‘I understand you, Mr Lynch.’
Quigley had said that one night he looked through a window and saw the Protestant clergyman, the Reverend Johnson, lying on the floor with his wife. There was another time, he said, that he observed Hickey the chemist being coaxed from an armchair by certain activities on the part of Mrs Hickey. Quigley had climbed up on the roof of a shed and had seen Mrs Sweeney being helped out of her stockings by Sweeney, the builder and decorator. Quigley’s voice might continue for an hour and a half, for there was hardly a man and his wife in the town whom he didn’t claim to have observed in intimate circumstances. John Joe did not ever ask how, when there was no convenient shed to climb on to, the dwarf managed to make his way to so many exposed upstairs windows. Such a question would have been wholly irrelevant.
At Mass, when John Joe saw the calves of women’s legs stuck out from the kneeling position, he experienced an excitement that later bred new fantasies within him. ‘That Mrs Moore,’ he would say to the old dwarf, and the dwarf would reply that one night in February he had observed Mrs Moore preparing herself for the return of her husband from a County Council meeting in Cork. From the powdered body of Mrs Moore, as described by Quigley, John Joe would move to an image that included himself. He saw himself pushing open the hall door of the Moores’ house, having been sent to the house with a message from his mother, and hearing Mrs Moore’s voice calling out, asking him to come upstairs. He stood on a landing and Mrs Moore came to him with a red coat wrapped round her to cover herself up. He could smell the powder on her body; the coat kept slipping from her shoulders. ‘I have some magazines for your mother,’ she said. ‘They’re inside the bedroom.’ He went and sat on the bed while she collected a pile of magazines. She sat beside him then, drawing his attention to a story here and there that might be of particular interest to his mother. Her knee was pressed against his, and in a moment she put her arm round his shoulders and said he was a good-looking lad. The red coat fell back on to the bed when Mrs Moore took one of John Joe’s large hands and placed it on her stomach. She then suggested, the evening being hot, that he should take off his jersey and his shirt.
Mrs Keogh, the owner of the public house, had featured also in John Joe’s imagination and in the conversation of the old dwarf. Quigley had seen her, he said, a week before her husband died, hitting her husband with a length of wire because he would not oblige her with his attentions. ‘Come down to the cellar,’ said Mrs Keogh while Brother Leahy scribbled on the blackboard. ‘Come down to the cellar, John Joe, and help me with a barrel.’ He descended the cellar steps in front of her and when he looked back he saw her legs under her dark mourning skirt. ‘I’m lost these days,’ she said, ‘since Mr Keogh went on.’ They moved the barrel together and then Mrs Keogh said it was hot work and it would be better if they took off their jerseys. ‘Haven’t you the lovely arms!’ she said as they rolled the barrel from one corner of the cellar to another. ‘Will we lie down here for a rest?’
‘We’ll chance another bottle,’ suggested Mr Lynch. ‘Is it going down you all right?’
‘My mother’ll be waiting for the rashers, Mr Lynch.’
‘No rasher can be cut, boy, till Mrs Keogh returns. You could slice your hand off on an old machine like that.’
‘We’ll have one more so.’
At the Christian Brothers’, jokes were passed about that concerned grisly developments in the beds of freshly wedded couples, or centred around heroes who carried by chance strings of sausages in their pockets and committed unfortunate errors when it came to cutting one off for the pan. Such yarns, succeeding generally, failed with John Joe, for they seemed to him to be lacking in quality.
‘How’s your mammy?’ Mr Lynch asked, watching John Joe pouring the stout.
‘Ah, she’s all right. I’m only worried she’s waiting on the rashers –’
‘There’s honour due to a mother.’
John Joe nodded. He held the glass at an angle to receive the dark, foaming liquid, as Mr Lynch had shown him. Mr Lynch’s mother, now seventy-nine, was still alive. They lived together in a house which Mr Lynch left every morning in order to work in the office of a meal business and which he left every evening in order to drink bottles of stout in Keogh’s. The bachelor state of Mr Lynch was one which John Joe wondered if he himself would one day share. Certainly, he saw little attraction in the notion of marriage, apart from the immediate physical advantage. Yet Mr Lynch’s life did not seem enviable either. Often on Sunday afternoons he observed the meal clerk walking slowly with his mother on his arm, seeming as lost in gloom as the married men who walked beside women pushing prams. Quigley, a bachelor also, was a happier man than Mr Lynch. He lived in what amounted to a shed at the bottom of his niece’s garden. Food was carried to him, but there were few, with the exception of John Joe, who lingered in his company. On Sundays, a day which John Joe, like Mr Lynch, spent with his mother, Quigley walked alone.
