Saints and Sinners (3 page)

One appointment in March with my doctor had been switched to evening. The night was dark and foggy when I got out, and the warm lights of the pub were indeed inviting. The atmosphere was completely different from that of daytime. Such hub and gaiety that, as I entered, I already felt a little intoxicated. Moreover, it was packed. At a large round table a birthday party was in full swing, and a young, obese woman was literally submerged by bunches of flowers and basking in her role as guest of honor. I made my way to the counter where Rafferty was standing and ordered a glass of white wine. Once I had been served, he moved me along to a second counter, where no one was drinking, to avoid the crush. For a while we did not exchange a word. Instead, we studied the array of bottles that were stacked on the top shelf, with their proud labels in gold or black or russet, scored with ornate lettering and coats of arms, testaments to their long lineage. On the lower shelf were the bottles placed upside down, their necks fluting into the clear plastic optics. Every pub, Rafferty said, gave a different measure, and Biddy's was popular because they gave five millimeters extra on a small whisky or vodka. Pondering this for a moment, he said that with drink the possibilities were endless, you could do anything or thought you could. Moreover, time got swallowed up, or more accurately, as he put it, got lost.

A few years after his father went home, his mother died. His father, as he believed, had killed her, had worn her out. The telegram came with the sad news, and he set out, as he said, for Victoria Station, to catch Slattery's coach that fetched passengers to the boat at Holyhead. Never made it. Went on benders along the way in various pubs, lads sympathizing with him and saying maudlin things, until the day had turned to night and the coach had left. I'll always regret that I didn't go, he said.

It was quite a while after that the drink got a hold on him, but he knew it was all connected, all part of the same soup. He'd work for six weeks and then booze. Then he'd work the odd day, get a few bob to buy cider, and before long, he was loafing. Mattresses under the bridges, men from every corner of Ireland, gassing at night, talking big in their cups, then arguing and puking in the morning, delirium tremens, seeing rats and snakes, sucking on empty bottles.

One morning (Rafferty continued), I crawled out from under a quilt to go and get a fix. Usually a few people were in the streets going to work or coming from night work, and they'd give you something, especially the women, the women had softer hearts. On the other side of the street I saw a woman in a belted white raincoat looking across at me. It was Madge, who'd married Billy.

She came over, and I can still see her thinking it but not saying it, "You should see yourself, Rafferty, your dignity gone, your teeth half-gone, your beautiful black hair gone gray, and your eyes glazed."

I said, "How's Billy?" and she said, "Billy's dead and gone," and her eyes filled up with tears. I could hardly believe it, Accordion Bill that had been such a swank, the two of them such swanks on the dance floor, winning medals and drinking rose wine. Billy had left the building work after they got the franchise of a pub over in St. Martin's Lane, which, as she said, was the ruination of him, of them. Then all of a sudden, she pulled a little notepad from her pocket and thrust it into my hand. This was the chance encounter he believed she had been waiting for, to meet someone from the old days, so that she could show it. Her history, jotted down at different times, often a scrawl and with several colored inks.

"Badly beaten up again. Internal bleeding, rushed to hospital and nearly lost the baby."

"Bill not home for three days and three nights, searched up and down the high street, found him in an allotment with other blokes drinking cheap cider, didn't even recognize me, brought him home, cleaned him up, washed him, shaved him, promised to get him new clothes when I got my pay packet."

"Billy wept in my arms half the night and I plucked up the courage and I asked him why did he drink like that and his answer was to blank things. I said what things. He said something happened, and that's all he'd say. Something happened. Took it to his grave he did."

''Another time I wakened, and he was stuffing pills and whisky down my neck, half-unconscious at the time. He wanted to be dead and he wanted us to go together because we loved one another. 'Go together,' I shouted, and two young children in the very next room."

“His mother was an Aries. On her 70th birthday I got him the ticket to go home. I said have a drink, have a few drinks, but promise me you won't get blotto, if you love me, promise me that, and he did and we hugged. He got to his sister's house very early in the morning, and the little niece was pulling at him to put on a CD, and his sister went into the kitchen to put on the kettle when he collapsed in the doorway. Never wakened again."

