Sean

“It’s very simple, Sean, you blackguard, you oaf, you,” Sir Drustan Tilian does the theatrical frown of the amiable drunk, too far into the gin to finish his quip without stammering, “you, you, uh, man.”

He points woozily at the table, which is festooned in gamblers, all baying and jeering in sloppy chorus. Lady Keir, who returned to Ildathach three weeks ago from her hunting expedition in Ys, has taken a position at the baize-covered table opposite of her opponent, a gentleman I do not recognise. She’s wearing a fashionable sleeveless silver tunic, and her wrists are wreathed in orchids. A dealer, the table’s buffer zone and by far the most sober person in the room, lurks statue-still between them. He’s dressed in a charming summer livery that clashes with his sombre countenance.

Drustan returned from his expedition with Lady Keir with an unexpected bonus, for the expedition managed to bag not one but three gwylls. The last of those decapitated heads was sold at an auction in this very club earlier this afternoon, and now the Lady seems content to burn through all of her earnings at record pace. She’s been back in the city for barely longer than I have, but over the last fortnight she has already spent all of the spirals she made from her other two trophies, and seems determined to spend the bounty from the third at breakneck pace.

My friend has taken the original approach of not betting on the game itself, but rather on its competitors. This is scientifically safe, according to him, though I fear that someone rather more mathematically minded has informed him of the idea, and he is repeating it to me, misunderstood and second-hand. I’m actually not familiar with the exact game the two are playing- some fashionable import from the Far Coast, played with jade and onyx tokens and rolled animal vertebrae. As far as I can tell, the most important single skill to the game is maximising resentful body language, and both players are virtuosos in this regard.

“You take the bet for one of the players, right? Your odds of winning are half,” The alcohol peals off of Drustan’s lungs and into my face directly. I’m not sure he’s right, but I can’t actually articulate why, because I’ve also been drinking. Only a little. “If you bet on one of them. My money is on Keir, of course.”

No title. How informal, exactly, did they become on the trek?

“So if you have a half chance of winning, all you have to do is double your bet if you lose, right? And then if you lose twice in a row, you double that bet, and so on, until you eventually win, and in that way you never really lose your money.”

This sounds like the calculus of the half-informed. I wish Íde or Iseult were here, to check his maths, because I’m on very thin ground here. I use all of my brainpower to mull this over, and try a critique: “But then… wouldn’t you be down an amount equal to eight times your initial bet if you lost four times…?”

He throws his hands in the air, spilling half of the gin in his glass over the rug. “Yes, but what are the odds of that, eh? One in sixteen! For an eight times payout! I’m telling you, you clodpate, it is a foregone thing.”

I’ll take his word for it.

There’s a bellowing from the crowd, which brings both of us back to the action. Lady Keir has lost, and stands, arms folded and face indignant as the other gentleman bows to his audience, his valet sweeping great armfuls of tokens into a velvet bag. One of the Vardon siblings, a young lady who must be Íde’s age, has both hands on the table and is saying something ferocious to the stony-faced dealer. Her sister is congratulating the winning gentleman, who at this point is drawing a jovial mass of ladies and gentleman from Lady Keir’s side of the table.

I slap Drustan’s back. “Bit of a shame then, that she’s lost? How much are you down?”

“Oh, Sean. Sean Sean Sean. I’m definitely,” he pats a chest pocket, then frowns and pats the other side of his blazer. “Probably still up. You must have more faith in the system.”

We walk together, his arm slung over my shoulder, though detach and then draw ourselves to more respectable poses as we enter the threshold of Lady Keir’s social space. He greets her, formally, and claims she had an excellent match. Actual, genuine compassion- Drustan, despite his attempts at cultivating a scoundrel’s reputation, is more of a charmer than a cad. I offer my condolences, which do nothing to alleviate her obvious sourness. The light of the room’s low candles reflect off of her steel spectacles. She says something in a soft voice to Drustan, nods cordially at me, and leaves without a word.

Now that this main event has concluded, the room has started to empty. There’s a bar here, which held the attention of the club members while it lasted. We have sucked it entirely dry, and thus will inevitably filter back to the main bar located in the central hall of the Shellflower Club, which is both gorgeous and well stocked. We join the tail end of the mob, which has decreased very slightly in number as its members succumb to the cumulative effects of hours of carousing and alcohol and narcotics. On the trek back to the main hall, I watch a coated man spin off of the group while trying to button his jacket, and stumble to lean against a bust to Saint Gramarye. He almost ricocheted off of the enormous wall-mounted Chaplain’s seal, barely avoiding toppling the crown-in-the-crucible motif. Now that would’ve been interesting.

