by William King
‘I’m going over to meet a chap called Seery in The Stag’s Head. A Clare man,’ he says when he comes back down with a floppy briefcase. ‘He was a schoolteacher for a year or so, but gave it up. Clever bucko. Will you come and meet him?’
‘Sure.’
‘This fella has notions; he’s young – late twenties, at the most – wants to do well for himself. He looks after my lodgements at Barclays, and I’m hoping he’ll come and do the books for me. I had a great woman do them, but she’s having a baby and then she’s off to Australia with the husband.’
The Clare man is reading The Guardian when we arrive at the pub. In his navy suit and polka dot tie, he fits in with the groups of men, some of whom stand at the counter talking loudly. Others are sitting around in cane-backed chairs: wearing check shirts and tweed jackets, they could have stepped out of Horse and Hound. A man is seated at a low table; in front of him is a plate of ham and tomatoes. While keeping an eye on the Tff high above the till, he twists the cap of a YR sauce bottle.
M.J. doesn’t waste much time in small talk. ‘I’m prepared to top what you’re getting at Barclays by two quid a week.’
‘Make it three. You won’t be sorry,’ says Seery.
‘Two and a bonus at Christmas and August.’
‘They were right – they told me you’re a hard man.’
‘And did they tell you I keep my word?’
‘Weekends for a start off, until I finish at Barclays.’ Seery’s shrewd eyes recede when he grins.
‘Right. And welcome to Galvin Construction. What’s your poison?’
‘A single malt should seal the bargain.’
M.J. strides ahead of him to the counter and beckons to the barmaid, who puts a whisky glass to the optic. The two of them talk while they wait, Seery raising himself up on his toes.
From a wooden beam hangs a tattered Union Jack; beside it a picture of the Queen looking away towards her far-flung Commonwealth. On the other walls are pictures of English rugby teams.
‘Why did you hit John Bull then, Christy, with your secure job?’ M.J. hands Seery his Glenfiddich, puts a glass of Watneys in front of me, and, without waiting for an answer, raises his tumbler of whisky in a toast. ‘Good luck, lads.’
‘I didn’t want to stare down at forty years of teaching snotty noses the difference between a noun and a pronoun, M.J., or, “I will arise and go now, and go to Inishfree.” Two weeks in Bray each summer walking up and down the promenade while the little woman does her window-shopping. Ah, no.’ An impish grin spreads across his face. ‘Anyway, half the secondary schools in Ireland are staffed by spoiled priests.’
‘You were going for the Church then?’ says M.J.
‘The Brothers.’
‘Right, well, I’m sure you know best yourself.’ They discover a mutual interest in horses, and are both surprised that Psidium won the Derby; his form as a two-year-old didn’t indicate any great promise, and he was left far behind at Long-champ. Both agree that Lester is the greatest. M.J. is excited about a two-year-old he has running at Newmarket at the latter end of July.
‘Right-eeo,’ he says and drains his glass. ‘The sooner you can start the better, Christy.’
On the way back, he is silent behind the wheel, until suddenly he says: ‘You know the first time I ever tasted tomatoes, or saw YR sauce?’
‘When?’
‘A threshing day at Summerhill House. They had two dinner tables – the big shots ate in a separate room from the rest of us.’ Graze of stubble when he rubs his jaw. ‘Lovely sunny weather towards the end of August. I was on the reek of straw that evening, when I noticed Grace going across the lawn in her uniform. The prettiest picture I’d ever seen in my life.’ He checks his dreamy tone and laughs. ‘I thought she stopped to look at me, but sure, I suppose that was my imagination. Anyway, oul Matty was taking her back to some convent school in Galway. I remember the cloud of dust when they were driving off down the avenue. They had one of them big American cars at the time.’
‘I remember. Like a funeral car.’
‘I wanted it all.’
‘What?’
‘The whole bag of tricks: the ivy house, the slated stalls and to be at the big shots’ table.’
Two weeks later Seery starts working for Galvin Construction. When the bank closes each Friday afternoon, he comes to one of the site offices and is still bent over documents long after the men have departed for the Crown, and the dumpers and generators are silent. He takes invoices from the spike and makes entries in the hard-bound ledgers. The following morning he is back and working on until the four o’clock stopping time.
