The barman was slow to respond. He was a tall, wiry man and moved as though worried that his limbs might not be entirely under his own control. He ran his hand across the top of his head, taking so much time to speak that Norm felt something of importance was going to be said. In the end he was non-committal. “Well, there’s a lot of Dannies,” the barman replied. “And a lot of Monahans too. Why would an Englishman be looking for any of them? And why would he be looking in my bar?”
“A friend of his suggested I should look him up.”
“A friend? Now that’s a rare thing. And for Danny too! Even rarer.”
Norm was beginning to get irritated. “Do you know where I can find him or not, because if not I’ll pay you for this drink and let you get on with your day.” He had hardly finished speaking when he was aware that someone was standing right beside him.
“I’m Danny,” a slow, quiet, voice said. “Who the fuck are you?”
Norm looked around. The voice had come from a man a good six inches taller than he was and a fair bit wider too. The barman had found something else to do at the other end of the room. “Eddie said I should look you up. He seemed to think I might be of some use.”
“And why would that be?”
By now Norm was feeling that he had very little to lose. “I’m not sure but it’s possibly got something to do with the fact that I’m just over the border from the north, I spent last night sleeping in a barn, that I’ve got no papers and no place to go and that when I’ve paid for this drink I’ll have the princely sum of 50 euros left in my pocket. Apart from that I’m pissed off that the only way I could get somewhere to have a quiet drink without worrying about some police bitches breaking up the party was to come all the way over here.”
The man beside him laughed heartily, clapped him on the back. “Sure, that sounds like the finest reasons imaginable. Let me buy you another drink.”
It was the start of a heavy evening.
They found a room for Norm upstairs from the bar. It was small and cramped. He was sharing it with several dozen cases of Irish whiskey. It wasn’t great but it was a great deal better than the barn he had slept in on his first night and given that it hadn’t stopped raining since, Norm was grateful that he’d bumped into the van driver.
When he woke next morning his head was telling him just how many too many whiskeys he’d had. Danny was standing in the doorway, looking annoyingly to be without any sign of a hangover. “It seems like you are what you say your are,” he said.
“That’s comforting. And there was me wondering if I was really someone else,” Norm replied. He was feeling that he hadn’t put in all this effort to get away from bullying women so that he could be bullied by someone else.
“Did your girl really want to go for you with one of those strap-on things, then?”
“That’s when I decided I’d had enough.”
“Jeez, there’s no telling what they’ll get up to next. We’re doing what we can here to help the fellers over in the six counties and we’re trying to make sure that none of your woman Johannsen’s crazy ideas catch on in the Dáil. You’re welcome to stay here. Eamonn here needs a potman and if you can see your way to helping us out in what we’re doing for the lads over the border then all the better.”