Martin Sloane (22 page)

Right! shouted his father.

Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Union of South Africa, of Your possessions and the other territories to any of them belonging or pertaining, and of Your Empire of India, according to their respective laws and customs?

I solemnly promise to do so, the prince replied.

Do I have a bollocking choice? said Martin’s father.

The archbishop continued, his voice tinny and small in the radio, Will You to Your power cause law and justice in mercy to be executed in all Your judgments?

I will, said the prince.

Then he was crowned and they could hear the static of the roaring crowds. His mother’s eyes filled up with tears but his father got up and unplugged the radio, then put it into a box.

There. You’ve got a new king.

Don’t tell me you didn’t find it interesting, even just a little, his mother said.

I find it interesting that the English royalty advertises its inbreeding even down to the fact that they have only two or three names for their kings. You get to be George or Edward. Or James.

Henry, she said.

Not for a very long time. William, maybe. He kissed her, conciliatory, but he was grinning. Well, congratulations to us all. We have a new king. When he left with the box in his arms, he was chuckling a little.

Martin’s mother turned to him. I hope you’ll not show that kind of disrespect when you get older. Martin knew he wouldn’t. The fact was, he loved the idea of kings and queens. He couldn’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t.

For king and country! his father shouted gleefully from upstairs. May the sun never go down on the Empire! Whoopeee!

Jesus H. Christ! she shouted back, covering Martin’s ears. Blasphemy was the only possible revenge.

Eventually, he went to his room and stood at his window, looking out onto the sight of Dublin, the grey church stone in the distance and the tops of the houses leading down to the city centre. The steeples that rose up here and there seemed a little sinister to him now, as if the ivory-coloured clocks in the towers were eyes that could see him from anywhere. He was now not certain what gods had claimed him (which ones would even want him?) or how many more gods would vie for his soul from this time forward. The steeples spread over the sky like sticklebacks on the tail of a lizard, winding along the streets and quays. Above, the sky did look dim and dusty to him now — the move was so inevitable that he had begun to see things as they were. It was not a nice place to live, if you were a boy who had trouble breathing. But it was still home, and that was what was hurting.

He gazed down onto the grey-red cobble in the street, the cracked stones he knew like they were the creases on his own palm. He knew how that road looked darkened by rain or made pale by a rare whole day of sun. He could tell what the weather was by listening in the dark to the sound of a car driving by under his window. The hiss of tires in rain, the smooth black rubber sounding over a hot road, the soft tread of a car driving carefully on the occasional snow. Panic rose again in him, as it had for two weeks now, and he clenched his eyes to calculate the hours left — only sixteen. The trucks would come at seven in the morning. He turned to his room as if the time remaining was something material that he could feel draining down a hole in the floor. He looked around the little space. He had spent all his life here! The hollow feeling of terror sank into his stomach. It wasn’t possible that they were leaving. Not to come back? Never to come back here? How was it possible?

He threw himself on the bed. Three more minutes had passed in despair. He would not squander the rest of the afternoon. He thought if there was a south-facing bedroom in the new house, that he would be allowed to have it — but he would have to ask his mother first. A brief euphoria ran through him like a charge.

Most of his books and clothing were stacked in crates around his room and in the carpeted hallway outside. A grey trunk with the word britannia painted in white held both his and Theresa’s shoes and coats. It had been his grandfather’s trunk when he made the passage from Portsmouth (via Dublin) to Montreal to start a watchmaking firm. His mother’s life was to have started over there — Martin had heard the story so many times — but she met the man she was to marry on that ship. Your father’s nose is the reason you’re here today, the story would always end. Your Zaida Mosher thought Daddy was Jewish and invited him to dinner in our cabin.

Martin thought about the trunk that had travelled over the Atlantic twice, and his troubles seemed as vast as that distance. Dublin to Galway!

And how terrible that his mother had said goodbye to everything all for nothing (well, except for marriage and children). She had left her home in England at the age of twenty-one and travelled all the way across the ocean to live in a place where the people spoke French, only to meet her future husband on the ship and turn around. Except that she was coming to Dublin, not going home. Talk about floating off course. (Maybe, thought Martin, it would happen somehow that they would have to come back right away too.)