Since Seery is one of the few who has gone beyond national school, we form a friendship of sorts. We visit an El Greco exhibition in the National Gallery, and after that to the pictures or for a drink to The Stag’s Head. More often than not, he goes through an act of tapping his pockets at the ticket office, before the stock excuse: ‘You won’t believe this – left my fecking wallet behind in the flat. I’ll pay you back.’ It’s the same routine when we meet in the pub: when his turn comes, we sit there with empty glasses while he spins out stories of women he’s bedded after a night at the London Irish Rugby Club, until eventually I go to the counter.
‘This is my office,’ he says with a twinkle while I bring two glasses to the table one evening. ‘Where I do my business. Good luck.’
‘Good luck.’
‘Advising Irishmen with brains,’ he taps his temple, ‘how to put their hard-earned money to good use and make sure Harold Macmillan gets as little as possible. The Isle of Man. Guernsey. Channel Islands. You’ll know all about it when you join the brother.’
A horse race has ended on the black and white television; the Horse and Hound set cheer in a polite way and order more pints of bitter.
‘I stay away from Kilburn,’ Seery says, the hint of an English accent creeping in. ‘They’re going nowhere.’
‘Poor devils.’
‘Don’t mind your poor devils. You’ve got to look out for number one in this cesspool. In two years I’ll have my own accountancy firm. Can be done you know. Then when I’m well-established, I’ll return to the oul sod and settle down. But first,’ he rubs his hands together, ‘there’s a rake of skirt in the Buffalo and the Galtymore. Have you sampled yet?’
‘No,’ I reply and hope he doesn’t see me redden.
‘No?’ He’s surprised. ‘You’d have no bother.’ He leans in and lowers his voice. ‘Loads of skirt.’ He reels off a list of fast things – nurses at Whittington Hospital and the Royal Brompton with their tongues hanging out for it. ‘I can fix you up any time you like.’ A sly grin on his face, he leans back to study my reaction, but just then a man wearing a grey pinstripe suit with a cheroot in his hand, touches his shoulder. Seery listens while the man whispers into his ear.
‘Excuse me, back in a jiffy.’ His accent has become more English. They both leave the pub by a side door; I watch them get into a white Hillman. The man in the pinstripe is talking, Seery is nodding.
I lose interest. Across from me a stained-glass window showing a hunt floods an alcove with golden light; beneath the hunt two men are wrapped up in a chess game.
Seery is humming when he returns.
‘That seems to have gone well,’ I say.
‘Tommy, the only lesson in life fellows like us need remember,’ he taps his forehead: ‘Up here for making dosh,’ and then points to his feet, ‘Down here for dancing.’ Casting sly looks around the bar, he leans towards me and opens his jacket to show a bulky envelope in his inside pocket. ‘That’s what I call using your nut.’ He whispers: ‘The magic words, Tommy – Guernsey, the Isle of Man.’ For a while then, he is lost in thought, until he notices the chess players. ‘Two things I thank the Brothers for.’
‘What?’
‘How to play chess.’
‘And the other?’
‘The morning I’m leaving the monastery, the Head Brother says to me: “Mix only with f
ellas who are making something of themselves. Stay away from them who are propping up the street corners. You don’t want to become like the Tech boys.”’
He had become a novice at fourteen. A broad-shouldered Brother in a black soutane had visited the two-roomed school above the village. The girls played in the yard while the Brother beamed down at them and spoke about the fine big college out by Dublin Bay: hurling and football every evening, a film on Sunday night, roast chicken three times a week. And when they got their Leaving Certificate, it was off to university.
‘Like winning the Hospitals Sweepstake,’ he says, ‘too much to refuse for a boy like me from a county council cottage.’
‘How long did you stay?’
‘Eleven years. In at fourteen. I left two years ago.’ He shakes his head, ‘Ah no, the monk’s life not for me. Unnatural. No bit of fluff. You know yourself.’ His glasses catch the light when he blows smoke rings into the air. ‘From now on, Tommy, everyone will be looking for an accountant who can keep his gob shut and prevent the revenue boyos from getting at the pot of gold.’ He is going to have the time of his life for the next few years and then find a professional woman – maybe a doctor. ‘And sure if it doesn’t work out, so what? Plenty of fish in the sea. What about you? You’ll go to college, I suppose, and then join the big man.’
