Goodbye to the Hill

by Lee Dunne

  **********

  Ma blushed with pleasure when she saw the bicycle, and I think that all the neighbours in the block must have come down to wish me luck, and to have a screw at the machine itself

  . Except oul’ Darcy, with her mouth on her like a torn pocket, starting on about how dangerous the roads were and all the rest of it. To tell the truth, I could willingly have put my fist in her face. Ma was a big enough worrier without getting something fresh to start on.

  Billy didn’t say a word about the bike. Not that he was jealous or anything. He just wasn’t interested. He liked clothes and white shirts, and he was always as neat as a well washed corpse. And if he’d had a new suit, I wouldn’t have said anything about that, so he keeping his mouth shut about the bike was fair enough, I suppose.

  Chapter 8

  Going to work on the bike made life sweeter for me and even returning to The Hill didn’t seem so bad, at first,

  I used to ride up and down singing my head off, not in the least put out by the way people looked at me. I felt so happy that I just didn’t care, and even when the skies opened, I could end up singing ‘Singin’ in the Rain!’

  By the end of that first week I’d found a new paper round which paid ten bob for six mornings’ work. This was marvellous because the money covered the repayment for the bike, and I could still have a lie-in on Sunday morning.

  Mind you, I had a right load of papers to deliver each day, but I shot round on my mount and seemed to get the round finished in no time.

  Its funny when you think about it but, regardless of the really full day I was putting in, I started two nights a week in Rathmines Tech as well.

  Going to the Tech was one of my happiest times, the luxury of it reminding me how sparse my early years had been in terms of getting an education.

  Now I was really going for it - one night I did the geography and commerce classes and the other night I took English.

  From the off, it was just great for me. Not in the least bit like the National School - with the endless Irish, and the beatings you got in St. Mary’s National on Richmond Hill, from those cruel bastards, Durkin and Breheny and a silver haired monster like Roche

  When my mind went back there, I said thanks to a God unknown, that I was that much old now, older and fairly well dressed, and having a bike, and a job that I liked doing.

  Also, there were girls in the classes, some of them even sitting beside you at the desk, and though this didn’t help the concentration much, it was very nice all the same.

  I was as determined as I could be to learn something from those classes, so each night I went right up to the front row and made it my business to listen to what the teachers were on about.

  I suppose it was the fact that I didn’t have to go that made it so enjoyable, free and easy enough that it was like fun. Like, you could tell that if you didn’t show up one night, the teacher couldn’t have cared less. It was the sort of attitude that I liked. You know, like as if you were free, although it was this very thing that made you go regularly and get more involved than you would ever have done at the National School.

  The English teacher was the one I liked best. He was a right comedian, and he had this way of saying things that just made you want to hear more. He was a tall fella with a sort of bevelled face that went in from the forehead and worked its way out gradually by the time it reached his chin. And he kept taking his glasses off and putting them back on again and he wasn’t past giving the eye to one or two of the mots, and you could see that if he had one on her own with a drink in her hand, he wouldn’t be too concerned about her bad grammar.

  In the commerce class they tried to teach you how to write business letters in a more modern style than we beg to acknowledge and all that old fashioned stuff.

  I made notes and listened carefully, and I thought of Cahill. His letters were about as modern as the pictures Mack Sennett used to make with Ben Turpin and that mob.

  All the corny clichés were forever getting slung into Cahill’s dictation and, he was basically so primitive in this context that, when he said something like ‘this man was the author of his own misfortune’ he looked as if he had just made it up.

  And there was I, in love with the more modern approach, knowing that, even before I put it into operation when I got the chance, it followed that Cahill and I were going to be at loggerheads.

  ***********

  I was really interested in the geography class too, forgiving myself, as a right head case, that I cared about how much carboniferous limestone was in one country, and how much rain fell in annually in another.

  Facts like this just fascinated me, and as the teacher built up pictures of strange places with fabulous names, I’d be sitting there dreaming of Java and Peru, and I was crazy to get down and see the Virgin Isles, though to be perfectly honest I was more interested in the birds that lived there, thinking they must all be virgins and dying for it on account of the shortage of men.

  As I say, I was a right header, like I couldn’t help thinking of crumpet even though I did want to learn something.

  Let’s face it I needed to learn something, for it was there in the Technical School that I discovered that Egypt was in Africa. I think above all else that this illustrates just how much I didn’t learn at the National School.

  Thanks to the English class I was becoming aware of names in the world of literature...Maugham, Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe. And when the teacher mentioned William Butler Yeats I smiled, thinking of the innocent domestic servants that Harry Redmond had bullshitted up on the Dodder banks.

  ‘What do you do, Harry?’ asked the big mot from Galway.

  ‘Me? Ah, I’m a writer...a poet...you know.’ The hand worked its way up under her jumper and onto bare flesh that never knew the feel of a support.

