by Brian Moore
Later, as they were finishing the greasy mixed grill she had cooked up, the dog barked in alarm, the caravan door slammed open, and her diminutive brother walked in. He seemed about to loose some complaint, but at that moment spied an unopened whiskey bottle on the counter. Refusing her offer of food, he opened the bottle and poured himself half a tumbler of whiskey. “Get the dishes cleared away,” he said. “Get a drink in your hands, will you, the pair of you. Drink! God, isn’t it great to have it. Your health, Jim. Wasn’t it lucky, now, we found each other.”
Three hours later they were all of them drunk. Mangan sprawled on the sofa with Kathleen by his side, while Conor, looking like a schoolboy in torn flannel trousers and Irish sweater, sat propped up on the kitchen counter. Suddenly, with an eldritch speech, Conor raised the whiskey bottle. “One dead man!” he cried, and poured the dregs of the bottle into his glass. Mangan, watching this performance, suddenly became aware that because he and Kathleen were drinking gin, the tiny man had finished the entire whiskey bottle on his own. This rapid consumption, coupled with the fact that he had not eaten, had produced in the last hour a heavy slurring of Conor’s speech and a change from his initial high good humor to a cantankerous argumentativeness which now seemed on the edge of erupting into an open fight with Mangan or Kathleen, or both.
In that moment of perception, Mangan’s mind delivered to him an answer to this problem. He arose and, walking with the care of a man whose own equilibrium is no longer under his complete jurisdiction, went to the counter and, reaching down behind it, produced the second full whiskey bottle. Smiling at Kathleen’s tiny brother, like a teacher rewarding an apt pupil, he unscrewed the cork and put the bottle down near its empty twin. “Your health, Conor,” he said.
“Right. Kill the bloody dead man!” Conor screeched, grabbing up the empty whiskey bottle and flinging it to smash in a splintering mess against the wall. “On to the second man, my lads!”
“For crying out loud,” Kathleen protested. “It’s me that will have to sweep that up.”
“Well, sweep it up, then,” Conor screeched. “You bloody tinker, you! What do you know about keeping a place decent, you tinker’s hoor. Sure, look at this caravan. Filthy dirty, it is.” He turned to Mangan, pointing a declamatory finger. “Did you know that, Jim? Hey, Jimmy, did you know that this one was off for two years traveling the length and breadth of Ireland with a tinker that already had a wife? Did she tell you that now? I’ll bet she didn’t.”
“Ah, will you give over, you drunken scut,” Kathleen cried. “Sure, that’s all former history. Jim is my lad now.” She put her arm around Mangan’s neck and kissed him, missing his cheek, her lips landing on the tip of his nose. “You like me, don’t you, Jim?”
“You’re lovely,” he said and kissed her back. A tinker’s whore?
“This girl here is in my charge,” Conor said, slurring, lifting his glass and drinking down the whiskey so fast it made him cough. “This wee girl here, d’you know what I mean? I’m her brother. Yes, I’m her brother, and when she came back from hooring around with that tinker in his caravan, with a sick wife and a child in it, too—I said when she came back from that carry-on and no decent person would speak to her—our parish priest Father Collins, God rest his soul, gave her into my charge. Do you follow me, Jim? She’s in my care. Q.E.D. Quod erat demonstrandum. Signed, sealed, and delivered. Inquire here at the office. Do you follow me, now?”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” Kathleen said. She got up, went into the kitchen area, and came back with two slices of an almond-icing cake which she had purchased that afternoon in Skull. “Here, Jim. Have a bit of this. It’s good stuff. Fuller’s cake. I love it. Do you want another gin?”
“Of course he wants another gin,” Conor screeched. “Give the fuckin’ man a fuckin’ gin. Give him a fuckin’ gin!”
“All right, all right,” Kathleen said. She looked at Mangan, who made a furtive signal to her, refusing the drink. She went to the gin bottle, took Mangan’s glass, poured a little gin into it, and filled it up with tonic. “One for the road, love.”
