The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (21 page)

‘A bit of a windfall, Pappy. Pappy?’

‘Yes, Eneas?’

‘Do you remember — do you remember, Tom’s first wife, that, you know, was got rid of, or, or, whatever it was happened her?’

‘Yeh. Of course. Roseanne. I do.’

‘Where is she, Pappy, now?’

‘Arra, Leitrim.’

‘Leitrim?’

‘Yes.’

‘And, Pappy, where like, in Leitrim, like?’

‘Oh, the county home, where else? The poor girl, she lost her wits. We popped her in. I don’t know. I suppose she’s still there. Where else would she be? If she’s still alive. It’s a queer hard thing when a person loses their wits. I seen many a fine person reduced by the same malady, and put suits on some of them. You know, Eneas, that’s a bright colour of a suit, now you stand there at the window. Blue, is it?’

‘Yeh, sort of electric blue, I think they called it.’

‘Electric? Like the plugs, like?’

‘Yeh.’

‘Very good.’

It’s a cold hard day in Leitrim and maybe, he thinks, it often is. Stones and ditches have the rags of cold weather on them, mosses and frosty wet. Gripped in his right fist he has a twist of snowdrops.

The matron’s old and lame, and she is surprised to see him and hear the name he asks for.

‘She never has had a visitor.’

‘Oh,’ he says, ‘well.’

‘Great spirit she has, lionlike.’

They move through the yellow corridors.

And the matron makes a door scrape open. Eneas is thinking suddenly of the iron shack, and the roses, what did she call them, something of St Anne’s? He must tell her about that rose called ‘Peace’ that Benson was growing in Africa. That will be something of interest to her, certainly.

There’s only a bent person in the corner, as far unlike a lion as he could imagine. She has a heavy woollen skirt on and a black sort of a memory of a cardigan. He thinks despite all of her heated dark breasts lying on his own chest reddened by desire in the long ago. The face when it turns, under the cowpat of grey hair, is not familiar to him. He doesn’t think there will be much use in mentioning roses to her now.

‘Roseanne,’ he says, ‘is it you?’

‘Did they not shoot you yet, then?’

‘No, they haven’t, truly.’ And shows her the snowdrops. ‘Flowers,’ he says.

‘Snowdrops, sure give them to me.’

He hands them over like an army dispatch.

‘You’re well treated, are you?’ he says.

‘Well, you give me flowers, like a lover.’ Then, pleasantly enough, ‘I wasn’t waiting for you, you know.’ ‘I often thought of you, in Africa…’

‘Is that where you were? Well, that’s a long way, brother.’ She puts the snowdrops to her nose.

‘No scent,’ she says expertly. ‘The sick and the mad,’ she adds, more mysteriously.

‘I just thought I’d come out and see you, since I was home anyway.’

‘Well,’ she says, looking at him. ‘I wasn’t waiting for you.’

He goes back away out the road to thumb a lift back into Sligo. Swinging his arms, swinging his arms, hawthorn, hawthorn.

Bread-and-butter bushes was the name for the hawthorn, on the way to school, up the nuns’ field by the raggedy ditches, and you could eat the leaves with relish, under the rain.

Swinging his arms, hawthorn, hawthorn.

A bright suit’s not enough.

Next time he walks down to the post office to get his official letter with the army pension in it, there’s another letter waiting also, poste restante.

Beasley’s Hostel,
Isle of Dogs,
London,
3rd April, 1959

Dear Brother Eneas,

Now I’ve been wandering these last months and ever hoping to find you. I’ve been looking, brother, into every passing face, to see if you are there. I crossed to the Horn of Africa scared out of my blessed wits by recollections of Lagos, and also, the very fierce fellas of the wilderness that would gladly kill and cook a man. I was standing at the door of the freight car, crossing to Kenya, shouting out your name in case you were near. Standing like a fool and shouting out at the lost lions and the burning bushes and the straw villages. Eneas, Eneas, was my eternal shout. And no blessed answer in the wilderness of my homeland.

The Isle of Dogs was a place you mentioned as a haven for men like us and I have scoured the Isle from stem to stern, every poor dosshouse and house of lonesome girls, and find you nowhere. This is a letter to say I am alive and looking for you and hoping to see you. The world is wide but I have trust in God’s instincts and the light of His kindness. I do. I am writing to the only other place I know that may be connected with your name, unless you are still in Lagos, a district now closed to me. I am afraid to write to Lagos and leave a clue for murdering men but all the same I did write to the company there but they send word they know nothing of your whereabouts. I am even afraid to write to you in Sligo lest I might stir up a hornet’s nest to devour you. Forgive if you will the force of friendship but I am not willing to be parted so needlessly. I would explain all if I could only ascertain your location.

