At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [25]
“How’re you, Mary?” called Doyler. “What way are the nights this weather?”
“The nights is drawing out,” said Mary Nights from her bent old head.
It was coming late now, and the boy was hooking the carcasses from the butcher’s shutter. Doyler said, “Wait for us a crack,” and darted inside. Jim watched him through the window, bargaining for some broken brawn.
His eyes were drawn to a shelf at the back, where above the barrels of corned beef, a cow’s head was on display. The butcher had prised its tongue out and curled it over the corner of its mouth, the way it would be licking its lips in anticipation of its own taste. Moony eyes were staring down, contemplating its blood collect on a plate. There was blood on the pavement too where the carcasses had dripped.
“After you with the push!”
A drunk had stumbled backwards out of Fennelly’s and knocked into a bunch of fellows. He turned on them with colossal injury.
“Who’re ya shoving at? Who d’ya think yous’re shoving? Come back to me here and I’ll learn yous manners.” He staggered to his feet, cursing and reeling. But he had lost the direction he was traveling and kept peering about as though to find it in the road. “Who is it wants a puck? If’s a puck yous want, need look no farther!”
Jim turned aside and found himself facing the blind lane that led to the Banks. Only a hundred yards from home, yet he had never been inside. There was no call for deliveries to the Banks. Gordie said he saw a naked woman there once. He used go down to buy bait when he was too idle to dig his own. He maintained it was like a party inside, with all sorts being drunk, red spirit even, and indeed you often heard singing in the night hours. Shrieks too, and sometimes, worst of all, that mad laughter that goes on too long and loud.
A marvel to picture tulips in such a place.
The Banks was the worst, but all about there was hardship. The dwellings beyond his father’s shop, the courts behind the butcher’s. You heard them at times, and if the wind went strange you had to smell them. But if you looked, you need never see more than shops and solid house-fronts. And when he looked up Adelaide Road to his father’s shop on its watch upon the lane, he saw it for once not from his schoolfellows’ view, as a dowdy and hucksterish stores, but as his customers must see it: the last and least, but still part of the strip of well-to-do that hedged their lives.
“Oft in the stilly night,
ere slumber’s chain has bo-o-und me—”
It was the drunk out of Fennelly’s who had begun to sing.
“Fond memory brings the light
of other days aro-und me—”
Moore’s old melody. Under a gas-lamp he stood, in its puddle of light, lurching a little; his face cadaverous thin, though his voice, for all it rasped, surprising true. He aimed his song above the rooftops to where the night sky shimmered, while he told the tears of his boyhood years, the words of love he had spo-o-ken.
So ardent did he sing, each note might carry a breath of his life. People passing stopped to hear. And seeing them gathered, he stumbled among them with his hat held out. It was easy to credit the truth of his song, that his dim old eyes, they once had shone, that his heart, once cheerful, had been bro-o-o-ken. Two coins chinkled in his hat. And so it was when nights were still and sleep had yet to bind him, round him shone that other light, fondly to remind him.
A creak in his voice, and the spell broke in a raucous cough. He sought to regain his moment, but he could not. People who drifted away he followed with his hat. Those drinkers who had crowded Fennelly’s door set in to mock him.
Jim retreated in the butcher’s doorway. There was another boy, he saw him in his mind’s eye, who when Doyler came out took hold his arm and strolled him away up the other direction. But Jim was not that boy, and now when Doyler emerged with his parcel of brawn, he stood mutely by, sensing the darkened mood.
“Mary and Joseph,” Doyler muttered, “in the street and all.” In a jerk he had the pieces of his flute whipped out. “Are you straight, Jim Mack?”