Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  ‘Keep it going, that’s it.’ He touched my shoulder before turning to shout a few friendly obscenities at Murphy who’d started the mixer.

  The heat grew worse. Jocko didn’t come. Nobody spoke much. Even on Galway’s face the sweat streaked the white coating of cement dust.

  ‘Anyone volunteer to go for lemonade?’ Keegan asked when more than an hour had gone. I said I’d go to Greenbaum’s; it was some minutes escape from the din of the engines and diesel and dust in the airless heat.

  ‘Walkin’ kills me these days.’ Keegan was grateful.

  I went through the gap in the split stakes linked with wire into Hessell Street, green and red peppers among the parsley and fruit of the stalls. It smelled of lice and blood and fowl, down and feathers stamped into the blood and henshit outside the Jewish poulterers, country air after the dust of the mixer.

  ‘Six Tizers,’ I asked Greenbaum, old grey Jew out of Poland. ‘Put them on the slate.’

  ‘Everything on the slate and then one day you jack and go and Greenbaum is left with the baby.’

  ‘You’ll get paid. Today is payday.’

  ‘And Greenbaum charges no deposit on the bottles. You just throw them away. And who loses? Greenbaum loses,’ he complained as he put the bottles on the counter, as much in love with complaint as the cripple with crutches he goes on using after he is cured.

  The bottles were passed around from mouth to mouth behind the mixer as the bucket climbed to Sligo at the top.

  ‘You shouldn’t gurgle,’ Keegan ragged at Galway. ‘We who are Irish –’

  ‘Should always be tidy when we sit down to tea,’ Galway took up viciously. ‘Come on: shovel, you old bollocks.’

  ‘Shovel or shite, shite or burst. It’s payday,’ Murphy shouted as if shovel had set an alarm off in his head, and without break the shovels drove and threw, two boxes of gravel to one of sand, the small grey puff of cement in the airless heat as we pulled the cut ends of the bag loose, till the hooter blew for payout.

  Tipperary joined me at the end of the queue outside the payout window.

  ‘Jocko didn’t arrive yet,’ I said to keep his conversation easy.

  ‘No. Sligo’s going to put the water on him from up top when he comes. It’s not fair.’

  ‘It’ll probably happen though.’

  ‘But it’s not fair.’

  We each held the thin brass medal on which our number was stamped, a hole in the medal for hanging it on the nail in the hut at night.

  At the window we called our name and number and showed the brass medal and the timekeeper handed us our pay in a small brown packet.

  On the front of the pack was written the number of hours we had worked, the rate per hour, the amount we’d earned minus the various deductions.

  As the men stood around checking their money, the large hands counting awkwardly and slowly, a woman’s voice cried, ‘Come and get them while they’re hot.’

  Their eyes lifted to search for the voice, towards the condemned row of houses ahead of the bulldozer and the burning wood, where from an upper window old Kathleen leaned out, shaking her large loose breasts at the men.

  ‘Cheap at the price,’ she cried. A cheer went up; and some obscenities were shouted like smallarms fire.

  ‘Even better downstairs,’ she cried back, her face flushed with alcohol.

  ‘A disgrace. Terrible,’ Tipperary said.

  ‘It’s all right. She just got excited by the money.’ He disturbed me more than she did.

  ‘This evening after pints of bitter they’ll slink round,’ he said.

  As I did once. A Christmas Eve. She’d told me she’d all her Christmas shopping done except to buy the turkey. She said she hoped to get one cheap at Smithfield. They dropped the prices before the market closed to get rid of the surplus, and she was relying on a customer who was a porter there.

  Only for her practised old hands it would have been impossible to raise desire, and if it was evil when it happened, the pumping of the tension of the instinct into her glycerined hole, then nothing was so extraordinarily ordinary as this evil.

  ‘Why not? Let them go round, and what’s so fucking special about what’s between your legs anyhow?’ I shouted at him, and turned my back so as not to have to see the hurt on the dim acolyte’s face in its confusion of altars. I started to count out the money from the small brown packet.

  I love to count out in money the hours of my one and precious life. I sell the hours and I get money. The money allows me to sell more hours. If I saved money I could buy the hours of some similar bastard and live like a royal incubus, which would suit me much better than the way I am now, though apparently even as I am now suits me well enough, since I do not want to die.

