Strumpet City (66 page)

‘What’s this?’ Joe asked.

‘I wouldn’t take that money from him,’ Pat told the publican.

‘And why not?’

‘While you were away, this gentleman and myself had a little conversation.’

‘Just so,’ Harmless said.

‘And we found we both knew this man here. He’s a scab.’

‘Who’s a scab?’ Joe demanded.

‘You are,’ Pat said, becoming belligerent.

‘Now gentlemen,’ the publican appealed, ‘no violence—for the love of God.’

Harmless was polite about it.

‘We’d like him removed,’ he suggested to the publican.

‘Let him try,’ Joe said.

‘I can’t remove a man that’s not under the influence and is paying for what he orders in accordance with the requirements of the Innkeepers Act,’ the publican said.

‘So give me back my drink,’ Joe demanded.

‘That’s right,’ the publican said, ‘give him back his drink and let there be no more nonsense.’

He appealed to Harmless.

‘You’re a civil spoken class of a man,’ he said, ‘and I’m asking you now to control your friend.’

Harmless tapped Pat on the shoulder and said:

‘Give him back his drink.’

‘Certainly,’ Pat said. He lifted the pint glass and emptied it over Joe’s head.

The publican yelled and began to climb over the counter. Harmless grabbed him by the shoulders, holding him in a grip of iron. Meanwhile Pat and Joe, locked together, were rolling about the floor.

‘Get the police,’ the publican yelled wildly to whoever was hidden in the snug. ‘Go out and shout for the police, before they break up the place.’

Harmless lifted him bodily, held him poised for a moment while he took aim, then pitched him neatly on to the shelf behind the bar. A shower of bottles and glasses scattered as he landed, littering the floor.

‘Out,’ Pat whispered to Joe.

Harmless followed them as they ran outside. Mick appeared from nowhere and began blowing a police whistle.

‘With regard to the front window there . . .’ Harmless remarked.

‘I’d better let go at it,’ Pat agreed, ‘otherwise the Bobbies mighn’t consider it worth while giving chase.’

Mick gave a few more blasts at the police whistle.

‘Just so,’ Harmless said, with regard to the window. They heard the sound of running feet in the distance.

‘You boys break for it now,’ Pat said, ‘I’ll hang on until they’re in sight.’

‘Right,’ Mick said.

‘Come on,’ Harmless ordered.

‘I’m bloody well destroyed with porter,’ Joe complained.

‘A good run will warm you up,’ Harmless told him, ‘and prevent you taking cold on account of the wetting.’

‘Hurry,’ Pat said.

The three of them ran off. He listened to their footsteps receding. He listened also to the footsteps which were approaching. At what he judged to be the right moment he took the stone from his pocket and heaved it at the plate glass window. Although he was expecting it, the crash of breaking glass startled him. He turned to run.

‘Pat.’

It was Lily again. He almost fell over her as he turned.

‘I followed you,’ she said, ‘I was afraid you’d get hurt. Why do you do things like this?’

He hesitated. Her presence threw him into confusion. For several precious moments he could not think what to do. Then he realised the police were dangerously close.

‘I have to run.’

She gripped his arm and screamed.

‘Pat . . .’

He did the only thing possible. Grabbing her hand, he began to drag her along.

‘Run, Lily—run like hell.’

But he had allowed the police to come too close. If he made for the canal barge now, he would lead them to the others. He turned off the route he had planned, using the laneways in an attempt to lose his pursuers. He took a wrong turning and found himself stopped by a wall.

‘Try to climb over,’ he said to Lily. He helped her but she lost her grip each time.

‘Go yourself,’ she begged him, ‘they won’t harm a woman.’

‘Wouldn’t they,’ Pat said.

He was trying to lift her a third time when the police reached them. A hand grabbed him by the collar and a fist smashed into his face. He fell back against the wall, blood spurting from his broken lips. Lily sprang forward to defend him but was swung off her feet by one of the policemen. He flung her to the ground. Her head struck against the wall and her arm buckled under her as she fell. The police grabbed Pat.

‘Where are the others?’ one of them demanded.

‘The woman,’ Pat said, ‘pick her up. She’s hurt.’

