At Swim, Two Boys

by Jamie O'Neill

Fairweather cumulus to give the correct designation: on account they cumulate, so Mr. Mack believed.

A happy dosser was nosing along the lane and Mr. Mack watched with lenient disdain. Any old bone. Lick of something out of a can. Dog’s life really. When he came to the street Mr. Mack touched a finger to his hat, but the happy dosser paid him no regard. He slouched along and Mr. Mack saw it puddling after, something he had spilt in the road, his wasted civility. Lips pursed with comment, he pulled, squeezing, one droop of his bush mustache.

Presently, a jerky streak of anatomy distinguished itself in the door, coughing and spluttering while it came, and shielding its eyes from the sun. “Is it yourself, Sergeant?” “Hello now, Mr. Doyle,” said Mr. Mack.

Mr. Mack could not engage but a rise was being took out of him. The paperman made play of settling his papers, huffling and humphing in that irritating consumptive way. He made play of banging his chest for air. He spat, coughing with the spittle, a powdery disgruntled cough—“Choky today,” said he—and Mr. Mack viewed the spittle-drenched sheet he now held in his hand. This fellow, the curse of an old comrade, try anything to vex me. “I’m after picking up,” choosily he said, “an Irish Times, only I read here—” “An Irish Times, Sergeant? Carry me out and bury me decent, so you have and all. Aren’t you swell away with the high-jinkers there?” Mr. Mack plumped his face and a laugh, like a fruit, dropped from his mouth. “I wouldn’t know about any high-jinkers,” he confided. “Only I read here ’tis twice the price of any other paper. Twice the price,” he repeated, shaking his cautious head. A carillon of coins chinkled in his pocket. “I don’t know now can the expense be justified.”

At last the paperman had the change found. Two lusterless pennies, he held them out, the old sort, with the old Queen’s hair in a bun. Mr. Mack was on the blow of plucking them in his fingers when the paperman coughed—“Squeeze me”—coughed into his—“Squeeze me peas, Sergeant”—coughed into his sleeve. Not what you’d call coughing but hacking down the tracts of his throat to catch some breath had gone missing there. His virulence spattered the air between, and Mr. Mack thought how true what they say, take your life in your hands every breath you breathe.

Pall of his face back there. They do say they take on worse in the sunshine, your consumptives do. Segotia: is it some class of a flower? I never thought to inquire. Pal of me heart. Well, we’re talking twenty thirty years back. Mick and Mack the paddy whacks. We had our day, ’tis true. Boys together and bugles together and bayonets in the ranks. Rang like bells, all we wanted was hanging. But there’s no pals except you’re equals. I learnt me that after I got my very first stripe.

Brambly path through shadowy wood. Birds singing on all sides. Mess of nettles, cow-parsley, could take a scythe to them. Light green frilly leaves would put you in mind of, ahem, petticoats. A blackbird scuttled off the path like a schoolboy caught at a caper. Then he was out in the light, and the lawns of Ballygihen House stretched leisurely to the sea. The sea oh the sea, long may it be. What a magnificent house it was, view and vantage them both, for its windows commanded the breadth of Dublin Bay. If he had this house what wouldn’t he do but sit upon its sloping lawns while all day long the mailboats to’d and fro’d.

Quick look-see in the hand-me-down window. Now that’s new. Must tell Jim about that. A flute in Ducie’s window. Second thoughts, steer clear. Trouble enough with Gordie and the pledgeshop. Brewery men at Fennelly’s. Mighty clatter they make. On purpose much of the time. Advertise their presence. Fine old Clydesdale eating at his bait-sack. They look after them well, give them that. Now here’s a wonder—paper stand deserted. Crowd of loafers holding up the corner. A nipper-squeak across the road and his heart lifted for it was the boy out of the ironmonger’s to say the tram had passed, package ready for collection. He took the delivery, signed the entry-book, patting the boy’s head in lieu of gratuity, recrossed the street.

New tin of snuff on the counter. Must remember to mark that down in the book. Impossible to keep tabs else. Straits of Ballambangjan ahead. “I wonder if I might just . . . pardon me while I . . . if you could maybe.” Maneuver safe between. Find harbor in the kitchen. Range stone cold, why wouldn’t she keep an eye on it? Poke head back inside an instant. “Range is out, Aunt Sawney, should your guests require some tea.” Three snorts came in reply as each woman took a pinch of snuff.

Page was a touch cramped at the base so that the end line, “Proprietress: Sawney Burke,” had to be got in small print. Still, it was the motto that mattered, and that was a topper. Will comfort our troops in France. Appeal to the honor of the house. Mustache. Touch it. Spot of something in the hairs. Egg, is it? Stuck. Was I right all the same to leave it to honor only? Nothing about the pocket. How’s about this for the hookum? Pounds, Shillings and Pence! Why Not Buy Local And Save On Leather? Appeal to the pocket of the house. Might better have had two orders made up. One for the swells, other for the smells. Never mind the smells, the Macks is on the up.

Why would anyone look into a font? he wondered as he poured the holy water. Suppose when you are that way, dig with the other foot that is, these things take on an interest, a mystery even, which all too often for ourselves, digging as it were with the right foot, which is to say the proper one, have lost—lost where I was heading for there. Cheeses, would you look at that motor the way it’s pitching up Glasthule. Tearaways they have at the wheel. Take your life in your hands every turn you take. Hold on now, I believe I recognize that motor-car. He blew on his mustache, considering. There’s a pucker idea: fonts for trams. Should send that in the paper. Never seen a font in a moving object. Would a bishop have one in his brougham for instance? Or is there maybe an injunction against fonts in anything not stationary? Should check the facts before committing to paper. There’s fellows ready to pounce, the least miscalculation.

