by Dermot Healy
As they emerged at Castlerock, he ordered another whiskey.
“He cleans up awful well,” the woman said to her friend.
“I was talking tay Alice yosterday.”
“I wouldn’t be capable of taking on wha’ she did.”
“He took a fair knock.”
The whole carriage shook.
“Whold awne.”
“That’s nice.”
“It’s lovely, lovely. It’s lovely out be Portstewart.”
“Now that he’s through he’ll blow it all in Israel.”
Away from the track the sea spun like a flat disc. There was a sheep down on one knee eating. At Coleraine a crowd of football fans and university professors got on. Beyond Coleraine cattle were searching among the dark-grassed dunes. The train turned away from the coast and headed inland.
“Now that he’s through,” the woman said with a touch of pride, “at the end of the day, he’ll blow it all in Israel.”
The floor under Jack shook. “That’s nice,” he said, imitating her voice. His bladder suddenly eased, and he sought the chain that was not there. He found the foot pedal. The water gushed down the toilet bowl. He felt his way back to his seat and sat down. He looked up and found the same steel-blue eyes fixed upon him. He shifted uncomfortably and smiled.
But the smile was not returned. He suddenly realized that he was looking into the same bad unrelenting eye. He had returned to the seat he had occupied earlier, opposite the man in the carriage for non-smokers.
The man’s lower lip curved upward with the disdain of the abstemious.
Jack stood.
“God help us,” he said. Deeply embarrassed he returned along the carriages, but now he could not find where he had been. He tried remembering who had been sitting across from him, but his mind was blank. He saw empty seats and any one of them could have been his. He walked along the two carriages searching, but the faces had changed. He could not recognize anybody. Then he saw his bag, and he sat down again opposite the two women. Outside, large fields of potatoes had now appeared. He grew mesmerized by the flowering potato fields. The white flowers, the mounds of earth where the round roots nestled. Soon to be picked, laid in furrows and moved in bags to a market somewhere. In Mullet they’d winter under turf and mould. In Inisheer they’d lie uncovered in a shed. In Cleggan they’d be under sand. After boiling they’d be drained, teemed, and bursting floury out of their steaming skins, they’d be served.
As he watched, the electric wires dipped and rose, then were suddenly halted by a pole. Then they started again, swooping down and off. They’d fling themselves high onto the grips of the trapeze. Take off and, at the next juncture, just as Jack was becoming hypnotized, the wires swung away out of sight from the rails.
He was way ahead of himself. He saw himself alighting from the train. He saw himself searching for his ticket. It’d be in his little pocket. On the crowded ascent to Botanic Avenue he looks around for Catherine. She is standing at the back of the crowd watching his face for his reaction. She is tremendously happy.
I’ll arrive, thought Jack, I will.
The train shuttled forward linking his various lives, each in its separate compartment, each swaying gently on. Sometimes he’d find himself in one compartment, sometimes in another. It was painful looking back. Occasionally uproariously funny. A brief patch of Northern light caught his eye as the train hooted. The carriages pulled against one another as if they might sever the chains that linked them. They entered the next tunnel.
“Where’s Mammy?” asked a father across the aisle.
“She’s a wreck,” the child answered, and everyone laughed.
Jack feared that he would carry the present despair of his mind into whatever proceedings lay ahead. His mind, alienated by the journey, was trying to undermine any happiness that was to come when the journey was over. He tried to correct this tendency by dreaming ahead. But his mind continually trapped him in the present. There was nothing after. He tried to think of the carriages ahead. Then he recalled the eye of the man in the grey suit.
I’m exaggerating everything, he thought. Jesus! I’m frightening myself.
He ordered a fourth miniature and gulped half of it down. He might regret this some day, he thought. He did not feel drunk, but empty. What am I worried about? he asked himself. But he could not reason beyond the fact that this was Northern Ireland, people die here. Yet it wasn’t that. What was it that was worrying him? And he knew such worry would make him blind to another’s feelings.
Then he cheered himself by thinking, Well, on arrival I’ll see all my fears were unfounded. So his happiness would be all the greater. But the further now that the train plunged into the late morning the more alien he felt. The veins on the back of his hands began to pulsate.
In the seat behind him there was a sudden outburst of ribald laughter. Only then did his consciousness take in the voice that was speaking. Someone fell against his seat.
“Sorry,” said the youth.
“It’s all right,” said Jack.
“Taig cunt,” said the youth.
Immediately, the woman in the seat to his left leaned over and said to Jack that she was on her way for a check-up at the hospital. The ticket collector was flirting with her in the window seat. He winked at Jack. He had a round whiskey face and small eyes. His tie was undone and his mouth was set in a tight bow of short temper. The ticket collector did not want his conversation with the woman interrupted. But as the woman talked away to Jack, the ticket collector became a ticket collector again. He dropped his drunken leer. Jack ordered more drink from the trolley boy.
“Whoopah!” cheered the woman, “you started it, you might as well finish it.”
And she ordered a drink for herself.
“The cure is wonderful,” Jack said.
Jack moved over and the trolley boy sat down. They began talking of rabbits.
