Hemispheres Read Free

the window glass, drawn by the lamp, gentle and insistent. I watch a gob of sweat come adrift from
     Dave’s hairline and sway down the side of his face, making a neat detour round the eye socket and the corner of the mouth,
     disappearing below the neckline of his shirt. His hands appear on the table, cards in the left, the right hand tugging insistently
     at the watch strap. He has the cards.
    Thou shalt have a fishy, when the boat comes in.
    I fold, Fabián says. It is too much.
    His pupils are deflating to small, sharp coals. Blink.
    I don’t have that much with me, says Dave. Could get it in a couple of days, maybe.
    Nobody says nothing. Dave buckles and unbuckles the watch strap. The ash on his cigarette is almost to the filter, beginning
     to bend under its own weight, about to drop.
    Okay, he says, the boat. It’s ocean-going. You boys might need that. It must be worth the money.
    Blink. Blink. Blink. He has the cards.
    We’ll take the boat, I say, but you must show first.
    Dave nods, and then he begins to lay his cards down, one by one. The dancing light of paraffin, cards in motion, nothing decided.
     I try to stretch it out. I try to make it last for ever. One heart after another, fat red berries. He has a heart flush. Must
     have been dealt it straight.
    I drain my glass of beer. Astringent, medicine for the heart. Their eyes are on me, shining. The deep mahogany sheen of the
     tabletop. I begin to lay my cards down, one by one. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Four jacks.
    Softly and soundlessly, the pillar of ash drops into the ashtray and the cigarette dies. A moth still presses at the window,
     patiently and persistently, looking for the moon.

2 . Red-Throated Diver
(Gavia stellata)
    The cold moon burned like a thumbprint smeared on the windowglass of the sky. I leaned back against the shutters of the pub
     and teased bitter cigarette smoke into my lungs. It was three years to the day since Yan went missing on the Falklands. I
     remember the phone ringing in the bar that day and Kate running to get it. She looked happy as she went, the smell of hairspray
     trailing behind her.
    Back then it was all clunky mechanics, before fibre-optics and satellites and that. The baffling sequence of tiny relays and
     micro-switches it took to patch a phone call through the exchanges from one place to another. And if one switch among thousands
     flipped in the wrong direction you could be diverted to the far side of the world. Me and Paul used to play this game with
     the phone book. You pick an international code and dial a random number. Sometimes you get number unobtainable or the phone
     just rings and rings. But once in a while there’s a click as someone picks up and then you hear a voice. A real person, from
     Uzbekistan, or Tasmania, or Tierra del Fuego, someone you’ll never see. Someone you’ll never meet.
    When this happened we pissed ourselves laughing and slammed the receiver down.
    Kate didn’t like to see me smoking. Even though I was sixteen and she chained herself hoarse on them Superkings. You know
     the ones, look like a magician’s wand when you wag them between finger and thumb.
    I’m your mam Danny, she said. It’s a do as I say not as I do thing.
    Not my fault, I said. It’s the absence of a father figure.
    I leaned against those blistered shutters and tried to get my technique right. How did he smoke? There was a thumb and forefinger
     raise to the mouth, then a quick sucking of breath, the cheeks concave. Pursed lips and a furtive look around like a schoolkid
     smoking in the bogs.
    I watched the early traffic on Port Clarence Road, winding down towards the Transporter. My cigarette died in the raw blustery
     wind rattling down the river, and inside the pub the phone began to shrill.
    Phones get me thinking about life, about the complexity of patching yourself through from there to here like an electron singing
     in a wire. Each time you make a choice – no matter how trivial – you flip