The Hill Bachelors

by William Trevor

  ‘I think I’ll go back,’ he said the next time he ran into Feeny, outside the Spurs and Horse one night. At first he’d thought Feeny was touchy when he went on about his experience in a launderette or plates being washed twice; now he felt it could be true. You’d buy a packet of cigarettes off the same woman in a shop and she wouldn’t pass a few minutes with you, even though you’d been in yesterday. The only good part of being in this city was the public houses where you’d meet boys from home, where there was a bit of banter and cheerfulness, and a sing-song when it was permitted. But when the evening was over you were on your own again.

  ‘Why’d you go back, boy?’

  ‘It doesn’t suit me.’

  ‘I know what you mean. I often thought of it myself.’

  ‘It’s no life for a young fellow.’

  ‘They’ve driven you out. They spent eight centuries tormenting us and now they’re at it again.’

  ‘He called my mam a hooer.’

  Huxter wasn’t fit to tie Mrs Brogan’s laces, Feeny said. He’d seen it before, he said. ‘They’re all the same, boy.’

  ‘I’ll finish out the few weeks with the job we’re on.’

  ‘You’ll be home for Christmas.’

  ‘I will.’

  They were walking slowly on the street, the public houses emptying, the night air dank and cold. Feeny paused in a pool of darkness, beneath a street light that wasn’t working. Softly, he said:

  ‘Mr McTighe has the business for you.’

  It sounded like another tip, but Feeny said no. He walked on in silence, and Liam Pat said to himself it would be another job, a different foreman. He thought about that. Huxter was the worst of it, but it wasn’t only Huxter. Liam Pat was homesick for the estate, for the small town where people said hullo to you. Since he’d been here he’d eaten any old how, sandwiches he bought the evening before, for breakfast and again in the middle of the day, burger and chips later on, Bob’s Dining Rooms on a Sunday. He hadn’t thought about that before he’d come — what he’d eat, what a Sunday would be like. Sometimes at Mass he saw a girl he liked the look of, the same girl each time, quiet-featured, with her hair tied back. But when he went up to her after Mass a few weeks back she turned away without speaking.

  ‘I don’t want another job,’ he said.

  ‘Why would you, Liam Pat? After what they put you through?’

  ‘I thought you said Mr McTighe —’

  ‘Ah no, no. Mr McTighe was only remembering the time you and Dessie Coglan used distribute the little magazine.’

  They still walked slowly, Feeny setting the pace.

  ‘We were kids though,’ Liam Pat said, astonished at what was being said.

  ‘You showed your colours all the same.’

  Liam Pat didn’t understand that. He didn’t know why they were talking about a time when he was still at the Brothers’, when he and Dessie Coglan used to push the freedom magazine into the letter-boxes. As soon as it was dark they’d do it, so’s no one would see them. Undercover stuff, Dessie used to say, and a couple of times he mentioned Michael Collins.

  ‘I had word from Mr McTighe,’ Feeny said.

  ‘Are we calling in there?’

  ‘He’ll have a beer for us.’

  ‘We were only being big fellas when we went round with the magazine.’

  ‘It’s remembered you went round with it.’

  Liam Pat never knew where the copies of the magazine came from. Dessie Coglan just said the lads, but more likely it was the barber, Gaughan, an elderly man who lost the four fingers of his left hand in 1921. Liam Pat often noticed Dessie coming out of Gaughan’s or talking to Gaughan in his doorway, beneath the striped barber’s pole. In spite of his fingerless hand, Gaughan could still shave a man or cut a head of hair.

  ‘Come on in,’ Mr McTighe invited, opening his back door to them. ‘That’s a raw old night.’

  They sat in the kitchen again. Mr McTighe handed round cans of Carling Black Label.

  ‘You’ll do the business, Liam?’

  ‘What’s that, Mr McTighe?’

  ‘Feeny here’ll show you the ropes.’

  ‘The thing is, I’m going back to Ireland.’

  ‘I thought maybe you would be. “There’s a man will be going home,” I said to myself. Didn’t I say that, Feeny?’

  ‘You did of course, Mr McTighe.’

  ‘What I was thinking, you’d do the little thing for me before you’d be on your way, Liam. Like we were discussing the other night,’ Mr McTighe said, and Liam Pat wondered if he’d had too much beer that night, for he couldn’t remember any kind of discussion taking place.

