James Plunkett - Strumpet City

‘Because I’ve been given the general list drawn up by the Federation with instructions to follow it, when I’m taking men on. Your name is on it. You don’t believe me?’

The information was hard to accept. As he reflected on it he felt panic beginning to stir in the back of his mind.

‘I believe you,’ Fitz said.

‘Then let me try what I suggested.’

Fitz hesitated. He shut his mind to speculation about the future.

‘No,’ he said.

‘You’re a stubborn bloody man,’ Carrington said. He offered another cigarette and they smoked in silence. Then Carrington said:

‘There’s something else I wanted to speak to you about. I’m thinking of that friend of yours who lost his legs here a couple of years ago. Mulhall—wasn’t it?’

‘Bernard Mulhall,’ Fitz said. ‘He died.’

‘I know that. Had he a family?’

‘A wife and an only son.’

‘That’s what I was told. How old is the son?’

‘About eighteen. He might be more.’

‘I think I can help him.’

‘I seem to remember Bernie Mulhall being on your blacklist too.’

‘I know. But there was a lot of admiration and sympathy for him higher up. I can offer him a job.’

‘Have you been told to?’

‘Not in so many words. But one of the Directors expressed interest in the case and sent word down the line. A bit mad in his way—Yearling.’

Fitz made no comment.

‘He’s the man that left you home on the evening of the accident,’ Carrington supplied.

‘I remember him,’ Fitz said.

‘Will you send young Mulhall down to me?’

‘I will,’ Fitz said.

‘And keep in touch with me. There’s nothing I can do here, but I get to know of odd jobs here and there. They might help to keep things going for you while you look around.’

‘Do you think there’s any point in looking around?’

‘If you can stand up to being sent from pillar to post. Don’t let them beat you.’

Fitz smiled at him.

‘I’m wondering whose side you’re on.’

‘Not on Larkin’s anyway,’ Carrington said. ‘Yours—I suppose.’

‘That’s something,’ Fitz said.

Willie Mulhall started in the foundry a week later. It was his first adult job. His mother came over to thank Mary the moment she got the news.

‘Now I’ll be able to pay back what I owe you,’ she said. She embraced Mary and began to cry.

There was nothing for Fitz. He went from job to job but was turned away time after time. In February the Strike Fund closed down altogether. When that happened Mary put the clock on the pram and wheeled it down to The Erin’s Isle Pawnshop. Mr. Silverwater refused to look at it. He was open for people who wanted to redeem the articles they had pledged, not to take in more. She returned home and Fitz put it back on its place on the mantelpiece.

‘What are we to do?’ she asked him. He had no answer for her. Except to offer to try what Carrington had suggested. That, too, was impossible.

‘We’ll keep trying. Things will be better as the rest begin working again. Something is bound to turn up.’

That evening he borrowed from Joe, who was back at work in Nolan & Keyes.

‘It’ll be a while before I can pay you back,’ he said.

‘Don’t be worrying,’ Joe told him. But he worried just the same. He had never before borrowed money without knowing how he was going to return it. He was starting at the bottom again—a scavenger for odd jobs.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Pat was passing the shop with its display of religious goods when the little foreman stopped him on the pavement and said:

‘I don’t seem to have seen you around lately?’

‘I’ve been in gaol,’ Pat said.

‘When did you get out?’

‘This morning, about two hours ago.’

‘And what was it like?’

Pat considered.

‘A bit confined,’ he decided.

‘Come over here with me, for the love of God.’

‘What is it?’ Pat asked.

The little foreman insisted on dragging him over to the window.

‘Have a look at that,’ he invited, pointing at it. Pat looked in.

‘Well—I’ll be damned,’ he said.

Inside the window, with a pencil behind his ear and a roll of dockets peeping from the breast pocket of his shop coat, Timothy Keever was struggling to put a statue of St. Patrick on display. The statue was heavy and the window space already crowded.

‘Watch this,’ said the little foreman. Pat had met him from time to time in various bookmakers’ shops, where his fellow-punters knew him as Ballcock Brannigan. He now banged with his fist on the glass to attract Keever’s attention. Neither could hear the other because of the thickness of the glass, so Ballcock began to convey his instructions in dumbshow. Keever, indicating that he understood, moved first a statue of St. Christopher and another of the Little Flower. But the rearrangement was unsuccessful. He looked out for further instructions.

‘Move the other stuff first.’ Ballcock shouted in at him. Keever shook his head.

‘Did you ever see such a thick?’ Ballcock asked Pat. He gave the instruction again, this time in dumbshow. Keever acknowledged and set to work again. He shifted a heavily mounted candle, Paschal in design; then a set of purple vestments, appropriate liturgically to the seasons of Advent and Lent; then a shroud which would provide for the last sartorial decencies of some deceased Brother of the Third Order of St. Francis. In his struggle with these complexities he banged his head severely against a sanctuary lamp, a pendulous one with a red bowl and a brass container.

‘Holy Jaysus,’ Ballcock said. Keever, reaching up to steady the lamp which was swaying from the blow, nearly toppled the statue nearest to him. Ballcock hammered furiously on the glass.

‘You clumsy bastard,’ he shouted. Keever looked out, puzzled.

‘Deaf as well as everything else,’ Ballcock decided. He turned his back to the glass and lit a cigarette.

‘That’s what you get for employing ex-scabs,’ Pat said.

‘No choice of mine,’ Ballcock said. ‘Clerical influence—that’s what has Keever in his job. Here, have a cigarette.’

‘Thanks,’ Pat said.

‘I suppose you haven’t been doing the horses lately?’

‘They didn’t encourage it,’ Pat said. ‘What’s any good today?’

‘I’ll tell you what’s good,’ Ballcock confided. ‘Packleader at Leicester in the two-forty. It’s information which I got from a priest that’s a customer—a most Reverend punter.’

‘I haven’t done a horse for months,’ Pat told him.

‘Nor nothing else neither,’ Ballcock said, ‘not if gaol’s the same as in my day.’

‘That’s right,’ Pat agreed. ‘Nothing else.’

‘Well—be true to the Church and back Packleader. Follow your clergy. Have you a job?’

‘I don’t know. I’m on my way down to Nolan & Keyes to find out.’

‘If you don’t pick it up right away,’ Ballcock offered, ‘drop back to me. I have three days casual I can give you.’

‘I’d be glad of it.’

‘Welcome,’ Ballcock said. He flung away his cigarette butt and looked again at the window. Keever was doing his best to rearrange the display.

‘Excuse me,’ Ballcock said, ‘I have a few things to discuss with mahogany skull there.’

He strode in and called Keever from the window. They both disappeared into the back of the shop.

It was a cold, blustering day, with a sky that was too bright and too wide after his months in prison and streets that were noisy and suddenly unfamiliar. The shop window was better. It was neatly framed and, now that Keever had left, comfortingly devoid of speech and movement. St. Patrick, the National Apostle, occupied a central position. In green robes and bishop’s mitre he gazed past Pat at the streets of the capital city. Snakes at his feet cowered in petrified terror of his golden crozier and in his right hand a stone shamrock symbolised the mystery of the Unity and the Most Holy Trinity. St. Patrick’s Day, Pat calculated, was almost exactly a week away. He was glad to make the calculation. It brought him into touch with everyday life for the first time since his release.