by Max Hennessy
It was early morning when I finally got him tucked in and got rid of Yorky. Then I lay down on my own bed for half an hour and waited for him to come round.
The sun was well up and the kids were in the streets when I woke up. Old Boxer was sitting on the edge of the sagging bed, staring at the floor with empty eyes, a dreadful weariness in the curve of his back. His thinning hair was dishevelled, and his suit had streaks of mud on it. I climbed off the bed and leaned near the window, smoking a cigarette, glad for once that Yorky wasn’t there with his chatter. I’d packed him off home, bundled him unceremoniously away to the station, protesting, apologizing, and with half his pay already spent.
‘I told him, Jess,’ were his last words. ‘I told him over and over again until he didn’t know what to say.’
I drew on my cigarette slowly and watched Old Boxer, half-resentful against him for dragging me away from Kate. She’d gone quickly, with nothing more than a brief good-bye, leaving me disappointed at the suddenness of her going, and I’d turned savagely on Yorky, full of recriminations I knew weren’t really deserved, but angry that they should drag me back just when I was beginning to feel sober and intelligent again.
Over my head on the faded wallpaper in a patch of grey morning light hung a Biblical quotation, one of Mrs. Fee’s furnishings that Pat had taken over, I suppose.
There is no peace, saith the Lord, unto the Wicked, it proclaimed in ornate gilded letters, and I felt there was no apter description for the torment of the wretched old man in front of me.
There was no peace in his soul, no peace in his mind. Only turbulent thoughts, cynicisms and bitterness that wouldn’t let him rest. When he wasn’t majestically drunk, there was only a shabby, shuffling old creature left, only the shell of a man.
Old Boxer looked up at me unexpectedly.
‘I’m sorry, Jess,’ he said. ‘I always do it. But I can’t sit in these awful places and sniff at the cabbage that drips off the walls.’
‘What’s wrong with getting a good meal under your belt?’
‘And coming here sober and tasting the cheerless joys of the tomb?’ His shoulders shuddered. ‘I can’t do that. I’ve done it too many times already. It’s a slow poison that gets into your system.’
‘Why don’t you try a decent hotel?’ I suggested, staring round the drab room and at the street outside crowded with screaming kids.
‘It’s all the same,’ he said wearily. ‘I’d still have to sit alone in the damn’ places.’
‘Haven’t you a home anywhere?’ I queried, and as I asked the question I was startled to realize I didn’t know the answer – even after all the years we’d spent together.
‘Home?’ He gave a short sharp bark of laughter. ‘Only a ship’s forecastle.’ He lit a cigarette with trembling fingers and drew hurried puffs at it.
‘Haven’t you any relations?’
‘Plenty.’
‘Can’t you go and stay with them?’
‘Hah!’ He laughed. ‘They’d drive me mad with their sanctimonious pi-jaw – if they’d ever have me near enough to let me listen to it.’ He seemed to be cheering up a little as the glint of anger brightened his dull eyes and warmed his gaunt features. His bad temper was always more bearable than his depression. ‘They wouldn’t be seen dead in my company,’ he said.
‘Why not? What’s there to be ashamed of in a sailor?’
‘According to my family there are no sailors outside a Royal Navy Ward Room.’
I stared. Old Boxer caught my eye, and tossed his half-smoked cigarette into the untidy fireplace.
‘And you didn’t fancy the Navy?’ I asked.
He hesitated a long time before he replied. ‘I was more than ten years in the Royal Navy,’ he said slowly.
‘And you left?’
He suddenly stood up and began to pace up and down the small room, in the old familiar habit of walking on a short deck for exercise, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, monotonously. It seemed ages before he replied.
‘They asked me to leave,’ he said eventually.
‘Oh!’ I felt I’d turned over something unpleasant that Old Boxer had been trying hard to hide.
He looked at me. ‘That’s what they always say when they find out. They say ‘Oh!’ just as you did, and their faces look as though they’d just put their foot in something dirty.’
I stared out of the window, unable to look at the bitter, twisted smile on his mouth. He leaned at the other side of the window and stared intently at a milkman delivering his goods on the far side of the street.
