Emerald Germs of Ireland (26 page)

The sound of the bedroom door slamming obliterated the renewed cries which issued from a torn and bereft soul, further rendered anonymous by the clattering and banging of plates and dishes downstairs.

It was to be some weeks before the folly of his response on that occasion became wholly clear to Pat. Because, of course, it had not been his mother who was to blame at all! And all that he had been witnessing was yet another example of his blaming her for absolutely everything! “How could I have been so stupid?” he chided himself remorselessly. He shook his head. “Phee-oow!” he said and looked out the window of his bedroom. It was like the sun was coming up. A lovely, hard, twinkling, and shiningly optimistic sun. For one split second, he felt like doing a kick in the air. Now that, at last, everything had become clear to him, as it had once and for all the previous day.

He had been coming down from chapel (it was his aspiration that religion might provide him with some succor) when the street rang out with the sound of a familiar voice.

“Oi! McNab! Get over here!”

Instinctively—despite the fact that he was now nineteen years of age—he complied.

“Well, McGush!” barked Patsy Traynor. “What do you think of this fellow?”

“Oho!” snorted Henry McGush. “I’ve been hearing queer stories about this boy! Oh, indeed and I have! Oho, he’s been some baby lately, the way I hear it!”

Patsy Traynor winked and elbowed his colleague in an exaggeratedly conspiratorial fashion.

“And me as well, McGush! Bad tales too, I tell you! What have you been up to, McNab, you rascal you?”

“Twanging a certain lassie, I hear!”

“Twanging her, eh? Twanging her now he has the tie off!”

“Is that what you’re at, McNab? Giving her the twang? Oo, be cripes I’d say she likes it. I’d say she’s fond of it, Pat, would you?”

“Yelping for the twang is what I’d say! That’s what I’d say now, Henry!” grinned Patsy Traynor.

“Yelping for it, cripes I’d say she is!”

“Yelping for it! There’s no two ways!” cheered Henry McGush.

“Yelping for it, begaw I’d say!”

“And McNab’s the man to twang it!”

“Except for one thing,” said Patsy Traynor.

It was the moment before the lethal thumb hovers above the button. And then—the cataclysm.

“Except I got there early! The bould Patsy twanged her first!”

Twin faces exploding into florid laughter rendered Pat dumbstruck.

“And the bucking eejit never knew it!”

How many letters (pink and many of them doused in perfume) Pat was surrounded by as he sat cross-legged upon his bed it is impossible to say. A “clatter” or “an avalanche” might go some way toward approximating the number. Perhaps it may not even be relevant. What certainly is relevant is the single thought which pulsated relentlessly now inside his mind—had he been wrong all along? Had he (no, it couldn’t be true!) perhaps, even dreamed all those times they’d had together? The candy floss, the snow, the laughter by the river, her cries as he pushed the swing ever higher—had, all along, he imagined the most precious, impervious, glistening stone when what he held in his hand was but a dead ember such as he could randomly pluck from the fireplace and disdainfully crush beneath his heel? It seemed a bony hand had taken hold of his stomach bag and squeezed, perhaps with an acidic bitterness, certainly without pity.

There is a man in a long coat standing by a graveside. The day seems fashioned for the purpose or made for such a solitary vigil, with veils of rain sweeping up the hillside and getting lost in the maw of gray light that settles on the evening countryside. It might be expected that this man would weep but such is not the case, for he is someone long since past sorrow and all its kin. Indeed, somewhere within him sdii burns a glow of what can only be described as hope. For, as he gazes upon the elegant calligraphy upon gray limestone expertly hewn, Bridie Traynor—Deed. 1980, he permits a smile to come to his lips as he considers that somehow it might have come to pass that his worst fears had not proven true. That, all along, she had been his and his alone.
And that maybe, had things been otherwise, he might somehow have made her happy.

“Happier than he ever did,” thinks Pat McNab as his eyes light upon her name once more and at last he turns to leave. Acknowledging the greeting of a fellow mourner, he sinks his hands deep inside his pockets and makes his way now toward the gate. A passing car douses the cemetery wall with dank puddle water. Turning his face toward the town, those words come to him again (“Come on, luvvy!”), lodging close by his tonsils like the coldest nuggets of ice, orchestrating the familiar tableau that played before him each and every night, threading their eloquence through the days that had been hers with Patsy Traynor but denied to Pat McNab.

There was no one in the playground now and the swing was his alone. Neither was there snow, simply the relentless hiss of the rain and the almost infantile gurgling of the gutters. A sweetpaper blew across the grass, fought with a litter bin for some moments, and flew on. Pat clutched the chains of the swing and tried not to think of her face the way it would come when he tormented himself; the lights gleaming above the ballroom door, Traynor emerging out from behind the cars, her small sculpted hand in his. As a soft but eerily cheeky voice cried, “Poor old innocent Pat’s gone home at last, Patsy! Now we can have ourselves a decent coort!”

