Paddy's Day

The motion had been short. Mr Quennell had a copy of it in the blue folder, printed from the Dáil’s own website, with the division list attached, and he had read it out on the aeroplane, in a voice of quiet professional admiration, as if it were a very fine piece of drafting, which it was.

That Dáil Éireann, having regard to the events of 22 December 2031 at licensed premises in the constituency of Dublin Central, respectfully requests that His Majesty return to the said premises on Saint Patrick’s Day 2032 to complete what he began.

It had passed a hundred and forty-one to three. The three had been, Mr Quennell said, a group of deputies from the west who had wanted it to say Clare instead.

---

He had practised.

He had practised for three months. There was a stout tap at Eight Bars, because Mrs Merriweather had put one in in January, on the day the motion was reported in the Courier, without being asked, and had said you’ll want this, and he had wanted it. He had pulled a stout every night after closing, alone, at a quarter to one, when the bar was empty and the chairs were up on the tables and the only sound was the radiator in the flat upstairs banging every eleven minutes through the ceiling. Three-quarters. Put it down. Walk away. Do something else. Come back. Top it up.

Every night, he had got it wrong.

He had got it wrong in every way there was. He had waited too long and too short, he had walked away and forgotten to come back, he had come back too soon, he had stood and stared at it, which was the worst, because when he stared at it he could never tell whether it was still at the top the way a pond goes still. Kimura had drunk every one, on her stool, at a quarter past one, being errors, and reported on the beer mat that by the middle of February they had become nearly drinkable, which from Kimura was a parade.

And every night, at ten past one, Jack had sent a video from the New Inn, where Sue had also put in a stout tap, in January, without being asked, because she had seen the news. It was always the same video. Jack, behind the bar of the New Inn, after closing, with the chairs on the tables, pulling a stout, three-quarters, walking away, coming back, topping it up. And the head always sank. Every time. For three months. In the middle, like a soufflé, and Jack always held it up to the camera with an expression of total betrayal, and said ninety-one, or a hundred and four, or I hate this drink, and sent it.

They had not got it right once. Either of them. In three months.

---

Dublin on Saint Patrick’s Day was the loudest place he had ever been.

It was louder than the Maidan. It was louder than the Free State Hotel. It was louder than the Mall on the day of Trooping, when he had heard HANOVER shouted through the wall of a hundred thousand people. From six in the morning, the city was full, every street, every bridge, every pavement, green, all of it, green hats and green scarves and green faces, and orange as well, which he had not expected, sashes of orange on the men from the north who had come down on the train for the parade, walking with the men in green, because, Mr Kinsella said, this was the day they both had, and they both meant to have it.

The parade went past the end of the street at eleven. It took two hours. There were pipe bands and brass bands and a band of accordions from Fermanagh and a lodge of the Orange Order from Belfast in bowler hats walking behind the Ancient Order of Hibernians from Cork, in good order, at a decent interval, with a man from each walking at the join and holding the same banner, which said SAINT PATRICK, and nothing else, because, as Mr Kinsella said, that was the one thing everybody had agreed about since about 1920.

The King watched it from the step of Daly’s with Mr Kinsella, and Theo, and Jack, who had come in on the morning flight from Bristol with a rucksack and a face of grim determination.

“I’ve been practising,” said Jack.

“I know. I’ve seen the videos.”

“Every one of them sank.”

“I know. Mine as well.”

Jack looked at the parade going past the end of the street.

“Three months,” he said. “I’ve been doing bitter for four years and I can do it in my sleep and I’ve been doing that for three months and it hates me.” He turned to Mr Kinsella. “Why does it hate me?”

Mr Kinsella, who was seventy and had poured a million, one hundred thousand pints of stout and would pour, on this one day, about another eight hundred, looked at the boy from Gloucestershire for a while.

“It doesn’t hate you,” he said. “You’re thinking about it.” He looked at the King. “So’s he. You’re both thinking about it. You’ve been thinking about it for three months.” He folded his arms. “Tonight you’ll be too busy.”

---

They were too busy by four.

Daly’s held, comfortably, about a hundred and fifty people. On Saint Patrick’s Day, Mr Kinsella said, it held three hundred, uncomfortably. On Saint Patrick’s Day with the King behind the bar by motion of the Dáil, it held, by Kimura’s estimate, which she made at five o’clock by counting the heads in the broken mirror, four hundred and sixty, and there were another two thousand in the street, and the guard of honour of the Irish Army, who had been sent back for the second visit, had been absorbed by the crowd at about half past three and were somewhere inside it, with their rifles, singing.

He stopped thinking at about half past four.

He did not notice it happen. That was the point, Mr Kinsella said afterwards. You never noticed it happen. He was behind the bar of Daly’s with Mr Kinsella on his left and Jack on his right and Theo at the end by the snug, and four hundred and sixty people in front of him, and every one of them wanted a stout, all at once, and he pulled a stout to three-quarters and put it down and turned to the next person, who wanted a stout, and pulled that one to three-quarters and put it down, and turned to the next, and pulled, and put down, and by then the first one had been sitting for however long it had been sitting, he did not know, he had not been looking at it, he had been pulling the others, and he picked it up and topped it up, and put it on the bar, and took the money, and turned to the fourth person, and topped up the second, and pulled the fifth to three-quarters, and topped up the third.

He was doing it in a line. A row of glasses on the drip tray, at different stages, settling, and he went down the row, topping up, and came back up it, pulling, and he never looked at any one of them for more than a second, because there was no time, because there were four hundred and sixty people, and the next one was always already there.

At about five o’clock he put a stout on the bar in front of the man on the first stool.

