I Could Read the Sky Page 7

  The touch of the Horse is sure. He lets me gently down to the ground.

  24

  THE DOOR IS not green. There’s no priest nor porter nor songs inside. The door is iron and it is open. Inside there is fire.

  What I could do then. I could forget my name. I could lie in bed for a week. I could seek the darkness. I could hunch my shoulders, grin like a fool and say, Any chance of a start? I could go to the wrong door. I could frighten Francie. I could lose the music. I could pass like a ghost through the city, the city itself ghostly. I could walk without knowing it.

  I can see the boy standing on his brother’s back painting the door with his hands. If I try to follow him through potato fields and sites and rooms to the place where everything was burning I get lost. I remember the poison and shame and heat. I remember waiting for the peace that would not come.

  There is smoke in the bar and the tall windows let in the evening light. It must be summer, the way the light is, the way people sit in their shirts before their drinks. I am drinking gin because I never had it before. I do not know this place nor how I got to it. A radio is playing. There is a ukulele and a woman singing about the seashore. I picture her fat and blonde, the hair turning up at the ends rigid as wire. I picture the red lipstick. She sounds cheerful and cruel and I want all this to go away. There are men studying formsheets and men looking through the smoke to the light of the window. Alone at the bar, sitting on a stool, is a man with skin the colour of mahogany nearly, his hands clutching the sides of his head. I drink down the gin and go to the bar for another. I look at the man as I wait, at the creases in the skin of his neck. He is from Pakistan maybe, or Bangladesh. He is looking into his beer and his lips are moving and he is speaking. He is moving back and forth according to the pattern of what he is saying. I can’t make it out. I wonder is he praying. I wonder are we the same. I bend lower to hear what he is saying and he feels me there. He looks up. His eyes are yellow and brown and red. “I wish God would destroy the world,” he says.

  25

  I‘VE FINISHED THE tea and swallowed the pills the nurse brought me in the little paper cup. She stretches up in her white uniform to draw the curtain and tells us all that we should go to sleep. The new man beside me does as he is told and the old boy across is asleep already. It is two-thirty on a Monday afternoon. I have clean pyjamas, clean sheets and a clean face. I am sitting up in the bed with my hands folded across my lap and my eyes wide open staring at a spot on the wall opposite. I’m awake like I’ve had a bucket of sea water thrown over me.

  Into the room, carrying a box of chocolates, steps my mother’s Uncle John. He makes straight for me and sits down at the end of my bed. I don’t know how I built him the way I did but he is a fine man, a lean islander’s face, the blue eyes full of sea and sky, the lines around his eyes and mouth receiving his laughter. What way was he when the men in masks found him in the room in Northampton? He has a jacket on Roscoe would have liked and a gold ring. The flat cap is new and sits on his knee. There are men on the Kilburn High Road you can only see unfinished buildings in their eyes. You cannot see the city in his face. You see the sea. You see him with his hand on the till of a boat cutting through water. He looks right just the way the house does when I think of it set into the side of the green hill in Labasheeda. But while the lines smile his mouth can’t, for a scar curves like a turning centipede from the left corner of his nose, down onto his lip and into his mouth. This part of him cannot move.

  “When I first left I lived in New York,” he says. “I found a patch of grass in among the buildings and the concrete and on Sundays I would go there and sit in it. It was just like the grass on the rise of Tullaherin.” He laughs and gives my leg a squeeze through the covers like I know all about the bitterness of this joke.

  He starts with the two houses on Tullaherin and moves in a sweep across the townland. He tells me the colours of the doors the day he left. He tells me what fields had the finest animals. He tells me about him who could throw heavy stones the furthest, made the best thatch, could ride a horse standing on its back, lift and carry a curragh on his own, shout loudest, sing sweetest, drink deepest, charm women. He told me about her that reared children that could run fast, had the loveliest hair, moved with the lightest step, said words in French, argued with the priest, remembered the generations, made the sweetest butter.

  “I read a book once,” he says. “I read many one time. The thing about a book is that the man who is writing it brings all the lives from all the different places and makes them flow together in the same stream. As they move down towards the end it’s like they have loops and holes and shapes that all fit together just nicely so that they’re just one big piece really. You can look back and see how all of them got where they are. That’s the time the writer brings the book to an end and there’s no seeing past it. I’d like to meet the man who wrote a book like that so I could ask him where he got those lives. I never met anything like that in all my time. I look back and I see a big field full of mud, people and animals sliding and me sliding with them. There’s no end. There’s just times when some are standing and some are fallen.”

  He tells me then he’s heard about the music I make with the accordion and I want so badly to play for him to keep him there. He fades in and out like a radio losing its signal.

  He leaves the chocolates down beside the bed, and he stands up. He places his large warm hand on my brow and makes a cross like a priest giving ashes before Lent. “Those people from home, any that remember me tell them I was asking. We’re the same, you and me. Tell them we forgive them and they should forgive us.”

  He goes then, the bitter laugh he means for me breaking and falling behind him like a ring of smoke.

