The Abstainer

by Ian McGuire

  —

  After they finish talking, Doyle takes his knapsack upstairs and lies down on the bed to rest. The mattress is damp and smells of semen and hair oil. An hour later, a young woman arrives with a box of candles, a loaf of bread, three eggs, a twist of tea, and a bucket of coal. When he asks about the whiskey, she says she hasn’t heard anything about whiskey. While she is kneeling down making the fire, a boy comes with O’Connor’s address. Doyle takes the note and tells the boy to wait outside. After he’s eaten his supper, they go to George Street and the boy points to number seven. Doyle loiters on the corner for a while, walks about, then comes back again. There is a faint light in the downstairs window but no sign of any movement in or out. It is dark and cold now and a grimy rain is coming down in gusts. The starless sky is the same flat color as the roofs and the walls, and the roofs and walls are the same flat color as the muddy pavement beneath his feet, as if all the world has been inked in the same grim and deathly hue. He walks onto Oxford Road and asks directions to King Street. It would be quicker to take a cab or omnibus, he knows, but he needs to learn the ways himself. When he reaches the Town Hall, he waits, then goes inside and looks for a sign to the detective office. When he finds it, he sits on a bench in the corridor and watches the policemen coming and going. They look calm, unconcerned, as if nothing could possibly go wrong. No one talks to him or gives him even a second glance. He thinks about asking for James O’Connor, making something up, but decides against it. After half an hour of sitting there, he takes out his notebook and pencil, and draws a diagram of the corridor and the rooms coming off it, then he stands up and leaves.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, Doyle waits by the cab stand on King Street and when James O’Connor emerges from the Town Hall, Rice’s boy, Seamus, who knows him by sight, makes the sign as agreed. The two men walk along Piccadilly past the infirmary and lunatic asylum, then on up the hill: O’Connor ahead, hunched, oblivious, and Doyle following thirty feet behind. Black smoke leaks from the high factory chimneys into a cloud-packed sky; the morning light is weak, recessional, as if the day is ending before it has even begun. When they arrive at the London Road Station, there are five constables and a sergeant already there. O’Connor joins the group; they talk for a while, then, when the train arrives from Liverpool, the constables spread along the platform and start questioning the male passengers as they disembark. Doyle sits on a bench near the ticket windows and watches. It is a clumsy method, he thinks. The platforms are too crowded; a man with any kind of sense could easily await his moment and slip past unnoticed. The Liverpool trains arrive every half hour and Doyle watches them repeat the process seven times. On two occasions, one of the constables waves to O’Connor and O’Connor comes over and talks to the passenger himself, asking him more questions and writing down the answers in his notebook, but both times, after ten or fifteen minutes of talk, they let the fellow go.

  At noon, a new group of six constables arrives. The two groups mingle for a while, talking and joking, then, when the train comes in, the first group leaves and the new men start questioning the passengers. O’Connor stays on the platform to make sure they know what to do, then goes into the station cafeteria and sits down at a table by the window. Doyle watches. O’Connor orders a cup of tea and drinks it slowly, blowing first, and putting the cup back down on the saucer between each sip. When he’s finished the tea, he grimaces, rubs his eyes, then takes his notebook out of his pocket and leafs through it. His face is pale, the eyes shadowed and sunken. There is something about the way he sits and moves, a stiffness and hesitancy, that makes Doyle wonder if he is sick or has suffered some injury. A waiter asks him a question, and O’Connor nods, then looks back at the notebook. A few minutes later, he pays the bill, counts the change, and puts it in his waistcoat pocket. He leaves the cafeteria and walks back past the bench where Doyle is still seated. Doyle waits until he has passed, then stands up and follows. The two men, separated but together, move, in Indian file, across the bustling concourse, then back out into the cold, gray largeness of the day.

