Grace

by Paul Lynch

  Of a sudden she is inside the eating shop and stands before a table near the door, her hand held out, the air sauced with smell and heat and she hears herself saying, just a morsel, your honor, just a little piece. An aproned man hurries towards her and roughs her out the door. Get your hands off me, mister. There is nothing in Bart’s look and yet how she hates the sight of him when he helps her up off the street. She grabs the bottle out of his armpit and uncorks it and puts it to her mouth and drinks. Bart grabs the bottle off her and his mouth opens to shout but by now the drink is sliding its blade down her throat.

  Bart shouts, what kind of fool are you? We can’t sell it if you drink it. And anyhow, what fool drinks on an empty stomach?

  Colly says, fuck him telling us what to do.

  This coughing-hot strangeness and her stomach is shouting. Everything tingles and burns.

  Bart holds her with a maddened look. Then he puts the bottle to his lips and drinks. What in the fuck? he says. I think this might be rum.

  Colly says, go on, give me a drink.

  She thinks, this is way better than baccy.

  Bart grabs the bottle off her and takes a longer sup.

  She feels the rush of some great and sudden giddiness, wants to laugh at the world, wants to laugh at Bart’s face, this sad way he has of looking at her. She says, aren’t we some trio of filthy magpies. She pokes out her elbows and lets roll a magpie’s rattle that dilates into cackling laughter. Bart narrows her with a look and then takes another sup from the bottle. What trio? he says. There’s only the two of us.

  She watches some man dawdle a moment to watch their commotion and shouts at him to fuck off, mister nosy-face. She says to Bart, did you ever consider card tricks? Her laugh is riotous. Colly has started to sing and she hasn’t a notion where he has gotten his strange rhyme from.

  Diddley-aye-de-don,

  Wee John went to bed with his breeches on.

  Diddley-aye-de-doff,

  Wasn’t it big Mary in the bed took ’em off.

  What in the hell is up with you? Bart says. He makes a grab for the bottle and wrestles it off her. She watches him eyeing her without blinking as he takes another long drink. She leans against the wall and studies Bart and thinks, I am sick of all this, sick of the rain and sick of the city and I am sick of his stupid face.

  She shouts out, I want to go home.

  Bart’s face reddens and he roars out, what is wrong with you? You are always in a strop.

  I mean what I say. I am sick of all this. I am going to go home tomorrow and there’s nothing you can do about it.

  How are you going to go home tomorrow, the condition you are in?

  I don’t care what you think. I am done with all this.

  She is aware of the shapes of men and women gathering with laughing mouths to watch.

  Bart says, keep your voice down. Listen, I will take you home.

  It’s no longer any of your business.

  Yes it is.

  No it’s not.

  Listen. I want to go north anyhow, go back to Galway. There’s more luck to be had there. I know some people. He leans forward and whispers. Why don’t we try and get some money here first. Then take a car northwards.

  Would you listen to yourself. We are here since forever and have nothing to show for it except wet-cold and hunger and today you nearly got us dead. I am sick of it. I am sick of the sight of you. Get away from me with your stupid arm. Get away from me, I said.

  She turns towards some stranger and points at Bart. Tell him to leave me alone.

  Calm down, Grace.

  The man steps forward and says to Bart, this young woman says to leave off, maybe you should leave her.

  Bart pulls his knife and waves it. How about I chat with you instead?

  She steps between the man and the knife and shouts into Bart’s face.

  I don’t love you.

  The way of Bart now and how she will never forget, so very still and something awful happening to his eyes as if a soul in a body could collapse, the way his mouth puckers a wordless hole and then behind him some stranger laughs. Of a sudden Bart pulls her forward into a kiss and she meets the strange taste of his mouth and a voice from her innermost shouts until she pushes Bart and strikes his jaw with her fist.

  She shouts, I told you to fuck off.

  She tries to shake the hurt out of her hand.

  Encircling laughter fills up her ears and Bart useless before her.

  Her body and her shadow coming apart as she takes flight down the street.

