At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [176]
There was a parapet about two feet high where he lodged his feet and he leant back against the roof. Nobody would hardly see him up here. And people never looked up. Up was always the place to hide. He pulled some papers out of his pocket. One of them was a sketch he had made of the Green, its paths and ponds, bandstand, where would a thicket break the line of fire, that sort of thing. He judged it against what he saw, clearly now and entire for the first time. Not bad for a fellow had never made a map in his life. He began penciling adjustments.
The pigeons trooped back. Little sideways steps they made along the ledge. They had the bricks white with their droppings. With a start he remembered what that fucker had done. He reached inside his trousers and felt about his groin. He spat. There’d be another day and that man’s time would come. He had work to do.
When he was satisfied with the Green, he looked about the surrounding rooftops. He began to make his way towards the railway station, crawling along and creeping over the intersecting walls. Every now and then he stopped to make a note of a problem in the way and its workaround, or of a particular vantage, say, for sniping. He’d write it up proper back at the Hall. You couldn’t get all the way to the station, a lane cut in. But he’d known that anyway. Still, if you took a lep down on a wall there and shinned it up a drainpipe you might come close. That was another day’s work. He started back for the Russell Hotel.
The boots was waiting for him under the skylight. He had a mug of tea ready. “Now what did you go and do that for?”
“I only thought.”
Doyler took the tea, gruffly thanked him.
“That was your bloke, wasn’t it?”
“Who was me bloke?”
“The gentleman.”
Doyler looked at him, not liking him at all, a sniffy sort of a face, would want to blow his nose. “What do you mean, me bloke, anyway?”
“I thought you was with him, you know, that you went with him.”
“I never went anywheres with him bar Kingstown.”
“He got you them clothes.”
“He never bought me nothing and I don’t know what you think you’re saying. Here now and thanks for your tea.”
He held the door, then followed the boots through the back ways of the hotel and out into the stable lane. The quilt seemed to want to follow him into Harcourt Street. “Was that any help to you?” he wanted to know.
“Help enough.”
“You can come again. I’ll let you in.”
“I might then.”
“The architecture, isn’t it. At the night classes.”
Doyler had a notion of clandestine activity which this lanky snuffles dogging him in the street didn’t serve at all. He felt a pull on his sleeve and he turned impatiently. “What is it you want?”
The boy leant his head sideways looking into Doyler’s face. “Don’t you like me?”
“Ah now, what’s this now? You don’t want to be bothering your head if a man likes you. Don’t you have work to do? You have it very easy here is all I can say. Go on now.”
He pushed him, not roughly, to send him on his way, then he crossed to Stephen’s Green without looking back. Soft as shite that one was. A few weeks before, he was in the Green, trying to make sense of the paths, and that young quilt had come out of the gents there. He was all pally in an anxious sort of a way. Doyler thought he remembered him all right but he wasn’t going to make any fuss about it. Only he happened to hear the Russell Hotel mentioned at training, and he let it drop that he might know the boots there. Would he be let on the roof, they wanted to know, and Doyler said he’d ask, what harm.
He made some quick turns in and out of alleyways to be sure of anyone following, then he headed down for the river. There was a Guinness barge tooting under the bridge and seagulls squalled above. He looked up O’Connell Street. Jim wouldn’t be still at the pro-Cathedral. There was no good traipsing up there. What had he to say to Jim, anyway, that he couldn’t write it in a letter? He was under orders. He hadn’t time to be making calls.
He walked along the quay looking down at the lumpy green of the Liffey. Above the Customs House the