Goodbye to the Hill

by Lee Dunne

  I kissed Maureen good night by the gate. I’d already agreed to go up to the house the next night. Her parents were going to be out, and now that we’d started on the full shilling I agreed with her that we might as well go to bed and do it in comfort whenever we got the chance.

  By the time I got back to Rathmines Road I’d gotten over the worry of feeling that she owned me. Nobody owned me. Nobody owned me and nobody ever would. I could sling Maureen or any other mot out any time I felt like it. I went out with her because I fancied her double strong and the minute I found out that I was cheesed off with her I’d put an end to it. And that was all that was to it. After telling myself this for a good few minutes I realised I was trying to convince myself of something.

  Yet again at the end of the lane up to The Hill, I felt the flats reach out and touch me and I walked back down to the corner and looked up along Mount Pleasant Avenue, raising my eyes in the darkness to where I knew the Dublin Mountains sat looking down at me. And I wondered if they knew I was feeling sorry for myself or if they realised how much I hated living on The Hill, or how much I cursed and swore, hating everybody who’d been lucky enough to be born on Palmerston Road or somewhere just as nice. But then the mountains couldn’t have understood. I didn’t myself.

  Ma was awake when I got in. I didn’t put on the light, but I knew by her heavy breathing that she’d been waiting until she heard my key in the lock. And if I put the light on she’d start talking. Just then I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. I headed as quietly as I could towards the bedroom door.

  ‘Yer late, son,’ her voice was barely above a whisper, but it cut through me like a knife.

  ‘Sorry to wake you, Ma. I tried not to.’

  ‘You didn’t wake me. I wasn’t asleep. Where were you till now?’

  ‘Ah, I was just out.’ I know it sounded weak, but it was the best I could do.’

  ‘Well, there’s no good on the streets at this hour. You shouldn’t be so late.’

  I was still standing by the bedroom door. ‘Okay. I’m sorry, Ma. Night’

  There was no having a go at Ma or telling her to mind her own business. When she pulled me up like that it was for my own good and I took if the way it was meant.

  ‘Good night, son. God bless you.’

  God bless you, the all time standby of the Irish mother. They held onto God and his mother and all the others like a drowning man would hold onto a plank of wood. They didn’t do it consciously. They believed in God and they loved him but they didn’t see that they were clinging on to him because support was in short supply. Their grey sad hearts got more than a fair share of rain but sunshine was as scarce as fillet steak.

  As I took off my shoes Billy was lying on his back and he was cutting up timber like a bloody sawmill. I wished I’d had the guts to have a leak down his throat. That would shut up his snoring and what a yarn it would have been to tell Harry Redmond. I moved as quietly as I could. If I woke him up there’d be a fist fight and with the way I was feeling he could have broken me up in little bits.

  I got into bed in my shirt. I didn’t like wearing it to sleep in because of trying to keep it clean for the office, but if I tried sleeping in the nude the blanket made my skin itch, so until the day we managed to have some sheets, the shirt was on twenty four hour call.

  I woke up in an awful sweat after the worst nightmare I ever had in my life. It was so bad that I was glad to wake up and find I was at home on The Hill. Even that was heaven compared to the nightmare.

  I was in short trousers and I was walking down the aisle with Maureen. Nobody seemed to care about the sight of my knees, but I was very nervous, and as I got near the old Canon, who was a right crotchety old bastard, he gave me a bull’s look. And his voice as he read the marriage bit was like hot razor blades tearing around the inside of my head. Instead of his usual monotonous bleat he was punching it out like a bloody machine gun and he was putting the fear of Christ right up me.

  I didn’t look at Maureen but I knew she’d be okay. She wasn’t all that big for four months. Her father was behind us and he was built like a brick shithouse. I could feel his eyes boring holes in the back of my head and that was something that I could have lived without.

  Just then I was asked if I’d take Maureen to be this, that and the other. For one second I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Then I took a deep breath and I yelled into the old Canon’s face, ‘I will in my ballocks’!

  And I turned and ran from the church.