  Full of beer tonight after the Rose and Crown we’ll go round to Marge and Kathleen like dying elephants in the condemned row.

  Before I’d finished counting, Tipperary tapped my shoulder and I shouted, ‘Fuck off,’ and did not turn to see his face.

  The hooter went. The offered breasts withdrew. A window slammed.

  ‘The last round,’ someone said.

  The mixer started. The shovels drove and threw: gravel, sand, gravel; gravel, sand, gravel; cement.

  Murphy sledged on the beaten steel of the hopper, vocal again now that the brown packet was a solid wad against his arse. ‘Our fukker who art in heaven bought his boots for nine-and-eleven,’ he sang out as he sledged. ‘Come on: shovel or shite, shite or burst.’

  Jocko came so quietly that he was in the pool of shadow under the hopper before he was noticed, the pint bottle of violet-coloured spirit swinging wide from one pocket, crawling on all fours towards the pool of water in the sand beneath the drum of the mixer.

  ‘Out,’ Murphy shouted with a curse, angered that Jocko had got so far without being noticed. ‘Out. I’ll teach your arse a lesson. Out.’

  He took the shovel that leaned against the mixer, and drove at Jocko, the dull thud of the blade on cloth and flesh or bone, buttocks that someone must have bathed once, carried in her arms.

  ‘I warned you if you tried this stunt again I’d warm your arse. I want to be at no coroner’s inquest on your head. Out.’

  We stood and watched Murphy drive him out of the pool of water, then push him out of the shadow of the hopper into the evening glare. We said nothing.

  The eyes in the hollow sockets, grey beard matted about the scabs of the face, registered no pain, no anything: and when they fell on the barrow of wet concrete that the surveyor had used to test the strength of the mix he moved mechanically towards it, sat in, and started to souse himself up and down in the liquid concrete as a child in a bath.

  ‘Jesus, when that sets to his arse it’ll be nobody’s business,’ Galway said between dismay and laughter.

  ‘Out of the fukken barrow,’ Murphy shouted, and lifted him out by the neck, pushing him down the tyre-marked yellow slope. He staggered but did not fall. The wet clothes clung to his back and the violet-coloured bottle in the pocket was clouded and dirty with wet concrete.

  Sligo, his cap back to front, leaned across the scaffolding rail on top, the black rubber hose in his hands. The jet of water started to circle Jocko, darkening the yellow sand. Sligo used his thumb on the jet so that it sprayed out like heavy rain.

  When Jocko felt the water, he lifted his face to its coolness, but then, slowly and deliberately, he took a plastic coat and faded beret from the opposite pocket to where the bottle swung, and in the same slow deliberate way put them on, buttoning the plastic coat to the throat and putting the collar up. The jet followed a few yards of his slow walk and then fell back, but he still walked in the evening sun as if it was raining.

  Greenbaum, old grey rat searching for Tizer bottles among the heaps of rubble, lifted his head to watch him pass through the gap in the fence of split stakes into Hessell Street but immediately bent again to search and complain. ‘Greenbaum charges no deposit on the bottles, and then what do they do, throw them away, throw t
hem away, never return. Greenbaum’s an old fool.’

  Strandhill, the Sea

  The street in front of Parkes’ Guest House, grains of sand from the street coming on the grey fur of the tennis ball, the hopping under my hand idle as the conversations from the green bench before the flowerbed, red bells of the fuchsia vivid behind them and some roses and gillyflowers, the earth around the roots of everything speckled with sea shells, overhead the weathered roughcast of the wall of the house.

  The sky was filling. Rain would come, and walls close around the living evening, looking towards the bleared windows, no way to get out from the voices.

  ‘There was great stuff in those Baby Fords and Austins. The cars going nowadays are only tin compared,’ Mr McVittie said, the heavy gold watch chain across the waistcoat of the brown suit, silver hair parted in the centre, knobbed walking stick in his hand. He could have stepped out of a yellowed wedding photo.

  ‘Only they weren’t so fast as now,’ Mr O’Connor added, following McVittie all the week in the way stray dogs at night will stick to any pair of heels that seem to go home.

