The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (23 page)

About four — and Harcourt would rise and try and find the time on his useless radio, but he’s too stiff — they both perk up again, as if they were monks, and always rose at four, to go out into the broken light to start hoeing and digging and praying … Harcourt thaws out in a few minutes and finally rises and fetches himself into the back scullery to brew some saving tea and brings out the victorious cups and tin pot to his smiling friend.

‘See, they never did come, and maybe they won’t come now,’ says Eneas, listening to the solid rain beyond the confines of the hotel, glad of his hotel, his shelter, glad even of his life, precarious as it might be. It’s not a district of birds, but nonetheless he senses the birds of England beginning ubiquitously, down by the shattered mines of Cornwall, up on the sacred glens of the Lake District, wherever the birds of England made their nests. Imaginary birdsong fills his dark head. He smiles and smiles at Harcourt, drinking the excellent tea. In the midst of dust and dirt and ancientness, the excellent tea of Port Harcourt…

‘See, they never did come,’ he says, but this even as Jonno and another man troop in through the night-laden door. He knows it is Jonno because Jonno is imprinted on his brain like a potato stamp they used to make at school together, a potato stamp. Star or circle or such, dipped in the paint and pressed damp and raw on the paper — Jonno Lynch himself. The other man is a mere boy, probably born when him and Jonno were already ould fellas, nearly. Eighteen or so, who could tell?

‘Well, Jesus, Jonno,’ Eneas says, getting up, ‘you’ve given us a right old night of alarm and panic,’ he says, without panic.

‘Sit down, you fuckin traitorous bollocks,’ says the young fella.

‘Oh — that’s no Sligoman, Harcourt,’ says Eneas, ‘that there’s a Dubliner, yeh, a gentleman of Dublin city.’

But he sits down. And Harcourt sits down. They could neither of them say why. Practice in their dreams maybe.

‘Fuckin five fuckin o’clock,’ says the boy. ‘Fuckin dawn, it is.’

‘That’s right,’ says Eneas.

Jonno Lynch approaches nearer. The good ten years have told against him. He’s not the chipper man in the airport anyway, the sleek man, the mighty man. But no matter. Confident as ever in his footless way.

‘How are ye, Jonno?’ says Eneas, like they were in a pub, a pub in Sligo and many years behind them of drinking and companionship. The way it should have been in a real feckin country.

‘You know the score,’ says Jonno.

‘What?’ says Eneas.

Tuck you, Eneas, you know the score, shut your mouth,’ ‘Shut the fuck up, you cunt,’ says the boy. And he brings out a gun into the bleak shadows, only a shard of a shadow itself. ‘And you, you fuckin nigger with your fuckin bad answers, you fuckin sit where you are, like a good boy, the whole fuckin time …’

Tunny time to be doing this, Jonno, after all these years,’ says Eneas conversationally. ‘Hah?’

‘All comes round, Eneas. All comes round. Nothing going on for forty, fifty years, then, bang-bang-a-doodle, we’re back in business. Have to show the young the ropes. Fight’s on again, boy. Oh, we’ll have the great days now. Freedom for the poor lost Catholic Irish of the North. That’s the new story. Marching and giving out against that old pagan queen Elizabeth. Well, we fought her father in our day, hah? Maybe her grandfather, was it? Hah? The North, Eneas. Haven’t you been reading the news?’

‘The North of what?’

‘Hah, you’re the wide-boy. Always was the wide-boy. North going to go up like a bloody ould November bonfire. Liberty. Love of country. Things you don’t understand, Eneas. Things that make great men. Great notions. Powerful classes of feelings. Patriots! Belfast, Derry, Portadown. Lisburn — haven’t you been decking the news, boyo?’

‘It’s old news, Jonno. Doesn’t make good reading when you’re old neither. I prefer the comic strips. Eh, Dagwood, and the like, Mandrake, you know.’

‘Day’s come, Eneas. It’s nighty-night. Got to clean up the old black-lists. Work outstanding. Debts to be paid in full. No more interest on your loan of life, son. Because, jaysus, there’ll be fresh black-lists now. You got me now?’

And Jonno seems to bellow into himself, like a bull inside out, to fetch the decency and friendship out of his bowels, to make a lion of himself maybe. Eneas recognizes it. The fierceness of fighting men, men in the bleakest terror of killing. He suffers suddenly an iota, a handful even, of pity for this Jonno. And Jonno bellows deep into himself without a sound, a terrible sight indeed. And he nods at the Dubliner and the Dubliner lifts the old gun but before he fires Harcourt stands up abruptly and shouts at him. It isn’t a shout with a word in it, but a life packed into it, certainly, those weeks running across Africa in terror and grief, and all their gimcrack happiness betimes. It’s such a magnificent shout that the young man is stilled for a moment. Anyway it’s difficult to kill a man with a heavy old gun and Eneas knows he’ll have to step up to him close. All in all he doesn’t mind having a go for freedom.