There was a silence in the room for a while. Suddenly a lot of things about Old Boxer were explained – the obvious culture, the breeding that proclaimed itself in spite of his shabby clothes, the gaunt good looks, the education. It explained also why he’d bought a decrepit boat-yard and never had the interest to make a business of it. He lit another cigarette and reseated himself on the bed to the tinny accompaniment of springs.
‘God knows why I’m telling you all this,’ he said. ‘I haven’t told it to any man before.’ His eyes were narrow as he went on speaking, as though he were peering back into the past, forcing himself to stare into places he’d never dared to re-explore before. ‘I was court-martialled,’ he said quietly. ‘Two men were killed because I was drunk, and a good ship broke her back.’
I waited for further explanations but he seemed to prefer to leave the incident buried. Outside, the milkman was calling his wares, and I could hear his voice, melancholy and monotonous as a fog buoy, above the sound of the traffic. Inside the house, someone was clumping about the landing, clattering buckets on the bare stairs.
Old Boxer sat on the edge of the iron bedstead, his hands limp, his head deep between his shoulders, then he suddenly reached out and drew towards him his long deep-sea kit-bag from the end of the bed. He untied the cord at the top and drew out a sword and scabbard. I’d seen it before for brief instances. Everybody in the forecastle had always known he had it. We’d often wondered about it, but he’d never seemed to want to tell us anything, and nobody had dared ask or steal a gander at it, even when he was on watch.
‘See that?’ he said, holding it up and indicating the tarnished gilt and silver. ‘That was my dress sword. That’s all I’ve got left now.’
I felt the slender weapon in my hands and handed it back to him with a feeling of embarrassment. He took it reverently. ‘It was my father’s,’ he explained. ‘It was his father’s, and probably his grandfather’s. I don’t know. It would have been my son’s only—’
He stopped dead and, tossing aside his cigarette-end, ground it out with the toe of his boot.
‘And there you are,’ he said with forced cheerfulness. ‘The story of my life. How to be an old bum known to half the barmen in the world. How to become a doss-house ghost. How to end up on the rubbish dump.’ He seemed brighter and even appeared to be enjoying his bitterness. He always did, I think. I suspect he got a malicious pleasure out of his cynicism.
Then he turned round to me and said wryly, ‘That’s why I can’t sit in these cabbage-smelling rooms thinking of things such as I’ve told you.’
I said nothing. There didn’t seem to be much I could comment that would be any good to him.
‘It isn’t a pretty story, is it, Jess?’ he said, and the bitter cynicism was fading, and depression was settling on him again.
‘There’s not much more to it.’ he went on sourly. ‘Only a history of pawnshops and shabby lodging-houses like this, and one dreary ship after another.’ He rubbed a hand across his face suddenly. ‘You know where I’ll end up?’ he asked. ‘In the forecastle of a Greek steamer, or out on the China coast. That’s where they all go. Nobody else’ll have ’em. People like me are the only ones who’ll stand the racket.
‘God,’ he said, ‘it makes you wonder sometimes what might have become of me. Once there seemed such a lot of hope. And now’ – he indicated the sword on the bed where he’d placed it – ‘that’s all I�
��ve got left. And even that’s getting shabby and old and tired like me. The only thing that’s holding it together’s tradition.’
He stood up and stretched himself, gaunt and grey-faced, his eyes red with booze.
‘But they’ll probably be glad of me yet, Jess.’ He indicated a newspaper on the bed. Its front page carried a photograph of Hitler. ‘If that madman heads the way I expect he will, they might have me back after all. Cheer up, lad,’ he said suddenly. His mood of black depression seemed to have transferred itself to me.
I hurriedly shrugged off the feeling. There was more to Old Boxer’s story, I knew, I’d heard only half of it. Some inner knowledge told me he’d left things still unsaid, but I felt in no mood for more bitter confidences. I was suddenly dreadfully tired. I’d been up all night sorting out his affairs, and I felt I’d had enough of them.
I pushed myself upright and threw my fag-end out of the window. A small boy picked it up and began to draw at it in hurried puffs, waving to me as he did so.
‘You’re on your own now,’ I said. ‘I’m going home. God knows,’ I went on in a fit of anger at myself, ‘I’ve wasted enough time. If you’re in trouble again you can stew in your own juice.’
