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And he welcomed it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Perth 2017
Fionn
A Saturday night in Nellie Magee’s pub was ablast with the musings of Irish folk. Those who left for a ‘better life’, which was often the way, almost to the point of ancestral inheritance. Fionn had been reading about the possibility of that recently, memory inheritance from the ancestors.
Being a logical thinker, Fionn—who was working his third evening in a row—wouldn’t usually be inclined to fascinate over something so conjectured, but tonight he was. He had even researched the noise of Tonn Clíodhna—the wave—crashing off the cliffs in Cork being a noise said only to be heard by the Irish, passed on for thousands of years through memory. And maybe it was all bullshit. A personal, subliminal force to find comfort when so far from home, but he loved the concept, and it really did make him feel less homesick; a state of mind which came to him more than anticipated when he’d left so little behind.
Still, these trains of sickly thought didn’t cut into his now more than hospitable life, because sure enough, Nellie Magee’s made him feel at home. A place where patrons vented about missing their grandfather’s funeral or the stress of renewing their visa, or that looming decision to move home to start a family. It was important to note the person often musing onsuch topics would be keeping a keen eye on the settle of their pint of Guinness on the bar. Important because it rounded off the picturesque scenes when he described them in his letters to home. The letters he wrote on a Sunday after dinner in Nellie’s.
Still, he didn’t have the luxury of refusing the Saturday because even though he was the owners, Derry and Nellies, most favourited new barman in the year he had spent working there, it didn’t stop him from being continuously grateful. To him, the hand that held gratefulness was often one coated in the thick residue of guilt, so he always offered to work on the night before the dinner.
What they’d given him by offering regular work had primarily attributed to what was the best year of his life. People might make the fair point of saying Fionn had little competition in the matter, and Fionn might agree.
No.
He would.
Hewouldagree.
But that didn’t take from the joy of it all the same. To live peacefully didn’t require a comparative suffering.
I’ve suffered enough.
It was right at this moment Fionn was full of discontent for the first time in weeks. Although given the events he expected to unfold tonight, it hardly surprised him.
He leaned now, on the back bar where spirits hung upside down against the back walled mirror,Guinness Est. 1759printed across it. He had been huddling into himself this way for the last five minutes.
He preferred it this way, instead of being out with the smokers, the opportunity to expel lingering musings onto paper while the soothing sounds of rebel songs were played by the corner band of bodhrans, fiddles, and tin whistles.
Pressed open near the gloss shelf ledge was his little black notebook he’d bought in the duty-free on his way down under. It was within these pages totalled to the value of €1.50 that Fionn found himself to feel content—mostly because he’d reached a point in life where he valued himself as more than that amount.
Admittedly, the notebook had been bought with the goal of writing down the night he’d been reunited with Áine Meaher. Áine Meaher with the beautiful eyes and the kind heart, and the calculated sentence structure of a modern-day goddess. But the notebook’s plan didn’t go that way.
This didn’t make him sad though, because in her place it had been filled to its near brim with words of his new life; a life where every corner and person and colloquialism inspired and brought about a story or poem or philosophical wonder.
Fionn wiped the bar’s stickiness onto his black shirt just below the stitched harp on his pocketed peck, then took a red pen from his ears ledge to write the thought he refused to let escape him before the next drink order filled his brain instead:
It calls me and beckons endlessly through talk to most mundane. I must tell it now, I’ve had enough because I have enough and I am no longer a man in pain.
Fionn had accepted only recently, though quite gratuitously, the urge to gamble was a recurring one. A haunting temptation that despite him not relapsing in, was still something he needed to, at times, conscientiously reject. But in the temptation, he no longer felt weak. He felt powerful for resisting.
A walloping smack swiped across Fionn’s arse, stinging past the jeans his shirt was neatly tucked into. His back arched to avoid the second wave as Gemma swanned past him with a bar towel over her shoulder and a hot toddy in her outer hand, more red from the whiskey than the one she’d used to smack him.
Fionn folded up the notebook and tucked it into his shirt pocket as he turned to face her, a grin on his lips and his arms folded into himself for her cheek.
“Back to work. A hen table is asking after you,” she told him as if her seniority to the role meant anything.
“Just because I don’t smoke doesn’t mean I don’t get my break like the rest of ye’ gobshites.”
“And just because you’re handsome doesn’t mean you get to take liberties. I’ve seen your fucking tips Fionn O’ Rourke. They’re outrageous.”
Gemma had often made comments similar to this since he started; comments with undertones of sexual apprise. And though Fionn had noted she was a beautiful woman for her tanned skin, midnight eyes and lack of give for anyone who dared to cross her, his entertainment of their shenanigans was limited to small bouts of flirtatious banter to pass the long working nights.
“I can’t help my popularity from the tourists. And to be fair Gemma, they probably tip me better because I get the order right,” he quipped.
