‘Take your chance,’ he said from above me. ‘You should go away.’
I groped my way down. The light was dim like a church but the walls smelled of evil and too much poverty. It was a bad church. One afternoon in a close like this, when I was looking for digs, I had surprised two boys holding a cat out of a third floor window. They had tied a string to its hind legs and it swung sobbing hate high above the stones of the back court. This is the city, I had thought, I’m in the city.
I came out of the front of the close into another street of desolate tenements and walked out of it into a hallucination of green fields. They had demolished streets of buildings and sown the vacant places with grass. These dazzling plots glowed like jewellery in the vivid light. On the far side, with the dirt of a hundred years cleaned away, it turned out that tenements were built of brown stone and cream stone. They shone like summer castles, but there were no banners.
A bus came and I took a seat at the front which was a mistake. When the driver swerved to avoid a dog, my bad foot slammed into the partition. I swallowed vomit and thought either you were the kind of driver who could run over a dog or you weren’t. Children were being killed all the time by drivers like this bastard who swerved.
Waiting on the bench outside the X-ray department, I found the card Primo had given me in my pocket. It had a puncture in each corner where it had been tacked to the door.
On the back of it in the same neat print as ‘Anders’ on the front, someone had lettered the word BROND.
FOUR
There was something wrong about Kennedy. He would come in and sit with me for half an hour and then get up and go off to work. I had never asked to be any more than his lodger. He was always working, but now he had time as well for these communions. It was not as if he was a great conversationalist.
‘A strange thing . . .’
Pause till he had gathered the last modicum of my attention. I glazed over with the effort of attention he required.
‘In Ulster now they’ve had these killings, knee-cappings, that bombing.’ He paid out his insight slowly like a fisherman with a length of line. ‘Would you credit it that sex crimes are not one iota higher than they ever were?’
He was drinking the last of a mug of tea. Lately he had taken to joining me with his last cup before he went out.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said, ‘but that they’re not lower than they ever were, though it’s hard to get the truth of it.’
‘The legendary purity of the Irish.’
‘How’s that?’
I was sorry I had mentioned it.
‘Nothing. It was just something I read in a book . . . It was a book about Chicago or somewhere in the States. One chapter was about this gang of bankrobbers and killers – public enemies one to seven – “mad dogs” the papers called them. And the guy who wrote the book had this great bit where he said: “There is no record of irregularity in their sex life; in that they preserved the legendary purity of the Irish.” ’
‘What would their names be then?’ Kennedy asked.
‘Names?’ Anybody I had told that story to had laughed. Nobody had ever asked for their names. ‘It’s a while since I read it. I don’t know. O’Bannion probably.’
For a second I thought I had offended him, but he said innocently, ‘Ah. There’s a lot of them RCs in crime.’
On the other hand, since being confined to the house I had seen less of Jackie. Not that I should have been confined to it – or was particularly since whenever boredom overtook me I swung out between my sticks with an old Chirnside Amateurs sock pulled on over the bandaging. Still, I spent most of my time about the place. I didn’t much want to meet Brond or the mysterious Anders – in fact the way I was feeling I didn’t even want to meet Mr Morrison. When I thought of that behemoth of nostalgia butted into firewood against the tenement wall, the person I least wanted to see again was the old gentleman.
At the beginning, though, I used the excuse to hang about the house because I had the notion that with everyone else out of the way – gone home for the summer or at work – Jackie and I would get to know one another better. Like the song said: Getting – to – know – all a – bout you.
‘God bless all here!’ I said hopefully, limping into the kitchen the morning after they’d put on the plaster.
‘Have you nothing to do?’
She rattled greasy breakfast dishes into the basin.
‘I’ll dry for you, if you like.’
‘I can manage.’
My backside rested comfortably on the edge of the table. It was nice to get the weight off my foot.
‘How long are you going to be like that?’ she asked in a tone less kind than interested.
‘Not long. I’m a quick healer. I lost three of the toenails,’ I added, trying to strike a balance between being brave and being honest.
‘Not meaning to be uncivil,’ she said knocking one plate on another, ‘but since when did your lodging money buy you the use of the kitchen?’
That had been the first day and after it Jackie cooled as Kennedy warmed to me. I was surprised one morning when she put her head round the door of the lodgers’ sitting room and smiled at me.
‘There’s a lady to see you.’
I thought of my mother, but it was Margaret Briody who came and stood just inside the door. She was wearing jeans and my head was level with her crotch because she was taller than I remembered. Over it the cloth was frayed, faded blue and stretched.
‘It’s nice to see you,’ I said.
Jackie offered us tea and she refused and then Jackie told her to sit down which I should have done and all the time I was looking at her and wondering what beautiful chance had brought her.
‘Burst toes sounds horrible,’ Margaret said wincing.
Half the winter we had kept benches warm in the same two Ordinary classes, but apart from the night of the Professor’s party all she had ever said to me was, ‘Thank God, that’s over,’ after an exam at Easter.
‘I’ve been very brave,’ I said. ‘How did you hear I was out of commission?’
‘I met Peter. He told me.’
The only Peter I could think of was Peter Thomson, the dairyman my father laughed at and envied because he dressed like a townie and put the farmer’s back up by refusing to do odd jobs when he wasn’t tending the herd.
‘Peter Kilpatrick,’ Margaret said widening her blue eyes at me.
‘I didn’t know you knew . . . Peter.’ In my head I usually thought of my fellow lodger as that loud-mouthed bastard Kilpatrick.
‘Well, I’d be bound to,’ she said. ‘Since I’m in the club.’
‘Club?’
‘Moirhill Harriers. I joined when I was fourteen. Peter was their star then – particularly for us girls.’ She had a dark brown laugh like peat water pouring off a hill. ‘He has marvellous thighs.’
‘What about you? I mean – do you still do the running bit?’
‘I won the four hundred metres at the Inter-Universities,’ she said.
‘I didn’t know.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about it. The world’s full of people who haven’t heard the news yet.’
‘You must be pretty good all the same,’ I said.
Under the circumstances, it seemed reasonable to have a look at her legs. Neither jeans nor running to be first could spoil them.
‘I’m thinking of taking up athletics next session myself,’ I said.
The way things were going I could train for the stitched-up one-legged events.
As if reading my thoughts, she asked, ‘Will your foot be all right by then?’
‘That’s no problem.’ Round the perimeter, I pictured us jogging gently. Would a poll of fourteen-year-old harriers – girls only, please – rate my thighs as marvellous? ‘When I go back to the hospital in a fortnight, they’re going to amputate. That gives me plenty of time to get used to the tin foot before classes start. I wouldn’t go in for the sprints, of course, and the marathon might be a bit hard on the join. Something in between.’