“One for the road, my arse!” Conor Mangan screeched irritably. “It’s the shank of the evening, am I right, Jim? Am I right there, Yank? Tell us now. Have you ever met Telly Savalas, the Kojak man?”
“No, I haven’t,” Mangan said. “Have a drink.”
“Ah, go and fuck yourself!” The tiny man suddenly leaped off the counter, missing his balance and falling face down on the floor. Mangan rose unsteadily to help him, but Kathleen, like a mother going to a child, expertly picked up her tiny brother and set him back on his feet. “Now mind your tongue, Con,” she said to him. “Come on with me. I want a word with you.”
“Fuck off!”
“Come on.”
She was both taller and stronger than her inebriated brother. She put her arm around him and led him into the bedroom area, pulling the dirty curtain shut behind them. Mangan heard her voice, whispering in some tongue he did not understand, Irish, he supposed.
“I know your fuckin’ game,” the little man shouted suddenly.
Again, Mangan heard her low, urgent whisper. The little man replied in the strange tongue. She whispered again and he bellowed in English: “Where’s the fuckin’ whiskey? Bring us a drink, for Jaysus’ sake.”
Kathleen pulled aside the curtain and beckoned to Mangan. “Bring him the whiskey, will you, love?”
Mangan, bottle and glass in hand, went into the sleeping alcove. The small man lay spread-eagled on the bed, his features turkey-red, his eyes glassy and loose in his head, the left one wandering. Kathleen took the bottle and poured whiskey in the glass. “I’ll leave the bottle on the dresser,” she said. “Do you hear me, Con? I’ll put it on the dresser with the cork in it. Don’t spill it, will you, like a good lad? Do you hear me, Con?”
“I heard you. I heard you,” the little drunkard said, sucking on his whiskey. “Sure, I had a bloody awful day, so I had. Packy took off with my lorry and left me stranded. I had to get lifts all the way back from Cork. And walk up here from Drishane.”
“You never told me that about the lorry,” Kathleen said. “Where is it now?”
“I tell you, Packy took it.”
“But what about the scrap you were to pick up?”
“The scrap thing is banjaxed,” the little man said in his slurred, contentious voice. “’Twas all Packy’s fault. He never found the fella. Packy went off with the truck and left me. I got a lift back as far as Bandon and then I had to walk four miles before I got another. And then in Timo-league I was a whole bloody hour waiting for a fuckin’ lorry driver to come out of the pub. Never asked me if I had a fuckin’ mouth on me. I tell you, I had a hard row to hoe, so I had, while you were gallivantin’ around Skull with your Yank, here.” He reached out, trying to find the chair seat to put his glass on. She took the glass and put it on the floor where he could reach it.
“Have a nap now, Con,” she said. She bent down and gently brushed the little man’s hair clear from his sweating brow.
“I don’t want a fuckin’ nap. I had a hard row . . .” the little man muttered. But his eyes were closed, and as they watched, his nostrils trembled in a snore.
“He’s away with it now,” Kathleen said. “I’d say he’ll sleep awhile.”
“I should think so,” Mangan said. “A whole bottle of whiskey.”
“Oh, that’s only an appetizer. When he wakes up he’ll polish off the other one as well. We’ll hide the gin, or he’d have that, too.”
She pulled the dirty curtain shut as they came out of the sleeping alcove. She went to the kerosene lamp and turned it down. “Are you sleepy yourself?” she asked, smiling.
In the dimmed light he saw her move among the cluttered furniture of the caravan, picking up the gin bottle and glasses. Her long white cotton dress swirled round her ankles, and again he thought of some Madonna statue in a poor village church, the hair painted red, the white gown, the alabaster purity of the features.
Her feet were bare, and looking at them, he felt a rush of erotic attraction. He moved toward her.
“Wait,” she said, putting up her hand to stop him, although she had not seemed to see him move. “I’ll give you the gin to take down to the house. And here’s a torch.” She brought him a flashlight. “Go on down, now,” she said. “You’ll find the key under the doormat. Turn it twice to the right. I’ll be down later.”
“When?” he asked. He tried to embrace her, but she moved off easily, in a way that was designed not to anger him.
