about by everyone for their own use.’
‘I’m sorry’, I said. ‘I’m drunk. I wasn’t getting at you.’
Garth put the drinks down and sat back. Liam took a long sip of Jack Daniels and smiled, ruefully.
‘I normally have this conversation with myself,’ he said. ‘My manager says in three years I’ll be as big as any of them: Philomena Begley, Daniel O’Donnell, Big Tom. “Leave everything to me,” he says and I do. He knows the business. He decides when my albums come out, but I’ll decide when I do.’
‘That’s your business,’ Garth said. ‘We’ve more serious things to discuss, like which club to go dancing in.’
It took intense persuading to get Liam to visit a gay club, and he only agreed when Garth repeatedly explained how discreet the one he had chosen was. It was in the taxi that Garth mentioned Luke, asking Liam if he remembered a wedding party in the Irish Centre.
‘The place was packed,’ Liam replied. ‘I play it once a month. I won’t know anyone there.’
‘There’s a guy Tracey wants to know about,’ Garth pressed him. ‘From Dublin but living here. His name is Luke and he works in tiles. He knew you or a fair amount about you.’
I realised Garth had never told Liam how he came to be in that coffee shop and he was taking a risk for me now.
‘What did he claim to know?’ Liam was defensive again.
‘Where I might meet you, for example.’
Liam lowered the window so that cold air filled the cab. The West Indian driver drove with sullen fury, jerking us about. Liam’s good humour had vanished as he digested the news of someone else knowing his movements.
‘And that it might be worth your while going there?’ Liam asked. Garth said nothing, but Liam leaned back, tense now with the world shrinking in his mind.
‘I don’t know anyone called Luke,’ he said eventually.
I recognised the club when we got there. Garth had taken me there once with Roxy and Honor. I always loved gay clubs. They had the best sounds and least hassle and gay men were great dancers around you. The club was packed. At first Liam made it clear that I was with Garth and he was with Jack Daniels. He downed three of them neat. I could imagine him lying awake, perpetually wondering who knew and who didn’t. Now Luke was another name for his list, closer to home than us and therefore more dangerous.
Garth and I danced alone at first and only when Liam was approached by men did we persuade him to join us. He appeared awkward but then, as he relaxed, he took over our part of the floor, slipping into routines which had looked hackneyed in the Irish Centre. Now, though the music was utterly different, they were breath-takingly joyous. Men stopped to watch, infected by his boyish animation. Nobody does Elvis in a gay club, but he did, the younger Elvis, wide-eyed and sexually innocent, before Colonel Parker’s gimmicks killed him off. I remembered Garth’s story and realised that previously I was watching a dancing chicken. Now I saw the man Garth had always guessed at. The music halted and we returned to the bar for more drinks. Liam took a long sip, his hair damp with sweat.
‘You’re wrong about something,’ I said after Garth went to the gents. ‘I do know sean-nós singing.’
Liam looked at me in surprise, struggling to remember his outburst in the pub. ‘What does it sound like?’
I tried to recall the unaccompanied drone of an old man’s voice through a listening post at dawn.
‘Like a sperm-whale clapped out after fucking twenty leagues under the sea.’
Liam laughed, draining his glass. ‘Jaysus, you’re not far off the mark,’ he replied.
‘I’ve only heard it once,’ I confessed. ‘It’s probably an acquired taste, like Jack Daniels.’
‘Only words count in sean-nós,’ Liam said. ‘The voice is an unadorned instrument to get them out. Your friend Luke would know sean-nós singing.’
‘You know who he is?’
‘I saw him talk to you in the Irish Centre,’ Liam replied. ‘He’s been pointed out to me at traditional sessions over here. He drinks by himself, taking everything in, even me, obviously. He wouldn’t be a regular and would only come for the music. I mean he’d have nothing in common with the people you’d meet at a traditional gig.’
‘Isn’t that music popular in Ireland?’ I asked.
‘Yes and no,’ he replied. ‘It won’t die out, but country and western is what’s big in Ireland. Then there’s rock music, U2, Sinead O’Connor, The Cranberries. In Dublin you can’t spit without hitting rock stars chilling out. But traditional music has a world of its own. That’s why Luke stood out. He’s a Duggan, if you know what I mean.’
‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘Who are the Duggans?’
A man in a leather jacket asked Liam to dance and he shook his head, watching Garth return. Tomorrow Liam might regret this but now he was drunk and enjoying himself. He wanted to dance again and this time I knew three would be a crowd.
‘Traditional music is like a religion in parts of the West or Kerry or Donegal,’ Liam said. ‘But Luke’s types are generally more into James Last. All those lush strings to drown out the noise of knee-caps being broken. Take my word and keep away. The shagging Duggans.’ He laughed, heading for the throbbing beat of the dance floor. ‘You don’t expect to walk into a session and see someone from the biggest shower of thugs in Dublin tapping his feet to the tunes, now do you?’
THE FOLLOWING SUNDAY NIGHT I took the tube across London, staring at faces on the platforms and then at my own face reflected back as the train careered through the bowels of the city. People got on and got off, high-heeled girls chattering, lone men with Sunday supplements, everybody rushing somewhere. I might have stayed on the Circle Line all evening, watching the same stations rush back at me. Anywhere was better than a second Sunday alone in that flat.
At Blackfriars the old woman got on. Temple, Embankment, St James’s Park. Within minutes I knew she was going nowhere and that she could sense I was faking a destination too. The carriage was empty. I felt her staring. I thought she was lonely and wanted to talk, then I realised her eyes were taunting me. ‘I had friends at your age,’ she seemed to say, ‘I’d a family and a purpose.’ Her eyes were bird-bright. She looked like the sort of woman you saw in postcards of Trafalgar Square, with pigeons clouding the air at her shoulders as she tossed broken bread probably soaked with paraquat. I stared back and she held my gaze as if declaring this carriage as her private kingdom.
Even without her eyes taunting me I always knew that eventually I’d get off at Edgware Road. I had simply been delaying the moment, trying to fool myself that I wasn’t returning to where I had waited for Luke a fortnight before. It was three minutes’ walk from the station, but it seemed longer. Ten minutes would bring me to the splendour of Marylebone Road, but here the streets seemed more Arabic than English.
It was a strange location for an Irish Centre, surrounded by the scent of spices and taped muzak from cheap restaurants. A notice in a window promised live belly dancing at weekends. I stared at the few diners through the glass. I stood in the doorway opposite the Irish Centre and watched people come from a meeting upstairs. Some left while others drifted towards the bar where rock music was starting. I wanted the street empty like on that night. I closed my eyes but everything felt different.
Loud voices crossed towards me. I walked on so quickly that I was almost past the hotel when I stopped. The lobby was deserted, the receptionist absent from her desk. A stag’s head protruded above the unlit fireplace, looking like he’d been strangled by cobwebs. The Irish voices were at my shoulder now. I pushed the door open and stepped into the