‘Very likely. Engineering probably.’
I keep to myself another voice that has lately been faintly calling, and that has persuaded me to make tentative enquiries to All Saints, in the Oriel diocese, which also trains priests for the foreign missions. The president of the seminary replies promptly: as soon as I matriculate, I’ll be welcome for an interview. He encloses a brochure about All Saints and a prospectus: one black lounge suit, one black hat, seven white shirts with detachable collars, seven sets of vests and shorts, seven pairs of socks, one black soutane, one Roman collar. On the front cover of the glossy brochure, students in soutanes are resting in front of Doric pillars leading to a doorway: one or two are smoking pipes. The back has a picture of students jumping for a football: goalposts stand out against a blue sky.
But I don’t reveal to Seery my wish to become a missionary, lest I spoil a summer’s freedom or jeopardise my possibilities with nurses from the Whittington, their tongues hanging out for it.
7
IOPT FOR THE BUILDING SITE at Hitchin, rather than the pipe-laying job at Stevenage.
‘If ’tis too much,’ says M.J., ‘come back to Chiswick and take a proper holiday. Play a bit of football up at New Eltham. With all the oul emigration, they have good Gaelic teams there; you might get a run out with one of them. Or why don’t you go to Wimbledon? An old English gent I bought land from is always offering me tickets. Now wouldn’t I look nice at a tennis match?’
‘No. I’ll give the building a try. Harden me up.’
‘The navvy’s job is no picnic.’
‘I’ll take a week at the end.’
‘You’re as stubborn as a mule.’
‘A family trait.’
I know now I wanted to pay him back for the Barclay cheques that kept the rector of the boarding school smiling whenever we met in the corridor. So I tend bricklayers, keep the mixer going, make sure they have enough mortar, or compo, on the scaffold when the walls rise. Even though it grates, I throw out the odd cunt or bollix, or who took the fucken pickaxe? in order to merge with the herd. In a short time, I know about headers and stretchers, the difference between English and Flemish bonding, and about pointing and bedding. Three parts sand, one part cement disappear into the mixer: a crust of mortar around the mouth, clean as a washing machine on the inside. Wearing a dirty white shirt that he will throw away on Saturday evening when he buys another drip-dry, Kilrush, a foreman, stalks the site. ‘Work till you drop, you fuckers,’ is his mantra. He winks at me – secret code that we’re on the same side.
My hands blister, and my thighs, where I rest the shovel for leverage, are raw and sore at night. In bed my whole body tingles from struggling with bags of cement, tilting the mixer, and filling the hod for Sputnik, one of the navvies, to climb the ladder and slide back down, his two feet clinging to the outside of the horizontal bars. Some evenings I am so jaded after having my dinner in The Highway that I trudge up the stairs before nightfall, collapse on to the bed and fall fast asleep with my clothes on until the alarm clock explodes in my ear. (Nowadays when a dog barking or a car starting up can keep me awake for half the night, I look back and wonder how I drifted off despite the shouting and the crash of breaking glasses below me, and the mad scramble when Sandra the barmaid had to call the police.)
Occasionally the uproar wakes me with a start and draws me to the window: there I watch a blur of flailing fists, wild savage shouts and blood pouring down shirt-fronts. And then, as if they are only playing a part in a film set and some invisible director shouts ‘Cut,’ the fighting stops and they fall silent when a paddy wagon comes screaming down Victoria Road.
Later that summer, M.J. and Jody pick a gang to swing into action at the first sign of trouble. They all stand well over six feet, most had wrestled at the Holloway Road Gymnasium – one or two are boxers. After that, the paddy wagon is seldom seen.
Bonnie calls a couple of times a week. In a low-cut dress, she pulls pints if Sandra is short-staffed and the bar is crowded, especially at weekends. When M.J. comes to empty the till and take the money to the safe upstairs, she leaves with him.
The Highway is the first Irish pub to sell bacon and cabbage every evening just as the men are hopping off the lorries after a two-hour journey. I watch while a man puts a cheque on the counter. ‘Cash that for me, Sandra, like a good girl,’ he says, settling himself on the high stool and breaking open a packet of Craven A.
