Read The Wake (And What Jeremiah Did Next) for Free Online Page B

Taxis and the second when he was employed by Carndonagh hospital as an ambulance driver during which time he sometimes still got Mick the taxi even though he hadn’t driven a taxi for years. I decided not to do this for two reasons, firstly because Bill was demanding my full attention in an effort obviously to keep his mind off the rabblement opposite and secondly because I wasn’t sure how my voice would come out. On that particular matter I had some minutes before decided that I’d be making a beeline for the bottle again the minute Bill left because, although I wasn’t in favor of going back to Irish wakes and funerals of old where it was not unknown for mourners to drink all night and then be stretched out in a paralytic state sometimes next to the grave even while interment was taking place, I could see no good reason not to get slaughtered that night and then sleep it off. For this was a wake without bereaved, unique in that regard, and if you couldn’t get slaughtered at this one then what one could you get slaughtered at?
    “You’re wrong,” said Seamus to Margie. “It was Mick the taxi. Sure didn’t he tell me himself the Sunday he was driving me and Packie and them from the Keg o’ Poteen back up to Derry after we missed the last bus when we were down playing the friendly against Clonmany Trojans. And by the way, the anti-treaty league you were asking me about there a minute ago Margie had nothing to do with the other thing. It just so happened some people that were in one were in the other as well. It’s like a Venn diagram. Did you ever hear tell of a Venn diagram did you?”
    “What’s that you’re saying?” asked Bill who should have known better.
    “It’s got two parts that cross over each other,” explained Seamus with a trace of condescension. “Like circles. What’s the word? Intersect. I did it in Maths at Saint Columb’s. Maybe they didn’t do it in your day.”
    “No no,” said Bill impatiently. “Not the Venn Diagram. I know all about that of course. I passed Mathematics with distinction. What were you saying about the anti-treaty league?”
    “There was actually no such thing in point of fact,” continued Seamus. “It wasn’t a league as such.”
    “A misnomer,” said Margie.
    “Misnomer’s the word,” agreed Seamus. “The crowd that were against the treaty with England were the Republicans, not the anti-treaty league. And that wasn’t actually the name at all in point of fact. What’s this now it was?”
    The kitchen door opened and a woman from two doors below Aisling’s came in. I decided to lie low, figuring she knew where the coffin was. She knelt down and stayed down for ages and then I heard the sobs starting as she was getting up. Margie put the empty glass that was in her hand sitting under the chair and went over to comfort her, rubbing away at her back as if she was trying to bring her wind up.
    “You and Maud were very close, weren’t you, Kate?” she said.
    Kate. That’s who it was, Kate Breslin. Never out of the cathedral, never done bowing and scraping to the priests and putting fresh flowers on the altar, her and Maud and these others ones. I met her a couple of times when I was coming out of Aisling’s and from the look on her face at the cut of me I always had the feeling she knew something was going on that wasn’t Christian. Well she wouldn’t be seeing me again that way.
    Between sobs Kate told Margie that she’d been to the Long Tower carnival in the Brandywell showgrounds with Maud last July, just three months ago nearly to the day it was, and the two of them had gone to this fortune teller Madam Esmerelda just for the fun of it and she’d told Maud that she, Maud, would come into an inheritance before the year was out. Margie said “Well maybe the fortune teller was right, Kate, because sure you and I know that Maud’s in heaven right now and if that’s not coming into her inheritance I don’t know what is.” I couldn’t hear