At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [183]
Then, when he was dead on his feet, he made his way back to his tenement kip. The two lads looked at him strange at times. They said his hands moved about in his sleep. More than once he was woke by a thump from one of them.
It turned April and Lent already was half-way gone. They had moved into town, his mother and the shrimpses and himself, bolting the moon out of Glasthule. They’d hunted out a cottage by King Street where they let out the back room. Himself was very poorly now, and when Doyler visited he could see the change that had come about. They had cups to drink out of, the shrimpses each had boots and there was a supply of turf by the fire. His army pension might actually go to some good, with himself on his back and unable to drink it.
His mother sat him by the fire and gave him tea and bread. She was worried the way he looked, was he feeding himself, why wouldn’t he take his meals with them. He wasn’t hardly listening, just looking at the flame of the turf. Then he heard her asking, “What happened with your friend?”
“Nothing, so far as I know.”
“I did at times see him in the street in Glasthule. He looked lonely to me there.” Doyler said nothing. “Wouldn’t you go out a day and swim with him?” his mother went on. He told her he had his duties. “And he the friend of your heart itself?”
“I have no friends now, Ma, beyond the army and the workers that come behind it.”
“Is it that they teach you at Liberty Hall?”
He stared into his Lenten red-headed tea. The shrimpses were crowded round a smoky lamp, the eldest showing the others something in a copy-book. They’d hung an old sheet for a screen. Himself was coughing quietly behind, almost decently, like he didn’t want to be disturbing the visitor. “How is he?” he asked.
“He’s not great.”
“Will I tell you, Ma, what they teach at Liberty Hall? Calvary is what. They have Connolly spouting nonsense about blood and sacrifice. Them poets out of the Volunteers has got to him. I wish to God Jim Larkin would come back.”
“Hasn’t God been good to give you one Jim?”
“Ah, Ma, I’m in the army. Aren’t we training for war sure.”
“A whisper, son—if there’s others unhappy, they won’t be happier for your sorrow. You’d want a long arm and you putting it round an army. You’re lonely to the world I think.”
He came out of the Hall one evening and that quilt of a boots was waiting for him. “Ah no,” said Doyler, “this won’t do at all.”
“Only you said we’d walk together.”
“Lookat, I can’t be dropping everything. Didn’t I say I’d leave word? How d’you know I’m not busy tonight?”
The boots would wait, he didn’t mind waiting. He was happy to wait.
Doyler looked up and down the quay. “All right. I’ll step back with you as far as the Green. That’s all, mind.”
The boots chatted away in his nervy manner. He seemed to want to please with his talk. There had been an attempted raid on Liberty Hall some weeks previous, and the boots was full of the stir of it. “Is it true there was two hundred armed polis?” he asked. Doyler just chucked his head. “They say Mr. Connolly himself stood at the steps with his gun aimed. They say he told the polis the first man moved was a dead man.”
It was true enough. The Hall had been left unguarded for some reason. The peelers came. Connolly kept them at bay while the word went out for mobilization.
“They say all over Dublin there was strange sights of men running through the streets with their bandoliers and rifles on them. You’d have a bandolier,” he said to Doyler. “I’d say you’d have one.”
“Never you mind,” Doyler told him. The boots was obviously after reading it up in a Workers’ Republic.
“The polis soon found they had no business with Liberty Hall,” he went on. “The Citizen Army had them