The Law of Dreams

by Peter Behrens

  “Where is Muck Muldoon?” a tramp asked Molly.

  Fergus flinched at the name.

  “Dead,” she answered.

  The tramp wore a smashed lady’s bonnet and had his bundle tied on a stick. “How did it happen?”

  “Oh, he tried to clip a horse, but the horse clipped him.”

  “Poor old Muck. He was a terrier.”

  “Poor old Muck,” she agreed.

  They boarded the horse and rode on. After they had gone a mile or so, Fergus looked around at her. “Did you care for Muldoon?”

  “What do you think? What a gommoch you are.”

  They encountered sheep, being driven west to sell in the railway camps, flowing nervously around the horse, pushed by fierce-looking Welsh drovers and heeled by fanatic dogs.

  “Muldoon I met on Derry quay when I was lurking there after my ma was transported. I was feeding off the Quakers’ soup — poor scran it was. Didn’t know how I’d keep alive.

  “Me and her, we used to run palsy games at the fairs, with our bones, our shells, our playing cards. You should see me cut sixpence off a farmer when I have got him feeling bold — how stupid men get at a fair. We hardly stole nothing that summer, only a bit of what come our way. Then she took some tools from a fellow making wagon wheels in Enniskillen, thinking we could sell them, and that was on account of a debt of honor, for the fellow had been promising we could live in his house, only he had a wife, which he didn’t tell us.

  “So she was hooked by the law, and the magistrate sentenced her for being an evil, idle wretch, which she wasn’t. Twelve years transportation. I sometimes wonder where she is, lost at sea, or playing the game in Van Dieman’s Land? But it don’t matter. Them transported, you never see again. They are good as dead.

  “Anyway, I was hungry. Muldoon asked, would I like a bite to eat. He was kind for a while. ‘Machree,’ he would say, ‘you were lost but I have found you.’ He had cold mutton in his pail, bread, and a little butter. A little poitin jar. Gave me his hard cloak to wear, paid my fare across to England, and said I’d be his cailín dhas.”

  His sweet girl, his pretty.

  “Do you suppose they have buried him by now?”

  “They plant fellows quick before the farmers try to stop them. In some field if the digging’s soft, or under the grade. Poor old Muldoon.”

  “You say so but you were frightened of him.”

  “Ach, he wasn’t so bad, I’ve seen worse.”

  The horse was jogging along, iron shoes scraping the road, when Molly tugged sharply at Fergus’s sleeve. “Stop!”

  He pulled the reins and stopped the horse. She had Muldoon’s watch out, holding it to her ear. Then she pressed it on Fergus’s ear. “Hear anything?”

  Listening strenuously, he could hear nothing but wind through gorse, and the horse’s breathing. “No.”

  “That’s Muck’s time has run out. Dead he is. Quite dead.” She began twisting the knob between her thumb and forefinger. “Here, you give it a lick. Don’t work it too tight. Just go easy, easy, and fill her in slow.”

  He wound the knob, feeling resistance increase with every turn.

  “That’s good enough.”

  Holding it to her ear, Molly smiled with satisfaction. “Now it’s our time.”

  THEY STOPPED at a contractor camp and bought hay from the farrier. Molly asked the time and set the watch. While the blue horse was feeding, Fergus watched a team of horses pulling a giant wooden roller up and down the grade, compacting.

  “When you die on the passage they feed you to the fish. It’s better to be buried under the line.” Molly was standing beside him. The farrier had offered her warm water to wash in. The sun was warm, and she had taken off her cloak. Her feet were bare, her breasts pressing the thin cotton gown. Dry, pink lips.

  He felt clumsy and vulnerable, standing so close. A swell of tenderness he did not know what to do with.

  Shea would want her, he realized.

  The Dragon was softer than anything Molly knew. Safer than rocking for Muldoon; more real than America. He ought to keep clear of the Dragon and its temptations, but he knew he had to see his friends, and see himself in their eyes. They were the only ones who knew him now. They were his people and he could not relinquish them.

