A HAPPY BIRTHDAY
SAMMY ADJUSTED HIS tie in front of the mirror and tucked in the frayed cuffs of his shirt sleeves. He whistled a few bars of something and whatever way he was holding his mouth he noticed he had missed a few copper-coloured hairs at the angle of his lip. He got out his razor again and dipped in his mug of now luke-warm water. He opened his mouth in a mock yawn and nicked off the remaining hairs. Next he combed his hair, shading it so low at the side of his head that it covered at least half the bald area. He sang aloud as he did so. His mother spoke out from the kitchen.
‘You’re in the quare mood to-day.’
Sammy carried his mug out to the kitchen and offered it to his mother, saying, ‘Like a nice cup of warm hairs, Ma?’
She made a face, calling him a dirty baste as he threw them down the sink.
‘Why shouldn’t I be in the quare mood?’ said Sammy. ‘Fifty to-day and they’re paying out on the dole too.’ His mother wiped her hands nervously on her apron.
‘Don’t be drinking, son, sure you won’t?’ Sammy said he wouldn’t.
‘Promise me,’ she said and he nodded, while making another attempt to spread the hairs more evenly over the skin of his head at the mirror in the kitchen.
‘Have you any bus fare Ma?’
‘What’s wrong with your legs?’ she asked. Sammy stooped very low trying to see the sky above the backyard wall.
‘Looks a bit like rain,’ he said. His mother shuffled into the room.
‘Where’s my purse?’ she said, stooping into the corner for her bag. ‘Do you think I’m made of money, eh? The pension doesn’t go too far when you’re around.’ Sammy slipped the two bob into his pocket and said he would pay her back when he got his money.
‘I’ve heard that before,’ said his mother. Sammy left the house and walked slowly into town.
On his way down the road he called into Forsythe’s and bought four cigarettes. The girl rolled them across the counter to him and he examined them, checking the brand. He asked for a packet and the girl sorted one out from beneath the counter, and slipped the cigarettes into it. Sammy patted them happily in his pocket. On the street he asked a man for a light and inhaled deeply the first of the day. He reached the town half an hour before he had to sign on so he went into the library to read the newspapers. Nothing but bloody explosions and robberies again. Something would have to be done. The IRA was getting the run of the country without one to say boo to them. Something would have to be done. He made his way to the bureau at about five to eleven. It was the cheeky wee bitch who was paying out. When he got his money he peeled off two pounds for his mother and stuck them in his top pocket out of the way. Then he headed for the pub where he knew all the boys would be.
When Sammy came out the bright sunlight was a great shock to him. As he walked along the street the walls seemed to come at him and nudge him. People deliberately went out of their way to veer into his path. The bus driver smiled at him for no reason and some young ones clapped after he had sung a song. He got off the bus and walked past a line of soldiers at the main gate. He stopped with the last one and put his hand on his arm and said,
‘Yis are doing a grand job.’
‘Wot?’ said the soldier.
‘Yis are the boys.’ The soldier’s gun as he leaned over to try and hear pointed to the middle of Sammy’s chest.
‘Wot?’ he said.
‘Forget it,’ said Sammy. He moved off through the gates towards the exhibition hall. A group of student demonstrators paraded silently weaving their way in and out of the domes. They carried placards – ‘ULSTER 71 WHITEWASH’, ‘EXPOSE 71’. Sammy made his way in front of one with long hair and stopped him with his hand. He held him at arm’s length, focusing the writing on the card. ‘TELL THE TRUTH, 40,000 UNEMPLOYED’. Sammy leaned closer to him.
‘Why don’t yis catch yourselves on?’ The student began to move forward. ‘Who do you think is paying your grants for you, eh? You’ll get no work coming to the country with the likes of you parading about making trouble.’ The first student had pushed past him but he continued speaking to the next in line.
