—What are you, an injun? Tug asks him.
—I’m a king! The boy sneers.
—What class of a weapon is that? A lance, a sword? I say.
—It’s a spear, he says.
He stamps up along the flattened fence and hops back onto the towpath. He goes through a martial-arts display: slashing the air with the rod then spinning it over his head, fluidly transferring it from one twisting hand to the other. He finishes by leaning forward on one knee and brandishing the crimped end of the rod at Tug’s sternum.
—This is my bridge, he says, baring his teeth.
—And what if we want to pass? Tug says.
—Not if I don’t say so!
Tug proffers his crumpled bag of chips.
—We can pay our way. Chip, King?
The boy reaches into the bag and takes a wadded handful of vinegar-soaked chips. He examines the clump, sniffs them, then peels the chips apart and divides them between the girls. The girls eat them quickly, one by one. They tilt their heads back and make convulsive swallowing movements with their necks, like baby chicks.
—Good little birdies, the boy says, and pats each girl on the head.
They giggle to each other.
—You shouldn’t take things from strangers, Tug says.
—I gave them the chips, the boy says, tapping his vested breast with his spear. What business do you have across the bridge?
—We’re looking for someone. A boy. A little blondie-haired fella, Tug says, a little bit like you. He went away but nobody knows where.
The boy knits his brow. He steps back up onto the fence and peers along the curvature of the river.
—There’s no one like that here, he says finally. I would’ve seen him. I’m the King, I see everything.
—Well, we have to try, Tug says.
Leave it be, Tug, I want to say, but I say nothing. So much of friendship is merely that: the saying of nothing in place of something.
I turn and take a quick look beyond the towpath, along the way we came. A hill leads up to the road and beyond that is the squat, ramshackle skyline of the town. I hear – or think I hear – sounds of distant commotion, shouting, and I picture Mark Cuculann outside Dockery’s, raging at the inverted wreck of his car. Marlene will be by his side, arms folded, and I can envisage the look she’ll be wearing, the verdigris glint of her narrow-lidded eyes, a smile flickering despite itself about the edges of her lips, lips painted the same shade as the proposal I scrawled for her on the passenger door. I feel for the cylinder of lipstick in my pocket, take it out, give it to one of the girls.
—More gifts, I say. Well, let’s get going then Tug.
Tug goes to step past the boy. The boy draws up the rod and jabs the crimped end into Tug’s gut. Tug grasps the rod, twists it towards himself. He mock-gasps, and claws the air.
—You’ve killed me, he croaks.
He staggers back, and folds his big creaking knees, and puddles downward, dropping face forwards flat into the grass, arse proffered to the sky like a supplicant.
—You’ve done it now, I say.
I toe-nudge the fetal Tug in the ribs. He jiggles lifelessly. The boy steps forward, mimics my action, toeing the loaf of Tug’s shoulder. The girls have gone silent.
—How are you going to explain this to your mammy? I say.
The boy’s eyes begin to brim, even as he tries to keep the jaw jutted.
—Ah, he’s set to start weeping, I say.
Tug, soft-hearted, can’t stay dead. He sputters, raises his head, grins. He eyes the boy. He hoists himself up.
—Don’t be teary now, wee man, he says, I was dead but I’m raised again.
He lumbers up over the fence and out onto the bridge and I follow.
—Goodbye King! Tug shouts.
As I pass him the boy scowlingly studies us, arms folded, aluminium spear resting against his shoulder.
—If ye fall in there’s nothing I can do, he warns.
The bridge creaks beneath us. Halfway across, the thin gnarled branches of the dead tree spill over, reach like witches’ fingers for our faces, and we have to press and swat them out of our way.
—So tell me, Tug, I say.
—What?
—Tell me more about the Clancy kid. About these German lesbians.
