But Denny’s mood was apt to darken suddenly at this time and, after the way Fennelly and his fellow scrummagers had looked at him, bringing back the memory of the afternoon’s events, he was in no mood now for jollity.
‘They’ve no respect for their elders, Fennelly and that Saint Mary’s crew,’ he said, swatting at the hands of his companions, who were prodding his bruised temple in mock awe.
‘They were only two years behind us,’ said Beast Features.
‘And are twice our size,’ said Billy.
‘If they weren’t in our Senior Cup year then they’re our juniors, and we’re their elders,’ said Denny.
‘You were beyond the bounds there in every way, Denny,’ said Beast Features. ‘And asking for it.’
‘Frankly, it was about time – both Beastie and I agreed,’ said Billy.
‘Now,’ said Denny – he semaphored the barman for another glass of malt; Billy and Beast Features glanced at each other with bowed heads, and Beastie looked at Denny disapprovingly. Both B&B were on the lemonade.
‘Well, he’s given me the wake-up call at least,’ he said. He pressed his contusion, rather enjoying the fizzle of the pain between fingers and bone.
‘Good for him, and for you. I hope you realise now that you’re a stupid bollocks. You’re lucky he didn’t garryowen you all the way to Belfast.’
‘Ha! You said it, Beastie!’ said Billy.
‘What I realise …’ he said, having to break off to allow the guffawing and table-slapping to die down, ‘What I realise, chaps – what Mister Fennelly has woken me up to – is that the time has come for drastic action.’ He paused for effect. ‘Fellows, I’ve made up my mind.’
‘Go on,’ said Billy. ‘You’re about to deliver something dramatic, I can see.’
‘I’ve finally given up on this country. I’ve made up my mind that I’m going to America.’
‘Settle yourself down there, Denny,’ said Beast Features.
‘Listen to him!’ said Billy. ‘America! You’re a mammy’s boy, Denny! You didn’t even last six weeks in Italy! You came running home for mammy’s milk!’
The barman pushed his way through to them and, with a deliberate bang on the table, put a glass full of ice, and only ice, in front of Denny. To Beast Features he said, with a wagging finger, ‘Not a drop more for him.’
‘Good on you, Mick!’ said Beast Features. ‘That’s the way. You see, Denny, even Mick is taking Vincent Fennelly’s side on this one. You’ve become an awful arse, it’s obvious to everybody.’
‘America!’ said Billy again, shaking his head.
‘Pay no heed to him,’ said Beast Features. ‘He’s always been a home bird.’
‘I was a home bird, Beastie, that’s true, and I still am, to a degree.’ He twirled the ice in his glass, and hiccupped. ‘That degree being the point at which the Ireland that could have been changes to the Ireland that is now. That first is the Ireland I’m tied to for ever – the Ireland I carried in my kit bag to Italy and sang to Maestro Tosi about.’
‘Who dismissed it as claptrap!’ said Beast Features. ‘As anybody with any taste would and does. Sentimental crud, manufactured in the main by Englishmen and Americans and West Britons!’
‘Ah, Beastie now,’ Denny protested. ‘Those Thomas Moores and Chauncey Challoners – they had great antennae for the Irish soul.’
‘If it’s from such as your own that that rubbish was divined then your soul is as shaky and artificial as the corner turrets on the Irish House Bar.’
‘And I’ll tell you what,’ said Denny, ‘at least those ballads have more of a connection with this land than the rock and the roll and the doo wop that’s rife about the place now.’
‘Oh, not this again! Jealous of youth! Jealous of youth!’
‘Why would I be jealous of youth? Get out of that!’
‘Jealous of youth!’ said Beast Features. ‘Because the good discerning people of this country didn’t care much for your music anymore –’
‘Ah, easy now, Beastie,’ said Billy.
‘– and now these rock and rollers have come along, and the folks are lapping it up. And you can’t bear it seeing Pádraigín Cruise (what’s he calling himself now? Pádraigín O’Clock?), you can’t bear it seeing Pádraigín getting in on it. The girls falling at his feet!’