It behoved me to leave Nigeria in a violent and dark fashion, to wit, escaping the terrors of Lagos. I’ve a tale to tell of murder and misery pertaining to my late lamented father and your friend Harcourt bears the scars of a beating and imprisonment. But God allowed me freedom at last in the darks of the night because murdering men love to drink worse than us and my head was clear and I ran out into my Africa like a mighty rabbit and got loose from them. I burst forth and tasted freedom. And hurried down to the stockyard but you were long gone, whither I did not know, safely I hoped and prayed. It was my hope that you’d jumped the expected train to Kenya. And I leapt on the next train myself in my misery of loss and fear. For if you were gone back into the dark town I could not follow you. Fear worse than a child’s, brother Eneas, and darker than tar.

But I’ve sought you ever since, in Nairobi and secondly along the coast, with no reward. And I doubt in my heart you could be in Sligo, it being your dark Lagos after all, full of wretched killers. But Sligo’s the only name I have after the Isle of Dogs, and God send this letter to you in the upshot. You see I sorely miss you, my brother. And hope this letter finds you and finds you well.

I remain,

yr obednt servnt,

Port Harcourt.

In any court in the land he would count it a remarkable letter. Not just because it has reached him but also the birds of friendship flying about among the words. Yes, sir, it is a mighty thing to enjoy the fact of a friend in the world. A mighty thing. He is affected to his boots by it. The old tone of Harcourt carried in a perilous letter. The living force of it.

So it’s back to his old task of hail and farewell.

‘Well, take care, son, as ever,’ says the Mam, and takes a hold of him, and would kiss his face but she can’t reach it. ‘Will you bend down to me?’ she says. ‘And take your punishment like a man.’

And she kisses him quick, like he has it written on his hat at the seaside. She’s buoyant, weirdly so, excited. Everything a mystery!

His Pappy’s more subdued, more puzzled. They go out into Father Moran’s Park along the river. The old man is as lithe as a boy, right enough, stooping to pick up sticks and stones to fling into the salmon-coloured river, silver and black. On the other hand he himself, Eneas himself, is tired and his joints feel creaky. His father gambols about the riverbank.

‘Here, Pappy,’ he says, taking out a roll of notes in an elastic band. ‘Something to keep the wolf from the door.’

‘What is it?’ says the old musician.

‘Cash,’ says his son.

‘Good on you,’ says Old Tom. The old man pockets the fold of notes and laughs. ‘You’re a bit of a wonder to me, Eneas. Always were. Quaint little lad, sitting up waiting for me.’

‘Ah, well, yes.’

He contents himself with the night boat to England.

‘Farewell,’ his Mam said to him, and ‘Bye-bye,’ and isn’t that right and on the button? Parcels speckled by rain…

The thought of Harcourt, the victory of Harcourt’s letter, offers a balm.

Oh, he was going to be the great man in Sligo, but, all in all, when the few sums are totted up, you’ve to start off great to be a great man. He is a little smidgen of a fella, a shadow, a half-thought at the back of his brothers’ minds maybe, a sort of warning to them, a kind of bogeyman to fright the children and put manners on to them.

It’s one of the rare fine nights at sea on the Irish Sea with the dark blue heavens hammered by the hammers of God and the stars set in the cold enamel aching somehow there in their distances. He cannot help thinking of the sky as a realm of jewels but he supposes it is all fire and ruin just the same. All fire and ruin. He sits on a wooden bench like you’d find in a municipal park, up on the deck of the dark mail-packet, alone it seems of the passengers. The mysterious vents and round brasses shine in the friendly moonlight. Below him the fleeing emigrants are stilled in their flight by pints and smashed-up songs, preferring the stale air, disregarding the clean, clear night of honest stars. Somewhere in the first-class he imagines dark strangers sitting, noble, immaculate, aglow. And he leans his head back against the iron ship and opens his face to the quiet sky, and wonders how deep the sounding-lead would go here, let down by the eternal ‘boy’, and scratches at himself in his privacy, and if there is stardust then he is getting it now, it will be lying on his cheeks as cool as cups.

He would rather, yes he would, Roseanne by his side, and indeed he knows Harcourt would not grudge him Roseanne, no, sir. But she had not been waiting for him.

