At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [24]
“Tulips?” said Jim.
“Aren’t they brave? They will be brave in the morning, anyhow. They’re for the ma. You know there’s hordes in the gardens behind.”
“You’re after stealing them?”
“Stealing, me arse. Redistribution if you must know.” He leant forward and spat into a rock-pool below. “What kept you at the brothers’?”
“You were waiting on me?”
“Wanted to say hello was all.”
Jim said, “Brother Polycarp has me doing a Thirty Days’ Devotion.”
“Mary and Joseph,” said Doyler. “You’d be all year at that.”
Of course they wouldn’t, only Mary’s month of May, but it was a humorous thing to say. Jim took off his college cap to set it straight, and Doyler said, nodding sideways, “See you got the scholarship all right.”
“I did. I heard and you got yours and all.”
A moment, then Doyler slapped his hand on the coping. “Get piles off sitting here. Walk along back with you?”
“All right,” said Jim. He picked up his flute-sock and fell into step.
Peripherally he was aware of a luminescence beside him. Doyler’s blue-gone clothes, so thoroughly brushed, shone like the night sky. He sniffed to see if the smell was there that the fellows had complained of at practice. Nothing, unless his smell was same like the shore.
“Still got that blink, then?”
“What blink?”
“They used call you Blinky for it.”
He’d forgotten that. Blinky they used call him at the national school. “That was years since.”
“Four years,” said Doyler. “D’you remember them soaps?”
“I do.”
“I never thanked you for that.”
“That’s all right.”
“You never split on me. I was thankful for that.”
“Sure, you returned them all.”
“Could have been in bother over that. Himself could have been in bother.”
“You replaced them,” said Jim. “There was no harm.”
“I’m thankful all the same.”
A tram scooted past, looking for speed for the climb out of Glasthule. Bovril briefly was British beef, then all lay quiet. Save for Doyler’s walk. A slip-jig step, crotchet and quaver, crotchet and quaver.
“What happened your leg?”
“The leg? Polis done that.”
“Why would the polis do that to you?”
“Batons came down. I was one in the crowd.” Doyler shrugged. “Was a lot of that in the Lock-out.”
The Lock-out. It was the word they used for the Larkinite riots of a year or so back. The papers had been full of it, mob rule and baton charges in the streets of Dublin. It never really touched Kingstown, let alone Glasthule, save for a while the trams into town hadn’t run on time.
“What were you doing in the Lock-out?”
“Was a newsboy then. The newsboys was the first to go out.”
“Weren’t you sent to County Clare?”
“I got about. Are you straight?”
“Straight?” repeated Jim.
“Hold on to these a crack.” He thrust the tulips into Jim’s hand and Jim watched astonished as he tore at a poster on a letter-box they were passing. “When are the other boys coming?” a strapping Irish soldier inquired, save now his legs were missing. And Doyler was rhyming,
“Full steam ahead! John Redmond said
That everything is well, chum.
Home Rule will come when we are dead
And buried out in Belgium.”
Jim blinked. “You’ve turned a right Sinn Feiner,” he said.
“Sinn Feiners, me arse. I’m a socialist, never doubt it.”
This was unchancy ground and Jim was relieved they were approaching the Adelaide turning where the red-brick shops and naphtha flares would prove a civilizing force. Out of the blue, an arm lumped round his shoulder. “’S all right, Jim. Sure no one saw us and Dora’s away in the arms of Murphy.”
“Dora who?”
“Go way, you gaum.”
Jim squinted round to get a view of this queer and friendly character. He had a big round grin like a saucer was stuck in his mouth. His Adam’s apple jogged above his muffler while he chuckled away to himself. The arm round Jim’s neck gave a squeeze.
“Defense of the Realm Act, of course.”
Tramlines glistened under the quietly hissing lamps. The old woman with the widow’s stoop that people called Mary Nights was passing through, her pram of belongings behind her.