At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [163]
He thought of Marlowe, while he smoked, that they were fools who did not love tobacco and boys. He thought of Aristophanes, and on a rock in the sea he foresaw two boys with two halves of a medal. See how they fit? We two are one.
And what did I answer when he asked would I kiss another man? I clipped him round the ear of course. Or at least I had thought to. Only his head had moved and I found I was stroking his hair. Lovely hair, the two textures together, razored behind and fingery-flop in front. He was quite nuzzling against my hand, like an animal, and when I looked I saw his long lashes were drawn over his eyes. I bent down and kissed his forehead. His eyes opened, and he gave that extraordinary blink. Big wide eyes that fixed you in memory, then the eyes squeezed, erasing what he saw.
“Ready?”
“Yes.”
His bright face flushed with health and vim. Grinning even. “What’s so amusing?” MacMurrough asked.
“The men over.”
“Well?”
“Doyler used always laugh when rich folk came down the Forty Foot. They wouldn’t be used to walking out of their boots. The quality waddle, he called it.”
“I should hope you don’t think I walk with a waddle.” His barefaced denial. “It’s your turn to get the ices,” MacMurrough said severely and reached in his pocket for a coin.
“I have the money,” and the boy was off up the road.
Towards Newtown Smith and the sea MacMurrough ambled, then down the shore to a grey outcrop, licked by waves, happily named Doyle’s Rock. The Pavilion was gone, and there was no place convenient to tea, save some bun-shop with trestle tables. It smelt of soup and biddies, and the first time they went there MacMurrough could think of no surer escape than two ices they might eat on the road. Strolling home, they had strayed to this rock. Schoolboys and their masters being creatures of habit, ices on Doyle’s Rock were soon the necessary conclusion, the culmination even, of their afternoon swims together.
He had swum, before Jim had arrived for his lesson, his own quarter-mile dash to the pier and back. Now he felt the relax of his muscles, that ponderousness in the limbs that bespeaks their strength. A wonderful felicity of nature was this: that the employment of strength should strengthen one. For full a year he had immersed himself in the sea, that wondrous element, and he felt imbued now, a touch, with the sea’s immensity. Coming to the shore, swimming: it was a kind of pilgrimage to our earliest beginnings. Before we slunk up the beach and—what? found our feet.
The boy came with his ices two. He sat down beside, brushing his shoulder against MacMurrough. He made a habit of these casual touches, and would often cover them with some artifice, as shifting his legs that one might rub against MacMurrough’s or catching MacMurrough’s attention with a hand on his shoulder, that remained there, its fingers patting. From the beginning there had been an assumption of friendship, even of close friendship. At times it seemed absurd, a fancy. It must be this way, MacMurrough thought, when hysterics claim a previous life, dementia praecox must be like this, déjà vu even. Yes, I had known him all my life—and then we met.
They gazed upon the glaucous sea where oily-necked birds floated and dived. Untimely intervals, unlikely places, they resurfaced, floated and dived again.
The boy said, “You never told me you saved a man.”
“Who’s been telling you that?”
“Sure it’s all over the Forty Foot.”
“Well, I don’t know that I saved him so much. He wasn’t drowning, more floundering about.”
MacMurrough had been at the Forty Foot, where he liked to smoke his first cigarette of the day. At the boys’ end some fellow was making for shore, making heavy weather of it, he could see. They called it the boys’ end because boys might paddle on the sand there. But for swimming it was hardly recommended. Too many rocks, which