The Misremembered Man by Christina McKenna Page B

day.
    By the time Uncle Mick had come along, the fiery blood of his dissolute ancestor had been cut and thinned, to such a degree that only a weak trickle of lunacy remained.
    If there was madness in Mick, Jamie never saw it.
     
     
    The bicycle was propped by the gable, in the shade away from the saddle-cracking sun. From the bag that hung at its rear, Jamie extracted his shopping: first the newspaper, followed by a pot of lemon jam, a currant loaf, a tin of Andrews Liver Salts, and a white grease-stained bag containing an apple turnover and a cream slice. He cradled the goods in his left arm and rebuckled the saddlebag into place, a precaution he’d been forced to employ since the previous March, when a couple of mice had adopted it as their home and started a family.
    On rounding the front of the house, he stood for a time contemplating the scene before him. His eyes traveled out across the fields and homesteads that stretched away in the distance, to meet the Slievegerrin mountains. In the hazy sunlight they appeared vague, obscure, as if seen through breathed-on glass. Above them, a vast blue sky was building clouds in rumpled masses of dove-flocked grays and whites.
    What did Jamie see when he observed this tranquil scene, with its clumps of whitewashed dwellings and scatterings of short-shadowed cattle? In truth, he saw very little of it. The scene had become so familiar that all its rich beauty had faded, had been bled out to frame a mere backdrop to Jamie’s colorless musings.
    The time he stood there gazing out across the fields was time torn from the present and fed to the murky past that trailed like sludge behind him; the past that messed him up and slowed him down to despair and indecision. For with Mick’s death, the memories of that child who’d answered to a number and not a name had risen again. That lonely, frightened boy standing in the wind-torn darkness of the past had come back to haunt him both day and night.
    It was why, now more than ever, he reached for the drink and the lung-rotting smokes, the sweet cake in the greasy bag, the accordion in its musky case; all those fleeting pleasures to anesthetize his pain. Such joys lit the darkness, burned away the memories for a time, so that he could see all the way to “the sunlit clearing,” to that hallowed place where the future hadn’t shaped itself yet—a future which he knew to be one hundred times better than the present.
    All he wanted was to somehow get there, and taste that joy which everyone but him seemed to be experiencing. And at that point in his beleaguered life, with middle age upon him and his loved ones gone, he felt that sharing his thoughts and few possessions with a woman might be the answer. He looked down at the newspaper and his armful of shopping and, with a wan smile, turned and went into the house.
     
     
    After wetting the tea, he spread out the newspaper on the table, plonked his mug beside it and ripped open the pastry bag. The torn bag would do duty as a plate.
    The cream slice had collided with the pot of jam in transit and emerged from the bag looking like a bull had sat on one end of it: a soggy, half-flattened rectangle with a frill of cream bursting out over the apple turnover and mapping the paper with greasy blots. Jamie was not too bothered at the sight of the ruined slice. Sure wouldn’t it get crushed in his mouth anyway, and who was about to see the state of it, only himself?
    He ate with his right arm curled round the bag. In the orphanage he had learned to guard his meager rations from the other inmates in this way, his forearm becoming at once a barrier and a weapon which helped him survive.
    When he’d finished eating, he wiped the crumbs from the newspaper and started reading the entries slowly, using his index finger as a guide. He stopped under each word as if stitching a series of short rows along the page. He’d learned this reading technique in the schoolroom, and had never forgotten it. When,