They were drab streets, these streets of his. He was parish priest to a community of beggars. Their windows were broken and their abodes stank. No one considered them. No one cared for them. He had failed in care himself. It was not his nature to love rags and filth or to believe that suffering ennobled the illiterate. Yet he pitied them. It didn’t do them any good of course, but it was better than contempt. O’Connor was contemptuous. And a prig. Ought to shave himself in holy water.
To add to the drabness, rain began. It caught him unawares and made him angry. He had not reckoned on the possibility of rain. Rain was another part of the drabness of the world, the greyness of all Creation. It brought soot and dirt down out of the air and made a cesspool of the broken street. He looked about, saw a railway bridge and took shelter.
It was gloomy and cheerless. Drops of water dripped on him. A chilling wind inhabited the place. Through the eye of the arch he saw the vista of the street; grey, the rain beating on it so fiercely that the drops rebounded. He could find no single thing, outside him or within, to fasten on to in hope against the void and the absence of God. He looked at his walking stick.
‘Good evening, Father.’ The voice startled him. He did not look around immediately. These bodiless voices had troubled him before. He would not be tricked. Still looking at the stick he said, in a matter of fact way, in order to reassure himself.
‘I should have brought my umbrella.’
‘You don’t remember me, Father,’ the voice said. This time he looked around. He saw a bent and bearded figure with a haggard face. He stared.
‘Who are you?’
The figure wore a sack about its shoulders and a coat tied about the middle with a piece of rope.
‘Rashers Tierney, your Reverence. I used to work in the church. A boilerman.’
‘Tierney,’ Father Giffley said. He pondered. He remembered.
‘Tierney,’ Rashers repeated.
Father Giffley studied the face closely.
‘You look ill.’
‘I’m not in the best, right enough.’
‘Are you working?’
‘Divil the work.’
‘Your chest was bad,’ Father Giffley remembered, ‘and you had an animal—a dog.’
‘Rusty.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The dog’s name was Rusty.’
‘Quite. For the moment the animal’s name had escaped me.’
‘That’s terrible weather to be caught out in.’
‘It is,’ Father Giffley said. He looked again down the vista of the street, finding it still empty, still without God, still with no gleam of grace or of hope.
‘I could go off and search for a cab for you, Father,’ Rashers suggested.
‘You could,’ Father Giffley said firmly, ‘but you won’t.’
‘As you please, Father.’
‘Don’t be disappointed, however, I’ll give you something just the same.’ He searched in his pocket and found a half-crown.
‘Almighty God’s good luck to you,’ Rashers said, when it was handed to him. Almost immediately the sound of wheels and the trotting of a horse caused them both to look around. A cab was coming towards them through the rain.
‘He seems to have heard you,’ Father Giffley said, smiling. They stopped the driver at the bridge entrance and Rashers, thanking him again, went off into the rain.
Father Giffley watched his bent figure and slow gait. After a moment he said to the cabman.
‘Turn about. I want to speak with that old man again.’ When they drew abreast Father Giffley ordered the cab to stop, and called to Rashers to get in with him.
‘Where do you live?’ he asked.
‘Chandlers Court, Father.’
‘Take us to Chandlers Court,’ Father Giffley instructed. Rashers looked astounded, but the driver flicked his reins and the cab lurched forward.
The wet sack and the coat smelled abominably. Father Giffley undid the leather strap and opened the window an inch or so. Then the swaying motion of the cab began to draw him back into the half-world he had been fighting to keep away. He felt it flowing noiselessly towards him, a tide of darkness creeping across a dim strand. The leather-buttoned upholstery was regarding him with sea-creature eyes, expressionless, heavy-lidded. He sweated, sat up straight, forced himself to collect his thoughts. He opened the window a little more.
‘Tell me what happened to you since you were dismissed,’ he said to Rashers. ‘The whole story. Don’t be afraid. I am most interested to know.’
He leaned on his walking stick, gripped its knob tightly, listened. He was determined to attend meticulously. It would keep out the void that waited moment by moment to engulf him.
‘I’ll tell you that, Father,’ Rashers said, ‘and I’ll tell you no word of a lie. I have the ill fortune to live in the most misbegotten kip of a city in the whole wide world.’
Father Giffley nodded. The word kip engaged him. It meant, to the best of his knowledge, a common lodging place. He had heard it used in the Confessional to mean a resort of ill fame, a whorehouse. It was a fitting word. It pleased him.
‘Proceed,’ he said.
The bearded figure began to enumerate its misfortunes. Father Giffley, the better to aid concentration, categorised them under certain headings: The waning popularity of the tin whistle and the erosion of technical standards due to infiltration of the profession by charlatans and chancers; the inevitable, because hereditary, crookedness of Jewish pawnbrokers; the inability of once kind neighbours to be kind any longer; the fierce competition for the contents of all dustbins and in particular the assertion by the strong (to the complete exclusion of the infirm) of sole right to the refuse outside certain well-to-do houses where the leftovers reflected the high living standards of the inhabitants.
Father Giffley attended, gathered, itemised, as the cab jolted its way through rain-swept streets. The smell grew steadily worse. It was the breath of Destitution itself.
Father Giffley said:
‘If you call to me on Tuesday next I’ll see you get work to do, either about the church or elsewhere. Go to my housekeeper for something to eat and wait for me until I am free.’
‘The blessing of God on you, Father.’
‘You’ll do that?’
‘Let anything try to hinder me.’
‘Good.’
The cabdriver leaned down and shouted to them.
‘Chandlers Court, Father. Was it Number 3?’
‘Number 3,’ Rashers answered.
‘There’s something very peculiar going on there,’ the cabman said. He slackened pace and drew in to the footpath. As Rashers stepped down the cabman said to him:
‘Have a look.’
Father Giffley poked his head through the window. A crowd had gathered about one of the doorways.
‘It’s the police,’ Rashers said, ‘A police raid.’
‘Take my advice,’ the cabman offered, ‘and keep away from there until they leave.’
‘And let them ill treat the poor oul dog,’ Rashers said, ‘not bloody likely.’
He turned to salute Father Giffley and limped away.
‘What would the police want?’ Father Giffley said.
‘Breaking up the homes of the unfortunate people,’ the cabman said, ‘that’s a regular game of theirs.’
‘For what reason?’
‘To terrorise them. There’s another shipload of scabs came in from England this morning and Larkin is holding a protest march and a meeting about it tonight. So the police is getting in the first blow.’ The cabman gathered in the reins and added: ‘I know you condemn Larkin and the people that follows him, but it’s no bed of roses for any of them.’ He flicked the reins.
‘One moment,’ Father Giffley ordered. He stepped down on to the path and surveyed the crowd.
‘Wait here for me,’ he added, when he had made up his mind.