John McGahern - The Collected Stories

‘Train to Sligo.’

‘Empty, I suppose.’

‘I suppose … Time to be moving in the general direction of the bed.’

‘No hurry, long enough lying down in the finish. How is the eczema?’

‘Stays quiet long as I don’t go near timber. I’ve got this stuff on to keep the midges off.’ He brushed his finger lightly along his cheek.

‘If everything was right we’d appreciate nothing.’

‘Still, I’d have sworn I heard a chainsaw up this way today,’ Boles said as he turned to the road.

‘Must have been from elsewhere,’ Gillespie contradicted. ‘What the wind can do with sounds is no joke.’

‘There was hardly a puff of wind today.’

‘Surprising what even a little can do, as the woman said when she pissed in the sea.’ Gillespie laughed aggressively.

‘I was certain, but time to go,’ Boles said and called his dog.

‘No use detaining you if you have, though it’s young, the night, yet.’

‘Goodnight, then.’

‘ ’Night, Mr Boles.’

He watched him go, the light tapping of the cattle cane in time to the drag of feet in slippers, calling ‘Heel’ to the dog as headlamps flooded the road from Boyle.

‘That’s what’ll give him something to think about,’ Gillespie muttered as he called his own dog back and turned towards the house.

‘They’re in love, they’re in love, they’re in love! Nora’s in love with Stevie,’ the crowd of children cried at the fallen girl and boy.

They’d been struggling to sit in the Chair, a little hollow in the roadside ditch, on their way home from school. In one of the struggles Stevie had managed to get hold of the Chair, but before he could grip the grass or dig his heels into the clay Nora had jerked him out with all her weight. And when he came so easily with her she overbalanced on to the road, her grip tightening desperately on his arm to drag him down on top of her. His forehead struck heavily against her jaw, and they lay stunned together on the road for a moment, his mouth on the flesh of her side-face between the ear and outer roots of the hair, his body solidly on her, his legs thrown between her opened thighs.

There was an anxious silence, fear of the injury that’d ruin their game, till someone shouted, ‘They’re in love.’ The cry went through the crowd, raggedly taken up at first, though soon it grew to almost a chant.

‘They’re in love! They’re in love! They’re in love! Nora’s in love with Stevie!’

Nora, a blonde girl of thirteen, quickly woke to what the shouting was about and pushed the stunned boy loose with her palms. His knee caught her dress as he rolled and bared the white young flesh of her thighs from the brown as far as the knees to the legs of a faded blue knickers.

‘Nora has blue drawers,’ the jeer changed as the girl rose to her feet, instinctively smoothing her dress down, taut with shame and anger that broke in violent sobbing. She lifted her school-bag, burst through the circle of children, and began to run. They chased her down the earthen road between the sloe bushes to call, ‘Nora’s mad in love! Nora has blue drawers! Nora’s goin’ to marry Stevie’; but when someone shouted, ‘Nora’s goin’ to have a baby,’ it stopped as suddenly as it began. They’d gone too far. They slowed. Nora went out of sight at the next turn of the road. The stragglers and Stevie caught up with the main group. They looked about the fields and road, afraid they’d been observed. The whole thing could easily lead to trouble. They began to go quickly home, little conversation now, the group thinning as children said goodbye to each other till the next day and turned up the lanes to their farmhouses. After a mile only Stevie and a girl as old as Nora were left. They had to walk another whole mile of road to the village, climb Cox’s Hill on the way.

Their canvas shoes dragged rustling through the dead leaves as they walked in the frozen loneliness of the country in October. Men dug potatoes alone in fields of long ridges where only the weeds were green, the sea of stalks on which blossoms swayed in June dead and grey as matchwood. Neither of them spoke as they climbed Cox’s Hill, their eyes bent on the drag-drag of their canvas shoes uphill through the leaves, the noise of someone shouting angrily at a horse beginning to drift from the woods across the river. There was only this silence between them, and he had longed for the moment they’d be alone as now, hurt and shamed by the shouting that he couldn’t understand. He was waiting for her to speak but the only sound that came was the rustling of her canvas shoes uphill through the leaves.

‘They cheered and shouted,’ he had to fumble at last. ‘They cheered and shouted when I fell on Nora.’

The girl’s eyes stayed on the leaves that she was now kicking uphill as she walked.

‘They cheered and shouted,’ he said definitely. ‘Teresa, they cheered and shouted when I fell on Nora.’ This time she did look up and stared so coldly at him that he flinched.

‘They cheered and shouted,’ she admitted.

‘But why? I only fell on Nora.’

‘What does it matter why? They cheered and shouted, that’s all.’

‘But there must have been some reason?’

‘You fell on Nora.’

‘But why did they shout?’

‘That’s the why,’ she laughed.

‘But that’s the why is no answer. Was there some reason for it?’

‘There’s a raisin for everything. And a currant for the cake.’

‘But why, Teresa? Why did they shout?’

‘Why should I tell you?’

‘No why. Just tell me.’

‘You’re too young. You’ll have to wait to find out. Why should I be the one to tell you? Answer me that and I’ll tell you.’

‘You’re not that much older than me,’ he argued painfully and doggedly and without much hope.

They’d reached the top of the hill. Before them, against the lake with its swaying barrels and Oakport Wood turning to rust beyond great beech trees, was the village where they lived; the scattered shops and houses and humble sycamores of the roads dwarfed by the church in its graveyard of old yew and cypress trees. Past it the Shannon flowed, under the stone bridge at its end, flinting river of metal moving endlessly out into the wastes of pale sedge that waited for its flood waters to rise.

‘I don’t see what harm it would do you to tell,’ he pleaded.

‘You’ll have to grow up.’ She laughed the animal laugh of her superiority. Soon she’d be a woman in her prime. Already her body was changing. She laughed again without turning her head and started to run downhill. He moved to keep up with her, but he was too sick at heart, he let her run. He felt the same futility and confusion of everything as when his mother had gone away for ever, the terror and pain of his whole life draining away. Then something frighteningly alluring in the running girl’s stride stirred him to follow her, but he was again bewildered by the memory of the softness of Nora’s body, the shame of the shouting ringing in his ears. ‘They’re in love! They’re in love! They’re in love!’ and he began to weep with anguish.

All through the next morning the schoolroom was tense. They waited for what Master Kelly would say after prayers. It was with such relief they heard him say what he said every morning, ‘Open your home exercises and come up in your proper order, the fourth class first, and leave them on the table.’ They watched the road and concrete steps down to the school for someone to come and complain, but no one came. Every move of Nora’s was watched, every move of Stevie’s, every hand that went up to ask to go to the lavatory. The growing tension followed them to the playground, the boys in one group, the girls apart in another, Nora strung tight and eating her lunch alone by the wall. Then suddenly and unnaturally, as if she was the mouthpiece of a decision, one of the older girls called a game and declared, ‘Nora must be Queen. Come on, Nora, we’re making you the Queen,’ and they gathered round her, and soon the air was filled with the excited noises of their play. The boys started to kick an old rag ball made from corks and the wool of ripped socks about at the other end of the yard. Stevie watched the tenseness go in the play, connected in some way to the fit of shrieking at the Chair the evening before. ‘They’re in love! They’re in love! They’re in love!’ still haunting him with his own helplessness, but he’d try once more to get behind the mystery. He would offer Teresa a penny toffee bar on their way home.