“How about you, you rascal,” Drustan pokes me in the ribs, speaking loudly enough to be overheard by the crowd immediately around us. “I’ve been told you’ve been busy in the Wraithwild, just two weeks ago. With a Bani Yathrib tribeswoman and an Ildathach lady, no less, you utter reprobate. Though if I recall correctly, the former is highly allergic to fun.”

It’s easy to forget the number of people who know Iseult. She never talks about it.

I don’t need to look to know whose attention he’s trying to get. Just as we cross the threshold to the new part of the club (the original building was cut almost exactly in two by the Calamity, and they’ve kept the dividing line for some reason or another), a man and a woman move just within polite earshot. We troop down the stone corridor of the Shellflower Club, past glowering portraits of important club members and chic paintings of Khazraj landscapes. In this part of the building, which does tend to attract more louche crowds, the walls are more likely to be decorated with oleographs rather than actual paintings.

Subtlety through obviousness. I’ll play Drustan’s game. “Oh yes,” I reply bombastically. “Almost a month abroad. Lovely place, the Wraithwild. Must respect client confidentiality and all that, so can’t tell you why we were there,” I wink, outrageously. I hope it’s audible. “Or about the dayn we killed.” I’m quite sure that was mispronounced, but I give it a shot anyway, trying to sound suitably foreign. Hopefully this pair doesn’t speak any of the Wraithwild languages, and I can feign more exotic linguistic knowledge than I actually have. He replies, reeling the satellite couple towards us.

“A secret mission! And you killed a- a thing! And I suppose it didn’t hurt, being out there in the wilderness, protecting two young ladies…” That last one, delivered with a trailing drip of innuendo.

I give him a deadpan glare while delivering the next line, my expression entirely unmoored from the smarm in my voice. “Oh, I wouldn’t dare discuss that part of it.”

*

His name is Sulwyn, hers is Eirys, and after we have established that they are not romantically entwined through an initial barrage of questions and mild flirtations of compatibility, we decided to abandon the Shellflower Club for new territories. The party was still in a feverish state by the time we left. One of Lady Keir’s entourage had shattered an immense, orchid-staffed vase in the main hall, and we made our exit in the ensuing brouhaha. Drustan had rallied and made the empty bravado of a drunk man defending someone else’s honour: “What ruffian did this?!”, but he has ended up so entangled with seducing Eirys that we pulled him from the Club easily enough.

We spin out into the Ildathach evening. The aurora twists, sky-wide and furious, overhead.

I’m side by side with Sulwyn, easily pacing the meandering pair in front of us. He doesn’t seem nearly as drunk as she does, nor am I to Drustan, so we form a sober rear-guard to the woozy couple that stumbles down the street ahead of us. The air outside is chillier than inside of the sweltering heat of the dance hall, but still comfortable. Sulwyn reaches over and brushes away an orchid petal that is stuck to my shoulder.

Eirys whirls around, temporarily breaking free from Drustan with a riotous giggle. She laughs, truly laughs from her heart. “We’re going to The Sheep’s Head in Hackcloth Row,” she blurts out.

Not far from my flat. Did Drustan let something slip?

A swirl of yellowing leaves scutters across the oil-lit streets. I’m gripped with a sudden bolt of sober thought- surely it cannot yet be turning to autumn. We were only gone for a month, and yet the city changed so quickly. Selwyn lights a cigarette, and I watch the smoke leave his lips and trail upwards into the sky.

My musing is interrupted by Drustan, who at this point is on that ambiguous teetering position between being quite drunk and being extremely drunk. He gives me a devilish look before spinning on one heel, towing Eirys behind him laughing, and makes down a side street to avoid the flow of sewage that has bubbled up in the main road ahead of us. He feigns disgust.

“Smells like an Ysian high street.”

Eirys shoves him, hard. Playfully? “Fuck off, Ildathacher.”

“Ah, yes, I do apologise, I forgot our company. No offence, of course. I do love your country and its distinct odours. All those butteries and cheeseries and,” he shuffles his hands, imitating Ysian hand gestures. “Uh, milkeries.”

The pair of Ysians, exasperated, throw their arms up simultaneously.