‘When’ll you be leaving the Brothers?’ Mr Lynch asked.
‘In June.’
‘And you’ll be looking out for employment, John Joe?’
‘I was thinking I’d go into the sawmills.’
Mr Lynch nodded approvingly. ‘There’s a good future in the sawmills,’ he said. ‘Is the job fixed up?’
‘Not yet, Mr Lynch. They might give me a trial.’
Mr Lynch nodded again, and for a moment the two sat in silence. John Joe could see from the thoughtful way Mr Lynch was regarding his stout that there was something on his mind. Hoping to hear more about the Piccadilly tarts, John Joe patiently waited.
‘If your daddy was alive,’ said Mr Lynch eventually, ‘he might mention this to you, boy.’
He drank more stout and wiped the foam from his lips with the back of his hand. ‘I often see you out with Quigley. Is it a good thing to be spending your hours with a performer like that? Quigley’s away in the head.’
‘You’d be sorry for the poor creature, Mr Lynch.’
Mr Lynch said there was no need to feel sorry for Quigley, since that was the way Quigley was made. He lit another cigarette. He said:
‘Maybe they would say to themselves up at the sawmills that you were the same way as Quigley. If he keeps company with Quigley, they might say, aren’t they two of a kind?’
‘Ah, I don’t think they’d bother themselves, Mr Lynch. Sure, if you do the work well what would they have to complain of?’
‘Has the manager up there seen you out with Quigley and the jam jars?’
‘I don’t know, Mr Lynch.’
‘Everything I’m saying to you is for your own good in the future. Do you understand that? If I were in your shoes I’d let Quigley look after himself.’
For years his mother had been saying the same to him. Brother Leahy had drawn him aside one day and had pointed out that an elderly dwarf wasn’t a suitable companion for a young lad, especially since the dwarf was not sane. ‘I see you took no notice of me,’ Brother Leahy said six months later. ‘Tell me this, young fellow-me-lad, what kind of a conversation do you have with old Quigley?’ They talked, John Joe said, about trees and the flowers in the hedgerows. He liked to listen to Quigley, he said, because Quigley had acquired a knowledge of such matters. ‘Don’t tell me lies,’ snapped Brother Leahy, and did not say anything else.
Mrs Keogh returned from Confession. She came breathlessly into the bar, with pink cheeks, her ungloved hands the colour of meat. She was a woman of advanced middle age, a rotund woman who approached the proportions that John Joe most admired. She wore spectacles and had grey hair that was now a bit windswept. Her hat had blown off on the street, she said: she’d nearly gone mad trying to catch it. ‘Glory be to God,’ she cried when she saw John Joe. ‘What’s that fellow doing with a bottle of stout?’
‘We had a man-to-man talk,’ explained Mr Lynch. ‘I started him off on the pleasures of the bottle.’
‘Are you mad?’ shouted Mrs Keogh with a loud laugh. ‘He’s under age.’
&nb
sp; ‘I came for rashers,’ said John Joe. ‘A pound of green rashers, Mrs Keogh. The middle cut.’
‘You’re a shocking man,’ said Mrs Keogh to Mr Lynch. She threw off her coat and hat. ‘Will you pour me a bottle,’ she asked, ‘while I attend to this lad? Finish up that now, Mr Dempsey.’
She laughed again. She went away and they heard from the grocery the sound of the bacon machine.
John Joe finished his stout and stood up.
‘Good-night, Mr Lynch.’
‘Remember about Quigley like a good fellow. When the day will come that you’ll want to find a girl to marry, she might be saying you were the same type as Quigley. D’you understand me, John Joe?’
‘I do, Mr Lynch.’
He passed through the door in the partition and watched Mrs Keogh slicing the bacon. He imagined her, as Quigley had said he’d seen her, belabouring her late husband with a length of wire. He imagined her as he had seen her himself, taking off her jersey because it was hot in the cellar, and then unzipping her green tweed skirt.
‘I’ve sliced it thin,’ she said. ‘It tastes better thin, I think.’
‘It does surely, Mrs Keogh.’