He remained rooted to the bed, unable to decide in what order to put the few remaining things away. He hadn’t much time — William, Devon, and Ian Shoemaker, whom he didn’t really like, were coming to dinner. Theresa’s friends, who were somewhat more numerous, were also coming. There was the red-haired Mary, a Jenny, and little Celeste Shipley, whose mother always nervously speculated on her daughter’s much-hoped-for growth spurt. Then there was Theresa’s best friend, a nasty girl called Kelly. Kelly had once cornered Martin and asked him to remove his pants, which he felt compelled to do, since Kelly was much bigger than he. She had approached him with a small twig and stirred the front of his underpants with it. When nothing happened, she’d said, with great disappointment, It’s all a lie, and stalked off.

He was not looking forward to the dinner, which was to end with the presentation of gifts that had surely been chosen by the parents. He did not want to sit and eat with people he was never going to see again. He’d already said goodbye to Devon: they’d gone to the flats behind the cigar factory and burnt an entire book of matches one by one to mark all the great times they’d had. Then they’d awkwardly hugged, the way they’d seen their fathers hug other men, even clapping each other on the back. William hadn’t spoken to Martin since three days earlier, when they’d gone to the canal and tossed daisies into the water. He wanted to say goodbye, but not in front of everyone. And yet, maybe he and William had already said their farewells.

He wasn’t sure that any of Theresa’s friends had much use for a final gathering either. Maybe it was important for all the parents to see them together, and take photographs and give gifts. Maybe that’s how adults say goodbye to other adults, he thought — by watching their children say goodbye.

There were three hours to dinner. In the last two days, his mother had finally succumbed to Martin’s stubbornness and packed his entire room herself. But on the desk beside his window he had placed the dozen or so keepsakes and objects that he didn’t want her to touch, and, exasperated, she had told him anything that was left unpacked come dinnertime was going to be thrown away. He had by now cleaned out what was unnecessary from his cigar box (a few piles of coins and a cumbersome cloth monkey), and into it now he placed a few crucial things that he felt he might want easy access to: touchstones of his life. There was a small folding landscape of trees that his father had made. The black cardboard accordioned out into a line of carefully carved willows, oaks, and pines, and when he’d been much smaller, his father had put it in his window so at night the lights of the street would throw a forest against his wall.

This he placed flat against the bottom of the box. Then he put a miniature bed in. He had purchased this with his own money only last year, and for some reason he didn’t know, it had become one of his prized possessions. He could hardly understand why, but he knew the little bed, or the line of trees, or the empty matchbook held some of his emotions with the full and perfect speechlessness of things. He would sometimes glance at this bed and peacefulness would flood through him. Beside it he placed one of his mother’s thimbles, as if it were a glass of water for the tiny sleeper, or a basin to wash his hands in.

Then, using his penknife, he pried open a slat at the front of the box and revealed the open space under the main compartment. It had been the original bottom, but when he discovered that the lid of the box had been made in two layers of thin cedar, he pried the bottom part away and laid it in about an inch from the bottom of the box. Then he cut a slat off the outside to make a door into the false bottom. With the little bit of light seeping into the thin space, he could make out the original manufacturer’s label: Linwood Cigar Company, Dublin. And a picture of a lady in a red hat, winking. In here he usually kept bits of chocolate or paper money, but it was empty now, and he placed in it a gift his mother had received from her grandmother when she was a girl, and which she had passed on to Martin without Theresa’s knowing (for Theresa would have wanted it for herself). It was almost a hundred years old, and had gone smudgy from handling, but it was still recognizable as what it had been when it was new: a small naked infant cast in hard rubber, its features rendered in detail. There was its fine nose and its small puckered mouth, ten fingers and toes with tiny nails, and hair wrought in thin lines along its scalp. The infant lay on its side, fast asleep, its hands tucked under its head, and it was the size of a robin’s egg. There was no way to tell whether it was a boy child or a girl, but Martin believed it to be a boy. He placed it in the secret compartment, and it lay like a seed under the trees and the bed and the thimble. Then he pressed the slat back into place and closed the lid of the box. It was complete.