  * * *

  —

  It is after midnight when Doyle finds what he’s been searching for. He is sitting alone in a dram shop on one of the narrow lanes off Deansgate. He has a glass of rum untouched on the table in front of him and is listening carefully, without appearing to listen at all, to the conversation of the two men seated at his right. The men are discussing the price of a silver pocket watch and chain. The one selling is younger. He talks quickly, and shifts about in the chair, as if he is not used to staying seated in one place for long. He has a scanty mustache and his skin in the gaslight is damp and grainy. The other man is fat with a long brown beard spread out like a dirty napkin across his chest. His manner is coy, satirical, querulous. As he listens, he prods the watch back and forth across the table with his fingertip and shrugs or rolls his eyes. When the seller names his price, he chortles and then shakes his head, as though charmed and appalled in equal measure by the outlandishness of the sum invoked. The younger man persists nonetheless. He recalls, again, the watch’s many virtues, calls loud attention to its weight and luster. They approach another price, much smaller than the first one, then back away, then approach again, and finally, with great displays of reluctance and reckless generosity on both sides, arrive at a concord. Doyle estimates that the man has paid less than a quarter of what the watch is worth, but for something so obviously filched it is a reasonable bargain. He waits until the purchaser has left, then turns to the younger man and nods.

  “Would you happen to have another watch like that for sale?” he asks.

  The man glances at him then looks away, as if he is not sure the question is worth the energy of a response.

  “And what if I did?” he says.

  “Then I’d give you a fair price for it,” Doyle says. “More than that other fellow just gave.”

  The young man sniffs and looks him up and down.

  “What are you anyway,” he says. “American?”

  “Irish. From New York.”

  “One of them,” he says.

  “I’d have given you a good deal more for that watch. A good deal more.”

  The young man shrugs.

  “I decided to let him have it on the cheap,” he says. “He’s an old friend of mine, that’s why.”

  “It was a fine-looking watch. I’d say a watch like that one’s not so easy to come by. A man needs to know where to look.”

  The young man nods, then smiles.

  “Oh, I know where to look,” he says. “If anyone around here knows where to look, then it’s me.”

  “You’re the expert, are you?” Doyle says.

  The young man shakes his head and straightens as if remembering who he is.

  “I’m not a boaster,” he says. “I keep my business to myself.”

  “You’re a capable fellow, though: brave, quick-witted, resourceful. That’s what I mean. I can tell it just by looking at you.”

  “Maybe so. I wouldn’t disagree with that.”

  “And if a person had a particular need, a requirement? If there was something I wanted, for instance, that I couldn’t get in the normal way?”

  “What requirement would that be?”

  Doyle picks up his glass of rum and moves across to where the young man is sitting. He holds out his hand.

  “My name is Byrne,” he says.

  “Dixon.”

  Doyle looks down at the chair and Dixon nods.

  “Help yourself,” he says.

  Doyle stacks the empty glasses already on the table, pushes them to one side, then puts his own glass down and sits.

  “I can get you a watch like that other one easy enough,” Dixon tells him. “You meet me here tomorrow night.”

  “It’s not just a watch I’m talking about now, it’s something else bes
ides.”

  “What is it?”

  Doyle shrugs, then leans forward and lowers his voice.

  “It’s nothing at all,” he says, “for a brave, quick-thinking fellow like you at least. A minute’s work, that’s all.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The day of the Fenian funeral parade—a week since the hangings. Three thousand Irish gather in Stevenson Square in the noonday damp: men, women, and children sporting green neckties and ribbons and rosettes and, at the head of it all, a fife-and-drum band playing the “Dead March in Saul” and three priests holding framed portraits of the recently departed. O’Connor waits in a side street until the procession begins, then joins in at the tail. They walk through Piccadilly, black umbrellas upraised like Roman shields against the afternoon drizzle, then by the infirmary and lunatic asylum, past clots of curious onlookers, and on up London Road. They cross the Medlock by the printworks and turn right onto Grosvenor Street. O’Connor makes his way gradually forward through the crowd, looking and listening all the time. Apart from the scrape and shuffle of footsteps and the strains of music from the front, there is a churchlike quietness about it all. People speak to each other in undertones, and if a child laughs or shouts out, they turn around to look. The parade is a show of strength, a reminder that the hangings haven’t cowed them. Something else will follow after, O’Connor is sure of it, a gesture, or more than a gesture. He wonders again about Flanagan’s American. They would only send someone across from New York if there was a plan. And it won’t be an uprising again, not so soon after that last debacle; it will be something much smaller, something designed to scare and unsettle their enemies and give their supporters new hope—gunpowder perhaps, or arson, an assassination at the worst, although these things are always much more boasted about than achieved.

