The Collected Stories (6 page)

‘That it may rise higher than for fukken Noah. That they may have to climb trees,’ Murphy answered, laughing, vicious.

‘They never did much for us except to starve us out to England. You have to have the pull there or you’re dirt,’ Keegan advanced.

The familiar tirade would continue, predictable as the drive and throw of their shovels. I went outside to sit on a stack of steel in the sun until the hooter blew, but even there it wasn’t possible to be alone, for Tipperary followed to sit too on the steel. He’d been taken away to the Christian Brothers when he was eleven but hadn’t been able to pass the exams that would have qualified him as a teacher, and when they put him to work in the kitchens he’d left and come to England. He fixed steel in the bays. The cheeks were hollow, infantile puzzlement on the regular face from which sensuality, if it had ever been there, had withered.

‘Do you think Shakespeare’s all he’s bumped up to be?’ he asked.

He’d heard that I had gone two years to Secondary School, and he believed that we could speak as one educated man to another.
He was sometimes called the
Professor
, and baited mercilessly, though there was a purity in his dogged stupidity that troubled them towards a certain respect. His attention made me uncomfortable. I had no desire to be one of his thieves at these occasional crucifixions, or to play Judas for them to his Christ.

I told him that I didn’t know if Shakespeare was all that he was bumped up to be, but people said so, and it was people who did all the bumping up or bumping down.

‘But who is people?’ he pursued.

‘People is people. They praise Shakespeare. Pull your beer. Give you the start. They might even be ourselves.’ I laughed, and watched the door of the canteen, and listened for the hooter, and longed to hurt him away. He touched something deeper than my careful neutrality. I hadn’t any wish to live by anything deeper.

‘And do you consider George Bernard Shaw all that he’s bumped up to be?’ he asked, perhaps puzzling over his failure to answer satisfactorily the questions put to him at exams before they’d sent him to the kitchens.

‘I know nothing about George Bernard.’ I got up off the steel.

‘But you went to Secondary School?’

‘For two years.’

‘But why didn’t you go on? You passed the exams.’

‘Forget it. I didn’t go on.’ I was disturbed and hated Tipperary for the disturbance.

‘But why, you’d have learned things. You’d have learned whether things are what they’re bumped up to be or not.’

‘I’d have learned nothing. I might have got a better job but my ambition is wrong way round anyhow. Almost as good behind the mixer as anywhere else.’

While Tipperary meditated another question there was a motionless silence between us on the stack of rusted steel in the sun.

‘Murphy says he’s going to do Jocko if he comes today,’ I changed.

‘Sligo has some plans, too, up top,’ he answered slowly. ‘It’s not fair.’

‘It’ll happen though – if he comes.’

The hooter blew. Nobody came from the canteen. They’d sit there till Barney stormed in. ‘Come on. You don’t get paid sittin’ on
your arses five minutes after the hooter’s gone. Come on. Out.’

‘How’s it going, Paddy Boy?’ the lorry driver asked as he got me to sign for the load of gravel he’d tipped behind the mixer.

‘Dragging along,’ I answered as I scrawled a few illegible letters on the docket; it never mattered who signed.

‘Keep it going, that’s it.’ He touched my shoulder before turning to shout a few friendly obscenities at Murphy who’d started the mixer.

The heat grew worse. Jocko didn’t come. Nobody spoke much. Even on Galway’s face the sweat streaked the white coating of cement dust.

‘Anyone volunteer to go for lemonade?’ Keegan asked when more than an hour had gone. I said I’d go to Greenbaum’s; it was some minutes escape from the din of the engines and diesel and dust in the airless heat.

‘Walkin’ kills me these days.’ Keegan was grateful.

I went through the gap in the split stakes linked with wire into Hessell Street, green and red peppers among the parsley and fruit of the stalls. It smelled of lice and blood and fowl, down and feathers stamped into the blood and henshit outside the Jewish poulterers, country air after the dust of the mixer.

‘Six Tizers,’ I asked Greenbaum, old grey Jew out of Poland. ‘Put them on the slate.’

‘Everything on the slate and then one day you jack and go and Greenbaum is left with the baby.’

‘You’ll get paid. Today is payday.’

