The Canal Bridge: A Novel of Ireland, Love, and the First World War

by Tom Phelan

  Dublin was a terrible big place, and the trams on the tracks in the roads were like houses rolling along. A fellow could get killed if he didn’t keep an eye out. And the Liffey with those granite walls instead of grassy banks. The work of it! The years some lads must have spent on it, stonemasons they had to be to get it so nice. “If this is the Second City of the Empire,” Con said, while we were looking up at Lord Nelson on his pillar in Sackville Street, “just imagine what London must look like.”

  The best was the Guinness Brewery. After years of seeing the gold labels on the black bottles in the shop windows, there we were, looking at Arthur J. Guinness in Saint James’s Gate in Dublin: the horses with the shining tacklings, and their manes in ribbons you’d see girls wearing in their hair at the Maypole; the drays and the barrels with their hoops newly painted black; the little trains disappearing through big polished oak doors; cranes twice as high as the Windlass at the Canal Stores at home—eight of them we counted. And the boats on the river were like the boats at home on the Canal, except these had a different shape and had fresh paint on them with Arthur J.’s last name all along the sides, all as clean as whistles. Down the far side of the last river bridge the big ships for bringing the porter to England were bobbing in the water like corks on a fishing line in the Canal—and they the size of churches.

  “To think,” says Con, “that we’re looking at the place where all those barrels and bottles come out of, come all the way to Ballyrannel on the canal boats.”

  “Mustn’t Arthur J. be a ferocious rich man?” I asked. “Himself and the missus up all night every night counting the money.”

  In the barracks about a hundred of us had been slouching along like a bunch of cows stepping on each others’ heels before we got the smell of the liver and onions. And that smell was quicker than any porter the way it changed everyone. The nodding and smiling and the poking there was, and the lads after trying all day not to look at each other out of shyness, or out of unease for joining the English army.

  “God, there’s going to be great eating in the army, lads,” a big chap beside us said. And someone else said, “Be God, there is.” And another said, “That’s a great smell of meat. It’s making my teeth run with water,” and he sent a spit shooting out of him like the tongue of a frog. Ever after, Con talked about the Liver Spit when he was hungry and smelled food. “God, lads,” he’d say, “I’m so hungry I could squart a Liver Spit over the mountain.”

  The smell was so good that the names of places where Con said the English sent soldiers started popping up in my head, places where the sun was shining all the time, where people on their hunkers cooked in the streets dressed in nothing but sheets—India and Kenya and Australia and Rhodesia and Jamaica and Malaya and Burma and Ceylon and Borneo too, and New Zealand. It was terrible exciting, and I knew that Lionel was right about telling us to join the army to see the world and all the great and strange things, like lads sleeping on beds of nails, or walking through fires in their bare feet, or climbing tall coconut trees with no branches, or floating in the air, or climbing up a rope that hung out of nothing and disappearing when they got to the top, or kangaroos and anacondas and camels with two humps and elephants with tusks of ivory, or tigers’ eyes smouldering bright yellow in the dark forests.

  The smell of frying onions and liver was a promise being made by the army that a lad could be sent to any place in the world, to any spot in the empire on which the sun never set, an empire with huge mountains and lakes with no bottoms to them; waterfalls a mile high; rivers a hundred miles across where they floated into the sea; countries so big that Ireland could fit into them a couple of hundred times over; deserts, ice fields, lakes so vast they had tides. Oh, God! The smell of that liver and onions sent my mind spinning out of my head, and I poked Con in the ribs. “Isn’t it great, Con?” I said. “God, I’m terrible glad you and Lionel persuaded me to join up.”

  And Con said, “I never smelled anything so good in my life, Matt, not even Mammy’s pancakes on Shrove Tuesday with the lemon and the caster sugar.” And he poked me back in the ribs, and I could tell he was happy to hear me say I was glad I had come. I was as excited as he was about jungles in Africa where you always had your gun ready because of wild boars, about seeing all those faraway mountains so high the snow on them never melted. Kilimanjaro. The Himalayas. The Khyber Pass. Cotopaxi. Chimborazo. Oh God!

