by Shaun Herron
“W. B. Yeats,” he mumbled. “Bloody old windbag. . . .”
She folded backwards into the sand, McManus between her legs, and couldn’t raise his dead weight.
The driver and two old men from the tour came over the top of the sand and pulled him off the girl.
“Dirty bastard,” the driver shouted, and drew back a vengeful and heavy arm.
“Don’t!” the girl yelled. “He’s sick. He fell. I was trying to keep him from falling. He’s sick!”
“Like hell he’s sick. He had you on your back. He was between. . . .” He seemed to enjoy putting it that way.
“You dirty bastard,” she said surprisingly, and stung the old men to her defense.
“Look at him,” one of them said. “He’s sick. Sweating like a sow.”
They humped him to the coach and laid him out on the back seat. “He needs a doctor,” one of the old men said. Brendine sat on the edge of the seat, holding him on, all the way to Killarney. She got him a room in the tour hotel, saw that his pack was taken to it, and got a porter to call a doctor. Two of the old women came with the doctor to McManus’s room and found Brendine trying to undress him.
“Oh, no no no dear, not you. We’ll do that.” They were gentle, resolute, and unsuccessful.
“You can help me do it. I didn’t know stripping a man was so difficult.”
The doctor who might have been mistaken for a retired farmer said, “You’re the right age to find out,” and gave her a prescription for McManus and the name of a chemist’s shop where she could get it filled. Brendine felt immensely useful and mature.
“We can’t leave him naked,” one of the old ladies said. They were kindly old women. No doubt they had sons.
“I’ll find something.” Brendine went through his pack and found something. She pulled out his pajamas and said nothing about his gun. But when the porter brought his medicine from the chemist’s shop and they had fed McManus some soup and bathed his face and their husbands had come to take them to dinner, firmly they took Brendine with them and left the room key on McManus’s dressing table where she couldn’t get at it again, and saw her to her room after dinner and set up a patrol to see that if she did not stay there at least she did not go back to the sick man’s room. She outwaited them till age outwitted them and they went to sleep.
Through it all, McManus was vaguely present, affected more by a tingling inertia than by any awareness of a dangerous collapse. He accepted their help drowsily and gratefully. He was buried in their midst; shielded by their protective coloring. The American shield, he thought. He would leave it at Bantry, tomorrow. Then he must do something about this flu. When they left he went quickly to sleep. He was awake again and feeling better when Brendine knocked on his door. His watch said midnight.
She closed the door quickly and took charge. “Back to bed,” she ordered, and perched on the end of it. They watched one another with shy curiosity.
She’s playing mother, he decided. And she’s nice looking, with an erongenous face. He’d looked the word up once because somebody used it to describe a married woman they knew, and liked the idea that it really meant a face that made you think of sex. Her brown legs were showing up to the hips. They made him think of sex too.
“That was a funny turn you had today,” she said.
“I haven’t been feeling well. Thank you for your help.” It was very formal, and careful.
“You are a writer, aren’t you?” It was almost an appeal, as if she’d be disappointed if he said no.
He didn’t care about her disappointment. He considered her uses and couldn’t think of any. Tomorrow they’d be in Bantry and he’d leave them. What’s the harm? “Yes,” he said.
“I knew it. The driver thought you were trying to rape me.”
He’d heard how frank these American girls could be, as if words had no value and less effect. Then they slapped your face. “I just fell,” he said. “I was dizzy. Thank you for your help.”
“You said that.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“You’re shy, aren’t you?” she said.
“I suppose so. With girls. I am, yes. I don’t know many. Girls, I mean.”
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know. West. Down near Mizen Head, maybe. Somewhere very quiet.”
“To camp?”
“I was going to, but not now. I’ll have to get rid of this flu.”
“Are you going there to write?”
He’d heard how they asked questions, as if another person was just an information bank. “Yes.”
“What do you write?”
What did he write? He answered on the run, half-enjoying her curiosity. She sounded and looked very young. Her voice was very young. “How old are you?” He expected an evasion.
“Twenty. What do you write?”
He’d heard of their persistence.
