Eileen Counihan writes short stories and poetry and was runner-up in the 2007 Francis McManus Radio Short Story awards and winner of the 2008 Listowel Writers Week, Bryan McMahon short story award.  In 2011 and 2015, a short story of Eileen's featured in Make the Transition, a Transition Year English textbook published by EDCO.  She is currently working on her first novel which was long listed in the Irish Writers’ Novel Fair 2020.  

Waiting for her man

By Eileen Counihan

She sat huddled and shivering on the bottom step of the stairs, her feet tucked up under her dressing gown.  The rain was sweeping against the gable wall of the house.  An icy draught whistled under the old front door, making the temperature inside colder than the November evening outside.

Her mobile sat silently beside her.  Her restless thoughts roamed in increasingly futile circles. 

He’s not going to ring,  He’s got to ring.  He told me he would – he said “I’ll ring you later when I get home”.  He must have just got delayed or something.  He wouldn’t let me down.  Oh I feel dreadful, I must be getting a cold or flu.  

His face flashed before her – warm and glowing.  Please call, she prayed.

She stood up in an effort to still the voices in her head and went to the kitchen and lit a cigarette.  The flagstones were cold under her bare feet.  She paced up and down the room, pausing now and again to stare vacantly out at the rain beating against the window.  

Her pale reflection stared back at her.

“Oh God.  Oh God.”  With a start she realized her thoughts had broken into words.  She wondered whether she had been talking to herself for long.  She stood stock still and listened.  The house was silent.  She could feel a slow, sad wave of loss and fear move up her gullet from her stomach.  The panic was coming.

She lit another cigarette and tried to think back – how had her life become so complicated?

Then through her thoughts, it came.  The miraculous call of the mobile.  She jumped and answered to it in one smooth movement.

“Hello.”

“Josie?”  It was him.  It was him.

“Thank God it’s you.  I was beginning to think you weren’t going to call.”  She laughed nervously, afraid suddenly that she was giving too much away, that her need for him was too apparent.

“I can meet you in half an hour in O’Byrnes.” he said coolly.  “Can you make it?”

“I’ll be there.” was the only reply she could make because the phone was put abruptly down.  No goodbyes.

He rang.  He rang.  He rang.  The sweet blessed relief.  She jumped up and twirled around in the air, the lethargy had completely left her limbs.  Just the sound of his voice had dispelled the November gloom. She felt she could run all the way to O’Byrnes.

When she got there, the pub was packed with after-office drinkers.  Girls in sharp skirts and bobbed hair.  Men in tight suits, loosening their ties as the third pint hit them.  Josie didn't fit in.  Her doc martens and black leather jacket would have been more at home in a student bar than in this city centre pub and she tried to look inconspicuous as she sat near the door at an empty table.

He was always late.  Each time they met, she went through this hell of not knowing how long she should wait.  30 minutes?  An hour?  As the minutes ticked by she began to get more and more anxious.  Her fingers constantly played with the beermat which she tore into thousands of little pieces that she tried to pile into a heap in the centre of the table.

All the time her eyes remained on the door and the window.  She couldn’t help it.  She tried to look casually around at the other drinkers but her gaze kept returning automatically to the front door.  She wished she had bought a newspaper, but she daren’t go out and get one in case he came, and left.  Then she would never know.

Suddenly she had a terrible thought.  Maybe he had been in the toilets when she checked the back bar earlier.  She jumped up and double checked.  Maybe he had gone out the back exit?  Maybe he had met someone else on the way?

When she returned to the front bar, her seat had been taken, so she sat at the bar counter instead.  As she craned to see the front door, her heart leapt.  His familiar head passed by the window.  The hurried, slightly stooped walk made her stomach somersault with desire.

He spotted her immediately.

“What are you having to drink?” she asked as he kissed her cheek.  Lips so dry.

“A bottle of Bud.”

They both tried to look and sound nonchalant.  She glanced up at him.  He was pale and looked nervous.  His gaze constantly roamed the bar as if he was looking for someone else.

“So.  How are you?” she smiled.

She knew not to question the fact that he was over half an hour late.  Besides, now that he was here, she had already forgotten the anxious wait.

“Fine. Fine.  How’s the job?”

“Busy.  The usual.”

She racked her brain for small talk.  She knew she had to introduce the topic slowly as he got annoyed if she was too obvious.

