by John Boyne
Three Ducklings
In my mother’s opinion, Jack Smoot and Seán MacIntyre were as different as chalk and cheese, so it surprised her that they were such good friends. Where Seán was outgoing and affable to the point of innocence, Smoot was a darker and more reticent figure, given, she would discover, to prolonged periods of brooding and introspection that occasionally veered toward despair.
“The world,” he would remark to her a few weeks into their acquaintance, “is a terrible place and it was our misfortune to be have been born into it.”
“Still, the sun is out,” she would reply then, smiling at him. “So there’s that at least.”
As the bus arrived in to Dublin, Seán grew more animated in the seat next to her as he looked out the window, his eyes opening wide as he took in the unfamiliar streets and buildings that marked their approach, larger and more tightly packed together than any in Ballincollig. When the driver pulled in to Aston Quay, he was first up to collect his case from above and seemed agitated to be left waiting as the passengers ahead of him gathered their belongings. When he finally disembarked, he looked around anxiously until, with a glance across to the opposite side of the quay, he saw a man walking toward him from the direction of the small waiting room next to McBirney’s department store, at which point he broke into a relieved smile.
“Jack!” he roared, his voice almost choking in happiness as the man, about a year or two older than him, approached. They stood before each other for a moment, grinning, before shaking hands heartily and Smoot, in a rare moment of playfulness, pulled Seán’s cap off his head and threw it in the air in delight.
“You made it then,” he said.
“Did you doubt me?”
“I wasn’t sure. I thought I might be left standing here like O’Donovan’s donkey.”
My mother walked toward them, as happy as anyone to be out in the fresh air again. Unaware, of course, that a plan had been hatched somewhere between Newbridge and Rathcoole, Smoot didn’t pay any attention to her and focused entirely on his friend. “What about your father?” he asked. “Did you—”
“Jack, this is Catherine Goggin,” said Seán as she stopped next to him, doing her best to appear inconspicuous. Smoot stared at her, uncertain why the introduction was being made.
“Hello,” he said after a brief pause.
“We met on the bus,” said Seán. “We were sitting next to each other.”
“Is that so?” said Smoot. “Are you visiting family up here?”
“Not exactly,” said my mother.
“Catherine has found herself in a bit of bother,” explained Seán. “Her mammy and daddy threw her out of the house and they won’t have her back, so she’s come up to Dublin to try her luck.”
Smoot nodded, his tongue bulging in his cheek as he considered this. He was dark-haired, as dark as Seán was fair, and his cheeks were pockmarked with tiny scars. His broad shoulders gave my mother the immediate image of him carrying wooden barrels of Guinness around the forecourt of the brewery, swaying beneath the air-polluted stench of hops and barley. “There’s many who try that,” he said finally. “There’s chances, of course. Some don’t make it and they take the boat across the water instead.”
“I’ve had a recurring dream since I was a child that if I ever set foot on a boat, then it would sink and I would drown,” said my mother, inventing this bit of nonsense on the spot, for she’d never had any such dream and only said it now so that the plan that she and Seán had concocted on the bus would come to fruition. She hadn’t been scared before, she told me, but once she arrived in the city the idea of being left alone frightened her.
Smoot had no answer to this and simply stared at her with disdain before turning back to his friend.
“Sure we’ll get along then, will we?” he asked, putting his hands in his coat pockets and nodding at my mother to dismiss her. “We’ll go to our lodgings and then for a bite to eat. I’ve had nothing but a sandwich all day and I could devour a small Protestant if someone was to pour a little gravy over his head.”
“Grand job,” said Seán, and as Smoot turned to lead the way, Seán followed two steps behind with his suitcase in one hand, while Catherine trailed a few feet behind him. Smoot, glancing around, frowned and they both stopped, placed their bags on the ground. He stared at them as if they were both mad before walking on and once again they both followed. Finally, he turned to the pair of them, his hands on his hips in bewilderment.
“Is there something going on here that I don’t understand?” he asked.
