He kicks off his shoes and walks in his bare feet, along the strand. The white waves at the sandbar are clearly visible in the darkness but they do not seem so angry as in the day. There is the smell of cigar smoke on his clothes. He puts the cufflinks safely in his pants pocket, strips naked, and leaves his clothes further up the strand. When he wades into the big, white-fringed waves, the water is cold. He swims out, feeling clean again. He does not have to stay here. He can call the airline, change his flight, go back to Cambridge.
By the time he reaches the sandbar, he is tired. The water is colder, the waves angrier, now that it is night but he can rest here, as always, before the return swim to the shore. He lowers his feet to feel the sand. A thick wave thrashes over his head, knocking him back into the deep water. He swallows water, goes further out to find the shallow place but he cannot feel the bottom. He never meant to drink all that champagne. He never meant to go swimming in the first place. All he wanted was a happy birthday. He struggles for the longest time, goes underwater, believing it will be easier if he comes up only for air. Panic strikes him and then time passes and the panic changes into something peaceful. Why are opposites always so close? It’s like those beautiful, high notes on the violin, just a hair’s breadth away from a screech. He gives up and feels himself coming to the surface. He floats till he feels able to go on then slowly fights his way back the shore. It is a long way off but the lights of the complex are clear against the sky and getting closer.
When he reaches the shallow water, he crawls up onto the beach and collapses on the sand. He is breathing hard and looking around but the tide has taken his clothes. He imagines the first species that crawled out of the sea, the amount of courage that took. He lies there until his breath comes back then makes his way back to the pier where the boats are. Further off, a couple is walking a dog. He goes along the yachts looking at the decks until he sees a yellow T-shirt hanging over a rope. He puts it on but it’s too short to cover his privates so he puts one leg into the arm hole and awkwardly ties the cloth to cover himself.
When he gets back to the complex, the porter opens the door. In the lobby, he presses a button and waits for the elevator. When the elevator comes, it’s full of well-dressed people. A woman in a red dress looks at him and smiles. He gets in and presses 25. The elevator’s walls are mirrored and his reflection is a slightly sunburned man who is shivering. When he reaches the door, he hesitates and tells himself his mother will open it. He presses the button and hears the electronic bell ringing inside. Nothing happens. Maybe they are still at the restaurant. Maybe they are in a bar somewhere. Maybe the porter will open the door for him. He is wondering if he can call down to reception when the millionaire opens the door and looks at him.
‘Well!’ he says. ‘What have we got here?’
He looks at the yellow T-shirt tied like a diaper at his waist.
‘You have a good time?’ he says. ‘You finally got your hook in the water?’
The young man dodges past him and runs down the hall. Several versions of himself run down the hall alongside him.
‘Your mother’s losing her mind over you!’
He gets into the shower, stands under the hot water, realising he almost drowned. He stands there for a long time, gets out and wraps himself in a dressing gown. Then he looks up a number in the directory and lifts the phone.
‘Hello,’ says a woman’s voice. ‘Delta Airlines. May I help you?’
For a moment, he cannot answer. His mother has walked into the room and is standing there with a glass in her hand. He thinks about her mother who, after coming all that way, and with only an hour to spend, would not get into the water, even though she was a strong river swimmer. When he’d asked her why, she’d said she had no idea how deep it was.
‘May I help you?’ the voice asks again.
Surrender
(after McGahern)
For five days the sergeant kept the letter in the inside pocket of his uniform. There was something hard in the letter but his desire to open it was matched by his fear of what it might contain. Her letters, in recent times, without ever changing course, had taken on a different tone and he had heard that another man, a schoolteacher, was grazing a pony on her father’s land. Her father’s fields were on the mountain. What grazing would be there was poor and daubed with rushes. If the sergeant was to do as he had intended, there was but little time. Life, he felt, was pushing him into a corner.
All that day, he went about his duties. If Doherty, the guard in the dayroom, found him short, he did not pass any remarks, for the length of the sergeant’s fuse was never disputed. It was a wet December day and there was nothing to be done. Doherty kept his head down and went over the minute particulars of the permit once again. Turning a page, he felt the paper cold against his skin. He looked up and stared, with a degree of longing, at the hearth. The fire was so low it was almost out. The sergeant insisted always on a fire but never a fire that would throw out any decent heat. The guard rose from the desk and went slowly out into the rain.
The sergeant watched him as he came back and positioned two lumps of timber at either side of the flame.
‘Is it cold you are?’ said the sergeant, smiling.
‘No more than usual,’ answered Doherty.
‘Pull up tight to her there, why don’t you?’
‘It’s December,’ said the guard, reasonably.
‘It’s December,’ mimicked the Sergeant. ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’
‘What does that have to do with anything?’
‘The people of this country love sitting in at the fire. At the rate we’re going, we may go back to Westminster to warm our hands.’
Doherty sighed. ‘Should I go out and see what’s happening on the roads?’
‘You’ll go nowhere.’
