The Abstainer

by Ian McGuire

  He has just crossed the Gaythorn Bridge and is approaching the railway viaduct with a high brick wall on his left when a man walking the other way stops him and asks for the time of day. The man is young and sallow-skinned and dressed in laboring clothes. He smells of potted meat and cheap spirits. O’Connor tells him it is close to midnight, and when the man asks how close exactly, he reaches for his pocket watch to check. It is too dark to see the dial, so he walks over to a lamppost nearby and, as he does so, another man, taller and broader than the first, carrying a truncheon, steps out from a doorway and strikes him a fierce blow across the back of the head. O’Connor gasps, then drops to his knees and slumps forward. His cheek and forehead, unprotected, slap down onto the wet pavement like a side of beef slipped from a butcher’s hook.

  CHAPTER 4

  The next day, a young man knocks on the door of number seven George Street and waits. His head is still sore from the previous night, and his feet ache from the walking. He tries to remember what his mother used to tell him about James O’Connor, but he can only remember some of it. He has so many aunts and uncles that they get mixed up in his mind. He has seen a photograph from their wedding day, he is almost sure of that. He remembers Catherine looking surprised and serious in her lace veil, and Jimmy with a white rosebud in his buttonhole smiling as if he had just had a grand stroke of luck.

  The door is opened finally by a small plump woman with gray-black hair pulled back in a bun and a shawl around her shoulders.

  “And are you the doctor?” she says.

  “I’m here to see Jimmy O’Connor. I’m his nephew off the boat from New York.”

  She looks him up and down.

  “He didn’t mention any nephew from New York to me.”

  “He doesn’t know I’m here yet.”

  “A surprise, then, is it?”

  “A surprise,” he says, “yes, you could call it that.”

  The woman shrugs.

  “He needs a doctor looking at him. You should see the state of his face.”

  “What’s wrong with his face?”

  The woman rolls her eyes, then steps backward and gestures him inside.

  “You can go up and look for yourself. He thinks it’ll heal on its own, but I told him he needs a poultice or at least a plaster put on it, so it don’t get poisoned.”

  The young man leaves his suitcase in the hallway and starts to climb the stairs.

  “You have a visitor, Mr. O’Connor,” the woman shouts out, “your nephew from New York.” Then she says to the young man, in a quieter voice, “It’s the door on the left there.”

  He knocks. There is a long cough and then a voice calls him in.

  O’Connor’s face is lumpy and discolored—the skin is a pale, chicken-fat yellow around the cheekbone and jawline, a dull black and shiny purple about the blood-streaked eyes. He is sitting up in bed with a book open on his knee, although it is hard to believe he is able to read it.

  “Christ alive, what happened to you?” the young man says.

  “I was robbed last night. Two men attacked me.”

  It is hard for him to tell from his distended features whether O’Connor recognizes him or not.

  “It’s me, Michael Sullivan,” he says, “your nephew. Edna’s boy. I’m just off the boat from New York. I thought I’d try my luck over here in England for a while. Do you remember me from Ash Street, Danny’s little brother?”

  O’Connor frowns and looks at him more carefully.

  “I remember,” he says. “When did you go over to New York? Ten years ago, was it?”

  “Eleven. I was eight, Danny was fourteen.”

  “And your da was dead by then, so it was just you two boys and Edna.”

  “That’s right.”

  O’Connor pushes the blankets away from his legs, rolls sideways a little, and, with a gasp and a wince, swings his feet onto the rugless floor. He is wearing an ancient blue cardigan over his pajama top and gray bed socks. His hair is skewed sideways. He scrapes something green from the corner of one eye and looks at Sullivan more carefully.

  “Eleven years—you were just a child last time I saw you and now you’re here in England, no letter or warning even, knocking on my bedroom door?”

  Sullivan glances around the room. There is an old wardrobe painted brown, an iron washstand, and a chest of drawers piled high with books and papers. On the floor beside the bed there is a papier-mâché tray with a cheese rind, an apple core, and an empty teacup on it.