  26

  THE SPADE FEELS heavy in my hand. On the scaffolding I fear a fall. When there’s crack I step away with shame at the way the words are so slow and broken in my mouth. The accordion is the worst. It has so many buttons and I cannot find or remember them all.

  They have me sweeping. I sweep dust and shavings of wood and food that falls to the ground. When I am doing this work I have in my mind only the picture of myself with the broom in my hand. I could stuff a saddle. From this there is no hiding.

  I wait with the others in the early morning darkness along the railings in Camden Town. They are all in their coats leaning over, smoking cigarettes. Men who would live in your ear in a bar hold back from speech. They look serious. They look like they could be looking down into a river watching a swimming race. We wait for the Animal to come and pick the gang. When he steps down from the van he will take his coat off even in winter for he wants everyone there to see his arms. From the back he looks like a turf stack and from the front he’s a fright. He’s a scar like a trench running down from his eye, the eyes two halfpennies. In the centre is the nose. It’s like a big potato breaking up through the ground. It bends one way, then another and then back as it goes from the bridge to the tip. Many’s the man waiting on the railings would like to be the man who broke it for him. The mouth curves around his face like a dog’s. You have to watch him. You could be talking with him in a bar in a peaceful way about greyhounds or the price of drink and he’d rear up on you. He could break the pint glass on the edge of the table and bring it right up to your eye. When he walks his hands face backwards. His right arm swings like a weight at the end of a chain. Men from Connemara inspired by their hatred took him into the toilet in the Spotted Dog in Willesden and broke it over a knee.

  I wait there mornings for work with Francie and Martin and the others. Most always I get it even if it’s only sweeping. Ivan came with us when we first went down, a scarf and woollen hat on him and the donkey jacket so big he was like a clothes peg holding up a tent. When the Animal stepped from the van and saw him he knew he could have sport. “And what can you do, man of straw?” he said. The voice would just cut you. “I can dig,” says Ivan. “You couldn’t dig the shite from your own arse,” says the Animal. He leans over wi
th the two hands on his knees and lets out a roar. Anyone he spots not laughing doesn’t work that day. “I’m going to work on the buses,” says Ivan to us.

  I sit alone in the room with the accordion and try to get the feel of it. I lift it up and down like you would a baby to try to get the right sense of its weight. I move my fingers over the buttons. I play tunes Da tried to teach Joe when he was a child. On a Saturday afternoon with Francie at the bookie’s I sit on the edge of the bed and I try to play “She Moves Through the Fair”. My finger slips from a button and I get a flat sound like the call of a goose. I start again. The notes which are so full of this yearning hold just right until they move and fade into those that follow. I know then that you play not for what you can give anyone or for what they will think of you but only for the sake of the tune itself. It goes to the point where it seems it can get away from me but doesn’t. I can hold it in. I hold it as though in a dance. This is the time when no one can touch you. I am just like this when I hear Francie. “Jesus Christ, will you ever stop?” he says. He’s standing in the centre of the room with a look on him like a thirsty man begging for coins in the street. “The sadness of it,” he says, and he goes back out.

  27

  THE WINDOW FILLS with the face of the King. The hut is by the side of the road in Kennington and the glass is smeared with rainwater and coal dust and the fumes from buses but still I can see the long heavy jaw and the small round ears sticking out from the side of his head like bottle tops. I am drinking tea. The King raps lightly on the window. The hand itself is like a turfcutter’s loy. “You’ll not take tea without permission from the King,” he says. I’d heard of the King in Coventry, I’d heard of him in Luton and I’d heard of him all around London. Now he is before me.

  I go out to greet him. He reaches out the hand and I take it. He puts his face up close to mine and I can see the long lines and the scar on his neck from where a strut broke when he was tunnelling and the wall fell in on him. “I’ve been in every bar in Camden and Kilburn and Cricklewood looking for the man can play me ‘The Mason’s Apron’. I was in Glasgow and they didn’t know it there either. Would you be the man for me now?”

  I tell him I can play the tune and he rolls us each a cigarette and we lean back against the wall of the hut to smoke them. The green van pulls up and the Animal gets in, the springs going down under his weight. “Ever since I met that creature I’ve hated the people of Louth,” says the King.

  Two lads in their vests studying the trade of bricklaying heave a bag of cement off the back of a lorry and drag it along the ground. If it hits a bit of glass or the point of a stick it will open up onto the road. They come to a low wall then and try to lift it to the other side. But they can’t get hold of it. It slips from their hands. They both reach down at the same time to grip it underneath and their two heads meet with a thump just over the nose. “Will you look at them?” says the King. He leaves the cigarette on the ledge of the window and walks over. He tells the lads to stand aside. He leans over from the waist, grips the bag with his teeth and lifts it over the wall. He walks back to me then and takes up the cigarette. “The thing about that beast the Animal,” says the King, “is that he’s a coward.” Everyone mixing muck, everyone in the trench, everyone hauling bricks or pipes, people passing on the pavement, they’re all looking at him. Francie told me about the time he saw the King working the jackhammer when a woman came up to him and asked the way to the post office. “That way, madam,” he said, lifting the hammer with the one arm and pointing the way.

