‘Damian.’ He pushed the gate open and went onto the platform. Tufts of grass and groundsel grew up through cracks in the surface. Where once the tracks had been was now a mess of brambles and scrub.
Damian stopped work and after a moment stopped whistling as he looked up at Jack. One hand marginally moved the position of the black hat.
‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘We don’t see much of you about, these days.’
‘Work. Exams. You know the way it is.’
‘Oh, aye.’
He turned away. He ran his left hand over the top of the newel post and then down the length of it, feeling the smoothness, then he began his scouring once more.
‘Ever heard tell of Manus Dempsey?’ Jack asked at last.
‘Uh huh.’
His hand never stopped moving round and round. Tiny particles of dust flew from under his fingers and floated to the ground.
Jack walked right over to him.
‘Manus said he thought we ought to get acquainted.’
The hand slowed down. Damian looked up and smiled slightly.
‘Haven’t we been acquainted for years. Did you not tell Manus Dempsey that?’ He laughed.
‘Did you not tell Manus Dempsey I gave you a bloody nose?’
‘It didn’t seem very relevant.’
‘Anyway I don’t care very much for the same fella. A bit big for his boots. A Dublin swank. Maybe you’re a bit of a Dublin swank yourself?’
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘Good. Otherwise I might have to give you another bloody nose.’
‘You haven’t changed much.’
‘Nobody changes much. From the cradle to the grave. You learn to walk and talk and fight your corner. That’s about it.’
‘He says you’re a real craftsman.’
Damian started to rub vigorously once more.
‘Manus Dempsey wouldn’t know a craftsman from an undertaker.’
Jack laughed. ‘Not Manus. Him. The Englishman, Hawthorne or whatever his name is.’
Damian looked pleased. ‘Did he say that?’
‘Yup. A real craftsman.’
Damian put the sandpaper down on one of the steps and ran his hands down the full length of the post. Gently he did it, as if he were touching a human being. ‘Feel that,’ he said.
Jack moved over beside him and touched the wood. It was smooth all right.
‘Like a baby’s bottom,’ said Damian. ‘A few coats of paint now and they’ll be first-class.’
A bit of wood was always just a bit of wood to Jack, but the whole job certainly looked most professional. ‘It’s a pity you have to paint it. It looks great like that.’
Damian fished a cigarette packet out of the pocket of his overall.
‘First-class,’ Jack said encouragingly.
Damian held the packet out towards him without a word.
‘No thanks. I don’t’
‘The first today.’ He took a cigarette out of the packet and stuck it in his mouth. ‘I don’t know why I do it really. I’m not wild about them. I could give it up tomorrow.’
‘That’s what everybody says.’
‘I mean it. That’s the difference between me and everybody else. I mean what I say.’
‘Everybody says that too.’
Damian took the cigarette out of his mouth and threw it away into the brambles on the railway line. Then he took the packet out of his pocket and threw it after the cigarette. He took a box of matches out of the same pocket and looked at it for a moment. He put it back into his pocket again. ‘I’ll keep that,’ he said. ‘In case I want to set fire to you.’
He sat down on the bottom step and took off his hat. His hair was quite long. Soft red-brown curls, rather like a girl. He wiped his face with his hat and then put it down on the step beside him.
‘What do you want?’
‘I only came to say hello.’
‘Manus sent you all the way from Dublin to say hello?’
‘Something like that.’
He stared past Jack over the hedge, over the sloping fields towards the sea. ‘Want to see the box?’ he asked after a long silence. He jerked his head as he spoke, upwards towards the door.
‘Okay.’
‘I’ll call him.’
‘Couldn’t you …?’
‘It’s his box.’
‘What on earth are you doing working for a loony like him? He is a loony, isn’t he?’
‘He’s okay,’ said Damian. ‘I like him. He pays well.’ He laughed. ‘I like him even and he is a Brit. There’s something about him that I like. He knows when a person does something well. That’s good. There aren’t too many people round who care if you do things well. They want you to do them fast. That’s what matters. Get on with it. Get fucking on with it and cut the crap.’
Jack didn’t say a word, just stood and looked at Damian sitting there staring out at the sea. Play it by ear, Manus had said, he may need reactivation.
‘I want to build a boat one day.’
‘Oh.’
‘I have her in my mind’s eye. A beautiful wooden hull. A sailing boat.’
‘A sailing boat?’
‘Yeah. I’ve spent too much of my life on those dirty, noisy fishing boats. Engines, oil, fumes. I want to be able to go out there on my own, with the silence. Ever seen a hooker?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s a beautiful boat. Something like a hooker. Smaller of course. Down round Achill they make this … oh, about a twenty-footer. A yawl, one big sail. I’ve thought it might be more practical, but I prefer the hooker. So.’ He looked up at Jack suddenly and grinned.
‘We’ll get this station into working order. And then we’ll start on my boat. We have it worked out. A gleoiteog.That more or less is the same shape as the hooker, only small.’
‘You mean …?’
‘You see the goods shed up at the far end of the platform. He says we can build it there. There’ll never be any goods for storing here. It’s ideal. We’ll be able to run the station between us and build the boat. No problems.’