“It’s rare that I meet someone employed by the railroad,” said Jack, thinking to himself, this lad must be a Taig like me. The conductor is not. The woman may be.
“Don’t mind that fucker,” said the trolley boy, “that just went through the door.” He spoke with a mild trace of self-consciousness, dropping to a whisper because of what they were speaking of.
“Don’t say anything,” he whispered.
“I better push on,” he said loudly and stood. He put a free bottle on the table in front of Jack. A girl student, with blond cropped hair, dropped into the seat beside him. He wondered could she smell the stale sweat from him. She took out a notebook, then a calculator. It struck Jack that there were three or four voices working away in his head simultaneously, though he had no wish to talk to anybody at all. Nor to listen. Stations sped by, Lough Neagh passed like another sea to the right. Time wound down the distance.
The ticket collector appeared again.
“Tickets!” he called. “Tickets! Tickets!”
He disappeared from view.
“I think,” said the woman to Jack, “that I know him to see.”
“I think he’s from Fitzroy,” another woman answered. “What’s wrong with you anyway?”
“It’s my ticker,” she explained.
The girl looked up from her book, then down again. Tiredness fell on him. His head bumped against the window. The white plastic cups rocked on the table. He heard the miniatures striking against each other on the returning trolley. The plates linking the carriage buckled. To people on trains this happens, he said to himself.
He wiped away the mist from the window that he might see the city. Plumes of wind-driven black smoke from some house being demolished went by. Then came a graveyard with its back to the road. Each headstone appeared like someone kneeling, head bowed. These were vexed images. He put them out of his mind. Automatically he grabbed his bag by the strap, yet he was determined not to move till the carriage emptied. He held his bag tight against his stomach, then put it down again, for he realized there was a little way to go yet and he did
not want to be among those who were already on their feet, hauling bags from overhead, queueing up, as if this furtive preparation might somehow save them a few minutes later on.
He saw the lad who had called him a Taig alight. Then a group of schoolboys harassing each other climbed off. Jack stepped onto the platform, but could see no sign of Catherine. Then she appeared waving at the top of the crowded stairs that led to Botanic Avenue. It was as he had foreseen. She was perplexed and expectant and giddy. He felt immense relief seeing her there.
“Waunker,” shouted a schoolboy to another.
The other lad slung his bag onto his shoulder. “Your teacher,” he roared back, then seconds passed as he sought the most profane insult he could, “sucks cocks,” he turned to go, “in Hell!” The echo of the curse rang through the Belfast station.
23
The Irishman
“This is a nice place,” she’d say tenderly. He felt her touch the bottom of his hip. A hollow place in his chest. Places she touched were strange to him. Then his hands wandered over her, marvelling at her soft butt and stiff crotch hair. Her calves. Her breasts.
Then a strange thing would happen. Often Catherine felt him stop breathing. She’d know the tension was leaving him by the way he would grow her full length. Then his breathing would stop. Now she would become frightened. She was being left behind because she was too far outside, just looking in. She’d hold him tightly.
She’d grow inescapably tender towards him.
What he feared most was that everything might become sadly familiar. That his arms would inflate, a fever seek him out, that he’d hear someone say how such-and-such had lost its charm. That Catherine might be the sort of person who would cling steadfastly to her place of residence, wherever it be, and not let go. As her breasts brushed against him, Jack thought of home as a place frozen in the wastes. He was being lifted and transported. He believed in miracles and hated those who did not. He hated those people for whom change was not only unthinkable, but unlucky. He had seen this.
He never really knew whether it was him she was with when he entered her. At first it would appear the perfect lost path to take. Her satisfaction would turn to lust. And then from lust to fantasy. A few seconds later she would open her eyes and look at him. Then he knew that, on that night, he was only one of many.
That he could see so quickly into her intimate deception made him part ways with Catherine. Selfishly he would seek his own pleasure. For now she was not the woman he had gone to bed with some time before. Two other people, strangers, made love in their place, while they themselves voyeuristically looked on, vaguely urging them to passion.
Her affection afterwards would return with a hazy apprehension of defeat. He knew he had adopted a role. It was not the only role he was playing at the time. There was the public persona he adopted when he took to the streets. For the first few weeks he had barely ventured outside the house, and Catherine would bring home what food they needed. Mostly they phoned for Chinese takeaways or pizzas to be delivered. It was her that always answered the door. This life began to make him feel worthless. Mood swings took him from despair to an evangelical wish to be a friend of the unknown people he saw walking the streets below the windows. He soon tired of sitting alone in the house looking for repeats of TV programmes, or sauntering through the small garden where the rhubarb grew. It was not enough to be cooped up watching the strange streets.
The first day he went shopping he was aware of how blatant his Southern accent was. So he portrayed a nonchalant familiar personality, as if to say: I was the man who was here yesterday, and the day before. Surely you can’t have forgotten me? But, bleary-eyed and extremely polite, the shopkeepers scrutinized him, or else barely registered his presence. Yet he noted their surprise and their embarrassment when he spoke.
To offset this he became a creature of habit.
