Read Online In Search of the Blue Tiger by Robert Power - Free Book Online Page B

showing pictures of ships and seascapes. Others are made up of coloured glass shapes, blues, greens and watery whites: translucent as ice. Even though the air is cold, the street feels warm. Lamps are alight. Inside the houses I imagine pots bubble, pans sizzle on kitchen stoves; children play with wooden forts and curtained dolls houses; fathers sit by open fires, reading snippets from the newspaper as they smoke a nightly pipe of tobacco.
    There is a bend in the street and there it is. Mrs April’s house. Number 85.
    I stand for a moment, my hand on the latch of the front-garden gate. There is a low wall and a clipped privet hedge. A tall rose tree stands alone in a flowerbed in the centre of the garden, surrounded by weatherworn flagstones. I open the gate and step onto a gravel path. I fancy I am walking on a beach.
    Standing in the porch, I smooth down my hair like I’ve seen the matinee idols do at the pictures. I even put a hand behind my back to hide an imaginary bunch of red roses. I knock on the door, the shiny brass cold in my palm. She appears behind the frosted glass, her image at first ghostly, then more earthly, more distinct.
    â€˜Good evening, Oscar,’ she says, so confident, so composed. ‘I am glad you could come. Come on into the warm.’
    She stands to one side and beckons me forward. As I walk into the hallway she closes the door to the street and the house embraces me.
    Her clothes hang loose. She wears a linen dress that follows each turn of her body, each step. The glass beads around her neck glisten and sparkle. She says something, but I am mesmerised and the words are sucked into the chandelier that hangs above.
    â€˜This way,’ she says. ‘And sit here,’ she invites.
    I walk and I sit.
    She asks ‘…Stigir?’ and I say, ‘At home with Mother.’
    â€˜Cake,’ she says and I say, ‘Yes, please.’
    â€˜I’ll get the tea things. You just make yourself at home,’ she says to me.
    Me, the boy from the House of the Doomed and Damned, at tea with the librarian. She lifts the needle of the gramophone and places it on the record.
    â€˜I’ll be back in a jiffy.’ And she leaves the room to the voice on the record.
    â€˜I have a bonnet trimmed with blue,
do I wear it, yes I do,
I will wear it when I can,
going to the fair with my young man.’

    â€˜And what do you want to be going there for?’ said the Mother, the week previous, holding the letter in her hand like it had the plague.
    â€˜Mrs April is going to help me with my scrapbook,’ I replied. ‘See, it says so in the letter.’
    The Great Aunt looked up at Mother, awaiting a response. Tasting the distance between us.
    â€˜I don’t know that I approve,’ said the Mother, glancing sideways at her Aunt. ‘But she is a librarian, so it can only be educational.’
    The Great Aunt sucked her teeth, staring long and hard into the fire.
    â€˜I see no harm in an educational visit,’ Mother said hurriedly. ‘But friends of your own age, Oscar, you need friends of your own age.’
    I just stroked my dog, for I knew better.

    â€˜â€¦ to the fair with my young man.’
    The lullaby stops.
    â€˜Did you like the music, Oscar?’ she asks, as she bends over to take the record from the turntable.
    The wallpaper is bright; the tabletop shining and dusted.
    I remember the Father sitting with the cigarette glowing against the dark of the night. The arm and needle of the old phonograph grating and bumping against the dead space at the end of the record. Songs of Old Ireland, sorrow, rebellion, Fenian Men and bloodlust. Mother bruised and bloodied in the bed next door. He draws on his cigarette and the amber glow sharpens the shadows of his face.
    â€˜These things happen because I love her.’ The smell of whiskey sounds in his voice. ‘Because of our passion, Oscar. Do you understand me?’ The needle on the