The Session

The Christmas message had been recorded on the eleventh of December, in the front room of the flat above Eight Bars, between bangs.

It had been his idea. The ABC had wanted the Blue Drawing Room. The Household had wanted the library. Frederick had wanted the flat, because it was where he lived, and the message was supposed to be from where he lived, and the ABC had sent a crew of three with a camera on legs and a red light and a woman with a clipboard, and they had set up in the front room by the window, with the laundromat behind him through the glass and the burned armchair just out of shot, and he had sat down to record it, and at the end of the first sentence the radiator had banged.

They did it again. At the end of the third sentence the radiator banged.

“Every eleven minutes,” said Theo, from the kitchen door.

The woman with the clipboard looked at her watch. Then she looked at the radiator. Then she looked at Theo.

“Exactly eleven?”

“Since 1994. Mrs Merriweather says the plumber says it just likes to be noticed.”

So they timed it. The message was four minutes and forty seconds long. They waited for a bang, and then counted to ten, and then recorded, and had six minutes and twenty seconds of quiet in which to get four minutes and forty seconds right, and he got it right on the fifth try, and the radiator banged eleven seconds after the red light went off, and the woman with the clipboard said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” and then, “sorry, sir,” and he said it was all right, he had been thinking it himself.

It went out at three in the afternoon on Christmas Day in the Realm, which was eight in the evening in Ireland, and he was not watching it, because at eight in the evening on Christmas Day in Ireland he was in a kitchen in County Clare at the end of a table, being handed a drum.

---

Doolin was at the edge of the Atlantic. It was a scatter of white houses and three pubs on a road that ran down to a harbour and a pier and a great flat grey shelf of limestone that went out into the sea, and beyond the sea, very faint, on a clear day, the islands. It was not a clear day. It was Christmas Eve, and it had been raining since the morning, sideways, off the ocean, in a wind that came in over the limestone and up the road and into every gap in every coat in the village, and Theo, getting out of the car at four o’clock in it, said “Forty-one degrees,” and then, after a moment, “Five,” and then nothing else, because the wind had taken the rest.

The pub was called Hegarty’s. It had been Hegarty’s for longer than anybody could say, and it was low and white and long, with a thatched roof that the wind had been trying to take off since the eighteenth century, and inside it was one long room with a turf fire at one end and a bar along one side, and at the far end, in the corner by the fire, round a low table, a circle of chairs.

“That’s the session,” said Mrs Hegarty, behind the bar, nodding at the chairs. She was about sixty, small and fierce, with her hair in a bun and a cardigan the colour of the sea. “Half eight. Every night of the year. Christmas included.” She looked at the King. “It’s not a performance.”

“No.”

“I’m telling you because they always think it is. The Americans. They come in and sit down in front of it and wait for it to start, like it’s a concert, and clap at the end.” She looked at him over the bar. “It’s not a concert. It’s people playing. You can listen if you like. You can talk if you like. You don’t clap.”

“What do you do?”

“You buy them a drink,” said Mrs Hegarty, “and you leave them alone.”

---

The session started at twenty to nine. Nobody started it. That was the thing he had not understood. He had imagined somebody standing up and saying right, the way Mrs Merriweather rang the bell for Marcus. Instead, at about half past eight, people began to come in out of the rain with cases, and sit in the circle of chairs by the fire, and take things out of the cases, and drink, and talk, and at about twenty to nine a woman of about forty with a fiddle, who had been talking to the man next to her about a cow, stopped talking about the cow, put the fiddle under her chin, and began to play, and the man next to her, without saying anything, without looking at her, picked up a flute and played with her, and by the end of the first time through the tune there were six of them playing, fiddle and flute and a little squeezebox with buttons and a set of pipes that the man playing them worked with his elbow, under his arm, like bellows, and a guitar and a banjo, and the tune went round, and round again, and changed into another tune without anybody saying anything, and the pub did not go quiet. It went on talking. It talked over it, and under it, and through it, the way you talk over the sea.

Frederick stood behind the bar and listened.

He was working. That was the arrangement: behind the bar of Hegarty’s from four until close, as he was behind every bar that year, on Christmas Eve, with Mrs Hegarty, and Theo, in the Cranwell apron, and Jack, who had come from Dublin with them in the car on Tuesday and was behind the bar as well, at the other end, because Mrs Hegarty had looked at him at four o’clock and said you’ve done this before and he had said four years and she had said then you can do the end with the stout drinkers and I’ll keep the King away from the stout, which was evidently known about, even in County Clare.

