He scratched my new name on the end of his list. We were the same height, with the help of his chair. His eyes didn’t look that lovely to me. They were well hidden behind hair and lids. I wondered what Annie had done to make him show them to her.
—Right, said the stevedore.—O’Malley, he shouted.
The voice was a lot bigger than the rest of him. The ships and boats seemed to creak more as it pushed against them, and it sent the seagulls flapping back out to sea. It lassoed a man walking away from us, down towards George’s Dock. He stopped dead, and turned.
—We won’t be needing you after all, the stevedore shouted.—Go home and have a rest and come back tomorrow. Now, mister, he said to me.—The Inner Dock. Off you go. The good ship Aristotle. Ask for Kavanagh and he’ll give you a nice shovel.
I walked past O’Malley. He looked old, ready to lie down, but there was enough of the stuff left in him to spit at the ground I was about to walk on.
—Scab.
I kept going.
—Scab.
I was angry, ready to go after him and lock my jaws to his back but, really, I didn’t blame him. I’d robbed his job. But I’d done it fairly. Every morning for the best part of a year I’d go down to the Custom House and stand with the hundreds of other men, and wait for the stevedore to remember my name. There was no job for life, or even a week. Every day was a fresh start, a terrible wait until the stevedore remembered or forgot you. I saw O’Malley every morning and more often than not, and more and more often during the winter of 1916 and ’17, he went straight back home, wherever that was. He was already an old man at thirty-eight or nine, and me and the other young lads were the ones who were making him old. And one day, in February, a freezing morning that was never going to get any less vicious, there was no O’Malley. That was the end of him. His days as a man were over.
The older men hated the young ones, even when they were their own sons. They saw a new young lad strolling up and perching his arse on a bollard, waiting to be spotted by the stevedore, and they knew that their working days were almost done. The dockers were the toughest men in Dublin, but old ex-dockers were just old, nothing more, old men, like all the other old, broken men crawling around the city. They watched the young lads arriving, shy but big, bursting out of kids’ clothes, raring to burn energy, and they knew it: they were dead. And they hated me more than the other young lads because I could do the work of three of them; I couldn’t help it. They could see it in my shoulders, before I even picked up a shovel; they could see it in my walk and eyes, in the way my cap loved my head. I was the first name off the stevedore’s lips every morning that year. I often wished he’d do the decent thing and ignore me, but he never did.
The Aristotle was a crumbling bucket full of coal from Lancashire and I was sent down into its rusting centre with ten other men. All day, on a diet of coal dust and cold tea from a bottle, we filled the tubs that came down to us, dangled over us, blocked out what small light we could grab. I swallowed clouds of dust; I virtually smuggled it off the boat, enough to get any decent fire going. I could taste it, feel it settling in my belly, tumbling towards my lungs. But after four or five hours, I found that I could still talk as I shovelled, small bursts that didn’t leave my mouth hanging open for too long.
—The stevedore, I said.
—What about him?
—How come?
—He’s the stevedore?
—Yeah.
—He shrank, said the man beside me, a chap somewhere in his twenties who still swung his shovel like a show-off.
—Shrank?
—True as God.
—How?
—Don’t know.
We stepped back onto the coal as the full tub was hoisted up out of the boat’s gut. The light lit the dust and the coughing around me intensified; it was easier to breathe in the dark.
—You hear stories, said my new friend.
—Go on.
—Too much of the gee, he said.
—Go on.
—Took all the sap out of him.
I was fourteen, remember: it made sense, although the idea of there ever being too much of anything, especially sex, was out there in the dark, way beyond my experience or imagination.
The new tub was dangling over us, dropping our way.
—Used up all his marrow, he told me.—And serves him right. He’s been up on every man’s wife that’s working here today. Except mine.
—And mine, I said.
—Fair enough, he said.—That makes the two of us. We’re a very small club, pal.
He let his voice drop under the noise of the approaching tub and all the other noise that constantly shook the dock-land.
—It’s how they all got the start here, he told me.