We walk the twenty minutes to Hackcloth, and descend into The Sheep’s Head. Literally descend- it’s down a narrow flight of steps that squeezes Sulwyn’s body against mine as we barely fit into the heavy, charred door that entirely insulates the place from the city outside. We walk through a cloud of liquorice-scent courtesy of the flowers above the door, great purple spikes that I think must be giant hyssops. Inside, under the street, the air is choked with the heady scents of tobacco and tigerleaf. Sulwyn grabs Eirys, and excuses himself, saying that he’ll locate a table.

“So, what do you think?” Drustan asks me, sincerely. “She seems… yes.”

It’s loud. There’s a woman ferociously playing a fiddle in the corner, and a man beside her belting out Crowmere dancing chants with a small group of drunk merchants. The entire bar would fit in a space half the size of the gambling room in the Shellflower Club. I lean forward and shout directly into my friend’s ear.

“She does seem ‘yes’, Drustan. I think we should order from the bar, though, it doesn’t appear that they have table service.”

He manoeuvres like an overdressed iceberg, and I scan the room to see where our new friends have gotten to. My eyes are adapting to the nicotine fog. When we entered, I didn’t notice the age of the people in the bar. Or the cut of their coats. Looks like mostly students. I swing my eyes across the room, looking at the muggy, packed alcoves. Our friends have somehow managed to secure a place embedded within a wall, not far from the door. The booth to their right is overflowing with a crowd of boisterous youths, much of which spills considerably onto the floor. They’re young and animated, and one of them looks remarkably like Íde. The booth to their left is mostly morose drinkers in that stage of the night where they-

Wait.

We lock eyes, and her face goes through about ten emotions, one after the other. Eventually, her eyes bolt wide open, and she slowly holds up her hand in quiet, astonished greeting. Her friends closest to her stare at her hand, then at her eyes, then to me, and then collapse into a circle of interrogation with her at the centre. She snaps her gaze away before snarling something back at them and turning bright red. Drustan follows my grin, and announces, “I knew it! You dog! You rascal!”

I pivot neatly to the bar and buy four beers from a surly Crowmeren girl who must be close to a decade younger than me. The whole round costs less than a single cocktail at the Shellflower Club. Thus armed, I pass a pint to Drustan, seize three for myself, and make my way to back to Sulwyn and Eirys. I set two drinks down, keep one, then hold up a finger and shout over the din. “I’ll be right back.”

Sulwyn frowns, and Drustan waggles his eyebrows. Eirys looks contentedly at the pair of them and sets upon her glass like a woman dying of thirst.

I pull myself together and slip over to Íde’s table.

Definitely students. One hobbledehoy looks up at me blearily, his leg outside of the confines of the booth, and begins to swell, just at the cusp of belligerence. He turns to look at his friends, fumbling for support for the insult he’s going to deliver unto me as I eclipse the table. When he notices that they are all staring at me, and Íde is grinning, he breaks eye contact.

“Fancy seeing you here.”

My line has to be delivered over a belting Crowmere shanty, so I time it in the instrumental just after the chorus. It lands. Íde says something, when the pub erupts in applause, and I absolutely cannot make it out. She is bad at this. I debate squeezing myself in to the booth, then realise that I would crush a poor student underneath me if I tried. Instead, I give her a wink, then beckon her out.

She’s really bad at this, and plucks herself awkwardly over the scrum of legs and bodies that her fellows have created. When she eventually extracts herself from the pack, she embraces me in a sloppy hug. I can smell the beer on her breath. She steps on her tip toes and shouts into my ear. “What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

She looks up at me with a glazed, happy expression. We’re not at the same level of drunk. At least, I assume with her, it’s alcohol. Looking at her eyes, she could be on something harder. Henbane, maybe. I look at her friends and give them the warmest smile I can muster, and am met with a pigeon’s gallery of approval and indignation. I don’t actually need to talk to her in front of her cohort, and lean down to speak to her. “Let me introduce you to some friends of mine.”

Íde thinks she’s discrete, but the look that passes between her and her friends is blindingly crass. I tilt my head towards our original booth, and take the corner with a grin. “Hey, look who I found- “

I trail off. Sulwyn has vanished. I debate searching for him, and feel my mind split neatly into two different factions. Go find him, half of me says. Don’t bother, the other half replies.

The latter wins.

Drustan and Eirys are wrapped in a very close conversation that I choose not to interrupt. Undeterred, I point to the front door, and Íde follows me outside, up the tight stairwell.

The street sounds dead. My ears are ringing, and my nose is clogged with nicotine. The craving strikes me, and I pat my jackets for a cigarillo, eventually finding a pair of loose ones in one of my chest pockets. I draw them out, and offer one to Íde, knowing she will refuse.

