The Briefcase

The days are getting longer, and warmer too. Summer and the finals of the rugby and soccer are just a few weeks away. It's Arsenal instead of Liverpool in the Champion's League final, but Munster have made it to the Heineken Cup final. It's great to have a home team in a major European final (it's never going to happen in the soccer) and it's even better that they beat another Irish team to get there. There are many home competitors in the final of the swan pocket billiards, which proved to be much more successful than the swan dating hockey.

My cousin Jessica is an art teacher, and she's a very good artist herself. She went to see her aunt Bridget one afternoon, and they went for a walk around the garden. Bridget pointed out a statue with its head missing, and she said she had no idea who broke it, but Jessica didn't seem to hear this. She just stared into space. She'd been doing a lot of staring over the previous few weeks.

She shared an apartment with a friend of hers called Leah, who was a typist. Leah wrote a play for raisons. There were twenty-six raisons in the cast, and each was known by a letter of the alphabet. The raisons all looked exactly the same, and only Leah knew which one was which. She did the voices of all the raisons, but each one sounded the same.

She rehearsed this play every night for a few weeks. Jessica always watched it because it was better than anything on TV, but she had no idea what was going on. She listened to Leah saying things like, "I thought A had the briefcase. No, A says J gave it to H. How did J get the briefcase? I don't know. T thinks M has it. No, I asked M. M thinks N has the briefcase, and M would know about N."

The pace of the play got quicker each night. It was up to fifty lines per minute, but the script was getting longer too. Each raison had an equal part, so if she added in a line for one raison, she had to add in one for the other twenty-five too.

It all became a blur in Jessica's mind, and it affected her art too. She paints very quickly, and she tries to re-create her impression of what she sees rather than rendering each detail exactly. When she tried to paint a small waterfall and an old wooden bridge over a stream, she ended up painting a marshland.

"Everything is becoming blurred in my mind," she said to Leah. "I need to do something to sharpen things up."

She tried painting a blue van, but it came out as the sea.

When she was in the garden with Bridget, the scene in her mind was set in a room. She saw someone hiding behind a lamp shade, someone else on the ceiling, and a woman with a stuffed fox under her arm, and she was happy with this scene because at least it was sharper than the marshland or the sea.

Bridget's son, Ronan, was performing in a play with his Amateur Dramatics Society. He told his brother, Alan, that he was playing Shakespeare in one of Shakespeare's plays.

"What play is that?" Alan said.

"I can't remember."

"I'm not surprised you can't remember, because I can't remember any Shakespeare play in which he appeared himself. I don't think he appeared in anything."

"They worked him into the script. I think it's sort of an amalgam of a few of his plays, so that gave them the licence to work him into the script."

Alan went to see a rehearsal, and in fairness, they did manage to include Shakespeare in a very seamless way. The scene was in a garden. A man was waiting for a woman there. She had been out looking for the three witches all day. A bloodhound knew where the witches were hiding, but they gave the dog a potion to make him sleep. When the woman arrived the man asked her to forget about the witches and marry him. As he was talking, Shakespeare arrived on the stage with a tray, and there was a piece of cake on the tray. She ate the cake, and she kept eating it as the man waited for her response. In an aside to the audience, Shakespeare said, "The witches have put a potion in the cake too. As you can see she's eating it very slowly because there's a funny taste from it. She'll be eating that for a while. I wrote this aside to fill the silence while she's eating. And I wrote the bit about the cake because I really like cake."

Alan told Jessica about how Shakespeare was worked into the play, and he worked his way into her memory too. In her mind she saw the room with the man on the ceiling and the woman with the fox. She imagined Shakespeare bringing tea and cakes on a tray, and the fox wasn't really stuffed -- he had been given a potion to make him sleep. The man on the ceiling said, "I thought you had the briefcase."

"Shakespeare said you had the briefcase," the woman with the fox said.

Bridget made some tea, and they sat down at the kitchen table. Alan said, "I remember a Japanese film where people drank tea a lot like this. They didn't say much. They just slowly lifted the tea cups to their mouths, took a sip, and slowly put them back down on the saucers."

"What happened then?" Jessica said.

"I can't remember. I know it ended with a sort of a monster chasing people through a city, destroying buildings and so forth."

Jessica looked up at the ceiling, and she imagined Shakespeare looking down at her. He said, "Hi Jessica. I wrote this tea scene to give me time to hide the briefcase. And I really like tea."

Alan's friend, Leo, was a roadie with a rock band. He had just returned from a world tour, and he had developed a fear of paint while he was away. If the guitarist in the band didn't like the colour of something, he got Leo to paint it. He once had to paint a cat green. The cat managed to avoid any of the paint, and it scratched Leo's arms in the process. He just bought a plastic cactus and pretended it was the cat. The guitarist said, "Does it have to look at me like that?"

Jessica offered to paint his portrait to help him overcome his fear of paint, and she had a feeling that the haze in her mind was clearing and she'd paint something sharp.