So he pulled lager, and bitter, and cider, and poured whiskeys, which were the Irish kind, with an e, and which he found, after Rennie and the Speyside and the Islay, he could now drink, and did, one, at seven, with a drop of water, and Mrs Hegarty saw him put the drop of water in and looked at him with something that might have been respect, and he listened to the music going round, and did not clap, and bought the musicians a drink.

---

At ten past ten, a man by the fire stood up.

He was very old. He had been sitting at the edge of the circle since half past eight, not playing, in a tweed cap and a coat buttoned to the neck, with a pint of stout on the floor by his chair and something on his knee, round and flat, like a large sieve with no holes in it, and a little stick in his hand, about the length of a pencil, thicker at both ends. He stood up slowly and came across the room to the bar, the round flat thing under his arm, and stopped in front of the King.

“Seánie Hegarty,” said Mrs Hegarty, behind the bar. “My father-in-law. He’s eighty-eight.”

“Eighty-nine,” said Seánie, “in March.” He looked at the King with very bright blue eyes under the cap. “You’re the King.”

“Yes.”

“Of here.”

“Of here, yes.”

“And of the English.”

“And of Great Britain,” said Frederick. “And some other places.”

Seánie considered this.

“Well, it’s not your fault,” he said, and held out the round flat thing. “Here.”

It was a drum. A goatskin stretched over a wooden frame about eighteen inches across, with a cross of wood inside the back of it to hold it by, and it was very old, the skin gone the colour of tea, with a stain on it in one place shaped like Australia.

“It’s a bodhrán,” said Seánie. “It’s mine. I’ve played it sixty-one years in this pub. My father played it before me. You’ll play it now, for a tune, because it’s Christmas, and you’re the King, and there’s never been a King in this pub, and I’d like to see it.” He held out the little stick. “One rule.”

“What’s the rule?”

“Don’t play on every beat,” said Seánie Hegarty, and went and sat down.

---

He did not know what that meant.

He found out at a quarter past ten, in the corner by the fire, on a stool that the man with the pipes had moved over for him, with the drum held in his left hand by the cross at the back and the stick in his right hand, while the woman with the fiddle, who had been told by Mrs Hegarty what was happening, started a tune, a reel, fast, and the others came in, and the pub, which had been talking, stopped talking, because the King was sitting in the session with Seánie Hegarty’s bodhrán, and that was not something you talked over.

He played on every beat.

He did not mean to. He tried not to. He held the stick the way Seánie had shown him, loosely, between the thumb and finger, like a pen, and he listened to the reel going round, very fast, and he tried to find where to put the beat. And he found it. He found it at once. It was right there, in the middle of the tune, the place where your foot went down, and he put the stick on it, thump, and again, thump, and again, and again, every beat, steady as a clock, as a metronome, as a man hammering a nail, thump, thump, thump, thump, under the fiddle and the flute and the pipes, and he could hear, as he did it, that it was completely wrong, that the tune had a shape, a lift, a sort of swing to it, like somebody running downhill, and that what he was doing was nailing it to the floor.

The fiddle player looked at him, very kindly, and did not stop.

He played every beat to the end of the tune.

When it stopped, there was a short silence in Hegarty’s. Nobody clapped, because you did not clap. Seánie Hegarty, by the fire, with his stout, looked at the King with his very bright eyes and said, with enormous gentleness, in the way that a man of eighty-eight tells a boy of eighteen that his dog has died:

“Every beat.”

“I know.”

“Every single beat.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re not a drummer,” said Seánie. “You’re a carpenter.”

---

Jack tried next.

Jack had been watching from behind the bar, and had said, at the end of the tune, quite loudly, “It’s not that hard,” which was not a thing you said in Hegarty’s, and Mrs Hegarty had looked at him, and Seánie had heard him, and held out his hand for the bodhrán, and the King had given it to him, and Seánie had held it out to Jack.

“Go on, so,” he said.

Jack sat on the stool. The fiddle started.

