Strumpet City (70 page)

‘A grand animal,’ one of them said, stroking it while it drank, ‘cute as a Christian.’

‘Cuter,’ Pat remarked, ‘a Christian would be expected to pay for it.’

He remembered Ballcock’s tip and tied the reins to a lamp-post.

‘Watch her for me,’ he said, ‘I won’t be a minute.’

The bookmaker’s office smelled of sweat and stale smoke. He studied the board over the shoulders of several others, then decided on a double—both at Leicester. He wrote, laboriously as always, a slip which backed two shillings win on Packleader and decided to double it with Revolution in the three fifteen, both at Leicester. Revolution took his fancy. He put the docket which the clerk gave him in his pocket and felt that the day was now normal.

Mulcahy’s horse was tonguing its lips appreciatively. He untied her and she moved off contentedly. He let her take her own pace while he rested his aching muscles and observed the ordinary life of the streets with affection and tenderness. He felt kinship with his city; with his fellow carters who always waved a greeting, with the trams and their hissing trolleys, with the ramshackle houses and the humble people who trudged on humdrum errands. At the end of the day he unyoked in the stables by lamplight. He was back now in the place fortune and habit had ordained for him. It was more than bearable. It was desirable. Joe came to him and said:

‘If you’ve nowhere to stay tonight, you could doss down with me.’

‘Thanks. I’m fixed up already.’

‘Sure?’

‘All arranged.’

‘What about money?’

‘That’s a different matter.’

Joe fumbled in his pocket and put a two shilling piece into his hand.

‘I can spare it,’ he said.

Pat watched the glint of it in the lamplight.

‘You’re a brick.’

They left the stable yard together and Joe told him about Fitz.

‘We were luckier here,’ he said, ‘there was never any mention of signing any form.’

‘Poor Fitz,’ Pat said, ‘he gets the rough end of everything.’

‘If we ever reorganise, it’s someone like Fitz who will have to do it,’ Joe said. It was one of the few ungrudging thoughts Pat had ever heard him express. He nodded agreement and decided he must see Fitz, if only to mention the possibility of three days casual work with Ballcock Brannigan.

At Chandlers Court his mood changed. There was a deadness about it now that evening had fallen. He hesitated to face the reproach of the bare room. Optimism had come easily to his mates. They had more time in which to adjust to the collapse, more days of routine to get used to streets without placards announcing meetings and flaunting the name of Larkin. In their company his renewed contact with the bits and pieces of everyday had filled him with joy. Now, in the evening light and the emptiness of the familiar street, pity possessed him for the people of his city and their defeat.

A dog shambling along the opposite pavement caught his attention. It was the first he had seen in months. It was old and wore the look of defeat too. A bent and bearded old man followed at a distance. He did not recognise Rashers until the dog had mounted the steps and disappeared into the hallway of Number 3. The name floated like a ghost into his memory.

‘Hi—Rashers,’ he shouted.

The bearded figure made no response. He peered more closely to be certain he was not mistaken. The change in Rashers shocked him. He shouted again. Rashers mounted the steps slowly and unhearingly.

‘How’s the Bard of the Revolution?’ Pat yelled.

It had a momentary effect. Rashers, now in the open doorway, paused briefly. Then he turned his back and with the same slow gait disappeared into the house.

‘Do you know him?’ the lamplighter asked. He had pulled up in front of Pat and was parking his bicycle against the footpath.

‘Rashers Tierney,’ Pat said.

‘That’s the label.’

‘Has he gone deaf or what?’

‘Not deaf,’ the lamplighter distinguished. ‘Disinclined. I’ve known Rashers this many a year.’ He reached upwards, expertly engaging the gas tap with the hook on the side of his long stick. He pulled downwards, then touched the mantles with the thin blue flame which danced at its tip. The gas popped. A pool of light surrounded them.

‘Do you know the people in Number 3?’

‘The most of them,’ the lamplighter answered, appraising his handiwork, professionally critical.

‘The Fitzpatricks?’

‘Two pair front,’ the lamplighter said immediately.

‘I’ve got a message for them but I don’t want to go in with it myself. Will you oblige me?’

‘Certainly,’ the lamplighter said.