  “Family is family in the end,” he says. “The years don’t matter much. That’s my belief.”

  O’Connor sniffs and nods his head.

  “And it’s a convenient belief to have in the circumstances,” he says.

  “I would have written you before to say I was coming, but I had to leave in a rush.”

  “Are you in some trouble? Is that why you’re here?”

  Sullivan smiles, then changes his mind and tries to look somber. He remembers one of his uncles telling him that, before he started up drinking, Jimmy O’Connor was about the smartest man he knew in Dublin. Sharp as a pin. But the grief and the whiskey together had softened his brain. The story going around was that they had sent him off to England because the English wouldn’t know the difference.

  “I can tell you’re a policeman. Not much gets past you.”

  “So what was it? Debts? A woman?”

  “A woman,” he says, “a woman named Katie Dolan. We got a little too friendly, you could say. They wanted me to marry her, and the brothers were threatening all kinds of mayhem if I didn’t agree.”

  He pauses to see if O’Connor believes him. It is the kind of story, he thinks, that upright men pretend to be appalled by but never really are, since running away like that is what most of them would do themselves if they ever got the chance. And he is an excellent liar, he knows that. He has lied to plenty of people and none of them could ever tell.

  “What are you using for money?” O’Connor asks him.

  “I borrowed enough to pay my passage to Liverpool and to feed myself on the voyage, but now I need to find work. I’m a bank clerk by trade, I can tally figures and write a good, clean hand. If you know an opening in that line, or can tell me where to look for one, I’d be grateful for it.”

  “There’s no shortage of banks in this city. If you have a letter of introduction from your place in New York, it should be easy enough to find work here.”

  Sullivan picks one of the books off the chest of drawers and looks at it for a while.

  “Or I could try some different line, I suppose,” he says with a sudden smile. “I could even become a policeman like you are. What would you say to that?”

  “I’d say it’s hard work and it doesn’t pay so well. You should stick with what you know already.”

  Sullivan shrugs and puts the book back down.

  “Can I sleep here tonight? If you can find me a blanket to lie on, I’ll be fine right there on the floor.” He nods down at the space between the bed end and the fire. “I’m a quiet sleeper. I won’t trouble you any.”

  “So you really have no money left? Nothing at all?”

  Sullivan shakes his head.

  “But I’ll be looking for work tomorrow,” he says. “I’ll start off early, and I won’t stop until I find something.”

  O’Connor stands up slowly, waits for the pain to lessen, and then walks over to the wardrobe. He stretches up and takes a metal box from the top.

  “Here,” he says. “I’ll lend you half a crown. Go along to the Kings Arms and get yourself something to eat. You can sleep on the floor for two nights, but no more than that or Mrs. Walker will start complaining.”

  “The landlady? What difference does it make to her how long I stay?”

  “She won’t like a stranger sleeping on the floor. She run
s a tidy house here.”

  Sullivan takes the coin, looks at it a moment, then puts it in his pocket.

  “I’m sorry about Catherine,” he says. “From what I hear she was a good woman.”

  O’Connor looks at him blankly for a moment, and he wonders if he has made a mistake in mentioning it at all. Perhaps he finds it too painful to be reminded of what he’s lost, even now.

  “Who do you hear that from?” O’Connor asks.

  “From my ma and Danny. They remember her from the old days when she worked at Callaghan’s. Before you two were married.”

  “You don’t remember her yourself, though, do you?”

  “No, I can’t say I do. I was too small. But I’ve seen the pictures.”

  O’Connor nods.

  “The Kings Arms is over on Clarendon Street,” he says. “You go left at the end, and you’ll see it on the corner.”

  When Sullivan is gone, O’Connor goes downstairs to explain things to Mrs. Walker. He tells her it will be for two nights only, and if it is any longer than that he will pay her something extra. She waves away the offer but reminds him tartly that he should properly be looking after himself before he looks after any long-lost nephew arriving from America without a penny to his name, or even the decency to tell anyone they’re coming. If you marry into a family you must put up with the consequences, he tells her. And Mrs. Walker looks back at him and nods in a way that makes it clear she thinks he is wrongheaded but is too well-mannered to say so.