She painted a Japanese monster with laser beams from his eyes. The monster was chasing people who were wearing medieval costumes. A man with a Karate outfit was running away with a briefcase.

When Leo saw the painting he ran away saying, "This is just like Stockholm all over again."

Alan looked at the painting and said, "I'd have said Tokyo."

"At least it's something really sharp," Jessica said.

They went out to the garden to look for Leo, but there was no sign of him. In her mind, Jessica saw the man who had been hiding behind the lamp post, only he was hiding behind a tree now. The man who had been on the ceiling was trying to hide in the grass, but it was much too short. The fox was awake again, but the woman was asleep on the grass.

Ronan arrived in his Shakespeare costume. He was with some friends of his from the play, who were also wearing their costumes. When Jessica saw him walking into the garden, he walked into the scene in her mind too, and it all fitted together. Ninjas emerged from behind trees and bushes, but Shakespeare used his martial arts skills to fight them, flying through the air, kicking people on the head.

"It was you who broke the statue!" she said to Ronan. She was going to add 'and doped the fox', but she didn't.

She was the last person he expected to figure that out. She'd been talking in monosyllables like 'ahm' and 'who' for the past few weeks.

He thought his only hope was to pretend to be someone else. He already had the costume. So he put on a French accent when he said, "No, no, I do not know what you are talkeeng about."

She thought he sounded Japanese. "It was definitely you."

"No, no. I..." He ran away, and everyone else chased him.

They ran down the hill outside the house, past Leo, who was just emerging from behind the ditch where he was hiding. When he saw Shakespeare and his friends running by he thought it was just like Mexico, and he enjoyed Mexico.

The moose's head over the fireplace likes the snooker on TV. If you spend your days staring at a wall, I suppose you'd be in a good position to appreciate snooker. It's a great variation on staring at a green table. He enjoyed the rugby too, which is just men pushing each other on a field, one of the many varieties of that activity, but it's even better with swans.

A Dog on a Bed

On the day before yesterday, the ground in the garden was dry enough for me to walk around in my new shoes, but that didn't last long. There's no point wearing them in the garden anyway. I have to take a stick to keep the dog away from them, and if he can't get at the shoes he'll just try to take the stick. And if he does get the stick he'll get at the shoes.

My cousin Chloe spent a week in her aunt's summer house with her boyfriend, Bill. She was there with her friends, Jenny and Martha. Her brother, Gary, was there too, and he brought his friends, Kevin and Dan. The house was out in the middle of nowhere. Chloe and Bill had each other's company to pass the time, but the more time they spent together, the slower it seemed to pass by.

One morning, she leant against the window ledge at the front of the house. He stood on the lawn nearby, looking towards the front gate, and the quiet road beyond it.

"Maybe we'll find something to do in the shed," Chloe said.

They went to the shed at the back of the house. It was full of paint tins, boxes, old furniture and many other things that became unidentifiable beneath the dust and cobwebs. They found the front of an old brass bed, and after looking around for a few minutes they found the other parts of it too. Chloe suggested they put it together and clean it, just for something to do.

They put the bed together in the back yard. They removed the spots of white paint and polished the brass. It proved to be a great way to pass the time, and when they'd finished they spent another half-hour admiring their work.

Jenny arrived and admired it with them. She was holding a necklace with red plastic beads. "I won this when some Swedish people fell out of a boat," she said.

They went for a walk down the road.

Gary was at the lake with Martha. She was telling him about her dreams. "I often dream about talking to the wall. Sometimes I think it'd be nice to dream about something I can't do in real life, just for a change."

They met Jenny, Chloe and Bill, and they all went back to the house together. When they got back, an Irish Wolfhound was tied to the brass bed. He seemed very friendly. Chloe patted him on the head and he wagged his tail, but when she tried to remove his lead from the bed, he growled.

The lead was tied with a bow knot. It would have taken just one quick pull of the lead to remove the dog from the bed. Chloe distracted the dog by tearing a piece of paper into small pieces, giving Bill a chance to un-do the knot, but the dog seemed to know what they were up to, and he wouldn't let Bill anywhere near the bed.

As they were trying to figure out what to do, the Swedish people arrived. They looked very angry, and wet too, which is probably why they were angry. Jenny held out the necklace and said, "Ye can have this back."

"You can keep the necklace," one of the Swedes said. "Just say sorry."

"No. And I'm going to keep the necklace too."

"If you're not going to say sorry, then we want the necklace back."

"No." She put the necklace around the dog's neck. He seemed to like that too, and when one of the Swedes went to get it back, the dog growled at him.

They told the Swedes about how the dog seemed to like the bed, and one of them said, "Wouldn't he prefer a more comfortable bed?"

There was an Ikea self-assembly bed in one of the bedrooms upstairs, just waiting to be assembled. Gary's friends, Kevin and Dan, were staying in this room, but neither of them wanted to assemble the bed because they didn't know how, and even if they did, they'd just have a double bed for the two of them.