He did not know it was the man on the first stool. He had not noticed. The man had come in at a quarter to five through the crowd with the other ten, in their caps, in order, and had found their stools kept for them by Mr Kinsella with a beer mat on each that said, in Mr Kinsella’s handwriting, RESERVED SINCE 1999, and had sat down, and had taken out their watches, all eleven, and had been timing every stout the King poured since a quarter to five without his knowing.

The man on the first stool looked at the stout.

He looked at his watch.

He looked at the stout again, and the dome on top of it, which had risen to the rim and a little above it and stopped, flat and white and dense as cream, and had not sunk, and was not going to sink.

“A hundred and nineteen,” said the man on the first stool.

There was a pause.

“A hundred and nineteen,” said the man on the fourth.

There was a longer pause, down the length of the bar, among the eleven men in caps, the kind of pause that falls when something happens that has not happened for thirty years.

“We agree,” said the man on the eighth, in a voice of wonder.

---

He had not seen it. He had been pulling the next one.

He turned round, because the bar behind him had gone quiet, the eleven of them, in a pocket of quiet in the middle of four hundred and sixty people, and he saw them looking at the glass, and at their watches, and at each other, and he saw Mr Kinsella, at the end of the bar, with his arms folded, looking at him.

“What?” said Frederick.

“Look,” said Mr Kinsella.

He looked.

It was a stout. It was black as a church, with a band of cream on the top of it two fingers deep and a dome on the cream that rose just above the rim of the glass and stopped. It was exactly like the one Mr Kinsella had poured on the twenty-second of December, at a quarter past five, the first one, the one he had stood and looked at and thought was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in a glass.

He did not remember pouring it.

“I didn’t do anything,” he said.

“No,” said Mr Kinsella. “You didn’t.” He unfolded his arms. “That’s the trick.”

---

Jack did his at a quarter to six.

He did not know he had done it either. He was halfway down a row of seven, talking to a woman from Kilkenny about the van, which she had not asked about, and he topped one up without looking and put it on the bar and turned to the next, and the woman from Kilkenny picked it up, and looked at it, and the eleven men looked at it, and the man on the first stool looked at his watch, and said, “A hundred and twenty,” and the man on the fourth said, “A hundred and twenty,” and the man on the eighth said, “Again,” and Jack stopped talking about the van.

He turned round.

He looked at the stout in the woman from Kilkenny’s hand.

He did not say anything. For about four seconds, which for Jack was a very long time, he did not say anything at all. His face went red, slowly, from the collar up, the way it had gone at the New Inn when Gaz wrote the 3 on the board, and he looked at the stout, and then at the King, two feet away, behind the bar of Daly’s, with stout up to the elbow of his black T-shirt, and the King looked back at him.

“Three months,” said Jack.

“Three months.”

“I didn’t even look at it.”

“No.”

“It’s because I didn’t look at it.”

“I know.”

Jack looked at the stout a moment longer. Then he turned to the woman from Kilkenny.

“That one’s free,” he said. “Sorry. It’s the first one.” He turned back to the bar. “Next,” he said, very loudly, and pulled the next one to three-quarters without looking at it, and Frederick saw that his hands were shaking, very slightly, and that he was grinning so hard it must have hurt.

---

At seven, Seánie Hegarty came in.

Nobody had known he was coming. He had come up from Clare on the morning train, alone, at eighty-nine, which was what he had been since the tenth of March, with a bag and a coat and, under his arm, the bodhrán with the stain on it shaped like Australia, and he had walked from the station through the crowds on Saint Patrick’s Day, which had taken him two hours, and he came in through the door of Daly’s at seven o’clock and stood in it, very small and very old in his tweed cap, and looked round the bar for something, and found it.

He found Theo.

Theo was at the end of the bar by the snug in the Cranwell apron, with a cloth. He saw Seánie in the door and stopped.

Seánie came through the crowd. The crowd let him. It had seen a great many things in Daly’s that day, and it could tell, the way crowds can tell, that a very old man with a drum coming through it slowly towards a tall boy in an apron was a thing that should be let through. He reached the bar. He held out the drum.

“I said in the summer,” said Seánie. “But I’m eighty-nine.” He put it on the bar. “I’m not waiting for summer.”

Theo looked at the bodhrán.

“I can’t take it,” he said. “It’s yours. It was your father’s.”

“It was,” said Seánie. “And he gave it to me when he couldn’t any more, and I’ve had it sixty-one years, and nobody in my family plays it, and you do.” He pushed it across the bar. “Play it tonight. In here. For Patrick. Then take it home to wherever it is you live, above that bar, with the radiator. Bring it back to Clare when you can.” He looked at Theo with his very bright eyes. “And don’t play on every beat.”

---

There was a session in Daly’s from eight until closing. There had not been one, Mr Kinsella said, since 1999, when the musicians had all moved to a pub on the other side of the river that had more room. They came back that night. A fiddle, and a flute, and a squeezebox, and a guitar, and somebody’s cousin with a banjo, who had heard, and Seánie Hegarty on a stool by the snug with a stout, not playing, listening, and in the middle of them, on a chair from the snug, a tall boy in a long white apron with a drum on his knee, who did not play on every beat.

The King and Jack were behind the bar until half past twelve. They poured, between them, by Kimura’s beer mat, four hundred and eighty-one stouts. The eleven men on the stools timed every one. They agreed on two hundred and six of them, which Mr Kinsella said was more than they had agreed on in the previous thirty years together, and at a quarter past twelve the man on the first stool stood up, and took off his cap, and held it to his chest, and the other ten stood up with him, and did the same, and did not say anything, and sat down again, and took out their watches.

On Kimura’s beer mat, at the bottom of the back, there was a line, and under it:

Detail drank 3 stouts, being errors. Detail notes the errors stopped at 16.31.

And under that:

Detail notes Fennell’s stopped at 17.44. Detail notes neither of them noticed.