The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty

by Sebastian Barry

  One night, coming in from the blackness of the wharf, the Isle of Dogs smeared over with a crust of filthy rain, his coat heavy with it, and three fat loaves of bread under an arm for the breakfast, he finds Harcourt jumpy and flushed behind the counter of the lobby. On a usual night Harcourt is trawling his way through Iceland, Berlin and such with the well-worn knob of the radio. But all is silence in the old house, as if the inmates themselves were aware of Harcourt’s queer excitement. Harcourt gives him a fierce stare as he comes in as if expecting — God knows what apparition. The lobby is ill served by a bulb of poor wattage and the foul weather further blackens the lair of cobwebs and darkly marked linoleum. Harcourt tears out from behind the counter and drags his friend in over the threshold and bangs the door and even puts the old iron bar down across it, a thing he never bothers to do.

  ‘Hey, hey, what is it, Harcourt? Don’t pull an old man about so.’

  ‘See anyone out there?’

  ‘Not a soul…’

  ‘Got to get a lock on the place …’

  ‘Why so, Harcourt? Be plenty of old fellas trying to get in later.’

  ‘They’ll have to tell their names through the keyhole. Where you been wandering, brother? Expected you hours ago.’

  ‘No, you didn’t, Harcourt. I always go out for an hour and bring back the old bread at this time. Baker wouldn’t know what to do with himself if I didn’t fetch the unbought loaves … Seven years I’ve done that

  ‘Brother, man, never mind the feckin loaves now. We’ve had visitors, untrustworthy-looking visitors, not pleasant, not as kosher as you’d like, men in dark coats. What do you call them, bowsies!’

  ‘Eh, what bowsies you mean, Harcourt?’

  ‘Your kind of bowsies — Sligo bowsies.’

  ‘Looking for rooms, like?’

  ‘Looking for you, you mad bollocks.’

  And he pushes Eneas further back from the door and beckons him into the safer realm of the three brown plastic armchairs and the spider-thin table with a grimy magazine on it dating from nineteen sixty-two. Illustrated London Weekly.

  ‘Why looking for me? Done nothing, Harcourt.’

  ‘You done something, something — they know you. Oh, they’re polite, polite bowsies, but I can tell, there’s a sort of angle on everything, questions ordinary, but too many of them, too friendly, and they’re all excited, like me now, like they were creeping up on something, a deer or a fish in the river — creeping, creeping. Oh!’

  ‘I don’t think they can be anything serious. Look it, they’ll be friends from the boozer, looking for a loan of a ten-bob note …’

  ‘That’s right, Eneas, be stupid. All right. Now, first thing, after you go out, for your hour as you call it, your evening in the public house

  ‘Three pints of ale, Harcourt, nothing to keel a man over…’

  ‘Feck that,’ says Harcourt. ‘First man in is this cleaned-up fella, you know, mighty-looking fella as a matter of fact, big tremendous head of white hair, straight-backed, maybe not a Sligo man I would of said, but says he’s from Sligo, says he’s Jack McNulty, Eneas …’

  ‘Ah, sure, look, that’s just my brother, Harcourt. Well, Jesus, can’t say I’m too pleased he’s found me, but, well, no, I am, I am chuffed, I’d like to see him, is he coming back? You’ll have told him to come back?’

  ‘Of course I told him.’

  ‘Could of stayed here the night, eh? Didn’t think of that?’ ‘Oh, yes, bugger turns up, never seen him in my life, certain resemblance to yourself maybe, well-to-do sort of a character, not so bad, but do I ask him to stay the feckin night — no, sir, not with your history.’

  ‘Ah, well. No matter. So when will we see him?’

  ‘Well, I told him to come back in the morning. You know, and if you didn’t think he was who he said he was, you could thump him with a hammer, you could get a look at him coming up the street or something

  ‘It’s only Jack…’

  ‘All right.’ And Harcourt crosses his arms with a measure of meaning and grandeur.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, half an hour later, I’m in here, doodling with the radio, got Moscow for a few seconds as a matter of fact, in comes these two lads, big black coats on them, you know, you’d be kind of laughing in your head at them, you know, feckin old tribesmen I would of said, to borrow a phrase of yours

  ‘Gobshites…’

  ‘Yes, gobshites. Came slithering up to me, smiling, I don’t care for strangers smiling at me, and I didn’t think they were men looking for lodgings, though I hoped they were. But they had no kit, they had no weary look to them, they had no — they weren’t sorted in themselves, they weren’t shipshape, they weren’t the kind of men we like here.’