She began a long involved story about one of her bosses who had tried to double back on a Garda checkpoint only to get stopped outside Moate behind a funeral cortege.  The moment she started the story, she wised she hadn’t.  She could see his eyes glazing over and his smile becoming increasingly thin, as the story wore its way to its not very funny conclusion.  When she finished, he asked her abruptly.  “So what do you want?”

“The usual.” she answered.

He moved closer to her.  She was alive to his every move.  She felt his hand briefly touch her.  She closed her fist tightly.  Safe.  At last.

She got up and went to the toilets. There was someone in the cubicle.  She waited and pretended to be putting on lipstick but really she was too excited to do anything but stare at herself in the mirror.  At last the woman came out of the cubicle and she went in locking the door carefully behind her.

She breathed deeply trying to calm her shaking hands.  She opened her make up bag.  She had forgotten nothing.  Two minutes later, it hit her brain, her head fell forward on her chest, the needle still in her arm. The relief.  She could breathe again.

Pancake Tuesday

by Eileen Counihan

We didn’t get pancakes the day Da died.  I had been really looking forward to them for days but my Da had come home from work in the middle of the morning and gone up to his room complaining of indigestion followed by my Mam saying over and over “I think I should get the doctor, Joe.”  By the time she did get the doctor it was all too late and my Da had died.  Then she kept saying “I knew I should have called the doctor sooner”, but this time she didn’t say it to anyone in particular.

Then Mam started to cry and all the neighbours came in and sat with her in the front room.  Myself and Eoin sat in the kitchen waiting to be told what to do.  But nobody told us anything.  So me and Eoin went down to the river to play.  We climbed out over the river on a bigh branch as far as we could.  We took it in turns holding on while one of us jumped on the other end trying to make the other let go.  We never did.  But I was sure I heard the branch crack.  Then we went back to the town and bought chips at the chipper.  Rosa was looking all sad and asked us how we were and Eoin said we were fine and Rosa gave us two extra scoopfuls of chips and a bottle of TK red lemonade.  We didn’t have to pay for it.  On the way home eating our chips and drinking the lemonade, people from the town kept stopping us and saying things like “I’m sorry foryour troubles boys” or “I’ll say a prayer for you all”.  Eoin said “thank you” and everyone smiled at him.  Mr McGann the butcher kept blowing his nose with a big handkerchief and ruffled Eoin’s hair.   I didn’t say anything.  I can never think of anything to say when grown ups say things like “how are you” or “how is the family” or worst of all “how is school”.  So I just say nothing.  Mrs Dempster in number 24 says I’ve got a desperate long gob on me and that I’ll never be famous for my charm. 

When we got home, Mam was still sitting in the front room.  All the neighbours had gone home, but Father McIntyre was standing at the fireplace smoking a cigarette.

“Ah, here they are now Mrs Davis.  I knew there was nothing to be worried about.  Your mother was worried about you boys.”

Mam did not say anything.  She was looking into the fire and not at us which was a good thing because our shoes were soaking from the river.

Father McIntyre looked at Mam and back at us.  “Maybe you should run along and go to bed boys.”

“There are sausages on the pan” Mam suddenly said.

 “We got chips, we’re not hungry” said Eoin.  Mam didn’t say anything more she just nodded.

“You’re going to have to be big boys now.  Especially you Kevin.  Because you’re the eldest.”  said Father McIntyre throwing his cigarette into the fire.  I nodded back.

“You’re Da was a great man, you know.  One of the finest men I ever knew.”  I nodded again.  I thought for a second he was going to cry.  But he didn’t.  We went upstairs.  It was too cold to get undressed so we just got into bed in our clothes.  I lay on my back staring in the dark at my Liverpool posters.  I tried not to think about Da lying in the room next door but then Eoin said “Do you think his eyes are open.”  “Shut up” I whispered and Eoin started snuffling a bit.  So I said, “John Toshack”.  There was a pause for a moment and then a muffled voice came out from under the candlewick bedspread “Steve Heighway”  “Emlyn Hughes”  “Kevin Keegan”.  By the time I got to “Ray Clemence” I knew Eoin was fast asleep.

The next day nobody said we had to go to school so we played down by the river again and in the afternoon we bought Trigger bars and Sherbet Fountains and we went to the pictures to see Where Eagles Dare. It was brilliant and afterwards we came out and Eoin ran down the main street shouting “Achtung, Achtung” and “Raus bitte, raus”.  Everyone looked at us but nobody gave out.  We arrived back at the house.  It was totally silent and suddenly our laughing felt bad, like we had forgotten that Da had died.  Father McIntyre was in the sitting room again and Mam was still sitting in her chair facing the fire which wasn’t lit.   It felt funny seeing Mam sitting all the time, usually she is always doing things like the ironing or the cooking or the cleaning or the washing of our hair on a Friday night.  But now she seemed to have nothing to do.