“Poetry.”
“Have you any with you?”
“Only in my head.”
“Recite me a poem.” Like a little girl.
He ought to have foreseen that one. Did they read James Stephens in America? He’d heard they preferred Frank O’Connor’s translations from the Gaelic, so Stephens was safer. Which one? “The Coolin”? Very well known. “The Canal Bank”? Not well known.
Shyly he tried “The Canal Bank” on her. He said,
He surprised himself and delighted her. “Marvelous! Wonderfull” She clapped her hands with extravagant enthusiasm. And then, quietly, “If you’re not camping, where will you live?”
“Oh. There are some cottages for rent in the summer down there. The English usually rent them but they’re not coming any more. There’ll be plenty of places.”
“I have to spend all summer over here.”
“In Ireland?”
“In Europe. My parents think it’s good for me.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. It’s going to be.”
“Oh? In what way?” Well, it was a harmless way to spend an hour.
“Why do you carry a gun in your pack?”
It caught him completely off guard. Deliberately or not? Not deliberately, he decided. She had no guile. She simply asked what she wanted to know. He composed his mind carefully. “It’s my father’s,” he said. “Years ago when I was walking . . . sleeping in barns, you know . . . ? a tramp attacked me with a knife . . . I always bring it now. . . .” It was true and far enough from the truth. But it didn’t seem important to her.
“I know. A lot of people do that . . . take guns with them, I mean . . . in the States. I was wondering. . . .”
He was relieved and he waited to hear what she was wondering.
“I was wondering . . .” she said shyly, “. . . I don’t want to travel anymore with these old people. . . .”
“They are a bit old for you.”
“Could I travel with you?” It came out quickly, as if to ensure that it came out at all.
“Travel with me?” That was what she said. That was what he proposed the first time he tried to have sex with a girl. They’d been necking in a meadow and her enthusiasm seemed to promise all sorts of things. “Why don’t we go hiking next weekend and camp out?” he asked her, and she liked that too. So he decided to make a bid for it on the spot.
She bled his nose. “You dirty-minded wee guttersnipe,” she said, and he never ventured again. In a sense his sister became his girl. It was safer; free from possible humiliation and rejection. He was always afraid of rejection. What did this one mean?
“Was that awful?” she said.
“No. No.” He didn’t know what it was but he was thinking hard.
“I mean, young people nowadays . . . you know . . . ? travel together . . . you know the sort of thing? I can cook too. . . . You’re really not well, are you? I have nothing better to do . . . I don’t mean that the way it sounds . . . nothing else to do. . . . These tours I go on . . . you don’t really learn anything with old people, do you . . . ?”
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“But your people? What about . . . ?” They stumbled forward together.
“They’re in Maine, at the cottage there. I’m supposed to be improving myself . . . I could put my bags in the hotel at Bantry . . . I could buy a sleeping bag . . . I can pay my way, you know . . . I wouldn’t keep you from your work and any time you wanted to talk I’d be around . . . you know?”
A young couple in a cottage? Looking very normal? All people cared about was, Can you pay in advance? They could look married; there were always at least two bedrooms? Who’d pay them any heed, and when he felt it was time to make a run for England, she’d be cover. “If you feel all right about it . . . ?”
“Oh, yes. I’d love it.”
“All right. I’d certainly like to have your company.”
“We’ll leave the tour at Bantry, is that it?”
“That’s what I planned.”
“I’m glad we met.”
She put out his light. “We can plan in the morning, on the coach. It’ll be fun.”
In the corridor she thought: I forgot to ask his name, but I handled it very nicely. She wondered what he had in mind. “Are you a virgin, Brendine Healy of Boston?”
Would they? With a poet?
“Whee!” she said aloud, and startled a priest walking too carefully to his room.
He felt even better in the morning, almost cheerful, not alone, not bereft. There was company, free from taint or ill intent. They had breakfast together and he felt the censure in the eyes of the old ladies who watched over Brendine, passed the table, asked her how well she had slept, and did not ask him how well he felt. They’d been on foreign tours before. They’d seen foreign smart-boys after the maidenheads of young American girls before. This one had new tricks and she was falling for them.