  *

  Feeny opened the door of the room where the curtains were drawn over and took the stuff from the floorboards. He didn’t switch the light on, but instead shone a torch into where he’d lifted away a section of the boards. Liam Pat saw red and black wires and the cream-coloured face of a timing device. Child’s play, Feeny said, extinguishing the torch.

  Liam Pat heard the floorboards replaced. He stepped back into the passage off which the door of the room opened. Together he and Feeny passed through the hall and climbed the stairs to Liam Pat’s room.

  ‘Pull down that blind, boy,’ Feeny said.

  There was a photograph of Liam Pat’s mother stuck under the edge of a mirror over a wash-basin; just above it, one of his father had begun to curl at the two corners that were exposed. The cheap brown suitcase he’d travelled from Ireland with was open on the floor, clothes he’d brought back from the launderette dumped in it, not yet sorted out. He’d bought the suitcase in Lacey’s in Emmet Street, the day after he gave in his notice to O’Dwyer.

  ‘Listen to me now,’ Feeny said, sitting down on the bed.

  The springs rasped noisily. Feeny put a hand out to steady the sudden lurch of the headboard. ‘I’m glad to see that,’ he said, gesturing with his head in the direction of a card Liam Pat’s mother had made him promise he’d display in whatever room he found for himself. In the Virgin’s arms the infant Jesus raised two chubby fingers in blessing.

  ‘I’m not into anything like you’re thinking,’ Liam Pat said.

  ‘Mr McTighe brought you over, boy.’

  Feeny’s wizened features were without expression. His priestly suit was shapeless, worn through at one of the elbows. A tie as narrow as a bootlace hung from the soiled collar of his shirt, its minuscule knot hard and shiny. He stared at his knees when he said Mr McTighe had brought Liam Pat from Ireland. Liam Pat said:

  ‘I came over on my own though.’

  Still examining the dark material stretched over his knees, as if fearing damage here also, Feeny shook his head.

  ‘Mr McTighe fixed the room. Mr McTighe watched your welfare. “I like the cut of Liam Pat Brogan.” Those were his words, boy. The day after yourself and myself went round to him the first time wasn’t he on the phone to me, eight a.m. in the morning? Would you know what he said that time?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t.’

  ‘ “We have a man in Liam Pat Brogan,” was what he said.’

  ‘I couldn’t do what you’re saying all the same.’

  ‘Listen to me, boy. They have no history on you. You’re no more than another Paddy going home for Christmas. D’you understand what I’m saying to you, Liam Pat?’

  ‘I never heard of Mr McTighe till I was over here.’

  ‘He’s a friend to you, Liam Pat, the same way’s I am myself. Haven’t I been a friend, Liam Pat?’

  ‘You have surely.’

  ‘That’s all I’m saying to you.’

  ‘I’d never have the nerve for a bomber.’

  ‘Sure, is there anyone wants to be? Is there a man on the face of God’s earth would make a choice, boy?’ Feeny paused. He took a handkerchief from a pocket of his trousers and passed it beneath his nose. For the first time since they’d entered Liam Pat’s room he looked at him directly. ‘There’ll be no harm done, boy. No harm to life or limb. Nothing the like of th
at.’

  Liam Pat frowned. He shook his head, indicating further bewilderment.

  ‘Mr McTighe wouldn’t ask bloodshed of anyone,’ Feeny went on. ‘A Sunday night. You follow me on that? A Sunday’s a dead day in the city. Not a detail of that written down, though. Neither date nor time. Nothing I’m saying to you.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘Nothing, only memorized.’

  Feeny went on talking then. Because there was no chair in the room, Liam Pat sat on the floor, his back to the wall. Child’s play, Feeny said again. He talked about Mr McTighe and the mission that possessed Mr McTighe, the same that possessed every Irishman worth his salt, the further from home he was the more it was there. ‘You understand me?’ Feeny said often, punctuating his long speech with this query, concerned in case there was incomprehension where there should be clarity. ‘The dream of Wolfe Tone,’ he said. ‘The dream of Isaac Butt and Charles Stewart Parnell. The dream of Lord Edward Fitzgerald.’

