The Whipping Club (37 page)

             
“We can go hunting around for a B-and-B. I can afford a few days off before the job search begins,” Officer Dolan said.

             
“You and I could share a room,” Beth suggested. “And Officer Dolan could–”

             
“Beth. Call me Dan for now, would you?”

             
“He’s off duty, so he is, Beth,” Sister Cecilia interjected. “We all use our first names here.”

             
“I’ll go and get my case. If it’s all right, Sister, I’ll leave for a day or two.”

             
“Go on, Ava. You can do as you like. I’ll find someone else to torture with gin rummy for a few days,” she said with a wink.

Adrian stuffed his pockets with day-old bread and escaped through the scullery door in the early morning. Never to be heard from again, he hoped.
And who is the eejit now, Brother Ryder?
Whenever they could steal the chance, he and Peter were smart to play on the outskirts of Surtane. He learned his way through the woods and through the fallow fields to Malahide Road. No more stuffing his pockets full of chestnuts with his friend. No more Peter at all.

             
After a full day in hiding and a sleepless night of terror stuffed inside an empty trash bin in Phoenix Park, Adrian spent another half day riding around Dublin on a city bus so he could get some safe sleep. He’d have his payback one day, he told himself as he stepped out of the bus past the hordes of people carousing up and down O’Connell Street. Adrian knew his escape would have had punishing repercussions for all of the boys at Surtane, and some would want to kill him. There would be no movies for months now, letters withheld, food further rationed. But maybe the Brothers would just as soon let him go, he thought, lowering his blue woolen cap. No doubt they’d be better off without bad blood. Let him starve, they might think, though he was sure he wouldn’t starve. He ate the last crabapple he mitched from an orchard and stood silently in front of the Custom House with the lion and the unicorn carved in Portland stone on the roof and marveled at the beauty of it.

             
He set off for the dank cobblestone streets behind the quays, his feet frozen from wet puddles he walked into, the smell of urine in the air obscene. He watched a group of lorry truckers loading boxes of artificial manure from the Wicklow Manure Co., no doubt for farmers down the country. He’d gone to Dollymount beach once and seen the big ocean liners on the horizon and dreamt about Dublin’s seaport with Peter, but this rat infested loading dock was no sandy beach and there were no picture book blue skies.

             
He’d be off to the big sea himself and a new life away from this rat’s nest, he hoped, trying hard to locate the Jolly Roger Inn by the docklands near Ringsend. Small, rundown cottages littered the lanes, smells coming off the River Liffey of sewage violated his senses.

He kept his head down past
prowlers and pawnbroker shops,
disheveled mothers pulling their prams and snotty nosed kids through the back alleys as the noise of the traffic and the dense smog polluted his thoughts of Rosemary. He hurried along, the darkening day giving him some relief from the strain of trying to look

normal.

             
Past three o’clock this Friday, it was payday for dockers who started in the early morning hours before sun up. Weary men filled their pints at the bars, their shots of cheap whiskey lined the bars as well. It wasn’t much longer before he’d found the scummy sign for the Jolly Roger Inn. The G hung crooked like a hapless drunk.

             
He opened the hotel door and saw a bustling crowd hanging off the bar, and there stood a thin girl in her twenties, lifting a tray of drinks to take to crowded tables of hungry men.

             
Sweet Jesus, be thou my love.
He wouldn’t have recognized her without staring hard, but sweet Jesus. There was her black hair, much longer now down her back. Three hundred days off his purgatory sentence for pure thoughts, Brother Mack had once told him.
Indulge me this one day, sweet Jesus,
he begged, looking at her curly hair, her weary face. Her once creamy complexion and wide-eyed expression gone.

             
She didn’t see him and trotted off toward the hollering men.

             
Instantly he knew he’d have to find himself a job, get some money to help her. He took fifty pence from the money he taped inside his shoe, bought his first ale, and waited for her to return to the service end of the bar.

             
“Would you know who I could talk to about getting work?” he asked a mucky man beside him.

             
“What kind of a job you looking for?”

             
“On a ship.”

             
“On a ship, he says!” The man patted his pal on the back. “He’s looking for a job on a ship, he says,” repeating the joke.

             
“A closed shop,” a grubby man mumbled, sucking off the bones of his portion of ray, a few chips left on the plate. “Go on back where you come from.”

             
“I’m a Surtaner, sir.”

             
“What?”

             
“I’ve been living in Surtane,” Adrian said.

             
“And what have you done to be put in Surtane?”

             
“What do you mean, sir?”

             
“What crime have you committed? Nothing too serious, I hope.”

             
“I suppose my crime was being born, sir,” he said, sipping his ale.

             
“Better than most, then. And your training,” the first man continued, “or do you have any family connections?”

             
“None, sir, but I–”

             
“None! Oh, Jaysus.” He couldn’t contain himself from laughing. “You’re not going to walk down to the pier and start shoveling without a connection to you. You’re going for a long walk if you do.”

             
Adrian wiped his nose, lowered his eyes.

             
“There’s been more than one
murder on the docks,” the man
grumbled.

             
“Murders?”

