How could I have any confidence that I had seen him once before?
‘He wasn’t even wearing glasses,’ I mumbled.
‘Who?’ Donald Baxter asked, floating his moon face across the table at me. ‘Are you going to be sick? If you’re going to be sick, go away. What’s this about glasses?’
All of that was too complicated to explain, and so I told him about the Canadian and his geography lesson, but heard myself adding, ‘He’s a friend of the Professor’s too.’
‘Gracemount has some strange friends,’ Baxter said. ‘It comes from having been a spy. Have you never read that all the bright students get recruited at Trinity Hall for one side or the other?’ He laughed at the look on my face. ‘Don’t worry. M.I.— five or six and a half or something. He was on our side.’
I tried to tell him what the others had said after the Canadian but I couldn’t remember it very well and my throat ached from talking against the noise in the bar. It didn’t matter though. It seemed as if Donald Baxter had heard it before.
‘What could happen in Scotland that would have any significance? Decisions are things that happen somewhere else. The nationalised industries moved all the R. and D. south and took the steam out of James Watt’s kettle. Adam Smith got himself a transfer to Head Office in St Louis. Bright chap young Smith.’ It was impossible to tell if he was angry or playacting. ‘Real things happen in the real world. Here in never – never land all you can do is beat your wife or batter a stranger senseless against a wall.’
‘That sounds real enough to me,’ I said. ‘You’d think it was real enough if you were the guy against the wall.’
‘What do you know? You’re a country boy. A clown. You don’t know anything. That stuff doesn’t matter. It’s only personal.’
I didn’t know what he was talking about. To be sociable, I said, ‘Happy is the country that has no history.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said.
I didn’t have to stay there and be insulted. I started to get up, but lost my balance and staggered back. I turned to find a beefy face above a rugby tie glaring at me.
‘You spilled my beer,’ Beefy Face said.
It was true. I could see the back of his hand where it held the glass was wet, and some of the liquid had given a dark edge to the white cuff of his shirt.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘That’s not good enough.’ Beefy Face had a nice voice. You could tell that Daddy had paid to send him to a good school.
‘Can’t say any better than sorry.’ I wanted to go home and lie down and go to sleep. ‘I’ll buy you another pint. What is it you’re drinking?’
‘Tell you what. I’ll let you have it. And you can guess.’
As he finished, he turned his wrist and poured what was left of the pint down the front of my jacket.
I don’t often lose my temper. It frightens me. I must have hit him for he had fallen down. He collapsed so fast I went down too and landed on my knees beside him. That was all right. It made it easy to keep hitting him. Something in his face broke against my fist.
Hands grabbed me by the shoulders and I resisted until someone got a handful of my hair and dragged me backwards off him.
‘You bloody madman!’ someone panted in my ear. ‘You’d better get out of here! Fast!’
Choking on my rage, I saw Donald Baxter staring down at me.
‘My God!’ he said. ‘A homicidal pacifist!’
To the plaintive tune of his reproach, a white moon lost its shape on a drift of smoke.
Some uncertain time afterwards, the lock in the Kennedys’ front door had turned upside down. Cunningly I upturned the key and marrying it with the lock brought things to order.
Foxy Muldoon, least favoured of my fellow lodgers, was on his head on the bottom step of the hall stairs. If this shape was delirium, it should waver and give to let me pass through. Closer, it resolved into a great arse in chorus girl’s knickers and under it a face inverted yet too malignant not to be part of reality.
‘You look awful,’ Muldoon said. In some complicated manoeuvre, he reversed himself upright. He stared and exclaimed, ‘Christ!’
‘You called, my child?’
‘You’re sweating drunk. You look awful.’
‘Father, I have sinned – or I would have if she’d given me the chance.’
‘You shit!’
He began to crab up the stairs backwards, fixing his tiny malevolent eyes on me.
‘What shop did you get your knickers in?’
‘Double shit!’
‘Whoo!’ I made a poke towards the shadowy bulge of his trousers and then was lying on the stairs.
From this new angle, I saw the knickers went down to his ankles. Pyjamas! it was a revelation – pyjamas and his suit jacket on top! – and one I shared with him at once.
‘Why are you creeping about, little Jesus, in your jammies? Has Jackie been giving you holy communion?’
There was a crepitation as of skull plates. Inevitably, when I rolled over, the bookie’s clerk, Jackie’s husband, muffled out of the night with his key in his hand hung over me chewing his cheeks. I found my eyes watering and looked away.
I caught Muldoon’s exotic tail vanishing.
Behind me, a door closed and Kennedy was gone. Had he been there at all?
When I wakened, I struggled to get out of bed until I realised I was already on the floor. It was black dark; but then, if the curtains were drawn, they were of heavy velvet. Mornings I had lain in bed thinking it was the middle of the night, only when I had opened these curtains to be blinded by the sun. I crawled to check and when I came to the wall I felt a velvet hem and at full stretch stroked another. It was night. I erected myself. At first country dark, an accident of housebacks and the run of the hill, it sieved out into gable ends and a lightness of shifting cloud. To insult a man in his own house was a terrible thing. What right had I to call her Jackie? That had always been a bad joke. And ‘holy communion’ – if there was a God, I’d slipped up there.
The blasphemy decided it. I would go and apologise to the man, and had started to dress when I found I was, and the stairs ran under my feet as effortlessly as an escalator.
I knocked on the closed door, and then leant my head against it for coolness.
‘Ohahah!’ Jackie Kennedy cried on a sweet apprehensive note as my poor head fell through the open door into the cloven warmth of her bosom.
‘Are you an entire eejit?’ she asked, with something more than an idle curiosity.
I stared sadly at her as she removed herself from me.
‘Are you all right? You’re a hideous colour.’
‘Oh, I’m well. I’m fine. Would you call my landlord, please?’
‘Dear God! Your landlord? It’s five o’clock in the morning.’
‘It would only take a minute.’
Suddenly tired beyond tiredness, I nodded forward on to her breast. Upright, I might have slept in its musty comfort like a baby if one hand needing support had not fallen astray just as the inner door opened. The restful glow of the lamp was split by a white finger stretched from Kennedy to our tableau of innocence.
Terrified by the muscles of his cheeks in profile, I called out, ‘Don’t be upset, dada, it’s only me your own little gossoon Oedipus,’ and fell backwards out of my own poor mimicry of a Belfast accent, overtaken until I could feel falling no more.
TWO
Not that I had ever been in anything you could call doubt about the nature of my own true father. Careering in slow motion up in bed, on impulse I checked to see if he had changed out of his boots before coming to town to visit me.