  Two hours later, there is another knock and Mrs. Walker answers again. O’Connor, back in bed, listens carefully for a minute, then, cursing under his breath, levers himself up. He steps out onto the upstairs landing and bends down to look. Sullivan is slumped against the wall, holding forth in a slurred, singsongy voice about the pleasures of New York, while Mrs. Walker, who is Methodist and teetotal, but has lived on George Street long enough not to be surprised by much, has her arms folded tight across her chest and is nodding. O’Connor, moving slowly and wincing with each step, is almost at the bottom of the stairs before Sullivan even sees him.

  “Jimmy,” he exclaims. “Christ, look at you. Those fellows really gave you a good pounding, didn’t they? Have you ever seen anything like that face, Mrs. Walker? I can’t say I have. I really can’t.”

  Mrs. Walker doesn’t answer him. She looks over at O’Connor and shakes her head.

  “I’ll make you two some tea,” she says. “And there’s bread and beef dripping in the kitchen. Then I’m up to my bed.”

  “Bread and beef dripping!” Sullivan shouts. “Christ, I could slaughter some bread and beef dripping right now.”

  “I gave you that money for food, not whiskey,” O’Connor says.

  Sullivan turns and smiles loosely at him. He seems pleased with himself, as if getting drunk on someone else’s shilling is a rare achievement.

  “I didn’t like the look of what they had. Honestly. The chops were coated with grease. Just seeing them fairly killed my appetite, so I thought I’d just have a pint or two instead. I’ll pay you back, I promise, just as soon as I get somewhere.”

  Mrs. Walker calls them into the kitchen. She puts a pot of tea and half a loaf on the table with a knife, and says her good nights. There is an oil lamp burning on a shelf near the door, but the rest of the room is dark apart from the pulse of the fire in the blackened range. O’Connor slides a finger into his mouth and feels his loosened molars. The pain is always worse at night. He stirs the pot with the knife handle, then pours.

  “What will you do to them fellows when you catch up with them?” Sullivan asks. “What kind of lesson will you teach them for what they did to you?”

  “They’ll be tried before a magistrate like anyone else. Although I doubt I’ll catch anyone unless I get a good slice of luck.”

  “You remember what they look like, don’t you?”

  “I remember one of them, but it’s a big town and there’s no reason to think I’ll ever see him again.”

  Sullivan blinks and rubs his eyes like a child waking up from a long nap. For a moment, O’Connor wishes he was young again like that, young and foolish, with his mistakes all ahead of him, and no one to think of but himself.

  “I meant that about becoming a constable, you know,” Sullivan tells him. “I’ve thought about it more. I’ve had enough of sitting on a stool all day long. I’d rather be outside, stretching my legs, meeting new people.”

  He cuts off a piece of the bread and looks around for the dripping. O’Connor pushes the bowl across and watches him gobble.

  “You wouldn’t like it,” he says. “Day in, day out. It wouldn’t suit you.”

  “I’d look fine in that uniform, though, wouldn’t I?” He raises his eyebrows and grins at the thought. “Big shiny black topper, big fucking truncheon like that—just imagine me.”

  “You’d look like a great fool,” O’Connor tells him.

  Sullivan laughs.

  “Oh, you’re a hard man,” he says. “To say such a thing to your own sweet nephew. Hard and cruel, that’s what you are.”

  O’Connor spoons the sugar into his tea and stirs it.

  “Is that what Edna told you about me?” he says. “That I’m hard and cruel?”

  “Edna?” Sullivan shakes his head. “Oh no. Edna loves you. They all do. Jesus, they think you’re just the best.”

