No Country for Young Men

by Julia O'Faolain

  James waylaid a flight attendant. What was up? What was happening?

  ‘We’re turning back. There’s no cause for alarm.’

  ‘Turning … back?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘To Shannon?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid there’s fog over Shannon. We’ll be landing in Dublin.’

  ‘Will we be getting out of the plane?’

  ‘Oh, I should think so. You see, the fourth engine …’

  Fate, thought James. Now it was for him. Now he’d win. In love as in sport, being hot was everything. He’d persuade her now. He’d go right to the house, never mind who was there. She’d have to listen. If what had happened, fate’s falter, the lucky slip that brings the cup back to careless lips, did not persuade her that it was her manifest destiny to run off with him, then he would. Quite simply, now, he knew he could.

  ‘Could you bring me a large black coffee?’ he asked the flight attendant. ‘Please.’ He needed to sober up.

  Leaning his head back against the headrest, he occupied his mind with trying to recall in precise sequence the letter to Therese which he had swallowed with his double whiskey.

  He was going to win this game in overtime.

  *

  By the time Patsy had finished his lunch-break he was depressed. An old bugger who had been standing him drinks had got him down. He turned out to have unacceptable political opinions which Patsy, having drunk three of his pints, didn’t feel it would have been decent to dispute. But unvented arguments were stuck in his craw.

  Morosely, he walked back to the O’Malleys’ where he began clipping the hedge. The drink had given him heartburn and he was vexed with himself for taking it on an empty stomach. If this had been any decent kind of a house, they’d have provided lunch. Irish hospitality how are ye! That bloody woman, he thought, and his rage mounted. That snake of a Yank. Deporting was too good for him. How had the Captain managed to do it? Patsy hadn’t thought him that well in with the Powers-that-be. Well, there you had another case of things being kept from Patsy! Snip went the shears. Snip. He looked along the edge of the blade and there, on the other side of the road, getting out of a green Ford Cortina, was the Yank in person. Not deported at all then? Had the Captain lied? Been lied to? Maybe the Powers-that-be had laid a trap? And now here was Patsy, the Man in the Gap, unbriefed! The challenge exhilarated him. Be cool, Flynn, he directed himself. Maybe he should phone the Captain? But from where? He couldn’t get into the house ahead of the Yank and the nearest phone-box was a quarter of a mile from here.

  The Yank had reached the gate. Cool as you please, he passed Patsy without a nod. Snip, went the shears as Patsy folded and laid them aside. The Yank reached the front door and rang the bell. Patsy followed him up the steps.

  ‘Can I be of assistance?’

  The Yank looked down at him. ‘No.’

  Knew him? Didn’t? Were all Irishmen as alike as potatoes to this fellow then? Micks? Paddies?

  ‘There’s nobody in,’ said Patsy.

  The door opened, giving him the lie. Cormac stood inside it. ‘My mother’s out,’ he claimed. ‘She doesn’t want to see you.’

  ‘Sorry, Cormac.’ The Yank shoved his foot in the door. ‘I’m coming in. I’ve got to. She doesn’t know what she wants.’

  Cormac attempted to slam it but the Yank’s foot held. Patsy caught the fellow’s elbow, trying to jerk him backwards but it was the elbow which jerked unexpectedly, catching Patsy’s chin so that he staggered down two steps. By the time he had regained his footing the Yank was through the door and had slammed it behind him.

  In futile protest, Patsy pressed the bell, then raced, blind with fury, round the house and into the kitchen where he nearly fell over a bucket and Mary on her knees beside it, scrubbing.

  ‘What’s up?’ she goggled at him.

  ‘The phone,’ he hissed. ‘Get the Captain. The Yank is back. Tell him: Duffy. Forced his way in. Used violence.’

  ‘Duffy?’ Her moron’s face sought an expression. ‘Misther Duffy?’ said she, the good indoor servant, stressing etiquette. ‘Is it Mister Duffy you mean?’

