Collected Stories (51 page)

And calamity it was! Sonny arrived in the most appalling hullabaloo—even that much he couldn't do without a fuss—and from the first moment I disliked him. He was a difficult child—so far as I was concerned he was always difficult—and demanded far too much attention. Mother was simply silly about him, and couldn't see when he was only showing off. As company he was worse than useless. He slept all day, and I had to go round the house on tiptoe to avoid waking him. It wasn't any longer a question of not waking Father. The slogan now was “Don't-wake-Sonny!” I couldn't understand why the child wouldn't sleep at the proper time, so whenever Mother's back was turned I woke him. Sometimes to keep him awake I pinched him as well. Mother caught me at it one day and gave me a most unmerciful flaking.

One evening, when Father was coming in from work, I was playing trains in the front garden. I let on not to notice him; instead, I pretended to be talking to myself, and said in a loud voice: “If another bloody baby comes into this house, I'm going out.”

Father stopped dead and looked at me over his shoulder.

“What's that you said?” he asked sternly.

“I was only talking to myself,” I replied, trying to conceal my panic. “It's private.”

He turned and went in without a word. Mind you, I intended it as a solemn warning, but its effect was quite different. Father started being quite nice to me. I could understand that, of course. Mother was quite sickening about Sonny. Even at mealtimes she'd get up and gawk at him in the cradle with an idiotic smile, and tell Father to do the same. He was always polite about it, but he looked so puzzled you could see he didn't know what she was talking about. He complained of the way Sonny cried at night, but she only got cross and said that Sonny never cried except when there was something up with him—which was a flaming lie, because Sonny never had anything up with him, and only cried for attention. It was really painful to see how simpleminded she was. Father wasn't attractive, but he had a fine intelligence. He saw through Sonny, and now he knew that I saw through him as well.

One night I woke with a start. There was someone beside me in the bed. For one wild moment I felt sure it must be Mother, having come to her senses and left Father for good, but then I heard Sonny in convulsions in the next room, and Mother saying: “There! There! There!” and I knew it wasn't she. It was Father. He was lying beside me, wide awake, breathing hard and apparently as mad as hell.

After a while it came to me what he was mad about. It was his turn now. After turning me out of the big bed, he had been turned out himself. Mother had no consideration now for anyone but that poisonous pup, Sonny. I couldn't help feeling sorry for Father. I had been through it all myself, and even at that age I was magnanimous. I began to stroke him down and say: “There! There!” He wasn't exactly responsive.

“Aren't you asleep either?” he snarled.

“Ah, come on and put your arm around us, can't you?” I said, and he did, in a sort of way. Gingerly, I suppose, is how you'd describe it. He was very bony but better than nothing.

At Christmas he went out of his way to buy me a really nice model railway.

The Pretender

S
USIE
and I should have known well that Denis Corby's coming “to play with us” would mean nothing only trouble. We didn't want anyone new to play with; we had plenty, and they were all good class. But Mother was like that; giddy, open-handed and ready to listen to any tall tale. That wouldn't have been so bad if only she confined her charity to her own things, but she gave away ours as well. You couldn't turn your back in that house but she had something pinched on you, a gansey, an overcoat, or a pair of shoes, and as for the beggars that used to come to the door—! As Susie often said, we had no life.

But we were still mugs enough to swallow the yarn about the lovely lonesome little boy she'd found to play with us up on the hill. Cripes, you never in all your life got such a suck-in! Eleven o'clock one Saturday morning this fellow comes to the door, about the one age with myself only bigger, with a round red face and big green goggle-eyes. I saw at the first glance that he was no class. In fact I took him at first for a messenger boy.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Me mudder said I was to come and play with you,” he said with a scowl, and you could see he liked it about as much as I did.

“Is your name Corby?” I asked in astonishment.

“What's that?” he asked and then he said: “Yes.” I didn't honestly know whether he was deaf or an idiot or both.