  OUTSIDE CHESTER, with the light fading, Molly spat into her palm, slapped hands, and sold the blue horse to a Welsh farmer for six shillings. Fergus stood watching as the animal was tied behind the farmer’s cart and led away.

  No use trying hold on to any part of the world. Let it go, forget it, or be demented from sorrow.

  THEY HURRIED to the station. A Southern Express stood huffing like an important dream while passengers slipped into the carriages and navvies swarmed the trucks. The Northern Express had already gone through, an agent informed them. The next wasn’t due until morning, eight o’clock.

  “We’ll doss in a churchyard,” Molly decided. “No use wasting money.”

  They bought bread, cheese, and herrings at a victualer’s shop and ate as they walked. At the churchyard, tramps scattered among the graves were already asleep, rolled up in their blankets. Spreading out Muldoon’s coat on the grass behind a tombstone, they lay down, spooning for warmth. She held his hand close to her mouth and he felt her breath, warm and damp, on his thumb. He could feel his prick getting hard.

  After a while she rolled onto her back and looked at him. “I know what you want.”

  Seizing his hand she drew it under her skirt.

  Curious, tentative, he touched her.

  “Cold!”

  She seemed unable to relax her body. After a few moments, confused by her stiffness, unwilling to be rough, he withdrew his hand.

  “Do as you please!” she said. “Go on! It don’t matter! Go ahead.”

  “It’s no good unless you want to.”

  “That’s all talk.” She jabbed him with her elbow. “Do as you please — I don’t care.”

  He fumbled with buttons on the front of the gown and got a few undone. Underneath, she wore a gray woolen vest. He slid one hand under the layer of greasy, strong-smelling wool. The skin of her breasts felt warm and soft. He started kissing her again. She did not open her mouth. After a few kisses, she sat up, pushed him back, and started unbuttoning his trousers.

  Taking his cock in her fist, she began rubbing it briskly. As the shaft became slippery with fluid, his hips began to buck, and he felt very close to death or some new understanding. How angry and strange everything was, how unsettled the world.

  She took it between her lips, and an instant later he was jarring inside her mouth.

  After the last convulsion, he lay exhausted.

  She spat out the junk.

  “That was deadly good, wasn’t it?” she said.

  “It was.” But something was missing. He felt estranged, hopeless, falling through the world.

  “Is it what you wanted, so?”

  “I want you.”

  “Well, I’m here, ain’t I?” She wriggled close, dragging her cloak over them. “Go to sleep, strange fellow.”

  IN THE morning he was awakened by the noise of her being sick on the grass.

  He got up and rubbed her back until the convulsions had stopped. “Oh man, there’s black in that.” She was peering at the mess. “I’m sick, I’m sick. Oh man, I can’t follow this life no more.”

  He knew the first sign of black fever, typhus fever, was usually headache, thoughts tangling and blazing. Then violent sickness. Skin flushing dark, so the victim was black in the face. Chills. Overnight, fever sores blistering. Every joint swollen and tender. Terrible sleeps, like sleeping in fire.

  She was weeping. Wetting his handkerchief on the dew, he began cleaning her mouth.

  “I want to be warm, Fergus. Everything’s wrong. I’m never warm. There’s more to life than this.”

  “Have you never had the fever?”

  “Don’t talk to me of fever.” She made herself stand up straight, and shook out her
skirt. “I’m all right. I’m better now — I’ll be all right. We’ll have our ship by tonight, won’t we?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps.”

  “I tell you, man I won’t never more sleep on the ground.”

  “What time?”

  She cracked open the watch. “It’s time. Let’s go, let’s catch our flier.”

  IN THE mist, well-dressed railway passengers stood clutching their parcels and waiting for the Northern Express. At the far end of the platform, a group of navvies sat on their packs.

  No train in sight.

  “We’ve rations left from last night, don’t we? I’m famished, man. Give us a fill, I need something.” She was peering down the line, impatient.

  Her face showed good color, nothing feverish.

  He gave her bread and cheese, which she ate greedily, watching the line. “Here she comes, man.”

