William Trevor - The Hill Bachelors

‘Will they say do I know you? Will they say do I know Mr McTighe?’

‘They won’t have those names. If they ask you for names say the lads in your gang, say Rafferty and Noonan, say any names you heard in public houses. Say Feeny and McTighe if you’re stuck. They won’t know who you’re talking about.’

‘Are they not your names then?’

‘Why would they be, boy?’

Liam Pat’s protestation that he couldn’t do it didn’t weaken at first, but as Feeny went on and on, the words becoming images in Liam Pat’s vision, he himself always at the centre of things, he became aware of an excitement. Huxter wouldn’t know what was going to happen; Huxter would look at him and assume he was the same. The people who did not say hullo when he bought cigarettes or a newspaper would see no difference either. There was a strength in the excitement, a vigour Liam Pat had never experienced in his life before. He would carry the secret on to the site every morning. He would walk through the streets with it, a power in him where there’d been nothing. ‘You have a Corkman’s way with you,’ Feeny said, and in the room with the drawn curtains he showed Liam Pat the business.

*

Sixteen days went by before the chosen Sunday arrived. In the Spurs and Horse during that time Liam Pat wanted to talk the way Feeny and Mr McTighe did, in the same soft manner, mysteriously, some private meaning in the words he used. He was aware of a lightness in his mood and confidence in his manner, and more easily than before he was drawn into conversation. One evening the barmaid eyed him the way Rosita Drudy used to eye Dessie Coglan years ago in Brady’s Bar.

Liam Pat didn’t see Feeny again, as Feeny had warned him he wouldn’t. He didn’t see Mr McTighe. The man didn’t call for the rent, and for sixteen days Liam Pat was the only person in the house. He kept to his room except when he went to take up the sawn-through floorboards, familiarizing himself with what had to be done, making sure there was space enough in the sports bag when the clock was packed in a way that was convenient to set it. He cooked nothing in the kitchen because Feeny had said better not to. He didn’t understand that, but even so he obeyed the command, thinking of it in that way, an order, no questions asked. He made tea in his room, buttering bread and sprinkling sugar on the butter, opening tins of beans and soup, eating the contents cold. Five times in all he made the journey he was to make on the chosen Sunday, timing himself as Feeny had suggested, becoming used to the journey and alert to any variations there might be.

On the Saturday before the Sunday he packed his suitcase and took it across the city to a locker at Euston Station, still following Feeny’s instructions. When he returned to the house he collected what tins he’d opened and what food was left and filled a carrier bag, which he deposited in a dustbin in another street. The next day he had a meal at one o’clock in Bob’s Dining Rooms, the last he would ever have there. The people were friendlier than they’d been before.

Nothing that belonged to him remained in his room, or in the house, when he left it for the last time. Feeny said to clean his room with the Philips cleaner that was kept for general use at the bottom of the stairs. He said to go over everywhere, all the surfaces, and Liam Pat did so, using the little round brush without any extension on the suction tube. For his own protection, that was. Wipe the handles of the doors with a tissue last thing of all, Feeny had advised, anywhere he might have touched.

Shortly after seven he practised the timing again. He wanted to smoke a cigarette in the downstairs room, but he didn’t because Feeny had said not to. He zipped up the sports bag and left the house with it. Outside, he lit a cigarette.

On the way to the bus stop, two streets away, he dropped the key of the house down a drain, an instruction also. When Feeny had been advising him about cleaning the surfaces and making sure nothing was left that could identify him, Liam Pat had had the impression that Mr McTighe wouldn’t have bothered with any of that, that all Mr McTighe was interested in was getting the job done. He went upstairs on the bus and sat at the back. A couple got off at the next stop, leaving him on his own.

It was then that Liam Pat began to feel afraid. It was one thing to have it over Huxter, to know what Huxter didn’t know; it was one thing to get a smile from the barmaid. It was another altogether to be sitting on a bus with a device in a sports bag. The excitement that had first warmed him while he listened to Feeny, while he sat on the floor with his head resting against the wall, wasn’t there any more. Mr McTighe picking him out felt different now, and when he tried to see himself in Michael Collins’s trenchcoat, with Michael Collins’s stride, there was nothing there either. It sounded meaningless, Feeny saying he had a Corkman’s way with him.

He sat with the sports bag on the floor, steadied by his feet on either side of it. A weakness had come into his arms, and for a moment he thought he wouldn’t be able to lift them, but when he tried it was all right, even though the feeling of weakness was still there. A moment later nausea caused him to close his eyes.

The bus lurched and juddered through the empty Sunday-evening streets. Idling at bus stops, its engine vibrated, and between his knees Liam Pat’s hand repeatedly reached down to seize the handles of the sports bag, steadying it further. He wanted to get off, to hurry down the stairs that were beside where he was sitting, to jump off the bus while it was still moving, to leave the sports bag where it was. He sensed what he did not understand: that all this had happened before, that his terror had come so suddenly because he was experiencing, again, what he had experienced already.

Two girls came chattering up the stairs and walked down the length of the bus. They laughed as they sat down, one of them bending forward, unable to control herself. The other went on with what she was saying, laughing too, but Liam Pat couldn’t hear what she said. The conductor came for their fares and when he’d gone they found they didn’t have a light for their cigarettes. The one who’d laughed so much was on the inside, next to the window. The other one got up. ‘Ta,’ she said when she had asked Liam Pat if he had a lighter and he handed her his box of matches. He didn’t strike one because of the shaking in his hands, but even so she must have seen it. ‘Ta,’ she said again.

It could have been in a dream. He could have dreamed he was on a bus with the bag. He could have had a dream and forgotten it, like you sometimes did. The night he’d seen Feeny for the last time, it could have been he had a dream of being on a bus, and he tried to remember waking up the next morning, but he couldn’t.

The girl next to the window looked over her shoulder, as if she’d just been told that he’d handed her friend the box instead of striking a match for her. They’d remember him because of that. The one who’d approached him would remember the sports bag. ‘Cheers,’ the same one said when they both left the bus a couple of stops later.

It wasn’t a dream. It was the Examiner spread out on the kitchen table a few months ago and his father shaking his head over the funeral, sourly demanding why those people couldn’t have been left to their grief, why there were strangers there, wanting to carry the coffin. ‘My God! My God!’ his father savagely exclaimed.

It hadn’t worked the first time. A Sunday night then too, another boy, another bus. Liam Pat tried to remember that boy’s name, but he couldn’t. ‘Poor bloody hero,’ his father said.

Another Dessie Coglan had done the big fella, fixing it, in touch with another Gaughan, in touch with the lads, who came to parade at the funeral. Another Huxter was specially picked. Another Feeny said there’d be time to spare to get to Euston afterwards, no harm to life or limb, ten exactly the train was. The bits and pieces had been scraped up from the pavement and the street, skin and bone, part of a wallet fifty yards away.