  ‘Who were they then?’

  ‘Well now, my brother, they were asking for you too.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘Oh, yeh. That black lingo, you know, couldn’t barely catch it, the young one had, but he didn’t talk much, it was the other one, the old one, that talked — smarmy as a knicker salesman. Feck, Eneas, smarmy.’

  ‘Any name?’

  Now Eneas’s voice is more clipped. This is business of a kind. The business of other days. Expected business maybe, maybe not this long while since. Dark coats.

  ‘Maybe this is nothing to worry about,’ says Harcourt. ‘They had no weapons or nothing like that. I mean, I get all excited when I hear rats in the wainscoting, I do. Oh, Jesus, I’ll have to sit down. I’m not up to this, my brother.’

  ‘Any names?’ says Eneas. But he knows the names already. Well, he thinks he knows one of the names.

  ‘Then, these two are here talking to me, and another man comes in, Christ Jesus, it could be Euston station on the Easter holiday, and he says, something like, “What’s the story, Lynch, what’s the story?” — an ancient sort of bowsie this time, older than the old man, I mean, quite tender in his shoes, shaky, not right for going about and visiting flop houses on the Isle of Dogs.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Should of been at home in bed in Sligo or wherever he comes from.’

  ‘Sligo.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘They say Sligo?’

  ‘This other fella, Lynch, he says, “Just after asking, Mr O’Dowd.” “And what he say?” says, I suppose, the same Mr O’Dowd. “Said nothing yet of worth,” says Lynch. “Well, is he here or not, Lynch?” says the tottery man. So Lynch he turns to me, and he looks into my green eyes, and he says, “You heard the question, now, what we want to know, is Eneas McNulty here?” “No, no,” I say, “haven’t I just told the other man was here, no, Eneas McNulty is not here.” “So, do you know his present whereabouts?” says this man Lynch. “I do not,” I say, and I’m trying to look him in the eye too, you know, like an innocent man would, but I’m not so innocent. “What do you want him for?” I say, pleasant as a barmaid. “What for, indeed,” says Lynch. “Murder, and other things…” “Murder?” I say. Then Mr O’Dowd seems to think better of his friend’s remark, and tells them to come away, and doesn’t even look at me again, and only the young man looks back before they go out, looks back with a dark filthy look worse than winter…’ ‘Jonno never could hold his tongue,’ says Eneas. ‘They should of only sent the young fella in, and made a decent enquiry, something normal, nothing to get the wind up you. But of course in they all troop like the brave soldiers of Ireland they are, each one surer than the last they know how to deal with it. Jesus, feck, I can tell you, Harcourt, I feel like a hundred and ninety years old at this minute. A hundred and ninety.’

  And he slumps back in a plastic armchair. It’s as greedy as a mouth, sucks his back into itself, like he might vanish into the weary brown plastic. The two friends say nothing for a little, Harcourt glancing, glancing at the gloomy figure in the chair. And indeed, you might think a hundred and twenty years had been heaped on Eneas’s head, he’s melded with the shadows from head to toe.

  ‘Sweet buggering Jesus,’ Eneas says.
/>   ‘What’ll we do, brother? Is this the kibosh? Are you action stations?’

  ‘And I didn’t even want to see my brother Jack. Not so much. They must have followed him. How did he find me? War Office I expect. Him being a major and all. “I’m looking for the whereabouts of my brother, Sergeant McNulty. My name is Major John McNulty, Retired.” The whole feckin drill of it. Doing for me.’

  Then there’s a terrific banging on the barred door, and Harcourt leaps up like a shot rabbit, and flings himself, seventy years and all, across the grubby lobby, and grips the iron bar like he’d hold it in place against the hordes of Attila himself, and would be glad to take any Sligo bullet that might tear through the old wood — but no, it’s only Moses Seligman, the Yankee Jew, that sailed around the Horn seven times and never saw a storm.