‘Beastie, Beastie. Janey, man,’ said Billy. ‘You’ll finish poor Denny off.’
‘Sure it’s not making a dint on him,’ said Beast Features. ‘Look at him. His head down like bloody Dropjohn. He’s a heap. The man is a shambles. You’re a shambles, Denny, at thirty-one years of age. I’m telling him this for his own good. It’s a tragedy. Had a fine young voice, took a wrong turn with it, and too proud to admit he had. Rejected, not the pride nor the strength of character to regroup, try something different, move on from his stupid romantic notions. He could be a minor operatic star by now, if only he’d stuck it out in Italy. Or be doo-wopping and fingerclicking Pádraigín off the stage. But he’s not. He’s a drunk. A flailing and bilious drunk. And he’s shredded his voice with that poison. No – that won’t ever come back.’
Denny listened to every word, and Beast Features was right – not one of them made a scratch, because they amounted to nothing he didn’t know himself. But still in his dampened and sedated state he could rouse himself to spar. He lifted his head.
‘Well, you don’t understand me and the force that animates me. I was born a long time ago. Oh but that is how I feel. Have you heard about this idea from other religions of the transmigration of souls? This is how I inherited mine. And my soul is as green as the essential green chlorophyll of Ireland.’
‘The only thing green in you is the bile in your gullet,’ said Beast Features. ‘And what cod! It’s painful to listen to you. You claim to know yourself, but do you have any idea how you appear and sound to others? Is this what poor Aisling has to put up with at home?’
Aisling! The word cut through his toxic shield. Aisling! These things – they were the kinds of things that Aisling herself would say to him. Like when he would try to tell her that she was beautiful, and she would tell him to please be himself, to stop with his film-star talk.
‘I am bilious, it’s true, Beastie. I am bitter. What’s happened to Ireland these last few years … at least it gave me hope that the youth would clear out. Till only recently I used to will them to the boats. Be gone and good riddance, I used to say. I hoped for a cull. I hoped the poverty would ossify the country. I hoped that every pregnant young girl would queue up outside of Mamie Cadden’s abortionarium. I thought: Leave the place to the old and old in spirit now! Because the youth were ruining the country with their alien ideas. Still are. I passed the statue of Lord Ardilaun on the Green this morning’ – he looked at a bottle of stout on the adjacent table – ‘and I cursed him, I did, for ever having given confidence to the primitive, because we’re seeing the fruits of that now in the swagger and slouch of these wild apes with their rock-and-roll music and their sex mania.’
‘You’re only a scut yourself, Denny, give it up!’ said Beast Features. ‘And if it wasn’t for Ardilaun and his likes you’d still be in the jungle. Didn’t you need a scholarship to get into school? Another tragedy – you got to your airy little niche by talent alone, and only talent was going to keep you there. The rest of us bob along nicely on daddy’s largesse no matter the damage we do to ourselves.’
They fell into silence for a moment, before Billy said, ‘So, America, Denny. You’re not serious about this?’
‘Of course he’s not serious,’ said Beast Features. ‘But he’ll say that he’s serious, watch him.’
‘I am serious,’ said Denny. ‘The country’s gone to ruin and there’s no going back. The rot has set right in deep now.’
‘And you’re off to the land of modernity and rock and roll itself?’ said Billy.
‘A point well made, Billy!’ said Beast Features.
‘America’s the shining light of the world,’ said De
nny, ‘even more so now than before; too big to be tarnished by the rubbings and scrapings of a few skiffle musicians.’
‘A hopeless romantic! Beastie’s right about you,’ said Billy.
‘Would you call the Jews who built a country out of the dry rocks of Palestine hopeless? Would you call the Germans who took the dream of Deutschland to south-west Africa and made it real hopeless?’
‘Steady on with that talk,’ said Beast Features.
‘You’re going to build a new Ireland in the Mojave Desert, are you?’ said Billy, sniggering.
‘First things first. I’ll land in New York, same place that McCormack made his name.’
‘You’ll find a few dewy-eyed descendants might indulge you there for a while all right!’ said Billy.
‘Good enough for him!’ said Beast Features. ‘And does Aisling have a say in any of this?’
