Dessie was on the estate also. He had married into it, getting a house when the second child was born. Dessie had had big ideas at the Brothers’; with a drink or two in him he had them still. There was his talk of ‘the lads’ and of ‘connections’ with the extreme republican movement, his promotion of himself as a fixer. By trade he was a plasterer.
‘Give that man a phone as soon as you’re there,’ he instructed Liam Pat, and Liam Pat wrote the number down. He had always admired Dessie, the easy way he had with Rosita Drudy before he married her, the way he seemed to know how a hurling match would go even though he had never handled a hurley stick himself, the way he could talk through the cigarette he was smoking, his voice becoming so low you couldn’t hear what he was saying, his eyes narrowed to lend weight to the confidential nature of what he passed on. A few people said Dessie Coglan was all mouth, but Liam Pat disagreed.
It’s not bad at all, Liam Pat wrote on a postcard when he’d been in London a week. There’s a lad from Lismore and another from Westmeath . Under a foreman called Huxter he was operating a cement-mixer and filling in foundations. He got lonely was what he didn’t add to his message. The wage is twice what O’Dwyer gave, he squeezed in instead at the bottom of the card, which had a picture of a guardsman in a sentry-box on it.
Mrs Brogan put it on the mantelpiece. She felt lonely herself, as she’d known she would, the baby of the family gone. Brogan went out to the garden, trying not to think of the kind of place London was. Liam Pat was headstrong, like his mother, Mr Brogan considered. Good-natured but headstrong, the same red hair on the pair of them till her own had gone grey on her. He had asked Father Mooney to have a word with Liam Pat, but the damn bit of good it had done.
After that, every four weeks or so, Liam Pat telephoned on a Saturday evening. They always hoped they’d hear that he was about to return, but all he talked about was a job finished or a new job begun, how he waited every morning to be picked up by the van, to be driven halfway across London from the area where he had a room. The man who was known to Dessie Coglan had got him the work, as Dessie Coglan said he would. ‘A Mr Huxter’s on the lookout for young fellows,’ the man, called Feeny, had said when Liam Pat phoned him as soon as he arrived in London. In his Saturday conversations – on each occasion with his mother first and then, more briefly, with his father – Liam Pat didn’t reveal that when he’d asked Huxter about learning a trade the foreman had said take what was on offer or leave it, a general labourer was what was needed. Liam Pat didn’t report, either, that from the first morning in the gang Huxter had taken against him, without a reason that Liam Pat could see. It was Huxter’s way to pick on someone, they said in the gang.
They didn’t wonder why, nor did Liam Pat. They didn’t know that a victim was a necessary compensation for the shortages in Huxter’s life – his wife’s regular refusal to grant him what he considered to be his bedroom rights, the failure of a horse or greyhound; compensation, too, for surveyors’ sarcasm and the pernicketiness of fancy-booted architects. A big, black-moustached man, Huxter worked as hard as any of the men under him, stripping himself to his vest, a brass buckle on the belt that held his trousers up. ‘What kind of a name’s that?’ he said when Liam Pat told him, and called him Mick instead. There was something about Liam Pat’s freckled features that grated on Huxter, and although he was well used to Irish accents he convinced himself that he couldn’t understand this one. ‘Oh, very Irish,’ Huxter would say even when Liam Pat did something sensible, such as putting planks down in the mud to wheel the barrows on.
When Liam Pat had been working with Huxter for six weeks the man called Feeny got in touch again, on the phone one Sunday. ‘How’re you doing?’ Feeny enquired. ‘Are you settled, boy?’
Liam Pat said he was, and a few days later, when he was with the two other Irish boys from the gang, standing up at the bar in a public house called the Spurs and Horse, Feeny arrived in person. ‘How’re you doing?’ Feeny said, introducing himself. He was a wizened-featured man with black hair in a widow’s peak. He had a clerical look about him but he wasn’t a priest, as he soon made clear. He worked in a glass factory, he said.
He shook hands with all three of them, with Rafferty and Noonan as warmly as with Liam Pat. He bought them drinks, refusing to let them pay for his, saying he couldn’t allow young fellows. A bit of companionship was all he was after, he said. ‘Doesn’t it keep the poor exile going?’
