Just the place to chew the fat about matters of life and death

Sometimes at the butcher's, you can get a local education along with the rib-eye steaks you went in for, writes MICHAEL HARDING

I WAS AT the butcher’s buying a bit of meat, and there was an old man ahead of me. “Is it the usual?” the butcher inquired.

“The usual,” the old man repeated.

The butcher trimmed two centre-loin chops and was bagging them when the old man said: “Put in something for the dog.”

“Will do,” replied the butcher, and he scooped old bones out of a black bin into another white bag. They didn’t look very appetising.

“Ah, give him a few good bits,” the old man said, “sure there’s only the two of us.” He was a little bald man, with a blue nose, and slip-on shoes, that looked like they came out of a bin, and I suppose he was fond of his dog.

Anyway, he was just after paying when a long rake of a man in a shiny black suit, who clearly hadn’t shaved for days, a cigarette in the side of his mouth, came in and said: “Good man, Tommy, I see you’re getting the dinner for the family.” They both laughed.

“There’s a quare big funeral up at the church this morning,” the thin man declared, with bleak enthusiasm. “I wonder who it is.”

Tommy whispered the deceased’s name. “He went very quick in the end,” Tommy said.

“He did,” the butcher agreed. “What age of a man was he?”

“He was 52,” Tommy said.

“Fifty-two,” repeated the butcher.

“He was a young man,” Tommy said, clutching his white plastic bag of bones but showing no sign of moving out of the shop.

“And come here to me,” said the butcher, “what did he die of?”

“Cancer,” Tommy muttered, under his breath, as if it was a bad word.

“I knew he wasn’t well,” the thin man said, “but I didn’t know he was dead.”

“Oh he was riddled with it,” Tommy said. “It ate through him like woodworm.”

“The Lord have mercy on him,” the butcher said.

“Did you know him?” Tommy asked.

“No,” the butcher said, “but the wife be’s in here most weeks – shocking nice woman.” Then the butcher addressed the thin man. “You would have known him well at one time, Alex – am I correct?”

“Ah,” Alex said, “that was a long time ago,” as if it might be a war or something embarrassing they were referring to.

“I heard that the removal was a terrible ordeal for the wife,” the butcher said.

“Why so?” Tommy asked.

“Well,” he said, “apparently they had a barney about a month ago ’cos he was locked outside without the keys, and he broke a window to get in, and she said it was a disgrace to go smashing a big window. ‘You can’t be coming and going in and out the window,’ she said, ‘just ’cos you lost your keys.’ And he tried to explain to her that he couldn’t get in the small window. But when they had him coffined last Tuesday, up in the front bedroom, they tried to get him down the stairs, and they succeeded alright, but it wasn’t possible to turn the corner, to get out the front door, so they headed into the dining room, and there was the big window with the plywood still in it, and they just took out the plywood and off he goes back out the same window he came in.”

“You never know,” Alex said.

“You never know,” Tommy repeated, and we all bowed our heads in silence for a minute.

Tommy jiggled the bag of bones, as if he was testing their weight, and said: “I better be getting home to the dog. He’ll eat his way through the back door if I don’t make an appearance soon.”

When he was gone, the butcher looked at me and said: “Yes, Sir, what can I do you for?”

I said: “Could you give me three rib-eye steaks?”

“Coming up,” said the butcher.

Alex said: “He’s very fond of that dog.”

The butcher said: “Well, he’s pure silly about that dog; sit up and talk to you, it would. You’d want to see the pair of them on the canal in the mornings – you wouldn’t know if it was Tommy was walking the dog, or the dog that was walking Tommy.”

“What ever became of the wife?” Alex inquired.

“Ah now,” the butcher said, “that’s another story.”