A Bed in the Sticks

by Lee Dunne

  ‘You leave Pauline out of this,’ I said angrily.’

  ‘Pauline, my one true love,’ she lisped, ‘with fried eggs where I’ve got tits that drive guys up the wall.’

  I hit her hard enough to knock her back a step but she showed no tears, her eyes bruised with shock and something like despair, leaving me more than bloody sorry for what I had done.

  ‘May, I’m sorry, straight...’

  She didn’t even look at me, while I couldn’t find it in myself to open the door and go after her. I should have done. She was a good one, a girl in a million, and I was wrong to hit her like that. But she had made Pauline sound like a dirty word, getting then into calling her a rotten drunk, snorting derisively as she reminded me of many a rejection of my efforts to create a romantic interest in the heart of my favourite pianist.

  This had hurt, which, I suppose, was why I slapped her face in blind rage. I lay down on the bed again, wondering if anything in life was ever just plain straight forward and simple. I mean, even with May, the one girl that I felt could settle for honesty and be glad to have what we had going for us as we went beyond being friendly. But, it wasn’t so, because even may wanted more very quickly, the great sex somehow allow her feel entitled to some piece of me that didn’t have to be part of our incredible enjoyment of each other in bed. It just seemed that, if you were into serious intimacy with someone, it didn’t take long before they wanted more, and a lot more, which I just couldn’t give her, much as I had wanted to keep her as a bed mate when it was right for both of us.

  I didn’t want to be owned, swallowed up by the prison of lust that was powerful enough to side track you and allow you think that In Love was all, which, even I know was that it all. To keep it simple, I knew, without any doubt, that I didn’t want to give anybody the idea that they could own me.

  In fairness, May had been right when she said that if Pauline had come to my bed, I would have turned off a great radio play right away. I knew this to be true and what was more I knew I would have done anything I could to make her want to stay there, the pair of us wrapped up in each other. I was so blindly in love that it made me sad, and I was too self-centred to give any real house room to the thought that May felt like that about me.

  May never spoke to me again except when it was related to the word we sometimes did together, a line in a scene between is, things like that, but she was not behind the door in ensuring that I saw her leave a bar in one town after another, with the guy she had chosen to lay that night, the tilt of her self satisfied smile causing me great discomfort, when I considered how great we had been together in bed.

  Of course, my pride was bruised, though I made an effort to convince myself that I didn’t give a damn. But I hated think of other guys going through her, and I tried to make myself believe that she couldn’t enjoy the sex, and that she was just doing it to spite me. In a while, I did manage to switch off completely where she was concerned, and I was only sorry that I wasn’t man enough to have handled things a lot better than I did.

  Jimmy bought a good second hand car after our few weeks in Roscommon, trading in the old one which didn’t perform too well with a trailer attached, but he owed money on the hire purchase deal. This was a manageable situation when we were packing in the punters as the weather began moving in the direction of Spring, and the rent of halls was climbing all the time even though they would not have had so much as a coat of paint in donkey’s years.

  Without anything being said, Jimmy turned to me once more to discuss the problems that seemed to grow like grass when you were running an operation like Gay Time, and it was in response to his sharing his problems with me, that gave rise to me suggesting that he build a wooden booth for the summer months ahead. This came up because I’d been leafing through an old magazine, and found this article which gave a complete picture of how you would go about doing such a thing, and I thought it was a great idea.

  So did Jimmy because he knew that a booth with a canvas roof was an easier sell than a miserable village hall. Before he went away to do his sums, costing the operation and so on, he asked me would I join him, be a partner in the operation, with Tom being the third member of the team.

  At this time, Pauline seemed to be thawing out in relation to allowing me get a little closer to her, and a few nights before I got involved in the booth idea, I had kissed her. Everybody else had gone to the pub and without a word being said, I held her close to me, sore with love for her, hurt again by the fact that she was allowing me kiss her without kissing me back.

