A Bed in the Sticks

by Lee Dunne

  I was also feeling guilty since my presence had made him unnecessary in sketches and things because Jimmy put me into as much as possible, arguably to give me experience, but, he was obviously thinking of unloading Gary who was the more expensive player.

  I stayed by Gary on the night he was given his weeks notice. He was paralytic by the time I got him out of the pub. When we were outside, he insisted that I return to May and the others, and though I gave him an argument, he insisted, and I had respect his wishes. Of course, I thought about walking along some distance behind him but, I knew that if he looked back and found me there, he would be very angry and I let the idea drop.

  Later, after a very enjoyable hot jump over the hurdles with May, she talked me into a couple more, and it was after four in the morning when I left her, since we were in separate digs in the small town.

  I went by Gary’s wagon and discovered that he wasn’t there and his bed covers had not been disturbed. Next thing I did was check out the hall, not surprised that he wasn’t their either.

  Without giving it much thought, I headed out along the Enniskillen road; I don’t know why, but it was as if somebody had whispered in my ear; and I found him after about a half a mile.

  He was lying asleep on the snow-filled ditch by the side of the road and when the torch picked him out I thought he was dead. Then I heard him snore but, try as I did, I couldn’t wake him, so I heaved him onto my shoulders and somehow - don’t ask me how - I carried him back to the digs where I was staying.

  Despite his height, he wasn’t a heavy man but I was just about fractured by the time I got him onto my bed in the digs.

  He looked awful and I felt sure he needed a doctor, but, knowing him as I did, I decided against doing anything, until he woke up.

  My old friend was, by nature, so independent that he just switched off whenever anybody tried to do anything for him. So, I covered him up with my bed covers, sticking his wet clothes near the fireplace which was still warming the room, and I sat there with him until he woke up at nine o’clock.

  He still looked like a pan of cold dripping but, apart from drinking soup that I got from my landlady, he refused to allow me do anything else. No doctors, no aspirins, nothing.

  ‘I’m alright, love, really I am...’ This was all he would say when I told him he needed medical attention, and when Jimmy or any of the cast came in to see him, he pretended to be asleep until they left. But, he talked to me whenever he had the breath to do so. He told me of his youth -’brim filled days of happiness and joy’. And he talked of his marriage, telling me, without self pity, of the tragic death of his wife, a chronic alcoholic. He also talked of his career, and occasionally during those last days, his eyes would light up a little, and he would tell me of his nights of triumph in the theatre, and he mentioned more than once, the way he had guided the first tottering steps of the very young, Olivier. In this, he was surely bullshitting, but I decided to believe him. He was, to my mind, entitled to tell me, or the whole world for that matter; he had guided sunlight into my mind, opening windows, as he had shown me more truth and beauty than I had hoped to realise, as he helped me to learn to listen, really listen, when someone had something to say. And to the end, I remained his good listener, the kind of audience he had always needed.

  ‘I have never been ashamed of touring, love.’

  He said this to me on the morning he died. ‘An actors place is on a stage, regardless of where that stage might be situated.’

  Moments later, he tried for a smile but it didn’t happen. ‘And not just because I am a triton amongst minnows, a big fish in a little pool, nothing like that...For a long time, I’ve been a star in the wilderness - my days in town long since past- and I settled willingly for what you have called a bed in the sticks, all part of an actor’s role.’

  Pneumonia was the cause of his death. This was what the doctor’s certificate said. So what was the point of arguing? All the shouting and ranting wouldn’t alter anything, and when I thought about it, I decided to just keep quiet. Those that didn’t particularly care that he was dead were all decent people in their own way, and they were entitled in their own minds to shrug him off like a shoulder ache. He had been a disdainful man, an intellectual and an intellectual snob. He had rarely said a word on the show without patronising somebody, so it was little wonder that his burial passed dry-eyed people, but for my few tears. That night, we didn’t do a show and I drank so much that when I woke up, I couldn’t even remember getting into bed.

  The weather continued to be rough. Snow fell on and off for days and the houses so small that it wasn’t worthwhile doing a performance. But we did, we gave our audience the full show each night, hoping that word of mouth would get us some more people; the smallest number we played to was ten; and that the weather would just drop dead, for if the snow hung in there, we would be in real trouble. Like, farmers and their families had their hands full to survive and were very unlikely to be going to any show, be it good or great, so we were in real trouble.

  There was an all round cut in salaries that week and I realised that Jimmy had not been joking when he said he could not afford to keep Gary on for the three weeks up to Christmas.

  For example, the takings on Saturday night just cleared up the drink pill in Keegan’s, and we hadn’t been drinking for fun, so much as using alcohol to keep warm inside.

  Of course, this was an excuse when you consider that Maria and Pat Maguire hadn’t been drinking at all and they hadn’t frozen to death. But to me, the weather was awful enough to make most people want to just jump into a cask of brandy.

  Then, miracle of miracles, the snow disappeared in a two day period and Jimmy, desperate for a sign of good luck, decided that this was a favourable omen. I wasn’t happy when he said we’d stay another week, but I kept my feelings to myself.