  She sidles into the reeking chat-laughter of men outside the taverns, Colly letting loose one of his bawdy songs or a good yarn learned from McNutt, watches them laugh with her. Lets the smiling men buy her drink. Watching all the while for Bart, who follows like some stray dog, his face grown long and silent watching from the shadows. She points him out to other men, watches their mouths wag with laughter. She thinks, it is good this power you can have over another, like a hand closing over a fist. Later, when she turns to laugh at him, he is gone.

  Into the night and how the world becomes strangeness, everything inwarding to thought. She is sad-happy. She thinks she is the best-ever of herself. Colly roaring his head off, then singing a song along with two strange men and she does not know where they have come from. She is amazed at her own voice. Men whisper and walk with her and ask where are you from, who are you now, would you like me to walk with you? She humors some of them and waves the knife at others and then she is walking the docks and who is that but Mary Bresher warming her hands over a barrel fire.

  Grace says, I thought you had given up following me.

  Mary Bresher says, I am not following you—who would follow you, the show you are making of yourself.

  You sound like my mother.

  Your mother would not know you.

  I’ll tell you what. Go away and fuck yourself. I am sick of your little hauntings.

  Colly roaring for some tobacco and here is that fellow from earlier offering her a light and she walks with him, hears her own words as if another were speaking them, finds herself in a doorway with this same fellow and he offers her a bottle and she takes it and he is trying to kiss at her neck and she finds his hand between her legs and does not mind it. Time folding light into dark and of a sudden she is staring at her vomit all over the man’s feet and he is roaring at her and she is coming at him with the knife and he is gone, what is the city and what is the night, and you must lie down here, lie down in this corner, so colding, so colding.

  This murmuring city and then her eyelids open. Oh! Oh! She sees two low slum buildings and the sky between them blowing cold upon cold. Her mouth is turf and her head spaded. This everything-hurts-all-over. Oh! Oh! Oh! She is shocked to see blue fingers, pulls her fingers into fists and tightens her shivering arms about herself. Colly says, hey, muc, are you awake? She cannot listen, this dry-brains head and this pain beyond terrible. Are you listening, muc, I’m trying to tell you. It is then she realizes she has no cloak. She comes upright with a sudden alertness, leans crookedly against the doorway and tries to see about her feet. Colly!

  Two street cleaners with a swaying pushcart go past her heaving a smell of human waste. The eyes of one ask if she is all right and her eyes study him as if he were the taker of her cloak but he is just some street cleaner, some old simpleton washed in dirt. She turns and stares at this doorway she slept in, this doorway that put her out of her own feeling, this doorway that stole her cloak. The city is cold and the sky is a barren country. She wants to punch the screaming gulls. Thinks, what have you done to yourself, your feet covered in vomity drink and everything stinks of piss.

  She does not see the city as she walks but stares into the puzzle of herself, searches her mind for a story of the night but there is nothing but dark. How hunger has come ravenous and this eating cold and she begins to see the night as if in fragments from a dream.

  Bart!

  He has not returned to their room. She bends
to a woman slumped by the edge of an unlit fireplace and asks if he has been seen. The woman lets out a long breath as if it were the last of her ghost. Outside and she washes her face with icy water from a tap and a boy tries to charge her until Colly runs him off.

  Listen, muc, he says, forget that citty-armed cunt altogether, we are better off without his bad luck.

  And yet she walks the city until footsore. This strange feeling that has come upon her. Seeing his boxy shoulders and march-step in every man who is another. And so what if you have become a sleeve puller like everybody else, things are different now and that’s the way of it but things can also get better and so they will. She cadges tobacco from an old sailor with tarry fingers and fishy women tattooed on his arms. His watery wrinkled eyes surmise her head to toe. He asks if he can walk with her but Colly tells him to fuck off. She dulls the hunger with smoke, watches some fellow falling under the kicks of two constables and being dragged to standing and she wishes he were Bart because at least then you would have found him.