  I tried to act offhand, letting her go and lighting up a couple of cigarettes. To make what I thought as just chat, I talked about the booth, and I was really choked that she more or less, turned her nose up, despite my enthusiasm for the project.

  ‘You’re getting closer to being a showman with every month that passes. If you were thinking straight, you’d get out of here tomorrow.’

  ‘Pauline, if that’s your way of telling me you don’t want me around you,’

  She snorted at the very idea, smiling then, liking me a lot, or so it seemed to me: ‘You can be very dumb for such a smart Dublin Jackeen!’

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ I said, knowing that she was actually caring for me in those moments.

  ‘I’m only concerned about you...you have genuine talent. You’re not a carpenter or an electrician. You’re a born actor so you don’t have to muck in to earn your salary...Oh, what’s the use?’

  I started to leave. ‘My mother always talked to me as though I was an eight year old, too.’

  ‘I’m sorry so. I must learn to keep my big mouth shut.’

  He left the dressing area and I knew that she didn’t want me going with her. I gave her a minute to get away from me and then I left the place and walked back to the digs. I got into bed and I was trying to read a worthwhile book when I realised that if Pauline didn’t care a damn about me, she wouldn’t bother telling me things she knew I wasn’t going to like.

  I put the book down, feeling a warm glow creep over me. She just wouldn’t bother if I didn’t matter to her. I lay back in a more relaxed frame of mind and I shut my eyes, allowing her face to join me as I simply drifted off into a blissful sleep.

  On the following afternoon, I was in the back of the truck repairing some books Gary had left me, smiling still over the way Pauline had accepted my apology that morning. I had kissed her head afterwards, and instead of telling me I was silly, she had smiled a little then when I told her that I was in love with her.

  The books were spread on newspapers about the floor of the truck. I was busy with scissors and cello tape and paste, and I felt happier than I had been for a week. My list of books that I had read once was heading for a hundred, with about another two hundred to go before I exhausted my legacy. Then I would start again, and I would add to my collection as I read more and more.

  Gary had made me promise to read every book in the trunk in the week before he died, and I knew I wouldn’t break my word. And I remember yet again his words: ‘Knowledge is wealth, but there is more than that between those covers.’

  This thought was sitting there on my mind as I picked up a beaten leather bound edition of ‘Candide,’ wondering if there was anything I could do about improving its overall condition.

  It was one I hadn’t seen before and I probably wouldn’t have reached it for another twelve months, had I just read my way to it. Opening it up to check how strong or weak the inside was.

  There were six pages after the frontispiece, the remaining pages, except for the margins, had been cut out, and there, lying in an oblong cardboard box was a wad of money, which would turn out to be three hundred and ninety pounds in five pound notes.

  I was kneeling there, dumbfounded, with Gary’s life long savings in my hands, and I was remembering the way he had repeated to me that I must read every book in the trunk. I felt my tea
rs on my face, sniffing back the need to blow my nose, as I went on hearing him insist, ‘and I do mean every book, young man, every single one.’

  Even as he lay dying he wanted to give to me, but, he had obviously thought it better for me to work my way to the money as opposed to just telling me where it was.

  I sat on my haunches there in the truck bed, and I couldn’t stop myself crying like a baby, nor indeed, did I want to stop, because somehow it helped me feel closer to my old actor pal, he, even in death, proving his feeling for me, and all the more so for allowing me find it as I had, while I was honouring his trust that I would cherish the books he left behind, as much as he had loved them during his long life.

  He was months dead, grave-cold by now, and he was there, being still, a friend to me. ‘Every one, every one, I promise...twenty times I’ll read them, Gary. I won’t break my word to you, God bless you.’

  I said the words out loud in the back of Jimmy’s truck, and I meant them. And more, since I knew that I would spend my life willing to take in every bit of knowledge that was available to me. Gary had set my feet pointing in that direction and, I knew that, regardless of how tough the going might be, I would see that his investment in me, would earn worthy interest.

