The Collected Stories

by John McGahern

  Casually he felt the pillow, the coarse blankets, moved the mattress, and with his palm tested the solidity of the wooden platform; its boards were of white deal and they too had been freshly scrubbed. There was an old oil can beside a steel bucket in the corner. Carefully he moved it under the window, and by climbing on the can and gripping the iron bar he could see out on either side: a sort of lawn, a circular flowerbed, netting-wire, a bole of the sycamore tree, sallies, a strip of river. He tried to get down as silently as possible, but as soon as he took his weight off the oil can it rattled.

  ‘Are you all right there, Jimmy?’ Casey was at once asking anxiously from the other side of the door.

  ‘I’m fine. I was just surveying the surroundings. Soon I’ll lie down for a while.’

  He heard Casey hesitate for a moment, but then his feet sounded on the hollow boards of the dayroom, going towards the table and chairs. As much as to reassure Casey as from any need, he covered the mattress with one of the grey blankets and lay down, loosening his collar and tie. The bed was hard but not uncomfortable. He lay there, sometimes thinking, most of the time his mind as blank as the white ceiling, and occasionally he drifted in and out of sleep.

  There were things he was grateful for … that his parents were dead … that he did not have to face his mother’s uncomprehending distress. He felt little guilt. The shareholders would write him off as a loss against other profits. The old creamery would not cry out with the hurt. People he had always been afraid of hurting, and even when he disliked them he felt that he partly understood them, could put himself in their place, and that was almost the end of dislike. Sure, he had seen evil and around it a stupid, heartless laughing that echoed darkness; and yet, he had wanted love. He felt that more than ever now, even looking at where he was, to what he had come.

  That other darkness, all that surrounded life, used to trouble him once, but he had long given up making anything out of it, like a poor talent, and he no longer cared. Coming into the world was, he was sure now, not unlike getting into this poor cell. There was constant daylight above his head, split by the single bar, and beyond the sycamore leaves a radio aerial disappeared into a high branch. He could make jokes about it, but to make jokes alone was madness. He’d need a crowd for that, a blazing fire, rounds of drinks, and the whole long night awaiting.

  There was another fact that struck him now like coldness. In the long juggling act he’d engaged in for years that eventually got him to this cell – four years before only the sudden windfall of a legacy had lifted him clear – whenever he was known to be flush all the monies he had loaned out to others would flow back as soon as he called, but whenever he was seen to be in desperate need, nothing worthwhile was ever given back. It was not a pretty picture, but in this cell he was too far out to care much about it now.

  He’d had escapes too, enough of them to want no more. The first had been the Roman collar, to hand the pain and the joy of his own life into the keeping of an idea, and to will the idea true. It had been a near thing, especially because his mother had the vocation for him as well; but the pull of sex had been too strong, a dream of one girl in a silken dress among gardens disguising healthy animality. All his life he had moved among disguises, was moving among them still. He had even escaped marriage. The girl he’d loved, with the black head of hair thrown back and the sideways laugh, had been too wise to marry him: no framework could have withstood that second passion for immolation. There was the woman he didn’t love that he was resigned to marry when she told him she was pregnant. The weekend she discovered she wasn’t they’d gone to the Metropole and danced and drank the whole night away, he celebrating his escape out to where there were lungfuls of air, she celebrating that they were now free to choose to marry and have many children: ‘It will be no Protestant family.’ ‘It will be no family at all.’ Among so many disguises there was no lack of ironies.

  The monies he had given out, the sums that were given back, the larger sums that would never be returned, the rounds of drinks he’d paid for, the names he’d called out, the glow of recognition, his own name shouted to the sky the day Moon Dancer had won at Phoenix Park, other days and horses that had lost – all dwindling down to the small, ingratiating act of taking the Sergeant and Guard Casey to the Ulster Final.