‘You’ve gone loony too. It must be infectious.’
‘Where’s the harm? I thought about it for a while when he asked me to work for him. I thought then … I have to believe in him. I turned it over in my mind for several days. Where’s the harm in believing? That’s what I thought. I like him.’
Jack laughed.
Damian put his hat on and stood up.
‘You can laugh all you want,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and get him. He can show you the box.’
He strolled away from Jack along the platform.
He may need re-activation, Jack heard Manus’s voice in his ear. Reactivation … hell. He needed dumping.
He sat down on the step to wait. The warm smell of the sawdust tickled in his nose.
What would Manus do?
His methods were quite direct. That was one of the things Jack admired about him. I suffer from some kind of middle-class furtiveness, he thought, scratching his nose. The groundwork has been done there, sonny Jim, Manus had said. All you have to do is re-activate …
Ah shit,’ Jack said aloud.
Those Donegal guys are a bunch of lazy bums. They’ll do what they’re told but they have no drive. You have to keep behind them the whole time. Nag. Get up there, Jack old son, and nag.
What he hadn’t figured on though was the loony factor. ‘Shit,’ he said again.
Damian came out of the house and walked towards him.
‘He’s not up to it.’
Jack stood up. ‘What’s the matter with him?’
Damian shook his head.
‘Sometimes he just lays there with his eyes shut. Tell him to go away and come back another time, he said. He doesn’t mean any harm. He’ll maybe at himself again in an hour, ten minutes, tomorrow. Come back tomorrow … and bring your mother.’
‘My mother?’
‘Yeah. He said bring your mother.’
Jack laughed. �
�Like hell I will.’
‘Suit yourself. I’m just telling you what he said.’
‘Listen here, Damian, you know damn well I didn’t come here to see him or his signal box. Manus said to contact you.’
Damian looked at him without speaking. After a moment or two he pulled his hat off again. The wind moved his hair.
‘I’m going to make him a cup of coffee,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you round.’
He turned back towards the house.
‘What sort of a boat was it you said you were going to build?’
He kept walking. ‘A gleoiteog.’
He reached the door into the house before he spoke again. ‘I’ll be in Kelly’s Bar at eight.’ He waved his hat at Jack and went into the house.
When Jack got back to the house, Helen was standing in the yard, outside the kitchen door winding up the old gramophone. He knew she must have been messing around in his room.
‘Hello,’ she said as he came in the gate.
The handle creaked as she turned it.
‘What are you doing with that old thing?’
‘Mary Heron rang about an hour ago to remind me that I’m supposed to be helping her with the white elephant stall at the ICA jumble sale next week. I had forgotten. Oh God, I forget so much. Even if I write things down, I forget to look. I’d forgotten all about this until I found it in your room.’
‘Well that’s a white elephant all right. No one’s going to buy that.’
‘Someone without electricity might love it.’
‘Don’t be daft, mother. Everyone’s got electricity.’
She took a record out of a cardboard box on the table beside the machine and put it on the turntable. She pushed a switch and slowly the black disc began to revolve. Carefully she placed the needle in its shiny metal pickup on the edge of the record. For a moment there was a whining and then, slightly harsh but rhythmic, the sound of a dance band. She stood quite still and listened.
Why do you whisper green grass – gravel voice – why tell the trees –
‘Someone will buy it. You’ll see. Lots of records and two boxes of needles. I wonder if you can buy those needles nowadays.’
What ain’t so–
– ‘Look.’ She twiddled a knob on the side of the machine. ‘Those little shutters make it louder and softer. Listen.’
Whispering grass – the sound rose – the trees don’t – and fell – need to know.
‘I used to spend all my pocket money on records. They broke very easily. It’s amazing there are so many left really.’
The gravelly voice battered around the yard. Quite incongruous.
‘We could dance.’ She did a little experimental twirl. ‘Oh God, your father was a terrible dancer. He used to get all embarrassed when he danced and sort of seize up. The Ink Spots they were called. I suppose they must have been black. They sound black don’t they?’
She twiddled the shutters again. The singer was talking now in a very black voice.
‘Charlie Kennedy was the great dancer. It was such fun dancing with him. He could do anything. He used to practise steps that he saw on the films. The others stood on your toes or counted to themselves. He was great though. I wonder what ever happened to Charlie?’
‘He changed his name and became Gene Kelly.’
‘He was a divinity student, I think. Yes. He’s probably a bishop by now. A dancing bishop.’
Suddenly she leaned forward and took the needle off the record. The black disc whirled round in silence.
‘A dancing bishop in Matabeleland. Beautiful black girls with naked breasts and men beating drums. In the middle of them all Bishop Charlie Kennedy dancing away in his surplice.’
‘Matabeleland doesn’t exist any more.’
She made a slight face and then pushed the switch on the gramophone. With a sigh the turntable slowed down and then stopped. She took the record off and put it back into the box. She closed down the lid of the machine.
