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

Tipperary joined me at the end of the queue outside the payout window.

‘Jocko didn’t arrive yet,’ I said to keep his conversation easy.

‘No. Sligo’s going to put the water on him from up top when he comes. It’s not fair.’

‘It’ll probably happen though.’

‘But it’s not fair.’

We each held the thin brass medal on which our number was stamped, a hole in the medal for hanging it on the nail in the hut at night.

At the window we called our name and number and showed the brass medal and the timekeeper handed us our pay in a small brown packet.

On the front of the pack was written the number of hours we had worked, the rate per hour, the amount we’d earned minus the various deductions.

As the men stood around checking their money, the large hands counting awkwardly and slowly, a woman’s voice cried, ‘Come and get them while they’re hot.’

Their eyes lifted to search for the voice, towards the condemned row of houses ahead of the bulldozer and the burning wood, where from an upper window old Kathleen leaned out, shaking her large loose breasts at the men.

‘Cheap at the price,’ she cried. A cheer went up; and some obscenities were shouted like smallarms fire.

‘Even better downstairs,’ she cried back, her face flushed with alcohol.

‘A disgrace. Terrible,’ Tipperary said.

‘It’s all right. She just got excited by the money.’ He disturbed me more than she did.

‘This evening after pints of bitter they’ll slink round,’ he said.

As I did once. A Christmas Eve. She’d told me she’d all her Christmas shopping done except to buy the turkey. She said she hoped to get one cheap at Smithfield. They dropped the prices before the market closed to get rid of the surplus, and she was relying on a customer who was a porter there.

Only for her practised old hands it would have been impossible to raise desire, and if it was evil when it happened, the pumping of the tension of the instinct into her glycerined hole, then nothing was so extraordinarily ordinary as this evil.

‘Why not? Let them go round, and what’s so fucking special about what’s between your legs anyhow?’ I shouted at him, and turned my back so as not to have to see the hurt on the dim acolyte’s face in its confusion of altars. I started to count out the money from the small brown packet.

I love to count out in money the hours of my one and precious life . I sell the hours and I get money. The money allows me to sell more hours. If I saved money I could buy the hours of some similar bastard and live like a royal incubus, which would suit me much better than the way I am now, though apparently even as I am now suits me well enough, since I do not want to die.

Full of beer tonight after the Rose and Crown we’ll go round to Marge and Kathleen like dying elephants in the condemned row.

Before I’d finished counting, Tipperary tapped my shoulder and I shouted, ‘Fuck off,’ and did not turn to see his face.

The hooter went. The offered breasts withdrew. A window slammed.

‘The last round,’ someone said.

The mixer started. The shovels drove and threw: gravel, sand, gravel; gravel, sand, gravel; cement.

Murphy sledged on the beaten steel of the hopper, vocal again now that the brown packet was a solid wad against his arse. ‘Our fukker who art in heaven bought his boots for nine-and-eleven,’ he sang out as he sledged. ‘Come on: shovel or shite, shite or burst.’

Jocko came so quietly that he was in the pool of shadow under the hopper before he was noticed, the pint bottle of violet-coloured spirit swinging wide from one pocket, crawling on all fours towards the pool of water in the sand beneath the drum of the mixer.

‘Out,’ Murphy shouted with a curse, angered that Jocko had got so far without being noticed. ‘Out. I’ll teach your arse a lesson. Out.’

He took the shovel that leaned against the mixer, and drove at Jocko, the dull thud of the blade on cloth and flesh or bone, buttocks that someone must have bathed once, carried in her arms.

‘I warned you if you tried this stunt again I’d warm your arse. I want to be at no coroner’s inquest on your head. Out.’

We stood and watched Murphy drive him out of the pool of water, then push him out of the shadow of the hopper into the evening glare. We said nothing.

The eyes in the hollow sockets, grey beard matted about the scabs of the face, registered no pain, no anything: and when they fell on the barrow of wet concrete that the surveyor had used to test the strength of the mix he moved mechanically towards it, sat in, and started to souse himself up and down in the liquid concrete as a child in a bath.

‘Jesus, when that sets to his arse it’ll be nobody’s business,’ Galway said between dismay and laughter.

‘Out of the fukken barrow,’ Murphy shouted, and lifted him out by the neck, pushing him down the tyre-marked yellow slope. He staggered but did not fall. The wet clothes clung to his back and the violet-coloured bottle in the pocket was clouded and dirty with wet concrete.

Sligo, his cap back to front, leaned across the scaffolding rail on top, the black rubber hose in his hands. The jet of water started to circle Jocko, darkening the yellow sand. Sligo used his thumb on the jet so that it sprayed out like heavy rain.

When Jocko felt the water, he lifted his face to its coolness, but then, slowly and deliberately, he took a plastic coat and faded beret from the opposite pocket to where the bottle swung, and in the same slow deliberate way put them on, buttoning the plastic coat to the throat and putting the collar up. The jet followed a few yards of his slow walk and then fell back, but he still walked in the evening sun as if it was raining.

Greenbaum, old grey rat searching for Tizer bottles among the heaps of rubble, lifted his head to watch him pass through the gap in the fence of split stakes into Hessell Street but immediately bent again to search and complain. ‘Greenbaum charges no deposit on the bottles, and then what do they do, throw them away, throw them away, never return. Greenbaum’s an old fool.’

The street in front of Parkes’ Guest House, grains of sand from the street coming on the grey fur of the tennis ball, the hopping under my hand idle as the conversations from the green bench before the flowerbed, red bells of the fuchsia vivid behind them and some roses and gillyflowers, the earth around the roots of everything speckled with sea shells, overhead the weathered roughcast of the wall of the house.

The sky was filling. Rain would come, and walls close around the living evening, looking towards the bleared windows, no way to get out from the voices.

‘There was great stuff in those Baby Fords and Austins. The cars going nowadays are only tin compared,’ Mr McVittie said, the heavy gold watch chain across the waistcoat of the brown suit, silver hair parted in the centre, knobbed walking stick in his hand. He could have stepped out of a yellowed wedding photo.

‘Only they weren’t so fast as now,’ Mr O’Connor added, following McVittie all the week in the way stray dogs at night will stick to any pair of heels that seem to go home.

‘Before the war, before I got married, I used to have one of the old Citroëns, and it could go for ever, only it was very hard on petrol,’ Mr Ryan said, feel of his eyes on the up and down of the tennis ball on the street.

Conversations always the same: height of the Enfield rifle, summer of the long dresses, miles to the gallon — from morning to the last glows of the cigarettes on the benches at night, always informations, informations about everything. Having come out of darkness, they now blink with informations at all the things about them, before the soon when they’ll have to leave.