The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty

by Sebastian Barry

  And he is suffering now in these suburbs of the moon, his body is a-shake. He’s walking indeed like an epileptic. Well, there’s a thing. His only true notion is to canter back to the embankment and search for Harcourt there. Indeed, Harcourt may well be waiting there. For certain. But nothing is certain now. Bloody politics! Deathly, killing, seducing politics. Feckin ould freedom anyway. He feels his bones bollocky in their coat of skin. They’re loose in their sheaths of muscle. It’s not good. He fears it is not good. He fears this bloody life of his, with its ferocious sights, Dunkirks and all. A little farm the back of North Mayo, where he could turn the swaths to the sun in the August, and break his fast with a fortunate wife … Much wiser, much better, than this lethal African gallivanting. He prays God as he reaches the railway sidings that he will see Harcourt’s cold silhouette, maybe impatient, maybe broken and lonesome, no matter if only he might be there, against the embers of the moon.

  But lonesome Harcourt is not there, nor materializes out of the shaggy dark, nor does anything that Eneas urgently needs him to do. The embankment is indifferent to the emergency. Little despairing fires are lit here and there towards morning, drinkers trying to beckon warmth into their comfortless arms. Eneas trembles not with the cold but the submerged shark of fear at seeing death. The shark of fear lurks in his gut. He’s too fearful a man! Gobshite, dosser! Without Harcourt he is as small as a halfpenny star. Without Harcourt as a matter of fact he is bollocksed. His backside is hard as stone on the damaged clay. He feels old and calloused. He hunches there, his coated back bowed, his hands open and lying palm upwards. Unimpressive man, disappeared man. He thinks of his mother mightily dancing on the hearthstone in the unlikely stone-age of his youth. He doesn’t really believe he was ever that boy. Loved, and his father crazy and desirable with his broken tunes. The tunes are gone, the names are gone, the face of his father … His hands are the hands of a useless man, they lie there uselessly. There should of been a life made from those swollen hands. He should of kept at the sailing or the digging or stuck it out in Ireland and let the buggers shoot him if they had to. A bird without its bush wasn’t much. The whistles go out of it, and the blood. Yet all of Africa is strewn with men like him maybe, from Dar es Salaam to Cape Town, the yellow beaches of Cape Town. Lads from Southampton, Cardiff, Mullingar. Men without kids or sweethearts. Poor, rain-ruckled, diminished men. Like himself. Not as good as monkeys even. Rubbed-out men in the ravelled empire of the Queen.

  PART THREE

  18

  HE TAKES A WORKING BERTH on a steamer of low standing, carrying God knows what from Lagos to London, its rivets so rusty the boat screeches its passage northward. He carries the hoar of the Tropics now around his heart, the little mottled frost of time alone. He looks at the stars, but they’re scrap to him.

  The journey is a kind of sea fever, a lengthy dream of iron racketing in the great depths of its ribs, of mash and fruit delivered up to the sailors like ambrosia or lotuses — and, as ever, fierce, close work is a mighty balm, a soft medicine, as good as a confab with a dextrous leech. All living people, Harcourt, his tuneful father, Roseanne, become for the voyage mere rocketing planets at the back of his mind. The work goes deep into his arms and into his much-pickled brains, as the iron ship passes through meridians and bucketing sunlight and finally, sleet and the true frosts of France and England.

  From London docks he hurries through the Isle of Dogs. His great idea now is the War Office. It’s an inspiration. To the War Office, yes, to enquire after the state of his pension. Perhaps long ago they removed him from the honoured roll of disabled veterans, but it gives him a sterling sense of purpose, moving in his sea-soiled clothes through the famous streets of old Bull Mottram.

  There’s an exhilaration suddenly being back amid the red and yellow bricks of this eternal England. The hoardings make no sense to him but the begging sparrows do, and the affectionate decrepitude of the houses. He may be an old ghost scurrying along but he enjoys the handsomeness of the young men — youth itself is handsome — with their white shirts rolled to the elbows, and the growing grandeur of the city as he passes out of the poorer kingdoms. It’s nothing to do with him but as a human man he can rejoice. London lies under its tender sun and it seems to him that lonesome angels would not be out of place resting in the fabulous niches.

