by Paul Lynch
Bart knows his way over a short bridge that leads into Englishtown. Everything becomes untold in dark but for a church’s tolling that tells the hour of two. Colly says, Christ, this place smells of shit-rot. The buildings here are as high almost as Newtown but they are run-down and slanting. The narrow streets grip the dark. Even the spirit shops are shut for the night. And yet there are children. They web nakedly out of the shadows as if they have been waiting for these strangers, hoping to escort them to a room. Such children are the rats of the city, she thinks. They pull at their hands and their sleeves, plead and cajole—mister, mister—cailín gleoite—and Colly shouts at one of them to fuck off when a hand threatens to pull Grace’s cape loose. Bart stops and puts his hand up, says hold on a minute, and she is startled by a boy who stands apart from the others blue-skinned and pimpled, naked from the waist up. A simple pleading look that eats at her heart. She nods at him and they begin to follow, the other children catcalling. They are whispered at. A drunkard shouts his face to a wall. Some groaning she can hear through a glassless window might well be the sound of dying.
The streets seem to labyrinth and then the boy turns into an alley so blind she is seized with the fear that they have been led into a trap where they will be murdered for their cloaks. She halts and grabs hold of Bart’s sleeve but Bart is already shouting whoa to the boy as if he were a horse, the boy continuing to walk on as if he has not heard. They stand at the edge of the alley’s dark until the boy reappears. Bart says, we go no farther. He waves his hand and points another direction and the boy signals that everything is all right, his hand gesturing to come along, come along, and then he leads them along another route, Colly saying, keep a watch out, I don’t like this one bit. They go down slippy steps and one hand goes to a wall and the other hand to her knife, watching this boy light a guttering candle and then he puts his hand out for a coin. In the flicker-light she can see the sunken pallor of his face and yet there is an unmistakable boy-light in his eyes and it seems to her as if this moment were not happening now but is a moment that has happened in the long-ago. Bart says, I am here for work so can pay you coin tomorrow. How the boy wavers with his eyes and then leads them into the house which smells of wet-cold and mildew and worse and try not to think of it, she thinks, downwards into a cellar cramped with sleeping people and perhaps the dead and that is what you smelled, and she sees their sprawling figures in the candlelight and the walls are wet and she thinks she can smell sickness, can hear it in someone’s cough, and they find a space and Bart rests against her and too soon he is asleep.
Colly whispering, what new hell is this?
She knows when she wakes she has been trying to wake all night. Colly says, I have been sleeping inside out and backwards. A creeping numb-cold from hands to feet and Bart is looking shivery. A look on his face suggests he has not slept one bit. He is nicking at his boot with his knife. Colly reckons there might be three or four families living in this single room, twenty-four people is my count, and there must be six or seven rooms in this house, go figure. The walls shake with coughing. Tears stream down the peeling plaster. Grace stands quickly and goes to the door. We need to go, she shouts. Up the soot-dark steps shining from rainfall that eats through her cloak as it falls. How the buildings that stoop upon the narrow passage make her think of old men steadfast in illness against dying. And here is the boy stepping out of a doorway as if he has been waiting, his hand out for money.
She says, we’ll have coin for you tomorrow.
The boy steps boldly in front of her and waves his hand again. Bart slaps the hand away and the boy stares at him with a look of willed courage.
Bart says, did you not hear what we said?
Of a sudden, another boy appears alongside him. He says, Deaf Tom don’t hear you.
Colly says, then why didn’t he say so?
She tries to see into his eyes as if to see into his unhearing, to see her own lips moving as if talk were to his eyes the simple fact of chewing, sees instead his eyes wrought with fear and hate. She pulls Bart by the sleeve and they turn and go up the street, can still feel upon her back the eyes of the boy.
Bart speaks aloud. We’ll not return there tonight.
Every gobdaw in Ireland, she thinks, has come to Limerick. The streets are full of sleeve pullers, rogues and ruffians, tinkers, beggars, and peddlers. By the bridge into Newtown they huddle and shout, hold up ragged garments and bedding and what have you. She thinks, they’d sell their own limbs if they could find a buyer. You do not look at their faces. You do not search for what you do not want to see, the people who wear bluing skin instead of clothing, each bone that pokes in accusation.