He looked at what was now left behind: a model car, a tiny plastic flute, the cloth monkey, and an array of smaller objects, corks and bottle tops and buttons. These he put into a paper bag and tossed into the steamer trunk with the coats and shoes. Then he put the Linwood box on top of the steamer and stood back, regarding the emptiness of the room, which was now total. He went over to the window and looked out again. Somehow all of this had taken half an hour, and he could see that the sun had moved over a little. It would soon go down. He looked over the way, and through the window in William’s bedroom, he could see his friend pulling on a pair of socks. William tugged them on and then stood and turned, seeing Martin standing at his window. The two boys stared at each other over the expanse of street that had been their territory for their entire lives, but neither of them waved or acknowledged each other, only stood like sentries at their windows. Then William nodded slightly and turned away. Martin saw his back when William left the room on the other side.

Down, down into the streets and parks, along the river, past the churches and squares. Down Phibsborough over the canal bridge to Circular Road, where the statue of the soldier was, and down to Berkeley Street, past the Mater. St. Joseph’s over there, where his father had wanted to go in and thank the Virgin. He was running, past Eccles Street, past Mountjoy, and his chest began to ache. He slowed down, guilty, but realized no one would think it strange, the Sloane boy on his own walking down streets he’d walked many times. He passed Goldman’s and even waved to Missus.

It was the night of May twelfth, Coronation Day, and now his friends and his parents’ friends were walking up the street to their house to say goodbye and offer their farewell presents, and he was not there. He had slipped out of the mudroom door and gone along the back gardens until he’d hit the main road, and now here he was, with the failing light and the sounds of the city. Now seeing was more than an absorption of things, it was an action. He saw the streetlamps and the pubs, the shopfronts with their painted signs, the bright lights in the windows of Walton’s School of Music, where he’d canoodled on a wooden concert flute on Mondays between the hours of five and seven only last year. He passed McCann’s on Frederick Street, although they were closed now. His mother wouldn’t shop there because they charged them as much as they charged people who
weren’t
their neighbours. His mother figured living on the same street gave them a different status. She figured it would have if they’d all been Catholic.

The road turned here, angling into its midtown longitude, and the character of the street changed. It was no longer Phibsborough or Old Cabra, where the houses were tall and the commercial streets full of fruit and vegetable merchants, and nice pubs with orange fires going once you stepped inside. It seemed a little ruthless here between the outskirts and city centre, this was the corridor where people passed through and grabbed something, rather than lingering. There were twelve pubs between Dorset and Denmark Streets, and they looked black inside, their windows featureless and buff-coloured. No one went into them or came out. It was as if they had tenants, not customers. And above them rose the flat-faced buildings on either side, which were on the verge of becoming tenements, or rather, reverting. His parents had warned him that Frederick Street was not a place to go alone. Some of the casements above his head were even barred. The only thing that was nice about the street today was the bright Union Jacks hanging out of one or two of the windows. Strange to see them, his mother’s flag. You never saw that flag.

After Frederick, it was nicer; he heard the sounds of a tin flute and someone banging a table with the flat of his hand. A voice was saying, It don’t make no bit of difference! It’s the same bloody thing. And a voice replied, Get him another one of these! Keep your blood up!

Three men in suits were coming out of the St. George Hotel, laughing and singing,

God Save the King,

A ring a ding a ling!

At the bottom of the park, the street turned into O’Connell, and here the double-decker buses careened into their stops and roared off again into traffic. It was even louder now, and he crossed carefully to the meridian, looking both ways. People kept bumping into him, and he grasped tight to his pants pocket, which held a handful of coins he’d brought from the house. He bought a bag of hot salted groundnuts from a man with a cart and then stood, staring down the great street from the island in the middle. There’d been a big row that started at the post office, down there, on the right. There had been blood in the ruined streets.