At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [14]
For years he had believed that Howth was England until finally his father took him there, him and his brother, on the two tram journeys across Dublin. They made a scratch tea in a heathery field and his father had him speak to a poor fisherwoman to ask was this still Ireland. He remembered the surprise of her answer. “Not since the Chief passed over, nor yet till he come again.”
“Curious old harp,” his father had said. “Did you mark how and she grabbed the boy? Would frighten a boy that way.”
“She was a witch,” said Gordie. “The old woman of the sea.”
“Queer old harp she was.”
But she wasn’t old, Jim didn’t think. If she loosed her shawl she was young and beautiful, like the photograph-portrait of his mother at home.
The tide was half-way down and he listened to the lazy rush of its waves. Straggling rocks creamed in the sun, melting to tan, to umber in the sea. Dark weeds chained them. He smelt the breezy air that was like ozone through the school latrine. Farther along, towards Kingstown, urchinous boys were scraping for bait. Their cries mingled with the calls of gulls that hungrily wailed above. The sea glistened in the bay, a blue sheet that was hardly blue so sharply it shone, nor yet a sheet so spangled its surface. A calm upset by light alone.
You carry your weather with you, his father was fond of saying. Yet the day was glorious.
Sandycove’s beached harbor, the Martello tower on its cliff, its cliff improbably landward. Two figures strolled from the Point, towels slung over their shoulders. Bathers out of the Forty Foot, gentlemen’s bathing-place. There was a loneliness in watching them, for they were actors in the day’s glory, like the gabbling boys and the boisterous gulls.
His father had a story about that Martello that when the Government decommissioned the towers, after the French scares, its garrison had been overlooked. “Twenty year and more,” he told, “they remained at their post, when all this land was back of God speed. They were the lost troop, a sergeant and two swaddies. And yet, at long last when the authorities caught up with themself, it was discovered from the books in all those years not one guardmount, not one sentry-go had been shirked. There’s soldiering for you. That’s the spirit of the British Army.” And indeed it was not difficult to see his father there, reveille to Last Post, at spit and polish, jankers and Queen’s Regulations, counting in his quartermaster-sergeant’s English: boots, leather, pairs of, three.
Forlorn hope is from the Dutch for lost troop. How sad the words and beautiful. All love does ever rightly show humanity our tenderness.
Bills, two gross, local populace, delivery thereto. When he watched the horny hands with veins like rhizomes in the flesh carry up the onion box, he had believed it was his birthday present. His father would often confound surprise with suspense so that, even when faced with the bills, Jim had needed to rummage through to the bottom to be sure there was no mistake. Whatever else, there was no long trousers. Last in his form to be still in breeches with a cake from Findlater’s for after. Acme of swell.
The breeze brushed the sweat on his forehead. It would be good to take off his cap, feel wind in his hair. There were other actions he could envisage performing: loosening his tie, slipping out of his boots and stockings, unbuttoning the knees of his breeches. He imagined padding out to the edge, toes bunched against the jag of rocks. The way the weed would slither beside you, sea-lace and thong-weed. The water grew chiller as it climbed. Or he might venture as far as the Forty Foot itself, strip off and plunge headlong to the deep. He had never swum in the Forty Foot, he had never swum in the sea, but he could conjure the charge of the waves all over. Like those two bathers strolling down, he too would have acted. Involvement, not witness, would mark the day.
If you carry the weather with you, then character is determined by the prevailing wind.
In his pocket he found some sweets; Lemon’s, he remembered. The crinolined lady on the wrapper