by William King
In a minute, he is back, looking pleased with himself. ‘Every man has his price, Tommy. Never forget that,’ he whispers. ‘Twenty quid goes a long way in helping a parish priest to change his mind. He won’t be getting that much for a Mass around here for a long time.’
The priest appears in the sanctuary, scans the congregation and beckons to me. ‘I didn’t know you were young Paddy’s best friend,’ he says in the sacristy. ‘You should have told me. You’ll serve the Mass. Good man.’
After the burial service, in the graveyard above the village, the priest replaces the ribbon markers, closes the black-covered Roman Ritual and removes the purple stole from around his neck. With Garryowen and Sputnik, I fill in the grave. The clay hits the coffin with a dull sound; there is a sharp crack when pebbles strike against the brass plate. Dust rises from the dry earth while we work. We kneel for a silent prayer before the men head down the road to the two pubs. The women, who form a wailing huddle around Deano’s mother and sisters, remain staring at the mound on which we have placed the shovels in the shape of a cross.
I mooch around the graveyard, studying the headstones as if they hold some explanation for this hammer blow to my expectations about life, and Deano’s dream of being a veterinary surgeon and owning a big house on the Athlone Road. Election posters are wrapped around the poles: Vote for the party that cares. A plate-glass window of the village shop advertises the opening of The Dreamland Ballroom in Glenamaddy. Grand extension until 1 am. Admission five shillings. Music by Doc Carroll and The Royal Blues.
In the pub, the schoolmaster is standing at the counter with M.J. and Seery. ‘The poor fellow worked so hard for that scholarship,’ the Master is saying. ‘He used to arrive at my house every evening on a donkey. A donkey. Imagine.’ The watch-chain across his waistcoat shakes when he chuckles.
‘Great little worker,’ M.J. adds. ‘Never missed a day, and he was with me right through his college years.’ A brandy in his hand, Seery is taking it all in. He had got a one-way sailing ticket and planned to return with us in the ferry. When he wasn’t fawning on the young teacher who told us that she and all the girls were mad about Deano, he was in the back of the car with a ledger on his knees and dockets on the seat beside him.
A couple of sticky papers covered with flies hang from the ceiling laths. In a bizarre way, a catchphrase of my English teacher echoes in my head: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.’ Chalk on the wings of his soutane, he paces the schoolroom, giving the class a few minutes’ grace before he fires questions on the previous day’s lesson.
Fragments of the conversations rise and fall: someone has the last of his hay saved and is cutting a bit of oats; there’s a slight increase in the price of heifers. And the oul bovine TB is nearly cleared up, thank God. A burst of laughter comes from a group of young men who are standing by an empty fireplace, their pints resting on the mantle. The Master apologizes: ‘They can only take so much of death. Too frightening.’ He returns to his pipe and his topic: Lemass is putting Ireland on its feet at last. Dev has had his day. The Master is becoming more voluble as he lowers one glass of whiskey after another. M.J. is nodding, but I notice him glance at the round clock beside a picture of the Pope. Eventually he looks at his watch and affects surprise at the time; he stands, shakes hands with the Master and turns to a few men who had tried to buy him a drink earlier. ‘So long, lads, and if you decide to head to London, there’ll be no shortage of work. You’ll find me through The Highway pub on Kilburn High Road.’
At the outskirts of the village we stop at a Caltex pump where a chap about my own age is lying on an old car seat reading a Zane Grey western. He was in the same class as Deano’s younger brother. ‘Brains to burn, that family had. Deano would be a qualified vet next year, did you know that?’
‘Yes. I knew that.’
He talks while he fills up the petrol tank. As soon as he finishes his metal work course in the Tech, he is heading for New York. All his class, apart from the sons of well-off farmers, have gone away. While we chat, I can hear Seery talking figures and schemes to M.J. ‘Guernsey’, ‘the Isle of Man’ and ‘blasted tax’ escape through a chink in the nearest window.
Two cows are grazing on the roadside in front of Deano’s house when we call to say goodbye before setting off for Dublin. In an empty shed, children are taking turns on a swing: two ropes tied to a crossbeam – a hay sack for a seat. Barking and jumping, a mongrel races around them. ‘I have a few hundred here,’ says M.J. reaching into a pocket in the dashboard. ‘By the look of things, they’ll need it.’