‘How strange,’ she said, ‘that I never played it down all those years. It’s amazing really that it works after such neglect. Put it in the porch for me like an angel so it’s ready and waiting for Mary when she comes to collect it. Don’t drop it. I cherish it. I really cherish it.’
He did as he was told. There was a pile of his old clothes on the floor of the porch. He put down the gramophone and picked up his old school blazer which lay neatly folded on top of the pile. He ran back through the house and out into the yard. She was leaning against the low wall staring at the distant sea.
‘Look here,’ he said, waving the blazer at her. ‘You can’t give my blazer to a jumble sale.’
She looked round at him.
‘Why ever not?’
‘It’s my school blazer.’
She laughed.
‘You can’t let anyone go wandering round in an old St Columba’s blazer.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought that a thing like that would have worried you.’
‘Well it does.’
‘They can always cut the pocket off. It’s hardly worn. Remember you did a terrible spurt of growing just after I bought it and I had to get you another one practically immediately.’
She put out a hand and touched the sleeve.
‘It’s very good material. The moths’ll eat it if we just leave it lying around.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t sell my blazer.’
She shrugged. ‘Okay. Okay. Take it away. Feed it to the moths. Do what you like with it. I’m going to go and have a swim. My head is full of unresolved thoughts and I smell of your old musty clothes. Come and have a swim.’
He shook his head.
‘Do you good.’
‘Dashing in and out of icy water never did me good. It’s some sort of fantasy notion of yours that it does.’
‘I’ll bike,’ she said, not listening to him. ‘If you’re not coming I might as well bike. Then I’ll be so healthy I’ll be able to shut myself in the shed for days and days without thinking about exercise or fresh air or anything like that.’
‘What do you do over there for days and days?’
‘Paint.’
‘But why, mother?’
‘Why not? After all, a long long time ago I thought for a time that the one thing I wanted to be was a great painter.’ She smiled. ‘That was a long time ago. I must have been about fifteen. Another fantasy notion.’
‘Why didn’t you? What stopped you?’
‘I just didn’t have the gumption. I didn’t feel like suffering.’
She scraped at a piece of moss on the wall with her finger.
‘Why would you have had to suffer?’
‘I’d have had to uproot, learn how to be alone, wrestle with devils. So …’ She looked at him. The phrase ‘wrestle with devils’ had annoyed him, she could see that. He looked so like Dan at certain times, his mouth slightly pursed with displeasure.
‘So …’ she continued. ‘Here I am. Here you are. Here we both are.’
It was downhill all the way to the shore, cutting across the village street between Harkin’s Bar and Doherty’s Spar shop. A hundred yards or so beyond the village the road became a track, pitted and hollowed by the wheels of cars and caravans. A gate in the high hedge of thorn and fuchsia led into one end of the caravan park, but the track itself meandered on between the hedges until it widened into a flat patch where day trippers parked their cars in the summer. The sea was hidden by hills of sand and only the low roar told you what to expect when you climbed through the bent and the neat piles of rabbit droppings to the top of the dunes.
The beach was long and straight, offering no shelter from the west wind that blew in from the ocean, whipping the sand into little eddies that scurried along above the ground stinging your legs and even sometimes whirling up into your eyes.
There was no one about. Wheel marks showed where a tractor had been down earlier in the day moving sand up to someone’s farm. Crisscross bird tracks patterned the sand near the water’s edg
e. The sun behind a streak of cloud was moving at speed towards the rim of the horizon and, strangely, the moon, like a pale shadow of the sun, floated also in the sky. Helen had never been able to grasp the movements of the moon, but she felt quite honoured to be there alone on the beach with the pair of them. She gave a little wave.
‘Here I am. Here you are. Here we all are.’
What a damn silly thing to have said to Jack.
How damn silly at the age of fifty or whatever to feel evasive, protective about the inside of your head.
She kicked her espadrilles off onto the sand. It had been so hot at times in the summer that to stand barefoot had been almost impossible; each grain of sand had seemed to scorch its way into the soles of your feet … Now the sand was cool and slightly damp. She unfastened her jeans and pulled them off. Jack’s indifference was slightly less friendly than Dan’s had been. There was that element of contempt that prickled her. She dropped her jeans beside her shoes and began to walk towards the sea. Goddammit, the disease of parenthood was terminal. No way out round it, no hope of re-assessment.
‘Nuts,’ she said.
Five years before, five or six children had been drowned off this stretch of the beach. City children they had been, camping in the sand dunes. Sucked away into the innocent-looking sea by vicious undertow. She remembered the helpless sorrow they had all felt as each young body had been recovered. The county council had put notices along the beach after that, warning people of the danger, but now they had become weathered, illegible, vandalised. She unbuttoned her shirt and let it fall onto the wrinkled sand.
‘Why do you whisper green grass?’
The waves curled round her ankles. Not cold. For a few moments a million tiny stones, driven by the waves, beat into her legs and then the water became deep. You could feel the current pulling you as you lay upon the water. It wanted you to go towards the rocks at the southern end of the beach and then if you weren’t careful away out into the ocean. The bodies had been washed in again about three miles down the coast, at the outermost point of the wide bay.
The Railway Station Man Page 5