The Collected Stories Read online

  ‘I’d give anything to get out of this dump,’ he changed.

  ‘It’s quiet and beautiful.’ The same hollowness came, I was escaping, soothing the conscience as the music did the office.

  ‘Quiet as a graveyard,’ he took up. ‘And stare at beauty every day and it’ll turn sicker than stray vomit. The barracks shut now, a squad car in its place. Sometimes children come to the door with raffle tickets, that’s all. But there’s plenty of funerals, so busy Mrs McGreevy’s coffin last month came out roped on the roof of the bread van, and the way they talked about her was certain proof if proof was needed that nobody seriously believes in an after-life. They were sure they’d never hear the edge of her tongue again either in hell or heaven or the duck-arsed in-between. I’d give anything to get out,’ he said with passion.

  There was silence but it was easier after he’d spoken. Then he asked, ‘Are you down for long?’

  ‘I’ll stay till tomorrow if it’s all right.’

  ‘That’s about as long as you can stand us I suppose.’

  ‘It’s not that. I have to be at work.’

  I helped him gather the tools.

  ‘I think Rose is giving you your old room. I want to get the last things done before night.’

  ‘I’ve left your case in your old room, the bed is aired,’ she said when I came in.

  ‘There’s no trouble any more but I have to go tomorrow, it’s to be back at the office,’ I explained.

  ‘The next time you must come for longer.’ It was easy in the lies that give us room.

  ‘I’ll do that and thank you.’

  Quietly the dark came, the last tasks hurried, a shift of hens on the roost of the hen-house before the bolting of the door. Inside, the lamp was lit and he said, ‘That’s another day put down,’ as he took off his boots and socks, reek of feet and sweat as he draped socks over the boots on the floor.

  ‘Rose, the corns were tormenting me no end today. Any chance you’d give them a scrape with the razor?’

  ‘You better soak them first,’ she answered.

  She placed a basin of steaming water by his chair on the floor, the water yellowing when she added Dettol. She moved the lamp closer.

  He sat there, her huge old child, soaking his feet in water, protesting like a child. ‘It’s scalding, Rose,’ and she laughed back, ‘Go on, don’t be afraid.’ And when she knelt on the floor, her grey hair falling low, and dried the feet that dripped above the lighted water, I was able to go out without being noticed as she opened the bright razor.

  Cattle and a brown horse and sheep grazed on the side of the hill across the track. The sun came and went behind white cloud, and as it did the gravel shone white or dulled on the platform.

  ‘The train won’t go without you unless I tell it,’ the one official said to an anxious passenger pressing him to open the ticket office and he went on stacking boxes on the gravel where the goods van would come in. When he did open the office and sold tickets there was still time left and the scrape of feet changing position on the gravel grew more frequent.

  I had no hangover and no relax-sirs desire and as much reason to go back as come. I’d have hangover and desire in the morning and as much reason then as now. I was meeting Lightfoot in the bar beside the station and would answer ‘How did it go?’ with how it went, repetition of a life in the shape of a story that had as much reason to go on as stop.

  I walked through the open carriages. There was nobody I knew. Through the windows the fields of stone walls, blue roofs of Carrick, Shannon river. Sing for them once First Communion Day O River Shannon flowing and a four-leaved shamrock growing, silver medal on the blue suit and white ankle socks in new shoes. The farther flows the river the muddier the water: the light was brighter on its upper reaches. Rustle of the boat through the bulrushes as we went to Moran’s well for spring water in dry summers, cool of watercress and bitterness of the wild cherries shaken out of the whitethorn hedge, black bullrush seed floating in the gallons on the floorboards, all the vivid sections of the wheel we watched so slowly turn, impatient for the rich whole that never came but that all the preparations promised.

  Why We’re Here

  Gillespie tested the secondhand McCullagh chainsaw as soon as he came from the auction, sawing some blown-down branches stacked against the wall of the house into lengths for firewood. The saw ran perfectly.

  ‘Now to get rid of the evidence. For it’ll not be long till he’s up with his nose smelling unless I’m far out,’ he said to the sheepdog when he’d finished. He carried the saw and sawn lengths into the shed, scattering the white sawdust wide into the grass with his boot. Then he farted. ‘A great release that into the evening, thank God,’ he sighed, as he waited for the aroma of the decomposing porter he’d drunk in Henry’s after the auction to lift to his nostrils, his eyes going over the ground beside the stack of blown-down branches again. ‘Not much evidence left that I can see. Nothing to do now but wait for him to arrive up.’