‘And Greenbaum charges no deposit on the bottles. You just throw them away. And who loses? Greenbaum loses,’ he complained as he put the bottles on the counter, as much in love with complaint as the cripple with crutches he goes on using after he is cured.

The bottles were passed around from mouth to mouth behind the mixer as the bucket climbed to Sligo at the top.

‘You shouldn’t gurgle,’ Keegan ragged at Galway. ‘We who are Irish–’

‘Should always be tidy when we sit down to tea,’ Galway took up viciously. ‘Come on: shovel, you old bollocks.’

‘Shovel or shite, shite or burst. It’s payday,’ Murphy shouted as if
shovel
had set an alarm off in his head, and without break the
shovels drove and threw, two boxes of gravel to one of sand, the small grey puff of cement in the airless heat as we pulled the cut ends of the bag loose, till the hooter blew for payout.

Tipperary joined me at the end of the queue outside the payout window.

‘Jocko didn’t arrive yet,’ I said to keep his conversation easy.

‘No. Sligo’s going to put the water on him from up top when he comes. It’s not fair.’

‘It’ll probably happen though.’

‘But it’s not fair.’

We each held the thin brass medal on which our number was stamped, a hole in the medal for hanging it on the nail in the hut at night.

At the window we called our name and number and showed the brass medal and the timekeeper handed us our pay in a small brown packet.

On the front of the pack was written the number of hours we had worked, the rate per hour, the amount we’d earned minus the various deductions.

As the men stood around checking their money, the large hands counting awkwardly and slowly, a woman’s voice cried, ‘Come and get them while they’re hot.’

Their eyes lifted to search for the voice, towards the condemned row of houses ahead of the bulldozer and the burning wood, where from an upper window old Kathleen leaned out, shaking her large loose breasts at the men.

‘Cheap at the price,’ she cried. A cheer went up; and some obscenities were shouted like smallarms fire.

‘Even better downstairs,’ she cried back, her face flushed with alcohol.

‘A disgrace. Terrible,’ Tipperary said.

‘It’s all right. She just got excited by the money.’ He disturbed me more than she did.

‘This evening after pints of bitter they’ll slink round,’ he said.

As I did once. A Christmas Eve. She’d told me she’d all her Christmas shopping done except to buy the turkey. She said she hoped to get one cheap at Smithfield. They dropped the prices before the market closed to get rid of the surplus, and she was relying on a customer who was a porter there.

Only for her practised old hands it would have been impossible to raise desire, and if it was evil when it happened, the pumping of the tension of the instinct into her glycerined hole, then nothing was so extraordinarily ordinary as this evil.

‘Why not? Let them go round, and what’s so fucking special about what’s between your legs anyhow?’ I shouted at him, and turned my back so as not to have to see the hurt on the dim acolyte’s face in its confusion of altars. I started to count out the money from the small brown packet.

I love to count out in money the hours of my one and precious
life.
I sell the hours and I get money. The money allows me to sell more hours. If I saved money I could buy the hours of some similar bastard and live like a royal incubus, which would suit me much better than the way I am now, though apparently even as I am now suits me well enough, since I do not want to die.

Full of beer tonight after the Rose and Crown we’ll go round to Marge and Kathleen like dying elephants in the condemned row.

Before I’d finished counting, Tipperary tapped my shoulder and I shouted, ‘Fuck off,’ and did not turn to see his face.

The hooter went. The offered breasts withdrew. A window slammed.

‘The last round,’ someone said.

The mixer started. The shovels drove and threw: gravel, sand, gravel; gravel, sand, gravel; cement.

Murphy sledged on the beaten steel of the hopper, vocal again now that the brown packet was a solid wad against his arse. ‘Our fukker who art in heaven bought his boots for nine-and-eleven,’ he sang out as he sledged. ‘Come on: shovel or shite, shite or burst.’

Jocko came so quietly that he was in the pool of shadow under the hopper before he was noticed, the pint bottle of violet-coloured spirit swinging wide from one pocket, crawling on all fours towards the pool of water in the sand beneath the drum of the mixer.

‘Out,’ Murphy shouted with a curse, angered that Jocko had got so far without being noticed. ‘Out. I’ll teach your arse a lesson. Out.’