“Boys, how are you boys?”  said Fr McIntyre

“OK father” said Eoin.

“Good.  Good.  I was thinking that maybe you would like to come upstairs and say goodbye to your father?”

Eoin and I said nothing but I could almost feel Eoin shrink against the wall.  I looked over at Mam but she was looking at the floor directly in front of us.

“I think it’s important to say goodbye.  What do you say boys.”  I knew this wasn’t really a question so I nodded.

We followed Fr McIntyre up the stairs to the front bedroom.  The curtains were closed against the grey March evening.  The bedside lamp gave a low glow to the bedroom and the wardrobe seemed huge in the alcove beside the unlit fireplace.  The room felt strange, like it was a room I had never been in before. We stood in the doorway.  Fr McIntyre waved at us to come in further.  So we shuffled forward six inches. 

Da was lying on the bed.  And I could not believe it, not only was he fully dressed in his best suit and the tie he got last year in Arnotts in the sale but he was wearing his best black leather shoes.  His shoes on the bed.  Mam would kill us if we were lying on the bed with our shoes on but I didn’t say anything.  I could not really see his face and I did not want to, but Father McIntyre seemed to be pushing me towards the bed.  And then I saw the face and I stepped back against Father McIntyre.  It wasn’t Da’s face.  It mustn’t be Da.  It must be some other man who was the same size of Da and who had black hair swept back and who was wearing his best suit and his best black leather shoes.  But it definitely wasn’t Da.

I knew my Da.  He was big and solid.  And he was always smiling. The same picture kept replaying in my head.  It was the picture of me and Eoin and Mam and Da sitting around the kitchen table. It’s Saturday evening and we are having sausages and rashers and grilled tomatoes for tea.  The big pot of tea is sitting in the middle and Mam has got up to get more bread and butter.  And Eoin is talking.  Making us laugh with a story about little JoJo McManus and the time he did a wee in the confessional box.  And then Da looks over me at me and he is smiling with his hands up against the back of his head.  And I look over at him and catch his eye and then he gives me a great big fat wink.  And every bit of me is smiling too. 

And that’s the Da I remember, the Da who makes me feel like I don’t have to be funny or clever or anything special.  That just being Kevin is enough.

So then I was running down the stairs.  I knew I had to get away.  I was running out the front door.  My legs just wanted to run and run.  My stomach felt sour and heavy.  I was running down the road.  My voice wanted to say something but nothing came out.  I wanted to be away from everyone.  From Mam and her blank face.  From Fr McIntyre and his cigarettes that he is throwing into our fireplace.  From Eoin and his snuffling.  From all the people in the town with their looks.  And from Da.  Because I knew in my heart that the yellow faced man on the bed in our front room was my Da.  And that he was dead.  Da is dead.  The words went around my head like the church bells on Sunday morning. 

I sat down by the river and wiped my face with the sleeve of my jumper. I did not want to go back to them all. So I just sat there.  For a long time.  Trying to think of nothing which is a hard thing to do.  Harder than you would think.  And then when it was dark, I heard Mam’s voice and she was calling my name.  So I stood up.  And she was climbing down the bank in her indoor shoes and her tweed coat.  And even in the dark, I could see her face had a fierce sort of look on it.  “What are you doing running away like that.”  And I was happy that she sounded cross.  Then she gave me a hug.  Her body was shaking.  After a long time she pulled away and she tried real hard to smile, “Let’s go home and I’ll make us some pancakes for tea.”  I love pancakes, so I went home with her.

What do you want me to do about it?

by Eileen Counihan

The WiFi is down

The car tax is up

The toilet is leaking

The dishwasher's fucked

My novel's not written

My bank balance's red

The student's just cancelled

The dog's to be fed

There's no dinner in the fridge

There's a fault with the car

The grass needs cutting

And…  I need a shower

We're out of milk

We're out of ink

We're out of time

And don't you think

That someone else

Could help me please

I'm just one person

I'm on my knees.

Was this the deal

When I gave birth

That I would lose

My real self-worth?

So, get out of bed

Don't be a pest

Fix the WiFi

And I'll do the rest.