At ten-thirty he bought a pack of ten Embassy cigarettes in Seymore’s, then wandered into the Pakistani supermarket where he’d stock up with fruit and peas and frozen fish; next he bought lager from the off-licence, then maybe he’d wander through the nicnac shop, and lastly he’d buy a copy of the Belfast Newsletter – the proper Unionist paper – at George’s newsagents. Only one copy of the Catholic newspaper was ever on sale there. And it sat untouched on the counter throughout the day. It was still there in the afternoon when he came to collect the Evening News, which was bought by both religions.
“Don’t be tempted by it,” advised Catherine. “There’s not a soul in this area would be seen dead buying the Irish News.”
“I won’t, don’t worry.”
“It’s left there deliberately to trap a body. That’s how they’d know who you are. You’ve got to take care,” she said adamantly. “I feel responsible for bringing you here.”
“I want to get to know these people,” replied Jack. “I’m sharing this island with them.”
“But they are not inclined to share it with you,” she said coldly. “Remember that.”
On her days off she would accompany him on his rounds.
“What are we going in here for?” she asked, as they entered a small hardware shop.
“Nails,” he said.
“And what do we want with nails?”
“We want them for normality.”
Then he brought her across to the newsagent’s. The old lady there and himself had by now, much to Catherine’s amazement, grown familiar. She gave him a warm welcome. “Your paper, love,” she said and handed him the Belfast Newsletter. She picked it out from a bundle of others with the names of those that had ordered them written in pen across the top. On his was written the Irishman.
“The Irishman?” said Jack astounded, and he laughed.
“Well, we didn’t know your name,” she replied, embarrassed at her faux pas.
“It’s Jack,” said Jack.
“Jack,” she said. “I’ll remember that for again.”
His accent had marked him out as the Irishman.
“Where are you bringing me now?” asked Catherine. He took her across to a café. Catherine was shocked to find a group of RUC men seated on tall stools at the counter eating sandwiches and sweet cakes. The policemen’s rifles were laid across the counter in front of them. They called a greeting to Jack. He tipped his forehead in reply.
“Soon I suppose you’ll be on first name terms with them as well,” whispered Catherine.
“Give us two Queen cakes and two cups of coffee,” said Jack. They sat down among the building labourers, who sucked homemade soup out of plastic cartons, and local ladies eating homemade scones.
“I feel at home here,” he told Catherine.
“Don’t tell me about it,” she replied, “it only makes me anxious.”
In the early evenings, the kitchen and drawing room would be suffused with blues and reds from the stained-glass upper lights in the front windows. Jack placed his typewriter at a clear window facing the back garden. In the distance he had a view of the sea and beyond that, on good days, Carrickfergus. He could hear the ships hooting as they headed into Belfast Lough from Liverpool and the Isle of Man.
The Union Jack, as he sat at his typewriter, fluttered over the roofs of houses each side of him. He began putting words into the mouths of the women he saw, with their breasts muffled in bathrobes, as they stood outside hanging the washing on the lines. Their hoarse voices, as they harangued their children, seemed to emerge from the middle of the head at the point where the inner nostrils entered the skull. The sound was male and phlegmatic. The women were gruff and scolding and full of cheerful morbidity. The men, some thin-faced, others small and stout, sat on deck chairs reading the Sporting Chronicle and the Sun. They grew vegetables in every available plot and drank tins of Tennants lager. Poorly clad, they shuffled to and fro on the edge of the Empire, waiting to be summoned.
On Sunday mornings, sporting the particular mien of Protestant, Methodist or Presbyterian, the women donned their false mink and fur, and arranged
fruit and feathers on their heads; the men wore quiet suits, Russian hats and loud ties; then speaking a broad aristocratic patois they came down the side streets to church. Often from his desk by the open window, Jack would hear their voices raised in song that swelled like a powerful demonstration of defiance against despair, that then became ordinary, and finally sweet.
Their songs had the same exultation he’d heard from churches in the back streets of Brixton, and like the West Indians, the Belfast church-goers would emerge, gossipy and bantering, and walk the footpaths that ran through the grounds with a busy nonchalance. The children in bright suits and sombre dresses went by in straw hats. A few white-faced males would stand within the gates of the church, whispering to each other like men, who, wary of bankruptcy, had once again survived the uncertain fate of being human.
On weekdays huge trucks drove past, which made the small houses shake.
Then at night would come, in the middle of a dream always, the sound of a single speeding car.
He’d take a bus into town and go shopping at the Chinese supermarkets. Every time he visited the city centre he’d find that a new French or Italian café had sprung up. In them hordes of women in groups ate pasta with their own cheap Italian or Spanish wine which could be brought in at no extra charge. The men filled the bars drinking lager and gin. The light on the streets was the same as that found in north of England cities – cold, industrial, grey. On Sundays, everywhere was closed. The shutters came down over the pubs. Winds charged up side streets. Rain fell, breaking and reassembling the light above the blue roofs. At the end of some streets sat distant mountains. At the end of others were the peace lines – paint-splashed walls constructed from bare concrete blocks.
Sometimes he would meet Catherine after rehearsal in one of these cafés, or in Lavery’s or in the Crown. Or sometimes in the Lincoln Inn bar across from the BBC where lawyers and journalists mixed.