‘M.J.’ Seery stops turning pages; his tone is rigid. ‘I know it’s very sad, but if you give that,’ eyeing the bulky envelope, ‘you could be seen as accepting liability.’
The starched collar of his shirt strains when M.J. turns round and studies him. ‘Have you any screed of feeling, man?’
‘They’re nice people, M.J., and we’re all sorry for them and for Paddy, but when the dust settles, they might have that as material evidence that you were admitting liability and take you for thousands.’
By now the children have left the swing and are grinning at us through the warped bars of a gate. ‘If you want to give a few hundred,’ Seery continues, closing a ledger and smiling out at the children, ‘pitch in when the benefit dance is held in the Galty. No one need be the wiser then.’
M.J. studies the envelope: ‘You might be right,’ he says and hands it to Seery. ‘Look after that. I’m goin’ in for a minute.’ He jokes with the children, giving each of them a few coins; they refuse at first, but then take the money and run to the shed, comparing their good fortune.
11
A TEAM OF GARDENERS has already begun on the first section of houses when we return from the funeral. For a day or two the Galvin men work in long periods of silence so that whenever the mixer is turned off, we can hear the carpenters hammering the door frames and smoothing down the wood inside the nearby houses. Each evening they sweep out the sawdust and the curled shavings, filling the air with the smell of fresh timber. Some have by now gone to another contract, so that life seems to have drained from the site.
Sitting on a load of roof tiles during the break, I stare down at the spot where Deano crashed to his death, and hear again his last desperate cry. One of the carpenters settles himself beside me. ‘Deano,’ he says, as though reading my thoughts, ‘was he on the beer the night before?’
‘No. He was not on the beer the night before.’
He looks up in surprise, and then continues to roll a cigarette. ‘I was only asking.’
‘That’s all right.’ My anger cools. ‘No, some fucker removed a plank by mistake from underneath the tarpaulin, so when Paddy took a step on the scaffold, he had nothing… well, you know the rest.’
He strikes a match against one of the tiles; he wants to talk, I want to be alone. ‘Sorry. I know he was your friend, and if these things didn’t frighten us, sure we’d have no nature at all.’ But he himself has grown hardened to life’s casualties: trenches caving in because the foreman was cutting down on shuttering – shuttering costs money and a carpenter’s time. More money. He has seen bricks falling from the sky and splitting open a man’s skull. And the day a lorry backed up against a wall and crushed two men who were having their lunch in a suntrap. As always, of course, they deadened the pain of life’s misfortunes on the high stools of the Crown or through visits to Richmond Street.
I too try to shelve my discontent by returning to the Galty every Saturday night and groping for satisfaction with whomever will provide comfort and ease my confusion. While London is sleeping, I pick up the men at Camden Town and at Kilburn High Road. Gradually the banter returns: the fine bit of stuff that Seery got off with on Sunday night; the best man in Ireland right now to take a free is Mattie McDonagh; but Cassius Clay will never have the punch Jack Dempsey had.
‘You’re very quiet these days,’ says Jody when we are settled in to double baco
n and eggs at a café one morning.
‘I can’t get over what happened to Deano. Have you seen much of that, Jody – men losing their lives?’
‘Indeed I have. Up in Coventry, a young bloke, racing on a dumper.’ He is dipping a crust of bread into one of the eggs. ‘Same old story. Flash the few bob around when he went home – show them that he was doing well. Anyway, he was emptying concrete into a tunnel – twenty feet deep – and pulling right up to the edge. “Slow down,” we told him. “For Christ’s sake, slow down, you mad bastard.” No use. Well, one time he drove up too fast and the force carried him over the top. Awful. By the time we dug him out,’ he shakes his head, ‘the poor lad’s face and body were as grey as them floor tiles.’ With his deep blue eyes, he looks out through the window where men are shouting and hopping on trucks. ‘You get used to it. Lads lose their footing. You don’t think too much. Go mad if you did. And you hope you’ll get out of here alive and maybe come by a few acres back home.’
