Goodbye to the Hill

by Lee Dunne

  Breeda was pleased for me too, thinking it was what I wanted. I hadn’t ever mentioned the singing to her, for though we did things to each other each week, we didn’t talk much about ourselves. The two things just didn’t seem to go together.

  In January I got three small parts in an operetta in Clontarf on the north side of Dublin city. It was Gypsy Love by Franz Lehar, and apart from missing one entry, through day dreaming side-stage, I did alright. It was a good experience to have to do things with a lot of other people, and as there was always a decent drink in the dressing rooms, I enjoyed myself.

  Then through an urgent advert in The Independent I got a one-night stand with a fifth-rate dance band. We, the band and me, left Dublin at six in the evening and drove to the back of beyond, a place so country that I couldn’t pronounce the name. What I was sure of was the fact that, with one of the musicians driving like his life depended on it, it took us three hours to get there.

  The dance started at ten o’clock and went on until four in the morning, and it was the hardest work I’d ever done in my life.

  We had no rehearsals at all, so the bloke who ran the band told me to step up and sing the ones I knew after the first chorus had been played. I must have sung thirty to forty numbers that night and, by the time I got home at eight in the morning, I realised that I’d lost my voice completely. So, you could say that I’d really earned the three and a half quid that I’d been paid. But I was happy with the way things had gone, and I’d been promised more work with the band in the future.

  Doing that gig, as it was called, gave me a real taste of what I wanted to do, and going into work in the office became even harder. The work was interesting and I was soon dictating letters about glass claims, and I was given small employer’s liability cases to handle. I got on well at it, liking the business of dictating letters and talking to all kinds of people, both on the phone and at the counter in the office. Of course it was too good to last and it wasn’t long before Cahill and I were at each other’s throats about the way I worded my correspondence.

  He still insisted on the old stereotyped letter, and I wanted to use a bit of imagination based on the way the English teacher and the Commerce teacher at the Technical School had taught me. I stuck to my guns and things got so bad that he reported me to Mr. Hayes after I had told him to his face that he didn’t know a bee from a bull’s ballocks.

  I felt bad to be standing in front of Mr. Hayes, knowing that he was upset and angry with me.

  ‘Well, Mr. Maguire, what do you have to say?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, I lost my temper. It’s just that it seems so old fashioned, the way Mr. Cahill wants me to write. I was taught at night school that the way I’ve tried to do it is better, and much more economical in every way.’

  He didn’t like it, I could see that, but to give him his due, he tried to be fair.

  ‘Mister Cahill has worked in the insurance field for twenty years, Mr. Maguire. Is that to count for nothing, just because you think he may be wrong about certain things?’

  ‘No sir.’

  ‘Very well, then. I want you to apologise to Mr. Cahill.’ He was looking at me as he spoke so he could see me go stiff. ‘Whether you were, in your opinion, right or wrong, you were wrong to speak to the office manager as you did. You will apologise?’

  Even then he gave me a choice, although really it amounted to telling me. ‘Yes sir,’ I said, my sweat standing on my face.

  Cahill came in and he had a smug look on his face that made me clench my fists behind my back.

  ‘Ah, Mr. Cahill, Mr. Maguire wishes to apologise for his outburst. Will you accept his apology?’

  Cahill nodded, smiling, and Mr. Hayes looked at me.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I said to Cahill.

  ‘Apology accepted,’ Cahill said, in his magnanimous voice. ‘I’m sure it won’t happen again.’ He looked at Mr. Hayes.

  ‘It won’t sir,’ I said, hurting myself to push the sentence out.

  I was allowed to back out to the without a ballocking but I was fit to commit murder. I didn’t mind Mr. Hayes telling me off. I would willingly have let him kick me around the street sooner than have to apologise to the bastard called Cahill. But, what could I do? When it came down to it, I was about as important in the office as a broken filing cabinet. At least, that was how I felt in the moment.

