When Liam Pat had been working with Huxter for six weeks the man called Feeny got in touch again, on the phone one Sunday. ‘How’re you doing?’ Feeny enquired. ‘Are you settled, boy?’
Liam Pat said he was, and a few days later, when he was with the two other Irish boys from the gang, standing up at the bar in a public house called the Spurs and Horse, Feeny arrived in person. ‘How’re you doing?’ Feeny said, introducing himself. He was a wizened-featured man with black hair in a widow’s peak. He had a clerical look about him but he wasn’t a priest, as he soon made clear. He worked in a glass factory, he said.
He shook hands with all three of them, with Rafferty and Noonan as warmly as with Liam Pat. He bought them drinks, refusing to let them pay for his, saying he couldn’t allow young fellows. A bit of companionship was all he was after, he said. ‘Doesn’t it keep the poor exile going?’
There was general agreement with this sentiment. There were some who came over, Feeny said, who stayed no longer than a few days. ‘Missing the mam,’ he said, his thin lips drawn briefly back to allow a laugh that Rafferty remarked afterwards reminded him of the bark of a dog. ‘A young fellow one time didn’t step out of the train,’ Feeny said.
After that, Feeny often looked in at the Spurs and Horse. In subsequent conversations, asking questions and showing an interest, he learnt that Huxter was picking on Liam Pat. He didn’t know Huxter personally, he said, but both Rafferty and Noonan assured him that Liam Pat had cause for more complaint than he admitted to, that when Huxter got going he was no bloody joke. Feeny sympathized, tightening his mouth in a way he had, wagging his head in disgust. It was perhaps because of what he heard, Rafferty and Noonan deduced, that Feeny made a particular friend of Liam Pat, more than he did of either of them, which was fair enough in the circumstances.
Feeny took Liam Pat to greyhound tracks; he found him a better place to live; he lent him money when Liam Pat was short once, and didn’t press for repayment. As further weeks went by, everything would have been all right as far as Liam Pat was concerned if it hadn’t been for Huxter. ‘Ah, no, I’m grand,’ he continued to protest when he made his Saturday telephone call home, still not mentioning the difficulty he was experiencing with the foreman. But it had several times crossed his mind that one Monday morning he wouldn’t be there, waiting for the van to pick him up, that he’d had enough.
‘What would you do though, Liam Pat?’ Feeny asked in Bob’s Dining Rooms, where at weekends he and Liam Pat often met for a meal.
‘Go home.’
Feeny nodded; then he sighed and after a pause said it could come to that. He’d seen it before, a bullying foreman with a down on a young fellow he’d specially pick out.
‘It’s got so’s I hate him.’
Again Feeny allowed a silence to develop. Then he said:
‘They look down on us.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Any man with an Irish accent. The way things are.’
‘You mean bombs and stuff?’
‘I mean, you’re breathing their air and they’d charge you for it. The first time I run into you, Liam Pat, weren’t your friends saying they wouldn’t serve you in another bar you went into?’
‘The Hop Poles, that is. They won’t serve you in your working clothes.’
Feeny leaned forward, over a plate of liver and potatoes. He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘They wash the ware twice after us. Plates, cups, a glass you’d take a drink out of. I was in a launderette one time and I offered a woman the machine after I’d done with it. “No, thanks,” she said soon’s I opened my mouth.’
Liam Pat had never had such an experience, but people weren’t friendly. It was all right in the gang; it was all right when he went out with Rafferty and Noonan, or with Feeny. But people didn’t smile, they didn’t nod or say something when they saw you coming. The first woman he rented a room from was suspicious, always in the hall when he left the house, as if she thought he might be doing a flit with her belongings. In the place Feeny had found for him a man who didn’t live there, whose name he didn’t know, came round every Sunday morning and you paid him and he wrote out a slip. He never said anything, and Liam Pat used to wonder if he had some difficulty with speech. Although there was other people’s food in the kitchen, and although there were footsteps on the stairs and sometimes overhead, in the weeks Liam Pat had lived there he never saw any of the other tenants, or heard voices. The curtains of one of the downstairs rooms were always drawn over, which you could see from the outside and which added to the dead feeling of the house.
‘It’s the same the entire time,’ Feeny said. ‘Stupid as pigs. Can they write their names? You can see them thinking it.’
Huxter would say it straight out. ‘Get your guts put into it,’ Huxter shouted at Liam Pat, and once when something wasn’t done to his liking he said there were more brains in an Irish turnip. ‘Tow that bloody island out into the sea,’ he said another time. A drop of their own medicine, he said.
‘I couldn’t get you shifted,’ Feeny said. ‘If I could I would.’
‘Another gang, like?’
‘Maybe in a couple of weeks there’d be something.’
‘It’d be great, another gang.’
‘Did you ever know McTighe?’
Liam Pat shook his head. He said Feeny had asked him that before. Did McTighe run a gang? he asked.
‘He’s in with a bookie. It’d be a good thing if you knew McTighe. Good all round, Liam Pat.’
Ten days later, when Liam Pat was drinking with Rafferty and Noonan in the Spurs and Horse, Feeny joined them and afterwards walked away from the public house with Liam Pat.
‘Will we have one for the night?’ he suggested, surprising Liam Pat because they’d come away when closing time was called and it would be the same anywhere else. ‘No problem,’ Feeny said, disposing at once of this objection.
‘I have to get the last bus out, though. Ten minutes it’s due.’
‘You can doss where we’re going. No problem at all, boy.’
He wondered if Feeny was drunk. He’d best get back to his bed, he insisted, but Feeny didn’t appear to hear him. They turned into a side street. They went round to the back of a house. Feeny knocked gently on a window-pane and the rattle of television voices ceased almost immediately. The back door of the house opened.
‘Here’s Liam Pat Brogan,’ Feeny said.
A bulky middle-aged man, with coarse fair hair above stolid, reddish features, stood in the rectangle of light. He wore a black jersey and trousers.
‘The hard man,’ he greeted Liam Pat, proffering a hand with a cut healing along the edge of the thumb.
‘Mr McTighe,’ Feeny completed his introduction. ‘We were passing.’
Mr McTighe led the way into a kitchen. He snapped open two cans of beer and handed one to each of his guests. He picked up a third from the top of a refrigerator. Carling it was, Black Label.
‘How’re you doing, Liam Pat?’ Mr McTighe asked.
Liam Pat said he was all right, but Feeny softly denied that. More of the same, he reported: a foreman giving an Irish lad a hard time. Mr McTighe made a sympathetic motion with his large, square head. He had a hoarse voice, that seemed to come from the depths of his chest. A Belfast man, Liam Pat said to himself when he got used to the accent, a city man.
‘Is the room OK?’ Mr McTighe asked, a query that came as a surprise. ‘Are you settled?’
Liam Pat said his room was all right, and Feeny said:
‘It was Mr McTighe fixed that for you.’
‘The room?’