  I was spewing my guts into a geranium bed in one corner of the church yard when her two brothers started filling me in. They slung punches in from every angle and I was so sick that I couldn’t even put my hands up. When I fell down they put the boot in and I started to black out from a kick in the head. But just before I went out cold I saw my blue eyed Maureen getting into this big black car that was like a hearse and I could have sworn she gave me a wink with the left eye.

  Was it any wonder I woke up in a cold sweat. God, it had been so real that I felt my face in the dark before I was sure that my nose hadn’t been kicked right off me. And as I said, it was so good to be in my own bed, even if it was on The Hill. I listened for a few seconds, wondering if I’d woken Ma. Josie and Billy I wasn’t worried about, but Ma needed her sleep.

  How would she feel when I finally left the place? How would it affect her when I was no longer there with a cheeky word or a few shillings when she needed it? That was the hard part, hard for both of us. Ma was the one person I’d never had a mean thought about in my life. She was the one light in that dark miserable hole. She added dignity to the word mother.

  All her life Ma followed her heart, the head coming a very poor second. Even when she met my father it was the same thing. She loved him and she went to the altar with him. It wasn’t a practical thing to do but she didn’t care who he was or where he came from. And years later, when she found out that love on its own just isn’t enough, when poverty and all that poverty breeds showed her that much, she didn’t blame anybody. She got on with the job of trying to feed and dress her kids, enduring the awful, hopeless, endless business, giving them all she could and crying only over the things that she wasn’t able to provide. Love didn’t die, it just got pushed aside. There wasn’t time for love in the pit of her existence. Yet love was all she had, all she could afford to have, and this only gave her more children, until in the end the one thing that she needed to keep her going, was slowly but surely choking her to death. So God, sweet, lovely, impotent God was loved, and man slept alone.

  I did drift off the sleep again but I felt rough in the morning. I was sticky and uncomfortable between the legs. Maureen was all over my stomach and I wouldn’t have washed her off except that I felt dirty. The cold water soon knocked the sleep out of my eyes and I hated it. I’ve no time for this good health chat about a cold wash, winter and summer. Give me hot water every time.

  Maureen filled my thoughts all through the paper round and I felt warm just thinking about her. Apart from loving her and wanting her I liked her. She was a cheeky little cow and it was great fun to be with her and even in the bloody awful night mare she’d been on my side, even though I had left her standing at the altar. I smiled when I thought about that. If I’d gone as far as the church, even if it was a shotgun wedding, I wouldn’t have had the guts to do what I did in the dream. I wasn’t that much a man and I didn’t think I ever would be. There aren’t too many people who can be that true to themselves. So, I would have to make sure it never got to that stage unless I wanted to end up married with a load of kids.

  By half past ten Cahill was stuck into me in front of the whole general office. God, I don’t know how I kept my knuckles out of his mouth. I wouldn’t have minded if he’d had something to moan about, but it was so stupid that you could tell he was taking it out on me because he’d had a row with his missus or something. Probably wanted a slice off
the legs before his porridge, and when he hadn’t got it he’d come to take it out on someone. And who could be easier than Maguire.

  ‘Here, Maguire,’ he called, with the slow shit licker’s smile on his rubber mouth for the benefit of his typist who was taking short hand at his desk. ‘Would you be kind enough to translate this for me? I can only read English.’

  I took the copy proposal form from his hand, thinking that if his shitty nature could have showed, his face would have been Technicolor.

  ‘Sorry, Mr. Cahill, which part is it? The words were like lumps of clay as they came out of my mouth.

  Up came his head from the thing he was pretending to read and his face like a bucket of vomit. ‘It’s the whole thing, Maguire. What do you write with, a snail?’

  He made sure that the whole office could hear him. His eyes flicked from me to the typist - was she smiling at his repartee?

  I looked hard at the form and I honestly couldn’t see anything wrong with it. I read out the make and date of the car, its value, the fact that the proposer had agreed to carry a five pound accidental-damage excess and that he was entitled to a second-year no-claims-bonus. He took the form back with a big show of impatience and he wrote over my writing. I didn’t move. I could feel that there was more to come.