  That incident put the last nail in the coffin. Now I knew that if I didn’t get out soon I’d get the sack. I didn’t want trouble, but I knew that I couldn’t go on doing something that I felt was wrong, and the way that Cahill wanted me to dictate my letters made me sick. If it hadn’t been for Ma, I’d have been out of there that very day. I could have found the guts not to make an apology but I didn’t have enough to go home and tell Ma about it afterwards. So I began to resent my mother and that made me sadder than I’d ever been.

  Chapter 15

  From that day on, and I had no interest at all in my work. Cahill probably thought I was knuckling down, but it wasn’t that. I was biding my time and meanwhile I did what he expected me to do. We had no more arguments. My mind was a blank and I just went through the motions of the job like a zombie.

  Redmond and I still drank all over town and I was one of the regular turns in numerous pubs. And we began to get friendly with all kinds of people, and we made a good team. I was regarded as a fella who liked a drink and was fun to have around the place, especially if there was a party on, and Redmond, in shiny suit, was looked on as a sort of intellectual bum.

  So we began to go to parties all over Dublin and sometimes even in the country. This was a great achievement for both of us, because the snob thing in Dublin was, to my mind, stronger than it could have been anywhere else on earth.

  Anyway, I would go into my act and Redmond would stand around and spout his opinions about all kinds of things. And if anyone disagreed with him, he was more than likely to turn around and tell them to ‘get stuffed’ or to ‘shit and fall back in it’, and he was considered to be ‘a terrible character,’ which was praise indeed. It was the sort of thing that he was likely to say, rather than what he was talking about, that attracted people, and he knew it and he never let them down.

  I found myself that even when I wasn’t doing a turn I was still acting. Everything that I said was intended as entertainment. Every line was a gag, and the one that got a laugh was used again and again on different people. I couldn’t help it. I wanted so badly to be on the stage that I was, even when I wasn’t.

  There was no shortage of women at the parties, but for the first time in years I wasn’t all that bothered about sex. I had the stage in my mind and I had drinking in my blood and, apart from Breeda, I hardly bothered doing any chasing at all. And I began to think I was growing up.

  It wasn’t that I was going off women or anything like that. I still went a bit dry in the throat at the sight of strong legs and big breasts. It was just that sex was becoming a part of my life now, instead of being my whole life. Like most other changes that had taken place in me it happened without me being really conscious of it. You don’t notice your pubic hairs until you see the bush.

  At the same time Redmond was going through them, all over the place, and if he didn’t find a masochist with money, at least he found women who were far from penniless. And not one of them was under the impression that variation on a theme was the name of a race horse.

  At a Sunday night party in Skerries, north of Dublin City, a man eating American divorcee, who just loved ‘this li’l ole country’, took a tumble for Harry. I wasn’t surprised. With his crooked mouth and his Bohemian-intellectual act, he was bound to be a sensation, but even he couldn’t get over her very direct approach.

  ‘She doesn’t feck about, that one doesn’t,’ he said to me while she was at the lavatory. ‘Told me she wanted me beside her when she woke up in the morning, and that I
look pale and passionate, if you don’t fuckin’ mind.’

  It was funny to see Redmond, the king of the all-time bullshit artists, puzzled by the way a woman talked to him, and I laughed at the expression on his face.

  ‘I’m glad you’re amused,’ he said. ‘With friends like you, who needs bleedin’ enemies?’

  ‘Well, apart from the freckles you’re definitely a paleface, and if you’re not passionate by now you bloody well ought to be.’

  ‘I wonder if she’d got a lot of dough?’ he said, half aloud.

  ‘Well, she didn’t get the jewellery she’s wearing in Woolworth’s, and that’s for certain. Anyway, most Yanks that can afford to come over here usually are loaded. There’s no harm in giving it a try. You might even win a talent contest.’

  ‘You sleeveen bastard!’ he yelled into my face. ‘You never won the clobber singing. I knew it. I just knew it.’ And he started to laugh.

  ‘It was a good yarn, though, wasn’t it? Got you going, didn’t it?’

  He nodded, still laughing. ‘You bleedin’ liar. You’re worse than me.’