  I packed all the books away, leaving all the money but five pounds in the trunk. When I got down to the pub to meet Jimmy was talking thirty to the dozen to the man who had come to re-possess his car. I, deliberately interrupted them to buy a drink and I saw Jimmy’s eyes open a shade at the sight of the fiver on the counter.

  ‘How much is outstanding altogether?’ I asked stranger who was dropping the brandy down even as I spoke.

  ‘A hundred and eight pounds,’ he said, interest arising in his eyes as he sensed there could be a deal done here.

  ‘Will you leave us for a minute?’ I said to the man.

  He nodded and walked over to the window. ‘I can clear it for you,’ I said to Jimmy. He choked a bit on the brandy before he said, ‘You’re not kidding, either, are you?’

  ‘You need the car, I’ve got the money.’

  ‘If we give him sixty, he’ll be happy, Jimmy said with a crafty gleam in his eyes.’

  I shook my head: ‘To hell with that. Let’s clear it up. It’ll be one thing off your mind.’

  Jimmy didn’t say anything and I called the guy back to the bar counter.

  ‘One eighty, was it?

  ‘One eighty, yes’

  ‘For cash right now’

  ‘Well, I don’t know now.’

  He thought about it for a few seconds; ‘One seventy?’

  I shook my head and sipped brandy, keeping my eyes on his face, while he tried to look like he was signing away one of his lungs or something.

  ‘One seventy,’ he said in his magnanimous tone.

  I shook my head and sipped brandy.

  ‘I’m in a position to give you one thirty right now.’

  He reacted as though he’d just sat on a hot pole and then he said quickly: ‘I can go to one fifty but that’s it.’

  In the crunch we settled for this, while he worked hard to look like a man who’d just had bowel surgery.

  When we were alone, Jimmy asked me where the money had come from. ‘I’ve been fiddling the raffle,’ I said, grinning. ‘I’m only surprised you didn’t notice.’

  I finally told him that I’d found the money in one of Gary’s books. He looked at me, nodded, not really expecting me to tell him the truth.

  ‘Fair enough, Tony,’ he said, ‘you’re getting as dry as a bone.

  We had another drink and he told me he wanted me to be his partner in the show. I laughed at the idea, but he said he wanted it that way. That he couldn’t allow me to pay out all that money when he wasn’t sure that I was ever going to get paid back. He gave me a grin: ‘I’m not doing you any favours. You take half the responsibility as well.’

  ‘That won’t bother me,’ I said, while he held out his hand: ‘I don’t need paper if you don’t.’

  ‘Have you the money to build the booth?

  ‘When the shekels start rolling in, I won’t look so stupid. We’ll get our money back, just you wait and see.

  He considered this for a few moments and then he said:

  ‘you’re on, good or bad, fifty-fifty!’

  13

  The booth went up like a dream on the Friday after the Easter holiday and May Mitchell walked out on us on the following Sunday.

  Pauline didn’t comment when I told her I’d become Jimmy’s partner, but her expression of ‘good luck’ did suggest that I was certainly going to need it.

  Tom seemed genuinely pleased; he was crazy about the business and glad to think that I was hooked enough to put my money into it.

  Peter Hunter seemed surprised, but he didn’t say anything, while Maria’s congratulations were so obviously packed with jealousy that Pat was embarrassed.

  I didn’t really mind what any of them thought. I was busy with my work and, thrilling to the experience of actually owning something. Up to then, I had only ever owned a bicycle, and I had never been concerned about possessions, but a couple of days after Jimmy shook my hand to close our deal, I began to take extra care of the props, and I found that I was examining things with a view to improving them, and already I had started to dream up ideas that would help us put more zip into the show.

  It took a week of hard work for four of us to build the booth, which was a wooden structure with a canvas roof. We had hired a field and I nailed and painted, with creosote, my share of the tongue-and-groove timber that made up the side walls, and I also cooked many of the meals we hungrily sat down to.