  Then the recitation as he worked the knee between the thighs, token resistance, the words tumbling out of his mouth, Yeats, and Wordsworth, and the other masters, opening the legs for him.

  Then, his return to the boozer, details of the ride, and his own brand of poetry through the Guinness and the laughter that rocked him where he sat: I gave her tits a little suck, and the cheeks of her arse went chuck, chuck, chuck!’

  ***********

  Maugham impressed me then. I envied him the English that dripped from his fingertips and he told a good yarn. Steinbeck I loved for The Grapes of Wrath. I cried for his people and I admired his great humility, and Thomas Wolfe for his near Look Homeward Angel. The bits of this that I didn’t understand did worry me, but I hadn’t anybody that I could ask about them. I didn’t know one person who cared a damn about writers or the things they wrote. Not a solitary soul could I talk to about my reading. The teacher, I felt, would be willing enough. He had loaned me the books that I’ve mentioned, but he had his job to do with the class. Even Redmond, who was brilliant in his own way, would have laughed at me if I had tried to talk literature to him. For weeks and weeks I was burning up with frustration, not knowing what the hell I could do about it.

  So, because I couldn’t talk to anybody, I began to write things down. I didn’t think of it as writing, it was just me talking to myself on paper. Nobody ever saw the stuff I wrote. It was mine, conversation through the tip of my pen, but it made me a whole lot happier, so much so that I stopped looking for someone to talk to about books and writers. I was talking to myself now and that was enough.

  I enjoyed the physical thing of writing. For hours and hours I’d sit in the Reading Room of the library next door to the Tech, and I’d scribble away, filling exercise books one after the other. I couldn’t have done this at home - the radio was on most of the time. If not that, Billy listened to popular records on his new pick-up and if I was there I sat and listened and loved every second of it, even though I felt it was a waste of time. So the Reference Room became my study and I spent lots of time ther
e, just reading and writing and dreaming a bit too.

  I remember the day that I got my hands on a copy of The Great Gatsby. I didn’t know the book but I’d seen the film with Alan Ladd in it. A bloody terrible picture, but I thought it might help me understand the book. As it happened it was a marvellous book, probably one of the greatest, and when I thought about the lousy picture they’d made of it, I bled for Scott Fitzgerald. I read the book three times in a month and I never tired of it for one second.

  Gatsby taught me something too. For a book to be great it didn’t have to be full of big words and all kinds of vague references to Greek mythology and all the rest of it. People like Fitzgerald proved this, and I got the feeling he wanted every man on earth to read his book, to be able to share the experience that his genius had forced onto the paper. And I knew that I wouldn’t be afraid to pick up a book anymore. If there were words that I didn’t know I’d use a dictionary to find the meaning. I wanted to learn, so I’d go on reading and I’d continue writing into the exercise books and some day I’d learn how to type and I’d work and slave to become a writer. This was the start of a dream that never died, although more than once it got shoved aside because of a mot with overgrown mammary glands or a pint of Guinness with a nice white collar on it.

  Maureen Murphy didn’t help. She was responsible for a long delay in me getting on with the writing, and to think the poor girl never knew how close she was to a fella who some day was going to set the world alight with his stories.

  Talk about being a dreamer - I used to stand in the middle of the road, carried away by the sight of my book topping best-seller lists all over the world. And I won every prize ever awarded for fiction writing, and the miracle of it all was that I never got run down by a bus or something for my stupid day dreaming.

  I was just about to sling the English class when Maureen arrived one night. Writers and their books had been left behind to make way for all kinds of chat about grammar and syntax and that kind of stuff. I wasn’t interested. I had neither eye nor ear for transitive verbs and conjunctions and split infinitives. To me it was simple, I looked at something and it was right or wrong and at that time I felt this was enough. So I was fed-up and wanted to get back to books themselves and when I knew this wasn’t going to happen, not for ages, I was about to bale out. Then, as I say, Maureen arrived and things seemed different.

  When she walked into the classroom ahead of me I could hardly believe it. I mean, I was the king of dreamers and in my overactive imagination I’d done a lot, and done it very well too. Yet, I’d never considered the possibility that she might show up at The Tech, and believe me, that was a damn sight more likely than the most ordinary things I dreamed up all the time.

  She really was a lovely girl, and, God, when I looked at her the heart started pumping the chest off me. I still saw her most days on the delivery and I talked all sorts of cobblers to her-weather and the like - but cheeky and all as I was I just couldn’t find the courage to ask her for a date. I was crazy about her, but when I got near her I could only talk about nothing.

  That night, though, I was determined to do something about her, so when she sat down I moved into the desk beside her before I could stop and think about it. If I did that I knew I’d never make a move.

  ‘Hello there.’

  She looked up at me with her blue eyes. She was very sure of herself.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she smiled.

  I could only shrug, hardly knowing what to say.

  ‘I’m just trying to pick up a few things.’

  She looked about the classroom, then back to me.

  ‘There’s plenty here,’ she said, and her eyes sparkled with devilment.

