Emerald Germs of Ireland

by Patrick McCabe

  There are, as is the case with many of the aspects of the life of he who might be termed “our hero Pat,” two schools of thought concerning his “thespian ambitions.” Or what Dr. Toss Hamblyn (a long-standing patron of Sullivan’s Select Bar) often referred to as his “adventures in the screen trade”—one view being that it was the very pursuit of these which eventually put him “astray in the head altogether,” the other insisting that they had in effect opened up “a whole new world for Pat.” One which contained within it, indeed, the very seeds of his salvation. His transportation “over the edge,” they continued to attest, being the sole responsibility of one man, the schoolmaster Butty Halpin, whose small-minded egomania resulted, they insisted, not in Pat’s reformation or amelioration as a human being but in the planting of further laurel bushes for the purposes of disguising “grim secrets,” a superfluity of which the earth in the garden belonging to Pat McNab now concealed. At this point, in terms of numbers, approaching, thanks to the hauteur and self-aggrandizement of this diminutive, rotund pedagogue, double figures.

  “Whenever this is all over,” declared Alo McGilly one night in Sullivan’s, “history will see that one citizen of Gullytown and one alone bears the greater share of responsibility for these dreadful, dreadful tragedies—and that man is Butty Halpin.”

  Whether true or not, there can be no denying the fact that the Pat McNab who opened the door to Butty Halpin was a considerably brighter and breezier version than that which had been pottering about the murky interior of the McNab household for some several months now. And for this there was a single reason—the fact that only some days before he had descended the stairs to discover in the hallway a letter from the Dublin School of Acting (a response which he had never dreamed of receiving!) inviting him to attend for interview. Which explained the myriad series of voices (“Don’t make me laugh, Chan!” and “Good evening, Miss de Soto!”) which he had now begun to spend hours perfecting and the sanguine expression in his eyes as he extended his hand and proclaimed to the small, onion-shaped man who now stood on the step before him with a large briar chomped between his jaws: “Mr. Halpin! How good to see you!”

  Admittedly, Pat was somewhat taken aback when he heard his former teacher explain that the reason for his call was that he was, in effect, searching for a place of residence (for it was Pat’s intention to devote all his spare time now to his “travels in fantasy,” “thespian artificing,” or however else his cerebral peregrinations might be described, and to eschew all domestic pursuits)—but when “the master” (as he was often referred to) explained that he would be “billeting” for a “mere three weeks or so,” he found himself relieved—somewhat honored, indeed, that the renowned educator had seen fit to choose his establishment.

  “So that’s the way of it, Pat,” continued Mr. Halpin, wiping the remains of his fish fingers from his lips. “Now that Dots is gone, I’m all on my lonesome below and I thought sure I might as well stop with yourself until the new bungalow is built.”

  “And why wouldn’t you, master? Will you have another drop of tea there?”

  “I will indeed, Pat—to be sure,” replied the master, extending his blue-striped mug.

  There are those who would contend that the fatal moment, i.e., that which was the genesis of the reactivation of the resentment which Pat, despite himself, began to harbor toward his former teacher, occurred directly after this exchange. When Pat, in his excitement, blurted out all the details of his newfound good fortune. There was nothing which could have prepared him for the cold taciturnity of the master’s response. Nor for the cruel unwinding smile which followed hot on its heels as he picked his teeth with a match (how well Pat recalled that grating mannerism!) and murmured, in a low, barely audible tone, “Acting school? But sure you couldn’t act your way out of a paper bag, Pat!”

  Pat attempted to deliver a frivolous response but only succeeded in flushing to the roots as he stammered, “I have to go up for my audition. I have nearly all my parts learned.”

  Butty Halpin smiled and played with the few crumbs of marble cake which remained on the plate. Then he looked at Pat, twanged his braces (they were the very same ones he had worn when his host was in fourth class), and said, “Well, all I can say is that I hope you make a better fist of it than you did the football. Lord bless us and save us when I think of it!”

  Pat could feel the words shrinking in his throat, but he rallied nobly and replied, with convincing good humor, “Oh now! I was an awful case, master! Wasn’t I?”

  Butty shook his head as his left brace went, snap!