He stared at me with a hurt look, like a kicked dog.
‘I shan’t worry you, Jess,’ he said quietly.
He began to unpack his kit-bag, then, as though losing interest, he threw it under the bed and flung himself down on the hard mattress.
‘I’ll stay here,’ he said. ‘I always stay at Ernie the Weasel’s. You can forget you ever knew me,’ His voice was suddenly gentle. ‘If I see you with anyone I’ll pretend not to know you.’
His self-abasement and humility, his utter degradation, touched me and I felt like a lout.
‘Oh, don’t be a bloody fool!’ I growled.
I moved towards the door. ‘I’ll be seeing you,’ I said. ‘I’m going to enjoy my leave here in my own way. If you want a trip up to London, you can come with me when I go up to sit for my ticket. We can have a bit of a run round the pubs.’
Old Boxer lay on the bed for a moment, watching his cigarette smoke curl upwards to the cracked plaster of the ceiling. He thought I’d gone, and his face suddenly looked old – old and dried up, like a withered apple, and he seemed devoid of feeling and emotion.
The door opened gently as I looked at him and Yorky appeared, clutching his brown paper parcel, still with the braces dangling, his concertina in the other hand, his made-up bow-tie adrift, his cap on the back of his head. I was behind the door, and he never saw me as he entered the room.
Old Boxer had turned a dull eye towards him, and his depression seemed to have deepened at the sight of Yorky’s moon smile.
‘Missed me train after all, ’Orace, me old flower,’ Yorky said cheerfully. ‘The chickens and that’ll ’ave to wait a bit.’
He tossed his parcel on to the bed.
‘Come and ’ave a drink, cock,’ he went on. ‘They’ve just opened.’
Old Boxer licked his dry lips as though he were conscious of the sour taste in his mouth.
‘God damn you, Yorky!’ he said, half under his breath. ‘God damn you to everlasting hell!’
‘That’s the stuff!’ Yorky grinned cheerfully and bent to help him off the bed. ‘Come on. You sound more like yer old self now.’
I slipped outside and dodged silently down the stairs. I wasn’t going to get mixed up in anything more. I suddenly felt I’d had a basinful of Old Boxer. I wanted to get away to people without care, young people, people with hope.
I paused on the landing below as I heard Old Boxer speak.
‘Only an eyeful then,’ he said. ‘No more. Just one till you can get another train. And, for God’s sake, if I get bottled, don’t fetch Jess again. I’ll stew in my own juice this time.’
The words came down to me through the cage the old-fashioned banisters made.
‘O.K., ’Orace.’ Yorky was saying, as I set off down the next flight of stairs. ‘As soon as you start getting awkward, I’ll chin you and call a cab.’
III
Dig was in the hall when I arrived, poking at an old pipe with a feather, a scarf round his neck against the cool air, his carpet slippers on his feet.
He was in a restless mood. He’d been writing and he had a pen over his ear and a wad of paper stuffed into his pocket. There was a hole in his sock, I noticed, and he looked a bit neglected in his frayed jacket and trousers. He wasn’t very well shaved, either, and I saw that his whiskers had flecks of white in them.
He was by the stairs when the door opened and as I stared down at him he seemed to have shrunk a little. He was greyer and dustier and stringier than ever, his long neck stretching out of his loose collar, his suit more rumpled than I remembered it.
His mild eyes looked up, startled, almost as though he thought I was an intruder.
‘What do you want?’ he said. Then his eyes widened and he lolloped across the hall like a great shaggy puppy, one slipper flapping off, his pipe and feather dropped to the floor and forgotten.
‘It’s Jess!’ he shouted in his high-pitched, reedy voice. ‘It’s Jess come back!’
There were tears in his eyes as he held me at arm’s length and studied me.
‘Jess,’ he said. ‘Jess.’ And he seemed to be rolling my name round his tongue. It made me embarrassed and ashamed of myself. ‘You’ve grown. You’ve put on weight proper. Where’ve you been? What you been doing with yourself?’
He dragged me by the arm into the kitchen, talking faster than I believed him capable of.