Nothing much in the street. Far away beyond the fields and the new red-bricked terraces rose the Dublin Mountains. Green grew to grey. Oats by reason the wet climatics. Clever the way the fields know to stop just where the hills begin. Turf then. They were down the other week trying to hock it on account the price of coal. Is there a season for turf, though? Make a donkey of yourself buying the wrong time of year. Curls of smoke from the cottages nearby. Keeping the home fires burning. Back inside the shop. Clink, it’s only me. Font again, no wonder it dries up so. Trade a little slack. Always the same this time of day. Might give that counter a wipe-down. Bits of snuff and goodness knows. Time to finish a stocking before dinner? Wouldn’t it be grand now if Gordie would be wearing one of my stockings. Where’s there a place to fix a new shelf? Need a display for maybe a quality range of teas. High-grown, tippy Darjeeling, cans of, please. That would fetch the carriage trade.

Wonder he learnt his readamadaisy.

Unseemly talk and scandalous notions, the working man and brothers and priests. Politics was a puzzle at the best of times. Gordie had joined the Irish Volunteers that drilled to fight the Ulster Volunteers that drilled to fight Home Rule. But then the war came and they all joined up and were drilling together now to fight the Hun.

“Where was the priests when we called on them? Where was the priests when they locked out the workers? At the pulpit is where, damning to hell the working man. They have a saying down Clare way, the four cautions: Beware a woman in front of you, beware a horse behind of you, beware a cart beside of you, and beware a priest every which way.” He turned his head on the stone and looked cheekily out from under his cap. “Am I wicked or what?”

It awed him that Doyler was not bemeaned by his life as Jim felt bemeaned by his.

He collected the tray and ascended the backstairs, extinguishing lights as he went. “A boy about stockings,” he said when he came to the bedroom. “Now, there’s a comfort for the troops.” Doyler turned from the window. “If ever you lays a hand on that one you’re dead.” MacMurrough grinned and tossed him his badge. “I believe you may have mislaid this. Careless, very.” “Dead meat, you got that?”

Anthony MacMurrough, surviving son of Sir John MacMurrough, and grandson of the late regretted Dermot James William MacMurrough, QC, MP, so forth and so fifth, has returned from His Majesty’s Wandsworth where lately he served two years’ hard for gross indecency with a chauffeur-mechanic. July Jamboree in Glasthule. Apply Ballygihen House.” He said this looking her in the face, while her face hardened, but he looked away after and it was from her voice he learnt how deeply he disappointed his aunt. “Yes, they have coarsened you. They have made—I mean the English have made—a braggart of my nephew. No doubt you believe I interfere. But you are fortunate to have anyone take an interest at all.” “I should survive without you, Aunt Eva.” “Yes, you would,” she agreed, “if only to spite us.”

Shin Feiners, Leaguers, Volunteers. They stood for Ireland, that much was clear, Ireland her own. Doyler was a socialist. Jim liked the way he pronounced the word, without the expected sh sound, but he still had only the muzziest idea what it stood for. Doyler himself was small help. His talk was names and slogans. Citizen Army. Liberty Hall. Nor King nor Kaiser.

Jim knew his face was skewed and he tried to square it for his father’s sake. But he could not accept his father behaving that way. He comes to shake your hand, your friend, the lad you grew up with. He wants to congratulate you on being made sergeant. And you reprimand him for his buttons. It was like your stripes would be sewn to your heart not your sleeve. Jim knew he would never play so false. No matter how the world divided them, he’d never let his pal down so. For friendship was a heartfelt thing. Its absence was an ache inside that no rank could ever assuage. He was certain he would never act so—yet even as these assurances trundled on, the suspicion grew that in fact he already had.

But no, Jim had his three stripes on his sleeve and Doyler had buttons far too greasy. Let Jim be the schoolteacher. It was good enough for Doyler if he was the dungman’s lad the remainder of his days. And God help me, he never asked anything of me, never ever a thing, save a kiss, and even that I refused him.

“I’m sure you were,” said Mr. Mack. “I’m sure you’re good brave boys. But you’d do better thinking of school and getting your readamadaisy and your rickmatick right.”

“Aren’t we two very foolish old quilts,” he said, “to be argufying the past?

Poor old Mr. Mack. He has it harder than any of us, I sometimes think. There he is with his heart all set on being a gent. Will he never learn ’tis the mark of a gent, not that hats are lifted to him, but that he lifts his hat to others? And Mr. Mack is a gent to the bone. To the crown of the bowler hat of him.

Every tenement, every fever-nest, every rookery in Dublin was spilling its contents in the road and it seemed to Mr. Mack all slumdom must reel its way to his tram-stop. Every shawlie and shabaroon, every larrikin and scut, every slut, daggle-tail, trollop and streel, frowsy old bowsies and loitering corner-boy sprawlers in caps, every farthing-face and ha’penny-boy, every gutty, gouger, louser, glugger, nudger, sharper, shloother, head, every whore’s melt of them, mister-me-friend and go-by-the-wall, the dogs in the street themself—all rascaldom was making for Mr. Mack’s tram-stop; and he must pinch and shove to gain any headway at all.

It was all ballyhooly let loose.

“I’ll find an island where we’ll live. A small island all to ourselves. There’ll be sand and dunes and cliffs. We shall call it Noman. Do you know why we shall call it Noman?” “Go on so.” “Because no man is an island.