Pat found the stub of a pencil but nothing he could write on. He took out the betting docket.

‘Half a minute,’ he said.

He wrote on the back of the docket:

Just out this morning and back at work in Nolan & Keyes. There is three days’ casual going with Broderick’s of Merchants Quay. Ask for Mr. Brannigan say I sent you. This docket is a Double Packleader and Revolution good name at Leicester if it comes up collect and use the cash. I’m fixed all right. See you on the Christmas tree. Pat Bannister.

As he read it over a thought struck him and he added:
I warn you Keever is working there but what about it.

The lamplighter took the docket and promised to leave it up immediately.

‘I’m greatly obliged,’ Pat assured him.

He watched him crossing the street and climbing the steps. As he entered the hall its gloom engulfed him so that there was nothing to see except the flame at the tip of his stick floating like a little star in the darkness. It too disappeared. It was time at last to visit Lily. He stood for a while looking up at the window of Fitz’s apartment, still tempted, still afraid. He turned at last and headed for O’Connell Bridge. He was sad. Once again the streets were too spacious. He wanted shelter and companionship.

The footsteps of the lamplighter echoing in the hall and on the stairs above caused the dog beside Rashers to stir restlessly.

‘Easy,’ Rashers whispered.

He lay on the floor on his bed of straw and accumulated rags. A little of the light from the street lamps found its way through the broken window. It touched the ceiling and the upper part of the wall, leaving the rest of the basement in darkness. The dog settled briefly but stirred again, a fidgeting movement that for the moment was unbearable.

‘It’s nobody for us,’ Rashers told him. Silent, cold, pale yellow in colour, the reflection on the wall compelled his attention. It had appeared quite suddenly some moments before. It had a soporific effect. He let his eyes dwell on it in the hope that it might soothe him into sleep. But the dog whimpered again, dragging him back to the dampness and darkness, reminding him that they were both sick and cold and hungry. He did not want to move. It had been a mistake to lie down the moment he got in. It made it harder than ever to resume responsibility.

‘In a minute,’ he pleaded, ‘give me a minute.’ He groped without enthusiasm for the sack which was somewhere in the darkness beside his bed. He failed to find it.

‘Sweet Mother of Jaysus,’ he moaned.

He sat up and located it near his feet. There was some bread in it he had retrieved from a bin. It smelled a bit from contact with the other garbage but he was past caring about that. It was the best he could do. He broke some off and held it towards the dog which sniffed at it for an unbearable length of time and kept turning its head away. Losing patience Rashers flung the bread on the floor.

‘Like it or lump it,’ he shouted.

The shout exhausted him. He lay back and began to nibble at what was left. It tasted sour but his body demanded it. His bad leg and his arm were becoming numb with the damp and the cold which was rising through the straw. It would be better to move about, to light a fire with the few sticks he had foraged, to boil a can and beg a few spoons of tea from someone in the house above him. No. Not from those who lived with him. If they gave—well and good; he would not ask. He returned to contemplation of the pale yellow strip of light on the ceiling.

It brought him down green lanes to race meetings of long ago. He saw white railings and coloured shirts and tents and three-card-trick men; the Curragh with its short grass and bushes of yellow gorse; the Park with its shading trees and the river to be glimpsed far below; Leopardstown by the railway line surrounded by blue mountains. He had been able for it then. A little luck and another summer and he would be able for it again. What was it Hennessy sometimes said? We never died of winter yet.

He bit again at the loaf but had to spit it out. The taste was abominable.

‘I’ll light my bit of a fire,’ he decided.

But he was so numb and weak that he was unable to rise. He tried different positions for leverage, grunted, gave up, forced himself to try again. There was no sound at all from the dog.

‘Rusty,’ he called, as terror overmastered him for a moment. The dog ambled across to him. He dragged himself along the floor until he reached the wall, which he used to lever himself at last into a standing position. He waited to get his breath back.

‘You were watching for them rats again,’ he accused the dog, ‘do you want to get yourself poisoned? How many times have I to speak to you?’

