John Joe, wishing to hear in further detail the bargain that Baker had made, said he could do with another drop. Mr Lynch directed him to a crate behind the counter. ‘You’re acquiring the taste,’ he said.
John Joe opened and poured the bottles. Mr Lynch offered him a cigarette, which he accepted. In the Coliseum cinema he had seen Piccadilly Circus, and in one particular film there had been Piccadilly tarts, just as Mr Lynch described, loitering in doorways provocatively. As always, coming out of the Coliseum, it had been a little strange to find himself again among small shops that sold clothes and hardware and meat, among vegetable shops and tiny confectioners’ and tobacconists’ and public houses. For a few minutes after the Coliseum’s programme was over the three streets of the town were busy with people going home, walking or riding on bicycles, or driving cars to distant farms, or going towards the chip-shop. When he was alone, John Joe usually leaned against the window of a shop to watch the activity before returning home himself; when his mother accompanied him to the pictures they naturally went home at once, his mother chatting on about the film they’d seen.
‘The simple thing is, John Joe, keep a certain type of thought out of your mind.’
‘Thought, Mr Lynch?’
‘Of a certain order.’
‘Ah, yes. Ah, definitely, Mr Lynch. A young fellow has no time for that class of thing.’
‘Live a healthy life.’
‘That’s what I’m saying, Mr Lynch.’
‘If I hadn’t had a certain type of thought I wouldn’t have found myself on the street that night. It was Baker who called them the glory girls. It’s a peculiar way of referring to the sort they are.’
‘Excuse me, Mr Lynch, but what kind of an age would they be?’
‘They were all ages, boy. There were nippers and a few more of them had wrinkles on the flesh of their faces. There were some who must have weighed fourteen stone and others you could put in your pocket.’
‘And was the one Baker made the bargain with a big one or a little one?’
‘She was medium-sized, boy.’
‘And had she black hair, Mr Lynch?’
‘As black as your boot. She had a hat on her head that was a disgrace to the nation, and black gloves on her hands. She was carrying a little umbrella.’
‘And, Mr Lynch, when your comrades met up with you again, did they tell you a thing at all?’
Mr Lynch lifted the glass to his lips. He filled his mouth with stout and savoured the liquid before allowing it to pass into his stomach. He turned his small eyes on the youth and regarded him in silence.
‘You have pimples on your chin,’ said Mr Lynch in the end. ‘I hope you’re living a clean life, now.’
‘A healthy life, Mr Lynch.’
‘It is a question your daddy would ask you. You know what I mean? There’s some lads can’t leave it alone.’
‘They go mad in the end, Mr Lynch.’
‘There was fellows in the British Army that couldn’t leave it alone.’
‘They’re a heathen crowd, Mr Lynch. Isn’t there terrible reports in the British papers?’
‘The body is God-given. There’s no need to abuse it.’
‘I’ve never done that thing, Mr Lynch.’
‘I couldn’t repeat,’ said Mr Lynch, ‘what the glory girl said when I walked away.’
John Joe, whose classroom meditations led him towards the naked bodies of women whom he had seen only clothed and whose conversations with the town’s idiot, Quigley, were of an obscene nature, said it was understandable that Mr Lynch could not repeat what the girl had said to him. A girl like that, he added, wasn’t fit to be encountered by a decent man.
‘Go behind the counter,’ said Mr Lynch, ‘and lift out two more bottles.’
John Joe walked to the crate of stout bottles. ‘I looked in at a window one time,’ Quigley had said to him, ‘and I saw Mrs Nugent resisting her husband. Nugent took no notice of her at all; he had the clothes from her body like you’d shell a pod of peas.’
‘I don’t think Baker lived,’ said Mr Lynch. ‘He’d be dead of disease.’
‘I feel sick to think of Baker, Mr Lynch.’
‘He was like an animal.’
All the women of the town – and most especially Mrs Taggart, the wife of a postman – John Joe had kept company with in his imagination. Mrs Taggart was a well-built woman, a foot taller than himself, a woman with whom he had seen himself walking in the fields on the Ballydehob road. She had found him alone and had said that she was crossing the fields to where her husband had fallen into a bog-hole, and would he be able to come with her? She had a heavy, chunky face and a wide neck on which the fat lay in encircling folds, like a fleshy necklace. Her hair was grey and black, done up in hairpins. ‘I was only codding you,’ she said when they reached the side of a secluded hillock. ‘You’re a good-looking fellow, Dempsey.’ On the side of the hillock, beneath a tree, Mrs Taggart commenced to rid herself of her outer garments, remarking that it was hot. ‘Slip out of that little jersey,’ she urged. ‘Wouldn’t it bake you today?’ Sitting beside him in her underclothes, Mrs Taggart asked him if he liked sunbathing. She drew her petticoat up so that the sun might reach the tops of her legs. She asked him to put his hand on one of her legs so that he could feel the muscles; she was a strong woman, she said, and added that the strongest muscles she possessed were the muscles of her stomach. ‘Wait till I show you,’ said Mrs Taggart.
On other occasions he found himself placed differently with Mrs Taggart: once, his mother had sent him round to her house to inquire if she had any eggs for sale and after she had put a dozen eggs in a basket Mrs Taggart asked him if he’d take a look at a thorn in the back of her leg. Another time he was passing her house and he heard her crying out for help. When he went inside he discovered that she had jammed the door of the bathroom and couldn’t get out. He managed to release the door and when he entered the bathroom he discovered that Mrs Taggart was standing up in the bath, seeming to have forgotten that she hadn’t her clothes on.
Mrs Keefe, the wife of a railway official, another statuesque woman, featured as regularly in John Joe’s imagination, as did a Mrs O’Brien, a Mrs Summers, and a Mrs Power. Mrs Power kept a bread-shop, and a very pleasant way of passing the time when Brother Leahy was talking was to walk into Mrs Power’s shop and hear her saying that she’d have to slip into the bakery for a small pan loaf and would he like to accompany her? Mrs Power wore a green overall with a belt that was tied in a knot at the front. In the bakery, while they were chatting, she would attempt to untie the belt but always found it difficult. ‘Can you aid me?’ Mrs Power would ask and John Joe would endeavour to loose the knot that lay tight against Mrs Power’s stout stomach. ‘Where’ve you gone, boy?’ Brother Leahy’s voice would whisper over and over again like a familiar incantation and John Joe would suddenly shout, realizing he was in pain.
‘It was the end of the war,’ said Mr Lynch. ‘The following morning myself and a gang of the other lads got a train up to Liverpool, and then we crossed back to Dublin. There was a priest on the train and I spoke to him about the whole thing. Every man was made like that, he said to me, only I was lucky to be rescued in the nick of time. If I’d have taken his name I’d have sent him the information about my mother’s dream. I think that would have interested him, John Joe. Wouldn’t you think so?’
‘Ah, it would of course.’
‘Isn’t it a great story, John Joe?’
‘It is, Mr Lynch.’
‘Don’t forget it ever, boy. No man is clear of temptations. You don’t have to go to Britain to get temptations.’