At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [248]
Jim smiled, feeling the crack in his face. He was kind was MacEmm to think of these things. And he would try to be with him on his island when he could. But he wouldn’t be swimming no more. He would be a stone and he would sink. He knew it annoyed MacEmm, him speaking this way, but he could not help it, and he said, “You know I’ll be a stone. Why won’t you tell me you know, if you love me?”
“Shush now, Jim. There’s men trying to sleep.”
“You don’t love me at all.”
The arm came tightly round and the hand pressed upon his heart. MacEmm’s breath was in his ear, telling him it would pass, it would all pass, it would one day be over. “You won’t forget any of it, my dear, I promise you that. But you’ll swim again and smile. I swear it.”
But no, it would never be over, Jim knew. This was only the beginning. They had to do this to learn how to hate. They had forgotten to hate the British. Now they’d learn. And they wouldn’t be playing soldiers no more. Next time would be murder. And he’d murder every last one till they were gone of his country. That he would. “Every last one,” he told MacMurrough. “And still I’ll kill them. I’ll kill them for fun if there was any fun to be had.”
“Stop it, Jim. You’ll get no comfort thinking that way. It’s not what anyone would have wanted. Not anyone,” MacMurrough repeated, holding Jim tightly still.
“Sure don’t I know,” said Jim, and he heard his voice flinty and frail. “He’d never want me this way. Nor you too, MacEmm. That’s why I hope they’ll shoot us all. I don’t know can I bear to become what I’ll be.”
“You’ll be my lovely boy,” said MacMurrough, “and you’ll grow to be my lovely man. That’s all now. You must try get some sleep.” He bent down and kissed Jim’s head, pulling his fingers through the drag of his hair. Then he laid back his own head against the wall.
The smell of smoke and burning oils wafted in the window draughts. He would murder this minute for a cigarette. A Rosary was being told by some of the men and he listened a while to the soft-spoke rhyme. Every now and then his hand lifted of itself and patted the boy’s side. He was settling at last, curled inside MacMurrough’s shoulder.
Distantly, intermittently, a Mauser barked—some kid on the roofs who had not heard, or would not heed, the general surrender. It was told Pearse and Connolly yet lived, though it was difficult to conceive anyone’s surviving the GPO. Those last nights the conflagration had helled all Dublin.
“Think of it,” the woman they called Madam had said to him while they watched the fires from the Surgeons roof: “that’s not Rome burning, that’s Dublin.”
And yes, there was a certain grandeur to it. “When this is over,” MacMurrough had murmured, “they’ll crucify us.”
“Won’t they!” Madam replied.
And MacMurrough had quizzed her face, under the blue startling light of a British flare, this incongruous banditta who was officer second-in-command of their troop: like no one so much as his aunt, but his aunt corrected, unfettered to the past.
“Will they see this from Glasthule?” Jim had broke in.
“They will, my dear.” Yes, they would be crowding Killiney Hill for their view.
“My poor father.”
MacMurrough had seen him then, Mr. Mack in his straw boater, up on the Hill, among the crowd but not of it, an eavesdrop on the general consternation, his eyes never shifting from the flickering sky; and the words muttered on his great fatherful face, Jim, my son James, while the fires burnt, the fires of Dublin, Dublin burning. MacMurrough had felt the terrible onus to survive.
Though in its way, a childish Irish way, it had proved a civil enough fight for them at the Surgeons. Unofficial lulls thrice daily for the Angelus; the decided ceasefire every morning, eleven sharp, when the park-keeper fed the ducks in the Green. Childish too the caprice of their rations: finest plum jam but no bread to scrape it on, tea brewed of cabbage water, cake. And a kid-soldier who stopped MacMurrough to inquire were they winning: “Only,” said he, “I never been