He had paper and sticks and two wooden setts saturated in tar which he had stolen from a pile where men had been digging up a road. When the fire had taken the tar in the setts bubbled and blazed furiously. The dog left off his vigil by the rat holes and came over to heat himself. Rashers boiled water, which warmed him and was better than nothing. Tomorrow he would beg at a few houses for sugar and tea. He took out the tin whistle and regarded it regretfully. The air hole at the mouthpiece was bent inwards, so that it was impossible now to get anything out of it beyond a shrill squeak. That had happened two days before. First he ran into trouble with a younger man called Morrissey when he went to search the bins on Pembroke Road. Morrissey had been there before him.

‘It’s my road,’ Rashers had said, ‘I’ve had this road since you were in petticoats.’

‘It’s mine now,’ Morrissey said.

‘You’re only an unprincipled bowsie,’ Rashers said. Morrissey gripped him by the beard, jerked him forward and struck him in the face with his free hand. The blow sent Rashers sprawling.

‘Clear off,’ Morrissey warned.

Rashers, his head reeling, refused to be silenced.

‘You’re only a bowsie,’ he said again. The dog snarled but it was an empty threat. It too had grown too old for fighting. He left Pembroke Road to Morrissey and tried playing his tin whistle outside the Church at Haddington Road. Here a policeman moved him on. In fury and impotence he dashed the tin whistle on the ground. When he cooled down sufficiently to pick it up, he found it was bent.

He drank the hot water and dwelt on the world’s misuse of him. Then he lay down again in the hope of falling asleep before the fire went out for want of fuel. It glowed on the walls, making grotesque shadows He was glad he had stolen the setts.

‘We never died of winter yet,’ he said to the dog. But his heart told him it was a lie.

‘Who is Keever?’ Mary asked.

‘The one Mulhall went to gaol for,’ Fitz told her, ‘he used to work as a carter.’

She remembered. ‘Will you try for the job?’

‘First thing in the morning.’

‘I’ll call you early.’

‘If I get three days with Broderick’s and the week Carrington told me about, that won’t be so bad.’

She was putting coal on the fire from a bucket Mrs. Mulhall had sent across to them earlier.

‘We’ll knock it out somehow,’ she said.

For how long, he wondered. There seemed no hope at all of anything permanent. He had been trying without any sign of success for three months. If he could get to England there would be some hope, but it would mean finding some way to keep Mary and the children alive while he looked around. He decided against mentioning it again. They had talked enough about it in the weeks that had passed. He turned the betting docket over and examined the message again. Packleader and Revolution: the combination amused him.

‘If this double turns up,’ he said, ‘we’ll buy a little place in the country.’

She smiled.

‘I wonder why he didn’t call himself,’ she said.

The House of the Boer War Heroes was unchanged and unchangeable. Souvenirs in the china cabinet still spoke of comings and goings that had ended at the turn of the century. The same uniformed groups occupied the mantelpiece and the top of the piano. Queen Victoria’s portrait on the sitting room wall stared down at Lily and Pat with longstanding disapproval. They had their tea at the fire and ignored her. With the landlady away the house was their own. Pat lay back on the sofa and smoked. To see a fire again was an adventure; to be with Lily a piece of good fortune he would never have dared to hope for. He watched her now as they talked and found her looking better than ever. Living in a house which was comfortable with an old woman who appreciated her as a companion rather than as a lodger had changed her. Her speech was less sharp, her manner more subdued and reticent. Life was no longer something to be fought.

‘I hated you being in gaol,’ she said, ‘all those criminals.’

‘There didn’t seem to be any criminals,’ Pat told her. ‘From the account of themselves they gave to me, every one of them was innocent. So far as I could find out, the only one guilty of the crime he was locked up for was myself.’

‘In that case it’s just as well they let you out,’ Lily decided, ‘you might have corrupted the rest.’

‘It used to worry me,’ Pat admitted.

‘And you have your job back?’

‘Started right away.’

‘I’m glad.’ She came over and sat beside him.

‘Pat—you must take it easy from now on. No more fighting and getting into trouble. Or heavy drinking.’

‘I’m not a heavy drinker,’ he objected, ‘you need money for that game.’

‘You seem to manage—somehow,’ she told him.

‘Are you going to nag?’

‘Listen to him,’ she begged, addressing Queen Victoria. But she relented and said, gently:

‘I thought you didn’t look well when you called. Gaol was no cakewalk, was it?’