Need

by Nik Cohn

  A child lay in the street.

  At lunchtime John Joe Maguire sat in Sweeney’s, drinking a Bud on draught. They had strange beer in this far country, cat’s piss was the fact of the matter, but the bar was cool and dark, and there was a story on the TV about a girl being brainwashed, a man who was pretending to be blind.

  It was only his third day in the city, his feet were not under him yet. At Christmas, when Juice Shovlin came home to Scath, red-faced and gleaming in a hired Daimler, buying drinks all around in Tigh Neachtain’s, the man had scattered his business cards like confetti. The Shovlin Group, Property and Pride, the cards read. “You must come up and see me sometime,” said Juice.

  “I’ll do that,” said John Joe.

  “Good man yourself,” said Juice, and handed him a cigar in an aluminium tube, not some squitty little Hamlet or Whiff, but a torpedo thick and long as the dirty drawings in Tigh Neachtain’s outhouse where John Joe was sick later on.

  His mother was still living then, propped up in her bed at Uncle Frank’s with her chocolates and Mills St Boon romances. But the morning after her funeral, he came down to breakfast late, with his suitcase already packed.

  “If you’re off to America the day, you’ll be wanting a good breakfast,” said Uncle Frank.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Could you not face a rasher?” his Auntie Phyllis asked. “Or a slice of blood sausage even?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Why couldn’t you? It’s paid for,” said Uncle Frank, poring over the football pages. It was raining out, Cousin Declan was pulling on his boots by the kitchen door. “I’d say Down would take some beating,” Cousin Declan said.

  “I’d say they would,” said Uncle Frank.

  The Shovlin Group had offices on Park Avenue, thirty-one floors up. When Juice Shovlin caught sight of John Joe and his suitcase, he burst out laughing. “The Great Maguire,” he said. “What the feck brings you here?”

  “You said I must come.”

  “Well, feck me rigid,” said Juice.

  For the two days and nights since then John Joe had put up at a YMCA. He couldn’t get much rest for the strange men jumping into his bed and out again at every hour, no food would stay on his stomach, and the heat had him sandbagged. But was he downhearted? He was not. Juice Shovlin had promised him a managerial position, he was due to start work this afternoon. Just time to clean his glass, and he walked out in the street.

  For a moment the heat and white glare blinded him. When his vision cleared, a child was at his feet.

  A young boy, seven or eight years old, lying on his side like a sleeper, with his feet on the sidewalk, his head lolling down off the kerb, and one hand stretched out in the light, its fingers loosely curled, as if soliciting alms.

  From Sweeney’s doorway you could only see one eye, and that was shut. John Joe’s first thought was, This child has gone to meet his maker. He is in a better place; his second was to pass by. He was a stranger here himself, after all, and the street was full of other people. Any one among them could stop and mind. Only none of them did.

  At least the child had shade. He was lying close by the rear wheel of a parked delivery van, almost under it in fact, a few yards away from the Blanco y Negro bodega. In the heat-haze above him, two men in blue coveralls were handing down crates of Boar’s Head ham and baloney, and sliding them across the sidewalk on a metal conveyor-belt, down into the chill of the cellar. The owner of Blanco y Negro, studying the receipts, massaged a bright red apple on his sleeve and did not stop saying Shit. One of the men in coveralls showed him where to sign. Saying Shit louder, he threw down his apple untouched, and it started to roll down the street, then hit a rut and veered off at an angle until it arrived at the kerb, where it came to rest against the boy’s body, cushioned in the crook behind his bare knees.

  John Joe picked it up.

  He took one bite, sweet but tasteless, mushy, and put the rest in his back pocket for safekeeping. Then he was squatting on his haunches, fumbling at the child’s throat. It was his duty.

  He found no pulse. Then again, he had no notion where to look for one. The flesh beneath his fingers felt cool, not cold, and when he pressed down, testing the collarbone, the breast, no trace of blood came away. Still the child made no stir or sound.

  “Give him air. Let him breathe,” some man said. John Joe moved his thumb and forefinger against the child’s lips, tried to prise the teeth open, but they would not part. His fingers felt clammy as slugs, obscene. When he lifted the shut eyelid, the orb was milky white. “Kid can’t breathe,” some other man said. “Why don’t you let the kid fuckin’ breathe?”