  ‘Moses, Christ, get yourself in,’ says Harcourt, ‘come on, brother.’

  ‘Where’s your hurry, Mr H., and why the locked door?’ ‘Don’t talk to me now, Mo,’ says Harcourt. ‘I can’t stand it. I can’t hear another word.’

  ‘This is not like you, Mr H. You have an ache? My uncle travelled in powders, Mr H. I can help you.’

  ‘You’re kind, Mo, kind. Be going up to your bed now.

  I’m just going to close up now.’

  ‘You never closed up in your life.’.

  ‘I’m closing up tonight.’

  ‘There’s Mr Masterson still in the Crown, and I saw some of the men across the way in Jackson’s little place, the whiskey place …’

  ‘I’m shutting the feckin door!’ says Harcourt, and wildly. ‘I’m shutting the feckin door.’

  ‘Men will have to come in,’ says Eneas from the shadows, his shadows and the general shadows.

  ‘Oh, hello, Mr M., I didn’t see you…’ says Moses Seligman.

  Now Harcourt is standing powerless at the door, wanting to let the bar down, but powerless, stymied.

  ‘How come I can’t shut our own door! How come I got to stand here, brothers, and keep the door open against the enemies of Eneas McNulty? Why in Jesus’ name do I have to do that!’

  Moses Seligman in his discretion nods at Eneas and goes away up the stairs — he can be heard making every creak creak the four flights to his valueless eyrie. Four bob a month. No extras. No glass in the window!

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Harcourt,’ says Eneas. ‘If they come, they come. I’ll tell you, most of my born days I waited for them to come. They said a few times they’d come and they never did. But lately, these last years, I haven’t cared about that. I don’t care about it now. We can talk to them. See what they want. They can shoot me if they wish. What odds?’

  ‘I…’ But Harcourt has no words readymade for that.

  ‘Did anything ever happen in your life you could avoid? I don’t think so. They ran you out of Lagos but you were meant to get out of there. God’s will. You were a young man still, sort of. We were meant to run this bloody old place together. It’s no matter, just death, death in one of his less appealing faces.’

  ‘Well, you sit there, old man, and spout philosophy. But I’m saying no one’s going to be shooting you. They wouldn’t dare shoot you. This is England, brother.’

  ‘Isle of Dogs.’

  ‘No one’s shooting you. I’ll see to it.’

  ‘How, Harcourt?’

  ‘I’ll feckin — we’ll leave here now, like we always did, we’ll leave this kip to rot, it’s not worth a fart anyway.’

  ‘Ah, thank you, thank you. But it wouldn’t do. They’ll be flying after us if the mood’s on them now. Even if they go home, I’ll think they’re flying after me. Ah, no, Harcourt, better have it out with them now, I’m too old for that old life of fear at the back of the head and nowhere to call home.’

  Harcourt walks back across the lobby and sits himself in front of Eneas.

  ‘OK, brother, we’ll wait so.’

  ‘You think?’ And Eneas laughs, a big braying laughter.

  ‘We’re too old for wives and too old for politics.’

  ‘We are!’

  They sit in the chairs all night, half dreaming and dozing, but no one comes through the portal of the Northern Lights Hotel except the stragglers from the pubs and drinking dens. And when those men bump their way through the dark lobby even Harcourt isn’t alarmed at the possibility it might be the avengers of Sligo. Yes, yes, they’re too old for jumping at shadows.

  About four — and Harcourt would rise and try and find the time on his useless radio, but he’s too stiff — they both perk up again, as if they were monks, and always rose at four, to go out into the broken light to start hoeing and digging and praying … Harcourt thaws out in a few minutes and finally rises and fetches himself into the back scullery to brew some saving tea and brings out the victorious cups and tin pot to his smiling friend.

