The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (18 page)

Oh and he remembers passing through a town, in the county of Roscommon, in his policeman days. Seeing in the wide market street two tinker women fighting, just like this, with sluggish intent, landing the most hefty punches on their breasts carpeted in vast and ragged cardigans. And he sailed past in his Crossley tender. Because the trouble of Roscommon was not contained in those two women contesting what question he did not know. Their punches were not political. And they are fighting still in the silent picture-house of his addled head, on the wide market street of his lonesome fears. Harcourt sleeps on. The stars fire down their brutal spears of light, making the old bowl of night a destructive spectacle.

How dark and hurt and deep the world.

And when they come to dispel Harcourt from the world of the camp, not because they dislike him but because they cannot bear the mystery of his illness in their midst, they find Eneas asleep or seemingly so on the half-broken chair. And indeed he has slept under the dying stars and Sligo dogs have barked through his dreams. They give him a few slight and reasonable pokes to get him awake. But he is already awake and needs only to open his eyes. He knows a purposeful delegation when he sees one. It is the time of the little peace between dark and sunrise where the insects seem to obey some strange law of silence. Eneas smiles at the seven or eight faces and glances back into the tent where his friend Harcourt still slumbers. There are two bruised faces among the intent group, and Eneas assumes these are the battlers of the night before, and as only one of them speaks he assumes this man is the victor and the desirer of Harcourt’s departure. The man speaks quietly and decently and it seems to Eneas religiously and perhaps it is a religious scruple that excludes Harcourt, or a rightful alarm at a diseased man being amid a closed camp of workers. Eneas asks in the same level tone for Benson to be fetched and the matter settled by the engineer. The speaker expresses doubt that a whiteman can understand the complexities of the matter, but Benson nevertheless is fetched for fairness’ sake. Now the tremendous population of cricketlike creatures begins, adding their aching volume to the dispute. All is elegant and courtly because the speaker for the delegation senses the strength of his position and so does Eneas. After all, this is their spinning world, this patch of toiling ground, and the force of public opinion, tiny though the public here may be, is a thing so violent violence is not needed to carry it.

Benson arrives looking distinctly unenthusiastic. He tries to explain that Harcourt and Eneas too for that matter are under a three-year contract and as such are bound to fulfil their terms. And as Harcourt is able to work when not in his fit then there is no true reason for him to be sent away.

‘And where will I send this man?’ says Benson. ‘There is nowhere he can go and fulfil his contract. Will I send him to Lagos where the company may proceed against him for breach of contract and most likely imprison him?’

‘This is not the matter in hand,’ says the speaker. ‘If he was God himself or King of England or boss of the company, no luck or fortune could attach to his staying. He is afflicted and as an afflicted person should not be seen among other men or work at their sides.’

‘He’s just a poor man with epilepsy. What trouble would you like to bring on his head, Joe? Epilepsy’s neither contagious, nor against religion. Can I not convince you?’ Eneas stands under the sun without hat or safety and is reminded of his brother Tom. The vaguely oratorical turn to Benson’s speech is the same. It is the politician talking to the voter, the owner of the mother tongue talking to the native with a measure of grace. Yet Benson is an Irishman. He is trying in some ancestral desperation to enter into the idiom of the African. But in borrowing only the tone of the speaker called Joe, Benson betrays his condescension. It would not be important except the speaker called Joe gives up suddenly and walks away with his companions.

‘I don’t know,’ says Benson to Eneas. The tone remains intact. ‘Unless you’re willing to fight for Harcourt with your bare fists I don’t think Harcourt can stay here.’ Eneas after all is a digger of Benson’s earth.

‘What will you do?’

‘I suppose I can send him back to Lagos.’

‘I don’t think he wants to be in Lagos.’

‘They’ll put him to work somewhere. Warehouses maybe.’

‘He wants to dig.’

‘These men here won’t let him stay. If I oppose them they’ll wear me down like a riverstone. I need them for this mighty work. Anyway, look at it this way, as an epileptic gets older the fits get worse. He could have choked to death yesterday.’

‘Maybe he doesn’t care. He wants to be here.’

‘He can go back on the truck this evening. If you want to go with him go with him,’ says Benson and turns away. ‘I have a canal to make.’

‘You put him together yesterday, Mr Benson.’

‘All the king’s horses, McNulty,’ says Benson, without looking back. Eneas thinks this engineer from Roscommon is not much use to Harcourt after all. Or temporary use. He thinks maybe he should run after Benson and grab him by the shoulder and have it out with him better. He can see himself doing it as he thinks it. But it’s too immense a task. Instead he goes into the tent to tell Harcourt the plans other people have made for him. For them both.