  All John Joe felt then was guilt. He saw his own crouched shape, the child unmoving beneath his hand. Not in front of all these people, he thought. As if he’d struck down the boy himself. As perhaps he had. He laid his head against the boy’s chest and listened, he strained, but all he could hear was the lurching of his own heart. Then he wanted to shake this boy, to slap him, he wanted to hurt him some way. But that was not feasible. Not here, he thought. Not now.

  Next door to the Blanco y Negro, two men in suits were watching from inside a funeral parlour. The men in coveralls were watching, too, and the man who had thrown down his apple; an old lady in a walking frame, and her black nurse; three teenage girls in hotpants and halter tops; some man, some other man; and one large woman in a floral housecoat.

  When this large woman knelt down beside the child’s head, John Joe heard her grunt, could hear her stays creak. “Don’t be so bloody silly,” the woman said.

  And the child got up. Rose like a whistled greyhound, in one smooth motion, and turned his face to the light. His opened eyes were hazel with golden flecks, but they didn’t seem to see John Joe, or the large woman either. In the door of Blanco y Negro another woman was standing, shouting. A dark woman who cried out in a tongue that John Joe didn’t understand, and on her fingers were clusters of rings, ruby red and emerald, that clutched the child, and bore him away.

  Left alone with the woman whose stays creaked, John Joe fished the red apple from his back pocket and took another chomp, but it was no use, there was still no savour, no tang. “Why waste your money? You might as well chew cotton wool,” the woman said. “Or sugared woodpulp, why not?”

  His first impression had been that she was fat, even gross, but now that he looked again, she only seemed hefty, a country woman’s built. Strong, dimpled arms and a broad-boned pink face all freckles, pudding-basin grey hair, beads of sweat on a full upper lip, green eyes, and a gap between her front teeth. In the street’s white glare, her skin looked rosy and roughened, as though she’d been rudely scrubbed at an outdoor tap on a raw morning. A butter churner, John Joe thought.

  Those green eyes now looked him up and down, a steady and measuring stare he did not enjoy one bit. “You’d be better off with a carrot. Help you see in the dark,” the woman said. “If you’d care to see in the dark, that it.”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “Good. That’s good.” But her mind had upped and walked away, he could sense that. Fumbling in the pocket of her housecoat, she found a half-smoked Camel. “My bird got loose. She’s stuck in the Virginia creeper,” the woman said.

  An odd voice she had, dead flat, uninfected, that grated like stripped gears from too many smokes, an accent that wasn’t English but put John Joe in mind of that country none the less, the tourists who pass through Kilmullen in season from Birmingham, Coventry and such. “Were you ever in Leamington Spa?” he asked, but she gave no sign that she heard him, just linked his arm, though his apple was only half-eaten, and started to walk him down the block. Her big legs were bare, her blue slippers were out at the toes. “The name is Kate,” she said. “You may call me Miss Root.”

  The place they came to shocked him. He’d been expecting a spinster’s tidy room and a budgie, not to tumble into the Amazon, plunged with no word of warning inside a world of serpents and lizards, man-eating
plants by the look of them, and fantastical birds straight out of a Tarzan book, parakeets and conures and hawk-headed caiques, all trilling and whooping to beat the band, with their eyes bright, bright, through the dark and dripping leaves.

  A pied-pearl bird sat on the counter, staring at the blank screen of a portable TV. When it caught sight of Miss Root, it flew to her shoulder, started pecking at her hair and cheeks.

  “Yon bird is trapped in no creeper,” said John Joe.

  “But he was,” said Miss Root. “Oh, he was.”

  That seemed small excuse. The day was wearing on, time was flushing. “Juice Shovlin’s expecting me,” said John Joe.

  “How would you like to earn ten bucks?”

  “I am already in work.”

  “Ten bucks for nothing. Almost nothing.”

  “Night-manager at a warehouse.”

  “So make it twenty.”

  Fair play to her, it was money for old farts. All he was required to do was make a few passes with a broom, trim a few obstreperous vines, while Miss Root smoked Camels and watched TV with her bird.