  ‘See, they never did come, and maybe they won’t come now,’ says Eneas, listening to the solid rain beyond the confines of the hotel, glad of his hotel, his shelter, glad even of his life, precarious as it might be. It’s not a district of birds, but nonetheless he senses the birds of England beginning ubiquitously, down by the shattered mines of Cornwall, up on the sacred glens of the Lake District, wherever the birds of England made their nests. Imaginary birdsong fills his dark head. He smiles and smiles at Harcourt, drinking the excellent tea. In the midst of dust and dirt and ancientness, the excellent tea of Port Harcourt…

  ‘See, they never did come,’ he says, but this even as Jonno and another man troop in through the night-laden door. He knows it is Jonno because Jonno is imprinted on his brain like a potato stamp they used to make at school together, a potato stamp. Star or circle or such, dipped in the paint and pressed damp and raw on the paper — Jonno Lynch himself. The other man is a mere boy, probably born when him and Jonno were already ould fellas, nearly. Eighteen or so, who could tell?

  ‘Well, Jesus, Jonno,’ Eneas says, getting up, ‘you’ve given us a right old night of alarm and panic,’ he says, without panic.

  ‘Sit down, you fuckin traitorous bollocks,’ says the young fella.

  ‘Oh — that’s no Sligoman, Harcourt,’ says Eneas, ‘that there’s a Dubliner, yeh, a gentleman of Dublin city.’

  But he sits down. And Harcourt sits down. They could neither of them say why. Practice in their dreams maybe.

  ‘Fuckin five fuckin o’clock,’ says the boy. ‘Fuckin dawn, it is.’

  ‘That’s right,’ says Eneas.

  Jonno Lynch approaches nearer. The good ten years have told against him. He’s not the chipper man in the airport anyway, the sleek man, the mighty man. But no matter. Confident as ever in his footless way.

  ‘How are ye, Jonno?’ says Eneas, like they were in a pub, a pub in Sligo and many years behind them of drinking and companionship. The way it should have been in a real feckin country.

  ‘You know the score,’ says Jonno.

  ‘What?’ says Eneas.

  Tuck you, Eneas, you know the score, shut your mouth,’ ‘Shut the fuck up, you cunt,’ says the boy. And he brings out a gun into the bleak shadows, only a shard of a shadow itself. ‘And you, you fuckin nigger with your fuckin bad answers, you fuckin sit where you are, like a good boy, the whole fuckin time …’

  Tunny time to be doing this, Jonno, after all these years,’ says Eneas conversationally. ‘Hah?’

  ‘All comes round, Eneas. All comes round. Nothing going on for forty, fifty years, then, bang-bang-a-doodle, we’re back in business. Have to show the young the ropes. Fight’s on again, boy. Oh, we’ll have the great days now. Freedom for the poor lost Catholic Irish of the North. That’s the new story. Marching and giving out against that old pagan queen Elizabeth. Well, we fought her father in our day, hah? Maybe her grandfather, was it? Hah? The North, Eneas. Haven’t you been reading the news?’

  ‘The North of what?’

  ‘Hah, you’re the wide-boy. Always was the wide-boy. North going to go up like a bloody ould November bonfire. Liberty. Love of country. Things you
don’t understand, Eneas. Things that make great men. Great notions. Powerful classes of feelings. Patriots! Belfast, Derry, Portadown. Lisburn — haven’t you been decking the news, boyo?’

  ‘It’s old news, Jonno. Doesn’t make good reading when you’re old neither. I prefer the comic strips. Eh, Dagwood, and the like, Mandrake, you know.’

  ‘Day’s come, Eneas. It’s nighty-night. Got to clean up the old black-lists. Work outstanding. Debts to be paid in full. No more interest on your loan of life, son. Because, jaysus, there’ll be fresh black-lists now. You got me now?’

  And Jonno seems to bellow into himself, like a bull inside out, to fetch the decency and friendship out of his bowels, to make a lion of himself maybe. Eneas recognizes it. The fierceness of fighting men, men in the bleakest terror of killing. He suffers suddenly an iota, a handful even, of pity for this Jonno. And Jonno bellows deep into himself without a sound, a terrible sight indeed. And he nods at the Dubliner and the Dubliner lifts the old gun but before he fires Harcourt stands up abruptly and shouts at him. It isn’t a shout with a word in it, but a life packed into it, certainly, those weeks running across Africa in terror and grief, and all their gimcrack happiness betimes. It’s such a magnificent shout that the young man is stilled for a moment. Anyway it’s difficult to kill a man with a heavy old gun and Eneas knows he’ll have to step up to him close. All in all he doesn’t mind having a go for freedom.