At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [148]
“Grobler’s Kloof,” said Mr. Mack. “Would you get it right.”
“I stood me ground, I did, with me fellow Toughs. I didn’t turn tail the first shot was fired. I stood to them Bojers, I did. ’Twasn’t me what ran for home.”
“To hades and back with you,” said Mr. Mack. “You’ve this story told up and down the street. We’ll have this out once for all. I was time-expired. I had my discharge papers gave out me—”
“There’s plenty men signed on again.”
“I had my passage booked. I had my young wife that was sickening. Sure the war was to be over by Christmas. How was I to know ’twould take three years? You think I had it rosy then, with my wife passed away on me and my two sons I didn’t know what to do with them, coming into Southampton and the news everywhere of rout after rout after rout? You think there was many wanting to employ me then, a man come back from the Cape and a war on? Only for Aunt Sawney above I was on the dunghill, my two young sons with me. And not a night but I thought of the regiment.”
“Battalion,” said Mr. Doyle.
“Ah, would you give it a rest, man.”
Mr. Doyle began a cough that rumbled in his belly before it rose to his chest and made quick hacking barks in his throat, and only when he turned could Mr. Mack see it wasn’t coughing at all, but laughing he was at. “God knows,” he said, “I’d take me chances with old Piet any day, with General Bother himself, before I’d face that crosspatch above.”
Mr. Mack granted him his laugh, and when the laughter was done the quiet that followed recalled him to the barracks at Quetta, high in the hills, when his sergeant’s stripe was fresh on his sleeve. The sense he had of fun and fellowship retreating wherever he advanced, always a corridor’s length away. “And yet,” he said, “’tis true, you know. Them buttons of yours was greasy.”
“Sure what about it,” said Mr. Doyle. “I wouldn’t know to get buttons now, leave out the grease to muck them. Bloody end to the lie in that.”
Mr. Mack’s fingers tapped on his knees. He watched the wispy curls coming up from the cigar, which Mr. Doyle had lit but would not yet smoke. “Aren’t we two very foolish old quilts,” he said, “to be argufying the past? Whatever about buttons and time-expired, it isn’t a sergeant at all I am now.”
“And what are you this night coming here to my hearth?”
Barmy old fool, thought Mr. Mack. “To tell the truth I’m a bit out of myself.”
“A child would tell you that.”
Mr. Mack picked up the bottle and made as if to sip. He made as if to change his mind and offered the bottle over. “For old time’s sake itself?”
He had the bottle held out a long while before Mr. Doyle nodded. He wiped his mouth and without looking accepted the whiskey. He drank his due of it, a good third, in slow slipping slugs, then wiped his lips again. He drew on the cigar till the smoke came out the sides of his mouth where the teeth were gone.
“Well, Arthur,” he said, after his cough had ended. “Is it a grandfather you are this night?”
Mr. Mack put his hand on the red-flanneled knee and he squeezed it gently where the bones beneath were the bones he knew that had aged and thinned with his memory of them. “Well, Mick,” he answered, “I believe and I am.”
Jim had wandered as far as the West Pier where the Helga gunboat gleamed at its mooring. Now he walked back along the harbor front to the East Pier again. The yacht clubs had been shut up for the duration and on their terraces canteens had been erected. Yellow light hung about, like balloons, in the doorways, where groups of Tommies gathered round. He heard the accents of Dublin and Cork, of the West and the North. The soldiers’ feet stamped in the cold, like horses’. Vapor drifted from their mouths and from the mugs they cupped in their hands.
The tide was high and the enclosed water of the harbor chopped and changed like an animal pacing its cage. He fancied the waves beyond the piers and felt queasy thinking of boats on the sea and the Tommies who must soon embark. It