There was general agreement with this sentiment. There were some who came over, Feeny said, who stayed no longer than a few days. ‘Missing the mam,’ he said, his thin lips drawn briefly back to allow a laugh that Rafferty remarked afterwards reminded him of the bark of a dog. ‘A young fellow one time didn’t step out of the train,’ Feeny said.
After that, Feeny often looked in at the Spurs and Horse. In subsequent conversations, asking questions and showing an interest, he learnt that Huxter was picking on Liam Pat. He didn’t know Huxter personally, he said, but both Rafferty and Noonan assured him that Liam Pat had cause for more complaint than he admitted to, that when Huxter got going he was no bloody joke. Feeny sympathized, tightening his mouth in a way he had, wagging his head in disgust. It was perhaps because of what he heard, Rafferty and Noonan deduced, that Feeny made a particular friend of Liam Pat, more than he did of either of them, which was fair enough in the circumstances.
Feeny took Liam Pat to greyhound tracks; he found him a better place to live; he lent him money when Liam Pat was short once, and didn’t press for repayment. As further weeks went by, everything would have been all right as far as Liam Pat was concerned if it hadn’t been for Huxter. ‘Ah, no, I’m grand,’ he continued to protest when he made his Saturday telephone call home, still not mentioning the difficulty he was experiencing with the foreman. But it had several times crossed his mind that one Monday morning he wouldn’t be there, waiting for the van to pick him up, that he’d had enough.
‘What would you do though, Liam Pat?’ Feeny asked in Bob’s Dining Rooms, where at weekends he and Liam Pat often met for a meal.
‘Go home.’
Feeny nodded; then he sighed and after a pause said it could come to that. He’d seen it before, a bullying foreman with a down on a young fellow he’d specially pick out.
‘It’s got so’s I hate him.’
Again Feeny allowed a silence to develop. Then he said:
‘They look down on us.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Any man with an Irish accent. The way things are.’
‘You mean bombs and stuff?’
‘I mean, you’re breathing their air and they’d charge you for it. The first time I run into you, Liam Pat, weren’t your friends saying they wouldn’t serve you in another bar you went into?’
‘The Hop Poles, that is. They won’t serve you in your working clothes.’
Feeny leaned forward, over a plate of liver and potatoes. He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘They wash the ware twice after us. Plates, cups, a glass you’d take a drink out of. I was in a launderette one time and I offered a woman the machine after I’d done with it. “No, thanks,” she said soon’s I opened my mouth.’
Liam Pat had never had such an experience, but people weren’t friendly. It was all right in the gang; it was all right when he went out with Rafferty and Noonan, or with Feeny. But people didn’t smile, they didn’t nod or say something when they saw you coming. The first woman he rented a room from was suspicious, always in the hall when he left the house, as if she thought he might be doing a flit with her belongings. In the place Feeny had found for him a man who didn’t live there, whose name he didn’t know, came round every Sunday morning and you paid him and he wrote out a slip. He never said anything, and Liam Pat used to wonder if he had some difficulty with speech. Although there was other people’s food in the kitchen, and although there were footsteps on the stairs and sometimes overhead, in the weeks Liam Pat had lived there he never saw any of the other tenants, or heard voices.
The curtains of one of the downstairs rooms were always drawn over, which you could see from the outside and which added to the dead feeling of the house.
‘It’s the same the entire time,’ Feeny said. ‘Stupid as pigs. Can they write their names? You can see them thinking it.’
Huxter would say it straight out. ‘Get your guts put into it,’ Huxter shouted at Liam Pat, and once when something wasn’t done to his liking he said there were more brains in an Irish turnip. ‘Tow that bloody island out into the sea,’ he said another time. A drop of their own medicine, he said.
‘I couldn’t get you shifted,’ Feeny said. ‘If I could I would.’
‘Another gang, like?’
‘Maybe in a couple of weeks there’d be something.’
‘It’d be great, another gang.’
‘Did you ever know McTighe?’
Liam Pat shook his head. He said Feeny had asked him that before. Did McTighe run a gang? he asked.
