A Bed in the Sticks

by Lee Dunne

  ‘You home for a holiday?’

  ‘You could say that,’ she nodded, ‘though it’s more of a rest.’ She leaned forward and said quietly,’ I’ve been on the game in London.’

  I tried to check my reaction, but I was a shade too late.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d be surprised.’ She leaned in to say in a hushed voice: ‘You were the coolest guy I ever met in Dublin.’ She drew smoke. ‘You wouldn’t say anything?’

  I shook my head: ‘You needn’t fret. If I was a female, I’m about certain I’d do the same.’

  She relaxed and sipped at her drink. ‘Don’t know why I told you. But I remember you, those times we danced in the Four’s P, you were just great. You were the only guy I ever met there that didn’t want me to throw the leg in a minute.’

  ‘How do you mean,’ I asked, playing the innocent!

  She chuckled and I found I really liked her. ‘You weren’t all over me like a rash just because I’ve got these boobs and an’ all. So many creeps in the Four P’s, but you were cool all the way, and I liked you.’

  I got another cigarette going and she said. ‘I liked you and I fancied you. Same time I lost the job and went to The Pool to stay with my sister. She has a part time job and she turns a couple of tricks a week, saving she is. So, well, I like sex, so I gave it a shot, and saved a right few quid.’

  I held a match to her cigarette and when she had taken a hit and let the smoke go, she said quietly, ‘I felt I had to tell somebody, and there you were.’

  ‘What about your mother? She doesn’t know.’

  ‘She thinks I work in a factory!’

  I sipped my drink and she said: ‘God, if she knew, she’d throw a blue fit. Six quid a week in a factory God! Can you just picture me?’

  Because she then asked me what I was up to I told her about leaving my job and my brain storm to go to England ‘without so much as a change of shirt - can you believe it. Ma went crazy and I wasn’t much better.’

  ‘Don’t take all the blame,’ she said, touching my hand in support. ‘Irish mother’s can be very selfish so they can. More then they realise.’

  I had never thought of Ma as being other than the most unselfish person I had ever known. From my earliest memory of her, she had gone without so that her kids might have what little there was. And I had rarely known her complain except out of sheer worry about something or other. But the memory of our row was still fresh and I remembered that I had been amazed by her attack on me.

  When it was time to go up on deck she said, ‘I’ll keep you

  company’ she said, and I felt warm about her. She was a nice girl and in my heart, I wished her well.

  It was very cold out on deck and she snuggled into me to keep warm. I looked over the water towards Dublin, a sting in my bowels at the thought of being back. I could feel the colour riding high in my face and though the wind was cutting through me I wasn’t concerned. If you feel warm in your guts, all the cold in Russia won’t get to you, and my feet seemed to be turning warm for the taste of a Dublin street.

  God bless the River Liffey with March sitting on the wind. Gulls slipping ahead and around the boat, the raucous cries not my favourite sound but, somehow, warm and welcoming as the to my heart.

  How different I felt compared to the previous Friday. I wanted to laugh now, make fun of myself for being such a fool.

  My right hand clasped the rail and when the tears came, hard and fast, I cried, not caring who saw me. And I allowed my new beautifully, brassy friend to embrace me while I wept, no pride or shame getting in my way. And before we parted we made a date to meet for a drink on Wednesday evening.

  ‘And don’t worry if you’re short of dough, I’ve got plenty!

  Those were her words and I was smiling through my tears as I watched her be driven away in a taxi. What a sweetheart!

  There was a rough breeze coming off the Liffey and my trousers were stiff as sails as I crossed the bridge. It was early. A few taxis moved south. Lorries were coming up the quays, heavy loads roped tightly against the wind, cyclists braving the morning, just as I had done six times a week for the last three years.

  I found myself grinning at the cheek of a newsboy on the corner near The Theatre Royal, as he was calling out to a girl wearing slacks as she rode past him.