  The rain stops and the umbrellas are taken down and furled. They pass the All Saints Church on the right and the Chorlton Town Hall on the left. The sky is the color of wet mortar, and the air tastes of soot and also faintly of ammonia from the chemical works nearby. There is no wind to speak of, and the dark smoke rises in shattered columns from the chimney pots. In Hulme, more people join, and when they get to Deansgate the phalanx of mourners is nine or ten wide and three-quarters of a mile long. The cabs and omnibuses pull onto the pavement to let them past. Before they cross the river, O’Connor notices Tommy Flanagan up ahead. He has a green ribbon wrapped around the crown of his brown bowler and a black mourning band on his arm; he is deep in conversation with a man O’Connor doesn’t recognize. Over the bridge, the march pauses in front of the prison and the priests offer up some inaudible prayers. The gibbet has gone from the top of the wall, he notices—dismantled already—but the fenced-off place below the drop where Michael Larkin was finished off is still extant. O’Connor stays back until the other man moves away, then he positions himself by Flanagan’s shoulder and speaks without turning his head.

  “Who was that fellow you were talking to just now?”

  Flanagan looks to see who it is, then quickly looks away again.

  “Not here!” he says. “Good Christ. Have you no sense at all?”

  “It’s a simple enough question.”

  “He’s no one you need to know about.”

  Flanagan sounds nervy, O’Connor thinks, much less cocksure than usual.

  “Did he say something to upset you, Tommy?”

  “It doesn’t matter what he said.”

  “It wasn’t your famous American, was it? Is he arrived already?”

  “What American?”

  “The one you told me about last week.”

  “There is no fucken American. That was just stupid talk is all. You should move away now. This is not the place or time.”

  “So that’s not him, then?”

  “Course not.”

  O’Connor tries to see where the other man has gone to. He only glimpsed him quickly from the side. He had long dark hair, what looked like a scar on one cheek, but more than that he couldn’t say. He checks the time by his pocket watch and makes a note in his book so he won’t forget the details in his next report to Maybury. There is something wrong with Flanagan, but it might not be important. Most likely the man is just a creditor.

  The parade curves back across the river and into Shude Hill. It has lost some of its earlier somberness, voices are raised, there is laughter, and, now and then, a group bursts into song. When they reach New Cross, the band put down their instruments and someone comes out of the Crown Hotel with a crate of ale; the three priests say their farewells and get into a cab. O’Connor stands in the doorway of a pawnbroker’s and watches the crowd disperse. There has been no trouble, but then he didn’t expect any—Manchester isn’t Liverpool or Glasgow where the Orangemen are bellicose and thick on the ground. He wonders whether to go directly back to the Town Hall now to write out his report but decides against it. It is getting dark and he is hungry. He will have his dinner at the Commercial coffeehouse, he thinks, then stop at the detective office on the way back.

  He steps out of the doorway and walks across the cobbled junction toward Oldham Street. Groups of people from the parade are still chattering and killing time. He sees someone take a dented pewter flask from his pocket, have a sip, and pass it. He feels the usual pang, the inner tremble, but nothing worse. He will have a good plate of hot pot, he decides, and a ginger ale; he will smoke his pipe and read all the magazines.

