John McGahern - The Barracks

“Aye,” he admitted.

“Did things go any way well?”

“Nothing happened.”

“Very little at all happened so,” she yielded with such tired frustration that he looked. Her head was lowered over a shirt of Willie’s. The needle shone as it was driven in and out of the cream stuff with mechanical precision.

He’d always felt her hostile to his private feud with Quirke, not that she ever reproached him openly, but he’d glimpsed it in stray words and silences. Once he had spoken about applying for a transfer and she had argued against it for the children’s sake, “Whatever life they’ve built up here for themselves will be broken down if we move. There’ll be new teachers, new friends.…”

He had just nodded and gone away and said nothing. So for the children’s sake he was supposed to make a monkey out of his own life, he thought. No man had more than one life, the children would have to take their chance as he had to take his, he wasn’t going to give it up for anybody’s or anything’s sake; but he’d decided that he didn’t want a transfer then — it would be little better than changing one hairshirt for another. In plain clothes he’d leave when he left, it would be in nobody’s uniform, and at his own choosing. He’d go about it in his own way, without reference to anybody. So he kept his mouth shut about his feelings and plans and frustrations, only confiding when the pressures became too great inside and another human being seemed possessed of more understanding than a bedroom wall.

Tonight he sensed that she had somehow changed: she’d oppose nothing and he wondered if it was possible that she might really want him to speak out. He saw her sewing away, and he laughed, a dry breaking laugh — she’d have her way.

“No. Nothing happened,” he said. “Except what happened the last time and the time before and the time before that again.

“‘My Lord, it was a thoughtless act of the moment that this young man will suffer in his conscience for the remainder of his life,’” he began to parody but grew too bored or angry to continue.

“Such bullshit — and it never stops! It has no end. You should have heard O’Donovan’s wisecracks today. He surpassed himself. He didn’t miss one chance.”

O’Donovan was the judge, waspish and one side of his face disfigured with a livid birthmark, never comfortable except in the display of his own wit, a composition of stabbing little references and allegories delivered with pompous sarcasm that played on small disadvantages; a kind of beating down that was surely meant to compensate for some private failure. Reegan had tasted the sting himself more than once.

“Two labourers home from England were up for drunken brawling and he said”—here Reegan began to mimic the cocksure tones of O’Donovan—“Labourers home from England who behave between jobs like film stars between pictures can’t expect to get the same kind of admiring treatment.’

“Apparently some of the Hollywood stars were up for brawling in Los Angeles last week: which was supposed to give the whole point to the joke,” Reegan explained. “And you should have heard them laughin’ and the sound of it. Such a performance all day! If someone let off an honest shout of laughin’ at any time you’d be able to hear a pin drop in that court. He’d never be forgiven! It reminded me at every turn of the school we went to and old Jockser Keenan — he fancied himself as an entertainer and we used to have to laugh for our lives all day.”

“They’re only men and not perfect,” Elizabeth pleaded out of mere curiosity and not to seem too silent. Her voice carried no conviction. It sounded the platitude it was and no one could take it as opposition.

“That’s right,” he shouted. “You’d have some search for a saint in that crew, there’s no mistake! But when I’m expected to dance to the tune, that’s the trouble! What the hell do I get out of dancin’ up?

“Nothing would do Quirke only come and talk to me. I got an hour of enforcin’ the law, and rules and regulations and Acts of Parliament. He asked me did I read the article in this month’s Review on The Road Traffic Act. What in-the-name-of-Jesus interest have I in The Road Traffic Act as me pay comes? And I’m sure I was supposed to play the game and say: ‘I looked quickly through it, sir, when it came but I must have missed the article somehow. I’d have read anything as interestin’ as that. I must look for it the very minute I go home. I’m terrible grateful to you for remindin’ me about it, sir.’ Jesus, it’s so ridiculous,” he swore.

“Then he asked me didn’t I think O’Donovan had a great sense of humour. You should have seen him watch me face to try to see what I meant when I said, ‘Yes, sir. He has a very fine sense of humour. He’d be able to make his livin’ in a circus, sir!’ ‘Yes, Reegan. A circus!’ he said and you should have heard his accent. ‘Yes, Reegan, a circus!’ He was afraid somebody had seen through him, but he’ll get on, make no mistake! He led the laughin’ every time O’Donovan cracked out. It’s the system of arselickin’: whoever’s on the bottom rung of the ladder must lick the arse above him till the last arse at the top is safely licked; they lick the arse above them and to keep their minds easy the buggers below must keep on lickin’ theirs. The poor bastard at the bottom has always the worst end of the stick! It’s in the natural order of things then, as Quirke would put it.”

He spoke with vicious reasonableness but he could not keep it up. It bit too near the bone.

“I’m sick of it,” he burst out. “Sick of saying:

‘Yes, sir!

‘No, sir!

‘It looks so, sir.

‘What do you think, sir?

‘I think it might be the best way to do that, sir.’ As I grow older I get sicker and sicker,” he said with heat and pain. “I can’t take much more of it, that’s certain! I don’t want to come just because some one else wants me, and have to go away when he doesn’t; I want to come when I want to myself and go away for the same reason. Why should another bastard shove me about? I don’t want to push anybody. But I’ll not be pushed much longer and Jesus, I’m tellin’ you that!”

Elizabeth was silent. She suspected that he’d be soon ashamed of having spoken at all, that was always the way with him, and she’d never heard him say so much before or so openly. Life for her these days happened much the same everywhere, she’d not enough illusions left, it had to be endured like a plague or transformed by acceptance but she said nothing. She went on sewing.

He sat silent at the table, his hands moving about his forehead and jaws with nervous excitement, until she asked cleverly, “Did Mullins come?”

“You can hear him down below,” he said, glad of the escape route. “We had just the round, three drinks, and he came away with us. It’s too near the first of the month for a spree.”

He laughed. He was easier.

The talk of town and court, their father echoing the world that they would one day climb to out of the servitude of their childhood captured the three children; but eventually the anger and frustration became too wearing. They went to steal outside in this first lull. It was the last hour of daylight.

“Just to put water on the slide,” they explained, when they were noticed going. “It’s going to freeze heavy tonight.”

“Mind you don’t put it where someone will fall.”

“It’s on the river path. Nobody’ll be walkin’ there till the summer.”

“Put coats on yourselves,” Reegan at last took it into his head to play the part of father, “and no splashin’ about of water. It’s no time of the year yet for a wettin’.”

A lovely blue dusk was on the water, a vapour of moon that’d climb to yellow light as the night came was already high. The sun had gone down to the rim of the hills they could not see beyond the woods, the spaces between the treetops burning with red light.