The Collected Stories

by John McGahern

  ‘I should have known better than to trust a homeboy,’ Moran said when he came back. ‘Not only did you do me out of the pound but you go and insult the woman and her dead son. You’re going to make quick time back to where you came from, my tulip.’ Moran stirred the airplane with his boot as if he wished to kick it but dared not out of respect for the money it had cost.

  ‘Well, you’ll have a good flight in it this Christmas.’

  The two-hour bell went for Midnight Mass, and as Moran hurried for the pub to get drinks before Mass, Mrs Moran started to strip the windows of curtains and to set a single candle to burn in each window. Later, as we made our way to the church, candles burned in the windows of all the houses and the church was ablaze with light. I was ashamed of the small old woman, afraid they’d identify me with her as we walked up between the crowded benches to where a steward directed us to a seat in the women’s side-altar. In the smell of burning wax and flowers and damp stone, I got out the brown beads and the black prayerbook with the gold cross on the cover they’d given me in the Home and began to prepare for the hours of boredom Midnight Mass meant. It did not turn out that way.

  A drunken policeman, Guard Mullins, had slipped past the stewards on guard at the door and into the women’s sidechapel. As Mass began he started to tell the schoolteacher’s wife how available her arse had been for handling while she’d worked in the bar before assuming the fur coat of respectability, ‘And now, O Lordy me, a prize rose garden wouldn’t get a luk in edgeways with its grandeur.’ The stewards had a hurried consultation whether to eject him or not and decided it’d probably cause less scandal to leave him as he was. He quietened into a drunken stupor until the Monsignor climbed into the pulpit to begin his annual hour of the season of peace and glad tidings. As soon as he began, ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. This Christmas, my dearly beloved children in Christ, I wish …’ Mullins woke to applaud with a hearty, ‘Hear, hear. I couldn’t approve more. You’re a man after my own heart. Down with the hypocrites!’ The Monsignor looked towards the policeman and then at the stewards, but as he was greeted by another, ‘Hear, hear!’ he closed his notes and in a voice of acid wished everybody a holy and happy Christmas and climbed angrily from the pulpit to conclude the shortest Midnight Mass the church had ever known. It was not, though, the end of the entertainment. As the communicants came from the rails Mullins singled out the tax collector, who walked down the aisle with closed, bowed head, and hands rigidly joined, to shout, ‘There’s the biggest hypocrite in the parish,’ which delighted almost everybody.

  As I went past the lighted candles in the window, I thought of Mullins as my friend and for the first time felt proud to be a ward of state. I avoided Moran and his wife, and from the attic I listened with glee to them criticizing Mullins. When the voices died I came quietly down to take a box of matches and the airplane and go to the jennet’s stable. I gathered dry straw in a heap, and as I lit it and the smoke rose the jennet gave his human squeal until I untied him and he was able to put his nostrils in the thick of the smoke. By the light of the burning straw I put the blue and white toy against the wall and started to kick. With each kick I gave a new sweetness was injected into my blood. For such a pretty toy it took few kicks to reduce it to shapelessness, and then, in the last flames of the straw, I flattened it on the stable floor, the jennet already nosing me to put more straw on the dying fire.

  As I quietened, I was glad that I’d torn up the unopened letter in the train that I was supposed to have given to Moran. I felt a new life had already started to grow out of the ashes, out of the stupidity of human wishes.

  Hearts of Oak and Bellies of Brass

  ‘If Jocko comes today I’ll warm his arse for this once.’ Murphy laughed fiercely. The hair on the powerful arms that held the sledge was smeared to the skin with a paste of dust and oil. The small blue eyes twinkled in the leather of the face as they searched for the effect of what he’d said. There was always the tension he might break loose from behind the mixer with the sledge, or, if he didn’t, that someone else would, with shovel or with sledge.

  ‘A disgrace, worse than an animal,’ Keegan echoed. He wore a brown hat that stank with sweat and dust over his bald head. Keegan was very proud he had a second cousin who was a schoolmaster in Mohill.

  ‘I want to be at no coroner’s inquest on his head,’ Murphy said and started to beat the back of the steel hopper out of boredom as the engine idled over.