And it rushes at him now like a leopard, one of those mighty fellas in Dublin Zoo that walk about in their cage and look the men to do you mischief, should they ever escape and wander out into the city on a dark night. Like one of those leopards, something flows up the side of the mailboat and crosses the rust-speckled deck, and fastens its long white teeth into his throat. And the mouth tears at his throat, the heavy molars dragging on his voicebox, and a flood of blood comes up through his neck from his drowned chest, and pours out through the magnificent gashes. And his very voice is wedded to that leopard darkness, the one drowning and the other in a delight of rage and strength. Tears fall uselessly down to wash the murder from his throat. And he hugs himself with his long arms in the suit suddenly peculiar to him also, and the leopard departs and this notion, this cockamamie notion of blessed love he has about her, about Roseanne, is not manageable suddenly after all but stabs at him, on the lonesome deck of the mail-packet, and who’s to see him, and what odds a man alone, and bugger the thing, and thank the good God there is no one to see him, shrunken into his tears, stabbed and stabbed by the sudden grief — eternally, entirely, and no, not uniquely, never so, in this wide creation of solo persons, alone. In the matter of a wife, alone. He thinks and thinks, like his brain was a metal plate and hammer, striking, striking, of the harbour of her sharp breasts, and is murdered, murdered.

Deep in his callused hands now, his starry face.

He goes from his mother’s kiss to Harcourt’s, because unexpectedly he is kissed by Harcourt, a rough kiss planted in at a wrong angle, but a kiss for all that. In fact Harcourt clasps him wordlessly and thrusts his face towards him but is so overwhelmed that he only manages to kiss Eneas’s lapel. He misses the face entirely. And then he stands holding on to Eneas as if the storm of the world might carry him off again, the tornado of accidental things, and by God it’s true that Harcourt’s own face is screwed up queerly and lemonlike tears are chasing each other down his cheeks.

‘Good old fella,’ says Eneas, like you might to a frighted horse, and he almost pats the old bastard’s shoulder. ‘Jesus.’

‘Jesus is right, brother, Jesus is right.’

‘You had a buggering hard time of it there in Lagos.’

‘You think so, my brother?’

‘Yes, sir. I saw the house. I saw what they did to … I saw what was his sad and regretful end

‘You saw all that. I’m sorry you saw that. Because only demons could do that to a man, a poor old man with his days behind him.’

‘I know, Harcourt, man, I know.’

‘Made me watch them, boy, made his poor son watch. Part of my sentence. Then they dragged me out into the dark of that district we knew so well, and thanks be to the Great Bugger himself, but they had plenty of cola-nut wine in them, and when I saw a gap I filled it with my flying heels, running I was thinking from my good father’s death. Nor did I go back to bury him and have lost the reputation of a dutiful son, sacred to any man, and fecked myself on to that fire-breathing train …’

They are facing each other in the lobby of Beasley’s, one of a hundred lopsided dosshouses on the Isle of Dogs, refuge of sailors. There’s an old man heeled up like a cart on a plastic seat that’s redder than lipstick, like a big lump of storm debris. And Eneas knows that all over the salted streets of the Isle lie these beached sailors. And he laughs his half-forgotten laughter. Judas, ages since he laughed that saving laughter. A lifetime. And he feels for the first time in a stretch a peculiar peacefulness. Peace, like Benson’s rose. And he thinks of Bull Mottram and the shortness of a person’s days and he smiles. He thinks of a lot of things standing there without quite knowing exactly what they are, vague, rushing things, scenes from his goings about and general things. He couldn’t say for ten bob how his heart is fixed in the matter of Harcourt. But never, never in all his living days has he taken delight, such delight, in the mere sighting of another human being. The mere sight of Harcourt there, with his lemony tears and his gabbing, the little bobbing iceberg of his deep sorrow, well, to tell the truth it’s a tonic. He feels like a fella of twenty. A hero at his ease. A lucky creature. A man blessed and enraptured. Oh, a king.

*

Nothing for it now but the inspired purchase of an old house at the southern edge of the Isle. He liberates his money to the vendor and in addition gives a couple of hundred to a builder to feck in a toilet and such and put locks on the rooms. To every inmate a lock. It is like a marriage house, though there is no bride, unless Harcourt is the bride. And the builder paints for Eneas a mighty sign, at cost price, for glory’s sake, which shows to the choppy waves of the channel and the Thames, Northern Lights Hotel. And into this hotel they receive the battered wanderers, the weary sailors, the refugees from ferocious lives, the distressed alcoholics, the repentant murderers if Harcourt’s suspicions are ever accurate — and the general flotsam of the great port river of life.