‘Sorry old china.’ With one hand on the Watneys pump while a head of foam rises to the top of the pint glass, Sandra surveys the bar. ‘There’s a line of blokes ahead of you, but I’ll give you a few quid on it now.’ A replica of other evenings: by closing time the cheque will have a deep hole. I return to another banned book, Lolita, I had bought that day at Charing Cross Road, and devour the pages until, suddenly, Bonnie is standing over me, a glass in her hand. ‘How can you read in this bedlam?’ She turns over the book to look at the cover: ‘Well, of all the sleeveens. Our scholar is only a wet week in this pagan country and now he’s reading dirty books.’
‘Educational purposes.’
‘Education, my arse. Move over in the bed.’ She slides into the corner seat beside me. ‘I’m jaded from humouring people all day.’ A pearl necklace hangs over her red summer frock.
‘I thought yourself and M.J. were going to the White City.’
She inclines her head and a mane of hair falls over her sullen look. ‘M.J. suits M.J. No one can come in the way of that boyo’s plans.’
‘What happened?’
‘Trouble out at Stevenage. One of the foremen could’ve looked after it, but I can be thrown aside like an old dishcloth whenever he likes.’ Her hurt becomes an angry outburst. ‘He’s hail-fellow-well-met, life and soul of the party, but there’s ice in his heart – that’s if he has any. And do you think he would apologize?’ She settles loose strands over one ear. ‘Selfish bastard.’
A violin player begins to run the bow along the strings and to tweak the tuning pegs, saving me from her fit of temper. He leads in a man who sings in the manner of professionals: one hand up to the side of his face.
Irene, goodnight Irene.
Irene, goodnight.
Goodnight Irene, goodnight Irene,
I’ll see you in my dreams.
Bonnie’s anger falls away, and, while she is speaking close to my face, I catch the whiff of drink from her breath: ‘In ten years he’ll be one of the richest bastards that ever set foot in Liverpool, but he’ll still be a bastard. And I don’t mean to offend you – he’s your brother.’
‘I’m sorry he let you down,’ I say, and when I turn, her hair brushes against my face, promising an excitement
that is dark and sensuous, and, as yet, unknown to me.
Veins stand out on the singer’s weather-beaten neck; the men urge him on as he comes to the final verse. He has no sooner finished than another man, swaying and holding on to the counter tries ‘Someday I’ll Go Back to Ireland’ in a hoarse voice that is out of tune. A shout goes up. ‘You’ll never go back to fucken Ireland. Neither will I. We’ll die in John Bull. They don’t fucken want us back there.’
Sandra screams: ‘And I don’t fucking want you here, mate. If you don’t shut it, I’ll call the rozzers, and you’ll spend the night in the clink.’ But no one takes any notice and the fiddle player drowns out the singer with a dance tune.
Sandra comes outside the counter to collect empty glasses and the drunken singer makes a grab for her sturdy hips, but she gives him a push with such force that he lands on a table where men are playing cards; pint glasses spill all over the players, and smash on the floor. He is called the biggest fucken eejit under the sun.
Seated at the bar, Leitrim Joe, whose shoulder muscles strain his crumpled jacket, takes a last drag from his cigarette butt, raises his head and does a recitation for one of the ceiling lights:
I remember, I remember,
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn …
‘You know somethin’, Leitrim, you’re a fucken poet,’ says one of the men drinking near him.
His party piece over, Leitrim hangs his head, and rests his turned-down wellingtons on the brass rail that runs along at the base of the counter. ‘Schooldays, the happiest days of our lives. Amn’t I right, lads?’
‘Ah, fuck you, Joe, and your schooldays.’
Just then a stocky man with a head of tousled hair staggers towards us; his face is half-hidden in the gloom and a cloud of cigarette smoke. He rocks on his feet at our table and peers at me. ‘Who the fuck are you? Fucken books. Readin’ fucken books,’ but his concentration lapses when he notices Bonnie. The baleful look softens. ‘Ah jaysus, if it isn’t wan of the finest-lookin’ mares. Give us an oul kiss.’ He spreads out his arms and almost falls on top of her as he bursts into song: