At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [232]
“You never lifted a finger.”
MacMurrough believed he knew what the boy meant. It was a scene whose recall could torment him still, so that physically he would need to flinch the memory away: the garden fête, the summer house, the boy’s shirt ripped, his nipple bared, that pathetic emblem, his bowed head. And MacMurrough rooted to the floor while the priest smiled, the priest barked.
“Not a finger,” the boy repeated. “After you leading me on to believe we was friendly. You had me going and all, MacMurrough. You told me wear that badge. You told me. I knew then all I meant to you.”
“Doyler, I am sorry. You must try to understand I wasn’t myself back then.”
“Sure I don’t mind.”
The balls were loosed, MacMurrough reprieved. Doyler turned away, and MacMurrough turned with him, not to be ultimately estranged. Even so he could feel himself hard by the boy’s bum. God damn me for an arrogant whoreson pimp.
“Listen to me now.”
“You can’t tell me nothing.”
“Listen to me, Doyler. Whatever passed between us, you must understand it was only me paying you. It made something of me, not of you. You never sold anything.” He reached an arm round and held it on his chest. “Won’t you say you forgive me now?”
“Sure I told you I don’t mind. There was a time I had the blue murders thinking of you. I don’t no more.”
They lay that way a while, MacMurrough embracing the boy, and Doyler embraced but rigidly untouched. Then MacMurrough said, “You will look after him, won’t you?”
“He don’t need looking after.”
“He has no notion of being careful.”
“He’s a rare plucked one, ain’t he.”
“He is, yes.”
“Will I tell you?”
To MacMurrough’s confusion, the boy turned round. He turned round and rested, even insisted, his head on MacMurrough’s chest. They were back as MacMurrough had started, and his hand patted once more the boy’s side.
“Will I tell you?” he repeated. “We went to Mass on Easter Sunday. We were at the back with the men and when it came to communion he stood up. He gave such a look at me and said, Come on. I thought, you know, after the night we’d spent. But he was so sure of things. We went up together. I snuck me eyes at him kneeling there. The priest was beside and he had his tongue out waiting. He was so sure everything was right and square. I don’t know but I loved him that minute. He frightened me a bit too. He’ll be a great leader of men one day.”
“Yes, I believe he will.” MacMurrough heard a doom in his voice, and to dispel it he added, “Lead them a merry old dance.” He became aware of Doyler’s hand again on his stand. He had the strangest sensation of Jim’s watching, of his willing this. “We still might, you know,” he said, “if you’d a mind to.”
The hand maintained its impartial progress up and down. “What and I was to do you?”
Yes he was, a cussed bloody-minded sodomitical object. “That’s sweet of you, my dear, and don’t think I shouldn’t enjoy it, except you’re of that age, you’d imagine you’d put one over upon me.”
“Fair’s fair,” said Doyler.
“Believe me, nature knows best in these matters.”
“That’s the way it is, MacMurrough. Take it or leave it.”
“Oh very well,” MacMurrough said. “Only Doyler, not as a punishment.”
Doyler hawked his throat. The hand removed from MacMurrough’s stand. He hawked again and spat twice in the hand. That old unction, MacMurrough thought, by arse or by tarse once more to balm us.
They slept cuddling, the each the other, though it seemed to MacMurrough he but dozed, when the bells were clanging to shake the windows and waken the sleep of the just.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The rain had begun to fall, drizzling upon Jim’s sleep. He blinked awake. He was sensible of an urgency, though not immediately of its cause. One by one his body told its complaints: the cold, the stiffness, the hunger, and now the wet. A church bell was striking the hour somewhere over the city, ringing once, ringing twice. He made out his neighbor in the grey light, shifting too in the narrow trench. Three bells the church rang. The rain fell on his face and he peered at the sky. Four