  “An awful case?” he continued. “Ah for God’s sake, Pat! Sure you could hardly tie your bucking laces never mind kick a ball!”

  Pat twisted a thread which was hanging out of the pocket of his black trousers and, hoarsely, replied, “Do you remember the day Mattie Skutch kicked the ball and it hit me in the face?”

  “Hit you in the face is right!” confirmed Butty. “Hit you in the face—”

  “And went straight into the goal!!”

  Butty shook his hairless domed head in despair.

  “Lost the bloody cup on us! After all my hard work! The whole season wasted!”

  Pat gulped and his nostrils gave an involuntary twitch.

  “Oh now, master,” he said, still twisting the thread, “it was some day all right!”

  Butty wiped his mouth one last time with a corner of the napkin and pushed the table away from him as he rose to his feet. He gazed at Pat as you would at an alcoholic whose spouse and dependents have deserted him and said, “Well, all I can say is, Pat—I hope you’re better at this acting business than you ever were at the football!”

  Something valiant sporadically arose in Pat as he lay there pondering over these events throughout the small hours—but it was not enough, and when morning finally came, and Butty grabbed his briefcase to dash off to school, calling back, “Thanks, Pat! See you at half-three,” very litde of it remained, in its place (where evidence of it had shone in Pat’s eyes) two ominously gray, semicircular shadows. A stranger would surely have found his smile deceptive now as he continued to repeat, to no one in particular—for the house was entirely empty—the words, “Thank you very much for your kind words of encouragement. However, at least I never claimed to be a teacher! At least I never did that, fucking human sausage, effing potato man!”

  There was no mistaking the spiderwork of cracks which interwove upon the glass of the mirror as Pat rubbed his bruised knuckles and withdrew, ramrod-stiff, to the somber confines of the library. As the day wore on, however, Pat, fortunately, began to see the lighter side of events, eventually—at approximately three o’clock—drawing the curtains to admit the daylight and repeating gaily—a new buoyancy in his eyes—for the benefit of his mother’s portrait, “What do I care about an auld baldy dwarf! For that’s all he is! Thinks he’s fucking Clark Gable, for the love of jasus!”

  He was continuing to chuckle when the jaunty, self-assured echo of the master’s whistling came drifting down the hallway.

  It was some days later that the dicky bow arrived in the post, meticulously wrapped in cellophane. ‘Yes—that’s for me, Pat,” the master announced, smartly removing it from his hands. “Or hadn’t you heard about me entering the ‘Spot the Talent’ show below in Sullivan’s?”

  “‘Spot the Talent’?” croaked Pat, quite taken aback.

  “Yes! Come Thursday night I’ll be up there with the best—giving them what for, eh, Pat? Yes sir, indeed!”

  “What for …” repeated Pat abstractedly to himself, as the master continued, “But then—you won’t be here, will you? You’ll be off to Dublin to audition for your—ahem!—acting school!!”

  It was as though Pat had momentarily contracted amnesia.

  “That’s right!” he suddenly cried aloud. “Of course!”

  “Of course!” sniffed the master. ‘You’re the boy will leave them standing, eh, Pat?”

  An acidic sickliness took hold of
Pat’s abdomen.

  But it was a happy Pat McNab who arrived home from Dublin the following Friday evening. Butty Halpin, fresh from a hard day’s work in St. Cashie’s Boys’ N.S., was there to greet him on the doorstep. “Well, Pat! How did it go? The audition, I mean?” he asked urgently.

  Pat beamed in his box-pleated coat.

  “I did it, master!” he cried proudly. “They say it’s only a matter of official notification now!”

  “Fair play to you, Pat! Able to say the big words all by yourself! Official notification! Ha ha!”

  Pat blinked uncertainly, unsure of an appropriate response. But he had no need of it, for a pudgy hand had already settled on his shoulder.

  “Pat! Come in at once!” demanded the master. “I want to show you the prize I won!”

  The Spot the Talent Waterford crystal decanter gleamed like diamonds on the sideboard in the late evening sunlight.

  “What do you think of that, Pat?” said the master.

  “It’s lovely, master,” Pat replied, gawping in admiration.