  ‘Before the war, before I got married, I used to have one of the old Citroëns, and it could go for ever, only it was very hard on petrol,’ Mr Ryan said, feel of his eyes on the up and down of the tennis ball on the street.

  Conversations always the same: height of the Enfield rifle, summer of the long dresses, miles to the gallon – from morning to the last glows of the cigarettes on the benches at night, always informations, informations about everything. Having come out of darkness, they now blink with informations at all the things about them, before the soon when they’ll have to leave.

  The sky filled over Sligo Bay, the darkness moving across the links and church, one clear strip of blue between Parkes’ and Knocknarea, and when that would fill – the rain, the steamed windows, the informations, till the dark settled on their day.

  Fear of the sky since morning had kept them on the benches away from the strand a mile downhill they’d come to enjoy, fear of the long trudge past the golf links and Kincora and Central in rain; but they’d still the air here, sea air, it was some consolation. Even the strand, reached in good weather, the mile downhill accomplished, the mile home uphill yet out of mind, and in possession of strand of Strandhill, long and level for miles, the cannon on its rotting initial-covered carriage pointed towards the Atlantic as if on guard over the two ice-cream parlours; women at the tideline, with a child in one hand and skirt held tight between thighs with the other, whinnying at each spent rush of water at their feet before it curled in a brown backwash round their heels; all this time envy of the buckets and beach ball of others to gladden a royal stay.

  Cars ran miles to the gallon, still on the bench: twenty-five, thirty-two, thirty-nine with careful timing and more use of clutch than brake. Another guest, Mr Haydon, marked the racing columns of the newspaper on the edge of the same bench; hairnet of purple threads on the face, commercial traveller. ‘Never made the grade,’ McVittie had pronounced. ‘Soon for the jump.’ On the next bench a pattern for a Fair Isle pullover lay open between Mrs O’Connor and Mrs Ryan, and around them children in all postures. Ingolsby was the one guest who sat alone, retired lecturer of English, while the tennis ball hopped or paused.

  ‘What part of the world is Lagos in?’ Haydon stirred out of the newspaper to interrupt the wear and tear on clutches. ‘You should know that, Mr Ryan. You’re a teacher.’

  ‘I think Africa,’ the uncertain reply came, and his sudden flush and blanching brought Ingolsby in.

  ‘Because somebody happens to be a teacher is no reason why they should know where Lagos is.’

  ‘If teachers don’t know that sort of thing who can know?’ Haydon was angered. ‘Don’t they have to teach the stuff to kids?’

  ‘If a teacher has to teach a geography lesson he simply looks up his information in a textbook beforehand. A doctor doesn’t go round with all his patients’ ailments in his head. He has files,’ Ingolsby explained with solid satisfaction.

  ‘But it’s not getting us any nearer to where the hell Lagos is?’

  ‘It’s in Nigeria,’ Ingolsby said.

  ‘It’s in Nigeria, in Africa.’ Ryan tried to smooth over the antagonism.

  ‘That was what I wanted to know. Thank you, Mr Ryan,’ Haydon said pointedly and buried his head in the newspaper again.

  ‘Amazing the actual number of places there is in this world, when you come to think,’ O’Connor added.

  ‘A man could spend his whole life learning the names of places and they’d still be as many as the sands of the seashore left,’ McVittie said.

  The ball was idle in my hand. The tide was full, a coal boat moving out from Sligo in the channel. There were no blue spaces against Knocknarea.

  Small annual calvary of the poor, mile downhill and uphill between Parkes’ and the cannon. The Calm Sea closer, inlet that ran to Ballisodare past the lobster pool, no envy there, deserted except the one day they put flags down and held the races at low tide, but still in the dead quiet the pain of voices coming across the golf links, and Jane Simpson with others there.

  The first rain was loud on Haydon’s newspaper, and it was followed by a general rising and gradual procession indoors between the still sparse drops.

  ‘Imagine the name they called this.’ Ingolsby paused to hold a blood-orange rose towards Ryan as they went along the flowerbed.

  ‘I’m not so well up on flowers,’ Ryan apologized.

  ‘Climbing Mrs Sam McGredy. Climbing Mrs Sam McGredy,’ Ingolsby enunciated.