17

Life in Lagos
turns slowly slowly into a diminishing epic of drinking the astonishing drink of the district. How this could be so for a man heretofore not ferociously interested in drink astonishes him. Certainly he has known others dedicated in practice and principle to the devouring of alcohol at all possible times and to the detriment of many another pursuit. He wonders sometimes as he wakes in the busy panic of a Lagos morning what matters in particular have awoken in him this consuming vice. He suspects too that it wasn’t only political demons that haunted Harcourt in former days but also this easy catastrophe of bar, bed, and beg. As befits perhaps a man on the edges of the desert of death Harcourt is thirsty.

The good hours of the day are given to the warehouse of the company. Eneas and Harcourt truck in the lofty piles of wood and stone that will one day be gates and locks of the canal. The great granite blocks look soft as butter with a thousand gentle chisel marks on every one. They’re heavy as houses. Eneas learns the principles of the block and tackle and sees in the long piles and avenues of materials the raw kindling of the fire of civilization itself. He is not agin it. In the long murks of the warehouse he appreciates it like a man might a song or a great painting. Someone is slowly painting over Africa, fellas like Benson, shoving out great confident lines across impressive distances like a child with chalk. It is exciting, and all the more reason for drinking the pleasant liquor. All the more reason for scraping a few cents together for a fierce bottle of the stuff. Him and Harcourt and civilization and Africa.

Sometimes they shack with Harcourt’s father. Not often, and not so much because the drinking is a bleak sight for a father, but because the father himself is decrepit and that hurts Harcourt. The old man prances about heavily and begs to be called Your Highness. Mad as stones. Harcourt would prefer to think of his father as the dandy servant of the crown going about putting right the pianos of the blest. But all that is behind him. Now the deep woe of age is upon him and heaped on his blindness is a small madness, a kind of tuppenny halfpenny madness. Neither grotesque or dangerous, but from minute to minute a dance of despairing hope and babble.

‘The trouble of the world,’ says Harcourt — this on one of their untenanted nights, in the dusty black ruckus of a back lane — ‘is we’re not long enough in it, that this famous life of humans is brief and lasts only the flick of a London sparrow’s wing, and still and all, brother McNulty, we’re not suited to it, and even this short scatter of days lies heavy on our hands.’ At this he examines his own hands as if he might see time itself lying there, heavily. ‘Oh, my brother, we are not masters of this life, as it turns out. In the upshot, peeking into the book of men’s lives, we are not masters. Our names are not written there. We’re for the high jump.’

‘Maybe so,’ says Eneas, in such a manner as to attract the eyes of Harcourt.

‘Maybe so — maybe so what, brother?’

‘Just, maybe so…’

‘No, no, no, brother — you’ve something more to say, so you say it. Please.’

‘Maybe we’re not written in the book of life, as you say, Harcourt.’

‘Yes?’

‘But that’s not the trouble, the trouble is …’

‘Well, what is it?’

‘We have no mate.’

Harcourt is stirred, he rises to his haunches. ‘You mean, you and me, friends, you mean, we’ve no friends, I’m saying, not friends, to each other, is it?’

‘No,’ says Eneas. ‘No, sir. You’re surely the finest friend I’ve known but, no, not mates like that, not mates the way the English say it, I mean, mates, wives, we’re solitary men, solo men, on our own, nothing to us but ourselves, no women, no babies, no childer, as the Dubliners say, no blessed offspring, Harcourt.’

Harcourt sinks back into the slight nest of dust. He stares as if stupidly before him, as if into the blackest darkness possible on the perilous earth.

‘Brother, brother, that is the trouble.’

‘I knew a fella one time,’ says Eneas, ‘fella by the name of Bull Mottram he was, quaint sort of a man, a sailor. He told me one time that the place for old sailors was the Isle of Dogs. That there was sanctuary there.’

Harcourt looks at him patiently.

‘Yes, brother?’

‘Sometimes, now that I’m old, how old I don’t quite know — what year is it?’

‘Can’t help you there. If we got our hands on a newspaper we’d know, certainly, my brother.’

‘Sometimes anyway I’m thinking of the Isle of Dogs, as a place of rest for a weary sailor, which I surely am.’

‘Don’t be old yet, brother, don’t be old yet.’

‘Sometimes I’m thinking of that, Harcourt.’

‘Be thinking of it, be thinking of it — but don’t you be old yet.’

