Like Fate

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St Pat’s on a Friday. No better excuse for a night out with the lads. Aidan’s about as Irish as an American president, or those plastic shamrocks tacked up all over the bar, but he pulls the ancestry card out every March 17th anyway. Especially if there’s a woman in the pub who catches his eye. 

They’ve been here since clocking off work, and the lads are already getting raucous. It’s only a matter of time before someone puts the Pogues on the jukebox and smashes a pint glass in somebody’s face. And a good time was had by all, he thinks, beaming around the place as if he owns it, and he might as well. It’s a fool that crosses Aidan Keogh any day, let alone on St Patrick’s with a drink inside him.

“Alright there, Aidan,” says a big lad with a broken nose, slapping him on the back as he passes. Aidan nods, grins and holds the man’s eye just long enough to make sure there’s the right amount of respect shown and he doesn’t need to start something, half hoping he will. But there’ll be time enough for that later. Parties are raging all over town, with a dozen scores racked up to settle before the night’s done. He smiles beatifically as he sups his Guinness, the frothy shamrock trembling under his lip.

Someone starts up a game of darts, and the lads congregate behind the players, cat-calling and taunting as the arrows fly. The drinks are flowing and the air has the kind of tension he loves:  music and laughter and the hint of something about to break. He sniffs it like an animal, tasting the flavour of it, every threat and promise. He notices her the moment she walks in.

She’s alone, the wind gusting in with her, scattering raindrops on the black-tiled floor. Long, red hair whipped wild from the weather, a grey trench-coat belted tight against the March chill. She stares around the bar, her face unreadable, and Aidan’s intrigued.

“And a red wine, for the lady,” he tells the barman as he waits for his stout to settle. “I’ll take it over myself.”

The crowd parts for him; even drunk most people have the sense to get out of his way, and those that don’t are dragged by friends who do.

“I hope I haven’t overstepped,” he says placing the red carefully in front of her. “You looked thirsty.”

She says nothing, just smiles a smile that sends prickles down his neck, and lifts the glass to lips as red as the wine. He watches, mesmerised, as she takes the smallest of sips. When he introduces himself, she nods at his name like she already knew. It makes him wonder if it was him she was looking for all along, and the thought strokes his ego with warm fingers made warmer by the stout he swallows down to keep her company.  

As he lowers his pint, he catches a glimpse of her through the glass. The curve distorts the shape of her face, throws the light strangely, so that for a moment, her eyes are dark hollows ringed in red, her mouth a bloody slash. He must be drunker than he thought. He shakes himself, and finds his charm.

“So what do I call you?”

There’s a wait just long enough to make him wonder if she’s going to answer before she says, “Moira.” Her voice sends the same shiver down his back that her smile did.

“Do I hear an accent there, Moira?”

She inclines her head. “A little place in the West. You wouldn’t have heard of it. And you? Are you Irish?” Something in the way she asks makes him think she already knows the answer, so he tells the truth for once.

“Only by blood. My grandparents are from Kilkenny.”

She doesn’t respond, and he hears himself rambling to fill the silence. It’s strange. Nobody makes Aidan Keogh nervous, but there’s something about this woman’s smile, her unwavering gaze, that puts him on his toes.

“And my granny used to tell me stories, all the time,” he’s saying, and the woman’s watching him, intent, so he goes on, “Finn McCool, the Pooka. The Banshee. She scared me stiff with that one!”

“What did she tell you about the Banshee?” she asks, and again there’s that edge to her voice; sweet, sharp. It sets his heart pounding like he’s about to wade into a fistfight. He likes it.

“Ah, you know the story. Wailing woman, comes to a house where someone’s going to die. Hear her for miles around, like the scream of a fox or the wind howling. Kept me awake a few nights, I tell you, every time I heard the siren on a police car!” He grins at the memory, the little boy who believed in monsters he couldn’t fight off with a swing of his fist. It’s a long time since Aidan’s been afraid of anyone.

Fixing him with her strange eyes, she dips a finger in her wine and trails it seductively around the edge of the glass. Round and round it goes, and the glass begins to vibrate, the high, shrill ringing lifting from it like a spell.

“Something like that, you mean?” she asks with a crooked little smile he wants to kiss. He reaches to still her finger, takes it in his hand and brings it to his lips. Her eyes never leave his as he sucks it into his mouth, tasting the wine and something underneath that he can’t place.

Wordlessly, she withdraws her hand, stands and picks up her coat. Before he realises what’s happened, she’s gone, the door banging behind her in a rush of cold air that cuts through the noise and the fug of beer.

Even as he shoves people out of his way to get to the door, Aidan doesn’t know if he’s offended her or she wants him to follow. He peers through the sleeting rain, the streetlights casting long shadows that hide her, even though she can’t have disappeared yet, hasn’t had time.

A shape steps from the murk like it’s been waiting for him. For a second he thinks it’s her, Moira, but then he sees how broad it is, and the way it walks toward him, like it’s got something to settle.  

It draws closer, showing Aidan a face he half recognizes: a broken nose not quite healed, a scab crusted over.  

“You had this coming.”

There’s a sharp pain and a twist, and Aidan coughs in surprise, spattering something dark and sticky on the pavement as he falls toward it. The man whips away as quickly as he came, and Aidan, his cheek pressed against concrete, can only watch the feet hurry off around the corner. 

He lies in a pool of orange light, the rain driving down on him like fate, and he hasn’t the strength to crawl the foot or so to the pub doorway. Somewhere in the distance a siren’s wailing.

Then from nowhere Moira’s there. He reaches out, mouthing “help me,” with no breath to make the words, and she crouches, her red hair falling around his face like a halo of flames, her eyes dark caverns in the shadows flung by the neon, and her face a skull.

And Aidan’s pleading with no voice, “call help, call help,” but she just opens up the bloody slash of her mouth, and starts to sing. The darkness crawls up him like vines, dragging him down to an older world than he’s ever known, a world he thought was make-believe.