  ‘Names are a funny thing,’ Ryan said without thought.

  ‘Names are a funny thing, as you put it,’ Ingolsby repeated sarcastically. ‘Peace or Ena Harkness or even the Moulin Rouge but Climbing Mrs Sam McGredy! That’s an atom bomb,’ then he lowered his voice. ‘Never feel you have to know anything because you happen to teach. Never let them bully you with their assumptions of what you should be. Say you don’t know, that it can be discovered in books, if they’re interested. It’s only pretending to know something that’s embarrassing.’

  The counsel roused impotent deeps of hatred in Ryan’s eyes as they went the last steps to the door.

  A Miss Evans was the one addition to the company over lunch, and when the litter was cleared away with the sheets that served as cloth, and the old varnish of the big elliptical table shone dully about the bowl of roses put back on its centre, Mrs Parkes set a small coal fire to burn in the grate as an apology for the gloom of rain. All the bars of the evening had fallen into place. ‘The rain anywhere is bad, but at the sea, at the sea, it’s the end,’ rose as a constant sighing in the conversations. The need to escape to some other world grew fiercer, but there was no money.

  ‘Steal, steal, steal,’ was the one way out.

  Raincoat and southwester and outside – without them noticing. Mist halfway down the slopes of Knocknarea, rain and mist blurring the sea. Past Huggards, past the peeling white swan sailing on the signboard of the Swan Hotel, steady drip from the eaves louder than the distant fall of the sea and gull cries, glow of the electric light burning inside through the mist on Peebles’ window, stationer and confectioner: shock of the warning bell ringing as you opened the door.

  A girl in blue overalls behind the counter was helping a man choose postcards and they were laughing.

  ‘Can I help you?’ She turned.

  ‘I want to look round.’ It was the only possible thing, and it was lucky she was busy with the man.

  Rows of comics were on the counter, hours of insensibility to the life in Parkes’, Wizard and Hotspur and Rover and Champion, whole worlds.

  Put a Hotspur on top of the Wizard, both on top of the yellow pile of Rovers, and draw breath. The man was paying for the postcards. Lift the three free, put them inside the open raincoat, the elbow holding them tight against the side. Walk.

  ‘Any chance of seeing you in the Silver Slipper tonight?’ the man asked.

 
‘Stranger things happened in the world,’ she answered, and they both laughed again.

  It was impossible to walk loose and casual to the door, it was one forced step after the other, having to think to walk, waiting all the time for the blow from behind. ‘Excuse me,’ it’d probably begin, and then the shame, the police. To get caught the one reason not to steal. In the next world it was only a venial sin, purgatory, and the saints alone got the through express to heaven.

  Step after step and rigid step and no blow, a cash register ringing and then the warning bell above the door and the breathing relief of the wet out-of-doors to the sea blurred beyond the golf links, rain coming down same as ever before. Past Huggards and over the sodden sand of the street, raindrops brilliant in the red ruffles of the roses by the wall.

  ‘Where did you get the money from for that trash?’ came once I was in the room.

  ‘Sixpence I found down at the front yesterday.’

  ‘Why have you to be always stuck in that trash? Why can’t you read something good like Shakespeare that’ll be of some use to you later?’

  The old tune: some use to you later.

  ‘I don’t imagine the comics’ll do much harm. Good taste isn’t cultivated in a day. We rise on stepping stones to greater things,’ Ingolsby intervened.

  ‘I suppose there’s some consolation in that.’ Ryan was anxious to escape, knowing the hostility the themes of Ingolsby’s ponderous conversations roused. They were felt as a slur or rebuke. This time he’d not escape easily. Ingolsby needed to live through his own voice too this wet evening.

  ‘What’s your opinion of Shakespeare’s validity for the modern world?’

  ‘It’s not so easy to say,’ he deferred again, his eyes anxious about the room, his wife on the sofa with Mrs O’Connor, measuring a sleeve of a pullover on their daughter; soon she’d be knitting silently and patiently again while the night came the same as every other coming into her patient life, while McVittie said to O’Connor, ‘The shops out in the country were hard hit by emigration. But we managed to survive. We branched into new lines. We got Esso to put down a petrol pump for instance. We changed with the times.’