‘Are you better after your stout? Don’t go telling your mammy now.’ Mrs Keogh laughed again, revealing long, crowded teeth. She weighed the bacon and wrapped it, munching a small piece of lean. ‘If there’s parsley in your mammy’s garden,’ she advised, ‘chew a bit to get the smell of the stout away, in case she’d be cross with Mr Lynch. Or a teaspoon of tea-leaves.’
‘There’s no parsley, Mrs Keogh.’
‘Wait till I get you the tea then.’
She opened a packet of tea and poured some on to the palm of his hand. She told him to chew it slowly and thoroughly and to let the leaves get into all the crevices of his mouth. She fastened the packet again, saying that no one would miss the little she’d taken from it. ‘Four and two for the rashers,’ she said.
He paid the money, with his mouth full of dry tea-leaves. He imagined Mrs Keogh leaning on her elbows on the counter and asking him if he had a kiss for her at all, calling him Mr Dempsey. He imagined her face stuck out towards his and her mouth open, displaying the big teeth, and her tongue damping her lips as the tongues of the Piccadilly tarts did, according to Mr Lynch. With the dryness in his own mouth and a gathering uneasiness in his stomach, his lips would go out to hers and he would taste her saliva.
‘Good-night so, Mrs Keogh.’
‘Good-night, Mr Dempsey. Tell your mother I was asking for her.’
He left the public house. The wind which had dislodged Mrs Keogh’s hat felt fresh and cold on his face. The pink wash on a house across the street seemed pinker than it had seemed before, the ground moved beneath his feet, the street lighting seemed brighter. Youths and girls stood outside the illuminated windows of the small sweet-shops, waiting for the Coliseum to open. Four farmers left Regan’s public house and mounted four bicycles and rode away, talking loudly. Your Murphy Dealer announced a large coloured sign in the window of a radio shop. Two boys he had known at school came out of a shop eating biscuits from a paper bag. ‘How’re you, John Joe?’ one of them said. ‘How’s Quigley these days?’ They had left the school now: one of them worked in Kilmartin’s the hardware’s, the other in the Courthouse. They were wearing blue serge suits; their hair had been combed with care, and greased to remain tidy. They would go to the Coliseum, John Joe guessed, and sit behind two girls, giggling and whispering during the programme. Afterwards they would follow the girls for a little while, pretending to have no interest in them; they would buy chips in the chip-shop before they went home.
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, announced the sign outside the Coliseum: His Girl Friday. As John Joe read them, the heavy black letters shifted, moving about on green paper that flapped in the wind, fixed with drawing-pins to an unpainted board. Mr Dunne, the owner of the grey Coliseum, arrived on his bicycle and unlocked his property. Sunday Only: Spencer Tracy in Boom Town. In spite of the sickness in his stomach and the unpleasant taste of tea-leaves in his mouth, John Joe felt happy and was aware of an inclination to loiter for a long time outside the cinema instead of returning to his mother.
‘It’s great tonight, John Joe,’ Mr Dunne said. ‘Are you coming in?’
John Joe shook his head. ‘I have to bring rashers home to my mother,’ he said. He saw Mrs Dunne approaching with a torch, for the small cinema was a family business. Every night and twice on Sundays, Mr Dunne sold the tickets while his wife showed the customers to their seats. ‘I looked in a window one time,’ Quigley had said, ‘and she was trying to put on her underclothes. Dunne was standing in his socks.’
A man and a girl came out of a sweet-shop next to the cinema, the girl with a box of Urney chocolates in her hand. She was thanking the man for them, saying they were lovely. ‘It’s a great show tonight, John Joe,’ Mrs Dunne said, repeating the statement of her husband, repeating what she and he said every day of their lives. John Joe wagged his head at her. It looked a great show definitely, he said. He imagined her putting on her underclothes. He imagined her one night, unable because of a cold to show the customers to their seats, remaining at home in bed while her husband managed as best he could. ‘I made a bit of bread for Mrs Dunne,’ his mother said. ‘Will you carry it down to her, John Joe?’ He rang the bell and waited until she came to the door with a coat over her night-dress. He handed her the bread wrapped in creased brown paper and she asked him to step into the hall out of the wind. ‘Will you take a bottle, John Joe?’ Mrs Dunne said. He followed her into the kitchen, where she poured them each a glass of stout. ‘Isn’t it shocking hot in here?’ she said. She took off her coat and sat at the kitchen table in her night-dress. ‘You’re a fine young fellow,’ she said, touching his hand with her fingers.