They twisted his arm. ‘The others . . . where are they?’

‘What others?’ Pat asked.

‘Clip him,’ one of the police advised.

He was struck across the mouth again. He could feel his arm twisting in its socket. The pain was excruciating.

‘Bastards,’ he yelled.

A fist struck him in the face and the world went black.

‘That was a mistake,’ one of the policemen said, ‘you’ve bloody well knocked him out.’

‘Take him in,’ another said.

‘What about the woman?’

‘She’s bad enough. We’d better get her to hospital.’

‘They’ll want to know how she got hurt.’

‘That’s easy,’ one of them said, ‘we’ll tell them this bloke here was beating her up.’

‘So he was,’ another agreed.

They took Lily and Pat from the laneway. The chase was abandoned.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

Father Giffley, stretching out his left hand, drew the lace curtains of his bedroom window gently aside. Beyond them was a green and yellow world. He blinked his eyes several times. It remained. The sky poured out a green and yellow light; the roofs reflected it back. In the street it was the same. People and conveyances floated with a swaying motion between a green and yellow sea. A bell somewhere struck the hour. He became rigid until it stopped. The notes boomed inside him, with a din that almost burst his chest. He was the clock. A metal-shod wheel bounced so loudly on the cobbles that it broke away and was propelled towards him, a coloured Catherine wheel of cold light. He ducked back in terror. The curtains fell into place again. He turned his attention to the room.

The light was subdued, the air was easier to breathe. It stank he was sure, of peppermints and whiskey. There was nothing he could do about that. It was too late now. His course was set. The whiskey bottle by the bedside was empty. There was nothing immediately to be done except to get more. He looked about him.

The bookcase in the corner regarded him accusingly. The black notebook on the chair moved of its own accord, very stealthily, hoping he would not notice. But he had. He pounced on it. Then he recollected himself and it resumed its inanimacy. He opened the pages and forced himself to concentrate. He read:

‘Call often to mind the proverb—the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.’

That was familiar. A friendly voice repeated the words into his ear. He nodded his head. Yes.

The green and yellow light was coming from inside him. He knew that. A condition of the liver. Exercise would drive it away. Or might. He put on his coat and hat, took his walking stick, wound his black scarf about his throat. If he could bring himself to eat, that would help too. But his will refused to entertain the idea. Eating, it said, would kill him. Don’t eat.

Images hung in his mind with the weight of a stone; first the threadbare hole in the hall carpet, then the green slime on the edges of the holy water font, after that the cupped depression worn in the granite flag at the entrance gate by countless churchgoing feet. They clung behind his eyes like a picture gallery until the repetitive movements of arms and legs, the swinging of his walking stick, the quickening of the sluggish juices of his body, dislodged them. One by one, at spaced out intervals, they crashed from their pegs. He was free of them. His body quivered uncontrollably and he was forced to stand still. When that in turn passed he felt better and thanked God. He could now find his way to another drink. It did not trouble him that it must involve in the end nothing less than his own doom. There was no longer any practical alternative. He found a public house and entered without shame. The customers stared at him. He asked for a glass of whiskey and lowered it at his ease, ignoring them. He felt better. That was the essental thing. He paid what was due and went out, noting with relief that the streets now wore their habitual winter grey and the things that passed him made the sounds of everyday.

They were drab streets, these streets of his. He was parish priest to a community of beggars. Their windows were broken and their abodes stank. No one considered them. No one cared for them. He had failed in care himself. It was not his nature to love rags and filth or to believe that suffering ennobled the illiterate. Yet he pitied them. It didn’t do them any good of course, but it was better than contempt. O’Connor was contemptuous. And a prig. Ought to shave himself in holy water.

To add to the drabness, rain began. It caught him unawares and made him angry. He had not reckoned on the possibility of rain. Rain was another part of the drabness of the world, the greyness of all Creation. It brought soot and dirt down out of the air and made a cesspool of the broken street. He looked about, saw a railway bridge and took shelter.

It was gloomy and cheerless. Drops of water dripped on him. A chilling wind inhabited the place. Through the eye of the arch he saw the vista of the street; grey, the rain beating on it so fiercely that the drops rebounded. He could find no single thing, outside him or within, to fasten on to in hope against the void and the absence of God. He looked at his walking stick.