We filled the new tub together.
—And the bloody young fellas, he said.—Half of them are his. More.
—I’m not, I told him.
—Oh, I know, he said.—I can see that. Think about it, though.
He left me thinking while I heard his shovel bite under the coal and he lifted the load and dropped it into the tub.
—The whole of Dublin and most of bloody Ireland is getting its coal and everything else from the sweat of that dwarf’s bastards. That’s no way to run a bloody country, is it?
—How did it go? Annie asked me when I got home that night.
—Grand, I said.—What colour are his eyes, anyway?
—A colour that has no name, she said.—The state of you.
Dried sweat and coal dust were a shell on my face, neck and hands. And I liked it.
Annie tapped my cheek.
—Jesus, she said.—Are you in there at all?
—I am, Annie, I told her.—Bursting to get out.
The Aristotle was gone the next morning, replaced by another coal bucket, and we climbed in and emptied it. I was digging coal for Tedcastle one day, filling my lungs with dust, and it was a boat full of pitch another day, and the eyes were burnt out of my head; dropping the lids over them was an agony at every blink. But grain was worse. Coal dust came with every breath but grain dust soaked up the air, robbed it as it hinted itself at your mouth. There was nothing at all left to breathe. I stood, surrounded by loose, high hills of wheat from Alberta or Dakota, in the dark of a wreck that should never have made it across the Atlantic, and willed everything to stop and stay absolutely still, just for a few seconds, the other men’s shovelling, the noise, the bobbing of the boat against the pier, and the other boats along the dock and the tugs making waves, the gulls landing on the water, everything, the chaff whirling around my face, for a second, just for half a second stop, so I wouldn’t faint and die. I suffocated all day long, fought back death with my shovel.
And then there was phosphorite. The phosphorite left your eyes more or less alone, or did no more damage than the pitch, but it went straight for your teeth instead. A day in the bowels of a boat full of phosphorite was a message from hell and the stevedore. A quick mouthful of the stuff was a lesson you never forgot. Digging away, as if to escape but actually burrowing deeper into it, while I felt my gums being eaten, a growing itch and pain, teeth wandering if I clenched them. It was said that Guinness’s porter was breakfast, dinner and tea to the dockers and it was literally true of the ones who’d been banished to the phosphorite boats once and twice too often. The gummy ones. The men with collapsed faces. They couldn’t eat, they hadn’t even the gums for porridge; the porter alone kept them alive. I saw these men and could easily believe that the stevedore’s whole body had collapsed. They were huge men with tiny, crumpled heads. Hardchaws and trouble-makers who’d been sent to melt in hell.
I got into a fight. With the only other man on the docks whose wife hadn’t been fucked by the stevedore. We stood at each other with bale-hooks. I’d bumped into him while hauling a stray crate of German ball bearings out of the path of a cart. He shoved me back, and there we were.
—Come on! he said.
I let him bluster.
—Come on, yeh dwarf’s bastard!
He swung at me. It was a careless, furious lunge. I grabbed his arm on its way back and pulled him to me, and gave him the butt of the hook to the side of his head. I held him by the hair that came out the back of his cap and got ready to smack him again, to knock him right into the ground. His hook went around my leg. I let go of a thump that took years and inches off him. He fell back and the hook followed him, with some of Annie’s husband’s trousers and a chunk of my leg. I fell onto him and decided to kill him. I kneed and bit whatever was under me, and searched for some meat to park the bale hook. And, suddenly, there was a foreign roar - there was a third party in the ruck. The stevedore. He was in between us. I didn’t know how long he’d been in there or how much of a hiding I’d given him. His fingers were in my nose and eyes. His face was in my face and Annie was right: there was no word for the colour of his eyes. And I understood something else: he was gorgeous.
I jumped away off him. Two of the other dockers broke my flight over the quay and into the water; I didn’t care where I was going.
The stevedore stood up. Then he got down off the only man’s stomach and let him stand up.
—Go home, he said.—The pair of yis.
