An Early Wake Read Online Free Page A

the bar and went behind it to start pulling Billy’s pint.
    Rose turned to her and said tentatively, “Maura, would you mind if Tim and I went out for a bit of lunch? It’s quiet here.”
    “Sure, go ahead. I think I can handle it.” She smiled to indicate her sarcasm. And she wanted some time to talk to Billy alone about this whole music thing, of which she knew absolutely nothing. She had trouble picturing any friend of Billy’s as a music guru, although Old Mick and Billy would have been in their late sixties back then. Now that she thought about it, she could name a lot of performers who were still going strong in their sixties and even seventies, touring and everything. Like the Rolling Stones. Maybe she’d been too quick to judge.
    Rose and Tim went out the door, and Maura topped off Billy’s pint and took it over to him. She checked to make sure everyone else was well supplied with drink, then sat down next to Billy.
    “Who’s that young man who left with our Rose?” he asked. “Not from around here, is he?”
    “No, he’s a student, from Dublin, he says. His name’s Tim Reilly. He said he wants to find out about the music scene here in Sullivan’s in the nineties. It’s the first I’ve heard about it.”
    Billy’s eyes lit up. “I hadn’t thought of that in years! This used to be quite the place to play.”
    “So he was right about that?” Maura asked.
    “Oh, yes, musicians would come from all over. Not for concerts, as such, but to—what should I call it? Jam?—with each other. Like a
seisiún
is for the traditional kind of music.”
    “What they were playing wasn’t traditional?”
    “No, these were players of popular stuff. Not always the lead singer of this band or the other, but a lot of the sidemen. Word would go out—don’t ask me how, it was before all this electronic nonsense—and the players would come together here of an evening, late, and settle in the back room and go on half the night. And people would come to hear them. I don’t know how they’d find out it was happenin’, but they’d start appearing early in the evening, and they’d stay ’til the end. Packed, the place was.”
    “Was Old Mick a musician?”
    “He’d been known to pick up a fiddle now and then, but mostly he kept the drinks flowing.”
    “How’d they get around the regulations about closing times, if they stuck around all night? Even I know you can’t keep serving ’til dawn.” Maura knew there was some give-and-take, depending on the attitude of the gardaí, the local police, but she didn’t think the rules could be stretched that far.
    “You’ll have heard the term ‘lock-in’?”
    “Yes, but I’m not sure how it works.”
    “If you want to keep yer pub open after legal closing time, you ask that yer patrons pay for their drinks beforehand, and then after closing time you lock yer doors and it becomes a private party, with no money changing hands.”
    “Ah.” Maura could see a lot of room for interpretation of the law there, but it made a kind of sense. “What about you, Billy? Did you join in?”
    He grinned. “You’ve never heard me sing, have you? Like a gate that needs greasin’. No, I’d keep an eye on the front of the house while Mick covered the back. Grand times they were.”
    “That kid who was talking with Rose—he says he’s a student at Trinity, studying how popular music changed in Ireland in the nineties—not the old stuff. He seems to think Sullivan’s was like the center of the music universe, at least around here. Would you be willing to talk to him? I can’t tell him anything, and Rose is too young to have known about it then, but I’m sure you could fill his ear for quite a while. Do you mind if I turn him over to you?”
    “I’m happy to go on about those days. And if he’s to be around fer a few days, then he and Rose can spend some time together as well.”
    Maura was struck once again with how perceptive Billy was. He might look like a