At Swim, Two Boys

by Jamie O’Neill

  “That goes for us all,” said Mr. Mack. “God willing. I would have gone myself but the shop and all. And my son had school that day.”

  “A scholar you have there.”

  “Something like it. What’s the wind of your fellow?”

  “No wind at all this way.”

  “My young one was hoping to see him, I think.”

  “They have a wish for one another.” The eyes darted up. “That age and they know no better.” The quick flare brought on his coughing and had him spitting afterwards, copiously into the fire. Mr. Mack saw it before it died, the pink tint of his phlegm.

  “The old whiskey,” he said, “would murder you altogether and you was to risk a sup.”

  “’Twouldn’t cure me at any rate.”

  “A cigar would be the end of you entirely.”

  “Not this side of Last Post and I’ll taste again the smoke of a cigar.”

  “Sure there’s plenty smoke where we’re headed,” said Mr. Mack. He had the corona out of his coat and he was testing its end with the blade of his pocket-knife. “Christmas box from the boy, but little the use it is to me. Is it this way you’d cut it, I don’t know?”

  “Ah sure give it here to me. Ballyhays you’ll make of that.”

  “You used have a fondness for the old cigar, I do recall.”

  “I had me day.”

  “You might light it now you’ve gone this far.”

  “Throw me a spill and I will.” He blew on the spill, little whiffery breaths, till it took fire and he brought it to the cigar. In the flame Mr. Mack saw his face, an old skin-and-bones of a thing. Deep furrows reached from his nose like tackles to hold his jaw in place. His hair was gone a shock of white, sticking out in startlement at the change. “I’m not dead yet,” he said in disputatious tone. “I might cheat the worms of me yet.”

  “Why wouldn’t you?” agreed Mr. Mack. “You have smoke enough and whiskey inside to be proof against all comers.”

  “There’s that.”

  “Except they shoot us, we Old Toughs refuse to die.”

  “The Dublin Refusiliers,” said Mr. Doyle.

  “You did always have a way with words,” said Mr. Mack smiling and shaking his head. “Would you take a sup of the creature now? If you had it to hand, say?”

  “I wouldn’t know to get any this hour.”

  “There’s a small drop I have with me.”

  “I saw that. And you known to have the pledge taken.”

  “Didn’t we take it together sure?”

  “Aye we did. There’s many gone under the bridge since that.”

  “Many and more,” agreed Mr. Mack. “We used always be pledging ourself after a night on the Billy Stink.”

  “The old Billy Stink was a killer right enough.”

  “That and the purge.”

  “That and the purge.”

  “And we did often share an old shock off a pipe together.”

  “I did often have a red pipe put in my hand, ’tis no lie.”

  “Sure the first pipe ever I smoked, we shared it.”

  “People was known share a bit in them days, ’tis true.”

  There was some old tinder in a nook in the hearth and Mr. Mack, judging his station as old comrade would just about stretch to it, leant down and threw a stick or two on the fire. He opened the parcel he’d left beside him and one by one he placed the coals he’d brought. He dusted the coal-dust from his hands and held them over the blueing flame. They were talking the while, of the past still, Mr. Mack asserting some friendly deed, Mr. Doyle recognizing in a general way the possibility of such things occurring.

  “The first time ever I scraped my chin,” said Mr. Mack, “’twas yourself found me the razor. I can remember you now, stropping the blade on the sling of your hipe for me.”

  “I wasn’t the worst for doing a good turn. If I could see my way at all, God knows.”

  Mr. Mack stared into the flames, and sure what did he see but this fellow here, with his shoulders back, his chest blown, thighs that would grip a shilling bit. Red hair you’d think his head was on fire. Not a man but he was proud to step out with Red Doyle. He had the poor ladies fainting with the scarlet fever. Mick and Mack the paddy-whacks. Rang like bells.

  “Till they gone and went and made a sergeant of you,” said Mr. Doyle, “and you turned like.”

  And there it was, that old wound, done with as that fire and still with a heat at the heart of it. Mr. Mack could see it now, in the flicker of flame, the queer look on the man’s face that time, before he had snapped to attention. Yes, Sergeant, said he. Buttons greasy, said he. But his eyes were crooked the way they looked. Mr. Mack could doubt but they were straight again since.