Bart says, there’s nothing worth stealing in Englishtown that isn’t being sold here.
Colly whispers, I’ll bet there’s secret trade in mice and rats.
Straggling behind Bart street after street as he makes inquiries after friends he says he knew a year or two ago. The doors and gateways shutting before him and everybody he knows is gone. Jim Slaw, he says. And Mick the Hammer. Where in the fuck? They were always here.
The sky and the streets and the faces they meet have become the same washy color. She follows behind Bart listening to the city, darning through sound her ear’s stitching needle, the yelling and chatter and clatter and catcalls while some distant metal heart clamors near the docks. Matching the sounds to what she sees. The sluggish rattle of a passing cart. A hoarse man trying to find more voice as he pleads with two sailors at his stall. A group of children on kindling legs cajoling some official. The silence of the beggary. There are rumors of fever on certain streets near the river. There are rumors of a gang of vicious children robbing people in the backstreets of Irishtown and for a moment she can see their faces, starving boys forced to become violent men.
They spend their last few pence on stale bread rolls. They are told where to find soup given out by some religious society or relief committee, nobody knows or cares. They join the queue and idle the hours listening to the chatter, it’s as if they are trying to kill you with waiting, did you notice how every day they are handing out one drop less, dinner missed the belly and went elsewhere. Then the door to the kitchen closes and they turn away with the others and grumble.
Colly says, that fellow over there.
She takes a good look at this man he is talking about, he must be Bart’s age and yet he moves with the ague of an oldster. He looks like a stick dressed by the wind, won’t even last the night.
When they get back to their lodgings, Deaf Tom holds up four fingers to remind them how many days’ payment is due.
She watches winter taking the city. It has come early this year. How it scavenges the light, sends despair to walk the streets. Or lie alongside the strung-out shapes that occupy each laneway, court, and stairwell. Each day the city seems to deepen its beggary, deepen the numbers who come from the country to gather on the quayside awaiting passage. They depart on the ships that Bart says are taking all the food out of Ireland and if this is true, she thinks, she wonders how anybody can allow it.
She wonders how a city can hold so many and yet how it can also hold so much wet. The rain hangs from the eaves and pools every corner, creeps into your feet, gnaws through your cloak, eats into your brain until you can think of nothing else. They stand under shop awnings until they are shouted at and she sees that a good many shops have their shutters down and Bart says a lot of the ordinary tradesmen now are done out of business.
Yet Newtown is another city. She has never seen people who look so continually pleased with themselves. Cockerel men in fine cloth standing outside great stone buildings talking about serious matters. Women fashioned in exotic hats and ribbons and colors walking under parasols. How the rain with its wanty fingers cannot touch them though the filthy streets dirty their booties.
She stands with Bart outside a coffeehouse reaching her eyes through the signed window, has never smelled anything like it. The men inside reading newspapers, supping and chatti
ng. Quidnuncs, Bart says. Nothing worse than men acting like women. She doesn’t know what he means but does not ask him, must be some word he’s read in the newspaper. Watching such men in the coffeehouse and watching such men on the street and she thinks that these people have been born clean, born into a higher position, while all the rest of us on earth were born into a lower position and such a thing is all down to who you are and where you come from and the luck of the draw and there is nothing you can do about it but take it back off them, because a fish cannot become a bird but there is nothing to stop a fish from wearing the bird’s feathers.
