A Short Story by Noel King
Editor’s note: This story took 1st prize in the Jonathan Swift Short Story competition 2021. It is published for the first time in Tinteán.
On Moore Street, the granddaughter selling fruit for her grandmother sneaks a puff of a cigarette. She blushes slightly at me, but I won’t say it – you’re too young to be smoking. I pay for my two bananas, two apples, two oranges and one pear, eat one of each in my room at Wynn’s Hotel, pack the others for the flight in the morning.
Window open on Abbey Street, I spot the girl again, she is mooching in the direction of Connolly Station. I can’t put an age on her, maybe fourteen. A grown man, maybe twenty, maybe foreign, looks like he’s following her. I lean out my window and notice he has caught up with her.
I go to a play in The Peacock, am having a cigarette at the interval when I see her again. This time another grown man is in her company. He seems to be Irish, they are chatting and she is shrugging her shoulders. They make to go into The Plough pub, but the bouncer asks her for ID, refuses her entry. The man gets a bit shifty, fiddles with his mobile phone, seems to pretend to answer a text and disappears into the pub. I’ve finish my cigarette, the bell is going inside the theatre. She has crossed the road on my side, I find myself saying ‘hello’.
‘Hiya,’ she says.
‘I bought fruit from you today,’ I say.
She shrugs, peers at me with a ‘what’re you on about mister’ look.
‘Shouldn’t you be at home at this hour,’ I say. ‘Where’s your grandmother?’
‘What’s dat gotta do with you?’
‘Nothing. Just… I’m from Cavan, girls your age don’t hang about street corners talking to adult men where I come from…’
She begins to shuffle off.
‘Look, I’m sorry, would you like to see a play?’ I find myself saying.
‘Wha’, like acting stuff, real actin’.’
‘Yes, you can slip in with me, they won’t notice, if they do I’ll pay for you.’
She shrugs a ‘may as well, nothing better to do’ shrug and enters the theatre with me. It’s half empty, so before Act 2 starts I whisper to her briefly what has happened in the first act; slip the programme into her hands. Her hands are raw, bony, red, fingernails bitten. She notices I’ve noticed and hides them under her fleecy. We laugh a lot – the audience – she doesn’t get the context, but chuckles when the characters use swear words.
After the curtain call, I begin to sweat at what I’ve done. A married man in Dublin, night before an early morning flight, ‘picking up’, no not that but… ‘entertaining’ a flower seller, a minor at the theatre.
‘Is the bar open, Mister, can you get me a Bacardi Breezer?’
‘Please stop calling me Mister, my name is John.’ I don’t know why I haven’t told her my real name.
‘Ok John, I’ve sat here with ya’s all dis time, I need a drink.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Old enough to be in here with you.’
I relent to buying her a drink, get myself a whiskey, two plastic glasses and we go outside for a smoke.’
‘I’d better see you home after this, it is late.’
‘Home! Late! Pah!’ She tells me her parents are away, it’s only her grandmother and herself at home, that it’s a ‘right dive’, that they sleep in the same bed, that her grandmother drinks, that she doesn’t go to school any more, was suspended for smoking and never went back. She can do numbers though, she tells me, knows exactly how to add up the prices for the customers at the stall and that’s all that matters.
Something about her is so vulnerable I find myself saying, ‘Mc Donalds or Burger King, which do you prefer?’ and take her for a cheeseburger and chips. There I tell her a bit more about myself, where I’m from, that I am married, have two daughters under ten, and about my early flight to Amsterdam in the morning.
‘Amsterdam, that sounds cool, will you take me?’
‘No, I will not take you.’
She looks dejected, says her grandmother wouldn’t miss her, would be glad to have her out of the way for a few days, that she doesn’t give her enough money, that she has to find a fella who can look after her.
I tell her she won’t meet the right sort of fella hanging around the streets at night and wonder if she goes to activities for her own age group, discos and stuff.
‘Discos? Youth clubs? You jokin’ me? Kids stuff! They wouldn’t let me in anyway.’
I talk to her about ambition, her future, what will happen when her grandmother ‘goes’, whether her parents will ever return. Have the ‘authorities’ been wondering why she hasn’t been to school.
‘Why are you so interested?’
I mumble something about maybe being a guardian angel that came along at a good time and she responds with saying ‘maybe a sugar Daddy’.
I don’t know what to do now. We have finished our food, pushed the rubbish into the bin and are outside the chipper, smoking again. For the first time I notice people noticing me, wondering if she is my daughter and how I allow a seemingly young girl to smoke. She pulls the string of her fleecy closer together, under it you can’t really notice what her breasts are like. We begin to walk towards the river, my hotel. I ask her then if she knows who Eliza Doolittle is? That annoying shrug again. I explain that she was a character in a great play and musical, that she was a cockney flower seller in London and this man took her on and made her a lady.
‘Was she preggers?’
I look questioningly at her.
‘Pregnant like. Did he get her up the pole?’
‘No, not that.’
‘Well, why did he take her on then. What was in it for him?’
‘It was in Victorian times, or Edwardian in fact, he was a linguist, wanted to prove a point, a bet in fact, yes a bet.’
This is all lost on her, and she fails to see the connection to us two. We reach the corner of Abbey Street and become awkward.
‘Look,’ I say, ‘I must go now, have that early flight to catch in the morning. Please let me walk you home. I’ll only go as far as you want me to…’ I eat my words.
‘No, that’s okay mister, John, sorry, someone like you… you’d only get mugged on the way back.’
I laugh at this, laugh and laugh. I ask her if she needs money, if she has a mobile phone number of her own, if she ever needs to talk again to ring me.
‘Nah mister, John, that’s allright, I’ll be grand, sure you know where the stall is. I’ll always be there, if you’re in Dublin like.’
I nod my head and keep nodding. I touch her arm. She walks away from me. I cross the Luas line to the front of my hotel and begin to tremble a little. I light another ciggie and watch her disappear around the corner. That night I dream of her, there will be many nights I will dream of her. Next time I’m in Dublin I will peer down into Moore Street, approach her stall, not let her see me, check if she seems ok, if her grandmother is about. Or maybe I won’t.
Noel King
Noel King was born and lives in Tralee, Co Kerry. His poetry collections are Prophesying the Past, (Salmon, 2010), The Stern Wave (Salmon, 2013) and Sons (Salmon, 2015) and Alternative Beginnings, Early Poems (Kite Modern Poetry Series, 2022). He has edited more than fifty books of work by others (Doghouse Books, 2003-2013) and was poetry editor of Revival Literary Journal (Limerick Writers’ Centre) in 2012/13. A short story collection, The Key Signature & Other Stories was published by Liberties Press in 2017. www.noelking.ie
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