And Tug begins to talk, to theorise, and I’m not really listening, but that’s okay. As he babbles I take in the back of his bobbing head, the ridges and undulations of his shaven skull. I take in the deep vertical crease in the fat of his neck like a lipless grimace, and the mountainous span of his swaying shoulders. I think of the picture of the Clancy kid, scissored from a Sunday newspaper, that Tug keeps tacked to the cork board in his room. The picture is the famous, familiar one, a birthday-party snap, crêpe birthday crown snugged down over the Clancy kid’s fair head, big smile revealing the heartbreaking buck teeth, eyes wide, lost in the happy transport of the instant. I think of Marlene. I think of her sprog, so close to being mine. I think of her sundial navel, her belly so taut I can lay her on her back and bounce coins off it. We all have things we won’t let go of.
The beams of the crippled bridge warp and sing beneath us all the way over, and when we make it to the far shore and step back down onto solid earth, a surge of gratitude flows through me. I reach out and pat Tug on the shoulder and turn to salute the boy king and his giggling girl entourage. But when I look back across the tumbling black turbulence of the water I see that the children are gone.
Hospitals Requests
Pat McCabe
‘The November frost had starched the countryside into silent rigidity.’
That was one of the sentences, along with various other scraps and fragments of stories, that I came across in my old notebook/diary detailing a variety of aspects of my adolescence in the sixties.
Not, to be honest, that I cared what the November frost had done – any more than I did about a great deal else, ever since the bond between us had been irreducibly severed. Even at a remove of almost forty years it can still make galling reading . . . although I have to say the legal people certainly seemed to derive a degree of amusement from its contents before eventually returning it to me.
‘Memories of Myrtle, Aug. 18, 1968.’
‘We continue, happily, during these God-given days, to appraise one another as figures in a myth of our own construction, a hopelessly elevated amour in which valedictions from A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Juliet or Romeo are by no means uncommon.’
The foregoing, annotated in a looping, vertiginous calligraphy, was bordered by an assortment of hand-drawn pictorial representations in Bic biro of my beautiful companion, Myrtle.
Whose father, as a general goods merchant and part-time auctioneer, sold milking machines throughout the district. This was to become a source, perhaps not of agony, but certainly of continued distress for me, throughout that blissful time when we perambulated the roads of our little home town in Ireland, my gorgeously wistful summer girl and me.
She whose coils of platinum-blonde hair were as irradiated, distended wonders. ‘Floating, unfurling as bog cotton in the sun,’ as I had apprehended it.
She was small in stature and, curiously, never wore lipstick. Not that such details mattered for, in any case, now it was over between us. ‘I’m sorry, Feeney Reilly, I don’t think we can ever meet again,’ she was to inform me, lowering her head in that familiar bashful way. ‘Would you like to buy some milking machines?’ demanded the ruffians who, as ever, stalked me going home, before cawing shrilly as they made their boisterous departure: ‘Mr Macklin’s milking machines – going cheap!’
‘You can have this photograph to remember me by,’ she suggested later. ‘Just to show there are no hard feelings or anything like that.’
I was grateful, to be honest, for it really was a nice print, a glossy one about three inches square, washed in vivid colours of purple and blue with her fair hair glowing vividly and her pale natural lips spreading out in a disarming smile
. It was one we had got taken in the train station in Dublin – in a Kodak booth specially provided for the purpose.
Ah, Myrtle Macklin – how I tremble at the name of my long-ago summer girl. It was a tragedy I didn’t think I would ever get over. And most likely wouldn’t have, either – but for the arrival of dear Auntie Honey. Or ‘Bunny Honey’ as my mother preferred to call her.
My heart it literally stood still in my chest when I first saw her; however, little did I dream that her arrival on our humble doorstep would in actual fact effect a cure for my malady, banish my obstinate delirium for ever.
But that is what it did, for Bunny Honey set my soul on fire. ‘She reads the News of the World,’ some locals said. Effectively suggesting that she possessed loose morals. Some were even more forthright, with Harry Murtagh’s wife actually declaring that she was ‘a low-born good-for-nothing tramp’.
I could scarcely believe it when she showed me the photographs. Also glossy, but in shades of achingly beautiful Kodachrome amber. ‘Yes, I was a Windmill girl in Soho,’ she beamed proudly, and I couldn’t command my eyes away from the sandal – the item of Scholl’s footwear that was dandling beneath the hem of her tight-fitting black slacks, complete with foot-strap. I found myself on the verge of collapse.