She takes it. I raise my eyebrows, then remember that I’ve never actually seen drunk Íde. Now to find the matches.

Íde stares at me for a moment, then looks up and to the side as if she’s thinking. “I could… write a sun sigil…”

Saints, she must be very drunk. Luckily I find a box, emblazoned in Scannell’s colours, in my trouser pockets. I light both of us, and we list in the darkness outside of The Sheep’s Head. It’s the weekend, and the streets aren’t totally empty. Warm oil light spills unevenly into the street, bathing us in a quiet orange. There’s a gang of partygoers about ten yards away from us, carousing and smoking. We watch, quietly, as a muttering man urinates just below a sign proclaiming COMMIT NO NUISANCE.

Íde looks up at me and takes a strong drag, which doesn’t send her wheezing.

“What are you doing here?” We ask the question simultaneously. I laugh, she grins, and I hold my hands up.

“Drustan- the, uh. The gentleman in the booth. He started talking to that woman, and she brought us here from a club we were at.” I omit mentioning Sulwyn. She nods, and looks like she’s going to ask a further question. She doesn’t, so I fill in the quiet. “What are you doing out?”

Íde shrugs. “We finished. Iseult did most of it. At the Violet Manor.”

They finished! Iseult didn’t bother to tell me. I don’t think Íde noticed my surprise.

“Did you tell Colt & Tumble? The launch date is set for a month from now.” A thought strikes me. “Wait, is Iseult here?”

Imagining Iseult in a place like The Sheep’s Head, her choler compounded by the noise and the crowd and the roasting, tobacco-filled air, is hilarious.

“No,” Íde says, and I feel very slightly let down. “I mean, yes, Colt & Tumble is aware. I think. The Wine Party is aware. So Mister Tumble should now. But no, Iseult isn’t here. She couldn’t keep up with the drinking.”

Iseult would never actually admit that. Íde sees the look on my face. “Alright, maybe she didn’t phrase it the same way. But she said she had somewhere else to be. We talked for a few hours, then she left at about the same my friends,” she waves aimlessly at the stairs that lead down into the pub, “showed up. An hour later, we relocated here. My friend knows the musicians.”

A slab of soberness presses down on my eyeballs. Maybe it’s being alone and outside. Íde looks like she hasn’t slept in a day or two. She stares off down the road, fixated on some distant point in the darkness. “I think I understand a bit more about her now, to be honest. Second time doing that kind of work with her. How,” and here she pauses, like she’s just thought of something. “How old is she, anyway?”

I’m learning all sorts of things tonight. Íde, drunk and impatient, actually interrupts me before I can speak. “Thirty-three? Thirty-four?”

“I know a lot of women who have been thirty-three for years, you know.” It’s an easy quip, but one she hasn’t heard before. She laughs, a sort of raw tinkling, and looks me dead in the face. “No, really.”

I could probably tell her anything, and she wouldn’t remember in the morning. I opt for the truth. “I’ve never actually asked her.”

She nods, content, then careens off to a new topic. Very shortened attention span. “So, let’s talk about you.”

Brick-subtle. She’s staring at a point about half an inch under my nose. I was like her, at her age. “What about me?”

“My friends in there,” she waves her hand. “They think that we’re… you know.” I don’t press the conversation, and instead nurse my cigarillo. Unbidden, she holds her own between her teeth, and makes a lewd hand gesture. I ignore this and retort. “I noticed that they all seemed rather interested in me.”

Her face is framed by a cloud of blue tobacco smoke. She cackles again. “And why not? You’re very, uh. You’re. You’re very gentleman. Noble family.”

Saints preserve me. I debate being direct with her, and opt instead to tell her a different sort of truth, and steer the conversation somewhere else. “Not much to say about them. I haven’t seen my family since I left Llancreg. Coming up on six years now.”

She peels away, somewhere between curious and frustrated. “Why, what happened?”

“My mother died.”

It’s a cheap trick. A haymaker phrase, right to the chin. It sobers her temporarily, and her newfound smarm evaporates. “Sean, I’m really sorry.”

Speaking about my mother, invoking her like this, it always dredges up the memories. I remember, when I was a child, she took me aside after a meeting between my parents and a representative from Ildathach. She’d cursed, quietly, before telling me about the city-people, and how their politeness was a reflex, and rarely from the heart. At the time, she’d delivered it with portentous tones, but it wasn’t until years after I’d moved to the city where I finally understood what she meant. That observation applies now. How much of Íde’s concern, right now, is sincere? Unmoored by the involuntary civility that the city cultivated in her? Does she feel anything, deeply, about me?