  He was waiting at the gate when Boles came on the road, the slow tapping of the cattle cane keeping time to the drag of the old feet in slippers, sharply calling ‘Heel’ to his dog as a car approached from Carrick, shine of ointment over the eczema on his face as he drew close.

  ‘Taking a bit of a constitutional, Mr Boles?’

  ‘The usual forty steps before the night,’ Boles laughed.

  The two dogs had started to circle, nosing each other, disturbing the brown droppings of the yew. They stood in its shade, where it leaned above the gateway.

  ‘Lepping out of your skin you are, Mr Boles. No holding the young ones in these days.’

  ‘Can’t put the clock back. The old works winding down, you know.’

  ‘No future in that way of thinking. You’re good for ten Beechers yet, if you ask me.’

  They watched the dogs trying to mount each other, circling on the dead droppings of the yew, their flutes erect, the pink flesh unsheathed, and far off a donkey braying filled the evening with a huge contentment.

  ‘At much, this weather?’ Boles asked.

  ‘The usual foolin’ around. Went to the auction.’

  ‘See anything there?’

  ‘No, the usual junk, the Ferguson went for a hundred. Not fit to pull you out of bed.’

  ‘Secondhand stuff is not the thing, a risk, no guarantee,’ Boles said, and then changed to ask: ‘Did I hear an engine running up this way an hour ago?’

  ‘None that I know of.’

  ‘I’d swear I heard an engine between the orchard and the house an hour ago.’

  ‘Country’s full of engines these days, Mr Boles. Can’t believe your ears where they come from.’

  ‘Strange.’ Boles was dissatisfied, but he changed again to ask: ‘Any word of Sinclair this weather?’

  ‘The crowd up for Croke Park saw him outside Amiens Street with an empty shopping bag. They said he looked shook. Booked close enough to the jump.’

  ‘Never looked very healthy.’

  ‘The ignorance and boredom of the people of this part of the country is appalling, simply appalling,’ Boles mimicked an English accent quietly. ‘That’s the speech he’ll make to Peter at the gate. A strange person.’

  ‘Touched, that’s all. I got to know his form well, the summer I bought this place from him and was waiting for him to shunt off. Especially when I was close to the house, mowing with the scythe there between the apple trees, he used to come out and spout to the end of the world. The ignorance and the boredom but nothing about his own, bad, manners and the rain, speaking as one intelligent man if you don’t mind to another, O Saecula Saeculorum world without end Amen the Lord deliver us. He even tried to show me how to put an edge on the scythe.’

  ‘I knew him fifteen years here.’

  ‘Fifteen too long, I’d say.’

  ‘No, he was a strange person. He suffered from the melancholy.’

  ‘But he had a pension, hadn’t he, from that cable in Valencia?’

  ‘No
, it wasn’t money troubled him.’

  ‘No reason why we exist, Mr Boles. Why we were born. What do we know? Nothing, Mr Boles. Simply nothing. Scratching our arses, refining our ignorance. Try to see some make or shape on the nothing we know,’ Boles mimicked again.

  ‘That was his style, no mistaking, nature of the beast. The way he used to treat that wife of his was nobody’s business.’

  ‘In Valencia he met her, a girl in the post office. He used to cut firewood in the plantation, I remember, and he’d blow a whistle he had when he’d enough cut. She’d come running with a rope the minute she’d heard the whistle. It was a fair sight to see her come staggering up the meadow with a backload of timber, and him strolling behind, golfin’ at the daisies with the saw, shouting fore.’

  ‘Poor soft bitch. I knew a few’d give him fore, and the size of him in those plus fours. He should have stayed where he belonged.’

  ‘I am reduced to the final ambition of wanting to go back to look on the green of the billiard table in the Prince of Wales on Edward Road. They may have taken it away though. Sign of a misspent youth, proficiency at billiards,’ Boles mimicked again.

