At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [107]
Comfort for the troops. He wants his friend. He actually wants his friend. Briefly MacMurrough glimpsed balmy waters where ephebes naked bathed. And on his bench, in pallium draped, their tutor kindly watches. Pulling on an Abdulla.
“He means a lot to you.”
“Who does?”
“Your friend.”
The eyes flared and, sneering, he said, “Don’t think I don’t cop you getting your eyeful of us swimming.”
Coolly MacMurrough replied, “Not watching so much as waiting my turn. Wouldn’t seem right, somehow, disturbing your lessons.”
The sneer curled the corner of his mouth while he considered this. The luster dulled in his eyes; his head bent. In its stead reared Mammon’s nummular nob.
“They do say money is the root of all evil.”
“I thought that was supposed to be the love of money.”
“There’s neat for you. ’Tis them without that loves it best. That puts Doyler in his place. Doyler and all his kind.”
Nanny Tremble thought another sticky bun and a refreshment of the cups was in order and MacMurrough did the honors. “Look here, do we have to talk about money?”
“Talk what you like. It’s you what’s paying.”
“I thought we’d got past all this.”
“Oh well, damn the thing anyway.” He seized a bun and took a munch of it, dominoes flashing between spittled dough. “You can have the suit back if you wants it.”
Was this good humor returning? MacMurrough searched till he found a little doyle that with coaxing might grow to a doyling full grin. “Would you let me watch you take it off?”
“Go away, you—I don’t what you are. A bad lot for sure.”
Friends again and honors easy. Time for a change of subject. “That badge you’re so careful about. I’ve noticed before. Some religious attachment?”
Quick dart of his eyes. “Religion, me arse. I’m a socialist.”
“An agitator, no less. In the Pavilion Gardens.”
He liked that. “Never know where we’d be.” He turned the lapel and screwed his eyes to view it. “Badge of the Citizen Army. Nor King nor Kaiser we serve, but Ireland. Meaning the working man.”
“Why do you hide it?”
“Don’t hide it.”
Very well. “Why do you wear it where no one can see?”
He let go the lapel and fussily patted it down. “They have them banned at work. Door to the street if they catched you wearing your badge. I suppose and you could say I have it hidden. Hard to know what’s for the best. You know why I got this job?”
“Good worker? Hard worker? Honest?”
“The owner was after letting the men go for to encourage them to list. Great plaudits he got for that day’s work. Then he employs us boys at half the rate. He has the union banned. What can you do? Half the rate means half a loaf but nix means nothing on the table. They don’t like you to have ideals. Ideals is for likes of you. For your aunt and the father.”
“Yet you still have ideals.”
“Aye do I. I have the words of them. I have a badge I don’t dare to show.”
It was a tale of woe which was just verging on the tedious. “Can be hard to believe in something when the world’s against it.”
“Aye aye, and what do you believe in, Mr. MacMurrough?”
A wasp buzzed about him and he felt, or apprehended, the small breeze of its wings. The terrace sloped to trees at the bottom and there beyond the railway began the harbor, whose arms reached to cuddle a calm. Swifts or swallows darted low in the air. An Irish summer: half-hour’s sunshine between the showers. God help the rain if it thought to pour on Aunt Eva’s fête. “Believe that I exist,” he said.
“Aren’t you the bold one.”
“Bolder than you might think. I have a friend, or rather I had one, he’s dead now; but he believed that I existed.”
A compursion of the boy’s face. “Does it mean something I don’t understand?”
“That we existed, he and I, and others like us.” MacMurrough shifted in his chair. A voice was wondering why he bothered with this; an innominate voice which was plausibly his own. “You asked me earlier were there many of us about. The question for my friend was, were there any of us at all. The world would say that we did not exist, that only our actions, our habits, were real, which the world called