Page 69 of Hang on St. Christopher

I looked over to the house next door. New neighbor. The house had been vacant for six months, but Mrs. Campbell on the other side said a woman had recently moved in.

This was evidently the woman.

Pretty, late twenties, black hair in a little bob, aquiline nose, blue eyes. She was wearing pajamas and fluffy slippers.

“Morning. Yes, I was looking for my milk.”

“Yesterday was the last-ever delivery. Antrim Dairies are exclusively selling through the supermarkets now.”

“You talked to Trevor about this?”

“Who’s Trevor?”

“The milkman.”

“No. Mrs. Campbell told me.”

“No more milk deliveryever?”

“No more milk delivery,” she said.

“And the bottles?”

“I think bottles are over. I think it’s all cartons now.”

“What’ll the kids use for their Molotov cocktails?”

“That’s the kind of unintentional side effect that no one ever thinks of.”

I looked at her. Those eyes were really something. “If there’s no milk, what are you doing outside, then?” I asked.

She waved a couple of letters at me. “There’s still the post.”

“Yeah, but for how much longer? Have you heard of this thing called email? First the milkman, then the postman. You’ll see.”

“You’re quite the gloomy customer, aren’t you?” she said, smiling.

I nodded and reached my hand over the fence. “Sean Duffy,” I said.

“Rachel Melville.”

“So what do you do, Rachel?”

“I teach English up at the new school. It’s an integrated school. For Protestant and Catholic children.”

“I heard about that place. What are they calling it?”

“We’re calling it the Sweeney School.”

“After the cop show?”

She did not smile.

“The barber, then?” I attempted.

She shook her head. “After King Sweeney, who was from around these parts.”

Sweeney was the King of Dál nAraide, who ruled this neck of the woods until the Battle of Mag Rath (Moira) in AD 637. If I’d wanted to show off, I could have quoted the story of Mad Sweeney in Irish, or I could have given her Seamus Heaney’s translation. I could even have given her a bit of T. S. Eliot’s “Sweeney Among the Nightingales.”

---