“Soon,” she said. “I want to tidy up that glass before he walks on it. Go on, now. Do you want me to bring down some sweets or cake, or something?”
“No, no.” She was waiting, willing him to go, so he took the two gin bottles in the plastic bag which she handed to him and, switching on the flashlight, stepped outside, feeling the rush of cold night air brace him as he negotiated the steps of the caravan. Underneath the steps, the dog growled. He felt wet drizzle on his face as he crossed the squelching boggy grass of the field, but the cold night air was tonic and his muzzy, drunken heaviness began to leave him. He reached the road and stood on the ridge of mountain. The night sky was still pale and cloudless, and he saw before him the great sweep of bay, the jutting promontories of the headlands standing out to sea, and, in the distance, the tiny, winking, deceitful light of Fastnet Rock. The wind buffeted his face as he turned his back on the sea and went down the steep narrow road to the old house.
Tinkers. Kathleen had spent two years on the roads with a tinker family. On his first day in Ireland, when Mangan stopped for gas outside Cork, he saw ahead of him off the highway two shabby motor trailers, a small truck, and two old painted horse caravans, drawn up like settlers’ wagons on the shabby grass. Around a campfire in the rain squatted a fat woman, a middle-aged man, and two scruffy youths. Their cur dogs snuffled for scraps in a nearby trash receptacle. When Mangan asked the gas-station attendant if these people were gypsies, the man paused in his work and said, with a shake of his head, “Not at all, sir, they’re not gypsies. Those are Irish people—tinkers, we call them. They wander up and down the country, itinerants, as you might say. Mind you, the County Council has houses provided for them, but they will not bide in them. Always in trouble, that lot. You’d have to watch your belongings if some of them are around.” And then, as though relenting, the gas-station attendant spat on the ground. “God help them, there’s some say the tinkers is people left over from another time, from the famine days when half of Ireland walked the roads without a home.”
“But how do they earn a living?”
“They don’t. They used to repair pots and pans, sir, but sure everything is plastic now. There’s no call for their services. They’d be on some form of public assistance, the most of them. That and what they can beg, borrow, or steal.”
Tinkers. But come to think of it, what difference was there in that life and the life she now lived in a caravan with her drunken, ne’er-do-well brother? Did the postman pay her for favors rendered? Or the drunken footballer who threw a stone up at the window this morning? Kathleen Mangan, my love. Are she and her brother, and Dinny and his derelict mother, descendants of the poet, or simply people left over from another time, their speech debased, their lives mean and pointless as that of cur dogs snuffling around a trash heap? And don’t I fit in, too? Walking down a road now, carrying two bottles of gin in a plastic bag, waiting for an eighteen-year-old tinker’s whore to come to my bed. A cur dog engaged in a pointless sniffing out of unknown ancestors, living off the scraps of his dead wife’s fortune.
And then, as that melancholy thought filled his mind, a dog barked in the night far below in the valley, and up the road Kathleen’s dog barked back. The dismal yapping continued as he walked on, suddenly eerily certain that in the surrounding dark fields someone was watching him. The moon, which had been invisible all evening, slid out from behind a brow of mountain, round and bright and ghostly full, and in its light he stopped and looked about, trying to see some hidden watcher. Ahead, the long windows of the house reflected the moon’s ghostly orb as it slid across their glassy surfaces. He turned in off the road, his footsteps scrunching on the gravel of the yard as he went up, pulled aside the doormat, and found the key. He turned the key twice in the door, as Kathleen had instructed, and pushed. With a loud clatter of its wooden footboard, the door opened into blackness.
His flashlight beam picking out the litter of pots and pans on the floor, he made his way cautiously down the front hallway. To his left was the closed door of the parlor containing the portraits and paintings, and as his light slid across that door, he stopped, feeling a twinge of the same excitement he had experienced when he looked at the daguerreotype of the man who was his double. As though compelled, he reached out and opened the parlor door. Moonlight flowed through the long parlor windows, shadowing the cretonne-covered furniture. He raised his flashlight to the picture-covered walls and set it searching among the painted and photographed faces.