  Have you ever been in love, me boys

  Have you ever felt the pain

  I’d rather be in jail I would

  Than be in love again …

  sang the schoolteacher tunefully, adding, “That’s what won it for me—the bold John McCormack, Pat!”

  “I had better go to bed now, master,” said Pat, rubbing his brow.

  “Yes, Pat!” replied Butty. “You must be tired after all your hard ‘acting’ work—ha ha!”

  “What, master?” said Pat, not thinking straight, his mind cluttered with a bewildering variety of “accents” and “pieces of dialogue.”

  “Good-night so, Pat,” responded the master, bemusedly shaking his globed head, as if mystified by the world and its absurdly unrealizable ambitions.

  It was approximately fifteen minutes past eight the following morning when Pat, lying in bed, heard the plaintive whistling of Tommy Noble the postman as he came sauntering up the lane, followed by the tantalizing flap of the letter box. Within seconds, he found himself bounding down the stairs, falling upon his knees in the hallway and opening up letters in what can only be described as a near frenzy. His heart sank as Reader’s Digest fliers, electricity bills, and HP hoover offers followed assorted tax communications in their horrid brown envelopes and the realization slowly dawned on him that there was in fact nothing from the acting school. This procedure was repeated, with startling exactitude, the following morning—indeed the one after that, also—with Pat on broken knees in the hallway surrounded by scrunched-up balls of unwanted missives, but nowhere near him the one his heart so eagerly desired.

  A pall of gloom settled over him as he sat at the kitchen table the following Friday afternoon, alerting a little as he heard the front door close and the sound of his tenant’s footsteps coming along the hall. Within seconds, the schoolmaster was standing in the doorway with his nostrils twitching, remarking, “There you are, Pat! What’s that I smell, I wonder? Turnips? God bless us, Pat, but you’re a topper, do you know that!”

  The bulbous pedagogue pulled a chair out from beneath the table and seated himself by his host. Withdrawing a large white handkerchief from the pocket of his cavalry twills, he blew thunderously into it and, his cheeks flushing bright-red, said, “You’ll never guess who I met coming up the lane, Pat!”

  Pat felt a huge tidal wave of possibility swelling within him.

  “Tommy Noble!” he cried, with all the excitement of a young child.

  “No! Timmy Sullivan!” replied the master. “He has me entered for the All-Ireland ‘Spot the Talent’ this coming Monday!”

  He gave his full attention to the steaming meal before him as he busily tucked his napkin into his shirt collar.

  “Boys!” he said, rubbing his hands. “Boys, but them turnips smell bucking powerful!”

  There was no mistaking the ghastly pallor of Pat McNab’s countenance as he endeavored to clasp his hands together on his lap, the better to contain their tremulous vibrations.

  The following morning found Pat poised on the landing awaiting the arrival of Tommy Noble. But it was not to be. And when “the tenant” came stepping gaily up the lane at approximately three thirty that evening, it might have been to the “place of eternal night” he was returning, for the spirit of Pat McNab was as close now to being utterly crushed as it might be possible for a human to endure. Which made the master’s brusqueness all the more insensitive and, without a doubt, indiscreet, as he complained, “Ah for the love of God, not turnips again today, Pat!”

  Pat paused over the cooker and genuinely made an effort to be civil and considerate.

  “I thought you liked turnips, master,” was his reply.

  The circular educationalist stiffened and left down his briefcase.

  “Well, I do. But not every day God sends. Japers, man, sure any lug would know that!”

  There was an undoubted edge to Pat’s response as he said, “Well, that’s all there is, I’m sorry to have to tell you!”

  The master was clearly taken aback but good-humoredly made light of it.

  “God bless us Pat but you’re in good humor today, aren’t you? I suppose no sign of Tommy Noble today again, eh? Would I be right, Pat, in making that assumption? Right, would I be, do you think?”

  The saucepan Pat held in his right hand made harsh music on the cluttered counter.

  “What do I care about Tommy Noble?” he replied, with a hint of iron.

  The master hooked his thumb in his braces and extended his stomach, grinning widely.

  “Sure don’t I know, Pat!” he said. “Which is why I suppose you don’t want to hear who I happened to meet coming up the lane!”