  Not that I fancied myself as any kind of chef, but Jimmy and the Hunters are everything I put on the table, though a couple of times, I found it hard to digest my own cooking.

  Our summer theatre was sixty four feet long, made up of eight sections either side, eight feet long by six feet high, with a canvas extension at the rear for the props, the stage and the performers, piano and drums.

  About two inches below the top of each supporting , post, a six-by-six inch length was clipped on, and this ran up to a centre bar, which ran the length of the booth.

  Over this apex the canvas stretched; everything being clipped into place before we raised the frame, the canvas being hauled over the top afterwards.

  This was tied to the brackets on the outside of the walls, which we had painted with a mix or creosote and black paint, and against this the new, off-white canvas looked very effective when he saw the booth erected for the first time.

  The stage and frame went up in the usual way, and once we got used to the numbered sections of the booth, we could put it up in an hour and a half, and I think we were all very proud of the result of our Easter holiday.

  When Jimmy told me that May was packing her things, I tried to reason with her, but she didn’t want to know. It had been bad enough working with me on the show but she was never going to work for me. I tried everything, but I didn’t get anywhere, and when I said that we could get together, if that was what she wanted, she turned on me, lashing out so fast that I couldn’t get out of the way of her hand.

  The blow stung one side of my face and I’m sure I would have slapped her all over the room if I hadn’t seen in her eyes, just how much she hated me. She stood there quivering with temper, and I knew that we were past everything.

  ‘Forget it, May. I’m sorry for not realising you felt that bad.’

  ‘I hope I never hate anybody the way I hate you right now,’ she said quietly.

  I nodded, trying to appear casual, not wanting her to see how hurt I was, that she, or anybody should ever look at me like that.

  Jimmy told me to forget it. She was so talented that he wasn’t expecting to hold her much longer, anyway. He smiled as he admit
ted: ‘No flannel, Tony, that’s why I was glad to get you as my partner...I wouldn’t have held you much longer, either.’

  The summer was long and warm and I enjoyed working under the canvas roof. As always, we all dressed back stage which was no hardship in the fine weather. We had cobbled slatted flooring together that kept out feet off the grass, and with business being mostly good, we were a fairly happy bunch, if you ignored the situation between Pauline and me.

  We took on a magician, Neal Mooned, who worked his act with a cool line in patter and I began doubling with Jenny. She played the guitar and we san folk songs, and, as it happened, we were very good together, thanks mainly to Jennie’s willingness to rehearse all day if necessary, to get a number as good as we could make it. Her confidence in me gave me a lot more, so that my solo spot got better, though I much preferred working the double with her.

  Neil Mooney didn’t drink at all but he was a gambler born and bred, so that by mid-summer we had a regular poker school going and mostly the money just went back and forth, from one session to the next. Nobody won alal the time, which made for good pals but after I had, don’t ask me how, cleaned everybody out for two sessions, one after the other, I wrote to my mother, sending her ten pounds. I asked her to try and forget how badly I had treated her, trying to make her understand that I simply had to get up and go.

  Ma returned my letter and the money, without so much as a note, and I sat stunned, my street arab’s heart breaking like bread in my chest. But, who could blame her?

  One letter with money thrown in to ease my conscience, had been my idea of a peace-offering when it was really yours truly trying to ease his conscience. A big mistake for sure, something I should have worked out for myself, because I knew Ma better than anybody else alive.

  ---------

  A couple of days later, Ma forwarded on a letter from Larry Deegan, my great pal from my insurance office days. He was in Sydney, Australia, and by the sound of things he was living very well. He talked about the dancer he had taken a tumble for when we were a couple of Jack the Lad’s about Dublin city and its pubs, admitting he had wanted to talk to me about it while it was going down, but, he hadn’t been able to do it because he wanted me to go on thinking he was Jack the Lad. I could identify with the scenario, like every other guy - we all waned to be as cool as Humphrey Bogart.