At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [32]
Pal of my heart. Wished I hadn’t seen that. Wished I hadn’t delayed in the road.
Mice in the shop. Outside he heard a shrill voice calling, Stop Press! Stop Press! Jim thought of a baton coming down on a newsboy’s leg. Why would they do that to a newsboy?
Lusitania, he was calling. Another place he had never heard of. Tomorrow they’d mark it down on the map. Soldier in the mud with his legs missing and he turns with Gordie’s face to say, When are the other boys coming?
Our Lady clothed with the sun and the moon at her feet and the twelve-starred crown atop the Muglins. No clear idea what a socialist does. Oft in the stilly night.
Upstairs, Aunt Sawney coughed and creaked in her cot. “She’s on her way,” Gordie had said on his last visit, his embarkation leave.
“Her way where?”
“Young ’un,” he said and cuffed Jim’s neck.
That night, lying head-and-tails as of old, Gordie had said quietly, “Do you never think of girls, young ’un?”
“What about them?”
“Nancy’s a bit of”—jam, he called her. “I take her out the odd time. Picture palaces together.”
“What do you see?”
“Matter a damn what you sees.” His toes nudged Jim’s ribs. “Dark as be damned in the picture palace.”
He wished it was dark as be damned in the kitchen. He wished it was dark as he was damned. He shifted on his side and a hand reached under the sheet to the hole he had cut in the ticking and felt its way through the lumps of horsehair till it found the rag he kept stolen there. He shut his eyes from the gaze of Our Lord and the reddening gaze of King George and Sir Redvers Buller, and he crossed out the image of Brother Polycarp’s face and squeezed the mimosa from his mind, and he wondered what would it be like to swim in the sea, to swim in the sea off the Forty Foot, while his shirt lifted and the sheet began to move and the smell came up of the glue-pot.
Old horny.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Nice bit of skirt.”
“Ah stuff it, will ya?”
The joke had been aired ten times over and no one was stirred by it any more. And yet it was curious to be wearing a kilt, to be clothed and to feel undressed inside. Four yards of saffron swung from Jim’s hips. Creamy stockings, Scotch cap, white shirt from Lee’s of George’s Street.
A glance beside at Doyler who was tangling with a garter. Dark hairs curled from his stockings, stopping at the knee where the kilt hemmed. He caught Jim’s look and saucily swayed, lifting his hands in a Highland manner. The ribbons from his cap dangled down his neck. All about the white shirts glared with newness, giving to everyone a bright and flourishing air.
“What cheer, eh?”
“Grand,” said Jim.
The usual must of the school commons was thickened with the sweat of unclothing. Over the benches lay shirts and gallused trousers, and the chatter and chaff was like many drums and many fifes and many boys and mayhem.
“Are we to be a marching band now, Brother?”
Brother Polycarp was at the blackboard where he was chalking an arrangement of “A Nation Once Again.” “Never fear, boy, when we of Presentation march it will be as gentlemen.” He turned. “Not as an early turn from the palace of varieties.”
“Why the kilts so, Brother?”
“Wouldn’t ye think to be merry enough with your Whitsun gauds, not to be moidering me with speculation?” He rapped his stick on the easel. “Quiet now, men, please. Ye can see the push I’m in. I have this jewel of the Hibernian muse to twist some refinement into it.”
He looked surprised at the effect of his command. Every boy stood stock still. He nodded appreciatively, turned back to the board. Only then did he see the newcomer at the door.
A priest. A young priest, black-suited, with a black felt hat, one hand stiffly in his jacket pocket, thumb hooked outside, the other holding a black breviary, finger keeping the page. So tall, his head had a stoop. Wire-framed spectacles saddled his nose. Oddly, ever so, foreign-looking. Stuck in his lapel, a button with a Celtic cross and words in Gaelic underneath. A young, tall, Irish-speaking priest.
“Dia agus