  They say no man alive could dig like the King. He dug up wooden water mains, unknown tunnels, ancient walls and bones. He saw the timbering go and a tunnel turn into a grave. He’d go right under a road on his own lit by a candle, emptying his own load with a tin bucket. I saw him past the time of the fullness of his strength but still I saw him lift the bag of cement with his teeth that day in Kennington. Then later I saw the paleness come into his features and the knees begin to weaken and I heard the rattling down in his lungs from his days under the ground digging the wet clay. Then came the time when no one could tell you where he was. If you asked anyone about him they would tell you a story of the wonder of his strength but they had not seen nor heard of him. He moved into the past.

  I thought of him on a day when the train from Leyton stalled on the tracks over the graveyard. It was winter, black low clouds rolling like waves in a heavy sea, the wind troubling the long grass. There was no one in the graveyard save for the one funeral just below me. The undertaker holding onto his tall hat in the wind, the pallbearers he’d hired shouldering the coffin, the priest reading from his book, the words scattering. No wife, no children, no neighbours, just one man in a trench coat, his hair white and blowing around his head in the circling wind. This was the place in the graveyard without stones or flowers, the common grave for those who are poor or who have no name or who leave no mark. The coffin is made of planks of pine. The lights in the train fall on the faces of the passengers. They read or they stare out ahead of them or they look into the distance. There are none that look down at the funeral. There are none that register the attentiveness of the man with the trench coat and white hair. I cannot think of who it is he is mourning. I think instead of the King. There were none who knew him who did not feel the power of the King. He bore it lightly, and in this way you felt strength when you were with him. If this were his funeral, I do not know of a name they could call him.

  28

  FRANCIE IS BEFORE the microphone with a pint in his hand and the other arm reaching out while he sings “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” like John McCormack. Everyone in the Mother Redcap thinks it’s great crack except the American, who is bent over his recording machine turning the dials. When he’s everything right with the machine he asks Francie to sit down and the Clareman to go up with his fiddle. It’s Sunday afternoon past closing time but they’re still pouring pints for the American’s paying. We’re there to hear the Clareman and because there’s nothing else to do on a Sunday afternoon.

  The Clareman is a fine player, I think, very gentle with the bow. He takes the drive out of a tune with the light way he has of playing, but he gives you the sweetness. He can get the tune inside you that way. I sit in with him for “The Star Above the Garter” and we go along nicely. The American gives me five pounds and sends over another pint. Between tunes he’s very busy with his arms like a policeman directing traffic. And he’s as loud as he is big. When he settles back down to his machine and the Clareman begins to play Maggie comes over and sits down beside me. What had we together by then? We’d had three dances at the Pride of Erin and a walk along the canal one Sunday when I saw her by accident. The Clareman plays “Spailpín a Rún” and I never heard it better. Just the way he gets hold of the tune makes me want to play. Maggie leans over, her hand on my knee. She’s easy that way, like a girl in the country. “I heard you had to go to the hospital with burns,” she says. She pushes her red hair up with her two hands and lets it fall over the left eye. The other is looking at me, brown and warm and clear. You cannot look at this eye and lie. “I got burned trying to crawl into the back of the television in the Archway Tavern,” I tell her. Her right hand goes up and I think it will go to my face but she thinks better of it maybe and it falls onto my shoulder and down my arm. “I know about that,” she says. “But you’re all right now.” Her touch is light like a small breeze and I remember the weight and the distance of it and I remember the way it sent a current up my spine and through my head. I can get it now as I think of it, very light and warm but with the power to lift me clear of the earth.

  29

  WHEN THE PRIEST calls the last of the numbers and Con Hogan from Belmullet finds he’s won nothing he tears his raffle tickets into small pieces and throws them into the air. They fall back down into his hair and onto his shoulders and legs. The Woodbine is burning low in his fingers, the smoke rising up through the curls of his hair and around the shreds of the tickets. “Ev
eryone was together then. On bicycles,” he says. This was a speech which he started in his brain before speaking. “You could see who they were. Now they’re all in motor cars. How can you see who anyone is in a motor car?” He draws on the Woodbine and doesn’t notice how it’s burning his finger. His legs are crossed and he’s leaned way over to one side and I wonder will he fall from his chair.

  “Do you see that man there?” says the King. He’s a bottle of John Powers with him and he places it on the table before sitting down. There’s himself, me, Francie, Martin, Maggie and her cousin Helen Maguire just over from Tyrone. I feel about him sitting down with us the way I felt about walking up the town on the Fair Day with Joe Brennan the time I was hired by Casey. “Just after he arrived from Belmullet I went with him to the pictures. ‘Hold on,’ he says as we’re on the way, and he goes into a shop with me following. ‘I’d like twenty-four Mars bars,’ he says to the girl behind the counter. She looks over to me. ‘Is he all right?’ she says. ‘Why?’ says I. ‘He’s asked me for twenty-four Mars bars.’ ‘Give them to him,’ says I. When we went into the street I looked at him hard and I said to him, ‘You’ll make a show of me.’ I had two and he had twenty-two. That’s Con Hogan from Belmullet.”