“Mummy!” I shouted. “Look who's here”—wondering at the same time if she could have seen him before she asked him to the house.

But she'd seen him all right, because her face lit up and she told him to come in. He took off his cap and, after taking two steps and hearing the clatter he made in the hall with his hobnailed boots, he did the rest of it on tiptoe.

I could have cried. The fellow didn't know a single game, and when we went out playing with the Horgans and the Wrights I simply didn't know how to explain this apparition that hung on to us like some sort of poor relation.

When we sat down to dinner he put his elbows on the table and looked at us, ignoring his plate.

“Don't you like your dinner, Denis?” asked Mother—she never asked us if we liked our dinner.

“What's that?” he said, goggling at her. I was beginning to notice that he said “What's that?” only to give himself time to think up an answer. “'Tis all right.”

“Oh, you ought to eat up,” said Father. “A big hefty fellow like you!”

“What does your mummy usually give you?” asked Mother.

“Soup,” he said.

“Would you sooner I gave you a spoon so?”

“I would.”

“What do you like for your dinner and I'll get it for you?”

“Jelly.”

Now, if that had been me, not saying “please” or “thank you,” I'd soon have got the back of my father's hand, but it seemed as if he could say what he liked and only eat what suited him. He took only a few mouthfuls of potatoes and gravy.

After dinner we went up to our bedroom so that we could show him our toys. He seemed as frightened of them as he was of a knife and fork.

“Haven't you any toys of your own?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Where do you live?” asked Susie.

“The Buildings.”

“Is that a nice place?”

“'Tis all right.” Everything was “all right” with him.

Now, I knew the Buildings because I passed it every day on the way to school and I knew it was not all right. It was far from it. It was a low-class sort of place where the kids went barefoot and the women sat all day on the doorsteps, talking.

“Haven't you any brothers and sisters?” Susie went on.

“No. Only me mudder.… And me Auntie Nellie,” he added after a moment.

“Who's your Auntie Nellie?”

“My auntie. She lives down the country. She comes up of an odd time.”

“And where's your daddy?” asked Susie.

“What's that?” he said, and again I could have sworn he was thinking up an answer. There was a longer pause than usual. “I tink me daddy is dead,” he added.

“How do you mean you think he's dead?” asked Susie. “Don't you know?”

“Me mudder said he was dead,” he said doubtfully.

“Well, your mother ought to know,” said Susie. “But if your daddy is dead where do ye get the money?”

“From my Auntie Nellie.”

“It's because your daddy is dead that you have no toys,” Susie said in her usual God-Almighty way. “'Tis always better if your mummy dies first.”

“It is not better, Susie Murphy,” I said, horrified at the cold-blooded way that girl always talked about Mummy. “God will kill you stone dead for saying that. You're only saying it because you always suck up to Daddy.”

“I do not always suck up to Daddy, Michael Murphy,” she replied coldly. “And it's true. Everyone knows it. If Mummy died Daddy could still keep us, but if Daddy died, Mummy wouldn't have anything.”

But though I always stuck up for Mummy against Susie, I had to admit that her latest acquisition wasn't up to much.

“Ah, that woman would sicken you,” Susie said when we were in bed that night. “Bringing in old beggars and tramps and giving them their dinner in our kitchen, the way you couldn't have a soul in to play, and then giving away our best clothes. You couldn't have a blooming thing in this house.”

Every Saturday after that Denis Corby came and tiptoed in the hall in his hobnailed boots and spooned at his dinner. As he said, the only thing he liked was jelly. He stayed on till our bedtime and listened to Mother reading us a story. He liked stories but he couldn't read himself, even comics, so Mother started teaching him and said he was very smart. A fellow who couldn't read at the age of seven, I didn't see how he could be smart. She never said I was smart.