  O’Connor nods. He still remembers Edna Brice when she was seventeen and lived on Flag Alley—tall and handsome, always full of the gossip. After she married Robbie Sullivan, she would take Catherine aside now and then and offer her advice about the wedded state. When Jimmy O’Connor’s name came up one time, Edna said she could do a lot better than a sour-faced police constable from Armagh with no people to speak of. Sour-faced. He’d laughed about that when Catherine told him. None of the Brices had liked him much. They were a lively family, noisy and boisterous, and they didn’t trust his quietness. They thought he must be keeping secrets from them, holding something back. They thought he was proud but proud of what? When he married Catherine and they moved a mile away to Kennedy’s Lane, they believed he was taking her away from them, and perhaps he was. Five years after that, when Catherine got sick, and he had to ask the Brices for help to nurse her, he could sense even beneath their concern a cool current of self-satisfaction as if they had been shown to be right at long last.

  “Edna’s keeping well, I trust,” he says.

  “Ah, she’s right as rain. She’s a grandma now, you know. Danny married an Italian girl, Antonella, and they have a little clapboard house in Brooklyn and two baby daughters. He works himself ragged on those streetcars. Up before dawn every single day.”

  O’Connor nods. He remembers Danny Sullivan outside the house on Ash Street playing rounders with an old broom handle and a ball made of rags and twine, short britches on him, and his grubby knees like knots in a piece of string, and now suddenly, in an instant it seems, he has a clapboard house in Brooklyn and a wife and two daughters.

  “Is that so?” he says. “I didn’t know.”

  “Danny says it suits him to the ground. I wouldn’t want it for myself, though. I’m not cut out for family life. I’m more like you are.”

  “More like me? And what am I like?”

  Sullivan grins for a moment, as if he is about to tell a sly joke.

  “Free and easy,” he says. “You answer to yourself alone.”

  O’Connor feels a spike of anger at the foolishness of it, a sudden hardening in his chest.

  “I’m not free and easy,” he says. “No one is. You’ll learn that soon enough.”

  Even through the fug of drunkenness, Sullivan understands that he is being rebuked. He frowns, then blinks and looks up at the ceiling.

  “Ah, I’m just playing around,” he says. “I don’t mean anything by it.”

  His words are s
lurred, as if his tongue has grown too big for his mouth. O’Connor stands up.

  “I’m getting tired now,” he says. “We should finish.”

  “I didn’t mean anything by it,” Sullivan says again. “I talk without thinking sometimes. Danny always chides me for it.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Sullivan shrugs, then rubs his chin. He is disheartened by this sudden change of mood. He wants things to go back to how they were before.

  “You keep an eye on the Fenians, don’t you?” he asks O’Connor. “That’s what I heard in New York.”

  O’Connor nods.

  “More or less,” he says.

  “I met one on the boat coming over here. He told me he was a draper from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, but I could tell straightaway he wasn’t any such thing. We’d play poker in the evenings just to pass the time away, four or five of us, all Irishmen. We kept the conversation playful as a rule, but one time, someone mentioned the Brotherhood. This fellow said, in his opinion, they were nothing but a dreamy rabble led on by men who cared more for their own pocketbooks than for the poor men of Ireland. Well, the rest of us didn’t get too exercised about it, we just nodded or shrugged and picked up the next card, but this fellow Byrne—Daniel Byrne was what he called himself—you should have seen the furious fucking look that came over him. He stiffened up like he was all ready for a fight right then and there. He looked this other fellow in the eye and started on about the difference between those who like to talk about liberty but are too fearful and womanly to ever act, and those others who keep quiet as a rule but are bold and manly enough to take up arms against their oppressors when required. Take up arms against their oppressors—that’s what he said, I swear.”

  He waits for O’Connor to sit down again, but O’Connor stays where he is.

  “If he told you he was a draper from Harrisburg,” O’Connor says, “that’s most likely all he was.”

  Sullivan shakes his head. The sweet fumes rise off him in waves. His cheeks are bright red and his lips are still shiny from the dripping.

  “If you ask me, he was an old Union soldier. He looked the part—long hair down to his collar nearly and scars on his face.”