The Railway Station Man

by Jennifer Johnston

  ‘Why tell the trees what ain’t so?’

  She lay on her back and allowed herself to drift. She knew for how long she could indulge herself in that pleasure before turning over and swimming strongly back into the safety of the breaking waves.

  ‘Whispering grass, the trees don’t need to know.’

  The sun was quite indifferent as she sang, the moon as usual smiled.

  ‘Why tell them all your secrets … deedeedee long ago?’

  She was half-way to the rocks. A seagull floated above her, quite relaxed on a current of air.

  ‘Whispering grass … oh no no no. The seagulls don’t need to know.’

  She turned over and swam back against the roll of the sea. After a couple of hundred yards she turned on her back once more and let the waves roll her in towards the shore.

  ‘Oh no no no. Whispering grass …’

  Her bottom hit the sand.

  She had judged it correctly, her shirt lay only a few yards away. She put it on and squeezed the water out of her hair.

  ‘Whispering grass, the trees don’t need to know.’

  Kelly’s Bar was dark and smelt of beer and a century’s cigarette smoke. As Jack came in through the door he was wrapped in the smell, it crept into his pockets and up his sleeves, a total embrace. He got the notion as he stood at the bar and peered through the darkness that if the building were to fall apart at that moment, a solid block of undispersable smell would remain by the street-side. In the darkest corner Damian sat alone at a small round table. He raised his hand. Jack nodded briefly and ordered a pint of Guinness. He took the drink and carried it over to the table, pulled up a chair and sat down.

  ‘I haven’t had a smoke since I saw you last,’ said Damian.

  ‘Big deal.’

  ‘Even my mother noticed. What’s up with you, she said. No fag hanging out of your face.’

  He laughed.

  ‘She’ll give me a medal, she says, if I keep it up for twelve months. I suggested she should make it hard cash. What would I do with your medal I asked her … knowing the kind she always has in her mind, smiling Jesus pinned to my vest. Aren’t medals for to assist in the saving of souls? What do I care about damnation? She gets so mad at me when I say things like that. Upset. I shouldn’t do it. She thinks I’m the walking personification of the ten deadly sins. Praying for me occupies a large part of her time.’

  ‘Seven,’ said Jack. ‘There are only seven.’

  ‘A Protestant point of view maybe …’

  ‘Ten commandments, seven deadly sins. Quite multi-denominational, I assure you.’ Jack’s voice was filled with humourless reproof.

  Damian laughed again.

  ‘There you are. I am an ignorant renegade. A bastún. She’s right. Why is it that mothers are always right?’

  One finger flicked away some Guinness froth that had been clinging to the gingery moustache that drooped over his upper lip. His eyes were amused as he looked across the table at Jack.

  ‘I haven’t noticed it,’ said Jack.

  ‘You don’t live at home. When you live at home you find out these things. Mothers are always right. The truth becomes irrelevant when mother is around. Keep your head down and say nothing, that’s what I’ve learnt. The odd leg pull and the rest of the time say nothing. Ah, she could be worse. I’ve seen worse. I’ve seen your mother down on the beach drawing pictures. I wouldn’t have thought there was much to draw, but she crouches down on the sand like …’ he paused for a moment’… some sort of a mad creature. Lost to the world. If you were standing next to her she wouldn’t notice you.’

  ‘She has bad eyes. Problems with her eyes’

  ‘It’s not that. Lost is the word you’d use.’

  Jack shrugged slightly.

  ‘You don’t say much do you?’

  ‘You don’t give anyone much chance.’

  Damian stood up grinning. He picked up his empty glass and nodded towards the bar.

  ‘I’m having another. Will I get you one? It’ll maybe loosen your tongue.’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘Live dangerously.’