“Listen, Jack,” said Seán. “Poor Catherine here is all alone in the world. She hasn’t a job or much money to find one. I said that maybe she could stay with us for a few days, just until she gets herself sorted. You don’t mind, do you?”
Smoot didn’t reply for a moment and my mother recognized the mixture of disappointment and resentment on his face. She wondered whether she should simply say that it was all right, that she didn’t want to be any bother to either of them and that she would leave them in peace, but then Seán had been so kind to her on the bus and if she didn’t go with him now, then where would she go?
“Do you two know each other from back home, is that it?” asked Smoot. “Is this some game you’re playing on me?”
“No, Jack, we only just met, I promise you.”
“Hold on a minute,” said Smoot, his eyes narrowing as he looked at my mother’s stomach, which, five months into my development, was becoming round. “Are you…? Is that…?”
My mother rolled her eyes. “I should take an ad out in the paper,” she said, “for the amount of interest there is in my belly today.”
“Ah here,” said Smoot, his face growing darker than ever. “Seán, has this got something to do with you? Are you bringing this problem to my door?”
“Of course not,” said Seán. “I told you, we only just met. We were sitting next to each other on the bus, that’s all.”
“And sure I was already five months gone by then,” added my mother.
“If that’s the case,” said Smoot, “then why does she become our responsibility? You’ve no ring on your finger, I see,” he added, nodding toward my mother’s left hand.
“No,” said my mother. “And little chance of getting one now.”
“Are you after Seán, is that it?”
My mother’s mouth fell open in a mixture of laughter and offense. “I am not,” she said. “Sure how many times do we have to tell you that we only just met? I’d hardly be setting my cap for anyone after a single bus journey.”
“No, but you’re happy to ask them for favors.”
“Jack, please, she’s alone,” said Seán quietly. “We both know what that’s like, don’t we? I thought a little bit of Christian charity wouldn’t do us any harm.”
“You and your fucking God,” said Smoot, shaking his head, and my mother, strong woman though she was, blanched at the obscenity, for people, as a rule, did not use such words in Goleen.
“It’ll be only for a few days,” repeated Seán. “Just until she finds her way.”
“But there’s very little room,” said Smoot in a defeated tone. “It was just meant to be for the two of us.” There was a long silence and finally he shrugged his shoulders and gave in. “Come along so,” he said. “It looks as if I’m to have no say in the matter, so I’ll make the best of things. A couple of days, you say?”
“A couple of days,” agreed my mother.
“Just until you get yourself sorted?”
“Just until then.”
“Hmm,” he said, striding ahead, leaving Seán and my mother to follow.
The Flat on Chatham Street
As they walked toward the bridge, my mother looked over the side of the railings into the River Liffey, a filthy determination of brown and green making its way urgently toward the Irish Sea as if it wanted out of the city as quickly as possible, leaving the priests, the pubs and the politics far behind it. Inhaling, she pulled a face an
d declared that it was nowhere near as clean as the water of West Cork.
“You could wash your hair in the streams down there,” she declared. “And there’s many that do, of course. My brothers go to a little creek at the back of our farm every Saturday morning for their wash with a single stick of Lifebuoy Soap between them and they come back shining like the sun on a summer’s day. Maisie Hartwell was caught watching them one time and her daddy leathered her for it, the filthy article. She was after their mickeys.”
“The buses,” declared Smoot, turning around and plucking the butt of a cigarette from his mouth before grinding it out beneath his boot, “go both ways.”
“Ah now, Jack,” said Seán, and the disappointment in his voice was so touching that my mother knew immediately that she would not want to be on the receiving end of such a tone.
“That’s what we call a joke,” said Smoot, quietly chastised.
“Ha,” replied my mother, “ha.”