They brought the parts for the bed down and left it near the dog. Then they turned around for about ten seconds, and when they turned back, the Swedes had assembled the bed.

"That certainly looks more comfortable," Chloe said.

They all turned around this time, and when they turned back, the Irish Wolfhound in the red necklace was asleep on the Ikea bed.

"Why can't I dream about things like that?" Martha said.

"He just wanted a place to sleep," Jenny said. She turned to the Swedes and said, "What if I just said 'thanks' instead of 'sorry'."

"Okay. And you can keep the necklace too."

"Thanks."

"Okay."

They all went for a walk to the house where the Swedes were staying. They sat on the verandah for an hour, drinking beer and talking about making jam (the Swedes had just been to a jam-making exhibition).

When they got back to the house, the bed and the dog were missing. They looked all around the garden, and in the shed too, but there was no sign of either, and they surely wouldn't have missed an Irish Wolfhound on a bed.

A young girl arrived and said, "Has anyone seen my doggie? I left him here earlier."

"What does he look like?" Gary said.

"He has brown eyes, and his ears are lovely."

"Is he taller than you?"

"Yeah."

"We've seen him alright. I don't know where he could have got to."

"He's probably wherever the bed is," Chloe said. "And the bed is probably in the bedroom."

They went to the bedroom upstairs, and there was the dog on the bed. Kevin and Dan were there too.

"How did ye get the bed inside with the dog on it?" Gary said.

"How do you think?" Dan said. Their clothes were torn. Kevin just had one shoe -- the dog had the other one.

The dog was happy to see his owner, but he didn't move from the bed. His name was Brainey. "He'll come home when he's hungry," the girl said. "He ate a big box full of food this morning, so it could take a while. That's why he's sleepy."

"Is there any way of luring him out of the house?" Gary said to the girl.

"There was a woman at this thing in the park a few weeks ago. It was at something in the park on a Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago. I don't know what it was. They were selling things. Some people were anyway. Some people were dancing. And some were trying to hide a violin under their jumper. One person was anyway. But this woman was dressed as Maid Marion and she was singing. I don't know if she was selling anything or dancing. Well, I know she wasn't dancing. I could see that. At first I thought she was selling spoons because she was holding two spoons, but one of them belonged to someone else and the other was probably her own. Brainey was very interested in her when she was singing. He followed her everywhere. I think it scared her a bit. Even when she stopped singing he was still a bit interested in her, but he didn't follow her everywhere."

"So we just need someone to dress as Maid Marion and sing," Chloe said.

"You should do it," Gary said to Martha.

"But I can't sing."

"All the more reason to do it. You should try to do something you can't do. You might dream about it later. Maybe you only dream about talking to walls because that's the sort of thing you do in real life. You've got to try something exciting, something you think you can't do."

They found an old dress in the wardrobe, and they made a cone-shaped hat out of cardboard. They put a silk scarf on top of the hat.

Martha put on the costume and sang, but she was terrible. The dog closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep, but she kept singing. He was probably wishing there was a way of closing his ears.

The dog eventually got sick of it and ran away.

Martha dreamt about thumb tacks that night. "Lots and lots of thumb tacks," she said, and she smiled.

The moose's head over the fireplace likes the glasses we got for him. He's always preferred big things to small things, and when he wears the glasses, the things he has to look at all day are slightly bigger. We didn't exactly 'get' the glasses for him. We found them, and we couldn't find their owner. The wife's uncle says he once found a pair of contact lenses at the end of the rainbow. He couldn't be sure it was the exact spot where the rainbow ended, but when he first saw it he guessed that the end would be in a field a few hundred yards away, so he went there and found the contact lenses.

Dancing in the Pub

Easter has always been the time when work on the garden really gets underway. You can't hide from that. All the best places to hide appear in May when the leaves return to the trees. Or disappear.

My cousin Albert was in the pub one evening with his friends, George and Neil. The three of them sat in silence, and they knew they were all thinking the same thing. Lots of things were tempting them to get up and dance, especially the thought that Louise was just a few tables away, and a friend of theirs told them that she once danced on her own to the music in this pub. Everyone else was too busy watching her to think of joining her, and they regretted that later. She didn't seem to mind the fact that she was dancing on her own. She even lifted her dress up a bit to give her legs more room to move, or so the story goes.

Albert and his friends would have loved to get up and dance because it seemed fairly likely that she'd join them, but they didn't have the nerve. If only they could get her to dance first, it'd be easy to join her. They had once figured out how to rescue a cat from a roof using elastic bands, so they thought they could surely solve this problem.

They approached it in their own way, by conducting experiments in a lab, creating blueprints, explaining theories on blackboards. Albert wore a white coat and stood in front of a light blue wall as he told the others his plan to get her to dance using continuous sounds that alternated between different frequencies every five seconds.

