‘I will.’
‘It’s good there’s work for you.’
‘Yes.’
They ate the two pieces of cake and then she cleared away the dishes and put them in the sink. He sat on a chair by the range. The men who’d been loitering outside Kelly’s Hotel might have driven over to Clonakilty by now, he thought. They’d be dancing with girls and later they’d go back to their wives and say they’d been somewhere else, playing cards together in Kelly’s maybe. Within the grey cement of the Coliseum the girl who’d been given the box of chocolates would be eating them, and the man who was with her would be wanting to put his hands on her.
Why couldn’t he say to his mother that he’d drunk three bottles of stout in Keogh’s? Why couldn’t he say he could see the naked body of Mrs Taggart? Why hadn’t he said to Mr Lynch that he should tell the truth about what was in his mind, like Quigley told the truth? Mr Lynch spent his life returning to the scenes that obsessed him, to the Belgian woman on the ground and the tarts of Piccadilly Circus. Yet he spoke of them only to fatherless boys, because it was the only excuse for mentioning them that he’d been able to think up.
‘I have this for you,’ she said.
She held towards him an old fountain pen that had belonged to his father, a pen he had seen before. She had taken it from a drawer of the dresser, where it was always kept.
‘I thought you could have it on your fifteenth birthday,’ she said.
He took it from her, a black-and-white pen that hadn’t been filled with ink for thirteen years. In the drawer of the dresser there was a pipe of his father’s, and a tie-pin and a bunch of keys and a pair of bicycle clips. She had washed and dried the dishes, he guessed, racking her mind to think of something she might offer him as the surprise she’d invented. The pen was the most suitable thing; she could hardly offer him the bicycle clips.
‘Wait till I get you the ink,’ she said, ‘and you can try it out.’ From the wireless came the voice of a man advertising household products. ‘Ryan’s Towel Soap’, urged the voice gently. ‘No better cleanser.’
He filled the pen from the bottle of ink she handed him. He sat down at the kitchen table again and tried the nib out on the piece of brown paper that Mrs Keogh had wrapped round the rashers and which his mother had neatly folded away for further use.
‘Isn’t it great it works still?’ she said. ‘It must be a good pen.’
It’s hot in here, he wrote. Wouldn’t you take off your jersey?
‘That’s a funny thing to write,’ his mother said.
‘It came into my head.’
They didn’t like him being with Quigley because they knew what Quigley talked about when he spoke the truth. They were jealous because there was no pretence between Quigley and himself. Even though it was only Quigley who talked, there was an understanding between them: being with Quigley was like being alone.
‘I want you to promise me a thing,’ she said, ‘now that you’re fifteen.’
He put the cap on the pen and bundled up the paper that had contained the rashers. He opened the top of the range and dropped the paper into it. She would ask him to promise not to hang about with the town’s idiot any more. He was a big boy now, he was big enough to own his father’s fountain pen, and it wasn’t right that he should be going out getting minnows in a jam jar with an elderly affected creature. It would go against his chances in the sawmills.
He listened to her saying what he had anticipated she would say. She went on talking, telling him about his father and the goodness there had been in his father before he fell from the scaffold. She took from the dresser the framed photograph that was so familiar to him and she put it into his hands, telling him to look closely at it. It would have made no difference, he thought, if his father had lived. His father would have been like the others; if ever he’d have dared to mention the nakedness of Mrs Taggart his father would have beaten him with a belt.
‘I am asking you for his sake,’ she said, ‘as much as for my own and for yours, John Joe.’
He didn’t understand what she meant by that, and he didn’t inquire. He would say what she wished to hear him say, and he would keep his promise to her because it would be the easiest thing to do. Quigley wasn’t hard to push away, you could tell him to get away like you’d tell a dog. It was funny that they should think that it would make much difference to him now, at this stage, not having Quigley to listen to.
‘All right,’ he said.
‘You’re a good boy, John Joe. Do you like the pen?’
‘It’s a lovely pen.’
‘You might write better with that one.’
She turned up the volume of the wireless and together they sat by the range, listening to the music. To live in a shed like Quigley did would not be too bad: to have his food carried down through a garden by a niece, to go about the town in that special way, alone with his thoughts. Quigley did not have to pretend to the niece who fed him. He didn’t have to say he’d been for a walk when he’d been drinking in Keogh’s, or that he’d been playing cards with men when he’d been dancing in Clonakilty. Quigley didn’t have to chew tea and keep quiet. Quigley talked; he said the words he wanted to say. Quigley was lucky being how he was.
‘I will go to bed now,’ he said eventually.
They said good-night to one another, and he climbed the stairs to his room. She would rouse him in good time, she called after him. ‘Have a good sleep,’ she said.
He closed the door of his room and looked with affection at his bed, for in the end there was only that. It was a bed that, sagging, held him in its centre and wrapped him warmly. There was ornamental brass-work at the head but not at the foot, and on the web of interlocking wire the hair mattress was thin. John Joe shed his clothes, shedding also the small town and his mother and Mr Lynch and the fact that he, on his fifteenth birthday, had drunk his first stout and had chewed tea. He entered his iron bed and the face of Mr Lynch passed from his mind and the voices of boys telling stories about freshly married couples faded away also. No one said to him now that he must not keep company with a crazed dwarf. In his iron bed, staring into the darkness, he made of the town what he wished to make of it, knowing that he would not be drawn away from his dreams by the tormenting fingers of a Christian Brother. In his iron bed he heard again only the voice of the town’s idiot and then that voice, too, was there no more. He travelled alone, visiting in his way the women of the town, adored and adoring, more alive in his bed than ever he was at the Christian Brothers’ School, or in the grey Coliseum, or in the chip-shop, or Keogh’s public house, or his mother’s kitchen, more alive than ever he would be at the sawmills. In his bed he entered a paradise: it was grand being alone.
Kinkies
‘Look,’ said Mr Belhatchet in the office one Thursday afternoon, ‘want you back in Trilby Mews.’
‘Me, Mr Belhatchet?’
‘Whole stack new designs. Sort them out.’
A year ago, when Eleanor had applied for the position at Sweetawear, he’d walked into Mr Syatt’s office, a young man with a dark bush of hair. She’d been expecting someone much older, about the age of Mr Syatt himself: Mr Belhatchet, a smiling, graceful figure, was in his mid-twenties. ‘Happy to know you,’ he’d said in an American manner but without any trace of an American accent. He’d been sharply dressed, in a dark grey suit that contained both a blue and a white pinstripe. He wore a discreetly jewelled ring on the little finger of his left hand. ‘Mr Belhatchet,’ Mr Syatt had explained, ‘will be your immediate boss. Sweetawear, of which he is in command, is one small part of our whole organization. There is, as well, Lisney and Company, Harraps, Tass and Prady Designs, Swiftway Designs, Dress-U, etcetera, etcetera.’ There was a canteen in the basement, Mr Syatt had added; the Christmas bonus was notably generous. Mr Syatt spoke in a precise, rather old-fashioned manner, punctuating his sentences carefully. ‘Use these?’ Mr Belhatchet had more casually offered, holding out a packet of Greek cigarettes, and she, wearing that day a high-necked blouse frilled with lace, had smilingly replied that she didn’t smoke.