Fatty O'Leary's Dinner Party Read Free Page B

have fallen on deaf ears, as the attendant had by now summoned the First Class purser and they were discussing the case in lowtones. Fatty heard a few phrases as he munched on the last morsels in his mouth.
    â€œPut him back there … Bring those other two up and put them here … Not the sort …”
    His fate was revealed to him as tactfully as possible. He was to move back to his original seat and his two former neighbours would be transferred to First Class.
    â€œWell at least you should warn them that they won’t be getting any of the benefits,” Fatty said sarcastically as he gathered his belongings for his ignominious return. But in that respect he was wrong. Twenty minutes later, when Fatty returned to retrieve his copy of
Antique Furniture Review
, inadvertently left in the First Class cabin, he saw his two former companions enjoying a full First Class meal, laid out before them on sparkling white porcelain. And each, he noticed, had a full glass of Mouton Rothschild.
    Fatty returned to his seat, smarting at the injustice. Why should they be given treatment that had been denied him? What was it about them that made them worthy of a First Class meal while he was so cruelly and insensitively deprived? He looked out of his narrow economy window; the stars seemed to have disappeared and he could no longer see the clouds. And at that melancholy moment,the answer came to him. There was only one explanation, he thought. They were thin.



4
    I RELAND CO - OPERATED , AT LEAST IN respect of its weather. At the moment that Fatty O’Leary’s plane touched down on the runway of Shannon Airport, the morning sun burst through the clouds in glorious shafts of light, bathing the surrounding landscape with gold. Fatty did not mention to Betty the humiliations of the flight; it did not seem appropriate to mar with thoughts of recrimination this long-awaited moment of homecoming – for that is how Fatty viewed his first, tentative steps on Irish soil – a return home after a mere two generations of absence. So to Betty’s questions as to whether he had been comfortable and whether he had enjoyed his dinner, he merely replied in the positive; it had all, he said, gone very quickly.
    For whatever reason he immediately felt different, like a man with little or no past – a man poised on the brink of some immense self-discovery. Even in these first few minutes, it seemed to him as if something portentous was going to happen and that a new future was about to reveal itself. Of course it was just an airport, like any other, but the world beyond it was certainly different from the north Texas plains surrounding the terminal at Dallas: through a large plateglass window he could already glimpse, in thedistance beyond the low hills, the presumed green turf of those
Ur
’Learys.
    Waiting for their luggage to appear on the carousel, the passengers stood in that odd half-intimacy of those who have been brought together for a journey, who recognise one another, dimly, but who are now once again becoming strangers. Suddenly the bags began to emerge from the mouth of some subterranean hall, as if being pushed up from the caverns of Lethe itself. Fatty spotted Betty’s distinctive blue suitcase, and hauled it onto a trolley. Then came a succession of other bags, some similar in appearance to Fatty’s, but none of them actually his.
    â€œPerhaps there’s a second load,” said Betty helpfully, but Fatty, with sinking heart, knew that there never was a second consignment of suitcases. If a suitcase failed to appear, it was lost.
    He sought out a man in uniform, who listened sympathetically before directing him to a small office. This, like an office of lost souls, had the air of a place of no hope. A chart was produced, with pictures of ownerless archetypical suitcases, like a police notice featuring delinquent or dangerous luggage; if suitcases could scowl, then these did.