This was just before Easter. The days were getting longer again, and they spent most of those daylight hours working on ways to get her to dance, but their experiments failed, and they always spotted some flaw in their plans.

They left the lab and looked at the white tiles on the ground at the bottom of a stairwell, where the sun shone in through a narrow window that ran from the ground to the ceiling. They looked at the light blue garage door at Albert's place. They just stood there in silence, looking at the flaking paint. The idea of the continuous sounds seemed stupid then. They walked past the factories, through the overgrown grass next to a wall of concrete blocks, and they went down a quiet road, a place they hadn't been in years. They stopped at a stop sign that was covered in dust.

Neil broke the silence. He said, "This dark world around me..." He was holding a small chrome flashlight. He turned that on and off a few times. "It works much better at night."

"So that's all we've come up with, is it?" Albert said. "A flashlight?"

"It would work much better at night."

"We're completely out of our depth here."

They went back to Albert's house. He looked at a letter that had arrived in the post, hoping it was from her, saying she'd like to dance with him in the pub. But it couldn't be from her, unless she works for the bank and uses their stationery to send personal letters.

He opened the envelope. No, she doesn't work for the bank.

He thought of asking Frank for advice. He was a bit of an expert on these things, and he knew Louise too.

So they went to see Frank. He lived in an attic room by the sea. 'La Mer' was on the record player, a very old version of the song. When they asked about Louise he sighed and told them about April days at the beach, when she walked barefoot and ran from the waves as they reached their highest point on the sand, and receded back out to sea. They played old records in this room, with Louise spinning around to the music.

"We're really looking for something much simpler than that," Albert said. "Just dancing in the pub."

"Ye're aiming too low. I could tell ye exactly what to do to get her barefoot on the beach."

"I think we're out of our depth here too," Albert whispered to the others.

They left Frank and walked along the beach. "What we need is sensible advice," Albert said. "Someone sensible to tell us what to do, because we'll never figure it out ourselves. If we want a woman to dance at the pub, we need to get a woman's perspective on it."

Albert decided to ask his cousin Rachel. The only trouble was, he was too embarrassed to ask her directly. He wanted to bring up the subject casually in a conversation.

Rachel's mother, Aunt Bridget, was organising a party. Albert, George and Neil volunteered to help in the preparations, just to spend some time with Rachel.

She was standing in the breeze in a field behind the house. She came here to think, but she couldn't think clearly about anything. She was trying to remember what she had written in an email to a friend, after getting a text from that friend saying 'Are you sure he was a pilot?'. Her mother had compiled a list of things they needed for the party. It was written on two sheets of paper that were held together with a paperclip. Rachel was also trying to remember some of the items on this list because she couldn't find it. She was trying to remember where she left it too.

At first she went into the back garden to think about these things, but her cousin Ted was there, along with his wife, Anne, and a friend of theirs called Judy. They were looking out over the fields. They spoke as they stared ahead, but they didn't seem to be listening to what the others were saying.

Rachel couldn't concentrate with them around, so she went into the fields. But when she tried to think there, she couldn't help remembering the three of them in the garden, and in her mind she saw them as three ghosts. The whole day was a bit of a mess, her mind and her hair blown all over the place in the breeze, her mind all mixed up.

Albert and his friends found her in the field. He spoke about the party, and he brought up the subject of the dacning-with-Louise as casually as he could. He asked if she had any ideas.

She just said, "Ahm... if..." A long period of silence followed. They looked at her hair moving all over the place in the breeze. "My head is just..." She moved her hands around too. "Maybe if you ask the ghosts."

"The ghosts?"

"Yeah. I don't know. Maybe. They're over there." She pointed out over the field, but she didn't seem too sure about that. She tried pointing in another direction. "There's three of them."

They found the 'ghosts' anyway.

Albert explained the situation again, and Judy said, "It's important to remember who you are and where you're going. Don't get distracted by the water, or the voices you hear in the distance, or the voices you infer from the hand gestures you see in the distance. I remember ten things, or maybe eleven, but ten of them had to do with looking into eyes. I don't know what the eleventh one was. There probably wasn't an eleventh one. And don't pick things out of your hair. Let's say that's the eleventh one."

'Look into her eyes' was the only piece of advice they took from that, so they decided to give that a go.

But when they were about to meet Louise outside the tennis courts, they spotted a potential problem. There was three of them and only one of her. Albert said he'd try first, and if he failed, the others could have a go.

He went over to her and looked into her eyes. That's when he noticed another flaw in the plan -- he didn't know what to say, but it didn't matter. She smiled, and he smiled too. He didn't need to say anything.

They walked away together. Neil and George thought they wouldn't get a chance to look into her eyes. They decided to focus their attention on Rachel instead, so they went back to Bridget's house to help with the party again.

They had tea with Bridget in the dining room as she discussed all of the jobs that needed to be done. She wanted them to sweep the concrete in the driveway.