  Patsy grabbed the kitchen phone and rang the Captain’s number, dialling three times from distrust for his own manual steadiness and for the Irish telephone system which was a shambles. There was nobody at the other end. He cast around for a weapon. That Yank was a big bruiser. Hesitating between a mallet and a meat-cleaver, he chose the cleaver, although he had a record and was squeamish. Might he have to deal with a rape? Elopement? Kidnapping? Or matters of political and public import? He rallied himself, being promoted and commissioned by the Captain’s absence. Adrenalin ran high. He had been waiting for this moment for more than twenty years. Stalking his game, he slid through the hollow darkness of the basement hall. No sounds. Upstairs, a door opened. Patsy prowled upwards to ground level, then paused.

  A spurty scream on the third floor located Mrs Michael and had the substance of flesh to it. Patsy saw it in his mind’s eye, a leaping thing, quivery and perhaps clawed.

  ‘Ohh!’ She half purred, half screamed: ‘Ohhh!’ As though her throat had flown out of her.

  The Yank’s voice was next to inaudible. ‘I felt dead,’ he was saying, ‘numbed … Would you have given in?’

  ‘Oh James,’ she said, ‘James!’ Carnal, the name became flesh in her mouth. ‘Thank God,’ she was moaning with an excitement which roused an odd response in Patsy, a sucker for strong feelings. His anger with her could be part-laced with sympathy. ‘Oh!’ she cried, ‘no!’ Her noises had an animal innocence which seemed to withdraw them from the strictures of the moral law. ‘I couldn’t have stood it,’ she ululated. ‘I couldn’t just lose you like that.’ There was a remnant of rage in her joy, he could tell, a mourning tinge which compounded his own bleak and tremulous fury.

  ‘So we must …’

  ‘Yes, yes …’

  Their accents chinked and quivered. They sounded foreign to Patsy, like a radio play beamed in from abroad. He climbed to a small landing lavatory between the first and second floors and slipped inside. The voices came closer, ebbed, rose.

  ‘Just that it suddenly seemed like fate.’

  ‘But now it’s reversed itself. Don’t you see?’

  Urgencies. Rummagings. A door banged.

  ‘Shush! Aunt Judith’s been in a state. Don’t want to set her off.’

  The interruptions were like the hops of a gramophone needle. He guessed the pair were walking in and out of doors on the floor above him, turning, descending, then retreating up the stairs.

  ‘Now!’

  ‘Oh, James, I …’

  ‘… mentally locked into … In reality, you’re free, don’t you see? You must see.’

  ‘I do. I do. Only we must keep our heads, think.’

  ‘Not too much. Where’s Cormac?’

  ‘He ran out. I don’t know. Owen Roe will be back though. Any minute. Listen, please, you’ve got to go. Hide. You’ll be arrested. How did you get back?’

  Patsy too would have liked to know that. He waited, fist clutched around the old-fashioned meat-cleaver. If that bugger tried to get her away, he’d pounce. Pow!, thought Patsy and, thinking, missed something.

  ‘Has he a key? I’ll bolt the front door.’

  The Yank’s voice was right outside the jakes where Patsy was hiding. The door handle moved. Was he coming in? Patsy raised his cleaver, but the chap must have been touching the knob idly and without intent for he had gone by. His next statement came from half a flight down. Patsy was torn between wanting to burst out and chase him and eagerness to first hear all he could. It was his duty to the Captain to find out the intruder’s purposes: public or private. This, he argued with himself, was why he was waiting. But a langour gripped him too.

  ‘I won’t leave without you. Not again.’

  Patsy’s eye at the jakes keyhole could see nothing. He could hear though and what he heard was queer. The Yank had raced back up to the second floor from whence a chor
us of stressful breathings reached Patsy in shreds and pauses. Sobs? Coughs? Sacred Heart tonight, the pair were crying. Their emotion locked into his own, maddeningly, like the pedal of someone’s bike getting locked into yours. This upset Patsy – threw him off stroke. He was listening now – no point deceiving himself – with a kind of inquisitive frenzy. What they said was alien to him, yet comforted his ragged, unvented pain, as the hot throb of alcohol can comfort a sick body. Patsy’s sickness was of the soul and chronic and here, consolingly, were a pair wrestling with something like it, clawing, like himself, after the next-to-impossible.