  “You took the heart out of me that day, you did,” said Mr. Doyle now. “What you see before you is the close of that day’s work.”

  Oh and the rest, thought Mr. Mack. All downhill after that, for sure. Tell a man his buttons is greasy and his pride is gone, his manhood broke, his life in tatters ever after. “Do you know something?” he said. “You was never any damned good for a soldier.”

  “Nor you was any good for a sergeant.”

  “We’re snacks there then.”

  “Snacks,” said Mr. Doyle. “And I’ll tell you what else,” he said, more animated now and the blush on his cheek-tips deepening. “There was nobody complaining me buttons was greasy at Talana Hill. No, nor at Glober’s Koof. Tugela neither.”

  “Grobler’s Kloof,” said Mr. Mack. “Would you get it right.”

  “I stood me ground, I did, with me fellow Toughs. I didn’t turn tail the first shot was fired. I stood to them Bojers, I did. ’Twasn’t me what ran for home.”

  “To hades and back with you,” said Mr. Mack. “You’ve this story told up and down the street. We’ll have this out once for all. I was time-expired. I had my discharge papers gave out me—”

  “There’s plenty men signed on again.”

  “I had my passage booked. I had my young wife that was sickening. Sure the war was to be over by Christmas. How was I to know ’twould take three years? You think I had it rosy then, with my wife passed away on me and my two sons I didn’t know what to do with them, coming into Southampton and the news everywhere of rout after rout after rout? You think there was many wanting to employ me then, a man come back from the Cape and a war on? Only for Aunt Sawney above I was on the dunghill, my two young sons with me. And not a night but I thought of the regiment.”

  “Battalion,” said Mr. Doyle.

  “Ah, would you give it a rest, man.”

  Mr. Doyle began a cough that rumbled in his belly before it rose to his chest and made quick hacking barks in his throat, and only when he turned could Mr. Mack see it wasn’t coughing at all, but laughing he was at. “God knows,” he said, “I’d take me chances with old Piet any day, with General Bother himself, before I’d face that crosspatch above.”

  Mr. Mack granted him his laugh, and when the laughter was done the quiet that followed recalled him to the barracks at Quetta, high in the hills, when his sergeant’s stripe was fresh on his sleeve. The sense he had of fun and fellowship retreating wherever he advanced, always a corridor’s length away. “And yet,” he said, “’tis true, you know. Them buttons of yours was greasy.”

  “Sure what about it,” said Mr. Doyle. “I wouldn’t know to get buttons now, leave out the grease to muck them. Bloody end to the lie in that.”

  Mr. Mack’s fingers tapped on his knees. He watched the wispy curls coming up from the cigar, which Mr. Doyle had lit but would not yet smoke. “Aren’t we two very foolish old quilts,” he said, “to be argufying the past? Whatever about buttons and time-expired, it isn’t a sergeant at all I am now.”

  “And what are you this night coming here to my hearth?”

  Barmy old fool, thought Mr. Mack. “To tell the truth I’m a bit out of myself.”

  “A child would tell you that.”

  Mr. Mack picked up the bottle and made as if
to sip. He made as if to change his mind and offered the bottle over. “For old time’s sake itself?”

  He had the bottle held out a long while before Mr. Doyle nodded. He wiped his mouth and without looking accepted the whiskey. He drank his due of it, a good third, in slow slipping slugs, then wiped his lips again. He drew on the cigar till the smoke came out the sides of his mouth where the teeth were gone.

  “Well, Arthur,” he said, after his cough had ended. “Is it a grandfather you are this night?”

  Mr. Mack put his hand on the red-flanneled knee and he squeezed it gently where the bones beneath were the bones he knew that had aged and thinned with his memory of them. “Well, Mick,” he answered, “I believe and I am.”

  Jim had wandered as far as the West Pier where the Helga gunboat gleamed at its mooring. Now he walked back along the harbor front to the East Pier again. The yacht clubs had been shut up for the duration and on their terraces canteens had been erected. Yellow light hung about, like balloons, in the doorways, where groups of Tommies gathered round. He heard the accents of Dublin and Cork, of the West and the North. The soldiers’ feet stamped in the cold, like horses’. Vapor drifted from their mouths and from the mugs they cupped in their hands.

