At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [150]
“Must get back. I’ll be ticked off for missing and I don’t get back soon.”
“But they’re not there any more. They’ve evacuated the beaches. You’ll never find them now.”
“It’s not this way you’ll find what you’re looking for.”
“What am I looking for?”
“So long, young ’un. Mind you keep to your books.”
Jim shook the phantasma from his head. A salt from the sea trickled on his face. The wind shivered up his jacket and his cold wet fingers drew the cuffs of his sleeves together. He had taken his cap off for fear of it flying. His hair flapped all ways.
He stood at the top of a steps. A blueish night light only just allowed the eyes to see. And he saw how the sea was truly wild. Waves dashed on the rocks, tumbling over in their hurry, creaming as far as the path below. Great gurgling sucks, like the sea drew breath, then roaring through chasms and spouting out in a froth of foam. It seemed to hang in the air, the foam, and shine of its own luminescence. The wind was boastful in his ear.
He closed his eyes and he saw himself in that sea, far far out, released from his bounds, riding the crest of billowing waves. He felt it in the pit of his stomach, the exhilaration of the deep, and the mystery of the deep reaching up to take him.
His eyes opened and he saw dimly the temples on the shoulder of the pier.
He edged along the path, judging the waves and darting between, till he came to the first of the temples. It was filthy dark inside but still he passed through the columns. The sudden quiet was enormous. He sat on a ledge at the back. Damp registered through his seat. He sensed the urinally smell. A drip from the roof dropped tip-tap. His mouth tasted of brine.
Before him in columned panorama the sea surged, grey with trouble and white with thrill. The same thrill and the same trouble boiled inside him. He felt a bursting to be known, to be born, that would no longer be delayed, but whose labor had come. He thought of that other birth at home and the child he soon would hold in his arms. Through his fingers he felt the wall behind and he was struck by the strangeness of concrete things: the ledge, the columns, the floor to his feet: things that did not move, while the sea never ceased.
He had not long to wait. A soldier had followed him. A match struck, a cigarette was lit. The red glow was offered in Jim’s direction.
In his dark-green uniform Doyler lay, his slouch hat over his eyes, on the hard plank of his police-cell bed. There were steps outside and a rattle of keys. His cell door opened. It was the old sergeant who was at the desk last evening when the polis brought him in. He had a cup of tea with him which he held out to Doyler. “Now,” he said. “You have your tea. Drink it.”
Doyler caught the accent of Clare. West Clare, he thought: the fellows for football.
“Make the best of it, boy,” the sergeant advised, once more at the door. “They’ll let you out on the Monday, I’m told, with a caution only. You have your feed and sup till that. Do you want a read of an old newspaper?”
“You can give me back me Workers’ Republic. I’ll read that.”
“You have a mouth on you,” said the sergeant. “I’m not wondering that it’s bruised.”
Doyler lifted the tea to his mouth. “I’d say you’d wish you was in West Clare tonight,” he said. “Away out of Kingstown. The old Kate Mac home.”
The old sergeant nodded. “Merry Christmas now,” he said.
“Merry Christmas, citizen,” said Doyler.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
They had made a kind of a cot for her, Mr. Mack had and Jim, out of, I don’t know, an old oranges crate, and they’d sanded it down and varnished it smooth, they were days at it, should have heard them out in the yard, bickering over what went where, and they’d taken the wheels from under the shop cart, so it was a kind of a pram, suppose you’d call it, with a handle at the end, which she pushed now, Nancy did, rocking it gently to and fro. She had fetched the customer’s chair from out the shop, and she sat outside in the lane, under a fierce January sun that wouldn’t heat you one bit, save