  ‘Hello there, Empty Fork!’

  The young woman’s retorted with a cruel sneer on her mouth: ‘What you have wouldn’t fill it!’

  No answer from the newsboy!

  I was like somebody half-jarred. I say this because even those things that usually annoyed me, they were like presents to my senses. I was back in Dublin. For better or for worse, I was home again.

  2

  My pal, Larry Deegan grinned at me across the table. ‘You’re an awful bloody man,’ he said

  I smoked and nodded, glad to be talking to him. His slim Victor Mature face looked good over a cup of coffee and the inevitable cigarette. ‘You can stay at my place till you get fixed up.’

  I could hardly keep my eyes open and all I could think about was getting my head down. ‘A right balloon I turned out to be.’

  He shook his head. ‘You’re not a nut.’ He grinned: ‘Well, not exactly, but you’re always going to be your own worst enemy.’

  I wasn’t sure what he meant by that.

  ‘You expect too much of yourself,’ he said. You’re going to have to slow down. You can’t do it all in a week.’

  I smiled, remembering how he had worried that I might screw myself to death after he’d introduced me to Breeda. How lucky I’d been that he worked in the office when I first went there. Like Redmond, he had helped me know the score, telling me things as though I already knew them, never making me feel that I was as green as I obviously was.

  He laughed at my expression. ‘I’m not preaching at you. Jesus! I should preach to anybody. It’s just that you burn up too much too quick...you’ve no reserve when you need it.’

  ‘Like Liverpool, you mean.’

  He nodded: ‘None of us knows it all but you can save your self an awful lot of aggravation by stopping for a moment and thinking.’

  For a minute, it was like listening to Redmond, my layabout mentor now living in Manhattan. ‘Anyway,’ he said, I’m glad to see you back.’

  ‘I’m glad somebody is.’

  ‘What’ll you do?’

  I thought of the girl on the boat and how she’d helped me make up my mind. ‘I’m taking that job with the touring company.’

  ‘You won’t go home?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Your mother might be over it by now.’

  ‘Doubtful,’ I said, ‘When she flips, it takes her a long time to get back to earth.”

  He pushed his flat key across the table. ‘Now, you go and get some sleep.’

  On the Wednesday night I sat in the lounge at the Metropole bar with Jenny Stanley, the girl I’d met again on the ferry boat.

  ‘Only the best,’ she said. ‘I have money to spend and I’m going to do it in the right places. I’m finished with bottles of cider and fish and chips.’

  She was wearing another skin tight dress and she was heavily made up, but somehow she still didn’t look like a prostitute. Not that I cared anyway. We were paying for our drinks and anybody who didn’t like us could always get up and go somewhere else.

  As it happened, more than one fella was trying to catch her eye and this made her smile. ‘Still think I’m an amateur.’ She almost choked a bit on her drink and I loved that wicked laugh of hers.

  Later that night, sitting up on the balcony in the Four Provinces, I caught her looking at me in a funny kind of way.

  ‘You’re not smashed, are you?’

  ‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘I was just thinking.’

 
‘About me, naturally,’ I joked.

  She nodded and I could see was in earnest. Then she said quietly, ‘about you.’

  ‘Fill in your application form, give it to my secretary on your way out and she’ll let you know when I can fit you in.’

  She didn’t laugh and I said, ‘I thought that was funny!’

  ‘Can I come back with you, to the flat?’

  ‘Well, sure...’

  ‘It’s not, well...’ She stubbed out her cigarette and her deep brown eyes were showing scared. ‘It’s just such a lift being with you.’

  I touched her fingers. You poor cow, I thought. One way or another, no matter what way we go, the price is high. ‘You’re alright yourself,’ I said, really meaning it.

  There was little talk in the taxi on the way back to Larry’s flat. I sat back, my shoulders hard against the seat and she held my hand as though she was afraid I’d pull it away at any second. Then just before we arrived, she turned to me and her kiss was warm and I could feel the tenderness of her flowing out to me.