  The tide was high and the enclosed water of the harbor chopped and changed like an animal pacing its cage. He fancied the waves beyond the piers and felt queasy thinking of boats on the sea and the Tommies who must soon embark. It seemed a poor mouth that would forbid them decorations on their last night in Ireland.

  Last Christmas they had all the decorations out. The trees along the front swung with lanterns, the Pavilion shone with all the lights of fairy. Last Christmas, if you went up Killiney Hill, you could sketch in jewels the arms of the piers as they reached to clutch their own from the sea. Last year the war would be over by Christmas. This year people said it might never be over.

  He crossed the opening of the pier, whose high wall governed the wind, and passed along the road by the Crock’s Garden, an exposed walk that straggled the shore. The wind here buffeted and blared, nicking his skin with an ice salt slice. He looked in through the railings where the bushes crowded the black-earth paths. He thought of the shelters down below that gave out on the sea. They were strange and eerie spaces, done out to be temples, with colonnaded fronts: they smelt of toilets. A match struck, startlingly close, and he saw the glows after of twin cigarettes. He hurried on.

  He wondered might he go back and view the ruins of the Pavilion; but a train was approaching by the Metals, so he crossed the road to watch. Adventure of its coming, the clatter and rush, that climaxed in a billowing steam. Then lives flickering by in single snaps of light. That odd impulse to wave your cap at strangers. The train disappeared under the road, gathering its business behind it, and the night resumed.

  Jim pressed against the wall that vibrated still with the train’s rumble. He could feel his thing below, stiff and unmitigated. What sustained it he could not think, for nothing of the sort was on his mind. He heard a voice on the path which he thought might be Mr. MacMurrough’s. But no, there was a woman’s voice too. An English officer passed, a girl on his arm.

  He couldn’t think what to do with himself. Had sufficient time elapsed for a child to be born? The screams back home had unsettled him, though it was a ridiculous notion to suppose it had anything to do with women’s suffrage. Butler was all mouth. That time they were passing above the ladies’ baths in Sandycove, and Butler was laughing and telling how you’d easy know by the higher pitch of the girls’ squealing when the water reached the spot. “Which spot?” “Ask your ma.” And walking the lower tier of the pier so’s you’d see up her legs if a girl was walking the upper. Why would you want to look there?

  He ran his tongue along his upper lip, imagining the feel where a mustache had been shaved. He had a wish to do something, to shape by deed the confusion he felt inside. But no deed he could think of seemed remotely expedient. It was so cold. He turned the collar of his jacket up and pulled his scarf more tightly round. He crossed the road and descended into the Crock’s Garden.

  He was picking his way through the veronica bushes, down the sudden steps and winding paths, when he felt the company of a young man beside him. It was a soldier in his greatcoat and cap, who walked a while in silence, then remarked in a familiar way, “Shame about the Christmas lights and all.”

  “Yes,” said Jim. He had to shout to be heard above the wind. “My brother brought me up the Hill last year.”

  “That was decent of him.”

  “Yes, he came home from the camp at Woodenbridge, he was in his Kitchener blue, and Christmas Eve we walked up Killiney Hill together.”

  “He’d have been fond of you, your brother.”

  “I was never sure of his ragging but I liked him all the same.”

  “Isn’t that the way with brothers, sure?”

  “When we got to the top we saw Kingstown below us and all the lights as far as Dublin. The city was like a fire and the Hill of Howth a dog at its hearth.”

  “Did he mention anything to you that time?”

  “Yes, he said it wouldn’t be long now and he’d be out of this fucking kip.”

  “Sure he was the devil’s own. But that was his way only. He was fond of the old sod, I’ll engage.”

  “He’s to be a father before this night is out.”

  “Farther and farther away,” said his brother.

  “Where’re you going?” For his brother was cutting through the scrub to find his way to the sea.

  “Must get back. I’ll be ticked off for missing and I don’t get back soon.”

  “But they’re not there any more. They’ve evacuated the beaches. You’ll never find them now.”

  “It’s not this way you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “So long, young ’un. Mind you keep to your books.”

  Jim shook the phantasma from his head. A salt from the sea trickled on his face. The wind shivered up his jacket and his cold wet fingers drew the cuffs of his sleeves together. He had taken his cap off for fear of it flying. His hair flapped all ways.