  Jack watched as he walked across the room and stood, his two hands flat on the bar, leaning towards the barman. Neat in his gestures, economical with his physical movements. Unlike his gabble. Over-fond of the sound of his own voice. Look at him there now, gabbling again as the black liquid crept into the tilted glass. The boy behind the bar laughed at something he had said, mopped the bar around the glass with a white cloth and laughed again. A bit of an opinion of himself. I wonder why is he involved? Family background? Never heard that. Conviction? Boredom? No, no, no. Not this one. Hate? He doesn’t look the hating type. He looks to me like someone who drifted in and hasn’t bothered to drift out again. Dangerous. They are the dangerous ones. No blinding commitment.

  ‘There you are.’

  Damian put the pint glass down on the table in front of Jack.

  ‘Bloody bastards fleece you now for the harmless pint.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Jack.

  ‘Slap another tax on pleasure every time the country gets a bit low in funds. Drinks, smokes, books, the pictures, football. Squeeze another few dollars out of the buggers. Squeeze.’ He laughed. ‘There’s one thing they forgot though.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  Damian drooped one of his eyes and said nothing.

  Jack thought for a moment.

  ‘Oh. That.’

  ‘Aye, that. It’s a good thought that no matter how hard they try neither Church nor State can stop people doing that.’

  ‘They do their best.’

  ‘I reckon if they put their minds to it they could come up with some system. A computer implanted under the skin of every growing boy. Monitoring bad thoughts, sinful acts. At the end of the year you get a bill from Dublin. Five pence for a bad thought. A pound for self-abuse and a couple of quid every time you go the whole way. The country would be solvent in five years. I don’t really amuse you, do I?’

  Jack looked down at the table.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Damian, ‘I amuse myself. You can’t do better than that. Be amused by your own codology.’

  ‘Manus …’ began Jack.

  Damian put his glass down on the table and frowned.

  ‘What of Manus? The great God Manus. I can see you’re dazzled by his very name.’

  ‘You haven’t a notion …’

  ‘And keep your voice down. Do you want everyone for miles round to know your business?’

  Jack felt his face going red.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Damian. ‘I speak a bit too quick at times. You shouldn’t pay any heed. What’s on the bugger’s mind?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Well …’ Damian mimicked.

  ‘He’s not too keen on the way things are going up here. There’s a sort of … ah … casual attitude to things. I think he’s not too happy about.’

  Damian smiled.

  ‘He said to tell you he’d be up. He’d have to come up.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Damian. ‘Let him come up. That would be best. No messengers.’ He groped in his pocket for a moment looking for his cigarettes and then remembered. Anything else?’

  ‘We need a staging post here. Somewhere stuff can be stored, adjacent to the border. Somewhere secure. It’ll only be for a few weeks at the most You’re to find us somewhere secure. Quite quickly. No messing about.’

  Damian nodded.

  ‘How much space?’

  ‘Quite a bit of space.’

  Damian rubbed his finger up the side of his glass.

  About,’ suggested Jack, ‘the size of a goods shed.’

  ‘Bugger off,’ said Damian.

  He lifted the glass and took a long drink.

  ‘Think about it. You said yourself that no one uses it. Manus only wants it for a couple of weeks. You can see that the Englishman isn’t around when we’re moving stuff. You’ll be there to keep an eye on things. Think about it.’
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br />   Damian put the glass down carefully on the table and wiped his mouth with the palm of his right hand. He didn’t speak.

  ‘What the hell are you doing in the Movement anyway?’ asked Jack after a long silence.

  ‘I’m not in it. I’m sort of alongside it. I’m not cut out to be a soldier.’ He laughed. ‘My mother’s old man was a Connaught Ranger.’

  He took another drink and wiped his mouth again with his hand. ‘There was soldiers. He caught a shark when he was sixty-eight. Out one day in a half-decker between here and Tory Sound. I remember that.’