  * * *

  —

  O’Connor has not taken a drink since he arrived in Manchester, although the temptation is still strong sometimes. Instead of whiskey, now, he drinks lime cordial, gingerette, sarsaparilla, black coffee, and mugs of sugared tea. He smokes a half ounce of cheap tobacco every day and works more hours than he is paid for. The weight in his chest is smaller than it was, but he can still sense its pressure when he moves about. He feels, most days, like a man making his way across a tightrope, reaching out with his stockinged feet for each new step and never daring once to look down. He knows he is better off here in England, where no one knows or cares about him, where he is free alike from history and expectation, but he wonders too how long this balancing act can last and how it will end. Will he really spend the rest of his life here in solitude and exile, playing bagatelle in temperance coffeehouses?

  He folds up the magazine and pushes it to one side. When he is reduced to reading the airy pieties of the British Workman he knows it is time to go home. The clock on the wall shows it is past ten already. He is not yet tired enough to sleep, but if he stops on the way to write his report, by the time he gets to his bed he might be. He pays the bill and says goodbye to Olson, the manager. Outside, it is raining again and the flagstones quiver blackly in the gaslight. He buttons his overcoat high and tugs up the collar for protection. The streets are still busy—bent-over women cowled in shawls and aprons make their way home from the Newton Street Mill, broad-hipped carts grumble past carrying barrels of pork and fish to the Smithfield market. He passes the cab stand on Piccadilly and nods to a porter taking shelter under the glazed awning of the Royal Hotel. In the detective office he has only Fazackerley and Malone for company. They talk for a while about the Fenian funeral parade, which, in Fazackerley’s opinion, being a week late and three corpses short, was not very much of a funeral parade at all, and then O’Connor writes out his report, signs it, and leaves.

  As he walks back toward George Street, O’Connor thinks of Catherine, his wife who died: her shape and her smell, and the sound of her voice whispering in his ear as they danced one Christmas Eve in the Finnegans’ parlor with Patrick Mooney playing the fiddle and the others laughing and clapping along. It is painful to remember her still so alive, the press of her hand on his shoulder and the pale part of her coal black hair, but the thought that one day that pain might fade or disappear completely is worse. Forgetting is the final betrayal, he thinks. The pain is what is left of the love, and w
hen that pain is gone there is nothing.

  He was thirty-three when they met. She worked in the grocers on Bishop Street; he went in there one day to buy matches and they fell to talking. She told him she liked to read, but she could hardly afford to buy books, so the next day he came back into the shop with a copy of Tennyson’s Poems wrapped up in brown paper and gave it to her as a gift. He told her he had other books just like it she could borrow if she ever wanted to, and she smiled and thanked him. He wasn’t usually so bold, his years in the police had taught him to think twice and move slowly, but once it had begun with Catherine, he couldn’t help himself. Afterward, when they were married and living together on Kennedy’s Lane, he wondered whether he had been lonely back then without even realizing it. After so long living in barracks, he had thought he was happy being alone, but perhaps the truth was that he had just grown used to the flavor of his own suffering.

  Their son, David, was born in ’63 but died of pleurisy, and two years after that Catherine became ill herself. She complained of headaches and tiredness at first, then she noticed the swelling one Sunday after mass. O’Connor was a head constable in G division working with the Fenian informers. He spent all the money he had saved on doctors, then borrowed more and spent that too, but nothing they did made a difference. After she died, he started drinking whiskey every day. It felt like a means of survival, a way of fending off the future. He would drink in the mornings before he left for work, and in the afternoons, if he was alone, he would find a quiet pub and drink some more. He should have been dismissed half a dozen times. It was only Pat Hurley, the inspector, who shielded him, made excuses, but in the end even Hurley lost patience. He called him in one day and told him that it was Manchester or nothing. He said he would write the reference for Maybury without making any mention of the drinking, but that was the very last lie he would tell.