What would my mother think of this?

This melancholy is misplaced. I’m being unfair to Íde. Of course she’s being earnest. Her empathy is practically always set to overflow.

I wave my hand dismissively. “I wouldn’t tell you if I didn’t want to talk about it,” I can see her about to talk, so I hastily plough on. “The Sir Sean Whelan business with Evin Tumble- that’s true. The Whelans are the noble family of ounceland Llancreg. Not a noble family. The noble family. As in, the landed gentry. For two centuries. We’re right on the Dolerite Rag, right between the Aergan to the west and Ildathach to the east. My father is from Llancreg, and my mother is from the Aergan. Clan Huxley. One of the reasons I think Colt & Tumble is happy enough that Iseult asked me to join. Evin’s from Crowmere, but the other partner, Wynne Colt? She’s half Aerganite, from her mother’s side. Same as me. Probably why everyone in our mutual social circles is a little wary of her.

“So, yes. I am the first son. Two sisters, both younger. My father wanted me to grow up a normal son of a baron. Nothing stuck. Don’t have the mindset for it. Poetry, governance, sigilry. Art. Music. Not my cup of coffee.”

I shrug, and take deep drag. This isn’t a planned speech, but Íde is enraptured.

“My mother though. She saw right away what to do with me. So, around eight, she taught me what she learned as a child. And that. That is me. I learned to talk from my dad. But the fighting and the riding and the shooting and the navigating and the living in the wild- we used to drive him mad. He’s not an angry person, not at all. But the number of nights I spent outside, in the woods and the plains. Great nights. Lovely nights. Would always dread coming back, because he’d be sick with worry.

“Anyway. Dad gave up on me at sixteen. Not gave up gave up. But realised that maybe he didn’t want his son, who read too slowly and took about three times longer to do sums than his daughter, to inherit stewardship of Llancreg. Not like I wanted the role anyway.

“Llancreg’s a vassal of Ildathach, has been since before the Calamity. Pay the ounce of gold every year, although obviously that’s become more ceremonial over time. So when the call came out that Ildathach was looking to recruit for a war in the Aergan… I left. And I joined the city, and fought my cousins and half my family, and when we returned victorious to Ildathach I got a letter which said my mother had died of river disease. She’d had it her whole life, and it finally caught up to her. The thing is,” completely unexpected tears. I bite them down. “I didn’t know. We marched within a dozen miles of Llancreg, but I couldn’t get permission to leave, when I’d requested. We didn’t know how far the Aerganites had gotten to Ildathach, if we’d meet a group of knights along the way. I could’ve seen her, one last time. And by the time I returned, and I found out…”

I hold the cigarillo between thumb and forefinger. It’s been drawn down so low it’s singing my skin.

“Anyway. That’s me. Poorest peer in Ildathach. Killed my mother’s kin, for no reason other than wanderlust and a now wavering sense of liege-honour. Live beneath a perfumery in Quillton. Teach a handful of professionals and bored aristocrats how to fight. Didn’t go back, even for my mother’s funeral. Won’t go back. Can’t bring myself to do it.”

She looks dazed, and takes a moment to collect herself. I wonder how much of this she’ll remember tomorrow. Íde raises a boot, a handsome new thing made of scarlet leather, and grinds the remnant of her cigarillo into the flagstones.

I’m not sure what to expect. She wraps her hands around my chest and hugs me, tightly.

Sometimes I forget that the most appropriate thing to do is to be quiet. We stay there for a few heartbeats. When she breaks the embrace, she looks up wide-eyed. Íde Ceallaigh, naïve and hungry, a savant and an actual, genuinely nice person. Just on the cusp of rising to her tip-toes.

A quiet trickle of time.

It is shattered, immediately, by two separate events. The first is that she breaks her eye contact and very politely throws up onto the street, which is equal measures surprising and unpropitious. The second is a cry from behind us.

“Ah-HAH!”

Various shapes have emerged from The Sheep’s Head over the last few minutes. The last batch of exiting revellers, who has only now come into view, includes Drustan- though Eirys is not in tow. He announces himself with a bibulous snicker. The fact that he has actually survived the onslaught of alcohol and narcotics he has stuffed into his body over the last six hours is honestly mind-boggling. Íde turns redder, for the shapes include more than just Drustan. He has with him a gaggle of Íde’s friends, and he points at me with the brave smugness of a man with a handful of aces. “I knew you had it in you! Sir Sean! You scallywag! You raconteur, you, you,” he snaps his fingers distractedly a few times, and one of Íde’s friends murmurs something to him, “you, oh very well done indeed, you malingerer.”