Smoot shook his head and continued on, and she was free to look around at the city, a place she had heard of all her life that was supposedly full of whores and atheists but that seemed much like home, only with more cars, bigger buildings and better clothes. In Goleen, there was only the working man, his wife and their children. No one was rich, no one was poor and the world maintained its stability by allowing the same few hundred pounds to pass back and forth from business to business, from farm to grocery store and from wage packet to public house on a regular basis. Here, though, she could see toffs in dark pinstriped suits sporting carefully constructed mustaches, ladies in their finery, dockers and boatmen, shop girls and railway workers. A barrister walked by on his way to the Four Courts in full regalia, his black poplin gown inflating in the air behind him like a cape, his white bobbed wig threatening to blow off in the breeze. From the opposite direction, a pair of young seminarians, weaving on the pavement with drink, were followed quickly by a small boy with a coal-blackened face and a man dressed as a woman, which was a creature she had never seen before. Oh, for a camera! she thought. That’d soften their cough in West Cork! As they came to the crossroads, she turned to look down the length of O’Connell Street and saw the tall Doric column that stood halfway along with the statue standing proudly on the plinth, its nose in the air so it didn’t have to inhale the stink of the people it lorded over.
“Is that Nelson’s Pillar?” she asked, pointing toward it, and both Smoot and Seán looked around.
“It is,” said Smoot. “How did you know that?”
“It wasn’t a hedgerow school I went to,” she told him. “I can spell my own name too, you know. And count to ten. It’s a fine thing all the same, isn’t it?”
“It’s a load of old stones thrown up to celebrate the Brits winning another battle,” said Smoot, ignoring her sarcasm. “They should send the bastard back to where he came from, if you ask me. It’s been more than twenty years since we achieved independence and still we have a dead man from Norfolk looking down over us, watching our every move.”
“I think he adds a certain splendor to the place,” she said, more to annoy him than anything else.
“Do you now?”
“I do.”
“Good luck to you so.”
She would get no closer to Horatio on this occasion, however, for they were walking in the opposite direction, making their way along Westmoreland Street and past the front gates of Trinity College, where my mother stared at the handsome young men gathered beneath the arch in their smart clothes and felt a twitch of envy in the pit of her stomach. What right did they have to such a place, she wondered, when it would forever be denied to her?
“They’d be a right stuck-up bunch in there, I’d say,” said Seán, following the direction of her eyes. “And all Protestants, of course. Jack, do you know any of the students in there at all?”
“Oh, I know every one of them,” said Smoot. “Sure don’t we all go out for dinner together every night and toast the King and say what a great fella Churchill is.”
My mother could feel a flame of irritation begin to burn inside her. It hadn’t been her idea to share lodgings for a few nights with them, it had been Seán’s, and an act of Christian charity on his part at that, but the plan made, she couldn’t see why Smoot had to be so rude about it. Along up Grafton Street they went anyway before turning right on to Chatham Street and finally to a little red door next to a pub where Smoot removed a brass key from his pocket and turned to look at them.
“There’s no landlord on the premises, thank Christ,” he said. “Mr. Hogan stops by on a Saturday morning for his rent money and I meet him outside and all he ever talks about is the bloody war. He’s up for the Germans. Wants them to make it one-all. The feckin’ eejit thinks that it’d be great justice if the Brits had their backs broken but what would happen next, I say to him, What’s the next country along? We are. We’d all be saluting Hitler by Christmas and goose-stepping down Henry Street with our arms in the air. Not that it’ll come to that though, sure the bloody thing is almost over. Anyway, I pay rent here of three shillings a week,” he added, looking at Catherine, and she took his point without saying anything to acknowledge it. Seven days in a week, that meant five pence a day. Two or three days: fifteen pence. That was only fair, she decided.
“Penny pictures!” called a boy walking down the street with a camera hanging around his neck. “Penny pictures!”
“Seán!” cried my mother, tugging at his arm. “Look at that. A friend of my father’s in Goleen had a camera. Have you ever had your picture taken?”
“I haven’t,” he said.
“Let’s have one now,” she said enthusiastically. “To mark our first day in Dublin.”
“Waste of a penny,” said Smoot.
