John McGahern - The Collected Stories

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.

The sky filled over Sligo Bay, the darkness moving across the links and church, one clear strip of blue between Parkes’ and Knocknarea, and when that would fill — the rain, the steamed windows, the informations, till the dark settled on their day.

Fear of the sky since morning had kept them on the benches away from the strand a mile downhill they’d come to enjoy, fear of the long trudge past the golf links and Kincora and Central in rain; but they’d still the air here, sea air, it was some consolation. Even the strand, reached in good weather, the mile downhill accomplished, the mile home uphill yet out of mind, and in possession of strand of Strandhill, long and level for miles, the cannon on its rotting initial-covered carriage pointed towards the Atlantic as if on guard over the two ice-cream parlours; women at the tideline, with a child in one hand and skirt held tight between thighs with the other, whinnying at each spent rush of water at their feet before it curled in a brown backwash round their heels; all this time envy of the buckets and beach ball of others to gladden a royal stay.

Cars ran miles to the gallon, still on the bench: twenty-five, thirty-two, thirty-nine with careful timing and more use of clutch than brake. Another guest, Mr Haydon, marked the racing columns of the newspaper on the edge of the same bench; hairnet of purple threads on the face, commercial traveller. ‘Never made the grade,’ McVittie had pronounced. ‘Soon for the jump.’ On the next bench a pattern for a Fair Isle pullover lay open between Mrs O’Connor and Mrs Ryan, and around them children in all postures. Ingolsby was the one guest who sat alone, retired lecturer of English, while the tennis ball hopped or paused.

‘What part of the world is Lagos in?’ Haydon stirred out of the newspaper to interrupt the wear and tear on clutches. ‘You should know that, Mr Ryan. You’re a teacher.’