I debate deflating him by pointing out that he had entered the establishment with a different woman, but I am very much grateful that I can escape from Íde’s embrace. To be honest, embarrassing Íde is both entertaining and significantly easier than dealing with my emotions. “We were just talking, Sir Drustan.”

“Just talking! Ohoh! To a, and I really must say, a rather stunningly attractive young student! How did you manage this miracle? She’s beautiful! And yet you, Sean, have a face like a loaf of bread! Made by a particularly ugly baker!” Íde is simultaneously trying to implode her own head with embarrassment and fumble for a suitable riposte. She has no chance of slotting in a rebuttal, because Drustan is very good at this. “Is that what they are calling it these days? Perhaps I should try just talking to one of these other lovely students! I did not expect you to conduct such unpoetical business, you rogue.”

People like Sulwyn and Eirys don’t mean anything to Sir Drustan Tilian. They’re gone, already, from his life. He’s not a bad person, I don’t dislike him by any means. I’ve known him for a decade, since the days he used to cringe at creditors. In fact, I generally enjoy being pulled into the tornado of his charisma. Ildathach aristocracy, especially recently, now that the memory of losing any war is two generations dead, generally believes itself to be literally bred better than most. Many of our peers (more his peers, truth be told, because there are many in these circles who secretly sneer at my title) believe themselves to be intellectuals or poets or warriors. In truth, most are little reflections of each other- rebounded thoughts, delivered from the occasional original quip or observation, reflected on and on and on within circles until they are exhausted and threadbare, at the tip of a hundred tongues.

Drustan is not one of these people. Or if he is, he’s smart enough not to show it when he’s around me, and I’ve been his friend for years. He has enough humility to know when to fold, and when to admit that he is wrong.

He is, however, incredibly talented at pretending that he is both learned and wise, mostly through the overwhelming magnetism of his bombast. This works in the vast majority of situations, except for this one, where he is intoxicated out of his mind and is conversing with actual academics.

I recognise this glint in his eye. He’s going through the motions of conversation, poised to interrupt and to argue, tricking the speaker into giving him some scrap of innuendo to pounce on. The crowd is expecting spectacle, but I decline to give him anything to chew on. I fold my arms, and his eyes glitter as he glides effortlessly on to the next stop of the evening.

He takes command of our gaggle of students and opts to lead us to a new haunt, even though we must be closer to sunrise than to midnight. He loudly accuses me of corrupting Ildathach’s youth, who should really be spending their time learning how to invent new forms of philosophy or geology. He gets into a spirited debate with Íde, who appears sobered by our conversation or her vomiting or both. When he explains his betting system to Íde, she points out that his methodology is nonsensical, and that if it were true he could get the same results by doubling his bet after winning instead of after losing, and uses terminology such as “representativeness heuristics” and “zero-sum”. Drustan, immediately seeing that he is on unequal intellectual footing, simply skirts her presumably sound arguments and begins making fun of her (‘this lovely young lady is not merely ornamental, she’s also a bookworm!’, and so forth). He rallies her friends to his side. It’s good natured. I think Íde enjoys herself.

“I’m going to order a three course meal,” Drustan declares, after securing a table for our roving gang at Fifty Fifth, despite the quiet judgement of the doormen. “But each course shall be gin.”

Shanties and ballads are butchered. Tabletops are danced upon.

When the familiar gloom of alcohol begin to shut off the bits of me that enjoy company, I make my excuses and begin to stumble home, walking Íde back to the Lugrough Club. She doesn’t stare at my mouth this time, and I wonder if it’s because she’s figured it out or if the potential threat of her landlady’s presence forces her into a more restrained mindset. The sun is coming up. If I’m not careful, I’ll run into Nan Murphy, up early to walk to the fish market and bring back stinking baskets to peddle in Quilton. I can’t imagine the look she’ll give me, or the burnt turf dust she’ll try to sell me as a hangover remedy.

I sneak down my empty street, then down again to the door of my flat. Neighbours avoided. I lock my deadbolts, detach my collar, throw the knife I carry under my belt onto the floor, and collapse face-first into my bed. I fall asleep with my clothes on, which has not happened for some time now.