Cold Eye of Heaven, The by Christine Dwyer Hickey Page A

this already shadowy street. The clash and wallop of noise; Irish-flavoured music from gaudy interiors of souvenir shops; buses wheezing and squawking like wounded animals. Motor cars. His head starts hopping again. Two foreign gypsies, long skirts and shawls, come sidling up to him, whimpering a begging prayer. A long thin hand comes out of a doorway asking for change. Another gypsy is changing a child’s shitty nappy on the step of an office. She folds it over and just fucks it there on the ground before hauling the child back up on her hip and moving away. He reaches the corner where yet another junkie, hood pulled over his head, is whining into a mobile phone. Farley stands a few feet away from him. From the side of the hood, an eye surveys him. Farley moves further away. Twenty years ago he’d have planted the bastard. Ten years ago he might have even tried.
    He puts his head down and keeps his walk brisk until, in a step that passes from shadow to light, he finds himself in the centre of the bridge.The sky clear and broad, the river air cold and sweet, the light sitting on water like cut glass. The ghosts all departed now, Farley sighs through his teeth and squares back his shoulders; stronger now, renewed. He has walked through his fear. He’s alright.
    It just goes to show you, Farley says to himself as he comes out of the shoemaker’s with an hour to kill. It just goes to show you, he says it again, while he tries to shape and capture the end of the sentence into whatever it is that it just goes to show you. Ah yes – the way you’d be worrying. Worrying about things like the business with the shoe and being thought of as a skinflint and after all that, there was no need to explain himself or make up a story about a one-legged brother. ‘Can you fix that shoe?’ he’d asked and been told then to come back in an hour. Bang, deal done and no more about it The shame of poverty, Farley wonders, does it ever really leave us, no matter how distant or dim?
    An hour to kill, that’s all he needs to remember. An hour. He looks at his watch, just gone eleven. Across the street a large group of men are standing at the wall smoking and talking; a look about them, slightly rundown, a shimmer of danger; eyes watching his every move. On this side of the road, just outside the pub, a girl in a red coat is smoking, hands mauve with the cold.
    â€˜What’s going on over there?’ he asks her.
    She gulps on her cigarette smoke. ‘Taxi men.’
    â€˜On strike?’
    â€˜Ah no. Just waiting.’
    â€˜For what?’
    â€˜Customers, I suppose.’ She bites down on another blast of smoke.
    Farley only notices then all the taxis parked along the road from top to bottom. A rush of yellow comes into his eye. He pats it with his glove, the yellow curdles, then disappears.
    â€˜I used to know a taxi man owned a racehorse,’ he says.
    â€˜Yea?’
    â€˜Yea. Are you not freezin standing there?’ he asks.
    â€˜Sure, what can I do?’
    â€˜I gave them up meself, years ago.’
    â€˜Still miss them?’ she asks, not unfriendly.
    â€˜Ah, not really, I was never much of a smoker. Did it more for show than anything else.’
    â€˜I tried to give up a few times,’ the girl says, ‘but I missed the company of them like?’
    â€˜Why, do they talk to you or somethin?’
    The girl smiles. ‘Going in for a drink?’ she says, tilting her head towards the pub door,
    â€˜I’m not much of a drinker either.’
    â€˜Don’t smoke. Don’t drink, Jesus what must that be like in this country?’
    Farley shrugs. ‘I tell you what it’s like. It’s like being a foreigner. It’s like you don’t belong here. Like everyone secretly hopes you’ll shag off back to wherever it is you’ve come from. That’s what it’s like. Anyway, I’m off, mind yourself now, good girl.’
    â€˜Girl!