Mothers and Sons by Colm Tóibín Page A

softly, half indifferently, and not move from her seat or change the expression on her face. He did not want either of these things to happen.
    He turned and noticed that his friends still had not finished their drinks; they had barely put away their instruments.
    ‘I’m going out to the car,’ he said. ‘You’ll find me out there. Make sure you grab Jimmy up at the bar. I’m taking him too.’
    When one of them looked at him puzzled, he knew that he had spoken falsely and too fast. He shrugged and made his way past the drinkers at the front door of the pub, making sure not to look at anybody. Outside, as the first car of the evening with its full headlights on approached, he was shaking. He knew he would have to be careful to say nothing more, to pretend that it had been an ordinary evening. It would all be forgotten; they would play and sing until the small hours. He sat in the car and waited in the darkness for the others to come.

The Name of the Game

A S SHE CAME DOWN the stairs, Nancy glanced at the photograph; she wondered when it would be right to take it down. The wallpaper had been there for years, and she knew the space behind the frame would stand out. It reminded her even more sharply than the traces all around – the few pieces of heavy dark furniture, the plasterwork in the hall, the two or three oil paintings – that these floors over the old spirit grocer’s in the Monument Square had once housed George’s family in what had passed for splendour. The hallway was full of boxes now, and the plasterwork had not been painted and the old furniture had been left in rooms over the storehouse next door, and George was dead, and his mother, sitting nobly in a large chair in the old photograph, was long gone to her grave. There was no need any more, Nancy thought, for a photograph of a teenage George, overdressed, standing behind his mother. Some day, she thought, she would take it down and put it in the storehouse.
    That morning, alone at the cash register, while Catherine who worked with her was on her break, she had caught a woman stealing. She had noticed the woman standing in the centre aisle with no wire basket, merely a dishevelledshopping bag; she had begun to look through a catalogue of frozen food but had kept an eye all the time on her. And as the woman made a dart for the door, Nancy moved quickly and stood in front of her blocking the way.
    ‘Leave it down here.’ Nancy pointed at the ledge beside the cash register.
    The woman stood motionless as Nancy turned and locked the door.
    ‘Quickly, now, quickly.’
    The woman took two packets of shortbread biscuits from her bag. She dropped them on the floor.
    ‘In future,’ Nancy said, ‘you can do your stealing up in Dunne’s Stores. They have plenty of biscuits up there. Open your bag to make sure you’ve nothing else.’
    ‘You think you’re great,’ the woman said, opening out her bag for inspection. ‘With your little feck of a supermarket. You’ve nothing at all in it.’
    ‘Go on,’ Nancy said, unlocking the door.
    ‘Sure, you’re only a huckster, the same as your oul’ mother.’
    ‘If you don’t leave this instant,’ Nancy said, ‘I’ll call the Guards.’
    ‘Oh, do you hear her? She got all posh in the Square.’
    ‘Go home now,’ Nancy said.
    ‘Are you still selling the Woodbines in ones and twos?’ the woman asked. She was ready to go. Her face was red with rage.
    There was one other customer, a woman, moving quietly in the centre aisle of the supermarket, pretending not to listen.
    ‘Not one of you wiped your arse up there. I don’t know how the Sheridans ever put up with you,’ the woman shouted.
    Nancy moved towards her and pushed her out into the Monument Square.
    ‘Go on now,’ she said. ‘Go on up to the Hill with you where you belong.’
    Nancy closed the door and went back quietly to the cash register as though she had an urgent task in hand. She noticed the packets of shortbread biscuits on the