At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [211]
“I don’t know but, if you hadn’t been there, would I have managed it at all.”
“Managed what exactly?” MacMurrough inquired.
“I could easy get him back to the Muglins. But I wouldn’t know much about the pumping thing. You’ll have to teach me that.”
Absurd youth. The shock was long erased: a tremor in a boat: no conception now of the horror a minute might have wrought. Even with the boy breathing MacMurrough had feared, as he had encountered before after a near-drowning, a comatose state. It was hard to be sure by the mouth, but he doubted Doyler had stopped breathing at all. His recovery was too swift and certain. Already when MacMurrough carried him up the harbor steps, he was complaining the trousers weren’t his and what had happened his uniform. The devil’s own luck: and no worse for it than gripes, the sicks, and a light feverishness: his due anyway after the water he had drunk.
He reached his wine to the floor. The boy stretched his shoulders, tame upon MacMurrough’s bosom. “You oughtn’t have been there at all,” he said. “Out in your boat looking over us. By rights I should be annoyed, but you know, I’m not at all annoyed with you.”
And so I am absolved.
“You were in your Jaegars too. When I’ll be a teacher I’ll wear Jaegar drawers.” He turned his head to see MacMurrough’s face. “Won’t I be handsome?”
If MacMurrough hadn’t surmised before, he might be certain now how swimmingly things had gone on the Muglins. The boy was glowing, MacMurrough could feel it on the palm of his hand, positively glowing with knowledge, animal and sexual. He had felt this once himself, but he could not recall the incident nor the other with whom it had been shared; and when he tried, the memory that came was of his face bruised and his arm held high after a schools’ boxing tournament.
“But you know, it’s strange,” the boy continued, “I did think of you out there on the island and I knew you were thinking of me. And I knew you knew how happy I was. You was so happy for me too, I knew that.” A pause, recapitulating, then: “Were happy, I mean.” He twisted round on the sofa. “I never asked—”
“The curse and flames!” cried MacMurrough.
“Did I hurt you? I never hurt you there, MacEmm?”
The imp had elbowed him exactly on his horn. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what you’re about. And you may take that fool’s grin off your face. I won’t desire you to rub it, no nor to kiss it better.”
The smile, at such wickedry, quite bulged from his face.
“Lie back now where I was comfortable.”
He lay back and MacMurrough once again stroked his fingers through his hair, beautiful hair, without tangle or scrag, you could play with it all ways and always it found itself with the merest shake of his head. He washed it in rainwater. Why in rainwater? The boy didn’t know, but it was something his father had taught him to do. What a wonderful father to have.
“I was going to ask you, how did you come to be so good in the sea?”
“Oh, the sea,” said MacMurrough. He touched his wine, then recited in his most elegant Hibernian,
“My grief on the sea,
How the waves of it roll.
For they heave between me
And the love of my soul.”
“That’s lovely,” said Jim.
“Yes, I got it out of a book of my aunt’s. It goes on:
“And my love came behind me,
He came from the south;
His breast to my bosom,
His mouth to my mouth.”
“A lovely warm feel. I’d say wine was like that.”
“So we often hope,” said MacMurrough. “The sea,” he reiterated. “I’m not sure I can remember how it started. Well I do, I suppose. I was holidaying at some dreary resort, might have put my name down for anything, but I opted for swimming. Actually, I was in a boating accident some while before that. The others, there were two others, well they drowned. I didn’t.” He waited. “Perhaps we’re drawn to what frightens us.”
“Are we?”
Yes, that horror drew him still. He screaming in the