  Truly he does not set much store by his pension being in existence nor would he put a decent bet on it. The little row of wooden booths is quiet. There’s a spittoon as big as a figurehead. His number is fetched against his travel documents by an elderly clerk. Maybe the clerk is younger than himself indeed, but Eneas feels no more than twenty. There’s a clattering of drawers and a scratching of a nice modern pen.

  ‘You’d be a veteran of Dunkirk yourself then, sir?’ says the clerk, which degree of courtesy is remarkable, given that Eneas isn’t exactly dressed for a tea-dance.

  ‘That’s the story,’ says Eneas McNulty.

  ‘I have a special regard for those such,’ says the man, ‘if you don’t mind my saying so.’

  ‘Oh, no, I don’t,’ says Eneas.

  ‘And you haven’t been drawing your funds at all, I see, sir. Not for some ten years or so …’

  ‘Been away in Africa.’

  ‘Ah, yes, sir — do you know, a lot of veterans tend to go overseas, sir. I sometimes surmise I know why. I don’t want to speak out of turn. But sorrow, I think, it is, that drives them away. That drives you all away far from the shores of your country.’

  ‘Do you know,’ says Eneas. ‘I never considered that — but you might have something there. Yeh.’

  Next thing, given the great politeness, he’s expecting the clerk to explain why there’s no money to be given out, this reason, that reason, and very understandable it’ll be, Eneas is sure. But the clerical officer issues him with a chit.

  ‘That’s all checked against your documents, all legal and above board. I haven’t crossed it, sir, to facilitate you, having been away for so long

  ‘Oh, right, yeh,’ says Eneas, and glances at the cheque. He grimaces and sighs through his yellowed teeth, the ones remaining anyhow.

  ‘All in order?’ says the clerk.

  ‘Well,’ says Eneas. ‘Are you sure and certain this is right? For me, right, the cheque, I’m saying?’

  ‘Believe me, sir, that’s a cheque will pass muster in any bank in the British Isles. By heavens, sir, you could go into a bank in Gibraltar with that or Nairobi, and you’d find it honoured in a twinkle.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure, I’m sure. No, it’s a beautiful cheque, indeed it is, it’s just

  ‘We could have sent you your money anywhere in the world poste restante, if you had authorized us, you know.’ ‘All right,’ he says, not secure on the meaning of the foreign phrase.

  ‘Do you have an address currently, sir? Or will you be coming in in person again?’

  It seems as dangerous a question as ever. But this is not a killing man. This is a friendly man, a man as courteous as a king, or a king’s servant. Eneas is reluctant now to be mysterious and rude with so elevated a character. In possession of this miraculous cheque. But he has no address, just the eternal address that forever lingers in his head, Sligo, Sligo.

  ‘Sligo,’ he says, ‘whatever you called it, the bit of foreign talk, and Sligo.’

  ‘Poste restante,’ says the clerk. ‘You just sign here, sir, and I’ll see you right. You might as well have your money regular, sir. You earned it, God knows.’

  ‘Well, yeh,’ says Eneas, remembering the great labour bestowed on Jean’s farm, in those vanishing days of war. ‘I expect every man that went to that war earned his money. I expect.’

  ‘That’s certainly my impression,’ says the noble clerk.

  Now Eneas is a touch stymied by such immaculate contact with officialdom. He sees himself again as a young sailor, passionate and hopeful on Avenue 1½, in golden Galveston. Politeness is a sorry thread leading back to youth, for a young man expects politeness wherever he w
anders, and knows he will always deserve it, by force of valuable character. Eneas is silenced. He would like to express something to the clerk, something vague in his mouth, something about things being made up for, about a heavy heart lightened, oh, he knows not what. The clerk’s little lightless face stares out at him over the polishless wood.

  ‘Well, no matter,’ says Eneas, ‘and thank you kindly, and good day to you. Be seeing you. God bless.’

  And out into the parsimonious sunlight with him, and the sparrows eking through crumbs, and such like. Gobsmacked.

  Twelve hundred pounds.