When she went to the kitchen to get more tea, George said, "This is ridiculous. We were supposed to come up with a plan to get Louise to dance in the pub, but instead we're sweeping the driveway at Albert's aunt's house."

"It's your fault."

"You haven't come up with a good idea since you fell off that vending machine."

"It's still your fault."

"You're going to fall off the chair. Look up at the ceiling... Why won't you look up at the ceiling?"

"Because I'll probably fall off the chair."

"There's a crack up there and it's in a very funny shape."

Neil held onto the sides of the chair, and he kept looking straight ahead in case he accidentally looked up at the ceiling.

Albert and Louise were going up and down in the elevators in a tall building. The doors of the elevators had a gold tint to them.

This is almost as good as the dancing, he thought. But not quite, because no one could see them. Who'd believe him when he told the story? And even if they did, 'we went up and down in the elevators' doesn't sound much anyway. Other people would have ways of telling the story that would make it sound exciting.

He wanted the day to go on so that he'd have more of a story to tell, but he knew he'd have to do more than just look in her eyes again. He said, "Can you remember where you were when... last October... because last October I was trying to explain Freud to someone who thought I was talking about the film Gremlins. I'm sure there's a Freudian explanation for that, but I didn't know what it was."

"Hmm, let me see. Last October... In August I was walking across a rooftop, on a red brick building, an evening after the rain cleared. We went out through an attic window. The wall rose above the bottom of the roof, and there was a narrow path all the way around."

She demonstrated what she was doing in August by taking Albert to this building. They stood on the roof, and she said, "I remember listening to someone explain how to make a hovercraft up here, and I thought it was an odd place to explain the workings of hovercrafts. He could have told me at the lake. What would Freud say about that?"

Albert didn't really know, but he did his best to explain it in terms of the film Gremlins.

"And September was mostly bright coloured woolen clothes." She modelled the clothes for him.

She looked through the pages of a book and said, "The last days of September were full of swimming pools, people with small dogs and fake tans. And October..." She turned the page, and then turned it back. "Should I go back for October?"

She turned back to the previous page, and then the one before that. She looked through the book for a few minutes, but she couldn't remember October at all.

They went outside and she said, "Reading the word 'October' does nothing for me. I see nothing on the paper, but sometimes I close my eyes and see those words, and next to them I see the things those words mean."

She closed her eyes and smiled. "The hair salon," she said. "I can vaguely remember that."

They went to the hair salon and looked inside. The interior had a very modern look. There were three stylists inside, all dressed in black. They were standing completely still, in perfect balance with their surroundings.

"We need to distract them somehow," Louise said. "I want to look at their appointment book for last October."

An hour later, as Ted, Anne and Judy were getting their hair cut, Albert and Louise got into the office of the salon without being seen. Louise found last year's appointment book and looked through the pages for October. She found her own name in it, next to the name 'DJ Dolan'.

"I know him," Louise said. "But I haven't seen him around in a while."

The three ghosts were still talking in monologues. Anne said, "I often look at this finger. Not all of my fingers look like this one, which is handy. It's a nice way to pass the time on those long days when I feel like yawning quite often but I don't really yawn a lot, not as often as I look at my finger anyway. He talks about the mountains and all the colours he sees from a distance. He said it was a bit like when he got out of the ironing board. Sometimes he sees purple when he closes his eyes and when he opens them he can't be sure. No one could really say for sure, so I don't really know and neither do they, unless you ask them and they tell you something and it sounds more believable than that thing you heard in the old water trough that's full of rain water now, but the tiny ripples of the words in that are beautiful, and I'd rather believe something beautiful."

As George and Neil swept the driveway, they wondered what they could do to impress Rachel. "What about flowers?" Neil said.

They thought about this. Both of them imagined giving her the flowers.

"Wait a minute," George said, "there's two of us and only one of her."

"We'll have to think of something else so."

They went back inside when they'd finished the driveway. They were looking at a vase that Rachel had made in a pottery class. Bridget told them about it earlier. She said Rachel was very proud of that.

"Why don't we get her flowers so she could put in the vase?" Neil said.

"We already ruled out the flowers because there's two of us."

"Oh yeah."

Neil was holding the vase when they saw the three ghosts looking in the window. The new hairstyles gave them a fright, and Neil dropped the vase.

They picked up the broken pieces, and they had to hide the pieces behind their backs with Rachel's sister, Nicola, came into the room. She suspected they were up to something, but they insisted they were just out for a walk.

"There's no point in lying," Nicola said. "You'll always get caught out in the end. Imagine lots of different pins all mixed up together. They're all different sizes, and some have little balls on the end of them, and the balls are all different colours. Think of your lies all mixed up with the pins, but only one of them is a paperclip."

Neil picked up a paperclip and said, "Is this it?"

"You're totally missing the point of what I'm saying here."

Albert and Louise followed DJ Dolan as he walked through the city streets, talking into a microphone, but the microphone wasn't plugged into anything. They wore long overcoats, hats and dark glasses, and they hid behind newspapers.