  There was a tanginess to Pat’s saliva, like marmalade. He whirled, simultaneously wiping his hands on his apron.

  “Tommy Noble!” he gasped, incredulously.

  “No! Timmy Sullivan!” chuckled the master.

  Pat’s heart sank anew and he was about to turn away when he felt a thick-fingered hand on his shoulder, the triumphant cry ringing out, “No! Tommy Noble!”

  Pat could not believe his eyes. He gasped as it appeared before him, the plain spotless white envelope expertly poised on the improvised tray of Butty Halpin’s upraised fingers.

  Moments later, they found themselves together in the quiet confines of the library, Butty’s head almost completely enshrouded in blue smoke from his pipe, fragments of paper from the envelope fluttering all about Pat as he endeavored to make his way inside the communication he had just received.

  “Oh, master,” he cried, “I can’t do it! I’m all butterfingers!”

  Butty Halpin puffed on his briar and advised, avuncularly, “Patience, Pat. Take your time, dear boy.”

  Pat gasped, a nerve tapping furiously over his right eye, as if being worked upon by the shoemaking implement of an infinitesimal, painstaking elf.

  “That’s right!” he said. “That’s right, master! Patience!”

  There was not a sound to be heard—save the distant lowing of a cow—as Pat ran his eyes across the letter which he now held, quiveringly, in his hand. It would not be an exaggeration to say that his entire countenance was then consumed by an expression of pure horror.

  Butty Halpin frowned, removing his pipe from his mouth.

  “What’s wrong, Pat?” he enquired, scratching the upper part of his cheek with his index finger.

  “It—,” began Pat, hoarsely.

  “What? What are you trying to say, Pat? Come on, man!” continued the Master.

  “It—,” repeated Pat, his lower lip trembling.

  “Here! Give me a look at that!” Butty Halpin demanded, a sudden and unexpected peremptoriness in his voice.

  Pat might have been a marble statue erected in the center of the library as the master digested its contents.

  “Well man, dear oh dear. Isn’t that a pity now?” he said, running his soft hand along the shining runway of his head.


  “Maybe it’s a mistake. Maybe it’s a mistake, master!” exclaimed Pat hopefully.

  Butty lowered his head and folded the letter in a manner that was strangely tender. It might have been the regretful denial of an official pardon.

  “I’m afraid not, Pat. These people don’t make mistakes, I’m sorry to have to tell you!”

  Pat lowered his head.

  “No, master,” he compliantly replied. “They wouldn’t, would they? They wouldn’t make a mistake.”

  The schoolteacher handed the folded white square to his landlord.

  “Who knows, Pat,” he said, “please God—maybe next year. Hmm?”

  Pat nodded, shamefully.

  “Yes, master. Please God.”

  “Well, good luck now,” went on the master, with a sudden breeziness, “I have to rehearse below in Sullivan’s this evening so I’ll be home late. Not long now before the big day is upon us!”

  “That’s right, master. Not long now. It won’t be long now!”

  “As the monkey said when it got its tail cut off! Ha ha! Well—good luck now, Pat, me auld son!” replied the master.

  Throughout the entire evening, Pat endeavored to avert his eyes from the glittering sculpture of crystal that was the decanter reclining on the sideboard and when, the following afternoon, his tenant remarked, “God Pat but I had to laugh yesterday when I seen your face! You really thought you had it, didn’t you?” it required all the resources he harbored within him to brightly smile and respond, as though he hadn’t a care in the world, by saying, “Oh now, master! Don’t be talking! Doesn’t it just show you the class of a cod I really am!”

  The master shook his head.

  “And the two wee eyes of you—dancing away with unbridled hope!”

  Now it was Pat’s turn to shake his head.

  “It was nearly as bad as the days when I used to think I was going to get my place on the school team!”

  “Aye! Do you mind that!” replied Butty, lighting his pipe.

  “Some hope of me ever being able to kick a ball, eh, master?”

  “Oh now, Pat—would you quit!” was the renowned pedagogue’s reply, elevating himself in his chair as he mused, “Do you know what I was thinking there, Pat? I wouldn’t mind a wee dram of the you-know-what?”