  Comprising, he must surmise, the accumulation of the weekly stipend. He remembers this sum as being so small that for it to add up so magnificently flings him into a dizzy panic. He grips the chit. He marches along like a foot soldier against the fiery guns. He thinks of the mighty efforts of Harcourt and himself over so many years to acquire the few coins for a drink. And all the while this monstrous sum was building and being added to in his name. He sticks the chit into his clothes, checking it repeatedly as he hauls himself through the light of tawny London. Even he, the master of pennies and sixpences, has full respect for the terrifying piece of paper against his breast.

  Of course he might drink now if he wished and drink hard and remove the pleasant terror that way. He trails into a park and seats himself with all the dignity of twelve hundred pounds and a backful of rags, and a better plan strikes him. Indeed, having given his address in reflex action as Sligo, can he not return to his Sligo as a man of wonder, a returned man like one of those Yanks spick and span as turkeys, a new man anyhow, an ordinary man but a distinctive one, a man with the gentle responsibility of — twelve hundred pounds? He could always imagine O’Dowd and company shooting a penniless man, but a bugger with twelve hundred pounds … He might sit with his brothers and swap knowledge of the world and buy a — well, whatever his mother felt she lacked, and likewise his father. He is not expert in the matter of gifts. He doesn’t remember ever giving a gift to anyone since the days of Viv.

  And maybe, now he puts his mind to it, and most importantly, there’d be some application of the money possible in the great and dark matter of Roseanne, queen of the iron shack. Roseanne Clear. He has been remiss in thinking about her, perhaps he has forbidden himself to think about her. Perhaps it is so long ago it is foolish to think about. And yet now when the matter of gifts arises she rises too, quite plain and clear in his head, bright and needful as a painting. The years are a row of dark houses and the man he is stands next to the man he was when he left Sligo for the last time, and there as close as summer heat is Roseanne. Human time is a curiosity, no doubt.

  Ah but it’s true that in the first bank he’finds he has trouble with the doorman. By the mere process of not looking, he’s trying to gain entry to a bank of particular swank. Nevertheless, the warrior in gold epaulettes relents when Eneas explains his business in his murky Sligo accent the doorman is an exile from Clare.

  Once inside — and here indeed are ranks of angels in a long sentence of niches, white and naked as the world found them — he finds wealth a tangled puzzle in itself. When they are satisfied so tattered a man is connected legally to the chit, they recommend to him a bewildering sequence of actions. In the first place he must surrender the marvellous chit to them, a moment of low panic and sadness, then allow them to open an account and issue him with a little booklet. There is honesty here at least, he surmises, and they have faithfully noted his fortune on the first line inside. Still and all, the booklet to him lacks the romance of the fine little cheque, wrecked though it is by the grip he put on it in the street. Of course he has had company cheques in the past and he knows such a thing must be surrendered but all the same he is flustered and boggy in the head from these immaculate dealings. At last he is equipped and reassured and sent out into the difficult world of wealth and infinite purchases.

  He is full of inspirations like any other person burdened by a windfall. Buying comes natural to him. Perhaps in the upshot it’s as old as swinging through trees. And at any rate hasn’t he had almost matchless practice with his Mam in the old idle days of childhood, rushing through the palatial streets of Sligo with the rain-bedappled parcels. Oh, yes.

  Into a simple haberdasher’s with him, and isn’t it the bee’s knees of a suit already made up and hanging tempting as ice-cream on the racks. Now that it comes to it he has wished all his life to get his hands on a brilliant readymade suit and not be all his life having something made for him by a seamstress. You’d be in terror years ago in the yards of the school that some fella’d spot the hand of a seamstress in the stitches of your trousers. Or worse, far worse, your own Mam. Readymade even then in the dinosaur days of Sligo was the ticket.

  All the blessed rage is the suit, he is magnificently informed, bang in new from somewhere in the East End of London, maybe the work of a rajah or a emperor of the Indians — that you’d see going round with sheets wrapped about their gleaming hair, princes and the like, so it is said. Now he is standing foursquare in a London premises with the cold assistant measuring him and then putting the jacket of the suit against his chest, and the trousers sort of shaken at his right leg, for the fit. What a spectacle and a wonder. The power of money is immaculate, like the Virgin herself. Maybe the blue has the glimmers of the Northern Lights about it, like the wing of a magpie gazed at sharp like, but all the same — fashion indeed. Maybe the crotch now that he puts his mind to it has a bit of a feisty handhold on his balls, but all the same — dandy enough. And then nothing will do the assistant but sell him an acher of a shirt with a black tie attached to it permanent with extra stitching — no extra charge, though. This strikes Eneas as very handy in a rushed morning — the assistant is full of praise for the ingenuity of the Indian tailors. At this point he shares the fact with the assistant that his own father and mother were tailor and seamstress and met in the Sligo lunatic asylum, but it all falls on deaf ears, even such magical information.