*
You think that you’ll forget, like I assumed I had done with Myrtle Macklin. Or ‘my once-upon-a-time summer girl’ which I had taken to calling her around that time. But it’s not always that easy. There are forces at that age that you don’t understand, and once they’ve taken root, established themselves surreptitiously deep inside you – well, I’m afraid there isn’t a great deal you can do.
I arrived home one day – I happened to be doing the Intermediate examination at the time – and found Auntie Bunny helping my mother with the zipper of her skirt. They were discussing clubs in London which no one in their right mind would frequent – ‘grubby places’ where ‘men and women of the worst character’ were known to congregate. When they saw me in the doorway they both started giggling. My father left down the paper, coughed uproariously and hurled himself out the door.
Looking back, I suppose, that was the first time I’d noticed anything. However, nothing happened after that – at least nothing worth reporting – until what I thought of as the ‘night of the stocking’. Or what Bunny herself took to describing as ‘The Great Kayser Bondor Stocking Mystery’.
She was scratching her head, clearly somewhat out of sorts, when I entered the kitchen. Her great glossy beehive was shining in the late evening sun, and her black slacks might have been sprayed onto her posterior. ‘I can’t quite understand it,’ she kept saying, ‘I was sure that I’d put them in my drawer. But one of my stockings . . . why, it definitely seems to have disappeared!’
She shook her head as we sat down at the table and consumed some tea.
She lived in Margate – on Marine Parade, right on the seafront, she told me, tapping her elongated nails on the table’s wooden surface.
‘Everyone wears their hair up,’ she continued with a smile. ‘On the mainland, I mean – just like this, in the style of Kathy Kirby.’
Then she told me all about the Blitz in London. ‘It could be lovely and yummy down in the tube stations where everyone gathered.’ She exhaled softly as she described how reassuring and warm it could be down there. ‘So yummy cosy with us all huddled in!’
I sat there, stiff, as her bosom heaved with the pink lambswool of her sweater swelling, as she regarded me, twinkling-staring directly into my eyes.
‘But where could that Kayser Bondor have possibly gone?’ she pondered anew, cradling her small chin on a pale moisturised hand.
Like my father previously, I was on the verge of losing my nerve and disappearing out the door – because I really didn’t know the answer to the question. I was flummoxed – but those eyes kept on sparkling. ‘I wonder,’ she repeated, and then again: ‘I wonder . . .’
*
At the end of the exams there was a party, and, in celebration, or so they said, they danced. Not me, just my mother and Bunny. She had always loved Bobby Darin, I heard my mother remark almost dazedly, huffing and puffing as she manoeuvred our mock-teak three-speed radiogram right out into the centre of the floor.
Bunny Honey took her by the hand, twirling together and tossing back their heads as out swept the swinging jazz number to which she and all her Windmill girl pals liked to dance.
‘Happy we’ll be beyond the sea,’ she laughed, with a little tinkle in her voice – those, of course, were the words of the song. This time – with any thoughts of the laughter of Myrtle Macklin my summer girl now long since dissipated, to such an extent that their very existence might have been questionable – she wasn’t wearing slacks but lots of beads, a white skirt and with her hair styled in a blonde French pleat. Snapping her fingers as I looked on, listening to them have a great laugh about a wooden doll called Lord Charles – an aristocratic dummy, a ventriloquist act, who apparently had often played the Windmill Theatre, and even sometimes used to sell confections from a tray, hot meat pies that were known to be delicious, as he swept along the aisles in his candy-striped blazer, bleating, ‘Any requests? I say, ladies, any requests? Lots of nice little juicies here!’ And who, although he was wooden – oh how my auntie laughed! – would often help himself to a drinkie or two, the monocled cad, and was not at all shy when it came to the ladies. ‘He used to leer from the wings, you know! Sloshed, I swear, as any sailor on shore leave! But at other times he could really be a dear – tee hee! O that bounder, that wicked old Lord Charles! The way he smiled with those clamped wooden teeth! Honestly!’