They return to the kitchen each day and sometimes you don’t get in and sometimes you do. She watches the splashy ladle dumping its watery soup, feeling both glad and hateful. A heel of bread. A room full of vile smells and sucking noises and a man who growls while collecting the bowls. Better to be out, she thinks, where you can creep the quays, watch the backyards of the high houses, the backyards of shops and stores. They walk the streets and send out their eyes but the city has too many eyes to meet them, the length of each street that swallows your strength and gives nothing in return for it. Everything is bolted and never has she seen so many watchmen and policemen and you do their thinking for them and step about in guilt for the thoughts of what you want to steal from them. Bart whispering that they must be careful, twice today they have been watched and followed by youths who belong to the Ryan gang, he says, you know them by the way they tie their neckerchiefs, they take only horses and money but perhaps that has all changed now. Them two fellows were figuring us out. And she begins to see them everywhere, each neckerchief a signal or perhaps not, who is to know who is what in the tumult of the city.
Today Deaf Tom came with some darkening man who stood stoat-eyed and said, you owe this boy payment for seven days. The warning he gave them. Now it is two o’clock. She stands under an archway with Bart watching the not-sky and how it has come down to meet this not-river and churn it into sea. It is as if the Shannon has been swelling all night into something eyeless and calmly malignant and now it lies in waiting. But for what? she thinks. For all the things you do not want to think of. This wind reaching into every mouth.
Colly says, you would wonder why God didn’t make us something else, of all the options available to Him—wouldn’t it be so much better to be a lion licking your hot balls in Africa or an elephant in India, or even an eagle winging over Wicklow would be better than this—who wants to be an Irishman born into wet—and do you know something else, I haven’t seen a single rat in days and you know what that means.
Ugh.
Grace.
What?
Do you know something?
What?
This is no way to live.
Fuck off, then.
Bart says, what was that?
She turns and stares at Bart pitting the knife into the heel of his useless hand. The flesh full of red marks. Her rage flies into shout and she feels like another person listening to herself. We have run out of luck. We should have had our pick of the riches of this city but instead we are penniless and getting worse with it. Why did we come here at all? This is your fault. It was you who said it. We would have been better off in the country.
Bart backwards against the wall as if her words were fists and then his eyes go strange, fuse into a look wrought by the cold and rain and what stirs in a soul hungry for nourish and what stirs in all souls in such a city and she sees what is held in his eye and knows it is fear.
He says, it might be time to put my cloak in hock.
She roars, hock your cloak and the cold will finish you off in a week.
Colly says, fucking spud-hander.
She has dreamt of a sudden laneway walled high and dark and a gang of children coming upon them not children at all but wolves set to devour their hearts. Just when it seems the deaf boy is going to run out of fingers, Bart finds them new lodgings. She eyes the tumbledown building and follows Bart through a crawl space into a near-pitch room. The wet from a broken window flies through the dark upon bodies asleep or bodies in agony or perhaps they are dead, she thinks, and really, does it matter, at least we won’t have to pay for it.
A long night of cold and Colly prattling on about souls. She thinks it must be something to do with this morbid city, all this winter-wet. Listening to the city’s dead-cart going by earlier on with a gloomy voice calling for bodies. Colly wanting to know if the soul has a memory box—like, when you die, where do your memories go—if the soul doesn’t have a memory box, how can you remember your life when you die—and tell me this, that time when Roger Doherty got his head smashed by the horse’s hoof and he went stupid as a mule, where did his mind go then—hee!—you see, that is the proof—I think there has to be a memory box of some kind in the head that stores all your life and his memory box got broken from the kick—but the thing is, if that is so, does that mean his soul will change as well and that he’ll go off to heaven stupid as a mule?
She realizes Bart is not beside her because here he is stepping into the room. In the half-light she sees his cheeks freshly razored and that horseshoe freshly shod to his face. His eyes have new poke in them. He pulls her by the wrist. There’s a commotion in the town, he says. Get up.