DJ Dolan stopped at a park, and he said nothing for a while. Then he turned around and went back the way he came, talking into the microphone again.

"I remember now," Louise said. "In the salon we were getting ready for the opening of a new bar. And I remember going there with him. And then about half of the people there ended up in this park the next day."

Neil and George hid the broken pieces of the vase. They decided to try the 'look in the eyes' method on Rachel. They tossed a coin to see who'd go first, and Neil won. They met her in the hall. Her hair was tied down with hair pins. When Neil looked into her eyes, there was silence. They could hear the faint sound of the wind outside the door. She looked back at him, and he got the impression that her mind was crystal clear then, and that she knew they had something to hide.

Neil and George ran away. Rachel just stood there. She was trying to remember if there was something about a pilot on the list of things to do for the party.

Albert and Louise met DJ Dolan and they took him back to the radio station. His producer had been standing in for him since last October, mostly by just humming. He got back just in time for the end of his show, and at the end, Louise said, "Why don't we all go to that bar again?"

Neil and George did their best to avoid Rachel, but they bumped into her in the kitchen. Her hair was still tied down, and as well as the hair pins, she also had a paperclip in her hair. One of her hair pins was holding together the two sheets of paper with the list of things for the party.

They panicked. They were convinced that this meant she knew. "We're really sorry we broke your vase," Neil said.

She just looked at them, and they looked at her for a few seconds, until they could take it no more and they ran away. She kept staring into space after they left.

They avoided her all through the party. The two of them were alone in the dining room, in the silence at the end of the night after most of the guests had left. They sat at the table beneath the chandelier, with empty cups and glasses on the white table cloth.

"Look up at the ceiling."

"No."

"Just look up at the bloody ceiling."

"F off."

Albert and Louise finally arrived at the party. When she went with Nicola to get a drink, Albert took out his notebook. He had made notes of everything they had done that day. "Dancing in the pub, was it?" he said to Neil and George. "Well let's see what we have here. I don't think there's any dancing in the pub. There's going up and down on elevators. That doesn't sound like much, even with the gold doors. But what have we here? August..."

Rachel was tip-toeing down a corridor upstairs. She thought she heard a noise, and she was following the sound. When she turned a corner she bumped into the three ghosts.

"Oh my God!" she said. "They broke my vase!"

She went back downstairs, and she found them in the dining room. Albert was reading from his notebook and the other two were looking up at the ceiling. In her mind, all three of them were one, so she punched Albert in the stomach and said, "That's for breaking my vase."

When Louise saw him lying on the ground, she ran over to him and said, "You poor thing." She brushed the hair back from his forehead, and she kissed him.

It became crystal clear to Albert, Neil and George what they had to do all along. Just get punched in the stomach, or anywhere. You could easily get someone to do that to you in the pub, or anywhere. It was such a simple solution, but they'd never have thought of that.

The moose's head over the fireplace has never liked horses (although he tolerates them now because he sees the chance to make money at the races) but we recently discovered that he has a dislike of monkeys too. Someone gave the wife a painting of a monkey who'd just found a gold chalice with a metal detector, and he looked very happy. The wife tried putting it in many different places around the house, to see if it would work anywhere. We both agreed that the attic was the best place for it. She tried putting it on the wall opposite the moose's head, and he clearly didn't like it. At first we thought he just didn't like the painting, but when I showed him a photo in a book of a sad monkey who'd just lost his cowboy hat, the moose looked very happy with that. I can't think of any way to make money from monkeys, just to change his opinion.

These Days

It really feels like Spring now that the clocks have gone on. Summer is just around the corner, and the sporting seasons are coming to an end. The semi-finals of the Champions League (soccer), the Heineken Cup (rugby) and the rabbit table bobsleigh (it's a combination of many different sports and past times) are coming up. The finals normally coincide with the start of summer, and the outcome of the rabbit table bobsleigh is normally a good indicator of the weather over the summer.

My cousin Hugh thought it was about time he learnt how to swim, and his fiancee, Annabel, said she'd teach him. Hugh was a candidate in an upcoming local election, but he didn't seem to have much in the way of political ideology. Annabel bought him Che Guevara armbands, in the hope that this would push him slightly to the left.

The first lesson was on a Saturday morning. Annabel only showed him the armbands when they were at the pool. He refused to wear them at first, but she said that without them, left and right would become irrelevant because the only way he'd go would be down.

So he wore the armbands, and he forgot about them after a while, as he concentrated on the swimming, but then he noticed a man who looked just like Fidel Castro. This man was staring at Hugh. He took the cigar out of his mouth when Hugh looked over at him.

When the man with the beard and cigar made his way towards them, Hugh decided he'd learnt enough for that day and they left.

