Bea washed, and folded her clothes, and brushed her teeth. She turned the light out, wondering in what way her dreams would be different now, reminding herself that she mustn’t cry out in case, being sleepy, she ruined everything.
The Mourning
In the town, on the grey estate on the Dunmanway road, they lived in a corner house. They always had. Mrs Brogan had borne and brought up six children there. Brogan, a council labourer, still grew vegetables and a few marigolds in its small back garden. Only Liam Pat was still at home with them, at twenty-three the youngest in the family, working for O’Dwyer the builder. His mother — his father, too, though in a different way — was upset when Liam Pat said he was thinking of moving further afield. ‘Cork?’ his mother asked. But it was England Liam Pat had in mind.
Dessie Coglan said he could get him fixed. He’d go himself, Dessie Coglan said, if he didn’t have the wife and another kid expected. No way Rosita would stir, no way she’d move five yards from the estate, with her mother two doors down. ‘You’ll fall on your feet there all right,’ Dessie Coglan confidently predicted. ‘No way you won’t.’
Liam Pat didn’t have wild ambitions; but he wanted to make what he could of himself. At the Christian Brothers’ he’d been the tidiest in the class. He’d been attentive, even though he often didn’t understand. Father Mooney used to compliment him on the suit he always put on for Mass, handed down through the family, and the tie he always wore on Sundays. ‘The respect, Liam Pat,’ Father Mooney would say. ‘It’s heartening for your old priest to see the respect, to see you’d give the boots a brush.’ Shoes, in fact, were what Liam Pat wore to Sunday Mass, black and patched, handed down also. Although they didn’t keep out the wet, that didn’t deter him from wearing them in the rain, stuffing them with newspaper when he was home again. ‘Ah, sure, you’ll pick it up,’ O’Dwyer said when Liam Pat asked him if he could learn a trade. He’d pick up the whole lot — plumbing, bricklaying, carpentry, house-painting. He’d have them all at his fingertips; if he settled for one of them, he wouldn’t get half the distance. Privately, O’Dwyer’s opinion was that Liam Pat didn’t have enough upstairs to master any trade and when it came down to it what was wrong with operating the mixer? ‘Keep the big mixer turning and keep Liam Pat Brogan behind it,’ was one of O’Dwyer’s good-humoured catch-phrases on the sites where his men built houses for him. ‘Typical O’Dwyer,’ Dessie Coglan scornfully pronounced. Stay with O’Dwyer and Liam Pat would be shovelling wet cement for the balance of his days.
Dessie was on the estate also. He had married into it, getting a house when the second child was born. Dessie had had big ideas at the Brothers’; with a drink or two in him he had them still. There was his talk of ‘the lads’ and of ‘connections’ with the extreme republican movement, his promotion of himself as a fixer. By trade he was a plasterer.
‘Give that man a phone as soon as you’re there,’ he instructed Liam Pat, and Liam Pat wrote the number down. He had always admired Dessie, the easy way he had with Rosita Drudy before he married her, the way he seemed to know how a hurling match would go even though he had never handled a hurley stick himself, the way he could talk through the cigarette he was smoking, his voice becoming so low you couldn’t hear what he was saying, his eyes narrowed to lend weight to the confidential nature of what he passed on. A few people said Dessie Coglan was all mouth, but Liam Pat disagreed.
It’s not bad at all, Liam Pat wrote on a postcard when he’d been in London a week. There’s a lad from Lismore and another from Westmeath. Under a foreman called Huxter he was operating a cement-mixer and filling in foundations. He got lonely was what he didn’t add to his message. The wage is twice what O’Dwyer gave, he squeezed in instead at the bottom of the card, which had a picture of a guardsman in a sentry-box on it.
Mrs Brogan put it on the mantelpiece. She felt lonely herself, as she’d known she would, the baby of the family gone. Brogan went out to the garden, trying not to think of the kind of place London was. Liam Pat was headstrong, like his mother, Mr Brogan considered. Good-natured but headstrong, the same red hair on the pair of them till her own had gone grey on her. He had asked Father Mooney to have a word with Liam Pat, but the damn bit of good it had done.
After that, every four weeks or so, Liam Pat telephoned on a Saturday evening. They always hoped they’d hear that he was about to return, but all he talked about was a job finished or a new job begun, how he waited every morning to be picked up by the van, to be driven halfway across London from the area where he had a room. The man who was known to Dessie Coglan had got him the work, as Dessie Coglan said he would. ‘A Mr Huxter’s on the lookout for young fellows,’ the man, called Feeny, had said when Liam Pat phoned him as soon as he arrived in London. In his Saturday conversations — on each occasion with his mother first and then, more briefly, with his father — Liam Pat didn’t reveal that when he’d asked Huxter about learning a trade the foreman had said take what was on offer or leave it, a general labourer was what was needed. Liam Pat didn’t report, either, that from the first morning in the gang Huxter had taken against him, without a reason that Liam Pat could see. It was Huxter’s way to pick on someone, they said in the gang.
They didn’t wonder why, nor did Liam Pat. They didn’t know that a victim was a necessary compensation for the shortages in Huxter’s life — his wife’s regular refusal to grant him what he considered to be his bedroom rights, the failure of a horse or greyhound; compensation, too, for surveyors’ sarcasm and the pernicketiness of fancy-booted architects. A big, black-moustached man, Huxter worked as hard as any of the men under him, stripping himself to his vest, a brass buckle on the belt that held his trousers up. ‘What kind of a name’s that?’ he said when Liam Pat told him, and called him Mick instead. There was something about Liam Pat’s freckled features that grated on Huxter, and although he was well used to Irish accents he convinced himself that he couldn’t understand this one. ‘Oh, very Irish,’ Huxter would say even when Liam Pat did something sensible, such as putting planks down in the mud to wheel the barrows on.
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.