  He could see the engine, furling white smoke. “Look at that beauty!” Molly cried, hopping like a bird. People began collecting packages as the train clanked into the station, smothering the platform in steam, cinders, and the stink of hot grease and iron. Navvies were getting to their feet.

  “Come on, Fergus, let’s find a place, she won’t stop long.” Without waiting for him Molly started down the platform, heading for the open trucks at the end of the train.

  If he stayed there, standing on the platform, she’d still board the train. He’d not see her again. He’d be alone. Safer. Watchful. Using solitude like a drink.

  Another tramp in a world of tramps.

  Alone, you lose your sense of yourself. Your thoughts slur. Eventually you’d vanish, like those ejected; like them dropped into the sea.

  “Fergus! She’s starting to pull!” She was beside one of the open trucks. “I can feel it! Come give me a leg-up, man!”

  Rejecting solitude, you follow what is warm.

  He hurried down the platform. When he reached the truck, he bent and cupped his hands. Laughing, she stepped up neatly and scrambled over the side. He climbed over after her. The tramps were packed shoulder-to-shoulder but Molly brusquely elbowed for space. “Make room, make room, gents — we all shall fit nice as fleas.” The whistle screamed and couplings slammed down the length of the train, and the truck gave a jolt and started rolling. It left the station quickly, clattering over switches. Smoke and red cinders fluttered over their heads. Past stables, wagon yards, and the backs of houses, they broke out into the open country.

  Molly was crouched out of the wind, lighting her pipe. He stood holding on to the truck’s swaying sides watching the fields of England flipping past.

  Great speed makes you feel powerful, as though you possess what you see, but the feeling is a delusion.

  City of Stone

  DISEMBARKING AT BIRKENHEAD, they followed a crowd of navvies past slaughter yards reeking of smoke, blood, and shit, down to the landing stage, where they paid a penny each and boarded the ferry.

  The Mersey teemed like every thought in his head spilling out. Dozens of steamers and ships trafficked up and down the river or lay waiting to enter the stone fortress docks on the Liverpool side.

  At midstream he caught the sharp aroma of the sea just as a three-master crossed their bow, her yellow sails flapping. She was headed out under tow from a steam tug; her deck was full of passengers capering and cheering and waving their hats.

  “Look at them going for America,” Molly said enviously.

  The sound of cheering was cut and garbled by the wind.

  As the ship crossed their bow he stared up at passengers lining the rails and felt the mystery of life on them, radiant.

  You don’t know where it is, the other side, you can’t imagine.

  “I WILL get clean,” Fergus announced.

  “Let’s find your friends first.”

  “No.” They were watching people with damp hair and shining faces coming out of the public baths on Georges Dock, a few steps up from the landing stage. “We’ll bathe first, and new clothes. Look out —”

  A runner was coming through, pushing a barrow piled with baggage. Yelling traffic out of his way, trailed by a pack of emigrants who looked stunned by what was happening to them.

  Liverpool no longer stunned him, but it was a hard place and used people hard, if they were unprotected. Ruined them.

  “Come on, Moll.”

  He led her to an old-clothes cart, one of a dozen on the quay. He longed to change his skin, to clean up, to impress Shea. They began sorting through hats, boots, and clothes piled on tables and pegged out on lines, flapping on the breeze. The better dressed, the stronger he would feel. Shea must see him as the hard fellow he had become. If she tried to take Molly, he would fight.

  “Do you like this, Moll?” He held up a shirt, Manchester cloth, red-and-white checked, with small, hard, white buttons, but she was absorbed trying on boots. He found a pair of duck trousers, sky blue in color, stiff from washing, with two rows of black buttons down the front. Linen and cotton underclothes. Woolen stockings that smelled of lamp oil. Studying a table of hats, he saw a beaver sleeker and even taller than his own, but his own was still good enough, still stiff enough and more or less straight, without the crazy dents and angles of Irish hats. He picked out another cotton shirt, checked black-and-white, missing a collar button.

  “I feel like a duck,” Molly said staring down at the boots on her feet.

  “Boots make you strong in the world, Moll. Nothing like it.”