  ‘On the same tack to me in the orchard. A strange coot. Luther’s idea about women. The bed and the sink. As good to engage a pig in serious conversation as a woman. All candles were made to burn before the high altar of their cunts. It was no rush of faith, let me tell you good sir, that led to my conversion. I was dragged into your Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church by my male member. I’ll not forget in a hurry how he came out with that spiff.’

  ‘He had a curious blend of language sometimes,’ Boles said.

  ‘And he ends up after all his guff with an empty shopping bag outside Amiens Street Station.’

  ‘A lesson, but I liked him. Great smell of apples in the evening.’

  ‘Rotting on the ground. Wouldn’t pay you to gather. Except a few hundredweight for Breffni Blossom. They don’t mind the bruises.’

  ‘Better than wastin’ in the grass.’

  The passing cars had their headlamps on now. A mile away, over fields of stone walks, the lighted windows of the nine-twenty diesel rattled past.

  ‘Train to Sligo.’

  ‘Empty, I suppose.’

  ‘I suppose … Time to be moving in the general direction of the bed.’

  ‘No hurry, long enough lying down in the finish. How is the eczema?’

  ‘Stays quiet long as I don’t go near timber. I’ve got this stuff on to keep the midges off.’ He brushed his finger lightly along his cheek.

  ‘If everything was right we’d appreciate nothing.’

  ‘Still, I’d have sworn I heard a chainsaw up this way today,’ Boles said as he turned to the road.

  ‘Must have been from elsewhere,’ Gillespie contradicted. ‘What the wind can do with sounds is no joke.’

  ‘There was hardly a puff of wind today.’

  ‘Surprising what even a little can do, as the woman said when she pissed in the sea.’ Gillespie laughed aggressively.

  ‘I was certain, but time to go,’ Boles said and called his dog.

  ‘No use detaining you if you have, though it’s young, the night, yet.’

  ‘Goodnight, then.’

  ‘ ’Night, Mr Boles.’

  He watched him go, the light tapping of the cattle cane in time to the drag of feet in slippers, calling ‘Heel’ to the dog as headlamps flooded the road from Boyle.

  ‘That’s what’ll give him something to think about,’ Gillespie muttered as he called his own dog back and turned towards the house.

  Coming into his Kingdom

  ‘They’re in love, they’re in love, they’re in love! Nora’s in love with Stevie,’ the crowd of children cried at the fallen girl and boy.

  They’d been struggling to sit in the Chair, a little hollow in the roadside ditch, on their way home from school. In one of the struggles Stevie had managed to get hold of the Chair, but before he could grip the grass or dig his heels into the clay Nora had jerked him out with all her weight. And when he came so easily with her she overbalanced on to the road, her grip tightening desperately on his arm to drag him down on top of her. His forehead struck heavily against her jaw, and they lay stunned together on the road for a moment, his mouth on the flesh of her side-face between the ear and outer roots of the hair, his body solidly on her, his legs thrown between her opened thighs.

  There was an anxious silence, fear of the injury that’d ruin their game, till someone shouted, ‘They’re in love.’ The cry went through the crowd, raggedly taken up at first, though soon it grew to almost a chant.

  ‘They’re in love! They’re in love! They’re in love! Nora’s in love with Stevie!’

  Nora, a blonde girl of thirteen, quickly woke to what the shouting was about and pushed the stunned boy loose with her palms. His knee caught her dress as he rolled and bared the white young flesh of her thighs from the brown as far as the knees to the legs of a faded blue knickers.

  ‘Nora has blue drawers,’ the jeer changed as the girl rose to her feet, instinctively smoothing her dress down, taut with shame and anger that broke in violent sobbing. She lifted her school-bag, burst through the circle of children, and began to run. They chased her down the earthen road between the sloe bushes to call, ‘Nora’s mad in love! Nora has blue drawers! Nora’s goin’ to marry Stevie’; but when someone shouted, ‘Nora’s goin’ to have a baby,’ it stopped as suddenly as it began. They’d gone too far. They slowed. Nora went out of sight at the next turn of the road. The stragglers and Stevie caught up with the main group. They looked about the fields and road, afraid they’d been observed. The whole thing could easily lead to trouble. They began to go quickly home, little conversation now, the group thinning as children said goodbye to each other till the next day and turned up the lanes to their farmhouses. After a mile only Stevie and a girl as old as Nora were left. They had to walk another whole mile of road to the village, climb Cox’s Hill on the way.