John Joe walked on, past Blackburn’s the draper’s and Kelly’s Atlantic Hotel. A number of men were idling outside the entrance to the bar, smoking cigarettes, one of them leaning on a bicycle. ‘There’s a dance in Clonakilty,’ a tall man said. ‘Will we drive over to that?’ The others took no notice of this suggestion. They were talking about the price of turkeys.
‘How’re you, John Joe?’ shouted a red-haired youth who worked in the sawmills. ‘Quigley was looking for you.’
‘I was up in Keogh’s for my mother.’
‘You’re a decent man,’ said the youth from the sawmills, going into the bar of Kelly’s Hotel.
At the far end of North Street, near the small house where he lived with his mother, he saw Quigley waiting for him. Once he had gone to the Coliseum with Quigley, telling his mother he was going with Kinsella, the boy who occupied the desk next to his at the Christian Brothers’. The occasion, the first and only time that Quigley had visited the Coliseum, had not been a success. Quigley hadn’t understood what was happening and had become frightened. He’d begun to mutter and kick the seats in front of him. ‘Take him off out of here,’ Mr Dunne had whispered, flashing his wife’s torch. ‘He’ll bring the house down.’ They had left the cinema after only a few minutes and had gone instead to the chip-shop.
‘I looked in a window last night,’ said Quigley now, hurrying to his friend’s side, ‘and, God, I saw a great thing.’
‘I was drinking stout with Mr Lynch in Keogh’s,’ said John Joe. He might tell Quigley about the glory girls that Mr Lynch had advised him against, and about Baker who had struck a bargain with one of them, but it wouldn’t be any use because Quigley never listened. No one held a conversation with Quigley: Quigley just talked.
‘It was one o’clock in the morning,’ said Quigley. His voice continued while John Joe opened the door of his mother’s house and closed it behind him. Quigley would wait for him in the street and later on they’d perhaps go down to the chip-shop together.
‘John Joe, where’ve you been?’ demanded his mother, coming into the narrow hall from the kitchen. Her face was red from sitting too close to the range, her eyes had anger in them. ‘What kept you, J
ohn Joe?’
‘Mrs Keogh was at Confession.’
‘What’s that on your teeth?’
‘What?’
‘You’ve got dirt on your teeth.’
‘I’ll brush them then.’
He handed her the rashers. They went together to the kitchen, which was a small, low room with a flagged floor and a dresser that reached to the ceiling. On this, among plates and dishes, was the framed photograph of John Joe’s father.
‘Were you out with Quigley?’ she asked, not believing that Mrs Keogh had kept him waiting for more than an hour.
He shook his head, brushing his teeth at the sink. His back was to her, and he imagined her distrustfully regarding him, her dark eyes gleaming with a kind of jealousy, her small wiry body poised as if to spring on any lie he should utter. Often he felt when he spoke to her that for her the words came physically from his lips, that they were things she could examine after he’d ejected them, in order to assess their truth.
‘I talked to Mr Lynch,’ he said. ‘He was looking after the shop.’
‘Is his mother well?’
‘He didn’t say.’
‘He’s very good to her.’
She unwrapped the bacon and dropped four rashers on to a pan that was warming on the range. John Joe sat down at the kitchen table. The feeling of euphoria that had possessed him outside the Coliseum was with him no longer; the floor was steady beneath his chair.
‘They’re good rashers,’ his mother said.
‘Mrs Keogh cut them thin.’
‘They’re best thin. They have a nicer taste.’
‘Mrs Keogh said that.’
‘What did Mr Lynch say to you? Didn’t he mention the old mother?’
‘He was talking about the war he was in.’
‘It nearly broke her heart when he went to join it.’
‘It was funny all right.’
‘We were a neutral country.’
Mr Lynch would be still sitting in the bar of Keogh’s. Every night of his life he sat there with his hat on his head, drinking bottles of stout. Other men would come into the bar and he would discuss matters with them and with Mrs Keogh. He would be drunk at the end of the evening. John Joe wondered if he chewed tea so that the smell of the stout would not be detected by his mother when he returned to her. He would return and tell her some lies about where he had been. He had joined the British Army in order to get away from her for a time, only she’d reached out to him from a dream.