Annabel went to meet a friend of hers, and Hugh walked away down the wide pavement outside the swimming pool. The street was quiet. A line of cars were parked by the kerb. He noticed a bright red car that seemed to be brand new. When he looked in the window he saw a woman in the driver's seat, and he recognised her. It was his cousin, Charlotte. He waved and said hello. She got out of the car to talk to him.

She had spent that Saturday morning doing the shopping, just like every other Saturday. In a shopping mall, she stood behind a huge glass pane in the window, looking out. There wasn't much to say, but much to see in the silence. A man in a tuxedo walked towards her, but he was just handing out leaflets for a dry cleaners. He said, "I've been picking potatoes all day long, but you'd never guess that from the way I look."

She went to the supermarket to get the groceries, which were mostly frozen food. She looked at some blue things, green ones too, and she tried to decide which one to go for. She thought about the fact that these are the choices that require her most careful consideration, and they don't matter at all. She might as well just go for the green one because it makes no difference. Or the blue.

She left the supermarket, and she gave a few coins to the people collecting for charity at the door. She put the bags in her new car, and she took the trolley back. She drove home again and put all of the groceries away, then she drove back into town to meet her cousin Jane for lunch. She parked on the street outside the swimming pool, and she sat there, thinking about how Saturday is supposed to be different to every other day of the week, but it's just like every other Saturday. The silence could be from any day. Nothing ever changes.

She told Hugh she was meeting Jane and her friend Claudia for lunch, and they arrived a few minutes later. They were helping to organise a party for people taking part in a basketball tournament. "Everyone has to get some job," Jane said. "Myself and Claudia will be singing, and because of that we can't help with the food and drink. Imelda is doing that, and the last time she did it she bought wine that comes in boxes and caviar that comes in orange or blackberry flavours."

Charlotte sighed and said, "She probably shops in the same place I shop. I'd still be there now if I was trying to choose between orange and blackberry caviar."

Jane and Claudia sang one of their songs to cheer her up, and she did start to smile.

When Hugh saw the man who looks like Castro walking towards them, he asked if he could join them at lunch, and he suggested they leave fairly quickly. Jane and Claudia walked behind Charlotte, singing all the time. She smiled.

They had lunch in a cafe nearby, and afterwards they met Charlotte's friend, Rob, on the street outside.

"Every day is like every other day, and every week is like every other week," Charlotte said. "Apart from when I'm around Rob and I have to talk in broken English and pretend I'm from... Where am I supposed to be from again?"

"No, that was last week," Rob said.

"Oh. Did you sort all that out?"

"Is there a man in a blue suit following me?"

She looked around. "No."

"Yeah, it seems to have sorted itself out."

"I think I have someone following me too," Hugh said. He told them about the Che Guevara armbands and the man who looked like Fidel Castro. He asked Rob if he had any ideas on how to get out of it.

"Don't pretend you're from Cuba anyway," Rob said. "You could try Germany."

"Where was I supposed to be from?" Charlotte said.

"Spain. I wouldn't try Spain, because they speak Spanish in Cuba."

Hugh saw the man who looked like Castro walking towards them. He said, "I think I'll just stick with my original plan for the time being, which is just avoiding him."

"Will we go to see Bertie?" Charlotte said.

Charlotte drove them there. She smiled as Jane and Claudia sang in the back seat. Rob started to sing along a bit too.

Bertie was at his aunt's house. There was a small field at the back, which he hoped to make into a vegetable garden.

They stood in the field with Bertie, looking at the holes in the ground, or at the blue sky and the white clouds above.

He showed them a postcard he got from his girlfriend, Monica, who was on holiday in Mexico. "I love her postcards," he said. "Look at the handwriting. It's typical of her never to fall anything short of absolute beauty."

Charlotte read the card. It said: 'If Sean comes around with his metal detector and his shovel, tell him I'll kick him in the balls when I get back'.

"You have read it, haven't you?" she said.

"No, I could never read her writing, but it's beautiful."

"Yeah." She wondered if she should tell him what it says, but it looked as if the damage with the metal detector and the shovel had already been done. "Let's count the holes."

They counted them. Sixteen holes. Jane and Claudia were standing behind Charlotte, and they started singing 'A Day in the Life' by the Beatles, because there's a line in that about counting holes in Blackburn. The song was supposed to build to a crescendo at the end, but instead it faded away. "And that's what days do," Charlotte said to herself. "They fade away when you're expecting a crescendo, and you just have to learn to expect them to fade away and accept that."

Jane and Claudia were distracted by some people walking down a narrow lane at the other side of the fence. A man was looking closely at the ground as he walked. He was being followed by people in a bus shelter, who were carrying the shelter around with them. Every time he looked back, they stopped and pretended to be waiting for a bus. One man kept opening a newspaper. There were a lot of people trying to cram into the shelter. Jane and Claudia joined them.

The others went inside. Bertie had been doing some work on the house too, and he showed them that. He took them to a small room at the back of the house, which was part an old extension that had been added about thirty years earlier. The room used to be much bigger, but a plywood partition divided it in two. Wallpaper covered the partition. The bright sun slowly moved across the bare floorboards.