‘She does. She can say that she’ll come with me.’
‘Or say that she won’t?’
‘Indeed.’
‘You’ll put her up to it?’
‘If you like. But she’s my wife, and she’ll come.’
‘She’s had enough of your pipe dreams. She won’t budge, and so neither will you.’
‘She has every reason to come. She could have a career in singing herself.’
‘She would have had it by now if she’d really wanted it. Denny, she lives in the modern and real world – what she wants is for you to settle down and do what husbands do.’
‘I think you misinterpret my attitude to modernity. I don’t accept what’s become of the world, but I am a modern man! I am a modern man! Just because I take from the past doesn’t mean that I’m not a modern man.’
‘You take from no past that’s ever happened! You take from the dream world!’
‘Well there you have it! The mark of a modern man is someone who wants to change things by the force of his dreaming, and to lead by his own example!’
‘The most you’ll do in the way of action is walk as far in the direction of America as the James’s Street fountain, take a gulp of water to sober up, and turn around for home again, stopping in every pub along the route.’
‘We should open a book on it,’ said Billy. ‘Five pounds that he’ll make it as far as Saint Patrick’s loo-lah hospital!’
‘So you’ll land, anyhow, in New York,’ said Beast Features, ‘helped down the gangplank by Marlon Brando, and you’ll be straight into making the big bucks at the Met Opera House, this Great Bard of Ireland, Denny Logan, with Aisling dangling off your arm, and you’ll be living it up in grand style on Fifth Avenue?’
‘Well, no, not exactly.’
‘No, I shouldn’t have thought so.’
‘The plan is, that I will go ahead on my own for a while to test the waters. There’ll be some hardship, of course there will, initially.’
‘And you’ll tough it out in some dosshouse or the YMCA, will you?’
‘No. I’ve joined a club. An uncle of mine down in Waterford has some connections in that way, and I’ve joined a club. And I’ll write to their members in New York, and they’ll take me in. The Davy Langans, they’re called. Men and women after my own heart.’
‘The Davy Whatkins?’
‘Langans. True cultural and political revolutionaries. Or rather, half-revolutionaries. Revolutionaries come right the way back around to where they started from. The Davy Langans seek to flip the world one hundred and eighty degrees.’
‘It gets better, Billy!’
‘I’ll go over, Beastie, and I’m telling you, a year from now you’ll be calling me a visionary.’
‘A double visionary!’
‘Hoo hoo!’ went Billy, nearly slipping under the table.
‘A year from now the rock and roll will be shown to have been a passing craze,’ said Denny, ‘and we’ll be back on with the real stuff. I’m going, fellows, this isn’t waffle, I’m going to America, and that’s it, just you see.’
‘You’d better run!’ said Billy. ‘Your ship is sailing!’
‘I’m going to go, I will!’ said Denny. ‘Unless …’
Beast Features lifted his hand to stay Billy’s hooting, and, needing to take a deep breath himself, said, ‘Unless, Denny?’
‘There’s another thing I might do. That we might do. A proposal, if you like. I don’t know how this sounds, but … Perhaps, well … I was thinking: a tenor trio. Me. You, Beastie. You, Billy. The three of us. I even have a name: the White-Headed Boys.’
The laughter must have been heard all the way back up Leinster Market.
‘Have you even flippin’ heard Billy sing before?! Have you heard me sing?! The White-Headed Boys! Oh boy, indeed! Lennox bloody Robinson’s already kicking in his grave, I can hear him! Will you go off to America now! Go off and stop stinking up the air with your horse manure! And don’t forget to swing by the Gaiety along the way, because you’ve a ticket to see Otello this evening.’
‘Lennox Robinson doesn’t have copyright on that name! And I have heard Billy sing, and he has a voice of very great potential! And I’m offering you both greatness and glory! And … yes. You’ll go away and think about that now! And … oof! Both of you – to Hell and to Hecate with you!’
Otello! He patted his breast pockets.
‘You’d forgotten, you drunk! Go up there and watch Paolo Silveri and see how a real singer should conduct himself! “White-Headed Boys”! Go on, piss off!’