He half rises and half lunges and grabs onto Jonno’s legs and Jonno goes over very sweetly. Then in the moment he lies there with Jonno he wonders why he has jumped at the man without a gun. He has a fierce sense of having trumped himself mightily and he closes his eyes fast against the shot that must surely be coming at his ear.

But instead Harcourt has launched himself at the Dubliner and the two fall back over one of the brown plastic chairs and the gun fires louder than a mine-blast you’d think and the lobby lights for the fraction of terrific power and then the dark is worse by that measure again after the shot.

Tuck, you bastards,’ says the youngster again, and Eneas can tell by his voice that he’s floundering the back of the chair and maybe Harcourt has that Nigerian grip on his windpipe, because the voice is flattened and tinny.

‘He’s dropped the bloody gun!’ shouts Harcourt. ‘Can you kill that other fella?’

But that other fella isn’t moving at all, as if the gunshot has shocked him into quiet. Jonno Lynch is queer but he isn’t this queer. And now here comes Moses Seligman down the stairs with his mariner’s lamp, the only thing he has never pawned. The Dubliner tears himself away from Harcourt the fiend from Lagos, the seventy-year-old fiend of a strangler, and kicks Harcourt expertly in the bollocks, and Harcourt roars again.

‘Get up, Mr Lynch,’ says the boy with some politeness, ‘the rats are coming out of the woodwork! Let’s fuckin go!’ But Jonno won’t get up. Eneas holds his legs fiercely and raises his own face to get a dekko at Jonno. Jonno Lynch, bright pal of youth and demon of his old man’s dreams.

‘Let him up, let him up, or I’ll shoot you, you cunt,’ says the boy.

‘He hasn’t got the gun,’ says Harcourt, by the chairs, with the gun.

‘Get up, Mr Lynch, or I’ll kill you too!’

‘He can’t get up, son,’ says Eneas. ‘Jonno Lynch is dead. You’ve killed him already.’

‘Oh fuckin hell,’ says the man, ‘oh fuckin mammy,’ and out on to the brightening wharf with him, and everyone half deaf after the calamity, and Moses Seligman astonished with the storm lamp raised aloft.

21

It is a lonesome
and a difficult thing to have your childhood friend dead beside you, certainly. It is a bad dark deep thing.

With the silence and the appearance of grave-robbers they carry Jonno Lynch up the two flights of stairs to Eneas’s room and there they lay him out. The seven current inmates crowd at the door. The old soldiers among them know the sight of a man killed by a bullet and even the sailors are not distressed as such by the picture of death.

‘Brothers,’ says Eneas. This is no good situation we have here. This is a man I knew once at home killed by a young fella from the same sad place. Trouble is, no one saw that shooting except the killer and he’s legged it to God knows where. He’ll be like a cockroach in the cracks of life from here on, God help him. For it’s a long world of grief and trouble for such as him. But, brothers, fact is maybe we could explain it all to the police and maybe not. But Harcourt and me and maybe some of you don’t like to do that if we can avoid it. If they can’t find the true killer here they may prefer to think one of us did it. Who can say about that? They like to put someone in jail. For the look of the thing. I have the gun in my britches pocket and others have touched it besides the killer. What I have to say to you, gents, is I’m closing the Northern Lights Hotel. It is no more. If it is agreeable I’d ask you to pack your bits and bobs and go. But I tell you, the management regrets this, it does, gents.’

The faces of the men are still in the frame of the door. It’s like a church meeting, the overflow of a church meeting. Dawn light touches onto them all in its different devious ways. Making gold the tawdry hair, sneaking glosses on to sleep-encrusted moustaches. Harcourt’s face shows a tremendous confidence he does not feel. Indeed and his knees are secretly banging about in his ample trousers. It’s to be expected. The sky has fallen on their heads in the upshot.

‘It’ll be hard for us,’ says Moses Seligman. ‘A person gets used to this old place.’

‘Bless me, I know,’ says Eneas. ‘Well, I know it.’

‘If we can accommodate you, we surely will,’ says Jeff Masterson, first mate those many years in the little traders of the South China Seas, with all the noble politeness of a man with pennies to his name. Police don’t suit them, no.

‘OK, Mr McNulty,’ says Moses Seligman.

Away they drift like moths to their various niches, their various knapsacks and handy bags.

‘What’s the plan?’ says Harcourt. He’s looking down at Jonno Lynch. His voice is dry and sharp.

‘I don’t know. Can’t leave him like this. We’re going to have to do something mighty.’

‘What?’ says Harcourt, reasonably.