  The stronger the smell of the liver and onions, the quicker our pace got until we were a pack of dogs after getting their first whiff of something they’re going to pull apart and devour in a shower of blood and pleasure. Some lads were near to dancing, and there was a good spring in the steps of the shyer lads, and I’d say every single one of us was wiping the back of his hand across his mouth and swallowing real hard.

  And there were lashings of food, piles of it. The grins of the lads when the soldiers behind the counter kept shovelling the food onto our plates and telling us there was plenty. “As many potatoes as you like,” and when we sat down at the tables, one of the new lads said in wonderment and admiration, “Begor, lads, but the spuds look like Kerr’s Pinks.” Salt, spuds, liver, onions, butter and jugs of milk—there was never the beatings of it in my life. We all took off our caps and rested them on our knees.

  Soon there was nothing but the clatter of the forks and knives and the chewing. Some of the lads must have never been anywhere in their lives, the way they were chawing, food falling onto the table out of their open mouths. I whispered to Con, and when he looked at the big fellow down the table, he said, “That lad has the teeth of a horse.” I thought to myself, I’ll have to put this in my first letter to Kitty; and I did, with a drawing of a man’s face with horse teeth. Kitty sent back the drawing with “Kiss me, Buckteeth, my tonsils are itchy” written under it.

  The plates were scraped clean. When the horse-toothed chap picked up his plate and licked it, so did the men beside him until everyone was pressing his plate to his face. Then we licked our knives and forks. And when there was nothing left, we all sat silent, most of us with our hands folded on our bellies. It was strange to have so many men sitting around tables and not to hear a sound. It was like there was no need for words because we were all thinking the same thing: “I’m glad I left the place I left, and by God, I’m ready for anything the English army tells me to do. I’d march from here to Timbuktu on a feed of onions and liver and spuds.”

  The laughing we did that night! When there was little light left in the windows and all the lads settled down for a great night’s sleep, everything got quiet. Then someone let rip with an explosion, the likes of which I had never imagined possible to come out of a man. It started off low and quickly rose in pitch, and then there was a blast like you’d hear in the distance when lads are using dynamite in a quarry. Before anyone could laugh, the whole place erupted in one big blow-up as we all let fly at the same time. When the rest of us ran out of ammunition, two lads, one at each end of the hut, started shooting against each other with farts, and we laughed them on until they ran out of air, and we all laughed and laughed and laughed ourselves to sleep in a few minutes.

  And we all slept, until the next thing we knew someone was standing in the doorway bellowing like it was the end of the world, roaring at us to stand at our beds with no humps on our backs. I never thought anyone could shout so loud.

  In nothing but our long-tailed shirts, we all stood to attention. Some legs were so hairy they were nearly black.

  The early morning sun was in the windows.

  Matthias Wrenn

  The likes of the lights in Dublin that Christ-mas in 1913 had never before been seen by any of us in the barracks. When the streets were wet, every light was doubled. The colours of them! Red lights like the redness of strawberries, and the green lights as green as the weed stems in the Canal in late August, and white lights the colour of a harvest moon rising.

  With humps on our backs, hands buried in deep pockets, we stood on the Ha’penny Bridge for hours, nine of
us, looking at the lights in the Liffey water. We were on our way home from Clancy’s Public House, feeling warm on the inside. Between us we had scraped together the price of two pints of Guinness each. On the Ha’penny Bridge a shout went up, like when someone catches a big perch in the Canal. And one of the lads was pointing to the water: “Look lads, there’s a line of soldiers marching. Look, quick, look.” Of course, none of us could get to his place on the bridge to see his vision before it rippled away like bits of glass falling out of a church window.

  “Look! A crowd of women dancing with those big dresses on them. Hoops.”

  “Look, lads, a crowd of horses with their arses in the air.”

  “Are they farting, Mick?”

  “Will you look at that! Just look at it—a hen with a clutch of chickens and them as yellow as anything.”

  “Look, lads! A flock of green geese rising into the pink dawn.”