  So, he and I, we drove out into the countryside where Jimmy hoped to gather some interest in our show. He rigged loud-speakers on the car and I used the microphone to tell one and all about our amazing successful show, listing the names of our stars and the names of the plays that we knew to be good and always popular with country audiences.

  Moving day, despite being very hard work, was a tonic we all needed, and though we played to many half-full houses in that first week, the revenue meant we all got some kind of wages on the Saturday.

  We rehearsed each morning and I played two of Gary’s role that week while Tom Hunter stepped into a couple I had been starring in, and somehow or other, we got through with flags flying, this revenue earned and the applause we got being the perfect tonic needed after such a winter of discontent.

  Apart from acting in the plays, I had roles in the sketches, also feeding Jimmy his cues, and I got through without even one fluff, before going out front to sell raffle tickets at interval. And I had to admit to myself that I felt better than I had in many a long winter week.

  12

  I sat behind the wheel of Jimmy’s car, waiting my turn for the Customs check at the border. New Years Day, I thought Happy New Year Maguire, or O’Neill, or whatever you call yourself.

  Jimmy was tailing me with the truck, but I couldn’t see him because I had his trailer, loaded for bear, attached to the car.

  I took the car up to where the uniform was waiting for me. Nice and easy, I told myself, smiling inside at the memory of the hurried driving lessons in and around Belfast. Day after day, Jimmy shoving me into the car, making me do it over and over again, until I felt I was driving like a veteran.

  He had made the driving lessons sound like a belated Christmas present, giving me all the old chat about it being ‘no load to carry’, manipulating me like a puppet, all the time knowing he was going to need me to take his car across the border into Southern Ireland, which was why he had invited me to spend the holiday with him in Belfast in the first place.

  Without a word the uniform too
k the papers from my hand. He looked cold and irritable, his sloppy, thick-lipped mouth s bit lopsided, his bright red hair pushing out from under his peaked cap.

  In the moment, Jimmy was there next to him, explaining that we were moving our touring show south. The guy did listen until Jimmy finished speaking, having looked from one of us to the other, as though we were a couple of things that had crawled out from under a nearby rock. Two hours later, we stopped about three miles south of the border for a drink.

  ‘What a pig!’ I said, with meaning.

  ‘Fascist bastard,’ Jimmy said, wanting to spit. ‘Bloody good job Hitler didn’t win the war. He’d have had the likes of your man in the S.S. right off... a pair of pliers and he’d have had my bloody fingernails off.’

  ‘For a minute or two there,’ I said, ‘I thought he was going to check the inner tubes.’

  Jimmy snorted and killed his brandy: ‘Bastard would have done if I hadn’t fettled him with that three-bags-full bit.’ He snorted like a horse in a bad humour. ‘It’s marvellous when you think about it, a little runt like that gets into a uniform and he gains four feet in height and slashes on anybody that bothers him. Honest, you’d think we had a couple of million French Letters in the boot or something.’

  I touched the packet of contraceptives in my inside pocket, still not sure why I bought them. Something to do with being able to walk into a pharmacy and just get them, I suppose, since they were banned south of the border.

  ‘Wonder if we’ll ever be able to buy them across the counter in Dublin?’

  He looked at me as though I had lost my marbles. ‘You’re kidding, aren’t you?’ He shook his head: ‘I can’t see it, Tony, like that would be admitting that people actually screw each other and that’d never do. Anyway, people not worrying about contraception might begin to enjoy sex flat out, like, which, as you know, being of Catholic extraction, is a shocking thing. And, as sex outside of marriage is a physical impossibility, any way, what would be the point to trying to sell French letters.

  He grinned and went on: You know, I’m sure the church believes that those lassies that end up in The Club are all Immaculate Conceptions.’

  I drifted into a hint of memory: One in which John Charles McQuaid, the Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of all Ireland, had actually touched me on the day of my Confirmation. This came about because my teacher had placed me on the aisle seat in a pew because I knew the catechism backwards. I could reel it off like a bright parrot, and nobody cared that I didn’t know a sixth of what it was all about. This didn’t matter. To be a good and perfect Christian, you didn’t have to understand, you just had to believe whatever it was that passed you by.

  Faith, so they taught, was all you needed to be a good Catholic. If you went around thinking about it, you only made life difficult for yourself and everybody else. I remember one time when I asked a teacher what the word Virgin, as in Blessed Virgin, meant, knowing bloody well that a maidenhead didn’t pull a cart, and he had told me to just get on with my study, to learn off by heart what had been marked out for me.

  He didn’t refuse to answer my question - he simply shouldered me out of the way. Even then you knew it was a big con. Believe! Have Faith! This they pumped into you until your brain was through and you accepted whatever came next. It wasn’t difficult, if you could believe in miracles, If you could do that, the rest was a cake walk.

  ---------

  Jimmy and I, we drove on, moving further south by the hour. He was keeping an eye on my driving and I was glad that he was. A couple of times, the wind coming off the mountains rocked the trailer severely enough for me to stop the car, so that, all in all, by the time we reached County Roscommon, my arms and my shoulders ached beyond belief. And my buttocks felt raw.