How Bart powers up the street like some groomed horse agleam and full of himself. She has not the energy for this march-walking. Colly says, let that horselicker go his own way. She folds her arms and scowls at his back, smiles when some fathead coachman lets out a deforming roar when Bart steps in front of him. Now they are standing before a crowd gathered by the gates of some grain house. Bart grabs her elbow. Over here, he says. The gates are warded by some twenty soldiers who stand impassive to the women and children sent to the front of the crowd, the women heckling and shouting at the soldiers, their men behind them laughing. She feels herself pulled forwards, inwards, inwards, holding on to the sleeve of Bart, and now she has forgotten her hunger and is woven with the crowd. A ringleader on a box is waving his arms and shouting and somebody roars out, let there be vengeance, and Colly shouts, cut the throats of those horselickers! A solemn man turns around and nods to her. She sees these are not the destitute of the city, not the ravenous scarecrows, the ragmen withered to sticks, the sick and crippled. They are dressed instead in the clothes of the city’s working people, the tradesmen, the craft workers, the shop workers. Glory be to the poor man! End the distress! Let the grain out! Cut the throats of those horselickers! Bart pulls at her sleeve and nods her towards the sight of a man with a different look from the others, a detective, no doubt. Bart shouts in her ear, let’s step back a bit. And anyway, she thinks, this is not the plan, standing here, shouting out for who knows what.
The crowd pulses to its own strange rhythm, pulls them leftwards until somebody shouts whoa and the surge settles down. They push to the rear of the crowd and she looks up and sees faces leaning from the windows of the factory buildings above them, thinks about how time has fallen away from the city, everything in the world stopped to just this, the silence between shouts, the whispered rumors being spread that they’re going to open the gates, that they’re saying come back tomorrow. Then some commotion behind them and she turns and sees some fool of a deliveryman is shouting and waving for his wagon to be let through and then some fellow with a grin is climbing the back of the wagon and he becomes a solemn Christ aloft with his arms held out, roars to the crowd, glory be to the poor man! He is met with a cheer and in the same moment there is a gunshot and the crowd unthinks into panic. She runs with Bart towards the wagon and there are others pulling at its contents and they take hold of a crate and she can see men unhitching the horses as if to steal them and there are men rocking the wagon and then Bart says, give it here, Bart the great rock carrier who gets the crate up on his back and moves away under it.
The sky behind them a shawl of whistles and roaring and then further gunshot. The sudden emptiness of a lane where Bart slides the crate off his back. That might be someone slumpe
d in a corner or it might not, she thinks. She looks over her shoulder as Bart knifes at the box.
Colly says, I hope to fuck it’s tobacco.
She says, we can hawk whatever it is. She is trying to work out how many warm dinners a guinea would buy.
Bart pulling loose straw from the box and his hand emerges gripping a dark bottle. It’s some kind of spirit, he says. It is then the air changes around them and she knows them as wolves that peel from the shadows and of a sudden they are swarmed, somebody taking rough hold of her arms from behind her and she spits and kicks, tries to shout to Bart, can see Bart reaching for his knife but somebody has hold of him. In silence the wolves grab at the bottles and then they are gone and she finds herself staring at the ground bereft and there is Bart holding a hurt head and at least you are not hurt also, she thinks. It is then that she sees it, a single bottle that has rolled free and she runs for it, puts it under her cloak.
We can sell it, she says.
See? Bart says. We have made our own luck.
They walk through the city pulling at the sleeves of men outside the spirit shops offering sale of the bottle. She cannot understand why nobody will buy it. Colly says, they think you want to sell them piss in a bottle. One stringy fellow uncorks the bottle and takes a suspicious sniff. I don’t know what that is, he says, but I’ll give you this much for it. Bart stares at the open hand and says, fuck off with yourself. Two boys begin following and she thinks they might be something to do with the Ryan gang though Bart says they have not the look for it. Colly says, they’ve been sent by that Deaf Tom, I know it. In Englishtown a drunkard with red cheeks makes a grab for the bottle and Bart cowers him with the knife. Come on, Bart says, let’s try Newtown again.
Their ghost-selves in the window have stopped to watch the occupants of an eating shop, the certain angle of shoulders hunched over tables, hands forking and cutting, wiping, fisting for a cough, curling to bring mugs to mouths, talking through half-chewed food, a huge fire roaring at the room. The shape of a woman leaning back laughing. Their blood is red with nourishment, she thinks, while my own blood is trickling over the rocks of my bones, and though you can learn to ignore hunger, not to give it a single thought, hunger is always thinking of you.
