‘He did of course.’
‘It’s a house that’s known to me,’ Mr McTighe said, and did not elucidate further. He gave a racing tip, Cassandra’s Friend at Newton Abbot, the first race.
‘Put your shirt on that, Liam Pat,’ Feeny advised, and laughed. They stayed no more than half an hour, leaving the kitchen as they had entered it, by the door to the back yard. On the street Feeny said:
‘You’re in good hands with Mr McTighe.’
Liam Pat didn’t understand that, but didn’t say so. It would have something to do with the racing tip, he said to himself. He asked who the man who came round on Sunday mornings for the rent was.
‘I wouldn’t know that, boy.’
‘I think I’m the only lodger there at the moment. There’s a few shifted out, I’d say.’
‘It’s quiet for you so.’
‘It’s quiet all right.’
Liam Pat had to walk back to the house that night; there’d been no question of dossing down in Mr McTighe’s. It took him nearly two hours, but the night was fine and he didn’t mind. He went over the conversation that had taken place, recalling Mr McTighe’s concern for his well-being, still bewildered by it. He slept soundly when he lay down, not bothering to take off his clothes, it being so late.
Weeks went by, during which Liam Pat didn’t see Feeny. One of the other rooms in the house where he lodged was occupied again, but only for a weekend, and then he seemed once more to be on his own. One Friday Huxter gave Rafferty and Noonan their cards, accusing them of skiving. ‘Stay if you want to,’ he said to Liam Pat, and Liam Pat was aware that the foreman didn’t want him to go, that he served a purpose as Huxter’s butt. But without his friends he was lonely, and a bitter resentment continuously nagged him, spreading from the foreman’s treatment of him and affecting with distortion people who were strangers to him.
‘I think I’ll go back,’ he said the next time he ran into Feeny, outside the Spurs and Horse one night. At first he’d thought Feeny was touchy when he went on about his experience in a launderette or plates being washed twice; now he felt it could be true. You’d buy a packet of cigarettes off the same woman in a shop and she wouldn’t pass a few minutes with you, even though you’d been in yesterday. The only good part of being in this city was the public houses where you’d meet boys from home, where there was a bit of banter and cheerfulness, and a sing-song when it was permitted. But when the evening was over you were on your own again.
‘Why’d you go back, boy?’
‘It doesn’t suit me.’
‘I know what you mean. I often thought of it myself.’
‘It’s no life for a young fellow.’
‘They’ve driven you out. They spent eight centuries tormenting us and now they’re at it again.’
‘He called my mam a hooer.’
Huxter wasn’t fit to tie Mrs Brogan’s laces, Feeny said. He’d seen it before, he said. ‘They’re all the same, boy.’
‘I’ll finish out the few weeks with the job we’re on.’
‘You’ll be home for Christmas.’
‘I will.’
They were walking slowly on the street, the public houses emptying, the night air dank and cold. Feeny paused in a pool of darkness, beneath a street light that wasn’t working. Softly, he said:
‘Mr McTighe has the business for you.’
It sounded like another tip, but Feeny said no. He walked on in silence, and Liam Pat said to himself it would be another job, a different foreman. He thought about that. Huxter was the worst of it, but it wasn’t only Huxter. Liam Pat was homesick for the estate, for the small town where people said hullo to you. Since he’d been here he’d eaten any old how, sandwiches he bought the evening before, for breakfast and again in the middle of the day, burger and chips later on, Bob’s Dining Rooms on a Sunday. He hadn’t thought about that before he’d come – what he’d eat, what a Sunday would be like. Sometimes at Mass he saw a girl he liked the look of, the same girl each time, quiet-featured, with her hair tied back. But when he went up to her after Mass a few weeks back she turned away without speaking.
‘I don’t want another job,’ he said.
‘Why would you, Liam Pat? After what they put you through?’
‘I thought you said Mr McTighe -’
‘Ah no, no. Mr McTighe was only remembering the time you and Dessie Coglan used distribute the little magazine.’
They still walked slowly, Feeny setting the pace.
‘We were kids though,’ Liam Pat said, astonished at what was being said.
‘You showed your colours all the same.’
Liam Pat didn’t understand that. He didn’t know why they were talking about a time when he was still at the Brothers’, when he and Dessie Coglan used to push the freedom magazine into the letter-boxes. As soon as it was dark they’d do it, so’s no one would see them. Undercover stuff, Dessie used to say, and a couple of times he mentioned Michael Collins.
‘I had word from Mr McTighe,’ Feeny said.
‘Are we calling in there?’
‘He’ll have a beer for us.’
‘We were only being big fellas when we went round with the magazine.’
‘It’s remembered you went round with it.’
Liam Pat never knew where the copies of the magazine came from. Dessie Coglan just said the lads, but more likely it was the barber, Gaughan, an elderly man who lost the four fingers of his left hand in 1921. Liam Pat often noticed Dessie coming out of Gaughan’s or talking to Gaughan in his doorway, beneath the striped barber’s pole. In spite of his fingerless hand, Gaughan could still shave a man or cut a head of hair.
‘Come on in,’ Mr McTighe invited, opening his back door to them. ‘That’s a raw old night.’
They sat in the kitchen again. Mr McTighe handed round cans of Carling Black Label.
‘You’ll do the business, Liam?’
‘What’s that, Mr McTighe?’
‘Feeny here’ll show you the ropes.’
‘The thing is, I’m going back to Ireland.’
‘I thought maybe you would be. “There’s a man will be going home,” I said to myself. Didn’t I say that, Feeny?’
‘You did of course, Mr McTighe.’
‘What I was thinking, you’d do the little thing for me before you’d be on your way, Liam. Like we were discussing the other night,’ Mr McTighe said, and Liam Pat wondered if he’d had too much beer that night, for he couldn’t remember any kind of discussion taking place.
Feeny opened the door of the room where the curtains were drawn over and took the stuff from the floorboards. He didn’t switch the light on, but instead shone a torch into where he’d lifted away a section of the boards. Liam Pat saw red and black wires and the cream-coloured face of a timing device. Child’s play, Feeny said, extinguishing the torch.
Liam Pat heard the floorboards replaced. He stepped back into the passage off which the door of the room opened. Together he and Feeny passed through the hall and climbed the stairs to Liam Pat’s room.
‘Pull down that blind, boy,’ Feeny said.
There was a photograph of Liam Pat’s mother stuck under the edge of a mirror over a wash-basin; just above it, one of his father had begun to curl at the two corners that were exposed. The cheap brown suitcase he’d travelled from Ireland with was open on the floor, clothes he’d brought back from the launderette dumped in it, not yet sorted out. He’d bought the suitcase in Lacey’s in Emmet Street, the day after he gave in his notice to O’Dwyer.
‘Listen to me now,’ Feeny said, sitting down on the bed.
The springs rasped noisily. Feeny put a hand out to steady the sudden lurch of the headboard. ‘I’m glad to see that,’ he said, gesturing with his head in the direction of a card Liam Pat’s mother had made him promise he’d display in whatever room he found for himself. In the Virgin’s arms the infant Jesus raised two chubby fingers in blessing.
‘I’m not into anything like you’re thinking,’ Liam Pat said.