  ‘That’s …‘

  ‘Listen. Will you listen. You don’t speak anything but crap and you don’t listen either … except perhaps to Manus. He lived with us for six years after my gran died. All the way up from Connemara he came. He found it hard to settle. She thought the world of him. She’d do more for your grandaddy than she’d ever do for me, my father used to say. She has all the books of old brown photographs … and his medals. He went to Dublin a couple of times, I mind, for reunions or something. My father used to take him to the train in Sligo. He’d bring his medals in a little black box. He always came back a new man … not just an old fogey telling his stories to the kids, because no one else had the time for him. You wouldn’t remember his shark?’

  ‘I heard the story. I didn’t know it was your grandfather caught it.’

  ‘Yes. Swan song.’

  ‘But none of this is …’

  ‘Yes. Inside my head it is … relevant I suppose you were going to say … something like that. He used to talk. Maybe that’s where I get my clacking tongue. Sit outside the kitchen door on summer evenings or by the fire in the winter and talk about the wars he’d seen, his old friends, the travelling, the great times they’d had together. India, terrible tragedies, happy days … all together like some kind of fairy story, only it was true. He would just sit there and let the brightness of his past catch up with him. I had all the time in the world to listen. And he’d talk about Ireland. You’ll have to shoot them out, he used to say. They’ll never go any other way. If you want them out you’ll have to shoot them out. They simply don’t understand the need that people have for freedom. People would rather be poor and suffer and be free. The English … he always talked about the English … don’t understand a stupid thing like that. So you’ll have to shoot them out, lad, and the quicker the better.’

  ‘Well? Wasn’t he right?’

  ‘He didn’t think it was right. He thought it was inevitable … like an operation without an anaesthetic, painful and possibly maiming. To be born Irish is a bitter birth, lad, he said to me. So many times he said that.’ He picked up his glass and drained it. He held it out, the inside patterned with froth, towards Jack.

  ‘Are you buying?’

  Jack stood up. He took the glass from Damian’s fingers.

  ‘Manus doesn’t like messers.’

  ‘I don’t like Manus.’ Spiky orange lashes framed his hostile eyes. Jack shrugged slightly and went over to the bar. Guinness was written on the round mats placed at intervals along the bar. Three men played cards in the corner by the bar and from the carpeted saloon he could hear the sound of a girl laughing.

  ‘A pint,’ he said, pushing the glass across the counter to the barman.

  ‘Only the one?’

  ‘Only the one.’

  There didn’t seem to be any point in having the rest of Damian’s life spilled out across the table at him. He had delivered his message. No point in wasting time.

  ‘I talk too much,’ said Damian, as Jack sat down across from him. ‘Aren’t you having one yourself?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘My mother is waiting.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘We eat at odd hours.’

  ‘I like my meals at regular four-hourly intervals.’

  ‘What’ll I say to Manus?’

  ‘How soon does he want this place?’

  ‘Within the month.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch with him. You can give him that message.’

  ‘Secure.’

  ‘You said that before. One of the few words you have said.’

  ‘I suppose we should try and like each other.’

  ‘Remember the bloody nose I gave you?’

  Jack nodded. ‘I gave you one too.’

  ‘You loosened one of my teeth.’

  ‘Did I? I never knew that.’ He felt obscurely pleased.

  ‘It fell out six months later. Look.’

  He rolled up his lip and Jack saw that a right-hand front molar was missing.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jack lied.

  ‘No hard feelings,’ said Damian. ‘The girls like a fellow to be battle-scarred.’

  ‘A sabre scar would be more glamorous.’

  ‘True.’

  They both laughed. Anyone coming into the bar at that moment might have thought they were good friends.

  ‘I must go.’ Jack stood up abruptly.

  ‘Suit yourself. Thanks for the drink. I’ll see you around.’ Damian picked up his drink and sauntered over to the corner where the men were playing cards. He pulled up a chair and sat down beside them.

  Helen looked at the four small watercolours on the table in front of her. They were unframed, but neatly mounted on dark cardboard mounts. Scenes of sky and sea and bare hills. Light spilled from the sky, down into the deep blocks of shadows, lonely hollows, through the branches of the trees to become absorbed into the unkempt fleece of sheep searching for shelter behind a thorn hedge. Energy drained down, down all the time. The light troubled every object that it touched.