  “Green geese?”

  “A huge big red flag and a thin giant carrying it.”

  The wind coming off the sea up along the river would cut a fellow in two, but we had our big coats on us, caps pulled down over ears. No one even complained of cold feet. We had great boots on and warm socks. Nothing but the best for the men in the army. The vapours of Arthur J.’s brew were in our brains, our bellies were full, and a full belly in the body is like a good fire in the kitchen, as Uncle Martin would say.

  I started to think about Kitty again, how she would love to see the lights at Christmas time in Dublin. When the army wasn’t taking all my attention, I seemed to think of nothing but Kitty. When I’d be going to sleep, I’d waken myself up again remembering the times we used to be together in Ali Baba’s Cave between the Supply and the Dakeydocks.

  That first time she led me there! And I not suspecting a thing, even though she was doing the thing I’d often dreamed of doing myself, but was too afraid to do. I had been living with the Hatchels so long that everyone saw Kitty and me as brother and sister. I used to think that way too, until I was about sixteen. And then one day, Kitty and I saw each other differently.

  When we came to the narrow gap in the whitethorns where I’d seen big people disappearing all my life, we loudly cleared our throats by way of knocking on the door that wasn’t there. There were no warning shouts from the far side, no cross man shouting at us to feck off. Inside the Cave was a small grassy patch as big as the gravedigger’s shed in the cemetery.

  When we were small we had often been here, looking around and wondering what the big people did when they came to the Cave. Once, we found four pennies in the grass, and Con said we were in Ali Baba’s treasure cave. Sometimes when we saw a man and a woman going through the gap after clearing their throats, we’d wait for a while before we threw handfuls of loose clay onto the roof of the Cave from the field behind the hedge. The clay would fall through the bushes like raindrops shaken from a tree by a stray breeze long after it has stopped raining. Most times, the man and woman in the Cave said nothing. But sometimes the man shouted words we’d never heard before.

  And now here I was, a big person, in Ali Baba’s Cave with a woman, and my heart was racing at the thought of what might happen. When Kitty pulled a couple of sacks out of a hole in the bushes, I nearly passed out with the feeling that scraped its way across the inside of my chest. I was nervous.

  I asked her about the sacks. Where had she got them? How did she get them out of the house without anyone seeing? How did she get them all the way along the Canal bank without meeting anyone?

  Kitty came over and put her finger to my lips. “Help me to spread them,” she said, meaning the sacks. I could hardly stand with the excitement.

  At first it was all very awkward when we lay down. I was on my back looking at the remains of a bird’s nest in the bushy branches above us. Afraid I’d touch Kitty by accident, I kept my arms at my sides. Now, when I look back at those first few minutes, I feel like a jackass, and that’s what she must have thought I was too, a real jackass, and a dead one at that.

  Until a year before the visit to the bushes, I had never even thought of Kitty as a girl. Since she was born, she did everything Con and I did, and some things a lot better. That time at Knockmullen Castle—I get weak in the knees when I think of it. Knockmullen is nothing but four high walls and a circular stairs attached to one corner of the old tower. The castle was one of a line of towers across the country hundreds of years ago. Fires were lit on top to warn everyone that invaders were coming.

  When we were twelve, Kitty decided to walk around on the top of the walls—eighty-seven feet up in the air. We measured it afterwards with a million pieces of twine knotted together and a stone tied to one end. She was already gone a few steps when she told us what she was going to do. Con and myself were too terrified to speak to her, to tell her to come back. Along the broken walls she went, her arms held out for balance while she stepped over wide holes and clumps of ivy and old nests of crows.

  I think Con and I stopped breathing and stayed stopped until she finished the journey, but when she skipped down onto the little landing beside us, we shouted at her until she cried; she thought we should have been cheering for her. We did applaud when we’d calmed down, maybe two years later.