And some roisterers, some weekend lads, spilling out of a drinking house distract them, because Harcourt and Eneas are not shy to put out their hands to the passing men, and ask them in worsened voices for the price of a celestial bottle. A broken-hearted whiteman and a broken-hearted blackman of still working age aren’t much of a pull for money. They get nothing but puzzlement.

‘My sister Teasy, she’s the finest mendicant nun in Bexhill!’

And the moon is a barrel seen from the top, with the nest of water showing a grieving face.

The years themselves go on and there are groups in the streets now with whittled sticks for guns, now and then a true gun, if old and pulled back into service from a long retirement. What’s afoot is freedom, that dreaded thing. He recognizes the passionate alarm of the smart police as they drive all tooth and nail through the major boulevards. Little peaceful backyards will suddenly mill about, as he passes, like a mob of woodlice with their stone dragged off. Harcourt’s mind acquires all the slim alarm of the emergency. Better a broken drinker now than an army man. There is no trace of uniform or employment about him. Their company contracts are long done, and they scratch for their shillings where they can. Better so, when the patriots are trying to tear the old Britishness out of Nigeria, erase the men and emblems of the very Queen herself.

Nevertheless Harcourt’s father reports some midnight visitors at his little shack, looking for Harcourt and very pushy and loud in the looking. New heroes of this trouble, but old foes and contemptuous enemies of Harcourt and his imperial ways. Imperial! Imperial dossers! Harcourt’s father, as an old servant of the crown, is happily too mad to be properly alarmed. But it behoves the two younger men to be as dark as lice, as secret as birds. And keep to the cracks and nooks of darkness. Which is doubly awkward, as Harcourt has some buckets of potatoes fermenting nicely in his father’s abode, only a few weeks from drinkability.

‘Did it ever occur to you, brother Eneas,’ says Harcourt, ‘that Lagos is almost the same word as Sligo, give or take an i or an a?’

‘What help would it be, heart, if it did? It’s a long road to Sligo. I saw yesterday in the window of the Asian tobacconist that we’re in nineteen hundred and fifty-eight. I stared into the window amazed. What year did I come to Nigeria? How long am I here? Fifty-eight! If the year is fifty-eight then I’m fifty-eight myself and an old fella like me can’t be seeing home in every town he goes to. I don’t know where I am, but it isn’t Sligo town.’

‘OK, brother. Brother?’

‘Yes?’

Harcourt halts him in the cindery street.

‘Does that mean we’re eight years going about?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not looking into it. A lady doesn’t like to count her years. An old Sligo bastard likewise.’

‘Right.’

Past they go, the spick-and-span police, in wagons very like to the Crossley tenders of yore along the rhododendron backways of the county Sligo. Roaring then through poverty and grandeur, blackbird and peacock. Beloved Ireland. Disastrous freedom. These fellas, the Nigerian police, are just like them, in the wrong suits to please the patriots.

‘Eneas!’

The final wagon nearly skims a slice of ham off of Eneas’s cheek.

‘What, what!’

‘Don’t step out there, brother.’

‘Just looking at them. Just looking at something familiar to me. They don’t know. I was once like them. They think their strength’s going to be a protection for themselves. But the only creature that survives the world is lambs. Those men’ll lose their Vivs and their Sligos. I can smell it.’

‘What can you smell, Eneas?’

‘Freedom.’

The shopkeepers’ eyes have tiny lights of terror dancing there. In the gloom among their tins and costly European goods, the relics of decency, items calling out to Eneas their longing for punctuality, trains on time, order, starched clothes, they harbour in their eyes the minuscule constellations of fear. And whereas only yesterday they awaited the tread of the stranger’s foot on their thresholds with professional interest and attention, now in this new day they cannot altogether rule out that same tread as the tread of a killer or an agent of retribution. Eneas and Harcourt find their formerly efficient ruses for begging more or less defunct, and few things are more frightening it seems than two bedraggled codgers stumbling in at a shop door. They can wholeheartedly curse this political turmoil, just as much as the flunkey in his endangered nest, or the imperial officer all tense with braid and doubt in his.

Nigeria is rising like a bird, dragging a little of the lake with it on its white feathers as it strikes out for the last light of the west. The swan follows the light with longing, leaving even the harbour of the blackening lake, letting the pearls of water fall back into the darkness. Perhaps freedom cannot be won because a man is ever a hobbled beast and is not among the beauties of God’s old catalogue of animals. The violent chill that rushes in behind sunset blows against the bird but inside its coat of feathers it’s as hot as a hearth.