"I can't wait to show all this to Monica," Bertie said. "Of course, I'll bring all the furniture back in before showing it to her. There was a painting of a bay on the wall, and a mirror. Sometimes I forget what I look like without mirrors. I touch my face to make sure it's still there. That's what Monica would call an affectation, even though there's no one around to see it. I can't even see it myself without the mirror. But I can see it in the film of my life in my mind. I'd like to play a painter in that film, an artist. I'm not much of a painter, as you can see from all the white spots after I tried to paint the ceiling. I can never see the paintings when I see them in the film in my mind. It'd be handy if I could, because then I could just paint them, after learning how to paint. I got a glimpse of one of them once, but it was just a happy bee with a dolphin. It was very good, in fairness. I'd love to be able to paint like that. But I wouldn't paint that sort of thing. You could tell the bee was happy because he was smiling and he was wearing a cowboy hat. I don't know about the dolphin."

There was silence, apart from the sound of the birds outside. Charlotte was more depressed than ever.

They went down the stairs and out onto the quiet street. Rob said, "I never see myself in a film, but sometimes I see myself as a sad character in a play, one of the ones who talks in monologues after the others have gone. They say, 'They've gone now,' and they talk about how the others take no notice of her. Or him. In this case it's a him, but I'm thinking of a play where it's a her. She talks about what she'll have for breakfast, usually something she finds under the table, or he. They'll go through the rest of their day, which is the same as every other day, and then he or she will talk about holidays when he or she was young. 'When I was a girl or a boy on "something" strand.' People say I'm nothing like that, but that's the way I see myself sometimes."

No cars passed by, and there was no one else on the street until Jane and Claudia returned, along with all the people under the bus shelter, and they still had the bus shelter. They were effectively a choir then, singing 'Fly me to the Moon'.

There were many more people in the group. Most of them were outside the bus shelter. A woman with a tiara was holding opera glasses, and she was with a man in a top hat. There was a pig in a jumper, and a man with a black eye and his left arm in a sling, who was receiving the loving attention of a woman who looked as if she'd just found the love of her life, having previously been engaged to someone else, a man from a rich family who was about to inherit a fortune from a wealthy uncle, but he bet the last of his ready cash on a horse called 'Something in my Igloo', and the horse fell at the first. He didn't want his parents to find out about this, but he only got himself into more trouble when he borrowed the money from a man who was managing a band, but the band were more interested in breaking into people's houses than in playing music, and the man was glad they had such an interest in this. It all ended with people pretending to be other people, and other people pretending to be members of a Russian theatre group, then lots of running away and hiding behind furniture before the happy ending.

A lot of people came to look at and listen to them. Hugh was enjoying it, until he saw the man who looked like Fidel Castro walking towards him.

Himself, Jane, Claudia, Charlotte, Bertie and Rob took the bus shelter and ran away under it. They ran down streets, sometimes stopping for a rest. They turned to face the other way when a bus passed by. They were on a hill and they found themselves looking down on a park. A woman was at an easel, trying to paint a picture of a dog, but he kept moving. She kept saying 'stay', and it worked while she was saying that, but it seemed as if he only stayed because he was trying to figure out what 'stay' means. As soon as she stopped saying it, he walked on again, his tail wagging.

When they turned around, Hugh was face to face with the man who looked like Castro.

He took the cigar out of his mouth and said, "Are you any relation of the Deasy's down beyond Skipereen?"

"Yeah, on my mother's side."

"I thought so. Did I see you at The Hatter's funeral?"

"Oh yeah. I was there alright."

"I thought so. He was a gas man, The Hatter. As decent as the day is long."

A bus stopped at the bus shelter, and a man in blue suit got off. He said to Rob, "Where are those chairs you promised? Those pensioners are still sitting on boxes."

"Ich sprechen... not English anyway. Ich bin ein... not Irish."

The man in the blue suit didn't believe he was not Irish, not that it would have made much difference if he had, but the man who looked like Castro was a friend of his. They worked together for years. They spent the next twenty minutes talking about old times, the things they got up to at work just to pass the time, and The Hatter. The man in the suit wasn't concerned about the chairs after laughing at what The Hatter once wrote on a weather balloon. He shook Rob's hand and said it wouldn't kill them to get some cushions for the boxes.

The moose's head over the fireplace has recently acquired an interest in opera. One of the relatives once tried to sing along with an opera singer on TV at a New Year's party, but he got it all wrong. The first thing he got wrong was that he was a he and the singer was a she. You can't really blame him for being a he, and he had the drink to blame for his other mistake. He insisted that this was the only time he's made such a error, and anyone could make that mistake when you see someone dressed as a Viking. Someone pointed out that the singer on TV wasn't dressed as a Viking, but he said he was talking about something in real life. That put us off opera for a good while, but we discovered the moose's interest by accident, and we play some for him every day.