At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [175]
“Then I pity you.”
MacMurrough saw his cuffs, his links, the elegance of just this square foot about his plate. I have no human failings, none whatsoever. All my failings are animal.
“I pity you for you will never know what it is to be a man. As I have never known—”
“As you?”
“As I pity myself for the ingrate I have for a nephew. I had thought you would settle now, that you would wish to settle. Marriage and children, I should find you an employment even. I had thought this period would be something we would share, privately. We would come to laugh of it even, in happier times. I had thought it was finished. I was mistaken.”
He thought for a moment she was going to cry. That indeed she was crying, and was reaching now into her reticule for a mouchoir. What she brought out made her wrist look frail and old. He saw the veins where her coat had pulled back. Its weight was too much for her to brandish it successfully. Her arm wavered up and down. She did not point at MacMurrough, as he had half expected, but at a party of officers at a table beside. It had often flitted through his mind, but he had never given it any serious consideration, that his aunt was mad.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“A Webley. You must have got him very drunk, your officer.”
“We might go to the manager now. We could so easily take this building. It has a commanding presence, you will agree. With the Shelbourne, we should hold the entire Green.”
“Hadn’t you better put it away now?”
“So soon?”
“Is it loaded, Aunt Eva?”
“I believe it may be.”
“Is the catch on?”
“I’m not sure if I can tell.”
“Please, Aunt Eva, will you give it to me now?” Slowly the gun went down on to the table. “We had as well put it to our heads,” she said. “The fight is coming and we leave nothing behind us. We leave it all to penny-boys and clerks.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The young man with Doyler, who indeed no longer worked at Lee’s of Kingstown, but had advanced to a position of boots and bottle-washer at the Russell Hotel adjacent the Green, was looking uneasy. He had knelt beside Doyler. “You all right now?” he asked.
Doyler pushed him away. “I told you wait, didn’t I?” He was still in agony. His groin felt it had kicked into his stomach. He had to bend tight and squeeze inside to hold the pain. And he was seething with anger. And now, Jesus, here was a peeler coming. That fucker sent him and all. He got to his feet, still bending and holding where it hurt. He felt a lightness in his head.
“You’ll be all right in a minute. You need to stand and walk round.”
“Will you get your maulers off of me? Come on, get out of this place.”
He led the boots out by the Surgeons, and hurried up past the keeper’s lodge into Harcourt Street. He stopped at the stable lane to the Russell Hotel. The weeds in the walls and crevices gave off a whiff of urine. He looked back to see was he followed. The pain was gone or bearable anyway. He sought his sensible workaday face. “You sure now you can get me in? I don’t want any trouble about it.”
The boots was sure. He went in the staff way, and after a time a coach-house door opened. He led Doyler through the dark and up narrow staircases that had a creak of worm and damp in their tread, up to the attic story. Nobody had seen them. He opened a door into an odd-shaped bandboxy room. Three beds jammed inside. He pointed to one and said, “That’s where I sleep.”
Doyler was looking up at the skylight. “How d’you get out?”
Well, you pulled the bed and if you balanced ever-so on the bedstead you could just with your fingers get a shove on the skylight. “Give me an hour,” said Doyler. “You’ll have to be back again to let me out. You won’t forget now?” He climbed on the bed, and the boots gave him his body for a ladder. The skylight eased open and he heard the clap of pigeon wings. Then he was out on the roof and all of the Green swam before him. He checked down again. That quilt of a boots had his face gawking. “Put the bed back,” he told him, whispering now. “And don’t stand about looking to be catched.” He shifted the skylight back