“Isolationists,” Brendine said, and sat with him on the coach.
In the hard light of day and the bumping back seat of the coach, McManus sickened and there was no relief in the thought that the girl would be useful to him. He was ill, he was hunted, and he had to lose himself in the southwest, and he had to get to a country doctor who would think no more of him than a vet would think of a sick cow.
When they stopped in Bantry and Brendine went to buy her pack and sleeping bag, McManus said he would wait for her, and rest. He watched her walk down the hill from the tour hotel towards Wolfe Tone Square and the shops, with St. Brendan the Navigator reaching his arms towards the bay. She was taking her hop-skip and giving him the thumbs up. She was nice, fresh, open, and a tremendous relief from the flowering shrews he knew in Ulster, but he couldn’t think about her, couldn’t be burdened by her; hadn’t the energy to be burdened with her.
“I want my stuff,” he told the driver, and hauled it out of the baggage hold, and hoisted it with difficulty on his back, and took his blackthorn stick and walked, as fast and as steadily as he could, out of the town and into the West.
He was sick. The pains were back and the coughing, and the chills, and the sweat. And the fears and the overbearing guilt.
For three days McManus walked his lacerated body and spirit in the West; to Sheep’s Head on the Atlantic where he hadn’t thought of going and didn’t know he was. He knew very little of what he was doing. He scrambled and fell and scrambled and did not break his bones. The wind burned him, the squalls from the ocean washed him. He slept on small beaches and behind dry-stone walls, sometimes on and sometimes under his unerected tent, sometimes in and sometimes on his sleeping bag: coughing, sweating, chilled to the marrow and wandering in his mind and aware now and then with a frightening but helpless clarity that he was very ill.
Asleep and awake Maureen was in his mind, drifting free and beyond reach or tormented and terrified and beyond his power to control; his father wailed and lamented, his mother comforted and accused; and his demented guilt built within him till his screaming woke him and he saw a farmer and his wife bent over his pack, going through its contents. The man had the gun in his hand. He dropped it and ran, shoving his frightened wife before him. McManus repacked with the police in his fears and shambled away.
There was nothing in his mind now but the guilt of his sister’s death and his parents’ anguish. With fearful imaginings and fevered distortions, the long sequence of events rehearsed themselves in his mind, from the day he went to the Falls until he heard his father’s demented wail and his mother’s desperate strength on the phone. He was talking to his mother, begging her forgiveness, when he walked into the half-door of a cottage and fell across it. His pack shifted sideways and he hung over the door, too weak to get up.
He heard the distant voice, “Merciful God, you’re dying, child,” and felt the arms drawing his floating body through the air; he was lying now on a soft warm cloud, a warm wet cloud, and there was a drifting face above him, muttering, with glasses and monstrous eyes that grew like starfish and shrank; enormous hands reached at his face and blotted out the day, trying to smother him and he couldn’t wrench his head from them or move his hot, wet, leaden body. “Maureen, Maureen,” boomed in his head and all things ended and returned. Two faces now, moving and merging, and a voice that writhed in the air like a flying whip, “Pour it into him,” and there was no strength for his defense and no more will. Poor Maureen. Maureen. She was at the Parkers’ back door; she was sprawling on the street red and riddled; she was calling him to help her. He ran, and flew and floated and was always out of reach, too far to help her. He gave himself up. . . . What right had he to live . . . ? It was his blame and guilt that Maureen died. . . . He consented to his own death, gratefully, and sank away gently, into the cold, wet, enveloping mass.
NINE
POWERS went up to bed, but not to sleep. He needed something pleasant in his mind to keep Clune out of it. When he sank into a half-sleep he could not control the things that crawled, crept, and leapt into his head; half-dreams and terrors, and all with Clune in them: Clune with that menacing eye patch, snarling at him from behind a kitchen table, Clune orating in a roomful of men, and the words in his mouth like long tangles of seaweed which he used as whips to beat Powers’ face. Powers firing at Clune and all that came out of his gun was a thin water-spray, Clune firing at Powers and all that came out of his gun were leaping frogs that clung slimily round Powers’ neck and filled him with clawing, horrified disgust. And people laughing, in a strange way, a coming-and-going sound like an ebb tide over pebbles.
