At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [1]
“Hello now, Mr. Doyle,” said Mr. Mack.
“Quartermaster-Sergeant Mack, how are you, how’s every hair’s breadth of you, what cheer to see you so spry.” A spit preceded him to the pavement. “You weren’t kept waiting at all?” This rather in rebuttal than inquiry. “Only I was inside getting of bronze for silver. Paper is it?”
The hades you were, thought Mr. Mack, and the smell of drink something atrocious. “Fennelly has a crowd in,” he remarked, “for the hour.”
“Bagmen,” the paperman replied. “Go-boys on the make out of Dublin. And a miselier mischaritable unChristianer crew—”
Ho ho ho, thought Mr. Mack. On the cadge, if I know my man. Them boys inside was too nimble for him.
“Would you believe, Sergeant, they’d mock a man for the paper he’d read?”
“What’s this now?” said Mr. Mack.
The paperman chucked his head. “God be their judge and a bitter one, say I. And your good self known for a decent skin with no more side than a margarine.”
Mr. Mack could not engage but a rise was being took out of him. The paperman made play of settling his papers, huffling and humphing in that irritating consumptive way. He made play of banging his chest for air. He spat, coughing with the spittle, a powdery disgruntled cough—“Choky today,” said he—and Mr. Mack viewed the spittle-drenched sheet he now held in his hand. This fellow, the curse of an old comrade, try anything to vex me.
“I’m after picking up,” choosily he said, “an Irish Times, only I read here—”
“An Irish Times, Sergeant? Carry me out and bury me decent, so you have and all. Aren’t you swell away with the high-jinkers there?”
Mr. Mack plumped his face and a laugh, like a fruit, dropped from his mouth. “I wouldn’t know about any high-jinkers,” he confided. “Only I read here ’tis twice the price of any other paper. Twice the price,” he repeated, shaking his cautious head. A carillon of coins chinkled in his pocket. “I don’t know now can the expense be justified.”
“Take a risk of it, Sergeant, and damn the begrudgers.” The paperman leant privily forward. “A gent on the up, likes of yourself, isn’t it worth it alone for the shocks and stares?”
Narrowly Mr. Mack considered his man. A fling or a fox-paw, he couldn’t be certain sure. He clipped his coin on the paper-stack. “Penny, I believe,” he said.
“Thruppence,” returned Mr. Doyle. “Balance two dee to the General.”
Mr. Mack talked small while he waited for his change. “Grand stretch of weather we’re having.”
“’Tisn’t the worst.”
“Grand I thought for the time of year.”
“Thanks be to God.”
“Oh thanks be to God entirely.”
Mr. Mack’s face faltered. Had ought to get my thanks in first. This fellow, not a mag to bless himself with, doing me down always. He watched him shambling through the pockets of his coat. And if it was change he was after in Fennelly’s it was devilish cunning change for never the jingle of a coin let out. A smile fixed on Mr. Mack’s face. Barking up the wrong tree with me, my merry old sweat. Two dee owed.
At last the paperman had the change found. Two lusterless pennies, he held them out, the old sort, with the old Queen’s hair in a bun. Mr. Mack was on the blow of plucking them in his fingers when the paperman coughed—“Squeeze me”—coughed into his—“Squeeze me peas, Sergeant”—coughed into his sleeve. Not what you’d call coughing but hacking down the tracts of his throat to catch some breath had gone missing there. His virulence spattered the air between, and Mr. Mack thought how true what they say, take your life in your hands every breath you breathe.
He cleared his own throat and said, “I trust I find you well?”
“Amn’t I standing, God be praised?” With a flump then he was down on the butter-box he kept for a seat.
Bulbous, pinkish, bush-mustached, Mr. Mack’s face lowered. He’d heard it mentioned right enough, that old Doyle, he was none too gaudy this weather. Never had thought to find him this far gone. That box wouldn’t know of him sitting on it. He looked down on the dull face,