The sergeant stood up and put his cap on. It was a new cap, stiff, with a shining peak. When he reached out for the big black cape at the back of the door, he threw it dramatically over his shoulders. Never once had the guard seen him rush. Every move he made was deliberate and enhanced by his good looks. It was hard not to look at him but he was not, in any case, the type of man you’d turn your back on. If his moods often changed, the expression in his eyes was always the same, intemperate blue. The men who had fought with him said they couldn’t ever predict his moves. They said also that his own were always the last to know. He had taken risks but had shown a strange gift for reading the enemy.
The timber spluttered into flame and its light momentarily struck the steel buttons of the sergeant’s tunic. He bent over, folded the trouser legs and secured the bicycle clips. When he opened the door, the wind blew a hard, dappled rain over the flagstones. The sergeant went out and stood for a moment, looking at the day. Always, he liked to stand for a moment. When he turned back to Doherty, the guard felt sure he could read his mind.
‘Don’t scorch the tail of your skirt,’ he said, and went off without bothering to close the door.
Doherty got up and watched him cycling down the barracks road. There was something half comical about the sergeant and his bike going off down the road but the remark lingered.
It was the easiest thing in the world to humiliate somebody. He had said this aloud at his wife’s side in bed one night, in the darkness, thinking she was asleep, but she had answered back, saying it was sometimes harder not to humiliate someone, that it was a weakness people had a Christian duty to resist. He had stayed awake pondering the statement long after her breathing changed. What did it mean? Women’s minds were made of glass: so clear and yet their thoughts broke easily, yielding to other glassy thoughts that were even harder. It was enough to attract a man and frighten him all at once.
The barracks was quiet but there was no peace; never was there any peace in this place. Winter was here, with the rain belting down and the wind scratching the bare hills. Doherty felt the child’s urge to go out for more timber, to build up the fire and make it blaze but at any moment the sergea
nt could come back and as little as that could mean the end. His post was nothing more than a fiction and could easily be dissolved. All it would take was the stroke of a pen. He pulled the chair up to the fire and thought of his wife and child. Another was on the way. He thought about his life and little else until he realised his thoughts were unlikely to reach any conclusion; then he looked at his hands, stretched out to the flame. What the sergeant wouldn’t say if he came back and saw the firelight on his palms.
Down the road, the sergeant had dismounted and was standing still under the yews. The yews were planted in different times, and it gave him pleasure to stand and take their shelter. The same dark smoke was still battering down on the barracks roof. He’d stood there for close to an hour, on watch, but the quality of the smoke hadn’t changed; neither was there any sign of Doherty going back out to the shed. The way you rear your little pup, you’ll have your little dog. As soon as the rain eased, he moved out from the patch of sheltered ground and pushed on for town.
Further along the road, a couple had stopped and was talking. The youth, a MacManus off the hill, was leaning over the saddle of his bike with his cap pushed well back off his face. The girl was laughing but as soon as she laid eyes on the sergeant, she went still.
‘A fine day it is for doing nothing,’ said the sergeant expansively. ‘Wouldn’t I love to be out in the broad daylight sweet-talking girls?’
The girl blushed and turned her head away.
‘I better be going on, Francie,’ she said.
The youth held his ground.
‘Don’t you know it’s the wrong side of the road you’re on?’ demanded the sergeant. ‘Does the youth of this country not even know which end of ye is up?’
The young man turned his bicycle in the opposite direction.
‘Does this suit you any better?’ He was saying it for the girl’s benefit but the girl had gone on.
‘What would suit me is to see the youth of this country rolling up their sleeves,’ the sergeant said. ‘Men didn’t risk their lives so the likes of ye could stand around idle.’
If we can’t be idle, what can we be? the young man wanted to say but his courage had gone, with the girl. He threw his leg over the crossbar and rode on, calling after her. The girl did not look back and kept her head down when the sergeant passed. The sergeant knew her mother, a widow who gave him butter and rhubarb in the summertime but all she had was a rough acre behind the house. As it turned out, there was hardly a woman in the entire district with land.
He rode on into the town and leant his bicycle against Duignan’s wall. The back door was on the latch. He pushed it open and entered a smoky kitchen whose walls were painted brown. Nobody was within but there was the smell of bread baking and someone had recently fried onions. A pang of hunger struck him; he’d gone without since morning. He went to the hearth and stared at the cast-iron pan on its heavy iron hook, the lid covered in embers. Close by, a cat was washing herself with a sput paw. Talk was filtering in from the front room that served as a shop. The sergeant could hear every word.
‘But isn’t he some man to cock his hat?’
‘What do they see in him at all?’
‘It’s not as though he hasn’t the looks,’ said another.
‘Sure hasn’t he the uniform?’
‘A cold bloody thing it would be to lie up against in the middle of the night,’ and there was a cackle that was a woman’s laughter.
The sergeant grew still. It was the old, still feeling of the upper hand that made lesser men freeze but the sergeant came alive. He felt himself back under the gorse with a Tommy in the sight of his gun; the old thrill of conspiracy, the raw nerve. He was about to stand closer to the shop door when suddenly it opened and the woman came in. She hardly paused when she saw him.
‘Hello, Sergeant!’ she called out, same as he was far away.