  Jocko came every day, crazed on meths and rough cider, and usually made straight for the pool of shade and water under the mixer.

  ‘He’d be just a ham sandwich if you brought down the hopper with him lying there and we’d all be in the fukken soup,’ Murphy continued.

  ‘Likes of him coming on the site anyhow would give it a bad name in no time,’ Keegan tiraded, while Galway rested on his shovel, watching the breasts of the machinists lean above their sewing in the third-floor windows of Rose and Margols, gown manufacturers on Christian Street. Galway was youngest of us all. I’d worked the whole of the hot summer with Galway and Keegan behind the mixer Murphy drove like some royal ape, and in the last two weeks Jocko had come every day. The mixer idled away. On the roof they were changing the bays.

  ‘Talkin’ about given the site a bad name, the way you came in this morning was disgrace to the livin’ daylight,’ Keegan said to me.

  ‘I wouldn’t lose any sleep about it if I were you.’ My grip tightened on the handle of the shovel, its blade was silver-sharp from a summer of gravel and of sand.

  ‘I come in with a decent jacket and tie, and then I change. I don’t come in with work clothes on. If people see you looking like shit they’ll take you for shit. I don’t know and I don’t care what the king of the monkeys wears but we who are Irish should always be tidy when we sit down to tea,’ he quoted in support from a forgotten schoolbook.

  ‘You and your fucking monkeys,’ I said. I kept a tight grip on the shovel as I remembered the lightning change of the face from its ordinary foolishness to viciousness when in horseplay Galway had knocked off the hat to betray the baldness. The blade of Keegan’s shovel just missed Galway’s throat.

  ‘King of the fukken monkeys,’ Galway guffawed as a breast leaned out of sight above her machine, but before Keegan’s attack had time to change to Galway, Barney whistled from the scaffolding rail on the roof. The bay was ready. The mixer, in smoke and stink of diesel, roared in gear.

  ‘Come on: shovel or shite, shite or burst,’ Murphy shouted above the roar.

  The shovels drove and threw in time into the long wooden box, tipped by handles at each end into the steel hopper when full, two boxes of gravel to the one of sand, and as the sand was tipped on the gravel Keegan came running from the stack with a cement bag on his shoulder to throw it down on top. Galway’s shovel cut the bag in two and the grey cloud of fallout drifted away as the ends were pulled free.

  The hopper rose. We could rest on shovels for this minute. When it stopped Murphy took the sledge to beat the back of the hopper, and the last of the sticking sand or gravel ran into the revolving drum where the water sloshed against the blades.

  As he hammered he shouted in time, ‘Our fukker who art in heaven bought his boots for nine-and-eleven,’ the back of the hopper bright as beaten silver in the sun.

  As the hopper came down again he shouted in the same time, ‘Shovel or shite, shite or burst,’ and the shovels mechanically drove and threw, two boxes of gravel to one of sand, and the grey fallout from the hundredweight of cement as the bag was cut in two, and the ends pulled free. It’d go on like this all day.

  Murphy ran the mixed concrete from the drum down a shoot into a metal bucket. With a whine of the lift engine the bucket rose to Sligo, a red-faced old man with a cap worn back to front, who tipped it into a cylindrical metal container fixed to the scaffolding, and then ran the bucket down again. The barrows were filled from a trapdoor in the container, and they ran on planks to toss the conc
rete on the steel in the bays. The best of the roof on a hot day was that wind blew from the Thames.

  In the boredom of the shovelfuls falling in time into the wooden box I go over my first day on the site a summer before.

  They’d said to roll my jacket in the gutter before I went in, and when I got on the site to ask for the shout.

  ‘Who has the shout here?’ I asked. They pointed Barney out. He wore the same black mourning suit in wellingtons that he now leaned in against the scaffolding rail, watching the concreting on the roof, the black tie hanging loose from the collar of the dirty white shirt.

  ‘Any chance of a start?’ I asked.

  His eyes went over me – shoulders, arms, thighs. I remembered my father’s cattle I had stood for sale in the Shambles once, walking stick along the backbone to gauge the rump, lips pulled back to read the teeth; but now I was offering to shovel for certain shillings an hour: shovel or shite, shite or burst.

  ‘Have you ever done any building work before?’ Barney had asked.