  I paid the fare and as we went up to the flat, I felt that she was close to weeping.

  That night, we slept together, but, apart from kissing her very gently I made no attempt to make love to her, feeling that sex was the very last thing she needed, though I couldn’t have told anybody why I thought this.

  It was Noon when her hand on my face woke me up, and she held me fiercely for a minute or two after that.

  ‘You’re the nicest, the best fella I’ve ever met in my life.’

  ‘Don’t kid yourself,’ I joked, ‘If you only knew what I got up to while you were asleep.’

  She hugged me, laughing like somebody who was more than happy, ‘Oh, I love you, I love you, I love you,’ she sighed like she was wishing for something and I let it go.

  I tried not to tense up when started into the love script, and she felt me resist her words. I needed to be loved in the sense that I needed to hold and be held, but the last thing I needed just then was for someone to fall in love with me.

  I had enough on my plate right now with feeling guilty enough with the Ma situation, without taking on any more responsibility.

  ‘Forget that,’ she said, pulling her face back to look into my eyes. ‘I’m very happy right now, that’s all.’

  I kissed the tip of her nose, and she touched her lips to mine. ‘I need the bathroom,’ she said, turning back at the door, ‘In a minute I’ll make you coffee, okay!’

  I watched her with gentle interest, thinking that, in the moment, she looked like a much younger girl. Her hard ‘don’t bother me, I’m tough’ quality had begun to look brittle in the morning light.

  I had the coffee made and was finding a pack of biscuits when Larry phoned to check that everything was alright for me and my friend.

  ‘How did you know I had a friend here?’

  He chuckled: ‘I saw you pair in the Metropole bar last night and the way she was looking at you, I thought I might have to come over there and separate you at the hip!’

  ‘I said. ‘You should have joined us, man. Jessie would love you.’

  ‘The way she was looking at you, that lady didn’t want anybody else around. She certainly is gorgeous.’

  ‘And one of the nicest girls I’ve ever met.’

  ‘Okay. I’m staying with Pippa for the next few nights,’ Larry said, ‘so the pad is yours. We’ll talk on the phone this evening, okay!’

  -------------

  Jenny didn’t want to go home to the family house but I told her I had a lot to do and she accepted this. We made a date for Friday night, and I was hard put to go on ignoring her need to stay with me. But, I needed my space to work out exactly what I had to attend to, if I was seriously going to take the job I’d stumbled on with the Road Show Touring Company.

  Once I had waved Jennie off in a cab, I walked towards Town, realising that I had never before just had a walk in the city.

  Now I was feeling the place coming up to warm my feet, and I was taken back to the barefoot days of my three years without having shoes to wear.

  This was no bog deal to kids like me that were living in the basement of society. Hundreds of others just like me, city kids I saw when I went for my weekly overall scrub, having paid my sixpence for it at Tara Street Baths - just one of thousands of Dublin’s poor that had no bathroom in our box of a flat rented from the Dublin Corporation.

  I walked past Woolworth’s and Singers, remember the jokes as a kid. All our family were in the choir, even the sewing machine was a singer! Remembering this lovely girl I had known that worked there. The pair of us into passionate kissing and me feeling for her breasts, asking her, ‘What happens if I open your bra?’ ‘I’d lose fifty per cent,’ she answered, and I’d laughed so much that I’d ruined everything.

  Thinking then as I got used to just walking on Grafton Street after leaving the little cinema and Hamlet, how come this was my first taste of Shakespeare? My God!-so much time, time that suddenly seemed so valuable just gone down the drain.

  My mind asking me then supposing you went to bed tonight and you got the call to press the top button on the right at the Pearly Gates. All right, it might upset, even sadden, one or two people, but apart from that, what had it all amounted to? Eighteen years amounting to what? Gallons of stout, certainly more than your fair share, whiskey only now and again due to the shortage of those crispy folding notes. Whatever sex you could harvest, some of it with women old as you mother for five shillings on the stairs of Crilly’s mouldy pub on the quays.