  ‘I thought of death,’ the Yank was saying. ‘Really, I did. I thought how we waste … Darling, listen, we must be ruthless. It’s now or never and …’ More sobs. Or what were they? Could sexual congress be taking place up there this minute? For the first time in his life, Patsy felt an interest in that activity which he had thought of up to now as being irredeemably carnal. Yoked to the kind of feeling which was leaking through this house like gas, the act, Patsy had to admit, could be a way of escaping the mean limits of the self. He had heard this said, before now, but had had trouble comparing sex with prayer or song or patriotism or even alcohol, since his knowledge of it had been gleaned in farmyards and from watching stray dogs in alleys.

  ‘… death …’ the Yank said again. It was a word which always thrilled Patsy in a bleak but invigorating way. It was a gregarious word, for he thought of it not in terms of the lone grave but of the Day of Judgement which would be like a vast, exuberant political rally with all the old distinctions swept away and all mankind equal and fraternal, shoulder to shoulder, bone to bone. This picture was inspired partly by the Dies Irae and partly by the ‘International’: Arise ye starvelings from your slumbers. Patsy could mock his fancy while enjoying it. It thawed his ill-humour when it came to mind and could undermine stern resolution.

  At the thought, wrath surged back. Why should he soften? Why? He had no business feeling sympathy with other people’s yearnings. Certainly not with those of the pair above stairs. He was letting his soft heart take advantage of him and giving way to sentiment. It was intolerable: as if the beetle under your foot were to speak up with the news that it too had feelings. A beetle, a beetle! What right had that gurrier above to intrude in other people’s cunts or countries? None, none. Patsy could have crowned him this minute, knocked his block off once and for all, yet durstn’t show himself for the bugger was big and fit and would have to be taken by surprise. Patsy’d have to lie low another bit – and, oh Jesus, with that thought his claustrophobia started up. He could have screamed with tension, the jakes reminding him suddenly of gaol and being in solitary. Out he’d have to get. Out, out. He felt as if he’d been locked up already, nicked for the crime he hadn’t yet committed: it was the story of his life. Hadn’t the cops caught him red-handed the time he’d been sent to put bombs in post-boxes?

  What was that? What was the pair up to now? Patsy leaned forward, ears straining but could not diagnose the noises reaching him.

  Worrying the hasp of the jakes window, he wondered could he duck out that way? Someone had painted the thing closed and the wood was weak. Better not break it.

  The voices up above were now like a dawn chorus. All twitters and trills. Again, he could only make out the odd scrap.

  ‘… love me?’

  ‘Yes, yes. I swear.’

  There was a lot of movement. More laughs. Fornication was undoubtedly taking place.

  ‘You see, I can’t leave you. Not for a minute. You’re not to be trusted.’

  ‘No, no, I’ll come. Really. Really, but meanwhile you must get out of here. Owen Roe mustn’t find you.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Really, you can trust me. I’ll join you.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Give me half – no, an hour to pack.’

  ‘We’ll take a plane to London, right? Now?’

  ‘Yes, James, sh!’

  More laughter. Silence. Kissing-time, guessed Patsy and wondered would the Captain be along in time to stop your woman. Surely he would, he persuaded himself. No need for violence. Best lie doggo and learn the couple’s plans. Where were they meeting?

  ‘An hour then … in the old place.’

  And down the stairs with the fellow like a blooming yoyo. Where to? Where was their ‘old place’?

  ‘I love you.’ A shout from below.

  ‘I love you. Go, please.’

  ‘You will come? No matter what? And bring your passport?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. In an hour.’