There was a lump in Pat’s throat now as he made his way home. There could be no denying it. Just as there had been on that first night—when he had hovered beneath the window (three weeks after Bridie had married Traynor) in the hope of catching a glimpse of her. A wave of revulsion had swept through him as his eyes assimilated the sight that met them. There had been blood upon that gentle face of alabaster as “the Brute” Traynor raised the melodeon anew and spared her not once with it, its horrible, undulating cacophony seeming to articulate Pat’s inner pain as once again its weight bore down upon her, the ogre—for what else was he!—snarling, “Where’s my dinner? I told you to have it! Didn’t I tell you to have it?” as his boot caught her plumb in the stomach and his wife collapsed at his feet in a state of exhaustion.

Pat turned from the window and made his way to the kitchen to prepare himself some supper. Soon it would be time to retire to bed—
alone. As he spooned the cocoa into his mug, he reflected how it had, in the end, been merciful. It hadn’t lasted long. With bitter irony, raising the striped mug to his lips, he murmured, “Probably as long as our love.”

Before sleep came to Pat that night, he construed a marble statue standing all alone in the middle of a cemetery. A statue that reminded him of pale white sculpted hands. And then he saw a frail, hunted creature bruised black and blue as a shadow stood above it, a tattered, would-be musical instrument cast aside, blood-spattered. And there can be no denying that in that instant, Pat McNab harbored hatred in his heart. But, as the soft fingers of sleep eventually stroked him toward its peaceful boudoir, another thought came into his mind. And with it, soft flakes of snow as gentle as thought itself on green and rolling parkland now silently floating down. Until the world seemed covered in it. And it is as if there is no one there but him, until he looks again and sees her, emerging from its pale pure haze, the words she whispers clear now in his ears, “It’s not true, Pat—about our love. For what we had will last forever, no matter what—I know it will find us again. Just like, one day, you’ll find me.”

Pat cried out but when he looked she had gone and there was nothing remaining but the snow, pale and unbroken and stretching to infinity. But when he awoke, Pat McNab knew for certain in his heart that one day when he closed his eyes he would look up and there she’d be again. In her knitted woolen cap, as large as life, and when he’d say, “How long this time then, Bridie Cunningham?” she’d smile and reply, “Forever, Pat,” and that there they’d stand, with lacy flakes gathering on their shoulders, the softest touch of their lips bringing tinkling notes, like the tiniest drops of falling milk, as if by magic from the air.

T
here are, as is the case with many of the aspects of the life of he who might be termed “our hero Pat,” two schools of thought concerning his “thespian ambitions.” Or what Dr. Toss Hamblyn (a long-standing patron of Sullivan’s Select Bar) often referred to as his “adventures in the screen trade”—one view being that it was the very pursuit of these which eventually put him “astray in the head altogether,” the other insisting that they had in effect opened up “a whole new world for Pat.” One which contained within it, indeed, the very seeds of his salvation. His transportation “over the edge,” they continued to attest, being the sole responsibility of one man, the schoolmaster Butty Halpin, whose small-minded egomania resulted, they insisted, not in Pat’s reformation or amelioration as a human being but in the planting of further laurel bushes for the purposes of disguising “grim secrets,” a superfluity of which the earth in the garden belonging to Pat McNab now concealed. At this point, in terms of numbers, approaching, thanks to the hauteur and self-aggrandizement of this diminutive, rotund pedagogue, double figures.

“Whenever this is all over,” declared Alo McGilly one night in Sullivan’s, “history will see that one citizen of Gullytown and one alone bears the greater share of responsibility for these dreadful, dreadful tragedies—and that man is Butty Halpin.”

Whether true or not, there can be no denying the fact that the Pat McNab who opened the door to Butty Halpin was a considerably brighter and breezier version than that which had been pottering
about the murky interior of the McNab household for some several months now. And for this there was a single reason—the fact that only some days before he had descended the stairs to discover in the hallway a letter from the Dublin School of Acting (a response which he had never dreamed of receiving!) inviting him to attend for interview. Which explained the myriad series of voices (“Don’t make me laugh, Chan!” and “Good evening, Miss de Soto!”) which he had now begun to spend hours perfecting and the sanguine expression in his eyes as he extended his hand and proclaimed to the small, onion-shaped man who now stood on the step before him with a large briar chomped between his jaws: “Mr. Halpin! How good to see you!”

Admittedly, Pat was somewhat taken aback when he heard his former teacher explain that the reason for his call was that he was, in effect, searching for a place of residence (for it was Pat’s intention to devote all his spare time now to his “travels in fantasy,” “thespian artificing,” or however else his cerebral peregrinations might be described, and to eschew all domestic pursuits)—but when “the master” (as he was often referred to) explained that he would be “billeting” for a “mere three weeks or so,” he found himself relieved—somewhat honored, indeed, that the renowned educator had seen fit to choose his establishment.