*
The house was deserted the next night I came home. Or so I thought. At least until I heard it – soft but unmistaken, her voice coming again. The only light in the quiet kitchen was that visible on the old valve radio, slowly pulsing – the tiniest little green bead on the dial.
I heard her joke – would I, she wanted to know, perhaps like a biscuit? ‘We used to always have one on our lunch break at the Windmill. A fig roll, I mean.’
She was holding a packet in her hands. She found a plate – even in the darkness it seemed to require little effort. She closed the cupboard and shuffled some biscuits onto the plate. ‘Did you ever happen to hear of Jim Figgerty?’ she asked me.
He was a fictional character they used to advertise Jacob’s biscuits. On the TV it said he knew the secret of how they got the figs inside the hard brown flavoured envelopes.
I nodded and said that yes I had indeed heard of him.
‘We don’t have him in the UK, though, of course,’ she went on. ‘No one over there would even know who he was. They wouldn’t, I’m afraid, have the faintest idea. It was your mother was telling me about him. She likes to tell me everything that goes on while I’m away. Ha ha! After all, it is such an exciting country, isn’t it? So much to do!’ Her lips grew thin as a strand of white sewing thread whenever she said that, and I could have sworn that her eyes . . . that they had almost become hollowed out. A development which had unnerved me by virtue of its sheer abruptness.
‘Isn’t that right?’ she said.
I didn’t know. I didn’t want to talk about it.
‘The mysterious secret of Jacob’s fig rolls,’ she whispered, nibbling the small rectangle all along the edges.
The twinging green bead had faded now, and we found ourselves immersed once more into darkness. Then suddenly the door crashed open as the kitchen literally exploded into light. ‘I was at Benediction,’ I heard my mother say.
Being a Protestant, my aunt was under no obligation to go.
*
The light was slanting in the window of the terrace as her Kathy Kirby sandal with the raised heel hung suspended once more from her alert wriggling toes. The shade of her nails was as startling as when I’d first seen them. ‘Cutex coral pink,’ she whispered again huskily, ‘soft enough to be innocent, sweet enough to inspire.’
Then sh
e coughed and looked away. Before sighing and turning to smile at me, ever so tenderly, wearing an expression that seemed almost forlorn.
‘Do you miss her?’ she inquired softly. ‘That beautiful summer girl you once had, I mean?’
‘No,’ I explained, as further tragedies unfolded on Raidió Éireann. A wall had fallen on six laughing schoolchildren who were there to welcome a local celebrity. Then there was the weather and sports reports, with ‘the focus this evening’ on Intermediate girls’ hockey. After that it was the sponsored programmes, starting off with Hospitals Requests.
Maureen was in confinement in St Mary’s Ward in St Ita’s in Athlone intoned the intimate, neighbourly voice of the presenter. She’d been taken bad while out for a walk. After tests they had discovered a shocking variety of ailments. Hope you get well soon, Maureen, I heard the announcer reading from a sympathy card. Bunny smiled, shivering a little as she folded her arms. ‘Imagine if you were in hospital,’ she said, ‘and I was the nurse. It wouldn’t be hard – I mean I have been an actress. Which means that I can pretend to be . . . well, anything really.’
It was the first I’d ever heard of the film Naked as Nature Intended, in which she’d apparently starred alongside a number of other Windmill girls. She began telling me the story of it just as the presenter of Hospitals Requests introduced another tune: the Pat Boone hit ‘Love Letters in the Sand’.
Most of the picture, she went on to explain, had been shot in a car park off the Charing Cross Road. With occasional forays to the south coast, down to the seaside town of Margate. ‘Ironically!’ she pealed, ‘the place where I live now! Doesn’t that just take the biscuit? Or, should I say, the fig roll, ha ha!’
There could be no other word but ‘mesmerising’ as she continued to describe her participation in the feature which entailed playing the role of a shy office girl by the name of Miss Lattimer. Whose boss announced one Friday afternoon that he happened to be going away for the weekend and did she perhaps think that she might like to come? It was only on the train that she learnt that he was, in fact, travelling to a nudist camp.