Jack did not play on every beat. Jack played on all of them. He played on the beats and between the beats and on the bits between the bits between the beats. He played the way he talked, without stopping, loud and cheerful and enormously confident, as though the bodhrán were a person he had just met and had a great deal to tell, and he hit the skin and the rim and, at one point, the edge of the low table, and the man with the pipes stopped playing in the middle of the tune and simply looked at him, with the pipes still under his arm, wheezing.

When it stopped, Seánie Hegarty took the bodhrán back from Jack without a word, and examined the skin, carefully, all over, as though checking it for wounds.

“Well,” said Jack. “I enjoyed that.”

“So did I,” said Seánie. “I’ve never heard anything like it.” He turned the drum over. “I’d be grateful if you never did it again.”

---

It was Theo.

Nobody expected it to be Theo. Theo had not asked. Theo had been behind the bar all evening in the long white apron, pulling lager badly and wiping down the bar and refilling the water jug on the musicians’ table without being asked, which Mrs Hegarty had noticed, and he had watched both tunes with his cloth in his hand and an expression of deep professional concentration, and when Seánie took the bodhrán back from Jack and looked round the room, Theo was the only person in Hegarty’s who was not laughing.

Seánie saw him.

“You,” he said. “The tall one. In the apron.”

“Me?”

“You were counting.”

Theo went red.

“I wasn’t,” he said. “I mean. I was. Not on purpose. I just.” He stopped. “It’s a habit.”

“What is?”

“Counting. Beats.” Theo looked at the floor. “I did first aid. Since I was thirteen. St John Ambulance. In a church hall in New Westminster. You learn chest compressions on a plastic dummy. A hundred to a hundred and twenty a minute. They tell you to do it to a song so you keep the speed.” He looked up. “I’ve done about four thousand hours on the dummy. I can’t stop counting. If something’s got a beat, I count it.”

Seánie Hegarty looked at the tall boy in the apron for a long moment with his very bright eyes.

Then he held out the bodhrán.

Theo sat on the stool. He held the drum the way he had watched Seánie show the King, by the cross at the back, and the stick between his finger and thumb, and he sat very still for a moment, the way he sat by a person on the floor before he started, with his head slightly down, listening.

The fiddle started.

Theo did not play for the first four bars. He listened. Frederick could see him counting, his lips moving very slightly. Then, on the fifth bar, very softly, he came in. He did not play every beat. He did not play all of them. He played, it seemed to Frederick, about one beat in three, and not always the same one, and between them he let the stick rest on the skin, or brushed it, or did nothing at all, and the beats he played were not on the place where your foot went down but just after it, or just before, so that the tune, which had been nailed to the floor by the King and torn to pieces by Jack, began to lift. It began to run downhill. It began to swing.

The fiddle player looked across at Theo and her face changed.

The man with the pipes, who had stopped for Jack, started again, and leaned into it.

The pub, which had stopped talking, did not start again. It just listened.

When the tune ended, nobody clapped, because you did not clap in Hegarty’s. But Seánie Hegarty, by the fire, very slowly, took off his tweed cap, and held it to his chest, and did not say anything at all, and after a moment the woman with the fiddle said, to Theo, across the circle, in Irish, something that Frederick did not understand, and Mrs Hegarty, behind the bar, translated, quietly, for the King’s benefit:

“She says, you’ve done this before.”

“What did he say?”

Theo, on the stool, with the bodhrán on his knee and his face the colour of a fire engine, had said something back, in English, very quietly.

“He said,” said Mrs Hegarty, “only on a dummy.”

---

At midnight, Christmas Day, the session was still going. It went on until two. Theo played the bodhrán for every tune after ten past ten, and Seánie Hegarty sat beside him and did not take it back, and at a quarter to one, between tunes, leaned over and said something in his ear, and Theo went red again and nodded.

Jack and Frederick stood behind the bar and pulled lager and poured whiskey with an e and did not clap.

“He’s good,” said Jack, at one o’clock, in a low voice, watching. “He’s actually good. Since when is Theo good at anything we’re bad at?”

“Since always,” said Frederick. “We just never had anything we were both bad at before.”

On Kimura’s beer mat, at the end of the bar by the door, there was a single entry under the date.

Christmas. Clare. Theo: drum. Seánie H. says: comes back in summer, he can have it. And under that: Detail did not clap.