John McGahern - The Collected Stories

The bolts were being drawn. Casey was standing in the doorway. ‘There’s something for you to eat, Jimmy.’ He hadn’t realized how dark the cell had been until he came out into the dayroom, and he had to shade his eyes against the light. He thought he’d be eating at the dayroom table, but he was brought up a long hallway to the Sergeant’s living quarters. At the end of the hallway was a huge kitchen, and one place was set on a big table in its centre. The Sergeant wasn’t there but his wife was and several children. No one spoke. In the big sideboard mirror he could see most of the room and Casey standing directly behind him with his arms folded. A lovely, strong girl of fourteen or fifteen placed a plate of sausages, black pudding, bacon and a small piece of liver between his knife and fork and poured him a steaming mug of tea. There was brown bread on the table, sugar, milk, salt, pepper. At first no one spoke and his knife and fork were loud on the plate as the children watched him covertly but with intense curiosity. Then Casey began to tease the children about their day in school.

‘Thanks,’ he said after he’d signed a docket at the end of the meal which stated that he had been provided with food.

‘For nothing at all,’ the Sergeant’s wife answered quietly, but it was little above a whisper, and he had to fight back a wave of gratitude. With Casey he went back down the long hallway to the dayroom. He was moving across the hollow boards to the cell door when Casey stopped him.

‘There’s no need to go in there yet, Jimmy. You can sit here for a while in front of the fire.’

They sat on the yellow chairs in front of the fire. Casey spent a long time arranging turf around the blazing centre of the fire with tongs. There were heavy ledgers on the table at their back. A row of baton cases and the gleaming handcuffs with the green ribbons hung from hooks on the wall. A stripped, narrow bed stood along the wall of the cell, its head beneath the phone on the wall. Only the cell wall stood between Casey’s bed and his own plain boards.

‘When do you think they’ll come?’ he asked when the guard seemed to have arranged the sods of turf to his satisfaction.

‘They’ll come some time in the morning. Do you know I feel badly about all this? It’s a pity it had to happen at all,’ Casey said out of a long silence.

‘It’s done now anyhow.’

‘Do you know what I think? There were too many spongers around. They took advantage. It’s them that should by rights be in your place.’

‘I don’t know … I don’t think so … It was me that allowed it … even abetted it.’

‘You don’t mind me asking this? How did it start? Don’t answer if you don’t want.’

‘As far as I know it began in small things. “He that contemneth small things …”

‘Shall fall little by little into grievous error,’ Casey finished the quotation in a low, meditative voice as he started to arrange the fire again. ‘No. I wouldn’t go as far as that. That’s too hard. You’d think it was God Almighty we were offending. What’s an old creamery anyhow? It’ll still go on taking in milk, turning our butter. No. Only in law is it anything at all.’

‘There were a few times I thought I might get out of it,’ he said slowly. ‘But the fact is that I didn’t. I don’t think people can change. They like to imagine they can, that is all.’

‘Maybe they can if they try hard enough — or they have to,’ Casey said without much confidence.

‘Then it’s nearly always too late,’ he said. ‘The one thing I feel really badly about is taking the Sergeant and yourself to the Ulster Final those few Sundays back. That was dragging the pair of you into the business. That wasn’t right.’

‘The Sergeant takes that personally. In my opinion he’s wrong. What was personal about it? You gave us a great day out, a day out of all of our lives,’ Casey said. ‘And everything was normal then.’

That was the trouble, everything was not normal then, he was about to say, but decided not to speak. Everything was normal now. He had been afraid of his own fear and was spreading the taint everywhere. Now that what he had feared most had happened he was no longer afraid. His own life seemed to be happening as satisfactorily as if he were free again among people.

Do you think people can change, Ned? he felt like asking Casey. Do you think people can change or are they given a set star at birth that they have to follow? What part does luck play in the whole shemozzle?

Casey had taken to arranging the fire again and would plainly welcome any conversation, but he found that he did not want to continue. He felt that he knew already as much as he’d ever come to know about these matters. Discussing them further could only be a form of idleness or Clones in some other light. He liked the guard, but he did not want to draw any closer.

Soon he’d have to ask him for leave to go back to his cell.

After Fonsie Ryan called his brother he sat in his wheelchair and waited with growing impatience for him to appear on the small stairs and then, as soon as Philly came down and sat at the table, Fonsie moved his wheelchair to the far wall to wait for him to finish. This silent pressure exasperated Philly as he ate.

‘Did Mother get up yet?’ he asked abruptly.

‘She didn’t feel like getting up. She went back to sleep after I brought her tea.’

Philly let his level stare rest on his brother but all Fonsie did was to move his wheelchair a few inches out from the wall and then, in the same leaning rocking movement, let it the same few inches back, his huge hands all the time gripping the wheels. With his large head and trunk, he sometimes looked like a circus dwarf. The legless trousers were sewn up below the hips.

Slowly and deliberately Philly buttered the toast, picked at the rashers and egg and sausages, took slow sips from his cup, but his nature was not hard. As quickly as he had grown angry he softened towards his brother.

‘Would you be interested in pushing down to Mulligan’s after a while for a pint?’

‘I have the shopping to do.’

‘Don’t let me hold you up, then,’ Philly responded sharply to the rebuff. ‘I’ll be well able to let myself out.’

‘There’s no hurry. I’ll wait and wash up. It’s nice to come back to a clean house.’

‘I can wash these things up. I do it all the time in Saudi Arabia.’

‘You’re on your holidays now,’ Fonsie said. ‘I’m in no rush but it’s too early in the day for me to drink.’

Three weeks before, Philly had come home in a fever of excitement from the oil fields. He always came home in that high state of fever and it lasted for a few days in the distribution of the presents he always brought home, especially to his mother; his delight looking at her sparse filigreed hair bent over the rug he had brought her, the bright tassels resting on her fingers; the meetings with old school friends, the meetings with neighbours, the buying of rounds and rounds of drinks; his own fever for company after the months at the oil wells and delight in the rounds of celebration blinding him to the poor fact that it is not generally light but shadow that we cast; and now all that fever had subsided to leave him alone and companionless in just another morning as he left the house without further word to Fonsie and with nothing better to do than walk to Mulligan’s.

Because of the good weather, many of the terrace doors were open and people sat in the doorways, their feet out on the pavement. A young blonde woman was painting her toenails red in the shadow of a pram in a doorway at the end of the terrace, and she did not look up as he passed. Increasingly people had their own lives here and his homecoming broke the monotony for a few days, and then he did not belong.