Cheating at Canasta Read Free

didn’t stop. In his mirror the road had gone dark again. He saw something white lying there but said to himself he had imagined it. In the back of the Cortina the embrace continued.
    Sweat had broken on the palms of Cahal’s hands, on his back and his forehead. She’d thrown herself at the side of the car and his own door was what she’d made contact with. Her mother was the unmarried woman of that cottage, many the time he’d heard that said in the garage. Fitzie Gill had shown him damage to his wing and said the child must have had a stone in her hand. But usually there wasn’t any damage, and no one had ever mentioned damage to the child herself.
    Bungalows announced the town, all of them lit up now. The Spanish began again, and he was asked if he could tell them what time the bus went to Galway. There was confusion because he thought they meant tonight, but then he understood it was the morning. He told them and when they paid him in Macey’s yard the man handed him a pencil and a notebook. He didn’t know what that was for, but they showed him, making gestures, and he wrote down the time of the bus. They shook hands with him before they went into the hotel.
    In the very early morning, just after half past one, Cahal woke up and couldn’t sleep again. He tried to recall what he’d seen of the football, the moves there’d been, the saves, the yellow card shown twice. But nothing seemed quite right, as if the television pictures and snatches of the commentary came from a dream, which he knew they hadn’t. He had examined the side of the car in the garage and there’d been nothing. He had switched out the lights of the garage and locked up. He’d watched the football in Shannon’s and hadn’t seen the end because he lost interest when nothing much was happening. He should have stopped; he didn’t know why he hadn’t. He couldn’t remember braking. He didn’t know if he’d tried to, he didn’t know if there hadn’t been time.
    The Ford Cortina had been seen setting out on the Loye road, and then returning. His father knew the way he’d gone, past the unmarried woman’s cottage. The Spaniards would have said in the hotel they’d seen the Virgin. They’d have said in the hotel they were going on to Galway. They could be found in Galway for questioning.
    In the dark Cahal tried to work it out. They would have heard the bump. They wouldn’t have known what it was, but they’d have heard it while they were kissing one another. They would remember how much longer it was before they got out of the car in Macey’s yard. It hadn’t been a white dress, Cahal realized suddenly: it trailed on the ground, too long for a dress, more like a nightdress.
    He’d seen the woman who lived there a few times when she came in to the shops, a dressmaker they said she was, small and wiry with dark inquisitive eyes and a twist in her features that made them less appealing than they might have been. When her child had been born to her the father had not been known—not even to herself, so it was said, though possibly without justification. People said she didn’t speak about the birth of her child.
    As Cahal lay in the darkness, he resisted the compulsion to get up in order to go back and see for himself; to walk out to the blue cottage, since to drive would be foolish; to look on the road for whatever might be there, he didn’t know what. Often he and Minnie Fennelly got up in the middle of the night in order to meet in the back shed at her house. They lay on a stack of netting there, whispering and petting one another, the way they couldn’t anywhere in the daytime. The best they could manage in the daytime was half an hour in the Ford Cortina out in the country somewhere. They could spend half the night in the shed.
    He calculated how long it would take him to walk out to where the incident had occurred. He wanted to; he wanted to get there and see nothing on the road and to close his eyes in relief. Sometimes