At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [35]
“Butler’s all mouth, but Fahy’s a hard nut.” He spat his bile on the rocks below.
Jim swallowed. The hand had lifted, but the tension it had induced remained. “Are we really to go to the Forty Foot?”
Doyler looked round as though the rocks would decide him. “Said you never been. Thought to show you was all.”
“It’ll be dark soon.”
A flash of his grin. “I’ll see you won’t fall in,” he said and the arm went round Jim’s shoulder.
Gently this time, though still the touch shot through Jim’s clothes, through his skin even. It was this way whenever their bodies met, if limping he brushed against him or laughing he squeezed his arm. The touch charged through like a sputtering tram-wire until it wasn’t Doyler he felt but what Doyler touched, which was himself. This is my shoulder, this my leg. And he did not think he had felt himself before, other than in pain or in sin.
“Are we straight so?”
“Aye we’re straight,” said Jim.
“Straight as a rush, so we are.”
The shore lay deserted in the last light of evening. The tide was far out, no sound bar a faint tingling and every now and then a wallow in the deeper pools. Doyler slipped down from the sea-wall to the rocks—“This is madness with our flutes,” said Jim—and they slid their way across the scalp. Up and down he lurched, making odd heelers when his right foot failed. “Good for the balance,” he maintained.
They skirted the ladies’ bathing-place, that seemed a deep and untouched pool, and climbed instead the brawny ridges that thrust to the sea, over the brash and barnacled boulders to Sandycove Harbor. They rounded the cushiony sand outside then plunged in the mud of the breach. And it was queer to enter the harbor that way. Sea-wrack lay everywhere, a rank and oily flow. Hard above loomed the Martello tower, looking ghostly and portentous on its grassy knoll.
Doyler stopped to peer round. The sand was grey, for color had departed as evening dropped. Rivulets of silver veined its skin, save where the deep dark crept from the caves of stranded boats. The solemn houses of Sandycove looked inward against the night. In the west the clouds were one with the mountains. All was hushed save a crane behind that whispering flapped away. Then Doyler patted his bad leg and gave out a roar.
“What?” said Jim.
“Run!” he roared.
He charged up the slipway, slithering down and up again, roaring all the while, a wild yahoo of a yell.
For a moment Jim stalled, looking about and behind. His mouth had watered and it surprised him to find he had spat. His spittle pearled in the draining sand. Then his feet were running and the breath came fierce in his lungs, and still he roared while Doyler roared, up to the Point where the wind hit them with a coarse cloth cuff; then round the battery wall, down the sloping winders, on through the shadows and shelters, down into the Forty Foot where their howls exhausted on the hanging rocks. They collapsed at the steps that dropped to the water where wavelets lapped, foamlessly lapping.
“That’s me spent.”
“Me too.”
His heart was pounding like a throb in the rock and his ears dinned with stopped sound.
“That was madness with our flutes.”
“That was madness with me leg.”
It was grand though too, thought Jim.
The way they had fallen their bodies were heaped, Doyler’s leg thrown over Jim’s.
“Why did you run?”
“Why wouldn’t I run?”
“You was roaring like billy-o.”
“So was you.”
Yet it hadn’t seemed it was they who roared, but the stillness that had raged against them. Jim sat up, scrupulously removing his leg from under. Phosphorescent glimmers showed in the cove. Away on Howth the Bailey swept and the lightship at the Kish responded, mother and daughter, crotchet and quaver. In the corner of his eye, he caught the Muglins winking. He felt flushed and able. Forty Foot at last, gentlemen’s bathing-place. He reached his hand to the water.
“Too cold for you?”
“Not at all,” he answered.
“Best spot in Ireland for a dive and a dip.