At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [76]
—Nod to the neighbors? repeated MacMurrough. Hello and Gomorrha to you. Hello and Gomorrha.
But they met no one at the gates and no one of consequence till past Glasthule. Crossing to Kingstown it was a surprise after the broken paving to hear his shoes clip on the Aberdeen setts. George’s Street was striped with awnings. Straw hats, postcards, trinkets, an excursionist’s treasury dangled in the sunshine. Those few buildings that were not new and red-bricked had scaffolding on their fronts, properly ashamed amid the town’s gay prosperity. A crazy jam of traffic, horsecart and tramcar. Six priests, four monks, seven nuns MacMurrough counted in the space between two public houses.
“Herrody May! Even Herrody May!”
—What can they mean? asked Scrotes.
—Herald or Mail, answered MacMurrough as the newsboys darted past. I don’t know how I know, but I do.
Austrian veal butcher’s festooned with Union flags. Indeed, the red-white-and-blue waved high and low.
—Empire Day, said Scrotes.
—Yes, Empire Day, agreed MacMurrough. I had forgotten.
And he was not alone, it seemed. Some dismal procession was wedging its way between the tramlines and horsemuck. Men with hockey-sticks, or hurleys as they called them, at a shambling march, their green armbands a scandalous sedition of the chromatic propriety. Jeers from the jarveys, cold stares from gentlemen, ragamuffin boys mocked their step. Even the dogs of the street joined in, yelping and wagging their furious tails: that uncanny sense in the canine that recognizes preponderant disdain. Then a biddy from a fruit-stall stepped out to lead them. She walked backwards in front, waving her skirts and jigging her feet in hilarious burlesque. And how the crowd loved her, cheering her on, and her hawker sisters called ribaldly after. But by degrees that could be measured in the granite setts, her face hardened and her mockery slowed, till all of a heap was revealed in their midst—Mother Erin. Erin go bragh, she sobbed till she stumbled in a gutter. Her sisters came with the bottle and the shambling men marched on.
Then a boy stopped his bicycle outside a shop selling wool and he made to climb off. The way his leg stretched it was like time stood still. MacMurrough could feel the abrasion of his breeches, could catch the sweat of his crotch, taste the ink on his fingers, even. The curve of the leg as it hung in the air had a Palladian perfection. He blinked in an odd way when he saw he was watched. MacMurrough smiled and the boy half smiled before the color rose and he turned away. The boy with the stockings, the comfort for the troops.
—You know, he said to Scrotes, if Ireland might be a boy instead of a blowsy old cow, I’d be all for Ireland, I would.
At last they turned into Marine Road, quietly sedately hoteled, guest-housed. Matrons in thick-starch double-blue frocks rustled by. Squadron of schoolboys done up as sailors, Nanny Tremble in charge with fob dangling. At the cab-stand, the blinkered blood-eyed nags. He stopped by the entrance booth to a walled and landscaped garden whence drifted the oompah of a brass band.
—So this is the famous Pavilion Gardens, said Scrotes. Has the aspect, you’ll forgive me, of an ice-cream factory.
—It’s intended to resemble a ship on the sea.
—No, definitely an ice-cream manufactory.
Through the bars of the gate he glimpsed ladies with parasols and gentlemen with cigars who strolled the snow-white palace of iron, of glass and iron and floating belvederes. Behind him, when he looked, two giant constables kept watch from the courthouse steps. He heard the stall-women at the railway station. He smelt the shit of the horses at the hazards.
—I have forgotten my cane, he said to Scrotes.
—You have forgotten nothing, Scrotes returned.
It was true. Only a gentleman might carry a sword. He pitched a coin at the man in the booth and swung through the turnstile.
Waiting to be seated, he felt his fists gripping. He would have preferred his back to the wall, but he had come this far, so he ordered a middle table.