‘I think a bit of dancing is required of us,’ says Harcourt. ‘I think a bit of side-stepping. Getting killed by the patriots of Nigeria is one bloody thing but dying of thirst is altogether another.’

‘Certainly,’ says Eneas.

‘I’ll go to my old father’s house with all due caution, brother, and throw my bits and pieces together. If there’s anything of yours there I’ll bundle it likewise.’

‘OK, Harcourt.’ He doesn’t like to point out the obvious — not a farthing will there be.

‘I’ll bundle it likewise and say goodbye to the old man and we’ll step out on the road to — to wherever a train still goes. How about Kenya?’

‘All right,’ he says.

‘I’ll meet you at the stockyard before nightfall.’

‘All right. Where the wandering men sit drinking in the evening.’

That’s the place. Only this time we’ll leap the train.’

‘We will,’ says Eneas, his throat as dry as fire.

He hurries to the stockyards and sits in the agreed place as obediently as a child.

An hour or two pass and as it is towards evening now the familiar wanderers gather on the scratchy slopes with their bottles garnered from a day of begging coins.

Eneas has no helpful, human bottle and his stomach is starting to shrink to a nut. He can feel his ribcage bending at all points like sixteen ancient bows. A yellow sweat emerges on his hatted head. He grips his old knees and tries to squeeze the little pain out through the wall of his stomach. Well, he can wait for Harcourt but he doesn’t believe he’s fit for travelling. It’s a while since they’ve lacked their evening drink and now ounce by ounce his courage is falling from him. An old man is a sad bugger of a sight truly. Now and then in the filthied sheets of dark a train toils enormously up the gradient, its lamp out front as bright as a moon. Hurry on, Harcourt, for the love of God, he mumbles. The courage of your pal is waning. Hurry on. Hurry on. Hurry on.

In the upshot he’s a heap of moisture. There’s no charity in it. His head is a roar of sickness. Maybe somewhere indistinctly he understands the true nature of these ravaging DTs and accepts their plundering. But Eneas McNulty, all the same, man and boy, seems to him to be extinct suddenly in the petty maelstrom of nothing to drink.

At the very pit, the very doom of disquiet, he stands abruptly and staggers off back into the dark quarters.

Movement and purpose allay his panic. With old legs flashing along, sparks and smoke fuming from his trousers, he thinks, he heads for Harcourt’s father’s shack. He must pass through empty quarters where the moon is the only watchman with his broken stare, and old buildings aping the buildings of the London docks disintegrate under the pinny stars. The building of himself is no better now, a little Sligo lean-to collapsing, collapsing. Sligo, Sligo. Tuneless song. Harcourt, Harcourt, rescue your pal.

There’s no handle to the old man’s door, it stands open, showing the dark room inside. The foot of the door scratches on the dusty boards. The smell of something akin to alcohol blusters about. But maybe he imagines it. There’s a dishonest stillness about the shack that is new to him. Surely the old father lies within, astray with his own addled brains, in the back room where his grimy bed is set.

‘Harcourt,’ he says, like a praying man, ‘Harcourt, for the love of God …’

He doesn’t believe there’s a blessed soul to answer him. The smell maintains itself, to his surprise. The room as if magically lightens as his own eyes are altered by the deeper gloom. He sees some of his own scant possessions knocked across the filthy floor, and a white hat of Harcourt’s well-known to him. This is a poor job of packing certainly. He suspects instantly that Harcourt has bought a bottle, and that is the smell he smells, and he can surely forgive his friend that weakness, because he would swallow a bottle, glass and all, himself. By Christ and His Nails, he would.

And he pushes on amid the bushes of darkness to the second room and he has to open that door. This room takes the moon from the gable window and after the dark assumes the brightness of a theatre. Harcourt’s father as expected lies on his miry cot, as neat as a porpoise. His bulk fits the dip in the poor bed perfectly, by long tenancy. It would be a comfort to Eneas but for the stench being twice as violent in here, a stench as hard as shit but with that axe of potatoes through it. Someone has shoved a tin funnel into Harcourt’s father’s mouth, and the old piano tuner seems to bear it carelessly. He forbears to struggle up and shout and communicate to Eneas — his son’s companion — his outrage. Down his cheeks and onto the mattress thin as soda bread, a yellow liquid lies, as if cooled like lava into rock, and Eneas puts out a hand and scoops just a hint of this stuff on to a finger and sniffs it and tastes it. Puzzling, primitive, like something you might put in your mouth as a child. His wild blood recognizes the rats of alcohol leaping into him like he was a sewer.