‘Singapore. And Australia. All over the shop. I heard about you through the shipping office. I followed your ships.’ He sighed then and said simply: ‘I’ve missed you, Jess. It’s been like a tomb here without you.’
He suddenly noticed one of his slippers was missing and jumped up. ‘Funny,’ he said. ‘How long I been without that?’ He glanced round him, anxiously, and I realized just how much he’d grown older and vaguer.
‘I had it when you come in,’ he said. ‘I coulda sworn.’
He hurried out of the room, just a little fussier than I remembered him, just a little more unsure of himself, just a little more absentminded.
He reappeared in the doorway a moment later, a smile on his face. He held his slipper in his hand but made no move to put it on. He sat down, bombarding me with questions. How long was I staying? What were my plans? Then his face fell suddenly and he blushed.
‘You home for long, Jess?’ he queried.
‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘Don’t suppose so.’
I could see he was disappointed. ‘Thought you might be staying for a bit,’ he said. ‘Even wondered if you might be thinking of settling down here.’
‘Shouldn’t think so,’ I admitted. I tried to be as non-committal as possible. I could never have told him that Atlantic Street would be a prison to me after my years at sea. It seemed ten times smaller than the smallest forecastle I could remember. It must have been all the things on the wall that did it – all the ornaments where Dig put his pipe-cleaners, all the gilt-framed pictures, all the crowded furniture. It seemed no bigger than a rabbit hutch.
And it wasn’t just the size of it. It was the stuffiness and the darkness that came from the nearness of the warehouse opposite and the narrowness of the street. Either that, or I’d grown bigger, in the way you can grow bigger than your surroundings.
‘Ah, well!’ Dig did his best to make his smile cheerful. ‘We’ve got to remember you’re a sailor now. You’ve got your living to earn. P’r’aps we’ll be seeing more of you, though?’ He ended on an anxious, questioning note.
‘Yes,’ I said, and I meant it. ‘I’ll be coming home more often.’
Dig grinned, then his grin died and a look of weariness crossed his face.
‘You ought to go and see your Ma, Jess,’ he said. ‘She’s always asking for you. She’s often wondered how you are. Slip up and see her.’
As I left the room
I had the feeling that he’d suddenly become conscious of that thing that separated us, that relationship which bound me to Ma despite our differences, but was denied to him. His eyes had an unhappy look and the excitement had gone out of them.
‘Don’t be too long, Jess,’ he said, then he hurriedly added: ‘But don’t worry about me. You can see me any time. Your Ma’s fairly well just now and she wouldn’t want to see you if she had one of her spells.’
Ma’s room was in its usual semi-darkness and as I entered I found myself wondering with amazement how anyone could live in such self-entombment for so long. Dimly, I saw the figure in the bed, swathed round with clothes; cheap magazines on the floor and on the eiderdown; dead flowers in vases. Ma was always too occupied with her grievance to empty them.
I edged into the room, half-suffocated by the stale, warm smell of it.
‘Hello, Ma,’ I said loudly, half hoping she was asleep so that I needn’t disturb her. ‘It’s Jess.’
The interview was a difficult one. I was as uncomfortable as usual before her. There was no longer any love left in her for anything except herself.
‘Been long enough making up your mind to come home,’ she said.
‘Never had a chance before,’ I lied cheerfully. ‘Never paid off here before.’
‘Forgotten your old Ma,’ she complained. ‘Now you’ve grown up you’ve no time for her. Expect it’s girls and that. They always say boys soon grow out of wanting their Ma.’
‘No, Ma,’ I said. ‘I haven’t forgotten you. See, I brought you a present.’
I passed over a silk shawl I’d bought in India years before. As a matter of fact, I’d bought it for Minnie, then decided she wouldn’t like it, and it had been in my kit-bag ever since. I’d remembered it at the last minute and dug it out for Ma.
I needn’t have bothered, though. She hardly looked at it.
‘Shan’t ever need it,’ she said. ‘Never get around to sitting up these days. Proper bedfast, I am.’
I knew she was lying because half her magazines and a bowl of fruit were on the dressing-table out of her reach, and the knowledge that she was putting on a show for me destroyed what little sympathy I had left for her.