  When she was five and we were six, she persuaded us to take off our clothes and cover each other with sand in the Lamberts’ sandpit: it was on a hot day and the fine sand was cool. She was the first of us to walk across the walls of the Bridge and the only one to do it blindfolded, Con and myself dying with the terrors on the Towpath. She was the only one who climbed to the top of Joe Mack’s tree, so tall that it was a landmark when we were struggling home on our bikes after a long Sunday ride. The sight of the tree always gave us new encouragement, like a mare smelling her foal after a long absence and suddenly getting a pain in the elder.

  In Ali Baba’s Cave, Kitty got up on her elbow and looked down at me. “Are you a corpse or what?” she giggled. “Are you afraid I’m going to do something terrible?” Then she bent over me and put her lips on mine.

  They were softer than moss.

  I lay there while she moved her lips across mine and back again. Then she slowly touched her lips to my forehead and down along the side of my face and across my lips again and up the other side of my face and onto my eyes. She came back to my mouth, and her lips were wet. She moved them back and forth across where my lips met.

  My body felt like it was bottling up a storm.

  She brought her lips to my ear and when she whispered, I could feel the heat of her breath. “Now, Matt, it’s your turn.” She lay down on her back on her sack, arms at her side.

  When I propped myself up and looked down into her face, she was smiling, but her eyes were closed. I leaned down and tried to do what she had done.

  “Again, Matt, only this time go twenty times slower. You have the softest lips,” she said.

  When I finished the circle of her face and wet my lips for the second run across her mouth, she slowly brought up one of her knees as if she couldn’t help it, like a dog thwacking the ground with its back paw when its ear is scratched.

  “You have the softest lips, Matt. Put your arms around me.”

  I never thought two people could have so many elbows between them. We gasped and giggled our way into each other’s arms, facing each other and with nothing for a pillow. I would have been more comfortable lying on a clothesline.

  “Wait,” I said, and I felt useful because I had something to offer. I took off my short coat and rolled it up, and Kitty raised her head as if we had done this a hundred times before.

  The pillow was very short, and when we put our arms around each other again our faces were inches apart and our noses, like our elbows, were in the way. I could feel her breath on my face. Kitty closed her eyes and pulled my head into the side of her neck. From chests to feet our bodies closed in on each other. Half up on my elbow, to take the weight of my head off Kitty, I pulled her into myself, and along my body I could feel her chest, her belly
, her thighs. At first I was afraid she might feel something poking her, but I relaxed and found the terrible comfort of holding Kitty’s body to mine, feeling her holding my body to hers.

  I could have stayed in the bushes on the Canal bank till the end of the world. The comfort of it. The completeness of it. But my elbow and shoulder were killing me. We moved, but held on to each other. Then our mouths were together, and her lips were wet. I wet mine too, opened my lips to do it, but it was Kitty’s tongue that did the job, the tip of her tongue running slowly back and forth across the width of my mouth.

  The softness of her. I just could not believe how soft her lips and face were.

  She brought my hand to her cheek, urged me to move it around, and I explored every nook and cranny of her face. For sixteen years I had been in the presence of that face, and I had never thought of touching it. Oh, the excitement of touching her, the excitement of being invited to touch her. We felt the insides of each others’ lips with our tongue-tips, while my fingers felt the shape of her ear.

  Then she took my hand and brought it down to her chest, and when I touched her there she groaned and her thighs moved in against me.

  And the softness of her. Like her lips, every bit as soft, and she squirming against me the more I moved my hand around, and she groaned too, like a cow softly saying hello to its calf. I circled and circled and felt the hard knot where her chest came to a point. When Kitty opened the top buttons of her dress, I saw her and my mouth went to that hard knot without my brain even telling it what to do.

  Lying there on the sack in the bushes with my arms around Kitty, with my lips stuck to her and she lying there stroking the back of my head, I felt like we were floating in the sky at night with a billion bright stars floating with us; like we were rolling slowly through grass in a sunny field glowing with a billion yellow dandelions; like we were rolling slowly, with our arms and legs around each other in the deepest sanctifying grace of the Canal, without making a stir on the surface, the roach and the perch sliding around us, looking. In Kitty’s arms, I discovered a feeling that I hadn’t known existed.