  The Yankee bird came back then and she stood at his elbow smiling like a new bride.

  ‘Oh!’ Redmond says as though he is surprised, ‘you’re back, hello. Now meet a fella who without doubt is the biggest bastardin’ liar in creation. Paddy Maguire, eh, this is Mrs. Nichol from America.’

  He winked at me. This was the way he talked to everyone and instead of slinging him out on the lawn, as you might think they would, they loved it. She wasn’t any different.

  ‘Just call me Irenee.’ She held out her hand and I shook it. ‘May I call you Paddy?’

  ‘You can call me what you like, darllin’, as long as it’s not too early in the morning.’

  She laughed at the joke despites its age, while Redmond mumbled something to the roof about ‘Holy Jeysus’.

  Irenee was a fine looking woman, with a large mouth and hot liquid eyes, and even if she was a bit flabby, I couldn’t see Harry worrying about that. I mean you could hardly stand up and say he was the most discriminating man in the world and expect to be taken seriously.

  Irenee had a flat in town and she gave us a lift back to Dublin. It was obvious, without a word being said, that she wanted Redmond to spend the night with her, and if the way she drove the motor was anything to go by, the highly sexed widow from Manhattan was going to give him a night to remember.

  He phoned me next morning at the office and even before I spoke to him I knew it had to be something really important. He had never done that before and Redmond didn’t get excited for nothing.

  ‘Good morning. I’m surprised you’re up so early,’ I said.

  He didn’t respond and I asked him what the story was.

  ‘What time do you get out to lunch?’ he asked, ‘quarter to one?’

  I said it was and he asked me to meet him in the Republican, which was a pub off Fleet Street. He didn’t want to talk on the phone, so I said I’d see him. I couldn’t wait for lunchtime to come. Whatever it was, that had Redmond excited, I wanted to hear about it.

  He was drinking a whiskey when I found him in the public bar and he had a double sitting on the counter for me. I didn’t like whiskey that early in the day, but I drank it anyway, while he waited for the pints of stout to come up.

  ‘She wants to marry me,’ he said, just like that, and he pulled a fiver out of his pocket to pay for the drinks.

  ‘I hope you’ll both be very happy,’ I said, somehow managing to keep my face straight.

  ‘I might have known I’d get a lot of sympathy from you. I’m glad you think it’s funny ‘cos I bleedin’ well don’t.’

  I started to laugh and I couldn’t stop. Tears filled my eyes but I held onto them while Redmond just stood there and waited patiently, until finally, I stopped.

  ‘I’m sorry, Harry, I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s just the thoughts of you going to the altar.’ I pulled my face straight again. ‘Do you love her?’

  ‘Look, you prick,’ he said viciously. ‘Save your jokes for your public. I’m in no mood for them.’

  ‘Has she got money?’

  ‘She’s stacked,’ he said, ‘gave me a score to buy myself some gear. I’m supposed to be going back there for me lunch.’

  ‘Twenty quid, thank God for that. I haven’t a pot.’

  ‘Ah, well, that’s one good thing. We can solve your financial problem.’

  He put his hand in his pocket and took out some notes. He threw me three pounds, and he said, ‘Right, now that I’ve paid for your services, what in the name of Jeysus am I going to do?’

  ‘Tell her you’re a bumboy,’ I said.

  He didn’t like that. For some reason he couldn’t bear the idea of anyone thinking him a homosexual. ‘I will in me ballocks tell her I’m queer. What do you take me for?’

  ‘Well, marry her then.’

  ‘Don’t be funny, Maguire. Anyway, after the number of times I sunk the log last night, she’d never believe I was a brownie.’

  ‘She might. Tell her you didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Tell her you like her, tell her anything. She’ll probably end up feeling sorry for you.’

  ‘What about the dough for the clobber? Give it back?’

  ‘You’re joking, aren’t you? You’d only hurt her pride if you did that. No, buy some gear, show her you’re not a bum.’

  ‘I’m not a bum.’

