even taking a piss, I had a terrible urge to sing. It near drove me mad. That's the way I felt, like if I couldn't sing, I was going to burst. But I'd rather burst than sing in the poxy Joy."

I said nothing, happy to let him mouth on.

"But here I am, back on the old patch, and I can do what I bloody well please. And the auld triangle went jingle-jangle …"

Smiling, I closed my eyes, listening to Charlie sing and remembering Claire Long again. I saw my face hovering hers, me collapsing on top of her, my head resting next to hers -- the smell of apples from her hair --, our ears touching, warm and wet, and our hearts thumping against the other's chest, like knocking on a door.

Somebody coughed close-by, silencing Charlie's singing, and we both struggled to our elbows, arriving about the same time. A dark figure stepped forward out of the shadow. I recognized Snowy.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Charlie said.

Snowy had turned his toes in, making his knees meet, and his hands pushed deep into the front pockets of his jeans, the bumps of his knuckles pushing through the denim. "Yeh … yeh … yeh-"

I groaned. Snowy either had a stutter, something I didn't notice that morning, or he was petrified in front of Charlie Deadly Owens.

"Are you following me?" Charlie asked him.

"No, no, yeh, yeh told me where yeh were going."

"That was in passing, not for yeh to fucking sneak up on me."

Snowy's fists made circles inside his jeans. "Sorry, sorry … sorry, Charlie."

"Well, what the hell do yeh want?"

"Yeh told me to tell yeh when the youngone started doing the night shift on her own?" Snowy finally got out.

"She's started so?" Charlie said.

Snowy's eyes widened, like he was wondering how Charlie knew. "Yeah, yeah."

"Right, thanks, now piss off."

Snowy's head started to bob, the patch of white appearing and disappearing. His eyes roved Charlie and me, resting with Charlie. "But, but, but … but yeh said yeh'd give me a pound."

Charlie drew back his arm and slapped my shoulder with the back of his hand. "Here, give him a pound, will yeh?"

Snowy squinted at me. "One fifty, you owe me from this morning."

Charlie turned to me, bright-eyed and open-mouthed, all mock surprise, his teeth full of black fillings and gummy gaps. "Are yeh telling me yeh didn't pay the youngfella?"

I rolled my eyes, dropped back on the grass, and pretended to study the sky.

"That's terrible, that is, Snowy … shocking … I don't know what to tell yeh … I don't know what to say about our Aidan here." Charlie tutted. "Tell you what. Why don't you go back to McGuinness's, keep an eye on the girl, let me know if she finishes out the shift on her own, does the cash and lock-up, and all that, or what's the story. Then … then … if yeh keep yer eyes sharp and bloody mouth shut, there's a fiver in it for yeh, wha? Wha about that, ha!"

"Yer not messing with me now, are yeh, Charlie?"

"Me? Me? Charlie Owens, mess? Charlie Deadly Owens? I'm going to do yeh a favor, Snowy, and pretend I never heard yeh say that, okay? That way you and me can still be friends, still do a bit of business together, yeah? … Yeah?"

"Yeah, yeah."

"Right, now, scram."

I closed my eyes, felt them jumping under the lids. Snowy's plastic soles scuffed the paved path, his footsteps fading. Charlie's clothes swished as he lay down again. I could smell the onions off him. He was chuckling to himself. "They want to change that gobshite's name to dozy."

I almost asked him what he was up to, but didn't bother. I'd figured out enough already to know Charlie was heading for trouble again, and, like always, would try to drag me along with him. What was a hero without his sidekick?

Of the two of us, Charlie was the actor, into playing parts, always wanting to be more than he was, but lying there right then I'd have given anything to be somebody else too, somebody else anywhere else. Anything, anything, other than to have to head back out onto Prospect Road and beyond, Charlie at my side, back in my so-called life.

Biography

Ethel C. McDonnell was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1967. She now lives with her husband and two daughters in San Francisco, California. Ethel received her Master of Fine Arts in English and Creative Writing from Mills College, Oakland, California, in 2004. She is currently close to completing her first novel.