  ‘No, but I’ve worked on land.’ They’d said not to lie.

  ‘What kind of work?’

  ‘The usual – turf, oats, potatoes.’

  ‘You’ve just come over on the boat, then?’

  ‘Yesterday … and I heard you might give me the start.’

  ‘Start at twelve, then,’ he said in his slow way and pointed to the wooden hut that was the office. ‘They’ll give you the address of the Labour. Get back with your cards before twelve.’

  There was no boredom those first days, though time was slower and there was more pain, drive to push the shovel in blistered hands with raw knee in the same time as the others, a shovel slyly jabbed against a thigh as if you’ve stumbled, and the taunt, ‘Too much wankin’ that’s what’s wrong,’ in the way fowl will peck to death a weakened hen; fear of Thursday, Barney’s tap on the shoulder. ‘You’re not strong enough for this job. You’ll have to look for something lighter for yourself. Your cards’ll be ready in the office at payout.’

  No fear of the tap on the shoulder on this or any Thursday now, shut mouth and patience and the hardening of the body. My shovel drove and threw as mechanically as any of theirs by now.

  ‘What time is it?’ I asked Keegan. He fumbled in his pocket for the big silver watch wrapped in cloth to protect it against the dust. He read the time.

  ‘Another fukken twenty minutes to go,’ Galway said in the exasperation of the burden of the slow passing of the minutes, a coin for each endured minute.

  ‘Another fukken twenty minutes,’ I repeated, the repetitious use of fukken with every simple phrase was harsh at first but now a habit. Its omission here would cause as much unease as its use where ‘Very kind. Thank you, Mr Jones’ was demanded.

  ‘There’s no fukken future in this job,’ Keegan complained tiredly. ‘You get old. The work is the same, but you’re less able for it any more. In other jobs as you get old you can put the work over on others.’

  ‘No sign of Jocko yet.’ Galway tried to change to Murphy. Galway wore a white handkerchief knotted at both ends to keep the dust out of his Brylcreemed black hair.

  ‘I’ll give him his future when he comes,’ Murphy said as he sledged the back of the hopper.

  ‘The childer go to school and they’ll have better than me,’ Keegan kept on at what was felt as nagging rebuke. ‘They’ll have some ambition. That’s why I work behind this bloody mixer and the woman chars. So that they can go to school. They’ll have some ambition. They’ll wear white collars.’

  ‘Pork chops, pints of bitter, and a good old ride before you sleep, that’s fukken ambition,’ Murphy left off sledging to shout, and when he finished he laughed above the mixer.

  ‘That’s right,’ Galway agreed. ‘Come on, Keegan: shovel.’

  ‘I’ll shovel with a jumped-up brat any day,’ Keegan answered with the same antagonism, but fell behind, sweat running down from under the hat.

  ‘Shovel or shite, shite or burst,’ Murphy trumpeted as he saw the competition, and then at last the hooter blew.

  We passed the Negro demolition crew as we went to the canteen, the wood from the houses burning fiercely behind the bulldozer. On the roof two Negroes hacked away slates with pickaxes. The prostitutes lived in the condemned row, moving from empty house to empty house ahead of the demolition. Limp rubbers floated in the gutters Monday mornings while they slept in the daylight.

  Through the hatch in the canteen Marge handed out ham or tomato rolls and mugs of tea.

  ‘Ta ta, Pa,’ she said as I gave her coins. This had been hardest of all to get used to, to have no name at all easier than to be endlessly called Pa.

  ‘Thanks, Marge.’ It angered me that there was still the bitterness of irony in my smile, that I was not yet completely my situation; this ambition of mine, in reverse, to annul all the votes in myself.

  I sat with the rest of the mixer gang at a trestle table. Behind us the chippies played cards. The enmity glowed sullenly between Galway and Keegan, but Galway ate his rolls and gulped tea without lifting his head from the racing paper, where he marked his fancies with a stub of pencil.

  I read aloud out of the local Herald my mother sent me each week from home that prayers had been ordered in all the churches in Ireland for good weather. It had rained all summer, and now the harvest was in danger.

  ‘That it may rise higher than for fukken Noah. That they may have to climb trees,’ Murphy answered, laughing, vicious.