‘Yis have never done a day’s work in your lives. You don’t know what ye’re talking about. So-called civil rights. Why don’t yis go down south where yis belong?’ A policeman came up behind him and guided him away. Sammy went past the exhibition hall and found the blue igloo of the bar tent. He fingered into his top pocket and pulled out the two pounds. He had more stout, he didn’t know how many, and now that he was in his own company he had a whiskey with each one. After a time he heard squealing coming from outside the tent and went out to see what it was about.
A crowd of girls were on the Hurricane Waltzer. Sammy talked to the man operating it until the session finished, then he paid his money and climbed up into a seat, being guided by hands from behind. The attendant locked him in with a bar. Sammy called to the girls who were paying their money for another turn, but the words came out all wrong. The machine started, clanking and grinding, spinning slowly. It gathered speed and began to loop and dip. The noise of the Waltzer was reaching a crescendo but at each sudden drop the squealing of the girls rose above it. Sammy’s hand tightened convulsively on the bar in front of him. He saw the upturned watching faces streak into one and other. Then he opened his mouth and it all came out.
Below people screamed and ran, covering their heads. One woman quickly put up her umbrella. The student demonstrators sheltered beneath their placards. It came out of him like sparks from a catherine wheel. An emulsion of minestrone stout. Spraying on the multi-coloured domes of the exhibition. Exclamation marks, yellow and buff bird-dung streaks flecking the canvas. Sparking off the tarmac paths, soaking spots in people’s Sunday best. Children slipped and fell. The machine operator and his mate stayed in their hut throughout. People signalled frantically, pointing to the revolving figure.
When the Waltzer came to a halt Sammy’s mouth was still open. As the operator was unlocking the safety bar Sammy belched and the operator dived to one side. As Sammy staggered away, the operator said to his mate, ‘There’s not a spot of boke on him.’
‘He’s probably the only one in the park.’
Sammy walked in a great arc and arrived back to the operator. His flap of hair hung by his ear and his head shone. ‘What’s there to see here?’ he asked. His elbow slipped off the edge of the counter and he belched loudly again.
The operator pointed. ‘Do you see that wee girl over there?’ Sammy looked at the pointing finger but not at its direction. ‘She’ll tell you all you want to know.’
He turned Sammy by the shoulders and aimed him in the direction of the information kiosk. When he asked the same question the girl with the skill of a thousand rehearsals told him all there was to see. Sammy swayed looking at her, blinking, then he looked down at his toes. His fingers fished for his last pound.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ll maybe go for a drink first. It’s my birthday.’
SECRETS
HE HAD BEEN called to be there at the end. His Great Aunt Mary had been dying for some days now and the house was full of relatives. He had just left his girlfriend home – they had been studying for ‘A’ levels together – and had come back to the house to find all the lights spilling onto the lawn and a sense of purpose which had been absent from the last few days.
He knelt at the bedroom door to join in the prayers. His knees were on the wooden threshold and he edged them forward onto the carpet. They had tried to wrap her fingers around a crucifix but they kept loosening. She lay low on the pillow and her face seemed to have shrunk by half since he had gone out earlier in the night. Her white hair was damped and pushed back from her forehead. She twisted her head, from side to side, her eyes closed. The prayers chorused on, trying to cover the sound she was making deep in her throat. Someone said about her teeth and his mother leaned over her and said, ‘That’s the pet’, and took her dentures from her mouth. Her lower face seemed to collapse. She half opened
her eyes but could not raise her eyelids enough and showed only crescents of white.
‘Hail Mary full of grace . . .’ the prayers went on. He closed his hands over his face so that he would not have to look but smelt the trace of his girlfriend’s handcream from his hands. The noise, deep and guttural, that his aunt was making became intolerable to him. It was as if she were drowning. She had lost all the dignity he knew her to have. He got up from the floor and stepped between the others who were kneeling and went into her sitting-room off the same landing.
