I Gave You My Heart: A short story for Christmas by Billy O'Callaghan

“The Beamish and the Jameson,” the barman says, his voice easy beneath the music, setting the glasses down on the table before her. “God, isn’t town manic, this weather?”

On the Grand Parade, by Finn’s Corner, the footpath is a tide of people: students in packs, girls in short skirts muffled top-heavy against the sleety cold, shoppers laden with bags stressed in their hurry to make the crossing before the lights go red again. A double-decker bus, angled into a left turn but with no space to finish its swing, has gridlocked the junction, and somewhere in the distance, from the Washington Street direction, an emergency services siren, ambulance or fire engine, wails slowly, screaming to be let through. Four o’clock on a Thursday,10 days to Christmas, and the overhead lights are already burning small pale fire, ropes of yellow-white bulbs strung across building fronts and lampposts, grim rather than seasonal against the early dusk.

Margaret has been in to St. Augustine’s, where she’d lit a candle in memory of her mother and sat for some ten or fifteen minutes, without bothering to pray, in front of the oversized crib to one side of the altar. The church was cold and only barely lit, the nativity scene frocked in shadow, and drawing her coat more tightly across her chest she had felt her past Christmases near, 36 of them and counting, senses of them, anyway – the tree in the corner of the living room at home, the feel of the scorching air in around a settled fire after being outside, the world smelling sweet and slightly alcoholic, the sounds from other rooms, her father in front of the television with a newspaper spread open to the racing pages across his lap, her mother and aunt back in the kitchen, songs playing somewhere, Sinatra and Bing and Nat King Cole, the baritone vocals low and snugly dark, the sad beautiful sound of strings faint as wishes on waking. Now back out on the street, caught in the heave of bodies, she lets herself be swept along the Parade but breaks from the crowd at the first opportunity, slipping down Tobin Street and out onto the South Main Street. Here too, the road is at a standstill with traffic but there is room at least on the footpaths to walk and breathe.