  The names stirred classroom memories for Liam Pat, the lay teacher Riordan requesting information about them, his bitten moustache disguising a long upper lip, a dust of chalk on his pinstripes. ‘Was your man Fitzgerald in the Flight of the Earls?’ Hasessy asked once, and Riordan was contemptuous.

  ‘The massacre of the innocents,’ Feeny said. ‘Bloody Sunday.’ He spoke of lies and deception, of falsity and broken promises, of bullying that was hardly different from the bullying of Huxter. ‘O’Connell,’ he said. ‘Pearse. Michael Collins. Those are the men, Liam Pat, and you’ll walk away one of them. You’ll walk away ten feet high.’

  As a fish is attracted by a worm and yet suspicious of it, Liam Pat was drawn into Feeny’s oratory. ‘God, you could be the Big Fella himself,’ Dessie Coglan complimented him one night when they were delivering the magazines. He had seen the roadside cross that honoured the life and the death of the Big Fella; he had seen the film only a few weeks back. He leaned his head against the wall and, while staring at Feeny, saw himself striding with Michael Collins’s big stride. The torrent of Feeny’s assurances and promises, and the connections Feeny made, affected him, but even so he said:

  ‘Sure, someone could be passing though.’

  ‘There’ll be no one passing, boy. A Sunday night’s chosen to make sure of it. Nothing only empty offices, no watchmen on the premises. All that’s gone into.’

  Feeny pushed himself off the bed. He motioned with his hand and Liam Pat stood up. Between now and the incident, Feeny said, there would be no one in the house except Liam Pat. Write nothing down, he instructed again. ‘You’ll be questioned. Policemen will maybe get on the train. Or they’ll be at the docks when you get there.’

  ‘What’ll I say to them though?’

  ‘Only that you’re going home to County Cork for Christmas. Only that you were nowhere near where they’re asking you about. Never in your life. Never heard of it.’

  ‘Will they say do I know you? Will they say do I know Mr McTighe?’

  ‘They won’t have those names. If they ask you for names say the lads in your gang, say Rafferty and Noonan, say any names you heard in public houses. Say Feeny and McTighe if you’re stuck. They won’t know who you’re talking about.’

  ‘Are they not your names then?’

  ‘Why would they be, boy?’

  Liam Pat’s protestation that he couldn’t do it didn’t weaken at first, but as Feeny went on and on, the words becoming images in Liam Pat’s vision, he himself always at the centre of things, he became aware of an excitement. Huxter wouldn’t know what was going to happen; Huxter would look at him and assume he was the same. The people who did not say hullo when he bought cigarettes or a newspaper would see no difference either. There was a strength in the excitement, a vigour Liam Pat had never experienced in his life before. He would carry the secret on to the site every morning. He would walk through the streets with it, a power in him where there’d been nothing. ‘You have a Corkman’s way with you,’ Feeny said, and in the room with the drawn curtains he showed Liam Pat the business.

  *

  Sixteen days went by before the chosen Sunday arrived. In the Spurs and Horse during that time Liam Pat wanted to talk the way Feeny and Mr McTighe did, in the same soft manner, mysteriously, some private meaning in the words he used. He was aware of a lightness in his mood and confidence in his manner, and more easily than before he was drawn into conversation. One evening the barmaid eyed him the way Rosita Drudy used to eye Dessie Coglan years ago in Brady’s Bar.

  Liam Pat didn’t see Feeny again, as Feeny had warned him he wouldn’t. He didn’t see Mr McTighe. The man didn’t call for the rent, and for sixteen days Liam Pat was the only person in the house. He kept to his room except when he went to take up the sawn-through floorboards, familiarizing himself with what had to be done, making sure there was space enough in the sports bag when the clock was packed in a way that was convenient to set it. He cooked nothing in the kitchen because Feeny had said better not to. He didn’t understand that, but even so he obeyed the command, thinking of it in that way, an order, no questions asked. He made tea in his room, buttering bread and sprinkling sugar on the butter, opening tins of beans and soup, eating the contents cold. Five times in all he made the journey he was to make on the chosen Sunday, timing himself as Feeny had suggested, becoming used to the journey and alert to any variations there might be.