  ‘They never did much for us except to starve us out to England. You have to have the pull there or you’re dirt,’ Keegan advanced.

  The familiar tirade would continue, predictable as the drive and throw of their shovels. I went outside to sit on a stack of steel in the sun until the hooter blew, but even there it wasn’t possible to be alone, for Tipperary followed to sit too on the steel. He’d been taken away to the Christian Brothers when he was eleven but hadn’t been able to pass the exams that would have qualified him as a teacher, and when they put him to work in the kitchens he’d left and come to England. He fixed steel in the bays. The cheeks were hollow, infantile puzzlement on the regular face from which sensuality, if it had ever been there, had withered.

  ‘Do you think Shakespeare’s all he’s bumped up to be?’ he asked.

  He’d heard that I had gone two years to Secondary School, and he believed that we could speak as one educated man to another. He was sometimes called the Professor, and baited mercilessly, though there was a purity in his dogged stupidity that troubled them towards a certain respect. His attention made me uncomfortable. I had no desire to be one of his thieves at these occasional crucifixions, or to play Judas for them to his Christ.

  I told him that I didn’t know if Shakespeare was all that he was bumped up to be, but people said so, and it was people who did all the bumping up or bumping down.

  ‘But who is people?’ he pursued.

  ‘People is people. They praise Shakespeare. Pull your beer. Give you the start. They might even be ourselves.’ I laughed, and watched the door of the canteen, and listened for the hooter, and longed to hurt him away. He touched something deeper than my careful neutrality. I hadn’t any wish to live by anything deeper.

  ‘And do you consider George Bernard Shaw all that he’s bumped up to be?’ he asked, perhaps puzzling over his failure to answer satisfactorily the questions put to him at exams before they’d sent him to the kitchens.

  ‘I know nothing about George Bernard.’ I got up off the steel.

  ‘But you went to Secondary School?’

  ‘For two years.’

  ‘But why didn’t you go on? You passed the exams.’

  ‘Forget it. I didn’t go on.’ I was disturbed and hated Tipperary for the disturbance.

  ‘But why, you’d have learned things. You’d have learned whether things are what they’re bumped up to be or not.’

  ‘I’d have learned nothing. I might have got a better job but my ambition is wrong way round anyhow. Almost a
s good behind the mixer as anywhere else.’

  While Tipperary meditated another question there was a motionless silence between us on the stack of rusted steel in the sun.

  ‘Murphy says he’s going to do Jocko if he comes today,’ I changed.

  ‘Sligo has some plans, too, up top,’ he answered slowly. ‘It’s not fair.’

  ‘It’ll happen though – if he comes.’

  The hooter blew. Nobody came from the canteen. They’d sit there till Barney stormed in. ‘Come on. You don’t get paid sittin’ on your arses five minutes after the hooter’s gone. Come on. Out.’

  ‘How’s it going, Paddy Boy?’ the lorry driver asked as he got me to sign for the load of gravel he’d tipped behind the mixer.

  ‘Dragging along,’ I answered as I scrawled a few illegible letters on the docket; it never mattered who signed.

  ‘Keep it going, that’s it.’ He touched my shoulder before turning to shout a few friendly obscenities at Murphy who’d started the mixer.

  The heat grew worse. Jocko didn’t come. Nobody spoke much. Even on Galway’s face the sweat streaked the white coating of cement dust.

  ‘Anyone volunteer to go for lemonade?’ Keegan asked when more than an hour had gone. I said I’d go to Greenbaum’s; it was some minutes escape from the din of the engines and diesel and dust in the airless heat.

  ‘Walkin’ kills me these days.’ Keegan was grateful.

  I went through the gap in the split stakes linked with wire into Hessell Street, green and red peppers among the parsley and fruit of the stalls. It smelled of lice and blood and fowl, down and feathers stamped into the blood and henshit outside the Jewish poulterers, country air after the dust of the mixer.

  ‘Six Tizers,’ I asked Greenbaum, old grey Jew out of Poland. ‘Put them on the slate.’

  ‘Everything on the slate and then one day you jack and go and Greenbaum is left with the baby.’

  ‘You’ll get paid. Today is payday.’