There wasn’t a sign of exertion on him, not a wheeze or a smudge.
—He started it, said the only man.
His fury was still hopping around inside him.
—Go home, said the stevedore.—Come back in the morning.
We did just that, home and back the next day, and the only man was sent home again to cool off for another day and I was sent to shovel phosphorite, and the next day and the next. It was my last fight on the dock; I learnt my lesson very quickly. Working inside a cloud of phosphorite was the hardest money I ever earned. By the end of a phosphorite day, I didn’t know how much cash was being put into my hand. I couldn’t really see, my mouth was a loose, angry mess, my hands red and screaming, barely capable of holding onto the readies. We were paid in the pub, every night; and a pint out of the wage for the stevedore, every night. A phosphorite veteran helped me to get my glass to my mouth. He held my wrist and guided the glass to my bottom lip.
—’hanks, I said, afraid to let my tongue touch my teeth.
I was being eaten alive by phosphorite, losing substance by the shovel-load. But on the sixth day the stevedore hesitated after shouting out my name, then sent me off to the Old Dock, to hump bananas. Annie must have worked hard on him; she must have gazed long and hard into those eyes.
And I loved it. The work. Every minute of it. I loved the dirt that settled on me. I loved the racket and the danger, the smell and feel of foreign things, even when it was only coal or even the phosphorite. I loved the mystery of the chests and crates, the origins stamped on their sides - Kashmir, Dresden, Lille, Bogota. I saw them, I smelt them. Coffee, hair oil, jute, tobacco. Rubber, pencils, copper, sugar cane and the oil that nursed machinery parts, the invisible dust of packed marble and the wild aroma of mahogany. And all the stuff we could feck - top hats, cuckoo clocks, all the finished goods and fruits. And the weight and importance of steel and iron ore. I was in the heart of the world. And I loved the escape in the evenings, the tiredness and the end of it, the first drink and then home to Annie. I was alive all day and night. The screech of unwilling metal, the weight of a load on my shoulder and back, biting through the sack and jacket that covered me, the unmerciful, slow progress of weighed-down cart-wheels. Cattle and sheep sliding on the ice, the thumps of their hoofs on the gangplank, the shouts and accents of the drovers. Running kids, making balls of the slack, to bring home or sell, from coal that had been crushed under wheels, doing what me and Victor used to do, escaping from under horses’ feet and the stevedore’s boot.
—Yeh dwarfy fucker! Yeh dwarfy fucker!
All of it.
The smell of the water, the way it lapped against the lock that kept the high tide of the river out of the docks. And the foreign lads on the boats, men from everywhere; they shouted to one another and it killed me that I couldn’t understand them. Chinese and Nordic, and black men of all the shades. Scots and Spaniards and travelled Irishmen. And the working girls waiting for the foreign men on the North Wall Quay, on the other side of the suspension bridge, exposed to the wind and daylight, the gulls squawking over them. All that life and hardness, misery and possibility. The Custom House Docks became my favourite place in the world. I belonged there.
And I liked bringing things home to Annie. Annie knew more about living than anyone I ever knew. There was never enough - good, bad, pain, pleasure, too little and much - Annie took the lot and fucked the consequences all and every day.
I held up a pineapple. I was proud of this one; it had taken more sneaking than the bananas I’d smuggled the day before. She was sitting on my chest.
—What’s this yoke here? I said.—I’ll give you three guesses.
—It’s a pineapple, said Annie.
—You knew, I said, disappointed. I’d been sure it would be new to her; it was the weirdest looking thing I’d ever held in my hand.
—Listen, buster, she said.—I was bringing home pineapples, and better ones than that one, a long time before I ever laid eyes or hands on you. But, sure, sling it over anyway.
She threw the pineapple over her shoulders and licked the tiny pockmarks Miss O’Shea’s nipples had left on my forehead.
—Someone got here before me, she said.
Ball bearings, big nuggets of coal, oranges, a box of needles for a gramophone—
—All we need now is a gramophone.