  She held up a pink gown with blue ribbon at the neck and a split seam. “I ought to burn my old thing; I smell of turnips.” She turned to the old-clothes man. “Tell me what it is for this gear.”

  “A pound the lot.”

  “That’s no good.”

  “It’s fine gear.”

  “Spun of gold, I suppose?” she sneered. “Come along, man, I’m not off the boat. Six shillings I’ll pay.”

  You’re too small for a whore, he thought, watching her bargain with the dealer. Too bony. You don’t want strangers inside, they will tear you open, will bust your thoughts.

  They settled for a price of nine shillings, with a canvas grip included, and raced for the baths. Tickets were a penny each, paid at the wicket. She paid for them both — she had their money, rolled up in Muck’s handkerchief. As he watched her heading into the women’s baths, another fear nipped him. Would she be waiting when he came out? He was about to call after her and ask for the money, for his share at least, but stopped himself.

  He didn’t know what she would do, but he wished to know.

  In the men’s dressing room white bodies of men and children appeared and disappeared through a gauze of steam. He stuffed his old clothes in the grip, which he left with an old attendant, receiving in exchange a brass disc on a cord that hung around his neck.

  Walking the tunnel to the baths, the noise of water splashing reminded him of that first night at the Dragon, how clean that bath had scraped him; and of Shea, oiling him, then coaxing him.

  He had been ill for weeks, and they had taken good care of him. Never before had he received such bounty and affection.

  The tiled bathroom was crowded with steam and men’s bodies. Hot water slashed from nozzles in the ceiling. Stepping under a torrent he felt a shock of heat, and stood for a couple of minutes hanging his head, like a bull dozing, absorbing the drench, before he began scrubbing.

  If she went off with the money she would swim like a fish in the streets of Liverpool and he would never find her.

  After rinsing off the soap, he stayed under the torrent while a stream of bathers flowed in and out of the room.

  Betrayal was what it was — the timing didn’t matter. He was in no hurry to find out.

  Most bathers seemed to fear the ferocity of the pounding, drenching deluge. They ducked under for only a few seconds, gasping and howling, slapping their chests and thighs, then rushing away.

  He could go for the Dragon, even without money, and Shea and Arthur and Mary and Betsy would wel
come him; would take him in if he had money or not.

  Perhaps there was a room somewhere within the Dragon — somewhere in the warren of passageways, staircases, kitchens, card rooms, and bedrooms — where he could hide, and no one could ever find him. An unvisited room, dusty and forgotten. A space concealed by the living house, surrounded, and perfectly safe.

  Of course such a room couldn’t be.

  That was your grave you were thinking of.

  “WHAT A Liverpool jockey you are,” she said, teasing.

  She had been waiting for him outside the baths, wearing her new gown, combing out her damp hair with her fingers.

  Looking down, he noticed with satisfaction how neatly his new trousers broke over his boots.

  “You’re the navigator, lead away,” she said, taking his arm. “All I know of Liverpool is shit and death. Find us some friends.”

  Threads attaching you to another person, to a woman, are biting and intense. You try to gather them in your hand and they are almost invisible but how they sting and cut.

  THE ALLEYS up from the dockland were lined with victualers’ shops and crowded with sailors, ship riggers, and the smoke of roasting meat. Every wall was plastered with bills and pictures of sailing ships.

  “If I had my letters like old McCarty, I could read them bills for what they say and find us on a ship tonight. If we stay long in Liverpool, Fergus, we’re bleeding money — I can’t wear these boots any longer, man, they are biting my feet.” Taking them off, she tied the laces and strung the boots over her shoulder. “Don’t know how you stand it.”

  Following spaciousness of light they came out of the alleys and into Custom House Square, where streams of traffic slashed past, drivers cracking whips, everything excited. Crossing the square, swept along in a sea of umbrellas and silk hats, they started up Hanover Street where girls and old men hawked pilchards, roast apples, and grilled nuts from carts and barrows.

  “We have the coin, we can get a bite to eat, man. Who knows how far it is.”

  “Waste of money. They will feed us at the Dragon.”

  “Are they clever? Can they help us bark the watch?”