I handed it back, and she said, "I still love him____

Will you tell me why I still love him, Rafferty?" I couldn't. As she ran to catch the bus she turned back and shouted, "No one is given a life just to throw it away." It done something to me. I went back to the tiny room beyond Holloway that a priest had got for me. I rarely set foot in it, because I preferred being under the bridges with the bums, but I went that morning. There was a mirror I got off a ship and seeing how I had fallen, I turned its face to the wall. I started to clean up, emptied things, worn tubes of toothpaste, eye lotion, old socks, and jumpers, and put them all in a bin bag. Then I got the Hoover from under the stairs and Hoovered, and I poured bleach into a can of water and scrubbed the windowsills and the woodwork. Standing in the shower, watching the pictures of little black umbrellas on the plastic curtain, I made this pact with myself. I couldn't quit the drink. You could say that I half won and I half lost. I set myself a goal, one pint in the morning and two pints at night and not a drop more, ever, except maybe for a toast at a wedding.

"A woman," he said, looking at me almost bashfully, "a woman can do something to a man that cuts deep. Madge did it, and so did my mother." The night before I left home for good (he went on) my mother decided that we would pick fraughans for a pie. They are a berry the color of the blueberry, but more tart, and they grew in secret places far up in the woods. It was one of those glorious summer evenings, the woods teeming with light, with life, birds, bees, grasshoppers, a sense that the days would never be gray or rainy again. We were lucky. We filled two jugs to the brim, our hands dyed a deep indigo. For some reason my mother daubed her face with her hands and then so did I, and there we were, two purple freaks, like clowns, laughing our heads off. Maybe the laughing, or maybe the recklessness emboldened her, but my mother squeezed my knuckles and said she had something to tell me, she loved me more than anything on this earth, more than her hot-tempered husband and her two darling daughters. It was too much. It was too much to be told at that young age, and I going away forever.

At times, he said after a long silence, he had toyed with the idea of going home, to visit the grave, when he saw Christmas decorations in the shop windows and raffles for Christmas cake, or got the cards from his sisters, who were now grown up and had married young and moved away. Except that he never went. "If I went home I would have had to kill him," he said, his sad gray eyes looking into mine, unflinchingly.

One Sunday in summer I was enlisted to help at a car-boot sale in a warehouse outside London. Adrian had organized it, so as to collect money to send deprived children to the seaside for a week's holiday. I was assigned to the bookstall—mostly tattered paperbacks with their covers torn off, a few novels, and a book about trees and plants indigenous to the Holy Land, pictures with panoramic views accompanied by beautiful quotations from the Bible. Rafferty was impresario, steering people to the various folding tables, to ransack for bargains. The offerings were motley—winter and summer dresses, worn blankets, quilts, men's shirts, crockery, car tires, and stacks of old records.

A young nun, her blue nylon veiling fluttering down her back, did brisk business selling cakes, pies, loaves of bread, and homemade jams that had been, as she proudly said, made in the mother house of her order. The other stand that drew a crowd was a litter of young pups in a deep cardboard box, mewling and scampering to get out. They were spaniel and some other breeds. One child, whose birthday it was, lifted his favorite one out, a black and white puppy with a single russet gash on the prow of its head, and as the father handed over two coins, numerous children clamored for a pet.

Though business was not great, Adrian pronounced it an out-and-out success. We packed the unsold stuff and swept up to give some semblance of cleanliness to the place. As we were being driven back to London in a van, Rafferty asked courteously if I would care for a drink before setting out for home. We got dropped off in a part of London that neither of us was familiar with and that was anything but inviting. Blocks of tall, dun-colored flats veered towards the sky. They were of such deliberate ugliness their planners must have determined that those who would live in them would do so in unmitigated gloom. A scarlet kite flew above them, sailing in its desultory way, now and then flurrying, as if a sudden swell of wind had overtaken it, and we could not but express the hope that it would never return to the ugly ravine whence someone, perhaps a child, had dispatched it. Nearby was a playground, more like a yard, bordered with a line of young poplars, beyond which youths yelled and shouted at one another as they played different ball games, the taller ones converged around a basketball net. Dogs ran around, barking ceaselessly.

