John McGahern - The Collected Stories

‘You’d think the car was specially parked there to deliver an accident.’

‘They’re all driving around in cars,’ Casey said, ‘but the mentality is still of the jennet and cart.’

It had been a sort of suffering to keep the talk going, but silence was even worse. There were many small flowers in the grass margins of the roadside.

They took their seats in the stand halfway through the minor game. There was one grace: though he came from close to Clones, there wasn’t a single person he knew sitting in any of the nearby seats. The minor game ended. Once the seniors came on the field he started at the sudden power and speed with which the ball was driven about. The game was never close. Cavan drew gradually ahead to win easily. Such was the air of unreality he felt, of three men watching themselves watch a game, that he was glad to buy oranges from a seller moving between seats, to hand the fruit around, to peel the skin away, to taste the bitter juice. Only once did he start and stir uncomfortably, when Guard Casey remarked about the powerful Cavan full-back who was roughing up the Tyrone forwards: ‘The Gunner is taking no prisoners today.’

He was not so lucky on leaving the game. In the packed streets of the town a voice called out, ‘Is it not Jimmy McCarron?’ And at once the whole street seemed to know him. They stood in his path, put arms around him, drew him to the bars. ‘An Ulster Final, look at the evening we’ll have, and it’s only starting.’

‘Another time, Mick. Another time, Joe. Great to see you but we have to get back.’ He had pushed desperately on, not introducing his two companions.

‘You seem to be the most popular man in town,’ the Sergeant said sarcastically once they were clear.

‘I’m from round here.’

‘It’s better to be popular anyhow than buried away out of sight,’ Casey came to his defence.

‘Up to a point. Up to a point,’ the Sergeant said. ‘Everything has its point.’

They stopped for tea at the Lawn Hotel in Belturbet. By slipping out to the reception desk while they were eating he managed to pay for the meal. Except for the Sergeant’s petrol he had paid for the entire day. This was brought up as they parted outside the barracks in the early evening.

‘It was a great day. We’ll have to make an annual day of the Ulster Final. But next year will be our day. Next year you’ll not be allowed spend a penny,’ the Sergeant said, but still he could see their satisfaction that the whole outing had cost them nothing.

Now that the committal proceedings were at an end an air of uncertainty crept into the dayroom. Did they feel compromised by the day? He did not look at their faces. The door on the river had to be unlocked in order to allow the peace commissioner to leave and was again locked after he left. He caught the Sergeant and Guard Casey looking at one another.

‘You better show him his place,’ the Sergeant said.

To the right of the door on the river was a big, heavy red door. It was not locked. Casey opened it slowly to show him his cell for the night.

‘It’s not great, Jimmy, but it’s as good as we could get it.’

The cement floor was still damp from being washed. Above the cement was a mattress on a low platform of boards. There was a pillow and several heavy grey blankets on the mattress. High in the wall a narrow window was cut, a single steel bar in its centre.

‘It’s fine. It couldn’t be better.’

‘If you want anything at all, just bang or shout, Jim,’ and the heavy door was closed and locked. He heard bolts being drawn.

Casually he felt the pillow, the coarse blankets, moved the mattress, and with his palm tested the solidity of the wooden platform; its boards were of white deal and they too had been freshly scrubbed. There was an old oil can beside a steel bucket in the corner. Carefully he moved it under the window, and by climbing on the can and gripping the iron bar he could see out on either side: a sort of lawn, a circular flowerbed, netting-wire, a bole of the sycamore tree, sallies, a strip of river. He tried to get down as silently as possible, but as soon as he took his weight off the oil can it rattled.

‘Are you all right there, Jimmy?’ Casey was at once asking anxiously from the other side of the door.

‘I’m fine. I was just surveying the surroundings. Soon I’ll lie down for a while.’

He heard Casey hesitate for a moment, but then his feet sounded on the hollow boards of the dayroom, going towards the table and chairs. As much as to reassure Casey as from any need, he covered the mattress with one of the grey blankets and lay down, loosening his collar and tie. The bed was hard but not uncomfortable. He lay there, sometimes thinking, most of the time his mind as blank as the white ceiling, and occasionally he drifted in and out of sleep.

There were things he was grateful for … that his parents were dead … that he did not have to face his mother’s uncomprehending distress. He felt little guilt. The shareholders would write him off as a loss against other profits. The old creamery would not cry out with the hurt. People he had always been afraid of hurting, and even when he disliked them he felt that he partly understood them, could put himself in their place, and that was almost the end of dislike. Sure, he had seen evil and around it a stupid, heartless laughing that echoed darkness; and yet, he had wanted love. He felt that more than ever now, even looking at where he was, to what he had come.

That other darkness, all that surrounded life, used to trouble him once, but he had long given up making anything out of it, like a poor talent, and he no longer cared. Coming into the world was, he was sure now, not unlike getting into this poor cell. There was constant daylight above his head, split by the single bar, and beyond the sycamore leaves a radio aerial disappeared into a high branch. He could make jokes about it, but to make jokes alone was madness. He’d need a crowd for that, a blazing fire, rounds of drinks, and the whole long night awaiting.

There was another fact that struck him now like coldness. In the long juggling act he’d engaged in for years that eventually got him to this cell — four years before only the sudden windfall of a legacy had lifted him clear — whenever he was known to be flush all the monies he had loaned out to others would flow back as soon as he called, but whenever he was seen to be in desperate need, nothing worthwhile was ever given back. It was not a pretty picture, but in this cell he was too far out to care much about it now.

He’d had escapes too, enough of them to want no more. The first had been the Roman collar, to hand the pain and the joy of his own life into the keeping of an idea, and to will the idea true. It had been a near thing, especially because his mother had the vocation for him as well; but the pull of sex had been too strong, a dream of one girl in a silken dress among gardens disguising healthy animality. All his life he had moved among disguises, was moving among them still. He had even escaped marriage. The girl he’d loved, with the black head of hair thrown back and the sideways laugh, had been too wise to marry him: no framework could have withstood that second passion for immolation. There was the woman he didn’t love that he was resigned to marry when she told him she was pregnant. The weekend she discovered she wasn’t they’d gone to the Metropole and danced and drank the whole night away, he celebrating his escape out to where there were lungfuls of air, she celebrating that they were now free to choose to marry and have many children: ‘It will be no Protestant family.’ ‘It will be no family at all.’ Among so many disguises there was no lack of ironies.

The monies he had given out, the sums that were given back, the larger sums that would never be returned, the rounds of drinks he’d paid for, the names he’d called out, the glow of recognition, his own name shouted to the sky the day Moon Dancer had won at Phoenix Park, other days and horses that had lost — all dwindling down to the small, ingratiating act of taking the Sergeant and Guard Casey to the Ulster Final.