  Well pleased with himself and the world, he issues forth under full sail. He expects naturally to be the object of admiration, but truth to tell no one gives him a second look. Of course he appreciates that he is in the capital of tailoring itself. If he was to take a bus to Folkestone or Bexhill or other rural and coastal towns, he knows he’d be the best dressed man there, surely.

  And so he comes in his thinking to his sister Teasy. No use going to Ireland straight off now without a visit to the finest mendicant nun in Bexhill. He feels the responsibility of the brother with money. It’s a mere shade of a feeling, but nonetheless forceful for that. By his clothes shall you know him, don’t they say? He wants Teasy to see him in his new clothes!

  Prideful and simple as a boy he takes the Bexhill train from the old palace of Charing Cross.

  A little ghostly perhaps, he waits for Teasy in the convent in a room speckled by a windy sunlight boisterous outside in the tarry garden. The tall vigorous nun who showed him in has looked at, he imagines, his suit with proper wonder. A ferocious contentment takes a hold of him. He waits minutely, intently, like a visiting king. Young as an apple. Bursting.

  But the woman that comes in to him seems far from Teasy, divorced from the Teasy of old. She walks wordless to the very limits of his shoes and holds out a hand of bones and grips his own shoe-hard hand with extravagant force.

  ‘Eneas,’ she says. ‘Eneas, good man, good man. I thought you were dead.’

  ‘Oh, no, Teasy, no, indeed, not at all.’

  He rises up and kisses his sister. What’s up with her he doesn’t know.

  ‘How have you been keeping? Often and often I asked the Mam where you might be and it was divil a bit she knew about you, you poor wandering man, you.’

  ‘Oh, sure, Teasy, I was wandering, no doubt, but, as you can see, I’m well fixed now, and heading home, and I was thinking there in London, oh, I couldn’t go past England without seeing you.’

  She sits him down like a person might an old man and sits herself
down adjacent where the strange sunlight, divorced from the wind that blows it, moils in the dustless room.

  ‘They’re terrible old now, the old people, you know,’ she says, ‘but, I never hear bad about them. Jack comes the odd time to see me, you know. Says they’re hearty enough. The old man still riding his bike!’

  ‘Mercy. Is he?’

  ‘He is. Oh, isn’t it yards and yards of years since I seen you. Oh, Eneas, well, there’s certainly a darkness in our poor family, with such gaps of years.’

  ‘Do you think?’ says Eneas. He’s shocked to find it so. The gap of years seems less to him. But of course, when you’re traipsing the backroads and the hillroads of Bexhill through all the four seasons, maybe a year is a longer affair.

  ‘I’ll tell you, Eneas, I always had a great gra for you, and I often worried you didn’t know that, and so kept away thinking I wasn’t much to you, but…’

  ‘Ah, but, girl, I always did know that. Certainly.’

  Round and round the cheerful sun, like so many dolphins turning in the bluest ocean, the deepest, the bluest.

  ‘Well,’ says Teasy, ‘it’s been a time of it. And I expect I’ve been thinking and thinking. More than I would normally.’

  ‘Why, Teasy, dear?’

  ‘Arra, man — have a gander at this.’

  And she hoists her black skirts up her girlish-looking legs, past the stop of her black stockings and on to her bare thigh. Then a peculiar thing happens. Some cloud wedges in between the sun and the lonely earth and the light alters in the room and to his surprise the same yellow colour of the sun remains on his sister’s pleasing face. She’s yellow as the beak of a blackbird.

  ‘What, Teasy?’ he says, in the grip of the moment, his sister’s chaste thighs revealed to him, for all the world like a merry harlot’s in some other place entirely, which stills him, still as an alerted mouse, and his heart is banging, banging in his chest, banging.