‘How did you end up here?’ I want to understand; the plan to join M.J. is now finally unravelling.
‘A friend of mine. We had spent a year together in the Tech. He came home one Christmas with a wristlet watch, and he used to tap his fag against a silver case before he lit up. He was one of the Pincher Laddies – McNicholas’s crowd. I thought I’d be made in London.’ He had to hide the cardboard suitcase from his mother and father in the hayshed. ‘Strangest thing of all: the old sheepdog was howling around the yard the morning I left. I told them – the Da and herself – that I was going to the hurling final in Croke Park.’
As we are leaving the café, Horse Muldoon comes tearing around the corner cursing and swearing that six of the Hitchin crew – the fucken Connies – hadn’t shown up and he would burst their goolies.
‘I’ll take the pick-up and collect them,’ I say. ‘Jody can take some of my gang,’
By now, I am well-used to the short cuts: down Camden High Street, then left at Old Street where the traffic gets heavy around seven o’clock.
The address on Horse’s torn-off Wild Woodbine packet leads me to a cul-de-sac off the Seven Sisters Road. When the knocker won’t budge, I call through the letterbox, and wait. Tall grass and weeds cover the tiny garden. One of the upstairs windows has a broken pane of glass; inside, a drip-dry shirt on a wire hanger is stirring in the breeze. I call again; this time a dark-skinned man in a long beige shirt over cream trousers answers the door. The smell of India pours out through the open door. ‘O yes,’ he says as if delighted to see me. ‘Irishmen upstairs. Noise. Very noise.’ He grins and puts both hands up to his ears. ‘Oh yes, very noise. Every night.’ A brown-eyed child clings to his trouser leg, smiles up at me and then hides.
Some of the banisters in the stairs are broken or hang aslant. As I reach the landing, a man in a torn singlet puts his head out the door, then swings around and shouts into the room: ‘Jaysus, get up! The college lad.’
‘Who?’
‘The boss’s fucken brother. Get up, you bastards.’
I hear a thump on the floorboards: ‘Get up, fuck you!’
They fill the quiet street with loud talk and the smell of stale beer.
‘Nice morning, lads.’
They grunt and hop into the back.
A tall sinewy man, a few years older than the others, sits in beside me. His red hair stands out, and on the side of his face is a trace of dried blood. He catches me looking.
‘A bit of a scrap in The Maid of Erin,’ he says as if by way of an apology.
‘Ah, sure, it happens.’
Silence in the back. I glance in the rear-view mirror. One of them is puking over the side: the green vomit splashes on the mudguard and slides down to the road. At a set of traffic lights, two women in gabardine coats glare at us. One of the men shouts. ‘What are you fucken lookin’ at?’
The women look away. ‘Disgusting. Those Irish,’ says one of them. She makes a face.
An older man, his hand on the sick youth’s shoulder, raises his tousled head. ‘Ah, go and fuck yourself, you dry old bitch. ’Tis how you never had a good ride in your life.’
The lights turn green.
‘The oul bitch,’ says the man beside me. He rolls down the window and sticks out his head, so that his long hair is tossed about wildly. ‘An bhuil tú ceart, a mhic?’ he asks.
‘Tá mé all right, a mhic.’
They let out a roar at the women, who are now falling back from my side-view mirror.
For a couple of nights I go upstairs to my room in The Highway and stare out the window at rows of terracotta chimney pots and the slated roofs of houses, trying to impose order into my thoughts. I would be insane to give up the newly found pleasures of the Galty, or the promise that lies ahead with M.J. Galvin Construction to go into a seminary.
The insane voice, however, has me in its grip. I begin to visit Quex Road Church and kneel beneath stained-glass windows; my mind wanders along the grain of the dark wooden pews to the brass plaques: ‘Pray for the souls of Francis Dolan and family. Remember Joseph Egan. R.I.P.’ I look up at the tabernacle – and for the soul of Patrick Conway. On my way out, I light a candle at the shrine to the Sacred Heart.
‘To be a priest?’ M.J. laughs when I break the news to him before I leave. He is removing boots caked with dried mud in the red and black chequered hallway, supporting himself with one hand on the newel post of the stairs. ‘Pull the other one, Tomásheen. A priest? Did the sun get to your brain or something.’ He looks at me; the smile fades. ‘You mean it.’