***
He should have gone home to Rathmines for a wash and a change of clothing, but he didn’t. Instead he spent the time left before the performance wandering the streets, about the Green mainly; four or five circuits of the perimeter, past Ardilaun again, the horse trough, Loreto, the College of Surgeons. He opened another button on his shirt, sucked the air hard to feed off its freshness. But all that he tasted was on the turn: something rotten from the York Street tenements, the muck of the leaves on the ground. He had once told Aisling that he knew Silveri; or at least that Silveri had, like himself, received tuition from Tosi. At any rate, Silveri, a regular performer in Dublin in those days, would have heard enough about the Maestro’s Irish charge that he’d welcome him always into his dressing room. And he had reminded Aisling of this again, before he came out.
The walk had not had the effect he’d wanted. By the time he entered the theatre foyer he was tired; his goose-pimpled skin shivered in the heat; he felt fluey, pooey; in that awful between-state place. Opera evenings in Dublin were democratic gatherings: women bossed their men around and told them what to do for them and what to think of this and that aspect of this or another production. He mooched in a corner. He himself lived in rooms in the former childhood home of orientalist Lafcadio Hearn in Rathmines; he wanted to tell someone, because someone was talking about The Mikado.
He kept slipping off into sleep during the show. All that booze and all of that air made it sleepy time for his body, and his body was being a brat. From the dark of the circle the image of the stage was soft and vibrant like the projection of a loose slide. Twice or four times he woke gulping air and feeling as if he were falling. Gravity surged through him in a crook shape: down, then through his stomach. Once he opened his eyes and there was Silveri, murdering his part. Silveri was a baritone; someone had had the terrible idea of moving him up to tenor. He died there with Silveri, back into sleep with the steep pitch of the balcony.
With a clunk and a clatter he was let out through the fire doors. He felt better now, although a smell of heated felt and gloss paint and burning electrics lingered in his damned nostrils. He came out of Tangier Lane into Grafton Street, splashing through puddles of milk and oil. He looked left and right, and up he started into the foothills.
He came out the other side of sickness, feeling bright even, but sad. Over the hump of the canal bridge at the end of Richmond Street rose the mint-green dome of the church of the township. In the dark it was especially vivid. He experienced a deep sadness for all he was to leave. His father’s side going
back generations had been Dublin people. His mother’s father’s people too. Soldiers stumbled away from the cricket club with their heads on the shoulders of women they’d only just met. University students ran in coursing packs. These were the transient. Then there were the lonely. It was the township of both these types. The passing-through, and the people worse than himself that lived in cornered-off spaces on sagging boards. They wrote letters to sisters saying they were not so bad now. Anyhow. He was not so bad. He’d had his revelation and his mind was made up. He’d go in to Aisling and tell her he loved her and damn her if she didn’t believe him.
He leaned against the railings outside the house. Downstairs’ cat Tiddles was on the little patch of green by the basement, arched and on the defensive. It was a lovely little cat. ‘Tiddles,’ he called to it. He went down on one knee and stretched his arm in through the bars.
He washed his face in the sink that all the flats shared. The light was weak, yellow and cold. He ran the tap and let the basin fill almost to the brim. There was no stopper in the plughole, and he watched the water very slowly drain away, thinking of what it would be like to be sick in a foreign country, to fight and fend, to freeze in a vest.
On evenings she wasn’t working she liked to light the fire, because there was one in the room, and it was romantic. She loved the fire, and she’d got permission from the landlord to paint the iron surround white, and while she’d been at it she also painted the detailing, the finicky flowers and ferns, so that now the surround was more green and red than white. They’d read all about Lafcadio Hearn, and they liked to think his spirit was still in the room, of course. He, too, had gone to America.
The fire was not low in the grate as it usually would have been at this time. Aisling too looked fresh and alive: she was sitting high in the bed with his pillows and her own propping her up. She was waiting for him with a warm smile, and the book she’d been reading was turned down on the blanket over her tummy. Her face looked soft and glossy under beauty cream, and her hair was tied back out of it. The smile dissolved as she saw the bruise on his head.
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