The banter in the shop drew to a sharp halt. There was a rough whisper and the clink of porter bottles. The woman came towards the pan with a cloth and swung the hook away from the fire. She removed the iron lid without letting an ember fall and took up the loaf. It was a white loaf with a cross cut deep into the surface of the dough. The sergeant had not seen a white loaf in months. Three times the woman rapped it with her knuckles and the sound it made was a hollow sound.
The sergeant had to hand it to her: her head was cool. There were few women in the country like her left. She went to the shop door and without looking beyond, shut it.
‘I don’t suppose those pigeons came in to roost?’
‘They came in last night,’ she said.
‘They didn’t all come?’
‘They’re all there. The even dozen, fresh from the barrow.’
‘A fine price they must be.’
When she told him what price they were, a fresh thrill ran down the entire length of his body. It was almost twice what he had anticipated and the extravagance was, in his experience, without comparison but he hid his pleasure.
‘I suppose I’ll have to take them now,’ he grunted.
‘It’s as you please,’ the woman said.
The shop door flew open and a small boy, one of her troops, ran in from the shop.
‘Slide the bolt there, Sean, good boy,’ the woman said.
The boy leant against the door until the latch caught then slid the bolt across. He drew up close to the woman and stared at the loaf.
‘Is there bread?’ the boy asked, tilting his head back. The boy’s face was pale and there were dark circles under his eyes.
‘You can have it when it cools,’ said the woman, propping the loaf against the window. She threw the bolt on the back door and opened the lower part of the dresser. The light, wooden crate was covered by a cloth. When she pulled the cloth away, the sergeant got their scent. They lay on a bed of wood chippings, each wrapped in fine, pink tissue.
The boy leaned in over the table and stared.
‘What are they, Mammy?’
‘They’re onions,’ she said.
‘They’re not!’ he cried.
‘They are,’ she said.
The boy reached out to stroke the tissue and stared up at the sergeant. The sergeant felt the boy’s hungry gaze. He took the tissue off each one and lifted it to his nose before he pushed back his cape and reached into his pocket for the money. As he was reaching in, his fingers lingered unnecessarily over the envelope and he realised his hand was half covetous of the letter. The woman wrapped the crate in a flour sack while the sergeant stood waiting.
‘Is it for Christmas you be wanting them, Sergeant?’
‘Christmas,’ he said. ‘Ay.’
She counted out the money on the kitchen table, and when he offered her something extra for the loaf, she looked at the boy. The boy’s face was paler now. His skin was chalky. When he saw his mother wrapping the loaf in the brown paper, he began to cry.
‘Mammy,’ he wailed. ‘My bread!’
‘Hush, a leanbh. I’ll make you another,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it just as soon as the sergeant leaves.’
The sergeant took the parcel out the back and tied it carefully on to the carrier of his bike. He was ready now for the barracks but he walked back through the kitchen, unlocked the door and entered the shop. The talk that had seized up when his presence was made known had risen back to neutral speech. This, too, seized up on his entry. Walking in through the silence, he felt the same old distance and superiority he always felt. He was reared near here, they knew his people but he would never be one of them. He stood at the counter and looked at the stains on the dark wood.
‘Isn’t it a harsh day?’
Always, there was someone who could not stand the silence. This was the type of man who, in other circumstances, could get another killed.
‘It’s a day for the fire,’ said another.
The sergeant hoped one of them would open his gob and make an open strike but not one of them had the courage. To his face, their talk would stay in the shallow, furtive waters o
f idle banter; anything of significance they had to say would be said just after he was gone. He paused at the front door where a calendar was hanging from a nail. He studied it closely though he well knew the date. Standing there, looking at the month of December, a blade of conviction passed through him. He opened the front door and went out into the rain without having uttered a word.
‘Well!’ said Duignan, watching the sergeant pushing his bike eagerly up the road.
‘Whoever would have thought it?’
‘If you want to know me, come live with me!’
The porter bottles came back out. Duignan took a draught, straightened himself and put his hands behind his back. In a perfect imitation, he slowly marched over to the wall and put his nose against the calendar.
‘It isn’t December?’
‘Ay, Sergeant.’
‘Do you think oranges would be ripe at this time of the year?’
As soon as he mentioned the word, there was a ripple of laughter. Each man, in his own mind, had a vision of the sergeant, the big IRA man, sitting into the feed of oranges. Duignan went to the counter and sniffed the wood. Stiffly, he swung back towards the men.
‘It isn’t porter I smell?’
‘It’s on the stage you should be!’
‘No, Sergeant!’ cried another. ‘’Tis oranges!’
Duignan carried on. There were fresh waves of laughter but it did not come to a head until the woman, her hands covered in flour, came in from the kitchen asking what, in the name of God, it was that had them so entertained?
The sergeant saw all this in his mind as he pushed his bicycle back to the barracks in the rain. Let them laugh. The last laugh would be his. The rain was coming down, hopping off the handlebars, his cape, the mudguard. It was down for the evening. There had not been a dry day for over a week and the roads were rough and sloppy.
When he reached the dayroom, he softly pushed the door open and there was Doherty, fast asleep, in the chair. The sergeant stole over to the desk, lifted the box of papers, and let it fall. Doherty woke in a splash of fear.
Walk the Blue Fields Page 9