‘Yeah, well, give it a try anyway.’
‘What would make you do a thing like that, boy?’ A frown shows on his tanned face, he flings the boots into the press beneath the stairs and slams the door. ‘And throw away the chance of a lifetime.’ He glowers at me and keeps running his hand through his wavy hair.
When Vera has gone to her ballroom dancing with her husband, he brings it up at the dinner table.
‘Where did this notion come from anyway?’
‘I’ve been speaking to a priest in school. He thinks I should give it a go.’
‘What? A priest in school. What do they know?’ He shakes his head. ‘Sure all them fellas do is play golf and eat scones with nuns. And walk around with shiny shoes. Waste of a life, if you ask me.’
‘If you think so little about the whole thing, why do you go to Mass?’
‘Go to Mass. Of course I go to Mass!’ His anger is rising again. ‘What has going to Mass to do with anything. Doesn’t take much to go to Mass; didn’t all belonging to us go? Are you out of your mind, boy?’ He pushes away his plate, and begins to tap the table. ‘For the life of me, I don’t know why a fella would want to do a thing like that when he could have it made in no time. And you want to go to Africa, you say.’
‘I’m not being ordained tomorrow. I’ll have seven years – if I stay – to think about it.’
Usually, when he has cleaned his plate, he is out the door to some meeting with a quantity surveyor or borough council official. Not this evening. Instead, he is in and out of the sitting-room, pulling out drawers, looking at maps. I switch on the radiogram and pick up the Daily Mail, and behind the newspaper I’m trying to shape a defence for the next attack. Yes. I’m searching for something. Answers. Why did Deano …? Something beyond Muldoon shouting and throwing youths around like rag dolls. Better not to take that line – Muldoon is a trusted foreman. Fragments from school retreats, and films showing priests strolling around schoolyards, black children grinning broadly and looking up at them. Gregory Peck going off to China in The Keys of the Kingdom. The young priest back from Uganda who said Mass in Ardglass chapel one Sunday, and talked about digging wells, and giving people a chance to live. And a current of something close to arousal was racing through my veins. In school the following day, he showed films and asked if any boy would sell The Far East.
‘Yes, I will. I’ll sell six, Father.’
The periodic reminders in The Sunday Press. Would
you like to devote your life to God? No greater love…. In a photograph, clerical students in soutanes are having a grand time in front of a seminary throwing snowballs at one another.
‘And tell me, how are you going to keep your paws off the young ladies? You’ll be going to bed on your own for the rest of your living days. By all accounts you weren’t sitting in a corner on your own in the Galty.’
‘Haven’t priests managed for the last nine or ten hundred years?’
‘I know nothing about these things, Tommy boy, but I know ’tis not natural.’ He is rolling up ground plans that don’t need rolling.
After much mindless activity, he grows calm again: ‘I’d make you a director in no time, if you got the engineering. Even if you didn’t get it. I never had the oul education, and sometimes ’tis hard to keep up. You know, at dinners, and meetings, these architects and engineers talking about their university days and classical music and Covent Garden. Doesn’t bother me too much because they know I could buy the lot of them, but still…. And to have one of my own, that would be great.’
I lower the music on the radiogram. ‘I have to give it a try.’
‘We’re not to your liking over here.’
‘No. I enjoyed the work.’
‘That’s the way things are.’
He gives in and we flit over territory now well-known to me: the flats in Dunstable, the Heathrow job, the sand pit at Sundon. He was getting out of cable-laying: the demand for houses would hold for a long time yet. Then suddenly I step on a mine. Dead men. Subbies pocketing wages.
His colour rises. ‘So we’re con men, is that it?’
‘Ah no.’
‘No? All right for them that have dreamy notions about how things should be, while us poor bastards paw the shit.’ He glares at me: ‘I got no help from anyone when I came over here, but I didn’t waste my time scratching my arse. I copped on very soon and saw where I could make a few bob. And every brand of a hoor out there trying to do me.’ He slams the door behind him. Stunned, I slump into the armchair as the jeep thunders into an angry roar.