  The man that was pretending to be blind saw a murder, the woman who was being brainwashed ran screaming off a roof. When John Joe looked up from his chores, Miss Root was studying him again with her flat green eyes, a piercing the like he hadn’t felt since Mrs. Connolly in Chemistry, that style she’d had of pinning you like something on a slide, as if to say: Your flies may not be undone as we speak, boy, but they will be, oh yes, they will.

  The heat in this room was hellfire. The gas heaters had bars like rows of ginger teeth, and the floorboards squelched like swamp wherever John Joe moved. “I’m finished. All done,” he said.

  “What you need is a haircut,” Miss Root told him then.

  Along one wall there was a heavy velvet curtain, with a separate chamber on the other side. A salon, you might say, or simply a barbershop. Washbasin, mirror and old-fashioned barber’s chair were grouped beneath a ceiling fan, and on the wall opposite hung a rotating pole.

  “I had a trim only Friday but,” John Joe said.

  “Just a smidgen off the top,” said Miss Root. “A quick snip around the ears.”

  What was her point? Timmy Mallory, Tonsorial Artist, had given him a short-back-and-sides in Glenties the morning of his mother’s funeral. Timmy called it his Alcatraz Special, guaranteed good for a calendar month. And meanwhile Juice Shovlin sat waiting, thirty-one floors above Park Avenue, in his good suit and clean white shirt and a powdered roll of flesh on his neck shiny pink as bubble gum where the collar squeezed too tight. There was no reason to stay here, no probable cause in creation. “A decent shave at least,” said Miss Root, and John Joe climbed into the barber’s chair, he bowed his head in submission.

  The ceiling fan purred steadily, uselessly; no breath of air stirred below. Up close, Miss Root smelled of animal cages and sawdust, Camels, carbolic soap, and her fingers on John Joe’s face did not feel like any woman’s. Impersonal, brusque, they slapped lather on him like a plasterer spackling an outhouse wall. At each stroke, a fresh fall of cigarette ash scattered on his forehead, his eyelids. Then he heard a razor stropping, and a pillow that might be breasts softly cradled the back of his skull.

  The shape of this room was a long narrow funnel like a shooting gallery, with a barred window at the far end instead of tin ducks floating past. The window faced onto a red-brick wall, and the windowsill was strewn with cups, used teabags, half a packet of highland shortbread. John Joe did his best to freeze this frame, not let it go. But there was no use. Under Miss Root’s hands he had no will, no self. Through the drifts of ash he felt his flesh turned and reshaped at whim. The straight-edged razor carved him a new set of cheekbones, a firmer chin and stronger jaw.

  Behind the velvet curtain, some animal moaned in its sleep. “Would that be a monkey?” he asked.

  “Not on your life. Filthy beasts,” said Miss Root, and slapped a steam-hot towel on him, blistering, blinding him. Then there was only the sound of her breathing in, breathing out, and the fitful creaking of her stays, a tugboat riding at anchor.

  In this darkness John Joe felt the next thing to nothing. “Da had a monkey one time,” he said.

  At Duchess Gardens, that was, when he was seven and they lived at the top of four flights of stairs above a padlocked green garden. There was one room in bright light, where his mother played the radio; another room, huddled and dark, was his own. A long thin corridor like a tunnel, like a rope dropped down a black well, led off someplace else. John Joe did not walk along it.

  His mother’s name was Bernadette, she had blue-black hair and blue-black eyes. He could not picture how her face looked then, just the wild morning sprawl of her hair on the pillows when he crept in bed beside her, the sun and sleep warm in the crook of her neck, the Victor Sylvester quick-steps playing soft on the bedside table, and the pink cardigan she wore as a bedjacket, its shaggy wool matted with the sugared smells of the night before. Lager and lime, rose-water soap, Jasmine Blossom perfume—Da despised these smells; he said they made a woman cheap. But Da, on these slow mornings, was not around.

  Where was he? Doing road-work, driving his taxi, swilling tea in Tiny Doyle’s. He was a prizefighter, a warrior, a man with thick purpled lips and a splayed nose, scars on both cheekbones, scars above and around both eyes. When he fought, his name was announced as Kid Ojeah, but Bernadette called him Moses.