“I suppose it would be a nice memory,” said Seán, waving the boy over and handing him a penny. “Come on, Jack. You get in it too.”
My mother stood next to Seán but when Smoot came over he elbowed her out of the way and the shutter clicked just as she turned to him in irritation.
“You’ll have it in three days,” said the boy. “What’s the address?”
“Right here,” said Smoot. “You can throw it through the letter box.”
“Do we only get one?” asked my mother.
“They’re a penny each,” said the boy. “If you want a second, it’ll cost you more.”
“One’s grand,” she said, turning away from him as Smoot used the key to let them in.
The staircase was narrow, allowing only one person to ascend at a time, the wallpaper yellow and peeling from the walls on both sides. There was no handrail and as my mother reached for her bag, Seán picked it up and ushered her forward after Smoot.
“Go along between us,” he said. “We couldn’t have you fall and injure the baby.”
She smiled at him gratefully and when she reached the top she entered a small room with a tin bathtub in one corner, a sink and, running along the far wall, the most enormous sofa that my mother had ever seen in her life. How on earth anyone had ever got it up the stairs was a mystery to her. It looked so plump and comfortable that it was all she could do not to collapse into its embrace and pretend that all her adventures of the last twenty-four hours had never happened.
“Well, this is all there is,” said Smoot, looking around with a mixture of pride and awkwardness. “The sink works when it takes the notion but the water is cold and it’s a bitch to fill the bucket and drag it over to the tub anytime you need a wash. If you need the toilet, you may use one of the pubs nearby. Only look as if you’re intending to meet someone in there or they put you out on the street.”
“Are we to have fucks and bastards and bitches all the time, Mr. Smoot?” asked my mother, smiling at him. “I don’t really mind, you understand, but just so that I know what to expect.”
Smoot stared at her. “Do you not like my language, Kitty?” he asked, and her smile faded quickly now.
“Don’t call me that,” she said. “It’s Cathe
rine, if you don’t mind.”
“Well, I’ll try to be more of a gentleman around you if it offends you so much, Kitty. I’ll watch my fucking p’s and q’s now that we have a…” He stopped and made a deliberate nod toward my mother’s belly. “A lady in the house.”
She swallowed, ready to pounce, but what could she do when he was providing a roof over her head?
“It’s a grand place,” said Seán finally, to break the tension. “Very cozy.”
“It is,” said Smoot, smiling at him, and my mother wondered whether there was anything she could do to earn his friendship in the way that Seán obviously had but nothing came to mind.
“Perhaps,” she said eventually, glancing at a half open door in the corner, through which she could see a single bed in the adjoining room, “perhaps this was a mistake. There’s not room for three of us here, is there? Mr. Smoot has his bedroom, and the sofa, Seán, was intended for you, I suppose. It wouldn’t be right for me to deprive you of it.”
Seán stared at the ground and said nothing.
“You can top and tail with me,” said Smoot, looking at Seán, whose face had turned scarlet with embarrassment. “Kitty here can take the sofa.”
The atmosphere in the room became so awkward and uncomfortable that my mother didn’t know what to think. Minutes went by, she told me, and the three of them just standing there in the center of the room, not uttering a word.
“Well then,” she said finally, relieved to have found a sentence lurking somewhere in the back of her mind. “Is anyone hungry at all? I think I have the price of three dinners to say thank you.”
A Journalist, Perhaps
Two weeks later, on the day that news reached Dublin that Adolf Hitler had put a bullet in his head, my mother wandered into a cheap jewelry shop on Coppinger Row and bought herself a wedding ring, a small golden band with a tiny gemstone to ornament it. She still hadn’t moved out of the flat on Chatham Street but had reached a discreet understanding with Jack Smoot, who made his peace with her presence by rarely acknowledging it. To make herself useful, she kept the place clean and used what little money she had to ensure a meal was on the table when they came home from work, for Seán had found a place at Guinness’s after all, although he wasn’t particularly enjoying it.