  Day into night and night into day and she thinks she has walked every road in the city, the factory smoke becoming one with the morning’s mist that creeps in over the river and how can you see who is Bart now and who isn’t? She thinks, this is what life is, a great unseeing, the people who took your cloak gone into mist and the people you care about gone into mist and yet you go about living as if you could see everything.

  She is struck by a feeling that Bart has taken the north road to Galway without her. This hunger worse now and she pulls at the sleeves of fine-looking men asking for a coin and Colly is rattling her ear with strange talk—bada bada, he says, let’s go into that bread shop and rob it, bada bada, let’s rob that young fella selling rats on a string.

  How hunger wolfs through the body after so much walking. You must do what you can and who cares if they hang you. She climbs through the back window of a house in Newtown brazen as the day, comes face-to-face with a child in a high chair, Colly making faces at the baby as she whispers the milky bread out of his hand, hears footfall in the hall, climbs back out again. A breathless dash towards the high wall. Colly shouting, you stupid bitch, you should have grabbed something to sell.

  She thinks, you should have grabbed a cloak.

  She offers to hold horses for money. Does not count the hours in the room but lies turning through cold and the sound of coughing, listens to the heavy steps of some old man fumbling through the crawl space and along the wall, looks up and sees it is Bart. Even in this half-light she can see he has been undone, his face bloodied, his feet barefoot, and his body without cloak or waistcoat, his knife and scabbard missing. A knife-fight cut into his arm, cut into his shirt stained with blood. He does not look at her but drops like a rag at the wall opposite, curls himself in silence. She goes to him—Oh! Oh!—and he is shivering and she puts her arms around his shoulders.

  Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

  So out of this cursed city. The rain and the outlands whispering together some old talk that is the story of the world, both everything and nothing. Now they are road walkers the same as every other. Walking with a wanty hand held out. She watches how the winter light traps upon all things a film of wet that gives the earth a barren luster. All that is greenworld passing to its dying color.

  They stand in a ditch to let a mudded mail coach come shuddering past them, Bart holding on to her elbow.

  She knows this business of walking northwards is a gamble. Every rood of countryside is picked clean. The pipe in her pocket a gawping mouth and yet Colly keeps going on about a smoke.

  Tappy-tap-tap, tappy-tap-tap, listen up, muc, we should at least put smoke in our bellies to tamp down the hunger.

  There are others on the road but why would you look at them, she thinks. They hardly look at you and anyhow haven’t you enough to keep you busy. There is Bart, for instance. He walks with rags tied to his feet and hardly speaks and when he does his voice is a scratch above whisper. He walks like a man who has given up, she thinks, like a man fondling some downwarding thought. His eyes have become like Sarah’s, like that of the unseeing ox. Or perhaps he is just thinking himself forward step by step, his teeth set, his eyes staring into the far-off as if to unthink himself into will. Yet he cannot keep up.

  Colly says, I think he is starting to tremble—that is what the cold will do, it eats into you until it has you all over and then you get the sickness.

  Every so often she must stop and wait while Colly shoos at Bart as if he were cattle—hup! hup!

  Bart will not meet her eye.

  She whispers to Colly, it is as if he has left some part of himself in the city.

  Colly says, he might have forgotten his shadow—look at the road, the shadow he throws is that of a small dog.

  She wants to know what happened to Bart in Limerick but every time she asks he waves his hand as if it were some small bother. She asks him again and again, was it the deaf boy and his friend? One of the street gangs?

  Twice today he has said that nothing is the matter. He whispers about people in Galway who will help them. Some fellow who owes him a favor. Says, Galway is only a horse-leap away. We will go there and get fed and rested and then I will take you to your people in Donegal.