  The bolts were being drawn. Casey was standing in the doorway. ‘There’s something for you to eat, Jimmy.’ He hadn’t realized how dark the cell had been until he came out into the dayroom, and he had to shade his eyes against the light. He thought he’d be eating at the dayroom table, but he was brought up a long hallway to the Sergeant’s living quarters. At the end of the hallway was a huge kitchen, and one place was set on a big table in its centre. The Sergeant wasn’t there but his wife was and several children. No one spoke. In the big sideboard mirror he could see most of the room and Casey standing directly behind him with his arms folded. A lovely, strong girl of fourteen or fifteen placed a plate of sausages, black pudding, bacon and a small piece of liver between his knife and fork and poured him a steaming mug of tea. There was brown bread on the table, sugar, milk, salt, pepper. At first no one spoke and his knife and fork were loud on the plate as the children watched him covertly but with intense curiosity. Then Casey began to tease the children about their day in school.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said after he’d signed a docket at the end of the meal which stated that he had been provided with food.

  ‘For nothing at all,’ the Sergeant’s wife answered quietly, but it was little above a whisper, and he had to fight back a wave of gratitude. With Casey he went back down the long hallway to the dayroom. He was moving across the hollow boards to the cell door when Casey stopped him.

  ‘There’s no need to go in there yet, Jimmy. You can sit here for a while in front of the fire.’

  They sat on the yellow chairs in front of the fire. Casey spent a long time arranging turf around the blazing centre of the fire with tongs. There were heavy ledgers on the table at their back. A row of baton cases and the gleaming handcuffs with the green ribbons hung from hooks on the wall. A stripped, narrow bed stood along the wall of the cell, its head beneath the phone on the wall. Only the cell wall stood between Casey’s bed and his own plain boards.

  ‘When do you think they’ll come?’ he asked when the guard seemed to have arranged the sods of turf to his satisfaction.

  ‘They’ll come some time in the morning. Do you know I feel badly about all this? It’s a pity it had to happen at all,’ Casey said out of a long silence.

  ‘It’s done now anyhow.’

  ‘Do you know what I think? There were too many spongers around. They took advantage. It’s them that should by rights be in your place.’

  ‘I don’t know … I don’t think so … It was me that allowed it … even abetted it.’

  ‘You don’t mind me asking this? How did it start? Don’t answer if you don’t want.’

  ‘As far as I know it began in small things. “He that contemneth small things …”

  ‘Shall fall little by little into grievous error,’ Casey finished the quotation in a low, meditative voice as he started to arrange the fire again. ‘No. I wouldn’t go as far as that. That’s too hard. You’d think it was God Almighty we were offending. What’s an old creamery anyhow? It’ll still go on taking in milk, turning our butter. No. Only in law is it anything at all.’

  ‘There were a few times I thought I might get out of it,’ he said slowly. ‘But the fact is that I didn’t. I don’t think people can change. They like to imagine they can, that is all.’

  ‘Maybe they can if they try hard enough – or they have to,’ Casey said without much confidence.

  ‘Then it’s nearly always too late,’ he said. ‘The one thing I feel really badly about is taking the Sergeant and yourself to the Ulster Final those few Sundays back. That was dragging the pair of you into the business. That wasn’t right.’

  ‘The Sergeant takes that personally. In my opinion he’s wrong. What was pers
onal about it? You gave us a great day out, a day out of all of our lives,’ Casey said. ‘And everything was normal then.’

  That was the trouble, everything was not normal then, he was about to say, but decided not to speak. Everything was normal now. He had been afraid of his own fear and was spreading the taint everywhere. Now that what he had feared most had happened he was no longer afraid. His own life seemed to be happening as satisfactorily as if he were free again among people.

  Do you think people can change, Ned? he felt like asking Casey. Do you think people can change or are they given a set star at birth that they have to follow? What part does luck play in the whole shemozzle?

  Casey had taken to arranging the fire again and would plainly welcome any conversation, but he found that he did not want to continue. He felt that he knew already as much as he’d ever come to know about these matters. Discussing them further could only be a form of idleness or Clones in some other light. He liked the guard, but he did not want to draw any closer.