  Inside the house he hardly spoke and, when he did, he spoke funny. He used to rise before daybreak, put on his clothes in the dark. When the front door creaked open, there was a moment’s silence. Da would start to whistle, trilling light and fluttery like a nightbird. Stop! In the Name of Love, he whistled, and danced down the stairs to the street.

  One time, though, he had come inside John Joe’s room, and carried him off in his boxing robe, red satin embossed with gold lettering, saying: KID OJEAH, THE LAGOS LAMBASTER.

  It was a raw morning near Christmas, the green garden was black, and a black taxi stood parked at the corner. John Joe sat by himself in the back seat, the satin robe felt slimy-cold, his bare feet dangled in air. Whistling and laughing, Da drove them through empty streets beneath high lamps. Fog turned the light sulphurous, the streets seemed full of holes. “I want my bed,” said John Joe.

  “You can’t have it,” said Da.

  Across the pavement was a plate-glass window bright with Christmas decorations; behind it was Tiny Doyle’s. Wreathed in steam, white men and black men in bomber jackets sat eating egg, sausage and chips, drinking mugs of sweet tea. When they saw Kid Ojeah in the doorway, they shouted out his name like praise.

  A life-size Santa Claus drove his sleigh and reindeer across one wall. Fairy lights and iridescent balls, strings of tinsel and paper chains made rainbows through the room.

  “Who’s this?” one man cried, pointing out John Joe.

  “This is the Champ,” said Da.

  Paraded on his father’s shoulders, he was spun round the room on high. The black men and white men shouted words he did not know, and a woman frying bacon grabbed at his thigh, made kissing sounds through bright orange lips. “Big head, big balls,” the woman said. Then they were through the back door, alone in a walled yard. A brindled mongrel bitch lay sleeping in dirty straw. When they passed by she opened one eye.

  Across the yard another door led inside a chapel. The door was heavy oak, the chapel high-ceilinged and bitter cold. A boxing ring was set up beneath a stained-glass window that showed St. George slaying the Dragon. One man skipped rope, another shadow-boxed. The morning light on the stained glass turned St. George’s sword to flaming gold.

  Taking John Joe by the hand, Da led him on bare feet across the chapel floor. Beside a row of metal lockers a sofa sagged against one wall, its guts spilling down through the springs. Sprawled on the sofa was a fat man in a slouch hat and army greatcoat, eating peanuts. “This man here, Tiny Doyle, he is your best uncle, sit on him,” said Da, placing John Joe with care on the f
at man’s chest. The man did not speak or stir, just spat shells. “My own son needs must see me fight,” said Da, and walked through a ragged curtain into a locker room.

  The man who re-emerged two minutes later wore high white boots with tassels, white trunks inscribed KO. When he struck a fighter’s stance, fists clenched, one of his front teeth flashed gold. “Look upon this man,” he said. “Is he not great?” With his weight resting on the ball of his right foot, he flexed and posed, swivelling slowly through a half-circle, his back a drawn bow, his calf and thigh muscles ropes, his biceps bulging like twin mouths stuffed full of gobstoppers. “What man born of woman could beat this man?” he cried. “What creature of God’s creation?”

  “Jimmy Partridge,” said Tiny Doyle. “Knocked you kicking inside three rounds.”

  “I was sick that night. Indispose.”

  “Arthur Crufts. Big Boy Williams. Lester Digges.”

  “Sick, I tell you.”

  “Tony Majors. Stoker Watts.”

  “Sick,” said Da. “Sick, sick.”

  Across the chapel the skipping rope snapped and whirred, feet scuffled on canvas, the two men training snorted and gasped. “Wrap me,” said Da, reaching out his hands for bandaging. “Make me strong.”

  “Fucking Ada,” said Tiny Doyle.

  What came next? A black stranger leaping and whirling across the chapel floor, spinning through bars of shadow and strips of light, the tassels dancing on his boots, his arms pistoning in crimson gloves, a leather helmet like a cage, silver spray flying backwards, a gold sword on fire.

  By the time they reached home John Joe was burning hot, ice cold. His mother at the top of the steep stairs stood waiting with her hair undone, her nails not painted.