  ‘I hope we’re not going to go through this every time you copy a proposal form. You’ll have to pay more attention to what you’re doing.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I said, and I walked back to my desk, my face as red as a bottle of blood.

  I sat there for a minute, trying to find the guts to walk back up to the bastard and spit in his face. I was kidding myself, I knew that, but I wanted to hurt that man if it was the last thing I ever did.

  Larry Deegan walked up the office just then, and as he passed me he gave me a wink, and I knew from the way he did that he was going to talk to Cahill. It was that certain look he wore when he had something up his sleeve, and I sat and listened.

  ‘That premium, for O’Day’s fleet’

  ‘What about it,’ Cahill asked.

  ‘It’s out by forty two pounds,’ Larry said loudly, but he was so matter-of-fact that he might have been asking the time.

  ‘It can’t be,’ Cahill said, with a little laugh as if he’d sat on the nib of a pen. ‘It can’t be, Deegan, I worked it out myself.’

  ‘You forgot the ten per cent load.’ Larry wasn’t arguing. He was telling him.

  There wasn’t a sound as Cahill looked at the calculation. He made hard work of it, sucking at his teeth, then the deep sigh as if he were dying. ‘Oh, yes, I see. Yes, that does make a difference, doesn’t it?’

  He laughed again, acting confident, but he didn’t fool anyone in the office. They knew him too well for that.

  ‘Ah well, it’s good to know you’re not infallible.’

  He tried to make it sound as though he were talking about Larry. And that was it, no apology, no word of thanks, nothing.

  Larry walked back down to his desk and I felt like jumping up and clapping him on the back. As far as I was concerned people could do that to Cahill all day. There wasn’t one thing about that man that I could take. For me, he took the good out of everything. If he felt like saying good morning, he did, but most times he just didn’t bother. And if you said it first he was likely to say ‘Is it?’, as if the joke was original. He just didn’t have a bit of class, that man, and most people, no matter who they are or where they come from, have a little bit, even if it’s only a very little bit.

  Being a Saturday, it was early closing and I was glad of that. I felt really tired after the nightmare and I had a pain in my back from the carry on with Maureen on the river bank. And I’d had a phone call from Mrs. Kearney. I hadn’t been up to see her all week, so I promised to call on Sunday afternoon. I told her that I’d been studying for an insurance examination, and whether she believed me or not, she was happy enough when I said I’d be up the next day. She was alright and it was decent of her to give me a dollar every week. Every little bit helped.

  Larry and I went for a drink after work and it was a gift to get on the outside of a few bottles of stout. The little boozer that we used was clean and the atmosphere was friendly and it was handy for both of us. And the Guinness there was so good that I didn’t envy Larry as he knocked back whiskey on the rocks, as though it was pure gold.

  He was a great pal to me, that Larry, and even then I knew that I’d never be able to pay him back for the confidence he’d given me. And it wasn’t just when I’d had a few drinks that I felt that way. We often sat over a coffee and talked and I never failed to learn something from him. He proved to me that worry was a sort of negative thing, that in itself it solved nothing. Through him I learned to shrug off things that would have really bothered me a short time before. He showed me that you had to take life as it came, the way he did himself.

  Ma had been a worrier all her life and all she got out of it was a head of grey hair. My father, too, I now realised, had made himself a grumpy impossible man because he was worried all the time about finding work. It’s funny and yet at the same time very sad, but he worried about his wife and kids to such a pitch that he became unbearable, and the wife and the kids that were the cause of it all just stopped loving him.

  It wasn’t the fault of any of them. The situation was there and the people involved in it had no choice. Somehow they had been dropped into place by a careless hand, left sitting up to their necks in poverty and pain and misery without every knowing why.

  Chapter 10

  My self and Larry were still in the pub at ten minutes to closing time, and he was standing up to order the last drinks when this girl gave him a push in the back. He turned round and he lit up when he saw who it was.

  ‘Breeda! Ah, hello. Good to see you.’