  Soon he’d have to ask him for leave to go back to his cell.

  The Country Funeral

  After Fonsie Ryan called his brother he sat in his wheelchair and waited with growing impatience for him to appear on the small stairs and then, as soon as Philly came down and sat at the table, Fonsie moved his wheelchair to the far wall to wait for him to finish. This silent pressure exasperated Philly as he ate.

  ‘Did Mother get up yet?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘She didn’t feel like getting up. She went back to sleep after I brought her tea.’

  Philly let his level stare rest on his brother but all Fonsie did was to move his wheelchair a few inches out from the wall and then, in the same leaning rocking movement, let it the same few inches back, his huge hands all the time gripping the wheels. With his large head and trunk, he sometimes looked like a circus dwarf. The legless trousers were sewn up below the hips.

  Slowly and deliberately Philly buttered the toast, picked at the rashers and egg and sausages, took slow sips from his cup, but his nature was not hard. As quickly as he had grown angry he softened towards his brother.

  ‘Would you be interested in pushing down to Mulligan’s after a while for a pint?’

  ‘I have the shopping to do.’

  ‘Don’t let me hold you up, then,’ Philly responded sharply to the rebuff. ‘I’ll be well able to let myself out.’

  ‘There’s no hurry. I’ll wait and wash up. It’s nice to come back to a clean house.’

  ‘I can wash these things up. I do it all the time in Saudi Arabia.’

  ‘You’re on your holidays now,’ Fonsie said. ‘I’m in no rush but it’s too early in the day for me to drink.’

  Three weeks before, Philly had come home in a fever of excitement from the oil fields. He always came home in that high state of fever and it lasted for a few days in the distribution of the presents he always brought home, especially to his mother; his delight looking at her sparse filigreed hair bent over the rug he had brought her, the bright tassels resting on her fingers; the meetings with old school friends, the meetings with neighbours, the buying of rounds and rounds of drinks; his own fever for company after the months at the oil wells and delight in the rounds of celebration blinding him to the poor fact that it is not generally light but shadow that we cast; and now all that fever had subsided to leave him alone and companionless in just another morning as he left the house without further word to Fonsie and with nothing better to do than walk to Mulligan’s.

  Because of the good weather, many of the terrace doors were open and people sat in the doorways, their feet out on the pavement. A young blonde woman was painting her toenails red in the shadow of a pram in a doorway at the end of the terrace, and she did not look up as he passed. Increasingly people had their own lives here and his homecoming broke the monotony for a few days, and then he did not belong.

  As soon as the barman in Mulligan’s had pulled his pint he offered Philly the newspaper spread out on the counter that he had been reading.

  ‘Don’t you want it yourself?’ Philly asked out of a sense of politeness.

  ‘I must have been through it at least twice. I’ve the complete arse read out of it since the morning.’

  There were three other drinkers scattered about the bar nursing their pints at tables.

  ‘There’s never anything in those newspapers,’ one of the drinkers said.

  ‘Still, you always think you’ll come on something,’ the barman responded hopefully.

  ‘That’s how they get your money,’ the drinker said.

  Feet passed the open doorway. When it was empty the concrete gave back its own grey dull light. Philly turned the pages slowly and sipped at the pint. The waiting silence of the bar became too close an echo of the emptiness he felt all around his life. As he sipped and turned the pages he resolved to drink no more. The day would be too hard to get through if he had more. He’d go back to the house and tell his mother he was returning early to the oil fields. There were other places he could kill time in. London and Naples were on the way to Bahrain.

  ‘He made a great splash when he came home first,’ one of the drinkers said to the empty bar as soon as Philly left. ‘He bought rings round him. Now the brother in the wheelchair isn’t with him anymore.’

  ‘Too much. Too much,’ a second drinker added forcefully though it wasn’t clear at all to what he referred.

  ‘It must be bad when that brother throws in the towel, because he’s a tank for drink. You’d think there was no bottom in that wheelchair.’