  On the Saturday before the Sunday he packed his suitcase and took it across the city to a locker at Euston Station, still following Feeny’s instructions. When he returned to the house he collected what tins he’d opened and what food was left and filled a carrier bag, which he deposited in a dustbin in another street. The next day he had a meal at one o’clock in Bob’s Dining Rooms, the last he would ever have there. The people were friendlier than they’d been before.

  Nothing that belonged to him remained in his room, or in the house, when he left it for the last time. Feeny said to clean his room with the Philips cleaner that was kept for general use at the bottom of the stairs. He said to go over everywhere, all the surfaces, and Liam Pat did so, using the little round brush without any extension on the suction tube. For his own protection, that was. Wipe the handles of the doors with a tissue last thing of all, Feeny had advised, anywhere he might have touched.

  Shortly after seven he practised the timing again. He wanted to smoke a cigarette in the downstairs room, but he didn’t because Feeny had said not to. He zipped up the sports bag and left the house with it. Outside, he lit a cigarette.

  On the way to the bus stop, two streets away, he dropped the key of the house down a drain, an instruction also. When Feeny had been advising him about cleaning the surfaces and making sure nothing was left that could identify him, Liam Pat had had the impression that Mr McTighe wouldn’t have bothered with any of that, that all Mr McTighe was interested in was getting the job done. He went upstairs on the bus and sat at the back. A couple got off at the next stop, leaving him on his own.

  It was then that Liam Pat began to feel afraid. It was one thing to have it over Huxter, to know what Huxter didn’t know; it was one thing to get a smile from the barmaid. It was another altogether to be sitting on a bus with a device in a sports bag. The excitement that had first warmed him while he listened to Feeny, while he sat on the floor with his head resting against the wall, wasn’t there any more. Mr McTighe picking him out felt different now, and when he tried to see himself in Michael Collins’s trenchcoat, with Michael Collins’s stride, there was nothing there either. It sounded meaningless, Feeny saying he had a Corkman’s way with him.

  He sat with the sports bag on the floor, steadied by his feet on either side of it. A weakness had come into his arms, and for a moment he thought he wouldn’t be able to lift them, but when he tried it was all right, even though the feeling of weakness was still there. A moment later nausea caused him to close his eyes.

  The bus lurched and juddered through the empty Sunday-evening streets. Idling at bus stops, its engine vibrated, and between his
knees Liam Pat’s hand repeatedly reached down to seize the handles of the sports bag, steadying it further. He wanted to get off, to hurry down the stairs that were beside where he was sitting, to jump off the bus while it was still moving, to leave the sports bag where it was. He sensed what he did not understand: that all this had happened before, that his terror had come so suddenly because he was experiencing, again, what he had experienced already.

  Two girls came chattering up the stairs and walked down the length of the bus. They laughed as they sat down, one of them bending forward, unable to control herself. The other went on with what she was saying, laughing too, but Liam Pat couldn’t hear what she said. The conductor came for their fares and when he’d gone they found they didn’t have a light for their cigarettes. The one who’d laughed so much was on the inside, next to the window. The other one got up. ‘Ta,’ she said when she had asked Liam Pat if he had a lighter and he handed her his box of matches. He didn’t strike one because of the shaking in his hands, but even so she must have seen it. ‘Ta,’ she said again.

  It could have been in a dream. He could have dreamed he was on a bus with the bag. He could have had a dream and forgotten it, like you sometimes did. The night he’d seen Feeny for the last time, it could have been he had a dream of being on a bus, and he tried to remember waking up the next morning, but he couldn’t.

  The girl next to the window looked over her shoulder, as if she’d just been told that he’d handed her friend the box instead of striking a match for her. They’d remember him because of that. The one who’d approached him would remember the sports bag. ‘Cheers,’ the same one said when they both left the bus a couple of stops later.

  It wasn’t a dream. It was the Examiner spread out on the kitchen table a few months ago and his father shaking his head over the funeral, sourly demanding why those people couldn’t have been left to their grief, why there were strangers there, wanting to carry the coffin. ‘My God! My God!’ his father savagely exclaimed.

  It hadn’t worked the first time. A Sunday night then too, another boy, another bus. Liam Pat tried to remember that boy’s name, but he couldn’t. ‘Poor bloody hero,’ his father said.