‘I’m thinking now, we’re going to have to burn the place. Burn the old place with Jonno in it, and let them make of it what they will. We’ll put my old blue suit on him and maybe they’ll say it’s me. And me and you will go off quiet and natural and see what’s what elsewhere. We done it before and we’re old now but we done it before and this is a catastrophe.’

‘Jesus, Eneas.’

‘It’s not a good thing. Rats like that young fella are never found. This is a murdered man, a murdered man. We could dump him in the river but sooner or later they’ll find him, yes they will, and even if they never did, he’ll rise up one day from his moorings like a blessed angel, see if he doesn’t. We’ll have to burn the place and hope they’ll think it’s me. Then Jonno Lynch never existed, at least on the Isle of Dogs. O’Dowd will never talk. The whereabouts of Jonno Lynch will be a mystery, one of the many mysteries of Sligo. Well, to tell the truth I don’t know what to do, unless it is what I say. I’m thinking too, my brother Jack will be here this morning, and any minute.’

‘We could tell him maybe. He’d help us. Your brother.’ ‘Jack McNulty is a respectable man. He won’t want to hear about this. No, he’ll just have to make what he can of it. Poor Jonno must have followed him from Sligo, lurking on boat and train, trailing him like a blessed killer. He’ll find the hotel burned when he gets here, and no trace of his brother, except a ruined body in his brother’s old room. I suppose it will be grief for the Mam. They’ll put Jonno Lynch in the ground maybe and have my name over him. There’ll be grand prayers said. Hell, yes, we’ll throw that old blue suit of mine on him for good measure. Everyone knows that old blue suit. Give us a hand.’

And the two roll Jonno about a bit and put on the worn blue suit once so fine and bright and then stand back regarding for all the world a sleeping man, a fella taking a nap in the morning in his worn blue suit. Eneas McNulty himself.

‘I tell you,’ says Eneas. ‘He was a decent boyo once. He was a sweet boyo once. What a to-do. What an ending. God bless the poor man.’

‘If you’re dead, Eneas, you can’t get your pension.’

‘We lived pretty fine in Lagos without it. We’ll live without it again. Happiness has its term, my Mam used to say.’

So down they go then and they’ll have to work fast because the world is waking outside. The inmates leave one by one, setting their faces against the future. Hands are shaken briefly. But mostly it’s dousing Eneas’s room with paraffin and the old stairs and the rim of the lobby. It won’t need much help to burn, Harcourt judges, the old hotel is a sort of tinderbox in itself, wood and plastic and rubbish. And as Eneas and Harcourt work, they sense more and more the good in Eneas’s plan, the elegant simplicity of it. Despite the terror of the night, their hearts are bettered by the work.

‘It’ll be a clean sheet all over again, Eneas. We’ll have to think on our feet again.’

‘We will.’

‘And we’ve great experience of the world, and we can turn our hands to a hundred jobs, in spite of age. We’ll work our way somewhere warm and be old dogs in the sunlight.’

‘Why not?’

At the same time Eneas is thinking of Jonno, going along the wall to rob the apples of the Presbyterian minister. You can’t be too sad about a man that came to kill you, he supposes. All the same he is very sad. And not least to lose the ark of the hotel. But sorrow needs time and he has none of it now.

It’s not long in the doing and now they stand in their coats in the lobby with matches. They can take nothing with them but truly they have little to leave behind. They go up the stairs again to Jonno to strike a match so the fire will be fiercest there. Eneas flicks the buzzing match and lets the flame build to a bud and drops it on a pile of old papers drenched in paraffin.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he says.

Then back down, to the lobby with them. The whole place stinks of paraffin and they know that soon a noisome smoke will be pumping out the windows of the hotel so their flight must be rapid. And indeed they are just at the door, just about to pass through onto the quays, when a little sound is heard. Or Eneas hears and Harcourt doesn’t, and Eneas stops on the threshold.

‘Hold on a sec,’ he says.

‘Come on, come on,’ says Harcourt.

‘Just a sec. I hear something.’

And indeed now Harcourt hears it too, a sort of little shouting noise almost like a dog barking away over the roofs. Maybe indeed a dog.

‘It’s just a dog,’ says Harcourt. ‘Barking to be let out for a piss.’

But Eneas listens intent as a watchmaker. The bark changes and is more like shouting again, human shouting, and he thinks he even knows the shout, he thinks it is his name, definitely his name, his lost name.

‘Eneas, Eneas, Eneas!’

‘That’s Jonno shouting,’ says Eneas quietly.

‘Your Jonno is dead as doornails. We saw him.’

‘We saw him, but maybe he isn’t dead. Maybe just the semblance of death. Like in an old story.’

‘And if it is? Why doesn’t he shout for his pals that wanted to shoot you? Hah? Why does he shout for you?’ Eneas moves back towards the smoking stairs.