  The barman stared in silent disapproval at his three customers. There were few things he disliked more than this ‘behind-backs’ criticism of a customer as soon as he left. He opened the newspaper loudly, staring pointedly out at the three drinkers until they were silent, and then bent his head to travel slowly through the pages again.

  ‘I heard a good one the other day,’ one of the drinkers cackled rebelliously. ‘The only chance of travel that ever comes to the poor is when they get sick. They go from one state to the other state and back again to base if they’re lucky.’

  The other two thought this hilarious and one pounded the table with his glass in appreciation. Then they looked towards the barman for approval but he just raised his eyes to stare absently out on the grey strip of concrete until the little insurrection died and he was able to continue travelling through the newspaper again.

  Philly came slowly back up the street. The blonde had finished painting her toenails – a loud vermilion – and she leaned the back of her head against a door jamb, her eyes closing as she gave her face and throat completely to the sun. The hooded pram above her outstretched legs was silent. Away, behind the area railings, old men wearing berets were playing bowls, a miniature French flag flying on the railings.

  Philly expected to enter an empty room but as soon as he put his key in the door he heard the raised voices. He held the key still. His mother was downstairs. She and Fonsie were arguing. With a welcome little rush of expectancy, he turned the key. The two were so engaged with one another that they did not notice him enter. His mother was in her blue dressing gown. She stood remarkably erect.

  ‘What’s going on?’ They were so involved with one another that they looked towards him as if he were a burglar.

  ‘Your Uncle Peter died last night, in Gloria. The Cullens just phoned,’ his mother said, and it was Philly’s turn to look at his mother and brother as if he couldn’t quite grasp why they were in the room.

  ‘You’ll all have to go,’ his mother said.

  ‘I don’t see why we should have to go. We haven’t seen the man in twenty years. He never even liked us.’ Fonsie said heatedly, turning the wheelchair to face Philly.

  ‘Of course we’ll go. We are all he has now. It wouldn’t look right if we didn’t go down.’ Philly would have grasped at any diversion, but the pictures of Gloria Bog that flooded his mind shut out the day and the room with amazing brightness and calm.

>   ‘That doesn’t mean I have to go,’ Fonsie said.

  ‘Of course you have to go. He was your uncle as well as mine,’ Philly said.

  ‘If nobody went to poor Peter’s funeral, God rest him, we’d be the talk of the countryside for years,’ their mother said. ‘If I know nothing else in the world I know what they’re like down there.’

  ‘Anyhow, there’s no way I can go in this.’ Fonsie gestured contemptuously to his wheelchair.

  ‘That’s no problem. I’ll hire a Mercedes. With a jalopy like that you wouldn’t think of coming yourself, Mother?’ Philly asked suddenly with the humour and malice of deep knowledge, and the silence that met the suggestion was as great as if some gross obscenity had been uttered.

  ‘I’d look a nice speck in Gloria when I haven’t been out of my own house in years. There wouldn’t be much point in going to poor Peter’s funeral, God rest him, and turning up at my own,’ she said in a voice in which a sudden frailty only served to point up the different shades of its steel.

  ‘He never even liked us. There were times I felt if he got a chance he’d throw me into a bog hole the way he drowned the black whippet that started eating the eggs,’ Philly said.

  ‘He’s gone now,’ the mother said. ‘He stood to us when he was needed. It made no difference whether he liked us or not.’

  ‘How will you manage on your own?’ Fonsie asked as if he had accepted he’d have to go.

  ‘Won’t Mrs O’Brien next door look in if you ask her and can’t I call her myself on the phone? It’ll be good for you to get out of the city for a change. None of the rest can be trusted to bring me back a word of anything that goes on,’ she flattered.

  ‘Was John told yet?’ Philly interrupted, asking about their eldest brother.

  ‘No. There’d be no use ringing him at home now. You’d have to ring him at the school,’ their mother said.

  The school’s number was written in a notebook. Philly had to wait a long time on the phone after he explained the urgency of the call while the school secretary got John from the classroom.