The Ginger Man - J. P. Donleavy [29]
"They really are. I know you don't understand. They would help us if they were able."
He rolled over on his side and pushed his head into the pillow. Marion turned off the light. Her hand pulling back the sheet. A groan of rusty springs. Darkness like the sea come for him. A bed of pain. Asking the dark tide to take me away. And I went out with the sea and knelt praying in the deep.
Suddenly he was awake. In sweat and fear. Marion clinging to him sobbing. Hear the thunder of her heart and wailing. I'm smitten with remorse and calculating in my heart Dublin looming a Swiss Cheese of streets and running through them screaming in tears. Children shrinking in the doorways. Gutters running pig's blood. Cold and winter.
In the morning all silence between them. Sebastian heating soup jelly, dipping bread in it and drinking a cup of tea. How I hate the fear of it Hate my own hatred. Get out of all this with escape and murder. Poor Marion. I have never felt so sad or pained. Because I feel it all seems so useless and impossible. I want to own something. I want to get us out of this. Get out of this goddamn country which I hate with all my blood and which has ruined me. Crush Skully's head with a poker. A green Jesus around my neck and this damn leaking ceiling and this foul linoleum and Marion and her wretched shoes and her stockings and panties and her tits and goddamn skinny back and orange boxes. And the black smell of grease and germ and spermy towels. All the rot behind the walls. Two years in Ireland, shrunken teat on the chest of the cold Atlantic. Land of crut. And the drunk falling screaming into the ditches at night, blowing shrill whistles across the fields and brown buggered bogs. Out there they watch between the nettles, counting the blades of grass, waiting for each other to die, with the eyes of cows and the brains of snakes. Monsters growling from their chains and wailing in the dark pits at night. And me. I think I am their father. Roaming the laneways, giving comfort, telling them to lead better lives, and not to let the children see the bull serving the cow. I anoint their silver streams, sing laments from the round towers. I bring seed from Iowa and reblood their pastures. I am. I know I am Custodian of the Book of Kells. Ringer of the Great Bell, Lord King of Tara, "Prince of the West and Heir to the Arran Islands" I tell you, you silly bunch of bastards, that I'm the father who sweetens the hay and lays the moist earth and potash to the roots and story teller of all the mouths. I'm out of the Viking ships. I am the fertilizer of royalty everywhere. And Tinker King who dances the goat dance on the Sugar Loaf and fox-trots in the streets of Chirciveen. Sebastian, the eternal tourist, Dangerfield.
For two days he sat in the little room. Out twice to buy a tin of spaghetti and pig's trotters. On the third day, remorse hardening with idleness. Reading letters of those with problems in the back of a women's magazine and a few proverbs from the Bible, for the Christianity that was in it And suddenly the sound of mail. On the hallway floor a letter from O'Keefe.
Dear Phony,
I'm up to my teeth. I'm a hungry son of a bitch, enough to eat dog. I bought a tin of peas and I ration myself twelve after every meal This place is the dullest I've ever been. I put an ad in the local paper to give English instruction to girls that wanted to take posts in England with families. Two showed up. One as ugly as an old man's sin and knew what I was after and didn't mind at all but as hard up as I am I couldn't get myself to seduce her, even for academic purposes. I am destined to love beautiful women and to inspire in them a desire to lay for someone else. But things are more complicated than that. The other girl complained to the head master and I was scared I was going to get the kaput But the head master is a good skin and he laughed and sympathized but told me to lay off because it wasn't so hot for the school. So much for my heterosexual life from which I have officially retired.
My homosexual personality is complete. I