We could see the sign for a pub, but the entrance eluded us. It was tucked in between a Catholic church, which we recognized by the cross on its gray-blue spire, and a community center for youths, but though we went up and down several flights of concrete steps and under dark, foul-smelling concrete archways, we kept returning to the same spot. A young Irishman in shorts offered to be of assistance, but said we must first have a peep in the window of the Catholic church, because the altar, brought from Europe centuries previous, was priceless. The church was locked, as evening Mass had been said. We looked through a long stained-glass window and saw an empty room with only a few pews. The altar, set back from the wall, had intricate sprays of gold leaf and was flanked with stout gold pillars. He was a most talkative young man, and pointing to the vista of flats, he listed the crimes that were rife there. He was a community worker and helped the local priest, whom he pronounced his hero. With ebullience, he produced a map of the area, where, with green drawing pins, he had highlighted the scene of three murders, all connected with drugs. Then he descanted, as might an aficionado, on the type of drugs that were being sold, their quality, and the astronomical prices they fetched. He asked us to guess how many languages were current in the neighborhood and then answered for us, over twenty languages, and the Irish no longer in the majority, many having gone home and many others having become millionaires.

We thanked him for conveying us, but he was already off on another tangent about some delinquent who passed himself off as blind and was actually a brilliant pickpocket. Inside the pub we had the greatest difficulty getting rid of him, and only after Rafferty whispered that we had an important matter to discuss did he take his leave of us, but not before he gave us his business card, printed with his name, a degree in ecology, and his availability as a tour guide of the area.

The place was completely empty. The faint straggling rays of the setting sun came through the long, low window, and fiddle music filtered from the kitchen area. Tapping one foot, Rafferty listened, listening so intently he seemed to be hearing it there and then and also hearing it from a great distance, rousing tunes that ushered him back to the neon purlieu of the Gal-tymore Dance Hall in Cricklewood, where they had modern and fiddle. Saturday nights. Admission two shillings and sixpence. Scores of young men, including him, togged out in the navy suit, white shirt, and savvy tie, standing at the edge of the dance floor, gauging the form. One girl was called Crania, after a pirate queen. Other girls wore bright flashy frocks or skirts with stiffened petticoats, but Grania had on a black dress with a white collar and inlaid white bib, giving the appearance of being a nurse. As he learned later, she was a seamstress in a shop on Oxford Street, making curtains and doing alterations. What first struck him, apart from her pure white skin and thick brown hair, with hues of red and gold like an autumn bogland, was how down-to-earth she was. Between dances she would sit, fling off her shoes, and mash her feet to ready herself for the next bout on the floor. Up at the mineral bar, other men would be buying her lemonade and pressing her for the next dance, and the one after that, and she was always saucy with them. He himself never got on the floor, because of an unconquerable shyness. Six months or more passed before she threw him a word, and as long again before she allowed him to walk her home. She lodged three miles beyond Cricklewood, near Holloway Fields. He recalled standing outside her digs till one or two in the morning, hearing her soft voice as she bewitched him with stories. Listening to her was like being transported. Her father was a tailor who also had a pub and grocery, where people drank, mulled over the latest bit of gossip. She herself preferred when one of the old people, from up the country, happened to come in and told stories of the long ago, cures and curses, warts removed by being rubbed with black stones taken out of the bed ofthe river, and the wonders ofBiddy Early the witch, who, by gazing into her blue bottle, reached second sight.

He would drink in the week evenings, but kept himself fairly sober on the Saturdays, to gaze at Gra-nia, to buy her the minerals and walk her home. One night when they were parting she handed him a gift in a sheet of folded paper and whispered a few words in Irish. This was her way of saying she was his.