didn’t I hear them myself?”
Pat moved quite close to the sergeant.
“Who said it!” he demanded to know. “Who did?”
The sergeant tossed back his head, dismissively.
“Och, sure don’t you know! The same boys who said you have your trousers on the wrong way round! Pat—would you let go of my cardigan, please?”
Pat was in fact horrified to realize he had been holding the sergeant’s cardigan for quite some time. He brushed the oatmeal-colored arm gently and slowly moved backward, a trifle light-headed.
The sergeant gave him a big, unexpected smile.
“It’s not that I mind, Pat, but you see—it was a present from my mother.”
The muscle in Pat’s cheek jerked as he replied, “Yes, Sergeant.”
“Who’s still alive, thank God! Süll walking the roads of Gullytown and not so much as a bother on her!”
Dusting down his trousers, he rose and stretched, adding blithely, “Which is more than I can say for some mothers! Or other innocent folk who once upon a time were free to take the air about our litde town! Well—good luck now, Pat!”
The sergeant did not turn as he crossed the road to see the orange flames in the grate performing a strange sort of Japanese Kabuki-type dance on Pat’s white-mask face where he stood alone in the gloom, as if about to cry out or hurl himself into the fire but actually doing neither.
There can be litde doubt but that the effect of this small contretemps between the sergeant and Pat, plus, indubitably, the intense heat of the open log fire—and such was the level of his preoccupation that it never occurred to Pat to dampen it even slightly—was to establish within him a sense of great unease, of feverish uncertainty and unreasonable sensitivity, such as might be experienced in the tropics. Evident now as he stood by the window of his bedroom, attired only in his pajamas, clamping his hands over his ears in order that he might not hear the constant, piercingly taut strains of “Twenty-one Years” as the indomitable melody persisted, as though whistled from afar.
“Stop it!” Pat cried, stumbling as his eyes snapped shut and in that very instant he was no longer in a room complete with sideboard, bedside locker, and portrait of Mother but there beneath a rotating mirror ball—God it was so hot!—in a dancehall of the 1950s (“Welcome to the Merryland!” ran the neon) as he watched spellbound while his mother—the young Mrs. McNab!—glided along in a wide-skirted floral dress, smiling as she mimed the words of a familiar song—”Twenty-one Years“!! And, standing close by, dredging her flesh hungrily, the red-cheeked figure that was Sergeant Foley, sinking his hands deep in his pockets as he moaned lasciviously, “Would you look at that! Boys, wouldn’t you like to slip that the budgeen one dark night or another!”
It seemed as if no time had passed at all, Pat having been returned to his bedroom with “Foley” lying beneath him on the bed (he had just arrived back only moments before, having forgotten his keys), Pat’s hands suddenly clutching the policeman’s neck as he throttled the life out of him. There could be no denying the lack of restraint behind Pat’s eyes—unshamed, vindicated.
“You’re a liar!” he cried. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! How dare you insult my mother!”
“Pat! Pat you’re strangling me!” the sergeant gasped, a little intoxicated, only now becoming aware of the gravity of the situation in which he now found himself.
As he composed himself, already sensing the first pigments of discoloring on his throat, he looked up to see Pat rummaging frantically in the wardrobe. A holdall was discharged, landing with a thud at his feet.
“Pack all your things and get out, Foley!” he heard Pat cry. “I know what you’re doing! You think I don’t know? Making all that stuff up to drive me mad! To get me to confess! That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Oh yes! Oho but you’re the smart fellow!”
“Confess? But confess to what, Pat’#x201D;
“The donkey man! The Bannion women! What? I don’t know! The germs! Ha ha! The germs—what else?”
“Pat—are you on drugs?”
“No! I’m not on drugs! And well you know it! Maybe you are! Coming in here with your cock-and-bull stories!”
“Cock-and-bull stories?” gasped the sergeant, stroking his throat.
“About the stadon being burned down. What kind of an eejit do you take me for?”
“Pat—before you go any further might I remind you that anything you say may be taken down in evidence—”
Pat’s eyes leaped.
“Evidence! Ha! Prove it! Just prove I laid a