William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

‘It’s the same the entire time,’ Feeny said. ‘Stupid as pigs. Can they write their names? You can see them thinking it.’

Huxter would say it straight out. ‘Get your guts put into it,’ Huxter shouted at Liam Pat, and once when something wasn’t done to his liking he said there were more brains in an Irish turnip. ‘Tow that bloody island out into the sea,’ he said another time. A drop of their own medicine, he said.

‘I couldn’t get you shifted,’ Feeny said. ‘If I could I would.’

‘Another gang, like?’

‘Maybe in a couple of weeks there’d be something.’

‘It’d be great, another gang.’

‘Did you ever know McTighe?’

Liam Pat shook his head. He said Feeny had asked him that before. Did McTighe run a gang? he asked.

‘He’s in with a bookie. It’d be a good thing if you knew McTighe. Good all round, Liam Pat.’

*

Ten days later, when Liam Pat was drinking with Rafferty and Noonan in the Spurs and Horse, Feeny joined them and afterwards walked away from the public house with Liam Pat.

‘Will we have one for the night?’ he suggested, surprising Liam Pat because they’d come away when closing time was called and it would be the same anywhere else. ‘No problem,’ Feeny said, disposing at once of this objection.

‘I have to get the last bus out, though. Ten minutes it’s due.’

‘You can doss where we’re going. No problem at all, boy.’

He wondered if Feeny was drunk. He’d best get back to his bed, he insisted, but Feeny didn’t appear to hear him. They turned into a side street. They went round to the back of a house. Feeny knocked gently on a window-pane and the rattle of television voices ceased almost immediately. The back door of the house opened.

‘Here’s Liam Pat Brogan,’ Feeny said.

A bulky middle-aged man, with coarse fair hair above stolid, reddish features, stood in the rectangle of light. He wore a black jersey and trousers.

‘The hard man,’ he greeted Liam Pat, proffering a hand with a cut healing along the edge of the thumb.

‘Mr McTighe,’ Feeny completed his introduction. ‘We were passing.’

Mr McTighe led the way into a kitchen. He snapped open two cans of beer and handed one to each of his guests. He picked up a third from the top of a refrigerator. Carling it was, Black Label.

‘How’re you doing, Liam Pat?’ Mr McTighe asked.

Liam Pat said he was all right, but Feeny softly denied that. More of the same, he reported: a foreman giving an Irish lad a hard time. Mr McTighe made a sympathetic motion with his large, square head. He had a hoarse voice, that seemed to come from the depths of his chest. A Belfast man, Liam Pat said to himself when he got used to the accent, a city man.

‘Is the room OK?’ Mr McTighe asked, a query that came as a surprise. ‘Are you settled?’

Liam Pat said his room was all right, and Feeny said:

‘It was Mr McTighe fixed that for you.’

‘The room?’

‘He did of course.’

‘It’s a house that’s known to me,’ Mr McTighe said, and did not elucidate further. He gave a racing tip, Cassandra’s Friend at Newton Abbot, the first race.

‘Put your shirt on that, Liam Pat,’ Feeny advised, and laughed. They stayed no more than half an hour, leaving the kitchen as they had entered it, by the door to the back yard. On the street Feeny said:

‘You’re in good hands with Mr McTighe.’

Liam Pat didn’t understand that, but didn’t say so. It would have something to do with the racing tip, he said to himself. He asked who the man who came round on Sunday mornings for the rent was.

‘I wouldn’t know that, boy.’

‘I think I’m the only lodger there at the moment. There’s a few shifted out, I’d say.’

‘It’s quiet for you so.’

‘It’s quiet all right.’

Liam Pat had to walk back to the house that night; there’d been no question of dossing down in Mr McTighe’s. It took him nearly two hours, but the night was fine and he didn’t mind. He went over the conversation that had taken place, recalling Mr McTighe’s concern for his well-being, still bewildered by it. He slept soundly when he lay down, not bothering to take off his clothes, it being so late.

*

Weeks went by, during which Liam Pat didn’t see Feeny. One of the other rooms in the house where he lodged was occupied again, but only for a weekend, and then he seemed once more to be on his own. One Friday Huxter gave Rafferty and Noonan their cards, accusing them of skiving. ‘Stay if you want to,’ he said to Liam Pat, and Liam Pat was aware that the foreman didn’t want him to go, that he served a purpose as Huxter’s butt. But without his friends he was lonely, and a bitter resentment continuously nagged him, spreading from the foreman’s treatment of him and affecting with distortion people who were strangers to him.

‘I think I’ll go back,’ he said the next time he ran into Feeny, outside the Spurs and Horse one night. At first he’d thought Feeny was touchy when he went on about his experience in a launderette or plates being washed twice; now he felt it could be true. You’d buy a packet of cigarettes off the same woman in a shop and she wouldn’t pass a few minutes with you, even though you’d been in yesterday. The only good part of being in this city was the public houses where you’d meet boys from home, where there was a bit of banter and cheerfulness, and a sing-song when it was permitted. But when the evening was over you were on your own again.

‘Why’d you go back, boy?’

‘It doesn’t suit me.’

‘I know what you mean. I often thought of it myself.’

‘It’s no life for a young fellow.’

‘They’ve driven you out. They spent eight centuries tormenting us and now they’re at it again.’

‘He called my mam a hooer.’

Huxter wasn’t fit to tie Mrs Brogan’s laces, Feeny said. He’d seen it before, he said. ‘They’re all the same, boy.’

‘I’ll finish out the few weeks with the job we’re on.’

‘You’ll be home for Christmas.’

‘I will.’

They were walking slowly on the street, the public houses emptying, the night air dank and cold. Feeny paused in a pool of darkness, beneath a street light that wasn’t working. Softly, he said:

‘Mr McTighe has the business for you.’

It sounded like another tip, but Feeny said no. He walked on in silence, and Liam Pat said to himself it would be another job, a different foreman. He thought about that. Huxter was the worst of it, but it wasn’t only Huxter. Liam Pat was homesick for the estate, for the small town where people said hullo to you. Since he’d been here he’d eaten any old how, sandwiches he bought the evening before, for breakfast and again in the middle of the day, burger and chips later on, Bob’s Dining Rooms on a Sunday. He hadn’t thought about that before he’d come — what he’d eat, what a Sunday would be like. Sometimes at Mass he saw a girl he liked the look of, the same girl each time, quiet-featured, with her hair tied back. But when he went up to her after Mass a few weeks back she turned away without speaking.

‘I don’t want another job,’ he said.

‘Why would you, Liam Pat? After what they put you through?’

‘I thought you said Mr McTighe —’

‘Ah no, no. Mr McTighe was only remembering the time you and Dessie Coglan used distribute the little magazine.’

They still walked slowly, Feeny setting the pace.

‘We were kids though,’ Liam Pat said, astonished at what was being said.

‘You showed your colours all the same.’

Liam Pat didn’t understand that. He didn’t know why they were talking about a time when he was still at the Brothers’, when he and Dessie Coglan used to push the freedom magazine into the letter-boxes. As soon as it was dark they’d do it, so’s no one would see them. Undercover stuff, Dessie used to say, and a couple of times he mentioned Michael Collins.