  He stood at the top of a steps. A blueish night light only just allowed the eyes to see. And he saw how the sea was truly wild. Waves dashed on the rocks, tumbling over in their hurry, creaming as far as the path below. Great gurgling sucks, like the sea drew breath, then roaring through chasms and spouting out in a froth of foam. It seemed to hang in the air, the foam, and shine of its own luminescence. The wind was boastful in his ear.

  He closed his eyes and he saw himself in that sea, far far out, released from his bounds, riding the crest of billowing waves. He felt it in the pit of his stomach, the exhilaration of the deep, and the mystery of the deep reaching up to take him.

  His eyes opened and he saw dimly the temples on the shoulder of the pier.

  He edged along the path, judging the waves and darting between, till he came to the first of the temples. It was filthy dark inside but still he passed through the columns. The sudden quiet was enormous. He sat on a ledge at the back. Damp registered through his seat. He sensed the urinally smell. A drip from the roof dropped tip-tap. His mouth tasted of brine.

  Before him in columned panorama the sea surged, grey with trouble and white with thrill. The same thrill and the same trouble boiled inside him. He felt a bursting to be known, to be born, that would no longer be delayed, but whose labor had come. He thought of that other birth at home and the child he soon would hold in his arms. Through his fingers he felt the wall behind and he was struck by the strangeness of concrete things: the ledge, the columns, the floor to his feet: things that did not move, while the sea never ceased.

  He had not long to wait. A soldier had followed him. A match struck, a cigarette was lit. The red glow was offered in Jim’s direction.

  In his dark-green uniform Doyler lay, his slouch hat over his eyes, on the hard plank of his police-cell bed. There were steps outsid
e and a rattle of keys. His cell door opened. It was the old sergeant who was at the desk last evening when the polis brought him in. He had a cup of tea with him which he held out to Doyler. “Now,” he said. “You have your tea. Drink it.”

  Doyler caught the accent of Clare. West Clare, he thought: the fellows for football.

  “Make the best of it, boy,” the sergeant advised, once more at the door. “They’ll let you out on the Monday, I’m told, with a caution only. You have your feed and sup till that. Do you want a read of an old newspaper?”

  “You can give me back me Workers’ Republic. I’ll read that.”

  “You have a mouth on you,” said the sergeant. “I’m not wondering that it’s bruised.”

  Doyler lifted the tea to his mouth. “I’d say you’d wish you was in West Clare tonight,” he said. “Away out of Kingstown. The old Kate Mac home.”

  The old sergeant nodded. “Merry Christmas now,” he said.

  “Merry Christmas, citizen,” said Doyler.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  They had made a kind of a cot for her, Mr. Mack had and Jim, out of, I don’t know, an old oranges crate, and they’d sanded it down and varnished it smooth, they were days at it, should have heard them out in the yard, bickering over what went where, and they’d taken the wheels from under the shop cart, so it was a kind of a pram, suppose you’d call it, with a handle at the end, which she pushed now, Nancy did, rocking it gently to and fro. She had fetched the customer’s chair from out the shop, and she sat outside in the lane, under a fierce January sun that wouldn’t heat you one bit, save that it warmed the heart to see. A couple old sparrows was chirping out of the chestnut trees over, the way they’d be fooled by a sunny day into arguing title. It was near enough her first steps out of the house, barring the christening, and she still had trouble walking, though if she thought to point to the pain, she couldn’t rightly tell where was it at. Up and down them stairs inside was murder altogether.

  But God is good, and there wasn’t pain but you was blessed for it; and the little blessing lay asleep in her rickety pram. Every few moments Nancy touched her hand to her cheek, checking for chill, but everything was rosy yet. And she really was rosy, was the little mite. That yellowy tinge, it had her in torments of worry that first week, it was after lifting, like Aunt Sawney always said it would, and her skin now was soft and pink and, I don’t know, velvety something. And you’d want to be bending down the while, to sniff her smell, that was all powdery-milkery. Oh it would put you in mind of eating her, so it would. “I could eat you, gobble you right up,” she said, shaking her head into the oranges crate, and she was sure a smile was after fainting across the face, though the sleepy mite was dozing still, with her squoze-up eyes and her thumb just licking her mouth.