John McGahern - Creatures of the Earth - New and Selected Stories

‘No sign of Jocko yet.’ Galway tried to change to Murphy. Galway wore a white handkerchief knotted at both ends to keep the dust out of his Brylcreemed black hair.

‘I’ll give him his future when he comes,’ Murphy said as he sledged the back of the hopper.

‘The childer go to school and they’ll have better than me,’ Keegan kept on at what was felt as nagging rebuke. ‘They’ll have some ambition. That’s why I work behind this bloody mixer and the woman chars. So that they can go to school. They’ll have some ambition. They’ll wear white collars.’

‘Pork chops, pints of bitter, and a good old ride before you sleep, that’s fukken ambition,’ Murphy left off sledging to shout, and when he finished he laughed above the mixer.

‘That’s right,’ Galway agreed. ‘Come on, Keegan: shovel.’

‘I’ll shovel with a jumped-up brat any day,’ Keegan answered with the same antagonism, but fell behind, sweat running down from under the hat.

‘Shovel or shite, shite or burst,’ Murphy trumpeted as he saw the competition, and then at last the hooter blew.

We passed the Negro demolition crew as we went to the canteen, the wood from the houses burning fiercely behind the bulldozer. On the roof two Negroes hacked away slates with pickaxes. The prostitutes lived in the condemned row, moving from empty house to empty house ahead of the demolition. Limp rubbers floated in the gutters Monday mornings while they slept in the daylight.

Through the hatch in the canteen Marge handed out ham or tomato rolls and mugs of tea.

‘Ta ta, Pa,’ she said as I gave her coins. This had been hardest of all to get used to, to have no name at all easier than to be endlessly called Pa .

‘Thanks, Marge.’ It angered me that there was still the bitterness of irony in my smile, that I was not yet completely my situation; this ambition of mine, in reverse, to annul all the votes in myself.

I sat with the rest of the mixer gang at a trestle table. Behind us the chippies played cards. The enmity glowed sullenly between Galway and Keegan, but Galway ate his rolls and gulped tea without lifting his head from the racing paper, where he marked his fancies with a stub of pencil.

I read aloud out of the local Herald my mother sent me each week from home that prayers had been ordered in all the churches in Ireland for good weather. It had rained all summer, and now the harvest was in danger.

‘That it may rise higher than for fukken Noah. That they may have to climb trees,’ Murphy answered, laughing, vicious.

‘They never did much for us except to starve us out to England. You have to have the pull there or you’re dirt,’ Keegan advanced.

The familiar tirade would continue, predictable as the drive and throw of their shovels. I went outside to sit on a stack of steel in the sun until the hooter blew, but even there it wasn’t possible to be alone, for Tipperary followed to sit too on the steel. He’d been taken away to the Christian Brothers when he was eleven but hadn’t been able to pass the exams that would have qualified him as a teacher, and when they put him to work in the kitchens he’d left and come to England. He fixed steel in the bays. The cheeks were hollow, infantile puzzlement on the regular face from which sensuality, if it had ever been there, had withered.

‘Do you think Shakespeare’s all he’s bumped up to be?’ he asked.

He’d heard that I had gone two years to Secondary School, and he believed that we could speak as one educated man to another. He was sometimes called the Professor , and baited mercilessly, though there was a purity in his dogged stupidity that troubled them towards a certain respect. His attention made me uncomfortable. I had no desire to be one of his thieves at these occasional crucifixions, or to play Judas for them to his Christ.

I told him that I didn’t know if Shakespeare was all that he was bumped up to be, but people said so, and it was people who did all the bumping up or bumping down.

‘But who is people?’ he pursued.

‘People is people. They praise Shakespeare. Pull your beer. Give you the start. They might even be ourselves.’ I laughed, and watched the door of the canteen, and listened for the hooter, and longed to hurt him away. He touched something deeper than my careful neutrality. I hadn’t any wish to live by anything deeper.

‘And do you consider George Bernard Shaw all that he’s bumped up to be?’ he asked, perhaps puzzling over his failure to answer satisfactorily the questions put to him at exams before they’d sent him to the kitchens.

‘I know nothing about George Bernard.’ I got up off the steel.

‘But you went to Secondary School?’

‘For two years.’

‘But why didn’t you go on? You passed the exams.’

‘Forget it. I didn’t go on.’ I was disturbed and hated Tipperary for the disturbance.

‘But why, you’d have learned things. You’d have learned whether things are what they’re bumped up to be or not.’

‘I’d have learned nothing. I might have got a better job but my ambition is wrong way round anyhow. Almost as good behind the mixer as anywhere else.’

While Tipperary meditated another question there was a motionless silence between us on the stack of rusted steel in the sun.

‘Murphy says he’s going to do Jocko if he comes today,’ I changed.

‘Sligo has some plans, too, up top,’ he answered slowly. ‘It’s not fair.’

‘It’ll happen though — if he comes.’

The hooter blew. Nobody came from the canteen. They’d sit there till Barney stormed in. ‘Come on. You don’t get paid sittin’ on your arses five minutes after the hooter’s gone. Come on. Out.’

‘How’s it going, Paddy Boy?’ the lorry driver asked as he got me to sign for the load of gravel he’d tipped behind the mixer.

‘Dragging along,’ I answered as I scrawled a few illegible letters on the docket; it never mattered who signed.

‘Keep it going, that’s it.’ He touched my shoulder before turning to shout a few friendly obscenities at Murphy who’d started the mixer.

The heat grew worse. Jocko didn’t come. Nobody spoke much. Even on Galway’s face the sweat streaked the white coating of cement dust.

‘Anyone volunteer to go for lemonade?’ Keegan asked when more than an hour had gone. I said I’d go to Greenbaum’s; it was some minutes escape from the din of the engines and diesel and dust in the airless heat.

‘Walkin’ kills me these days.’ Keegan was grateful.

I went through the gap in the split stakes linked with wire into Hessell Street, green and red peppers among the parsley and fruit of the stalls. It smelled of lice and blood and fowl, down and feathers stamped into the blood and henshit outside the Jewish poulterers, country air after the dust of the mixer.

‘Six Tizers,’ I asked Greenbaum, old grey Jew out of Poland. ‘Put them on the slate.’

‘Everything on the slate and then one day you jack and go and Greenbaum is left with the baby.’

‘You’ll get paid. Today is payday.’

‘And Greenbaum charges no deposit on the bottles. You just throw them away. And who loses? Greenbaum loses,’ he complained as he put the bottles on the counter, as much in love with complaint as the cripple with crutches he goes on using after he is cured.

The bottles were passed around from mouth to mouth behind the mixer as the bucket climbed to Sligo at the top.

‘You shouldn’t gurgle,’ Keegan ragged at Galway. ‘We who are Irish —’

‘Should always be tidy when we sit down to tea,’ Galway took up viciously. ‘Come on: shovel, you old bollocks.’

‘Shovel or shite, shite or burst. It’s payday,’ Murphy shouted as if shovel had set an alarm off in his head, and without break the shovels drove and threw, two boxes of gravel to one of sand, the small grey puff of cement in the airless heat as we pulled the cut ends of the bag loose, till the hooter blew for payout.