  They have tunneled through dark into this town called Ennis. Scavengers on the streets like stunned crows. The town watched over by buildings that might be flour mills. She thinks she will always remember the look of the fever hospital, the fright-shapes in the dark by the gates waiting to get in. Bart stops and leans out of breath against a wall. They find a place to sleep on the edge of town, some old forge, she thinks, though it might have been a baker’s once. There are other rough sleepers who speak in coughs. It is the longest night she can remember. The wind now trying to fashion some tuneless song and Bart’s breathing is not wrong but it is not right either. She tries to hold him and keep him warm but he won’t let her, twists like a younger in her arms, his body inwarding towards sickness, she thinks. She lies listening for signs of fever. Bart turning away. She stirs from a dreamy thought, how she can see herself walking the road northwards without the leaning weight of Bart. Then she thinks, but you would hear in every lone step the sound of his coughing.

  Today the wind smells of winter and raggy old women. Colly says, that crock-arm kept robbing my heat all night. She wanders the streets of Ennis town and sees how every space has a hand hanging out. There are people here who beg the beggars. Two beggars size upon her when she takes a corner and seeks charity. She finds a rusted tin on a rubbish heap and does a handstand against a shuttered shop, puts the tin out. The sky becomes the street’s filth and the ground becomes sky-puddle. Colly singing some song and she thinks of the strangeness of the world when seen from upside down, if only for a moment the world could be like this, perfectly reversed, how their money would fall from their pockets and their baskets would toss out their food and their jewelry would leap from their windows and you could walk the streets and pick what you like and you would be nobody’s fool.

  Twice today Bart has stopped and refused to walk onwards. His head hangs with exhaustion. This road ever-long and every townland in shush. The ditches whispering for some morsel of food or for a swallow of water. She thinks, there is a gap widening between the luckless and the lucked. Heaven for sure is coming down to meet the earth.

  It is the lucked who prize open the road’s silence. Carriages thunder the road as if nothing were the matter. People passing by on their way to the city or for ship’s passage, some of them dressed in their best clothes as if traveling to mass or a fair. Their belongings heaped and roped down. She wants to shout, the city is a trick—you think you can hide on its streets and escape this wintering but the city will eat you up. At least in the country the wintering sits on the road plain as daylight and you know where you are at. She stands with her hand held out watching such passing faces for some sign of witness but each is as blinkered as a horse.

  Here and there in so casual a manner they come upon a
body. Death harrows the silence and speaks as loudly as it wants. Every dead person wants to tell you the same thing, she thinks, that you think what has happened to me will not happen to you—

  Bart is walking with his head down and does not seem to notice.

  Colly says, the souls of the dead must be in great turmoil, for when you think about it, all a body wants is a shovel and some earth and some peace and quiet but they have been denied all that, have been left out for the birds and the badgers and whatever else as if they were wild animals, and when you think about it, the only thing that separates us from the animals is that we look after our dead and bury them, so it is understandable the dead would be annoyed—what is the world coming to when we let them parade about the place, it is the end of the world for sure.

  They stand in the yard of an abandoned farmhouse that shapes its gloom over a barren garden, a feeling of emptiness like presence. She wonders why an elm has had its bark stripped to head height and sees another just like it. Colly says, this was a house of tree eaters, I told you this was going on. For a moment she can imagine them, strange creatures with long arms like that drawing one time passed around in school that showed a monkey-man wearing a stovepipe hat and a jacket and breeches that was supposed to be an Irishman talking to some Englishman, long teeth for nibbling.

  She says to Bart, wait there a moment, points her knife and steps slowly into the house.

  Wah! Colly says, that smell—this place stinks of bird cac.

  Greasy daylight through the window and spatters of bird shit all over the walls and floor. The house two-roomed, emptied out but for the remnants of rough sleepers and some bird clicking by the rafter. There are splinters of smashed-up furniture and jags of broken delft in a corner as if somebody threw the crockery to the wall. Some fool has rolled into the house a log much too big to fit into the hearth and now it sits as a black-charred seat. Colly whispers, that’s a wood pigeon that’s got inside, I’ll bet you I can get it with a stone. The bird hurls itself off every wall and window before fleeing out the door into the wider world, where she watches it dissolve into the all as if it were only a thought of food and that is what you deserve for getting your hopes up. Bart stepping slowly into the house. He sits down on the log, an old man staring into the memory of fire.