He took the shovel that leaned against the mixer, and drove at Jocko, the dull thud of the blade on cloth and flesh or bone, buttocks that someone must have bathed once, carried in her arms.

‘I warned you if you tried this stunt again I’d warm your arse. I want to be at no coroner’s inquest on your head. Out.’

We stood and watched Murphy drive him out of the pool of water, then push him out of the shadow of the hopper into the evening glare. We said nothing.

The eyes in the hollow sockets, grey beard matted about the scabs of the face, registered no pain, no anything: and when they fell on the barrow of wet concrete that the surveyor had used to test the strength of the mix he moved mechanically towards it, sat in, and started to souse himself up and down in the liquid concrete as a child in a bath.

‘Jesus, when that sets to his arse it’ll be nobody’s business,’ Galway said between dismay and laughter.

‘Out of the fukken barrow,’ Murphy shouted, and lifted him out by the neck, pushing him down the tyre-marked yellow slope. He staggered but did not fall. The wet clothes clung to his back and the violet-coloured bottle in the pocket was clouded and dirty with wet concrete.

Sligo, his cap back to front, leaned across the scaffolding rail on top, the black rubber hose in his hands. The jet of water started to circle Jocko, darkening the yellow sand. Sligo used his thumb on the jet so that it sprayed out like heavy rain.

When Jocko felt the water, he lifted his face to its coolness, but then, slowly and deliberately, he took a plastic coat and faded beret from the opposite pocket to where the bottle swung, and in the same slow deliberate way put them on, buttoning the plastic coat to the throat and putting the collar up. The jet followed a few yards of his slow walk and then fell back, but he still walked in the evening sun as if it was raining.

Greenbaum, old grey rat searching for Tizer bottles among the heaps of rubble, lifted his head to watch him pass through the gap in the fence of split stakes into Hessell Street but immediately bent again to search and complain. ‘Greenbaum charges no deposit on the bottles, and then what do they do, throw them away, throw them away, never return. Greenbaum’s an old fool.’

The street in front of Parkes’ Guest House, grains of sand from the street coming on the grey fur of the tennis ball, the hopping under my hand idle as the conversations from the green bench before the flowerbed, red bells of the fuchsia vivid behind them and some roses and gillyflowers, the earth around the roots of everything speckled with sea shells, overhead the weathered roughcast of the wall of the house.

The sky was filling. Rain would come, and walls close around the living evening, looking towards the bleared windows, no way to get out from the voices.

‘There was great stuff in those Baby Fords and Austins. The cars going nowadays are only tin compared,’ Mr McVittie said, the heavy gold watch chain across the waistcoat of the brown suit, silver hair parted in the centre, knobbed walking stick in his hand. He could have stepped out of a yellowed wedding photo.

‘Only they weren’t so fast as now,’ Mr O’Connor added, following McVittie all the week in the way stray dogs at night will stick to any pair of heels that seem to go home.

‘Before the war, before I got married, I used to have one of the old Citroëns, and it could go for ever, only it was very hard on petrol,’ Mr Ryan said, feel of his eyes on the up and down of the tennis ball on the street.

Conversations always the same: height of the Enfield rifle, summer of the long dresses, miles to the gallon – from morning to the last glows of the cigarettes on the benches at night, always informations, informations about everything. Having come out of darkness, they now blink with informations at all the things about them, before the soon when they’ll have to leave.

The sky filled over Sligo Bay, the darkness moving across the links and church, one clear strip of blue between Parkes’ and Knocknarea, and when that would fill – the rain, the steamed windows, the informations, till the dark settled on their day.

Fear of the sky since morning had kept them on the benches away from the strand a mile downhill they’d come to enjoy, fear of the long trudge past the golf links and Kincora and Central in rain; but they’d still the air here, sea air, it was some consolation. Even the strand, reached in good weather, the mile downhill accomplished, the mile home uphill yet out of mind, and in possession of strand of Strandhill, long and level for miles, the cannon on its rotting initial-covered carriage pointed towards the Atlantic as if on guard over the two ice-cream parlours; women at the tideline, with a child in one hand and skirt held tight between thighs with the other, whinnying at each spent rush of water at their feet before it curled in a brown backwash round their heels; all this time envy of the buckets and beach ball of others to gladden a royal stay.