At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [103]
They passed the fellows who fished along the sea-wall and the boy spat derisively after them. “Too much larking for real fishing.”
“What do they catch?”
“Pollack if they’re lucky. Cook it as whitebait. Dabs, I suppose. Mostly all that lot’d catch is cold.”
Father tickling trout. Why did he bring me along? Tedium of those hours not allowed to speak. Struggle of the fish against the line, end always so flat. The pity of it served up at supper. Test of a true hunter—Do you eat your catch?
Doyler. I wonder what a doyler does. He doyles of course. But what is doyling? “Have you really nothing to change into?”
“I have a shirt all right.”
“No more?”
“You don’t want to know very much, do you, Mr. MacMurrough?”
“I didn’t intend . . . I don’t wish to pry.”
“’S all right. I know what you meant. This is where I turn.”
High wall by a mud lane which MacMurrough had always supposed led nowhere. So that’s where the smell comes from.
“So now you know where I live. And it’s me ma as cleans your dirty sheets, Mr. MacMurrough. So don’t be thinking I’ll be coming with you, you understand that now?”
“Wait a minute, can’t you?”
“Wait for what?”
“Just talk. Can’t we talk?”
The boy squinted up the lane then back at MacMurrough. “Talk so.”
“About lunch—”
“I already told you about that.”
“What if I were to arrange a suit of clothes?”
He snorted. “You kidding me on?”
“We could go up George’s Street. What’s it called, Lee’s. Just something made-up.”
“You’d really buy me a suit? Where’s the sell? You want your jeer at me in the Pavilion, is it?”
“Forget the Pavilion.”
“Why, then?”
“Does it matter why?”
“Matters to me.”
MacMurrough felt an anger rising, which really he might have contained. But, feeling liberal, he let the lid off a squeeze and said, “If you don’t recognize friendship when it’s offered, that’s your misfortune.” And he strode purposefully off. He had gone a dozen yards and had quite despaired of human nature, when the boy called after.
“No strings at all?”
“I told you, none.”
Some further jittering but MacMurrough in victory could be a patient soul. At length the boy smiled, in what MacMurrough was pleased to decide was a doyling way and, having doyled deliciously, he said, “Wait for us, then. Be back in a crack.” And the lovable legs went gamely tripping.
—Nicely tickled, said Dick.
And the chaplain said, That guttersnipe is out for anything he may get.
But Nanny Tremble thought he’d look dandy in a nice clean suit. Tweed, she proposed, out of Donegal. For I’m sure it looks awful damp where he stays.
MacMurrough glanced at the sky, whose lowering clouds were edged in sun. He smiled at the fishing men who, too, unhungrily hunted. He looked up the lane, feeling in his pocket his sovereign-purse, pondering wise old saws upon muck and brass and how amiably they got along, those commodities.
A boy was scampering over the far rocks. MacMurrough watched him. An unkempt but well-dressed boy, ten years old, maybe younger, lost in a private world with his glass jar and collecting-net. Through his feet and his scrambling hands, MacMurrough had a sense of the stones and sand and barnacles and wet. And breathing his air, he savored the lazy freedom of holidays. The boy stopped suddenly, as though something had struck him. He stood poised on a slip of rock, attending as if he heard a whisper in the faraway or glimpsed a shadow in the deep of his eye.
MacMurrough was seized with a certainty he would turn. The boy would turn and he would see MacMurrough and a horror of recognition would come on his face.
He stepped back till the wall stopped him. But the boy did not turn. His head shook the disturbance clear. Then, dipping behind an outcrop, he was gone.
Hobbling feet told Doyler’s return. “You changed your mind,” he said immediately he saw MacMurrough’s face.
MacMurrough looked down on the soap-bright phiz. His hair was smarmed and a new shirt blossomed, collarless but clean, inside his new-brushed serge. Really