  Pauline was the first to catch up with us the next day and I helped her park her wagon. She offered me a thank you drink and when we sat down she said: ‘Don’t let Jimmy make a show-man of you, will you?’

  The whiskey stuck in my throat and I coughed for like thirty seconds before I could speak. Gary Martin had once said the same thing to me, both of them people I had come to love.

  ‘You have genuine talent,’ Pauline said quietly, ‘unlike most people in the Fit Ups. They get by as actors because they do everything including parking wagons...what I’m saying is, you are better than all that.’

  ‘Isn’t it a part of being on the road, though?’

  She nodded: ‘But what I’m trying to say - don’t allow it to become natural. Don’t start to include that kind of thing in your way of thinking.’

  ‘I didn’t know you cared, Pauline.’

  She allowed me a wan smile. ‘I care more than you think.’

  ‘Do you care enough to marry me?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said with a shy smile.

  I stood up, saying: ‘Every time I say anything to you about how I feel, I’m being silly; well, I won’t bother you any more.’

  I left, slamming the trailer door, and I was choked as I walked to the pub. Why, in the name of Christ, did I bother? Who in his right mind flogs a dead horse? I must have been nuts. All over the Christmas with Jimmy in Belfast, I had lived like a monk, thinking of Pauline, hoping that she might have come around a little bit by the time we met to begin the new tour.

  Jimmy put a drink in front of me. ‘Never mind, Tony, you still have May.’

  I killed the drink, wishing it was May that I loved. She was a great girl, all anybody in his right mind could want, and she was in love with me. But it didn’t make any difference. I liked her and we were good together in bed, or anywhere else, for that matter, but that was as far as it went for me. And there was no good in me trying to force it. I wasn’t in love with her, and that was that.

  Jimmy was either very lucky in picking Roscommon for out opening county or he had pulled a stroke of genius. Right from our first night the crowds just flocked to see us seven nights a week. It was hard work with no night off, but it was good playing to full houses, and I had most afternoons to myself, so I was happy enough, once I could get Pauline out of my mind for a few hours.

  After lunch each day, I read for a couple of hours, and I listened to the radio, feeling that before long I would write something for them. This was something that seemed to get stronger every time I thought about it, and I remembered my first poem on radio at fourteen years of age, and a piece I had written for the Times Pictorial being published, feeling that when the time was right, I would write something else.

  Without anything being said, Gary’s things, including his trunk of books, had become my property after his death. I would have fought for the books if I’d had to, but there was no problem. And I looked after my legacy, repairing any book that had been damaged in any way through all the moving about, and I found I was enjoying real pleasure in maintaining my own little private library.

  Once or twice, May tried to muscle in on those times of mine in the afternoons but, as nicely as I could, I tried to make her understand that for those few hours, I wanted and needed to be on my own with the books and my bits of scribbling.

  A lot of the time, I shared digs with her, and sometimes with Tom and Peter Hunter, depending on the accommodation available in a particular house. And somehow, regardless of whether we were in the same digs or not, May and I had sex an awful lot of the time, and I loved it. There wasn’t enough night time to tire of the wild hot way she could hold me, and those afternoon get-togethers, they were something to experience.

  In fairness, I had never strung her along, kidded her that it would be anything more than that sex we made between us, and gradually, she began to accept this, admitting she had no claim on me. So, since she got as much from our sex life as I was lucky enough to enjoy, our get-togethers retained a steady place in our lives.

  But, from the first time on, I had never once kidded her, and being honest, I
was not expecting things between us to last for ever, though I had never thought of discontinuing what we enjoyed so much, and as she seemed contented enough, I saw no reason to change things. And so we continued our afternoon sessions except when she was menstruating, and in time, I got her to read a couple of books that were worthwhile, and a lot more worthy of her time that the trashy magazines she bought at every opportunity.

  Then came this afternoon when she appeared while I was lying on my bed listening to a worthwhile radio play. When I heard the door open and close, I looked up and there she was, sexy as ever, and literally throwing herself on top of me where I lay on the bed. And before I could even ask her to take it easy, on account of the play, she started to rub her hand all over my crotch.

  ‘I’ll soon make you forget your bloody play.’ She said lightly, randy enough that she misread my mood. Sitting up, I pushed her hand a way. ‘Do me a favour, it’s an important play.’

  She did more than bristle and she said angrily: ‘But I’m not important. That’s it, isn’t it?’

  ‘Christ! I didn’t say that.’

  ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘I’m sorry, May, but I told you about the afternoons, that hearing these great plays from the BBC is helping me get an education as a playwright.’

  In a moment, she was on her feet, her nostrils flaring as she called me a selfish bastard. ‘But, it’s fuck the play if you happen to be randy when I get here.’

  She gave me a few seconds to apologise, like so many times before, but without meaning to, I patronised her. ‘Don’t upset yourself, May.’

  ‘You bastard,’ she hissed at me. ‘I hate your guts.’

  ‘Alright,’ I snorted. ‘I’m sorry, but you hate me, so leave me alone.’

  ‘If it was Pauline...’