‘He’s in with a bookie. It’d be a good thing if you knew McTighe. Good all round, Liam Pat.’
Ten days later, when Liam Pat was drinking with Rafferty and Noonan in the Spurs and Horse, Feeny joined them and afterwards walked away from the public house with Liam Pat.
‘Will we have one for the night?’ he suggested, surprising Liam Pat because they’d come away when closing time was called and it would be the same anywhere else. ‘No problem,’ Feeny said, disposing at once of this objection.
‘I have to get the last bus out, though. Ten minutes it’s due.’
‘You can doss where we’re going. No problem at all, boy.’
He wondered if Feeny was drunk. He’d best get back to his bed, he insisted, but Feeny didn’t appear to hear him. They turned into a side street. They went round to the back of a house. Feeny knocked gently on a window-pane and the rattle of television voices ceased almost immediately. The back door of the house opened.
‘Here’s Liam Pat Brogan,’ Feeny said.
A bulky middle-aged man, with coarse fair hair above stolid, reddish features, stood in the rectangle of light. He wore a black jersey and trousers.
‘The hard man,’ he greeted Liam Pat, proffering a hand with a cut healing along the edge of the thumb.
‘Mr McTighe,’ Feeny completed his introduction. ‘We were passing.’
Mr McTighe led the way into a kitchen. He snapped open two cans of beer and handed one to each of his guests. He picked up a third from the top of a refrigerator. Carling it was, Black Label.
‘How’re you doing, Liam Pat?’ Mr McTighe asked.
Liam Pat said he was all right, but Feeny softly denied that. More of the same, he reported: a foreman giving an Irish lad a hard time. Mr McTighe made a sympathetic motion with his large, square head. He had a hoarse voice, that seemed to come from the depths of his chest. A Belfast man, Liam Pat said to himself when he got used to the accent, a city man.
‘Is the room OK?’ Mr McTighe asked, a query that came as a surprise. ‘Are you settled?’
Liam Pat said his room was all right, and Feeny said:
‘It was Mr McTighe fixed that for you.’
‘The room?’
‘He did of course.’
‘It’s a house that’s known to me,’ Mr McTighe said, and did not elucidate further. He gave a racing tip, Cassandra’s Friend at Newton Abbot, the first race.
‘Put your shirt on that, Liam Pat,’ Feeny advised, and laughed. They stayed no more than half an hour, leaving the kitchen as they had entered it, by the door to the back yard. On the street Feeny said:
‘You’re in good hands with Mr McTighe.’
Liam Pat didn’t understand that, but didn’t say so. It would have something to do with the racing tip, he said to himself. He asked who the man who came round on Sunday mornings for the rent was.
‘I wouldn’t know that, boy.’
‘I think I’m the only lodger there at the moment. There’s a few shifted out, I’d say.’
‘It’s quiet for you so.’
‘It’s quiet all right.’
Liam Pat had to walk back to the house that night; there’d been no question of dossing down in Mr McTighe’s. It took him nearly two hours, but the night was fine and he didn’t mind. He went over the conversation that had taken place, recalling Mr McTighe’s concern for his well-being, still bewildered by it. He slept soundly when he lay down, not bothering to take off his clothes, it being so late.
Weeks went by, during which Liam Pat didn’t see Feeny. One of the other rooms in the house where he lodged was occupied again, but only for a weekend, and then he seemed once more to be on his own. One Friday Huxter gave Rafferty and Noonan their cards, accusing them of skiving. ‘Stay if you want to,’ he said to Liam Pat, and Liam Pat was aware that the foreman didn’t want him to go, that he served a purpose as Huxter’s butt. But without his friends he was lonely, and a bitter resentment continuously nagged him, spreading from the foreman’s treatment of him and affecting with distortion people who were strangers to him.
‘I think I’ll go back,’ he said the next time he ran into Feeny, outside the Spurs and Horse one night. At first he’d thought Feeny was touchy when he went on about his experience in a launderette or plates being washed twice; now he felt it could be true. You’d buy a packet of cigarettes off the same woman in a shop and she wouldn’t pass a few minutes with you, even though you’d been in yesterday. The only good part of being in this city was the public houses where you’d meet boys from home, where there was a bit of banter and cheerfulness, and a sing-song when it was permitted. But when the evening was over you were on your own again.