But in other ways he was smart enough, too smart for me. Apparently a low-class boy and a complete outsider could do things I wasn't let do, like playing round the parlor, and if you asked any questions or passed any remarks, you only got into trouble. The old game of wardrobe-raiding had begun again, and I was supposed to admire the way Denis looked in my winter coat, though in secret I shed bitter tears over that coat, which was the only thing I had that went with my yellow tie. And the longer it went on, the deeper the mystery became.

One day Susie was showing off in her usual way about having been born in Dublin. She was very silly about that, because to listen to her you'd think no one had ever been born in Dublin only herself.

“Ah, shut up!” I said. “We all know you were born in Dublin and what about it?”

“Well, you weren't,” she said, skipping round, “and Denis wasn't.”

“How do you know he wasn't?” I asked. “Where were you born, Denis?”

“What's that?” he asked and gaped. Then, after a moment, he said: “In England.”

“Where did you say?” Susie asked, scowling.

“In England.”

“How do you know?”

“Me mudder told me.”

I was delighted at the turn things had taken. You never in all your life saw anyone so put out as Susie at the idea that a common boy from the Buildings could be born in a place she wasn't born in. What made it worse was that Mummy had worked in England, and it seemed to Susie like a shocking oversight not to have had her in a place she could really brag about. She was leaping.

“When was your mummy in England?” she asked.

“She wasn't in England.”

“Then how could you be born there, you big, silly fool?” she stormed.

“My Auntie Nellie was there,” he said sulkily.

“You couldn't be born in England just because your Auntie Nellie was there,” she said vindictively.

“Why couldn't I?” he asked, getting cross.

That stumped Susie properly. It stumped me as well. Seeing that we both thought Mother had bought us from the nurse, there didn't seem to be any good reason why an aunt couldn't have bought us as well. We argued about that for hours afterwards. Susie maintained with her usual Mrs. Know-all air that if an aunt bought a baby she stopped being his aunt and became his mummy but I wasn't sure of that at all. She said she'd ask Mummy, and I warned her she'd only get her head chewed off, but she said she didn't mind.

She didn't either. That kid was madly inquisitive, and she had ways of getting information out of people that really made me ashamed. One trick of hers was to repeat whatever she'd been told with a supercilious air and then wait for results. That's what she did about Denis Corby.

“Mummy,” she said next day, “do you know what that silly kid, Denis, said?”

“No, dear.”

“He said he was born in England and his mother was never in England at all,” said Susie and went off into an affected laugh.

“The dear knows ye might find something better to talk about,” Mother said in disgust. “A lot of difference it makes to the poor child where he was born.”

“What did I tell you?” I said to her afterwards. “I told you you'd only put Mummy in a wax. I tell you there's a mystery about that fellow and Mummy knows what it is. I wish he never came here at all.”

The Saturday following we were all given pennies and Denis and I were sent off for a walk. I thought it very cool of Mother, knowing quite well that Denis wasn't class enough for the fellows I mixed with, but it was one of those things she didn't seem to understand and I could never explain to her. I had the feeling that it would only make her mad.

It was a nice sunny afternoon, and we stayed at the cross, collecting cigarette pictures from fellows getting off the trams. We hadn't been there long when Bastable and another fellow came down the hill, two proper toffs—I mean they weren't even at my school but went to the Grammar School.

“Hullo, Bastable,” I said, “where are ye off to?” and I went a few steps with them.

“We have a boat down the river,” he said. “Will you come?”

I slouched along after them, between two minds. I badly wanted to go down the river, and it was jolly decent of Bastable to have asked me, but I was tied to Denis, who wasn't class enough to bring with me even if he was asked.

“I'm with this fellow,” I said with a sigh, and Bastable looked back at Denis, who was sitting on the high wall over the church, and realized at the first glance that he wouldn't do.

“Ah, boy, you don't know what you're missing,” he said.

I knew that only too well. I looked up and there was Denis, goggling down at us, close enough to remind me of the miserable sort of afternoon I'd have to spend with him if I stayed, but far enough away not to be on my conscience too much.