  She was a tall dark-haired girl with a heavy well-shaped body and when she smiled I could see that her teeth were very good. Her hair was cropped very short, which was good on her because her eyebrows were firm over warm dark eyes. Her mouth was large with soft fleshy lips and I thought she was really something. She wore a blue costume that somehow seemed almost casual on her and the straight seams of her stockings were a gift to look at.

  ‘Knocking them back, are you?’

  ‘Boredom,’ he said, winking an eye at me. ‘I was just now saying to Paddy here that Breeda was needed to give this place a boost.’

  She watched him closely as he spoke and I could see that she was fond of him. ‘This is Breeda Connell, Paddy,’ he said as he charmed her with a smile. ‘Breeda, meet a very good friend of mine, Paddy Maguire.’

  I stood up and we shook hands and I liked the firm grip that she gave me.

  ‘Watch out for this fella, Paddy, he’s fly!’

  She smiled when she said it and you couldn’t help liking her.’

  ‘Please to meet you, Breeda,’ I said, trying to keep the drool out of my voice.

  She let go of my hand and I stopped looking at her. I didn’t know what the score was between Larry and her self and I didn’t want to offend him.

  ‘Watch out for your self with him, Breeda,’ Larry said as he put a drink in front of her on the table, ‘he’s a tiger with the women.’

  ‘But he looks so young,’ she said, and even a remark like that from her was okay from her.

  ‘Well, why shouldn’t he?’ Larry said, ‘he’s only nineteen.’

  I was beginning to know Larry’s form by now, so I managed not to look surprised. She was still looking at me and she didn’t seem to doubt for a minute that Larry was telling the truth. This gave me a boost and I thought the twice-weekly shave that I didn’t really need must have been bringing a bit of stubble out at last.

  Larry was organising more drink and Breeda moved nearer to me. ‘Are you in insurance, Paddy?’

  ‘Yeh, same office as Larry, he�
��s a great fella.’

  ‘I’m glad you think so,’ she smiled wickedly. ‘He drinks too much.’

  ‘Sure, nobody’s perfect,’ I said, the Guinness gone to my head by this time.’

  Instantly she was sad, almost in tears. Then a quick, weary sort of smile and she seemed all right again.

  ‘Did I say something to offend you?’

  I tried to remember what it was that I had said, but I was feeling the drink now and I just couldn’t make it. But I had the odd feeling that I had been the cause of her sudden and brief sadness.

  ‘No, Paddy. It’s just me. I get a bit miserable sometimes. I’m a funny old stick.’

  Larry came back with more drinks and we didn’t get any further with that conversation. He’d bought two bottles of stout for me and I knew that when I drank those I’d be well and truly cut. I didn’t argue with him about it or about the drinks he’d been buying all afternoon. It was useless to bother. He’d only repeat that money was made round to go round.

  When we left the pub I wanted to shoot off and leave him with Breeda but he wouldn’t hear of it. I was drunk enough not to be able to ride the bike, but that wouldn’t have stopped me.

  Larry just wouldn’t let me go and even Breeda, who didn’t seem all that keen for me to go with them, began to press me when she saw that he was in earnest.

  I stood with her while he hailed a taxi and after he had a chat with the driver my bike was slung into the boot of the car. Then we were all together on the back seat, singing our way to Merrion Square where, by all accounts, Breeda had a flat.

  It was one of those Georgian houses that everybody raves about, except Dubliners themselves. The particular house that Breeda lived in was in a bit of a state. Dirty and tired looking, and worn like an old boot. You could see that it would take more than a few pots of paint to put it right, but I didn’t care. House like that were, to me, relics of another time that was best forgotten, the good old days, when privilege was the clobber worn only by the upper classes. My two grannies had scrubbed the steps of houses like that and they’d never entered them except by the tradesman’s entrance, as the side door was called. Kind words and gestures of appreciation had been scarce. The gentry had but little to say to pot-washers and step-scrubbers. So, drunk as I was, I looked at it and felt nothing that it was falling to bits. I had no tears for houses like that.