  I grinned but I could feel my face go red. I knew she was having me on, but I wanted to tell her that it was only herself that I was interested in. She looked older than she did in the office, she might have been twenty, and I wondered if I looked old enough even to be talking to her.

  ‘Trying to learn something,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t think you were the type,’ she said even as the teacher arrived and got up on his platform.

  Maureen took a couple of pencils from her handbag and she put them in front of her on the desk. I noticed that her hands were trembling ever so slightly and it wasn’t cold in the room. I wanted to think that I was making her nervous, but I was afraid to believe it. If I was wrong, and she snuffed me out like a candle, which she could have done, I wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it.

  That evening I didn’t hear a word that the teacher said. I wasn’t able to concentrate. My insides were all tight and I had a pain in my neck and shoulders from the effort of not looking at her all the time. Once or twice I had the feeling that she was looking at me, but I still couldn’t turn my head to see if she was. And I’ll tell you I was never so pleased to get to the end of a class. I was worn out and all I’d been doing was sit there and not hear a bloody word.

  We hadn’t spoken either through the lesson and when we got outside, still somehow together, I was dreading the second when she was going to walk away from me. If someone had told me I could be that stupid I’d have laughed in his face. I was a big-chat merchant, I could talk to anybody. Even Ma used to make the old joke about me being vaccinated with a gramophone needle.

  ‘It gets dark early, doesn’t it,’ Maureen said.

  ‘Yeh, it does. Still, summer will soon be here and it’ll be lighter in the evenings.’

  We stood there looking at each other and a load of kids came running by. Like whippets they were, bumping into everyone as they flashed along the footpath. They were screaming about the movie they had just seen in The Prinner. Scruffy little urchins without an arse in their trousers and it stopped me dead to see them. Only yesterday it was, Larry and me kicked out by the gunner-eyed attendant. Little Larry, God love him, the night he ruined his trousers, and Ma had to wash him all over before he went to bed. I felt sick with myself. That was the first thought of him in so long. Nothing was fixed and sure. Everything faded. One the ground that you finally went into was the same. Only the earth endured...

  ‘Can I give you a crossbar home, Maureen?’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a bike.’

  Before I could say anything this big-mouth came along the path pushing a Raleigh Lenten Clubman with one hand. It had a three-speed and dyno-hub, all the extras that cost so much, and he swaggered as though he owned the neighbourhood.

  He was about nineteen or twenty, a fairly big fella with a high forehead and straight black hair split on one side. He was good-looking, I suppose, but he had a mean mouth and there was no denying that he thought he was the cream off the milk.

  ‘Hey Maureen, come on and I’ll walk you home.’ He said it as though he was doing her a favour and he looked at me as though I’d just dropped out of a dog’s arse.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she asked him, and the way she smiled hurt me more that a kick in the nuts would have done.

  ‘Playing snooker,’ he grinned. ‘Won two quid, so come on and I’ll buy you a Knickerbocker Glory!’

  Shag you and your two quid and your Knickerbocker Glory head on you, I cursed him in my heart. Two quid was more than I earned in a whole week in the office. I no longer thought I didn’t like him, I was sure I didn’t.

  ‘This is Paddy Maguire,’ Maureen turned to me then. ‘This is Willie Egan, the biggest chancer in Dublin.’

  I held out my hand. ‘How do you do.’

  He nodded his head, but he didn’t say anything and he made no attempt to shake my hand. I was wild to have put myself in such a position. I should have let him make the first move. I should have guessed that the bastard would have tried to make me look silly. Then I remembered all the times Redmond had said that the fella’s that tried to make you look stupid only did it because they were jealous of you, and though I could
n’t see how that was the case, in that moment, I was more than willing to believe it .

  ‘Well, are you coming or not?’

  She shook her head at him. ‘I can’t, I have a date with Paddy.’

  I didn’t look at her in case the surprise showed in my face, but I looked at him and I didn’t mind that he hadn’t taken my hand. Who needed him, anyway?

  ‘My bikes around Leinster Road,’ I said to Maureen.

  She put her small hand into the crook of my arm and I looked at your man again. I’ll say this for him, he didn’t seem all that bothered and I knew that if it had been me I’d have been looking for a hole to crawl into.

  ‘Good night, Willie.’

  He grinned the way Douglas Fairbanks did just before he dived into the moat in The Prisoner of Zenda, and then he jumped up on that bike, right there on the footpath. ‘I’ll see you around,’ he said, and he shot off like a bullet and in a few seconds all we could see was the red hum of his rear reflector as he hit the top of Rathmines Road.

  ‘He’s an awful boaster.’ Maureen said as we turned the corner into Leinster Road.

  She didn’t know then and I never told her how much she helped me that night. To have backed me up when that bastard had tried to shoot me right up the arse was the biggest favour she could have done for me. I was sick with the inferiority thing, one of the scars you were sure to carry if you were born on The Hill.