‘Good evening, Father.’ The voice startled him. He did not look around immediately. These bodiless voices had troubled him before. He would not be tricked. Still looking at the stick he said, in a matter of fact way, in order to reassure himself.

‘I should have brought my umbrella.’

‘You don’t remember me, Father,’ the voice said. This time he looked around. He saw a bent and bearded figure with a haggard face. He stared.

‘Who are you?’

The figure wore a sack about its shoulders and a coat tied about the middle with a piece of rope.

‘Rashers Tierney, your Reverence. I used to work in the church. A boilerman.’

‘Tierney,’ Father Giffley said. He pondered. He remembered.

‘Tierney,’ Rashers repeated.

Father Giffley studied the face closely.

‘You look ill.’

‘I’m not in the best, right enough.’

‘Are you working?’

‘Divil the work.’

‘Your chest was bad,’ Father Giffley remembered, ‘and you had an animal—a dog.’

‘Rusty.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The dog’s name was Rusty.’

‘Quite. For the moment the animal’s name had escaped me.’

‘That’s terrible weather to be caught out in.’

‘It is,’ Father Giffley said. He looked again down the vista of the street, finding it still empty, still without God, still with no gleam of grace or of hope.

‘I could go off and search for a cab for you, Father,’ Rashers suggested.

‘You could,’ Father Giffley said firmly, ‘but you won’t.’

‘As you please, Father.’

‘Don’t be disappointed, however, I’ll give you something just the same.’ He searched in his pocket and found a half-crown.

‘Almighty God’s good luck to you,’ Rashers said, when it was handed to him. Almost immediately the sound of wheels and the trotting of a horse caused them both to look around. A cab was coming towards them through the rain.

‘He seems to have heard you,’ Father Giffley said, smiling. They stopped the driver at the bridge entrance and Rashers, thanking him again, went off into the rain.

Father Giffley watched his bent figure and slow gait. After a moment he said to the cabman.

‘Turn about. I want to speak with that old man again.’ When they drew abreast Father Giffley ordered the cab to stop, and called to Rashers to get in with him.

‘Where do you live?’ he asked.

‘Chandlers Court, Father.’

‘Take us to Chandlers Court,’ Father Giffley instructed. Rashers looked astounded, but the driver flicked his reins and the cab lurched forward.

The wet sack and the coat smelled abominably. Father Giffley undid the leather strap and opened the window an inch or so. Then the swaying motion of the cab began to draw him back into the half-world he had been fighting to keep away. He felt it flowing noiselessly towards him, a tide of darkness creeping across a dim strand. The leather-buttoned upholstery was regarding him with sea-creature eyes, expressionless, heavy-lidded. He sweated, sat up straight, forced himself to collect his thoughts. He opened the window a little more.

‘Tell me what happened to you since you were dismissed,’ he said to Rashers. ‘The whole story. Don’t be afraid. I am most interested to know.’

He leaned on his walking stick, gripped its knob tightly, listened. He was determined to attend meticulously. It would keep out the void that waited moment by moment to engulf him.

‘I’ll tell you that, Father,’ Rashers said, ‘and I’ll tell you no word of a lie. I have the ill fortune to live in the most misbegotten kip of a city in the whole wide world.’

Father Giffley nodded. The word kip engaged him. It meant, to the best of his knowledge, a common lodging place. He had heard it used in the Confessional to mean a resort of ill fame, a whorehouse. It was a fitting word. It pleased him.

‘Proceed,’ he said.

The bearded figure began to enumerate its misfortunes. Father Giffley, the better to aid concentration, categorised them under certain headings: The waning popularity of the tin whistle and the erosion of technical standards due to infiltration of the profession by charlatans and chancers; the inevitable, because hereditary, crookedness of Jewish pawnbrokers; the inability of once kind neighbours to be kind any longer; the fierce competition for the contents of all dustbins and in particular the assertion by the strong (to the complete exclusion of the infirm) of sole right to the refuse outside certain well-to-do houses where the leftovers reflected the high living standards of the inhabitants.