  Again the door closed, followed a minute later by the click of the garden gate. Then a car door slammed and the engine started up.

  Patsy, his custodial purpose half-gone, groaned at the smelly confines of this place out of which he could not simply walk. Your woman would catch, scold and humiliate him. Envy gripped him for people who could actually walk out of their lives. Change and renew themselves. It was something so impossible for himself, that he had never till now thought to be jealous of those who could and did.

  Under cover of the car’s departing noise, he had, however, heaved a shoulder against the window-frame so that it shot open. Upstairs, Mrs Μ was running about. Doing her packing. Whore! Well, it wasn’t too late to put a spoke in her wheel! It took minutes to ease his body out of the narrow window. Patsy wasn’t a fat man but neither was he as agile as he had once been He had an hour. Should he have faced the Yank? He should, he should, but his stomach had failed him. It was the cleaver: a bloody instrument. Should have taken the mallet. The thing now was to get the Captain and the husband to put a stop to her gallop. Catch up with the other fellow, make up for Patsy s funk – had it been funk? What else? Hardly connivance, for Heaven’s sake. He’d give the Captain a tinkle the minute he was out of here. There! He’d got clear of the window and was climbing down the side of the house. An espaliered pear tree which he had trained up the wall himself made a perfect ladder. Maybe his luck was on the turn? Poised to jump the last ten feet, he blinked as a flare of reflected sunset gleamed at him from the windscreen of a Ford Cortina parked on the opposite side of the canal. It had been driven right to the water’s edge and was not thirty yards away. As Patsy watched, the side door opened and out came the Yank. He walked round the car to the boot, opened it and came back. He was holding a pair of binoculars which he raised to his eyes and trained on Patsy or at any rate on the house.

  Watching for the other one’s signal, was he? Through an open window, Patsy could hear her fussing about, singing a snatch of song, screeching at Mary, haranguing the old aunt. It would take her more than an hour to collect herself, he decided and jumped purposefully to the ground. His hatred of the Californicator was back in full force. While Patsy watched him, the fellow slid into the car and disappeared behind the red blaze on the windscreen.

  *

  Sister Judith was having one of her nightmares. She wished she could waken from it but, although she kept reminding herself that a nightmare was all it was, she could not break the envelope of sleep. In her dream, two men wearing suits of cloth so thick it could have been used for carpeting, were sitting on either side of her. She was in bed and they sat fencing her in. They flanked her like a bodyguard, but their intentions were not protective. One showed her his index fingers, threatening to stick them up her nose and tear her nostrils open. When she found that she could not shout, she knew that this really was a dream. However, the fear did not go away. Each man was wearing a hat and heavy boots. Everything about them was heavy and menacing. They were gangsters from some movie, she decided. She had seen them on television and now she was dreaming about them.

  ‘Sister Judith,’ said one, ‘we want to ask you a few questions.’

  He had an Irish accent. He had taken off his hat and his suit was less heavy than just now.

  She wasn’t dreaming at all, she realized, but she still couldn’t scream. Then the scream came.

  The girl ran in. ‘What’s the matter?’
says she, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. ‘You were dreaming!’ she accused. ‘You dropped off.’

  Sister Judith looked around her. There were no men. She wanted to ask ‘Where are they?’ but was wary and watched the girl slyly. This was the redhead, though they might use wigs. ‘A dream,’ she agreed, ‘a bad one.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the girl. ‘Did Owen Roe upset you? He did, didn’t he? He’s a bully.’

  Good cop, bad cop. Sister Judith knew the technique. She’d seen it on TV. ‘You may think me a fool.’

  ‘Nobody does, Aunt Judith.’

  ‘Or mad or bad?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why were they grilling me so?’ Grilling! That was the word. She was in command of her faculties, whatever some might think. She repeated it: ‘Grilling!’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ll get him to lay off.’ The girl did look sorry. She looked as if she had been crying. In fact there were tears in her eyes. ‘If I can,’ she added.