And then, loud as a shot, a tin can was kicked over in the corridor outside. At once he switched off his light and stood silent. Heavy boots sounded on the flagstones and another flashlight beam moved in a jumping circle on the corridor wall. The circle of light came in at the parlor door and hit him in the face. He switched on his own light, raising its beam like a sword to intersect the stranger’s. It came to rest on a man’s dirty tweed jacket and gray cardigan. He raised it farther and there, facing him, was not a man but the strange, gray-haired old woman he had seen herding cows at Duntally, Dinny Mangan’s mother. She moved her head out of range of the flashlight’s beam and, turning, ran back down the corridor, knocking over tin cans in her blundering progress back to the front door. He ran after her and caught up with her outside in the yard as she reached the wall and her old bicycle, which was propped against it. He caught hold of her by the arm. “Just a minute,” he called. “What are you doing here?”
The flashlight she held was her bicycle lamp. Trembling under his grip, she fitted it back on the handlebars. “I might be asking you the same thing, sir,” she said in a soft, uncertain voice.
“I live here. I was just going to bed.”
“Dinny said you were living with them up in the caravan. I just saw you come from there.”
“So you were watching me.” Her trembling increased. He released her arm. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.” As he spoke, the moon slid off into cloud, and suddenly the only lights in the yard were the circles of their flashlights.
“I didn’t mean to follow you,” she said. “I took you for someone else.”
“For your dead husband? I look like him, don’t I?”
He felt her start. She lifted her bicycle from the wall. “I must be getting home,” she said. “I’m sorry I bothered you.”
“Please. Stop saying you’re sorry. Just tell me why you followed me into the house.”
“I’ve not been well,” she said. “I was in the hospital for a while. I’m sorry. I made a mistake. You’re an American. Now that I hear you speak, I can hear that. And you are a young man. I made a mistake, that was all.”
“It’s all right,” he reassured her. “No harm done. Look, why don’t you come in and have a drink with me? There are candles in the kitchen. Just one drink before you go down home.”
Looking down at her, at her unkempt gray hair, her hunched shoulders, her veined and liver-spotted hands, he felt a sudden rush of tenderness. Somehow her weeping reminded him of his own mother, who had wept so much that day his father told her their marriage was over. He went to the sink, mixed gin and bitter lemon, and brought it to her. “Drink that up,” he said. “It will do you good.”
She raised her head and wiped her eyes with a large linen handkerchief which she took from a pocket of her jacket. “Thanks, now,” she said. “I shouldn’t be having this.”
“It will do you good,” he repeated.
“Well, I haven’t slept well this
past while,” she said, and drank. “Dinny said the doctors say drink makes it worse. But I don’t know. Dinny’s a Pioneer. He never touches drink.” She began to weep again.
“Is there anything I can do? Did I upset you, is that why you followed me? Isn’t it because I remind you of your husband?”
She stared at him with tear-swollen eyes. “Why did you come into this house tonight?” she asked.
“I’m sleeping here.”
“Sleeping here? Where?”
“Upstairs.”
“Oh, my God,” she said, and wept.
“Why? What’s wrong with that?”
“Was it Seamus Feeley who put you in here?”
“No. It was Conor who invited me.”
“But how can he do that?” she said. “It’s not his house any more.”
“Whose house is it, then?”
“It belongs to some Englishman. It was sold last year.”
“But the pictures and the furniture are Conor’s.”
“The Englishman hasn’t moved in yet,” she said. “I suppose Con is the caretaker. He’ll have to move his things out when the Englishman comes next summer.”
“But it was Conor’s house?”
She drank at the gin, taking a long swallow as though it were medicine. “It was, surely,” she said. “But he drank it all away when his father died.”
“When was that?”
“His father? It’s some years back.”
“Your husband and Conor’s father were brothers?”
“They were, yes.” Again, she began to weep.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to upset you. There’s just one thing I want to ask. I have a photograph here, a photograph of someone a long time ago who looks like me. I wonder, would you look at it? Maybe you’d know who it is?”