Lisle stockings, tea, a gramophone - smuggled out in instalments over the best part of a month. I hid the remaining parts in a corner of the Tobacco Store, a warehouse alongside the Old Dock with enough in it to feed, clothe and make the world. I hid the parts in a high corner, in under the eaves, beside all the other items that the dockers hid there.
Annie and I listened and, with the window open all that summer and autumn, all of Summerhill listened to John McCormack singing the same song - The little toy dog is covered with dust but sturdy and staunch he stands - until there were no needles left in the box.
Annie ran her fingers up and down my back.
—What’s it this morning? she asked.
—John McCormack, please, Annie.
She plucked at the knuckles of my spine. The little toy soldier is red with rust - her ankles gave my arse an encouraging shove it didn’t need - and his musket moulds in his hand.
The wire mesh for a meat safe, the tassels off the border of a Persian rug, anything I could get under her dead husband’s jacket, at once or in instalments, they all came home to Annie. One chest in every hundred we’d break open with our bale-hooks and divvy out the contents. We’d fill our pockets with tea and on days when it was raining, combined with the sweat of our labour, the tea stained our jackets a shade near purple and we wore the sacks low on our shoulders until we were safe past the stevedore and his lickspittles. Home to Annie and her gramophone. When I eventually got home.
The dockers were the hardest men in the world. Their guts were lined with coal dust and pitch. They came to work armed with blades, iron bars, bale-hooks, their own knuckle-dusters. They drank to wake up in the early houses before work. And they drank during work, washed down the world’s dirt and grit and fed the headaches. And after work when they went to collect their wages, in Paddy Clare’s or Jack Maher’s, the dockers’ pubs, they drank what was left in their hands after the stevedore had finished doing his sums. While their children starved - and their wives too, on top of being fucked by the stevedore after he’d drunk his cut of the wages or sold them back to Paddy Clare - the dockers drank themselves into fighting form and looked around for some poor goat to take the place of the stevedore. Glasses of whiskey went into the pints of porter. And God help any poor eejit who walked in on top of a roaring docker swinging his belt. Harmless men ended up in the river and some of them never climbed out; they went under t
he lock and fed the mullet. The dockers were beyond the law. They knew no rules except their own and the stevedore’s. They were heady company for a young man who’d been left all alone by the dead. And I started to keep up with them.
So it went for the best part of a year. Work and drink and Annie. I knew that there were things happening, that the match we’d lit in Easter Week was becoming a bit of a fire. There were by-elections down the country, victories for Count Plunkett and Joe McGuinness, Joe the jailbird.
—Put him in to get him out, said Annie when she saw me coming at her.
And there was the return of some of the Easter Week men from the camps and prisons in England and Wales. I knew that they were back in town but I saw no one and I didn’t go looking. I had Annie and food and my memories of Miss O’Shea; I had my strength and sweat and the company of the hard men. The dockers didn’t have much time for republicanism; they lived too close to the water, I supposed, and spent most of their days with their backs to the country. Collins was back and the other big fellas but I saw and heard nothing of them. Liberty Hall was a pile of rubble that I walked past twice a day. I wasn’t part of anything now. It was the only year of my life that crawled and the pace suited me beautifully. Annie, work and drink. I walked home after a couple of drinks, home to dinner and John McCormack.
But then I wasn’t interested in dinner because of the drink inside me. I roamed the city and roared at the stars, whenever I saw them. I fell into Annie’s room at the end of my wanderings because even I had to sleep somewhere and lying on the ground outside reminded me too much of Victor. Sometimes she let me in and, when she didn’t, I fell asleep against her door whispering into her room.
—He had a wooden leg, Annie. Did I ever tell you that?
—It’s on my fuckin’ mantelpiece.
She locked me out but she never left me all alone.
Until, once, there was a chair against the handle inside. I kicked and fell and kicked again with the flat of my boot and shouted at Annie to let me in, it was too cold for the landing and I’d pulverise the door and the rest of the room and whole fuckin’ house if she didn’t let me in.