He was trembling with anger or sorrow, he didn’t know which. He sat in the brightness of her big sitting-room at the oval table and waited for something to happen. On the table was a cut-glass vase of irises, dying because she had been in bed for over a week. He sat staring at them. They were withering from the tips inward, scrolling themselves delicately, brown and neat. Clearing up after themselves. He stared at them for a long time until he heard the sounds of women weeping from the next room.
His aunt had been small – her head on a level with his when she sat at her table – and she seemed to get smaller each year. Her skin fresh, her hair white and waved and always well washed. She wore no jewelry except a cameo ring on the third finger of her right hand and, around her neck, a gold locket on a chain. The white classical profile on the ring was almost worn through and had become translucent and indistinct. The boy had noticed the ring when she had read to him as a child. In the beginning fairy tales, then as he got older extracts from famous novels, Lorna Doone, Persuasion, Wuthering Heights and her favourite extract, because she read it so often, Pip’s meeting with Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. She would sit with him on her knee, her arms around him, holding the page flat with her hand. When he was bored he would interrupt her and ask about the ring. He loved hearing her tell of how her grandmother had given it to her as a brooch and she had had a ring made from it. He would try to count back to see how old it was. Had her grandmother got it from her grandmother? And if so what had she turned it into? She would nod her head from side to side and say, ‘How would I know a thing like that?’ keeping her place in the closed book with her finger.
‘Don’t be so inquisitive,’ she’d say. ‘Let’s see what happens next in the story.’
One day she was sitting copying figures into a long narrow book with a dip pen when he came into her room. She didn’t look up but when he asked her a question she just said, ‘Mm?’ and went on writing. The vase of irises on the oval table vibrated slightly as she wrote.
‘What is it?’ She wiped the nib on blotting paper and looked up at him over her reading glasses.
‘I’ve started collecting stamps and Mamma says you might have some.’
‘Does she now –?’
She got up from the table and went to the tall walnut bureau-bookcase standing in the alcove. From a shelf of the bookcase she took a small wallet of keys and selected one for the lock. There was a harsh metal shearing sound as she pulled the desk flap down. The writing area was covered with green leather which had dog-eared at the corners. The inner part was divided into pigeon holes, all bulging with papers. Some of them, envelopes, were gathered in batches nipped at the waist with elastic bands. There were postcards and bills and cash-books. She pointed to the postcards.
‘You may have the stamps on those,’ she said. ‘But don’t tear them. Steam them off.’
She went back to the oval table and continued writing. He sat on the arm of the chair looking through the picture postcards – torchlight processions at Lourdes, brown photographs of town centres, dull black and whites of beaches backed by faded hotels. Then he turned them over and began to sort the stamps. Spanish, with a bald man, French with a rooster, German with funny jerky print, some Italian with what looked like a chimney-sweep’s bundle and a hatchet.
‘These are great,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got any of them.’
‘Just be careful how you take them off.’
‘Can I take them downstairs?’
‘Is your mother there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then perhaps it’s best if you bring the kettle up here.’
He went down to the kitchen. His mother was in the morning room polishing silver. He took the kettle and the flex upstairs. Except for the dipping and scratching of his aunt’s pen the room was silent. It was at the back of the house overlooking the orchard and the sound of traffic from the main road was distant and muted. A tiny rattle began as the kettle warmed up, then it bubbled and steam gushed quietly from its spout. The cards began to curl slightly in the jet of steam but she didn’t seem to be watching. The stamps peeled moistly off and he put them in a saucer of water to flatten them.
‘Who is Brother Benignus?’ he asked. She seemed not to hear. He asked again and she looked over her glasses.
‘He was a friend.’
His flourishing signature appeared again and again. Sometimes Bro Benignus, sometimes Benignus and once Iggy.
‘Is he alive?’
‘No, he’s dead now. Watch the kettle doesn’t run dry.’
When he had all the stamps off he put the postcards together and replaced them in the pigeon-hole. He reached over towards the letters but before his hand touched them his aunt’s voice, harsh for once, warned.