‘Why’d you go back, boy?’
‘It doesn’t suit me.’
‘I know what you mean. I often thought of it myself.’
‘It’s no life for a young fellow.’
‘They’ve driven you out. They spent eight centuries tormenting us and now they’re at it again.’
‘He called my mam a hooer.’
Huxter wasn’t fit to tie Mrs Brogan’s laces, Feeny said. He’d seen it before, he said. ‘They’re all the same, boy.’
‘I’ll finish out the few weeks with the job we’re on.’
‘You’ll be home for Christmas.’
‘I will.’
They were walking slowly on the street, the public houses emptying, the night air dank and cold. Feeny paused in a pool of darkness, beneath a street light that wasn’t working. Softly, he said:
‘Mr McTighe has the business for you.’
It sounded like another tip, but Feeny said no. He walked on in silence, and Liam Pat said to himself it would be another job, a different foreman. He thought about that. Huxter was the worst of it, but it wasn’t only Huxter. Liam Pat was homesick for the estate, for the small town where people said hullo to you. Since he’d been here he’d eaten any old how, sandwiches he bought the evening before, for breakfast and again in the middle of the day, burger and chips later on, Bob’s Dining Rooms on a Sunday. He hadn’t thought about that before he’d come – what he’d eat, what a Sunday would be like. Sometimes at Mass he saw a girl he liked the look of, the same girl each time, quiet-featured, with her hair tied back. But when he went up to her after Mass a few weeks back she turned away without speaking.
‘I don’t want another job,’ he said.
‘Why would you, Liam Pat? After what they put you through?’
‘I thought you said Mr McTighe -’
‘Ah no, no. Mr McTighe was only remembering the time you and Dessie Coglan used distribute the little magazine.’
They still walked slowly, Feeny setting the pace.
‘We were kids though,’ Liam Pat said, astonished at what was being said.
‘You showed your colours all the same.’
Liam Pat didn’t understand that. He didn’t know why they were talking about a time when he was still at the Brothers’, when he and Dessie Coglan used to push the freedom magazine into the letter-boxes. As soon as it was dark they
’d do it, so’s no one would see them. Undercover stuff, Dessie used to say, and a couple of times he mentioned Michael Collins.
‘I had word from Mr McTighe,’ Feeny said.
‘Are we calling in there?’
‘He’ll have a beer for us.’
‘We were only being big fellas when we went round with the magazine.’
‘It’s remembered you went round with it.’
Liam Pat never knew where the copies of the magazine came from. Dessie Coglan just said the lads, but more likely it was the barber, Gaughan, an elderly man who lost the four fingers of his left hand in 1921. Liam Pat often noticed Dessie coming out of Gaughan’s or talking to Gaughan in his doorway, beneath the striped barber’s pole. In spite of his fingerless hand, Gaughan could still shave a man or cut a head of hair.
‘Come on in,’ Mr McTighe invited, opening his back door to them. ‘That’s a raw old night.’
They sat in the kitchen again. Mr McTighe handed round cans of Carling Black Label.
‘You’ll do the business, Liam?’
‘What’s that, Mr McTighe?’
‘Feeny here’ll show you the ropes.’
‘The thing is, I’m going back to Ireland.’
‘I thought maybe you would be. “There’s a man will be going home,” I said to myself. Didn’t I say that, Feeny?’
‘You did of course, Mr McTighe.’
‘What I was thinking, you’d do the little thing for me before you’d be on your way, Liam. Like we were discussing the other night,’ Mr McTighe said, and Liam Pat wondered if he’d had too much beer that night, for he couldn’t remember any kind of discussion taking place.
Feeny opened the door of the room where the curtains were drawn over and took the stuff from the floorboards. He didn’t switch the light on, but instead shone a torch into where he’d lifted away a section of the boards. Liam Pat saw red and black wires and the cream-coloured face of a timing device. Child’s play, Feeny said, extinguishing the torch.