  Their canvas shoes dragged rustling through the dead leaves as they walked in the frozen loneliness of the country in October. Men dug potatoes alone in fields of long ridges where only the weeds were green, the sea of stalks on which blossoms swayed in June dead and grey as matchwood. Neither of them spoke as they climbed Cox’s Hill, their eyes bent on the drag-drag of their canvas shoes uphill through the leaves, the noise of someone shouting angrily at a horse beginning to drift from the woods across the river. There was only this silence between them, and he had longed for the moment they’d be alone as now, hurt and shamed by the shouting that he couldn’t understand. He was waiting for her to speak but the only sound that came was the rustling of her canvas shoes uphill through the leaves.

  ‘They cheered and shouted,’ he had to fumble at last. ‘They cheered and shouted when I fell on Nora.’

  The girl’s eyes stayed on the leaves that she was now kicking uphill as she walked.

  ‘They cheered and shouted,’ he said definitely. ‘Teresa, they cheered and shouted when I fell on Nora.’ This time she did look up and stared so coldly at him that he flinched.

  ‘They cheered and shouted,’ she admitted.

  ‘But why? I only fell on Nora.’

  ‘What does it matter why? They cheered and shouted, that’s all.’

  ‘But there must have been some reason?’

  ‘You fell on Nora.’

  ‘But why did they shout?’

  ‘That’s the why,’ she laughed.

  ‘But that’s the why is no answer. Was there some reason for it?’

  ‘There’s a raisin for everything. And a currant for the cake.’

  ‘But why, Teresa? Why did they shout?’

  ‘Why should I tell you?’

  ‘No why. Just tell me.’

  ‘You’re too young. You’ll have to wait to find out. Why should I be the one to tell you? Answer me that and I’ll tell you.’

  ‘You’re not that much older than me,’ he argued painfully and
doggedly and without much hope.

  They’d reached the top of the hill. Before them, against the lake with its swaying barrels and Oakport Wood turning to rust beyond great beech trees, was the village where they lived; the scattered shops and houses and humble sycamores of the roads dwarfed by the church in its graveyard of old yew and cypress trees. Past it the Shannon flowed, under the stone bridge at its end, flinting river of metal moving endlessly out into the wastes of pale sedge that waited for its flood waters to rise.

  ‘I don’t see what harm it would do you to tell,’ he pleaded.

  ‘You’ll have to grow up.’ She laughed the animal laugh of her superiority. Soon she’d be a woman in her prime. Already her body was changing. She laughed again without turning her head and started to run downhill. He moved to keep up with her, but he was too sick at heart, he let her run. He felt the same futility and confusion of everything as when his mother had gone away for ever, the terror and pain of his whole life draining away. Then something frighteningly alluring in the running girl’s stride stirred him to follow her, but he was again bewildered by the memory of the softness of Nora’s body, the shame of the shouting ringing in his ears. ‘They’re in love! They’re in love! They’re in love!’ and he began to weep with anguish.

  All through the next morning the schoolroom was tense. They waited for what Master Kelly would say after prayers. It was with such relief they heard him say what he said every morning, ‘Open your home exercises and come up in your proper order, the fourth class first, and leave them on the table.’ They watched the road and concrete steps down to the school for someone to come and complain, but no one came. Every move of Nora’s was watched, every move of Stevie’s, every hand that went up to ask to go to the lavatory. The growing tension followed them to the playground, the boys in one group, the girls apart in another, Nora strung tight and eating her lunch alone by the wall. Then suddenly and unnaturally, as if she was the mouthpiece of a decision, one of the older girls called a game and declared, ‘Nora must be Queen. Come on, Nora, we’re making you the Queen,’ and they gathered round her, and soon the air was filled with the excited noises of their play. The boys started to kick an old rag ball made from corks and the wool of ripped socks about at the other end of the yard. Stevie watched the tenseness go in the play, connected in some way to the fit of shrieking at the Chair the evening before. ‘They’re in love! They’re in love! They’re in love!’ still haunting him with his own helplessness, but he’d try once more to get behind the mystery. He would offer Teresa a penny toffee bar on their way home.