He tossed himself up out of it, half-rising, wide awake. Callaghan was standing by his own cot, in his shirt and shorts and socks, staring down at him. “What’s up w’you?” he said.
“Nothin. Put out the light.”
And for Christ’s sake, thinka some thin pleasant. Like Maureen McManus? She’ll do.
He spent a lot of waiting and waking time on women-fantasies. Now that he looked back on it, Maureen wasn’t all that much. As a matter of fact, she was a bit of a bloody nuisance. He’d have got a lot more out of it if he hadn’t had to waste so much time and energy keeping her down and getting into her. Getting at her was awkward.
Still, he got in and he could feel it. It wasn’t bad. No picture in the head of Maureen white in the water, her long hair floating away; only Maureen spread, her face distorted, her teeth bared, and her fists clenched, as he rolled off her. Not much hair on it, either. He liked hair. Next?
Yes. It was a pity about the one from the Malone Road he met in the Europa Bar the night before they blew it up. Middle-aged, plain, expensive clothes. Alone and willing to talk; husband on a business trip across the water in England, she said: Can I drop you anywhere? she said. Up Divis, for God’s sake, on the green grass was where she dropped him. He went over the details—this was better than Clune—re-enacting them. The way she laughed when he put her on the grass and no no no-ed when he was pulling off her knickers. Don’t, laughing and pushing weakly: I’m a married woman. She couldn’t have stopped him with a bulldozer, the state he was in. I’m cross with you, she said laughing, don’t put it in and whoof!
Who fucked who? Jasus! And after, her cryin and saying that was rape that was rape that was rape and I suppose now that you’ve raped me once, you’ll do it again? You wild animal. The things she called him as if she liked the sound and feel of them: You stallion, you bloody timber wolf, you big bull. . . . And, I’m afraid to go into the empty house. The least you can do is see me safe inside and then, with a bottle, pouring: I suppose now that you’re in you’ll tear every stitch off me and rape me on the bed. Six in the mornin, when he was tryin to leave, in the porch, without a stitch on her: If you’re going to rape me again before you run off have the decency to do it on the couch, not on the porch floor . . . Jasus!
It was a pity. He could have done with more of that one. Get out of my house, she said, get out, get out, I suppose you’re in the Europa often? I’ll be there the morrow night, he said. That was a laugh! So was she, with her head under a big hunk of ceilin. She smelled nice too.
Still, she was gone. Did her husband ever wonder what the hell she was doin dead in the Europa Bar? He got up quietly and took his clothes downstairs. The key was in his pocket and Mary Connors was in number twenty-five. It was one o’clock. He’d be back for Callaghan at six to get the bus for Strabane and the Border. Mary had an oul alarm clock that never failed.
She was asleep. The light didn’t wake her. Her room smelled of paint. White paint. She’d done the job herself and the window was closed. He opened it. That smell would make you sick and he didn’t come here to be sick. White was better than the dark brown and piss-house green in all the other houses around here, but those colored pictures of the country she’d cut out of magazines and stuck on pasteboard backs—what’d she want them for? Dropping his boots didn’t wake her. When he was naked he pulled down the bedclothes. That didn’t wake her. No nightie. She slept with her mouth open. So did Callaghan, breathing a kind of haugh-haugh-shhhooo-phhhooo sound. Mary’s head was on its side, a wet patch on the pillow by her mouth, where she dribbled. Great diddies. Great rump. Good strong thighs she knew how to use. So she should; who taught her after her man died? Not as white as Maureen; thicker; more muscle than the woman from Malone. That one’s thighs flapped about a bit. He flicked a pubic hair out of Mary Connors. She jerked, opened her eyes, and whooping whipped her strong legs over the edge of the bed and round his. He fell on her. Maureen and the woman from Malone were destroyed altogether and their remains beaten through the bed.