“So that’s the way of it, Pat,” continued Mr. Halpin, wiping the remains of his fish fingers from his lips. “Now that Dots is gone, I’m all on my lonesome below and I thought sure I might as well stop with yourself until the new bungalow is built.”

“And why wouldn’t you, master? Will you have another drop of tea there?”

“I will indeed, Pat—to be sure,” replied the master, extending his blue-striped mug.

There are those who would contend that the fatal moment, i.e., that which was the genesis of the reactivation of the resentment which Pat, despite himself, began to harbor toward his former teacher, occurred directly after this exchange. When Pat, in his excitement, blurted out all the details of his newfound good fortune. There was nothing which could have prepared him for the cold taciturnity of the master’s response. Nor for the cruel unwinding smile which followed hot on its
heels as he picked his teeth with a match (how well Pat recalled that grating mannerism!) and murmured, in a low, barely audible tone, “Acting school? But sure you couldn’t act your way out of a paper bag, Pat!”

Pat attempted to deliver a frivolous response but only succeeded in flushing to the roots as he stammered, “I have to go up for my audition. I have nearly all my parts learned.”

Butty Halpin smiled and played with the few crumbs of marble cake which remained on the plate. Then he looked at Pat, twanged his braces (they were the very same ones he had worn when his host was in fourth class), and said, “Well, all I can say is that I hope you make a better fist of it than you did the football. Lord bless us and save us when I think of it!”

Pat could feel the words shrinking in his throat, but he rallied nobly and replied, with convincing good humor, “Oh now! I was an awful case, master! Wasn’t I?”

Butty shook his head as his left brace went,
snap!

“An awful case?” he continued. “Ah for God’s sake, Pat! Sure you could hardly tie your bucking laces never mind kick a ball!”

Pat twisted a thread which was hanging out of the pocket of his black trousers and, hoarsely, replied, “Do you remember the day Mattie Skutch kicked the ball and it hit me in the face?”

“Hit you in the face is right!” confirmed Butty. “Hit you in the face—”

“And went straight into the goal!!”

Butty shook his hairless domed head in despair.

“Lost the bloody cup on us! After all my hard work! The whole season wasted!”

Pat gulped and his nostrils gave an involuntary twitch.

“Oh now, master,” he said, still twisting the thread, “it was some day all right!”

Butty wiped his mouth one last time with a corner of the napkin and pushed the table away from him as he rose to his feet. He gazed at Pat as you would at an alcoholic whose spouse and dependents have deserted him and said, “Well, all I can say is, Pat—I hope you’re better at this acting business than you ever were at the football!”

Something valiant sporadically arose in Pat as he lay there pondering over these events throughout the small hours—but it was not enough, and when morning finally came, and Butty grabbed his briefcase to dash off to school, calling back, “Thanks, Pat! See you at half-three,” very litde of it remained, in its place (where evidence of it had shone in Pat’s eyes) two ominously gray, semicircular shadows. A stranger would surely have found his smile deceptive now as he continued to repeat, to no one in particular—for the house was entirely empty—the words, “Thank you very much for your kind words of encouragement. However, at least I never claimed to be a teacher! At least I never did that, fucking human sausage, effing potato man!”

There was no mistaking the spiderwork of cracks which interwove upon the glass of the mirror as Pat rubbed his bruised knuckles and withdrew, ramrod-stiff, to the somber confines of the library. As the day wore on, however, Pat, fortunately, began to see the lighter side of events, eventually—at approximately three o’clock—drawing the curtains to admit the daylight and repeating gaily—a new buoyancy in his eyes—for the benefit of his mother’s portrait, “What do I care about an auld baldy dwarf! For that’s all he is! Thinks he’s fucking Clark Gable, for the love of jasus!”

He was continuing to chuckle when the jaunty, self-assured echo of the master’s whistling came drifting down the hallway.

It was some days later that the dicky bow arrived in the post, meticulously wrapped in cellophane. ‘Yes—that’s for me, Pat,” the master announced, smartly removing it from his hands. “Or hadn’t you heard about me entering the ‘Spot the Talent’ show below in Sullivan’s?”

“‘Spot the Talent’?” croaked Pat, quite taken aback.

“Yes! Come Thursday night I’ll be up there with the best—giving them what for, eh, Pat? Yes sir, indeed!”

“What for …” repeated Pat abstractedly to himself, as the master continued, “But then—you won’t be here, will you? You’ll be off to Dublin to audition for your—ahem!—acting school!!”

It was as though Pat had momentarily contracted amnesia.