‘A-A-A,’ she moved her pen from side to side.’ Do-not-touch,’ she said and smiled. ‘Anything else, yes! That section, no!’ She resumed her writing.
The boy went through some other papers and found some photographs. One was of a beautiful girl. It was very old-fashioned but he could see that she was beautiful. The picture was a pale brown oval set on a white square of card. The edges of the oval were misty. The girl in the photograph was young and had dark, dark hair scraped severely back and tied like a knotted rope on the top of her head – high arched eyebrows, her nose straight and thin, her mouth slightly smiling, yet not smiling – the way a mouth is after smiling. Her eyes looked out at him dark and knowing and beautiful.
‘Who is that?’ he asked.
‘Why? What do you think of her?’
‘She’s all right.’
‘Do you think she is beautiful?’ The boy nodded.
‘That’s me,’ she said. The boy was glad he had pleased her in return for the stamps.
Other photographs were there, not posed ones like Aunt Mary’s but Brownie snaps of laughing groups of girls in bucket hats like German helmets and coats to their ankles. They seemed tiny faces covered in clothes. There was a photograph of a young man smoking a cigarette, his hair combed one way by the wind against a background of sea.
‘Who is that in the uniform?’ the boy asked.
‘He’s a soldier,’ she answered without looking up.
‘Oh,’ said the boy. ‘But who is he?’
‘He was a friend of mine before you were born,’ she said. Then added, ‘Do I smell something cooking? Take your stamps and off you go. That’s the boy.’
The boy looked at the back of the picture of the man and saw in black spidery ink, ‘John, Aug ’15 Ballintoy’.
‘I thought maybe it was Brother Benignus,’ he said. She looked at him not answering.
‘Was your friend killed in the war?’
At first she said no, but then she changed her mind.
‘Perhaps he was,’ she said, then smiled. ‘You are far too inquisitive. Put it to use and go and see what is for tea. Your mother will need the kettle.’ She came over to the bureau and helped tidy the photographs away. Then she locked it and put the keys on the shelf.
‘Will you bring me up my tray?’
The boy nodded and left.
It was a Sunday evening, bright and summery. He was doing his homework and his mother was sitting on the carpet in one of her periodic fits of tidying out the drawers of the mahogany sideboard. On one side of her was a heap of paper scraps torn in quarters and bits of rubbish, on the other the useful items that had to be kept. The boy heard the bottom stair creak under Aunt Mary’s light footstep. She knocked and
put her head round the door and said that she was walking to Devotions. She was dressed in her good coat and hat and was just easing her fingers into her second glove. The boy saw her stop and pat her hair into place before the mirror in the hallway. His mother stretched over and slammed the door shut. It vibrated, then he heard the deeper sound of the outside door closing and her first few steps on the gravelled driveway. He sat for a long time wondering if he would have time or not. Devotions could take anything from twenty minutes to three quarters of an hour, depending on who was saying it.
Ten minutes must have passed, then the boy left his homework and went upstairs and into his aunt’s sitting room. He stood in front of the bureau wondering, then he reached for the keys. He tried several before he got the right one. The desk flap screeched as he pulled it down. He pretended to look at the postcards again in case there were any stamps he had missed. Then he put them away and reached for the bundle of letters. The elastic band was thick and old, brittle almost and when he took it off its track remained on the wad of letters. He carefully opened one and took out the letter and unfolded it, frail, khaki-coloured.
My dearest Mary, it began. I am so tired I can hardly write to you. I have spent what seems like all day censoring letters (there is a howitzer about 100 yds away firing every 2 minutes). The letters are heart-rending in their attempt to express what they cannot. Some of the men are illiterate, others almost so. I know that they feel as much as we do, yet they do not have the words to express it. That is your job in the schoolroom to give us generations who can read and write well. They have . . .
The boy’s eye skipped down the page and over the next. He read the last paragraph.
Collected Stories Page 4