‘You can’t go up there now, my brother.’

‘We have to get him,’ says Eneas, ‘we have to. You know.’ ‘Never turn back at the door. Don’t you know nothing? He’s burning,’ says Harcourt, thumping the front door for emphasis, ‘he’s burning, he’s burning. Come on with me.’

‘I will come on with you, Harcourt, I will,’ says Eneas, ‘but I can’t leave Jonno.’

The shouts of his friend behind him, the cries of Jonno before him. And he motors his seventy years back up the stairs as fast as exhaustion will let him. He has a terrific feeling of betraying Harcourt. Oh, he loves that Harcourt. His brother. But he’ll have Jonno out in a trice. Buggering Jonno can’t be left.

When he opens his door not only does the handle fuse to his palm but the whole door flies forward when he opens it, and out pours a huge demonic tide of roaring fire.

And Eneas McNulty’s days on the earth are over and his queer requiem is the crazy music of the fire. He knows his days are over because he rises now through the flames as round as water, up and up, rising stiff as wood through the rainbow of the flames. He is eminently surprised but at the same time eminently informed. He rises in a fashion of immaculate peace and the fire does not harm him.

On the one hand he sees his brother Jack toiling along the wharf in his spick-and-span civvies, heading for the now impossible rendezvous, and on the other, Harcourt forced out of the Northern Lights by enormous blooms of smoke and veritable dragons of flame. Eneas rises, smooth as a fish. The brittle light of the sky crackles overhead.

He comes then easily to the limits of a familiar garden. The hollyhocks have bloomed rashlike against the granite walls and the pollen of a thousand oaks falls like a fragrant army out of Midleton’s wood. The flowers burn in the damp grasses.

In the shade of his Pappy’s three holly trees his sister Teasy waits for him, smiling and then laughing, hurrying out on to the cinderpath to greet him. Her habit looks like an upturned bucket on her. She spreads her arms in an embrace of childhood. She is the gold ambassador of that rubbed-out terrain. The cold desert in his mind’s eye floods with the thousand small white flowers that are the afterlife of rainfall.

‘Come in with yourself,’ she says, and hugs his bones.

‘Are you all right, girl?’ he says.

‘Best,’ she says, ‘best.’

‘That ould thing’s sorted?’

‘It can’t trouble me now, sure.’

And she brings him up the cinderpath to the old iron door that used to lead to Midleton’s wood when the walled garden was still part of Midleton’s estate. In his father’s time it was always locked fast by keys and rust. But Teasy has the trick of it and pushes it open for him.

‘Go on up, you,’ she says, ‘and never mind nothing.’

And he remembers again the regard he has for that Teasy, and the love he has for her, and through he goes. He’s very touched he must admit by the care of her talk, though it was ever so, and the way she has helped him through the garden. Because he knows he needed someone to meet him.

Midleton’s wood when he’s through into it isn’t troubled by much except the calls of the wood-pigeons, co-co-co-ricco, familiar and forgotten, and a mighty tumbling of fierce white light that as a matter of fact seizes on him a little and he rises again as if by way of favour of it.

He passes a number of bottles with thick blue glass and the faces of people he knows etched in them, calling to him or singing merely he does not know, as the bottles are quite silent. His own heart beats thickly as if his blood has come to butter, turned and turned in the churn of the world and come to butter. This rinsed buttery feeling generates in him a fire of concern and regard. Even as he rises he understands that the thread that binds the dark turns and mazes of a life is bright with that feeling, yellow with it, as important as any letter. Why even a prisoner wishes to breathe the chill air of each morning is explained by that bright thread. Now that he looks so intently at the people he has known, without the least distraction, caught in their bottles, they blaze for him, they bloom. They are treasure. A good answer. And he waves to them like a small boy leaving with excitement and sorrow his local station.

He rises, he rises. Fast as a hen pheasant breaking from cover he rises.

And in bidding farewell to the lonesome earth, he knows suddenly and clearly the hard sadness of leaving the beautiful stations, the soft havens and hammered streets. And he gives recognition, with a lonesome prayer, to the difficulties of all living persons, and wishes them good journey through the extreme shoals of the long lake of life — with a last fare-thee-well and a God bless. To Harcourt in particular, his living brother.

His whereabouts, his troubles, his sun-marked face, his songs and chattels are nothing now. And if there is a book of life — which there may be — he knows in the upshot no person’s name is written there, and all are thrown at last without reprieve, king and commoner, into the lake of fire, and the great steam of stars. But the lake of fire into which all men are thrown is admirable, eternal, and clear. Once through the fire they are given their suits of stars. God the Tailor accepts the fabulous lunatics of the earth and stitches the immaculate seams. Sense invigorates the cloudy souls. With charity cloth beyond all redemption, they are redeemed.