“That’s right!” he suddenly cried aloud. “Of course!”

“Of course!” sniffed the master. ‘You’re the boy will leave them standing, eh, Pat?”

An acidic sickliness took hold of Pat’s abdomen.

But it was a happy Pat McNab who arrived home from Dublin the following Friday evening. Butty Halpin, fresh from a hard day’s work in St. Cashie’s Boys’ N.S., was there to greet him on the doorstep. “Well, Pat! How did it go? The audition, I mean?” he asked urgently.

Pat beamed in his box-pleated coat.

“I did it, master!” he cried proudly. “They say it’s only a matter of official notification now!”

“Fair play to you, Pat! Able to say the big words all by yourself! Official notification! Ha ha!”

Pat blinked uncertainly, unsure of an appropriate response. But he had no need of it, for a pudgy hand had already settled on his shoulder.

“Pat! Come in at once!” demanded the master. “I want to show you the prize I won!”

The Spot the Talent Waterford crystal decanter gleamed like diamonds on the sideboard in the late evening sunlight.

“What do you think of that, Pat?” said the master.

“It’s lovely, master,” Pat replied, gawping in admiration.

sang the schoolteacher tunefully, adding, “That’s what won it for me—the bold John McCormack, Pat!”

“I had better go to bed now, master,” said Pat, rubbing his brow.

“Yes, Pat!” replied Butty. “You must be tired after all your hard ‘acting’ work—ha ha!”

“What, master?” said Pat, not thinking straight, his mind cluttered with a bewildering variety of “accents” and “pieces of dialogue.”

“Good-night so, Pat,” responded the master, bemusedly shaking his globed head, as if mystified by the world and its absurdly unrealizable ambitions.

It was approximately fifteen minutes past eight the following morning when Pat, lying in bed, heard the plaintive whistling of Tommy Noble
the postman as he came sauntering up the lane, followed by the tantalizing flap of the letter box. Within seconds, he found himself bounding down the stairs, falling upon his knees in the hallway and opening up letters in what can only be described as a near frenzy. His heart sank as
Reader’s Digest
fliers, electricity bills, and HP hoover offers followed assorted tax communications in their horrid brown envelopes and the realization slowly dawned on him that there was in fact nothing from the acting school. This procedure was repeated, with startling exactitude, the following morning—indeed the one after that, also—with Pat on broken knees in the hallway surrounded by scrunched-up balls of unwanted missives, but nowhere near him the one his heart so eagerly desired.

A pall of gloom settled over him as he sat at the kitchen table the following Friday afternoon, alerting a little as he heard the front door close and the sound of his tenant’s footsteps coming along the hall. Within seconds, the schoolmaster was standing in the doorway with his nostrils twitching, remarking, “There you are, Pat! What’s that I smell, I wonder? Turnips? God bless us, Pat, but you’re a topper, do you know that!”

The bulbous pedagogue pulled a chair out from beneath the table and seated himself by his host. Withdrawing a large white handkerchief from the pocket of his cavalry twills, he blew thunderously into it and, his cheeks flushing bright-red, said, “You’ll never guess who I met coming up the lane, Pat!”

Pat felt a huge tidal wave of possibility swelling within him.

“Tommy Noble!” he cried, with all the excitement of a young child.

“No! Timmy Sullivan!” replied the master. “He has me entered for the All-Ireland ‘Spot the Talent’ this coming Monday!”

He gave his full attention to the steaming meal before him as he busily tucked his napkin into his shirt collar.

“Boys!” he said, rubbing his hands. “Boys, but them turnips smell bucking powerful!”

There was no mistaking the ghastly pallor of Pat McNab’s countenance as he endeavored to clasp his hands together on his lap, the better to contain their tremulous vibrations.

The following morning found Pat poised on the landing awaiting the arrival of Tommy Noble. But it was not to be. And when “the tenant”
came stepping gaily up the lane at approximately three thirty that evening, it might have been to the “place of eternal night” he was returning, for the spirit of Pat McNab was as close now to being utterly crushed as it might be possible for a human to endure. Which made the master’s brusqueness all the more insensitive and, without a doubt, indiscreet, as he complained, “Ah for the love of God, not turnips again today, Pat!”

Pat paused over the cooker and genuinely made an effort to be civil and considerate.

“I thought you liked turnips, master,” was his reply.

The circular educationalist stiffened and left down his briefcase.

“Well, I do. But not every day God sends. Japers, man, sure any lug would know that!”

There was an undoubted edge to Pat’s response as he said, “Well, that’s all there is, I’m sorry to have to tell you!”

The master was clearly taken aback but good-humoredly made light of it.

“God bless us Pat but you’re in good humor today, aren’t you? I suppose no sign of Tommy Noble today again, eh? Would I be right, Pat, in making that assumption? Right, would I be, do you think?”