At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [68]
—Oh, and he was so hungry last evening, said Nanny Tremble. Remember and he sent you down for the cold meats? We thought he’d never have his nough. But you can never give a boy too much to eat.
—And he lapped up all his milk, added Dick, stirring in his drawers.
No sign of injury though the limp is there. And that, too, had attracted at the Forty Foot. Youth, poverty, minor impairment: had a lot in his favor. Walked along the sea-wall with him that first time, tried to interest him in diving. Well, anything to keep a conversation up. Knowing grin he had. Convinced all along he was fly to the game. Tossed him a coin. The magic effect of half a crown, deposit on a bit of brown.
Found him that night outside the hand-me-down shop. I remember geese barking in the yards while we chatted on the sea-steps. I bent down and took him in my mouth.
Afterwards he had bread which he was happy to share. Boland’s. They don’t use foreign flour, he chose to tell me. I paid him, the full pledge, his flute for his flute. His smile was collusive then. And I thought of those lines from Blake: Stolen joys are sweet, and bread eaten in secret pleasant.
And very pleasant it has been. He found his notecase. “I hope you don’t mind paper,” he said, “as I haven’t sufficient coin.”
The boy took the red ten-shilling note. A week’s, two weeks’ wages, MacMurrough calculated. Not so very long ago and the least smile should have earned a sovereign. He watched him read the note like a morning paper, turn it over and read the back page. Soap shone on his face, and he gave his regular godless oath.
“Mary and Joseph, are you always so free with your bunce?”
“It wouldn’t do to defraud a laborer of his wages,” MacMurrough responded and kissed his forehead. “That sin cries to heaven for vengeance.”
“You’re a regular pagan,” said the boy.
“You’re not so bad yourself.”
He took him down the backstairs to the kitchen where no one yet stirred though MacMurrough knew the girl, and most probably Cook too, and whoever else in the turnover of staff, would be ears against the walls. He opened the kitchen door and paced up the area steps, suppressing in the open an urge to sneak. The boy felt this, for he asked, “Are you never worried you’ll be catched?”
—We will be caught, said the chaplain. We will go down for habitual degenerates and it will be that young blackguard’s blame.
MacMurrough said, “Actually, I was caught.”
The boy stopped on the gravel. “You was?”
MacMurrough ambled on. “It’s all right. They never catch you twice.”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“They never release you the first time.”
Down the path to the end of the garden where opened a private gate to the sea-wall. Mist out on Howth and a chill breeze; dew on the lawns where a blackbird practiced its range. Distant doves cooed with argumentative insistence. A magpie’s rattling gun. He believed he saw a rabbit. He believed he saw a fox. Hare and hyena, he told Scrotes: supporters of our chivalry.
“Good luck so,” said Doyler.
“Yes, good luck.”
The chaplain and Dick proffered their conflicting counsel as MacMurrough watched him tread his way. A sadness and tenderness descended as he saw how beautiful was the world. The clearing sky was beautiful, the leaping dew, the breeze that blew like mint upon his face. His seed was inside a darling boy who limped through this imperial morn in his raggedy-daggledy clothes. Lamb dressed up as mutton. How sad that made him feel, and tender. Tender and sad and cold.
MacMurrough climbed back into bed. He closed his eyes and wandered up spiral stairs till he came to Scrotes’s turret room. The old fellow was beavering away at his table. MacMurrough leant at his shoulder to over-read, piecing together with difficulty the vermiculate