Selected Stories

It sounded like another tip, but Feeny said no. He walked on in silence, and Liam Pat said to himself it would be another job, a different foreman. He thought about that. Huxter was the worst of it, but it wasn’t only Huxter. Liam Pat was homesick for the estate, for the small town where people said hullo to you. Since he’d been here he’d eaten any old how, sandwiches he bought the evening before, for breakfast and again in the middle of the day, burger and chips later on, Bob’s Dining Rooms on a Sunday. He hadn’t thought about that before he’d come – what he’d eat, what a Sunday would be like. Sometimes at Mass he saw a girl he liked the look of, the same girl each time, quiet-featured, with her hair tied back. But when he went up to her after Mass a few weeks back she turned away without speaking.

‘I don’t want another job,’ he said.

‘Why would you, Liam Pat? After what they put you through?’

‘I thought you said Mr McTighe -’

‘Ah no, no. Mr McTighe was only remembering the time you and Dessie Coglan used distribute the little magazine.’

They still walked slowly, Feeny setting the pace.

‘We were kids though,’ Liam Pat said, astonished at what was being said.

‘You showed your colours all the same.’

Liam Pat didn’t understand that. He didn’t know why they were talking about a time when he was still at the Brothers’, when he and Dessie Coglan used to push the freedom magazine into the letter-boxes. As soon as it was dark they’d do it, so’s no one would see them. Undercover stuff, Dessie used to say, and a couple of times he mentioned Michael Collins.

‘I had word from Mr McTighe,’ Feeny said.

‘Are we calling in there?’

‘He’ll have a beer for us.’

‘We were only being big fellas when we went round with the magazine.’

‘It’s remembered you went round with it.’

Liam Pat never knew where the copies of the magazine came from. Dessie Coglan just said the lads, but more likely it was the barber, Gaughan, an elderly man who lost the four fingers of his left hand in 1921. Liam Pat often noticed Dessie coming out of Gaughan’s or talking to Gaughan in his doorway, beneath the striped barber’s pole. In spite of his fingerless hand, Gaughan could still shave a man or cut a head of hair.

‘Come on in,’ Mr McTighe invited, opening his back door to them. ‘That’s a raw old night.’

They sat in the kitchen again. Mr McTighe handed round cans of Carling Black Label.

‘You’ll do the business, Liam?’

‘What’s that, Mr McTighe?’

‘Feeny here’ll show you the ropes.’

‘The thing is, I’m going back to Ireland.’

‘I thought maybe you would be. “There’s a man will be going home,” I said to myself. Didn’t I say that, Feeny?’

‘You did of course, Mr McTighe.’

‘What I was thinking, you’d do the little thing for me before you’d be on your way, Liam. Like we were discussing the other night,’ Mr McTighe said, and Liam Pat wondered if he’d had too much beer that night, for he couldn’t remember any kind of discussion taking place.

Feeny opened the door of the room where the curtains were drawn over and took the stuff from the floorboards. He didn’t switch the light on, but instead shone a torch into where he’d lifted away a section of the boards. Liam Pat saw red and black wires and the cream-coloured face of a timing device. Child’s play, Feeny said, extinguishing the torch.

Liam Pat heard the floorboards replaced. He stepped back into the passage off which the door of the room opened. Together he and Feeny passed through the hall and climbed the stairs to Liam Pat’s room.

‘Pull down that blind, boy,’ Feeny said.

There was a photograph of Liam Pat’s mother stuck under the edge of a mirror over a wash-basin; just above it, one of his father had begun to curl at the two corners that were exposed. The cheap brown suitcase he’d travelled from Ireland with was open on the floor, clothes he’d brought back from the launderette dumped in it, not yet sorted out. He’d bought the suitcase in Lacey’s in Emmet Street, the day after he gave in his notice to O’Dwyer.

‘Listen to me now,’ Feeny said, sitting down on the bed.

The springs rasped noisily. Feeny put a hand out to steady the sudden lurch of the headboard. ‘I’m glad to see that,’ he said, gesturing with his head in the direction of a card Liam Pat’s mother had made him promise he’d display in whatever room he found for himself. In the Virgin’s arms the infant Jesus raised two chubby fingers in blessing.

‘I’m not into anything like you’re thinking,’ Liam Pat said.

‘Mr McTighe brought you over, boy.’

Feeny’s wizened features were without expression. His priestly suit was shapeless, worn through at one of the elbows. A tie as narrow as a bootlace hung from the soiled collar of his shirt, its minuscule knot hard and shiny. He stared at his knees when he said Mr McTighe had brought Liam Pat from Ireland. Liam Pat said:

‘I came over on my own though.’

Still examining the dark material stretched over his knees, as if fearing damage here also, Feeny shook his head.