At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [130]
“I’m a fine able swimmer.”
Mr. Mack heard a bang on the table. He felt the sting in his palm where his hand had slammed the board. The anger spilt from his tongue. “Wouldn’t you think of someone else for a change? Do you never think I might need you round the shop? Always out for yourself. I’m all right Jack, that’s your motto.”
The miserables now to last till Christmas. Only shamming to be reading at all. After Gordie begging him to stick with his books. He passed the boy his tea. Species of nod was all he got. No use prinking me mustache, the thing is preened to death.
But things like this, you can’t whip it out of them. “Don’t you see, son, it’s yourself I’m thinking of?”
“Papa, don’t ask me to stop swimming. I can’t stop the swimming. Not now.”
“I’m not asking you, Jim.” He saw the hope flicker in his son’s eyes that now he must snuff out. “Not asking you, I’m telling you. No more swimming and that’s the end of that.”
Oh, it was too much with the photograph on the shelf and Gordie’s eyes on his back always, and the jaunty look of him from under his beaver, and his full dress kit that the photograph-johnnie would hire out for the occasion. And that cigarette, would he never have it finished? It was on his mind to take the picture there and then, whip it away upstairs, once for all, to the ledge above the prie-dieu where it belonged in the shadows with the photograph-portrait of his wife. God rest your soul and God forgive me, I’ve lost your son on you, so I have.
Chink-chink, stick-stick-stick, whiskery old chin poking in through the door. “Aunt Sawney! You weren’t long getting back.”
“No longer than ye was thieving me seat.”
How was this she wouldn’t fail to catch him in her chair, yet he never could recall getting into it? He got up to let her sit, but she only grumbled away to the stairs. What was to be done with her at all? Has a genuine goatee on the grow there. Lips all chapped. Well, if ’tis chapped lips is her trouble, she oughtn’t let the chaps to kiss them. He shook his head. Chapped lips. Chaps to kiss them. Sort of thing you could send in the papers.
It was curious to feel the scant mirth returning, even at the expense of a distracted old crone.
The nights were fast drawing in. Mary Nights, when asked, was emphatic about it. The fields were still in their ricks, and winter came. They had never known such storms. Even Aunt Sawney could not recall the like. People said it was the artillery barrages in France that disrupted the upper airs. Day after day the rain sheeted and grey lumbering clouds, like continents of night, heaved through the sky. The sea crashed on the sea-wall, shattering its waves in blizzards of foam. Seaweed lay everywhere. And when Jim went down there, in the howling wind, he felt the lawless solitude of weather too wild.
A sailing-ship struck by Sandycove Harbor. In the intervals of calm, in a pewter sea, tarnished and burnished by turns, bathers swam out to the wreck. But not Jim. Every morning before school, he climbed down the ladder at the Forty Foot cove, and there he clung while the waves surged and swayed him against the rock. But he did not let go the ladder, so it could not be said he swam. It was designing of him, what Brother Polycarp would have called Jesuitical, and it troubled him, the deceit. Yet it was daunting to do and required a mighty determination: no thrashing your limbs, no release from your bounds, no reward at all, just the miserable freeze. He offered it up to the lost souls, in tenements of Dublin, in wastes of Gallipoli. It was all he could think to do. If he lost touch with the water, when spring came round, who could say would he know to swim at all?
The storms passed. Then the foggy nights looked in on the kitchen like shawlie ghosts at the window. In the morning the air had the taste of tin. Aunt Sawney added trimming upon trimming to her Rosary, and his father prayed to Our Lady of Lepanto who in 1571 had granted victory over the Turk. But the map on the wall that had recorded the progress of the war had stopped at Gallipoli,