  The imagination moving into the picture, me, sitting there knowing the news I was about to get was going to be very, very heavy.

  ‘Is it serious, doctor?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, Mister Maguire, very serious.’

  I see myself take a deep inhale on the cigarette - like Bogey, when he was hit with bad news.

  ‘How long, doctor?’

  ‘Not long, I’m afraid.’

  He’s afraid. Holy Christ! How does he think I feel?

  Like some kind of outlaw my mind just took off and shot the rules to hell. Like, this was no time for common sense. I never had a chance, doctor! And it’s not that I mind dying, I don’t. I only mind it being right now! I’m not ready to go yet.

  I don’t want to split like this. Nothing left behind. Not a mark, nothing left behind. Not so much as a mark or a little light, or a scrap of colour. Not even a bloody stain of some kind.

  But you’re eighteen, Maguire, eighteen years old. I mean, Chopin or whoever he was, had written symphonies by the age of five...you had enough time to do something.

  What?

  Go on, admit it, you had the chance, but you chose booze and you indulged your taste for undercut. You wanked about when you could have been reading. You were going to write, you wanted to, anyway, but you hadn’t the strength to get up and walk away from anything resembling a tasty pair of bumpers - in a nutshell you were a tit-man from day one, and your addiction ate up a hefty percentage of your waking time as you spent too much time slipping and sliding, here there and everywhere. The only time it had felt right was when you did it with Maureen. With her it had been different. Like, you did more than just slip her a length. She touched you somewhere other than between your legs. The rest of the girls - God love them, really, if you were the best they could harvest. Who was the guy called it vaginal masturbation? He also called you the Mammary Gland Kid and you had to look it up to get what he meant.

  My day dreaming came to an end when a policeman with a serious grip stopped me walking under a bus at College Green.

  He was a big guy with a Tipperary face on him and he was decent enough about being careless enough to get run over. He didn’t put me down, abuse me for being stupid enough to get caught by pointless thinking - something that appreciated, and I
gave him my word I wouldn’t repeat the carry-on ever again.

  During that week, I read novels that Larry had in the flat, and I walked around the city late at night. Without thinking about it, I wanted to be alone and I spent a fair bit of time wrapped up in myself. In itself, this wasn’t anything new, it was the way I was thinking that made it different.

  I’d always been a day-dreamer; it would take a time to grow out of that; but I spent those long midnights, examining my conscience, asking myself all kinds of questions, and, for the very first time, I took a long hard look at my attitude to life.

  There was no explosion, nothing momentous landed on my curiosity but, one thing was clear, I couldn’t go on as I’d been doing; I didn’t want to anyway; without ending up in a shotgun wedding. And unless my drinking was cut down severely, I’d end up roaring in the horrors like Doran’s bull.

  I decided I’d make a start, turn the break from having to live on The Hill into the springboard that would lead to me changing my way of life. There was a better way of living, no matter how you looked at it, provided a fella was willing to get stuck in. You got no interest from a bank unless you put money in there in the first place.

  I’d been moaning to myself in the earlier part of the week.

  No time to do anything, which was - a load of bollocks really. There was time, tons of it, and if you wanted something, it

  was possible to get it, provided you were willing to go to work at earning it.

  I felt a growing energy to get on in life, accepting that it

  wouldn’t be easy, but tasting, for the first time, what I’d call a hint of real ambition, a new found wish to make something of my life.

  By the end of that first week back in Dublin, I felt that I owed a lot of that abortive runaway trip to the city of Liverpool. In just a few days it had helped me see that I’d been looking in the mirror for at least a couple of years without seeing what I was really like.

  Alright, I could accept this, and I realised that how I had been during the last couple of years had given my mother good cause to be concerned about where the hell my life was going.