At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [165]
“I should think it did.”
“Then after Christmas I fell in a terrible way. Well, you know about that. But all the while I knew this wasn’t real, or that it wasn’t the only real thing. There was this other me watching. He was a much stronger person, this other fellow. He wasn’t frightened. And he was getting fed up now. He was really fed up waiting.”
“And then it all came to a head?”
“I don’t know, but after my fever everything changed. I doubt I’d be scared now, not of anything. It’s like that time in the water. I couldn’t think what I was doing different. But I was swimming and I was sure of my strength. Maybe it’s you, MacEmm, made the difference.”
Their ices were long eaten. Sandycove had drained the last flush of light and the sun was sinking fast. Soon the lamplighter would be trotting about. MacMurrough, wishing their time wouldn’t be over, said, “Well.” The boy felt this too, for he said, “You could tell me about the Sacred Band again, of Thebes.”
MacMurrough laughed. “It’s caught your fancy, that, I believe.”
“I don’t know. To fight with your friend beside you. That would be grand. There’s grand things ahead. Can’t you feel it?”
“Yes, I do feel grand things coming, sometimes.”
“Not a man but he fell with his face to the foe.” He quoted MacMurrough’s telling. “It makes you shiver to say it. Is it true you’re to teach us the care of a rifle?”
“I have been asked. Not sure if I should really.”
“I’m sixteen.”
“Yes, I know you are.”
“Weren’t you shooting at my age?”
Well, long before sixteen. He had been kept back at school one holiday, measles or something. He was bored and broke into the gun-cupboard. Took pot-shots at the gas-standards in the courts. His punishment had been, creative this, to join the senior OTC. “Don’t you see it’s getting dangerous now, all this militarism?”
“We’ll be asked to fight for Ireland, sure I know that.”
“But what is Ireland that you should want to fight for it?”
“Sure I know that too.” He raised a shoulder, his head inclined then turned: an attempt to shrug shake and nod, all the same time. When he was shy or self-conscious of something he would say, his body would often fail him. “It’s Doyler,” he said.
“Doyler is your country?”
“It’s silly, I know. But that’s how I feel. I know Doyler will be out, and where would I be but out beside him? I don’t hate the English and I don’t know do I love the Irish. But I love him. I’m sure of that now. And he’s my country.”
Scrotes, my Scrotes, you should be here now.
The boy looked up from under his lashes. The color had tipped his cheeks. “I think a little bit of it too is yourself, MacEmm.”
“Me? My gracious.”
“Though I don’t suppose you’d want me fighting about it. But I don’t know anybody else I could talk these things with. I used think I’d burst with all the words in my head. I can talk things now. I don’t know but it’s like we have a language together. It’s great with the swimming, but it’s better again with the talking. You’re a part of my country too now, MacEmm.”
They were speaking of patriots, Dublin associations of famous rebels, of battles ancient and modern. There Lord Edward had lived, there the Danes had fled, on the left now the Ormond Camp when Cromwell held the city. The car through sober streets motored while the travelers made leaps and purlers in time.
MacMurrough leant forward from the back seat. “We must be coming to Merrion Square.”
“Soon,” answered his aunt.
“Bagott Street,” said her priest. “Up on the left now. Thomas Davis died there, a pneumonia brought on by ceaseless efforts for Young Ireland. ‘A Nation Once Again’—that was his. A tremendous poet, Madame MacMurrough, you will agree. An inspiration to us all, for all he was a heathen.”
“Merrion Square,” said Eveline.
They came into a bosky square of rose and russet terracing. Plates by the doors in close-lipped smiles