  She ran her fingers nervously along the edge of the table. This may be the most ludicrous thing to do, she thought, but I must move now, somehow announce my presence.

  A large canvas lay on the floor in the centre of the room. She painted that way, crouching down beside the canvas, leaning and stretching, the light coming above her head through the glass panes with which she had re-roofed the shed after she had moved into the cottage. Makeshift.

  Exposure.

  I have to have exposure now or become some sort of a mad woman locked into an ivory tower, pointlessly punishing myself for so many years of sloth. I must see them now in the hands of other people, see their eyes consider, explore, reject. Note the interest or indifference. Is it possible that for a moment they will recognise my existence?

  Exposure.

  She lit herself a cigarette. The tips of the fingers of her right hand were stained brown by nicotine.

  ‘I want someone to buy you, even for ten pence off a jumble stall, and hang you on a wall. Another wall. Any other wall.’

  She picked a black plastic sack off the floor and one by one she put the pictures into it. She folded the plastic into a neat bundle, her fingers in the end caressing the shiny surface of the bag as if it contained some dear and loving creature. Then she stood and stared at the bundle, hunching her shoulders up to her ears and letting them fall slowly again. She thrust the fingers of her left hand into the crevices between her collar bone and her right shoulder blade, probing to find the source of the stiffness that made sudden movement painful.

  Decrepitude, she thought, creeping decrepitude. How stupid, how typical to leave exploration so late that decrepitude is setting in. She crushed the remains of the cigarette out in a saucer already filled with dead butts.

  My whole life is makeshift.

  ‘Mother,’ Jack’s voice called across the yard.

  She hadn’t heard the car.

  ‘Coming.’

  She picked up the black bag.

  ‘Mother.’

  ‘Coming, coming, coming.’

  Dismal rain spread down from lethargic clouds.

  ‘Where are the Cornflakes?’

  ‘Darling, you said the other day that you didn’t like Cornflakes. You threw them out. You said no more Cornflakes.’

  ‘A passing phase. Today, I need Cornflakes.’

  ‘They’re in the press.’

/>   He didn’t move from behind the Irish Times. She sighed and went and got the packet from the press and put it down in front of him.

  ‘There.’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  The cat, bedraggled from the rain and a night of entertainment, licked with vigour at his fur. When he was quite dry he would take himself to Helen’s bed to sleep for a couple of hours.

  She sat down at the table.

  ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, how are you!’

  The paper was a wall between them.

  ‘Mists, yes … maybe it’s mellowly fruitful in England.’

  He turned a page, refolded, neatly, the paper. Newsprint in the country edition always greyed the fingers.

  ‘Keats can’t ever have visited the west of Ireland.’

  Silence.

  ‘Or was it Shelley?’

  She stretched out her hand for the cigarettes.

  ‘I always get them mixed up.’

  Matches.

  A symptom of my crass ignorance. I regret … I really do regret that I didn’t bother to learn anything at school.’

  She struck the match sharply on the box.

  ‘Everything seemed so irrelevant. Virgil’s Aeneid and the isosceles triangle. Both equally …’

  She lit the cigarette and took a deep pull.

  ‘… irrelevant. Litmus paper. What the hell about litmus paper?’

  Smoke trickled from her nose and mouth.

  ‘I did an exam question once on the Diet of Worms. I wonder what I said?’

  Silence.

  ‘Shakespeare, Yeats and Synge were as irrelevant to other people as litmus paper was to me. I noticed that much.’

  The cat yawned exquisitely, exposing the pink roof tree of his mouth and the arc of pointed teeth.

  Any more tea?’ Jack pushed his cup across the table.

  ‘Do you think,’ she asked as she poured, ‘that Cézanne knew about Archimedes’ Principle?’

  ‘For God’s sake, what does it matter?’

  ‘I just have this feeling that everything should link up somehow. Form a pattern.’