             
“Ah, you can believe it now,” the man said, taking a long swig of Harp’s. “There’s been a bit of back biting, you know what I mean, a lot of jealousies going round with some of them waiting for years for a bit of work, and then these young buggers with no background in it…” He guzzled his glass.

             
“Go and join the union and come back. We’ll see you unloading soon.”

             
“Thank you, sir.” Rain slapping the windowpanes felt like stings on Adrian’s cheeks.

             
“Come on, are you fond of drink? We’ll buy you a few scoops.”

             
“Sure, he looks like he’d lick it off a scabby leg,”
said another
laborer who’d joined in to laugh at him.

             
“Leave the lad alone, he’s only trying. Sure, you could be a casual—if you get picked—but you wouldn’t be getting your pin now,” the mumbler said. “You wouldn’t want to try, hear?”

             
“Sure, he can go and talk to the foreman. He might be picked every now and again for work, or at least you could rob yourself a bit of coal for your poor old mother,” the man said, pointing to his own head in tribute to his intelligence.

             
The smell of dead fish stuck to the men, and Adrian turned away, taking a sip of his ale. He found himself looking straight at Rosemary who had reappeared.

             
“She’s a good one. I’ll have her one day,” the man said. “I’ll have her, I will.” He nodded in her direction and nudged Adrian’s arm.

             
“Over my dead body you’ll have me,” she retorted. “I’ll have you kicked out if you don’t mind yourself, mister.”

             
Like a dark angel Rosemary stood there, tightening the belt on her loosely fitting dress. Adrian stared at her, a waif of a thing now, the loveliest small face he’d ever seen. Big eyes looked at him. The ale tasted bitter and woozy.

             
“Go on. Go over and introduce yourself like a man. You look as if you could use a poke.”

             
The men’s breath smelled of whiskey and reminded him of Brother Ryder. The waitress’s eyes softened as she sauntered over to him. Men lingered about her like mongrel dogs before a meal.

             
“Jesus Christ, I’m off,” Rosemary said, untying her apron and pulling Adrian out of the bar with the touch of her hand. “You’re not for real,” she said, her voice hoarse. “Is it you, then?”

             
He nodded, felt a bit ashamed of his crew cut. Rosemary told Adrian not to worry about the cackling calls from the men. She flipped the finger at them and started up the street. He watched her strut in black stiletto heels and a short dress and felt the man growing inside him. He followed her up three flights of narrow stairs and watched her take out her key, looking over at him, her eyes trusting, just the way he remembered.

             
There was a cot and a nightstand in the room. The stale smell of cigarettes and aerosol spray fused to the faded olive wallpaper, one chair by the window and a hot plate on a crate. Textbooks and notebooks and pencils were stored under the cot. He followed her over to the window and she put her hands on his shoulders, lowering him into the wooden chair. He fingered her gypsy-gold nylons, the buckle of her garter belt, looked into her heart-shaped face and told himself,
Don’t believe what they’ve fed you all these years. You’re a man now. It is the madmen that don’t fit in, or why would they be locked up in there
?

             
“What are you doing here?” Rosemary asked, and he wanted to ask her the same thing.

             
“I was looking for you, Rosemary.”

             
She turned away from the sound of her name as if reminded of someone else, and then she turned back smiling. Adrian grinned at the sight of her childlike mouth, with those Chiclet teeth he loved. Little crossed lovers missing the mark.

             
“I’ve come to marry you,” he said.

             
“You’re still such a boy, Adrian,” she said, her dimples emerging.

             
“I’m a sad boy without you, Rosemary.”

             
“You look sad.” He turned away, but she pulled on his chin, touched his cheek, and he stared at her beauty, this girl who could show him what love is.

             
She flipped on the transistor radio on the windowsill. He turned it off.

             
“I can’t bear the silence,” she said.

             
“Say something, then.”

             
“You look filthy.”

             
He dared touch her breasts and she slapped his hand away.

             
“Watch yourself, young man.”

             
“Talk to me, then.”

             
“You can stay,” she said, “but mind your manners, Adrian.”

             
She flipped on the radio again.

             
Rosemary finally told him that she was no hooker, that she’d been with a man only twice, the boyfriend whom she’d met a few months back and who cherished her. The young gentleman she adored spent his nights studying to be an accountant. He promised that he loved her, that they would marry when they got on their feet. They’d see to their future.

             
Her beauty and womanly ways titillated Adrian. He wanted her comfort in a different way. She was still fairly innocent, and she knew the boy from the orphanage would not hurt her. They would not hurt each other. Despite all her recent headway, she must have been glad to see Adrian and knew that she herself could use some comfort.

             
He kissed her softly on the cheek and pulled off his work shirt. He moved his hands up her torso, grabbed her neck, rubbed her tense muscles until she gently untwined his grasp.

             
She leaned her body into his like a baby curling up to sleep, nestled her little head into his neck. He wondered where Sister Agnes had sent her, why she was all alone. No roommate. He looked around. There was the single ratty chair that had sat too many one-nighters. An ice box doubled as a stained counter, plastic plates on top. A clumsily closed box of Cheerios, a small bag of crisps. There could have been another easy chair or perhaps a table lamp but that would have blocked the ajar wooden door of the grim closet space. The loneliness was everywhere.