  ‘All right, I’ll believe you. Don’t you fancy her at all?’

  ‘Course I fancy her. She’s got money to burn and she doesn’t mind spending it and she’d red hot in bed. It’s just that when they start talking about wedding bells I want to get my gur-cake and milk and get outa town.’ He took a deep breath and then he said, ‘There’s something else,’ ‘What?’

  ‘She wants to see some of my manuscripts.’

  ‘Your manuscripts,’

  ‘Yeh, my manuscripts, and it’s your fault. All that ballocks you gave her in the car last night, about me being a writer. You laid it on so thick that she believed every word you said.’

  ‘Ah, Harry. She couldn’t have.’

  ‘I’m telling you she did. The way you went on she thinks she’s found another James Joyce.’

  I paid for two pints of Guinness, not knowing what to say to him.

  ‘She must be a right eejit’ I said finally.

  ‘Brilliant,’ he said. ‘You worked that out all by yourself. So, what am I going to do about it?’

  ‘Write something,’ I said

  ‘Write something?’

  ‘Yeh. Scribble down any crap that comes into your head. Anything! That’s bound to take the heat out of her knickers.’

  He looked at me as though I’d taken leave of my senses. ‘Ah, come on now, Maguire. Cut the comedy. I’m

  nearly forty years old and I’ve never even written a letter in my life.’

  ‘All the better,’ I said. ‘It’s bound to be so lousy that even an eejit like her will give you the bum’s rush, and you won’t have to tell her you’re a queer, either.’

  He liked that. A slow grin crept across his crooked mouth and his eyes twinkled at the thought. ‘Yeh, that’s a real brainwave, Maguire. You’re welcome to the three nicker.’ He stopped dead. ‘But what’ll I write about?’

  ‘I’ll say one thing for you, Redmond. You get your money’s worth.’

  I took a drink and bit into the sandwich that was serving me as lunch. ‘Write about taking a scivvie up to the Dodder,’ I said.

  When I left him he went off to buy some foolscap and a pen and I chuckled all the way back to the office.

  During the afternoon tea break I told Larry Deegan all about it and, from that moment on, Redmond had two of us waiting to hear the next bit of news.

&nbs
p; In the evening I went into Campion’s and Harry wasn’t there. I bought a drink, intending to leave after one, but just then he came through the door and for a change it was my turn to wear the surprised look. This time it was Redmond who was wearing the new clobber and there was no two-ways about it, he was a good-looking fella, in a funny kind of way.

  He’d bought a blue double breasted suit with a single button drape and he wore a light blue shirt and a silver tie. His hair had been washed and cut and he smelled like something out of a high class knocking shop.

  He sat down like a fella who’d just won the Sweepstake and he put a hole in my pint even before he said good evening. Then he put his right foot out so that I could see his plain black casual shoes and I could only admire his taste.

  ‘You’ll have to come down with me, Maguire. That load of manure that I left with her at four o’clock. It was such rubbish I can’t face her on my own.’

  I said all right. As far as I was concerned it was a right laugh, so after a few more pints we left the pub and hailed a taxi. When we got out of the car Redmond paid the fare and I knew I was going to be sorry when we lost that sexy Yank.

  Her flat was in Eglinton Road, which was a fairly exclusive neighbourhood in those days. As I heard a fella say in a boozer one night, there wasn’t a dog in town with enough courage to even piss up against a lamp-post in Eglinton Road.

  Irenee opened the door for us and we stepped into carpet that stopped somewhere in the location of the knee. She threw her arms around Redmond and they were kissing as if they were starving, and she looked so good in this pale pink dress that I could have given her one myself.

  When she let him go for a breath she said hello to me and made me very welcome. ‘Pardon the state of the place, Paddy, I’m not really settled in yet.’

  I looked around the lounge. Maybe it was in a state. I didn’t know. I’d never been in a palace before. She went behind the bar and came up with a bottle of champagne and poured out three glasses.

  ‘To Harry Redmond,’ was her toast, ‘a great writer and a wonderful Irishman.’