And now I can’t pay for the messages. Christ on a bike. I had a right swagger there for a couple of years, thinking I was a great fella. Foreman, I was, clearing a grand a week. Set for life. Houses would never stop going up. I’d see babies like our own being pushed around the village below and think: lovely, work for the future, they’ll all need their own houses some day too. We knew Pokey was a prick, but none of us cared. What matter what kind of a man he was, once the bank kept giving him money to build more and more? Once they buried that boy of the Cunliffes years ago and his auld auntie grabbed that land and divided it out among the bigshots, we all thought we were feckin elected.
That poor boy knew more than any of us. I remember when they carried him up to the Height, how the Penroses wheeled little one-legged Eugene out on to the street as he passed on his way to lie between his mother and father, and Eugene spat on the hearse and the big dirty gob slid down along the side window. He couldn’t stop blackguarding that boy even and he dead. I remember him well. He got kicked around the place and all I ever did was laugh. He was the quietest boy you’d meet, he never threw a shape nor said a cross word, and he ended up getting shot down like a mad dog. And everyone was glad. We all hated him. We all believed the newspapers, over the evidence of our own eyes and ears and a lifetime of knowing what we knew to be true. We wanted to hate him. He hadn’t a hope.
I WAS as smart as any of the posh lads in school. I was well able for the English and geography and history. All those equations in physics and maths made sense to me. I couldn’t ever let on I knew anything, though, that would have been suicide in my gang. I did pass maths even though I know I could have done honours. I never opened my mouth in English. A lad from the village wrote an essay one time and Pawsy Rogers praised him from a height; he said it showed great flair and imagination. He got kicked the whole way back to the village.
I had that King Lear’s number from the start, well before the teacher started to break things down slowly for the thick lads: he was a stupid prick. He had it all and wanted more, he wanted the whole world to kiss his arse. I had Goneril and Regan pegged for bitches too, and I knew that Cordelia was the one who really, truly loved him. She wouldn’t lie to him, no matter how much he wanted her to. You’re a man and no more, she said, you’re not perfect, but I love you. Cordelia was true of heart. There aren’t many Cordelias in this world. Triona is one. I was scared before I knew I was, of facing down Josie Burke, and she told me. I was scared, imagine, even though I was in the right.
Pokey Burke left his father and mother to mop up after him. The auld lad said he didn’t know where Pokey was, but I knew he was lying. He owes me money, Josie, I said. Does he now? Did he not pay you a fine wage? He was looking down at me from the third step before his front door. I might as well have had a cap in my hand and called him sir. My stamps. My pension. My redundancy. I could hear my own voice shaking. The state looks after all that when fellas goes bust, he said. Go in as far as town to the dole office. He said no more, only kept looking down at me, down along his nose. Right so. Right so, I will. I didn’t say I’d been there already, we all had, and it turned out Pokey had rowed us up the creek and left us there. I should have said I’d been on to the taxman and the welfare inspectors and the unions and they’d soon soften Pokey’s cough, but I hadn’t and I didn’t and I turned away with a pain in my heart for the man I’d thought I was.
Triona said don’t mind them love, don’t think about them, the Burkes were always users and crooks dressed up like the salt of the earth. Everyone’s seen their real faces now. The whole village knows what they’ve done. You’re a worker and everyone knows it. People look up to you. They’ll be fighting each other to take you on once things pick up. Everyone around here knows you’re the only one can keep the reins on them madmen. Who else could be a foreman over the lads around here? Who else could knock a day’s work out of fat Rory Slattery? And stop Seanie Shaper from trying to get off with himself? I laughed then, through my invisible tears. I couldn’t stand myself. I couldn’t stand her smiling through her fear and having to coax me out of my misery like a big, sulky child. I wish to God I could talk to her the way she wants me to, besides forever making her guess what I’m thinking. Why can’t I find the words?
Right so, right so, right so. Imagine being such a coward and not even knowing it. Imagine being so suddenly useless.
I THOUGHT ABOUT killing my father all day yesterday. There are ways, you know, to kill a man, especially an old, frail man, which wouldn’t look like murder. It wouldn’t be murder anyway, just putting the skids under nature. It’s only badness that sustains him. I could hold a cushion or a pillow over his mouth and nose. He’d flail about, but I’d bat his hands softly back down. I wouldn’t mark him. His strength is gone from him. I wouldn’t like to see his eyes while I killed him; he’d be laughing at me, I know well he would. He’d still be telling me I’m only a useless prick, a streak of piss, a shame to him, even and he dying. He wouldn’t plead, only laugh at me with his yellow eyes.
I was always jealous of Seanie Shaper growing up. Any time I ever called to Seanie’s, I’d hear them laughing when I got to the bend before their house. They’d all be roaring laughing at some aping their father would be at, and their mother would be cooking and telling them to shut up their fooling but she’d be laughing herself. The odd time, I’d stay and eat, and Seanie and his brothers and sister would take ages to finish because they’d be laughing so much. Their father was wiry and kind-looking. He had a lovely smile. He’d warm you with it. You knew there was nothing in him only good nature. He had a big pile of old Ireland’s Own magazines he’d look for when they had the dinner ate. He needed them for the song words. They’d all roll their eyes and let on to be disgusted but still and all they’d clap and sing along while he pounded out the songs: ‘The Rathlin Bog’ and ‘The Rising of the Moon’ and ‘Come Out Ye Black and Tans’. It twisted my soul, the pleasure of that house, the warmth of it and the laughter; it was nearly unbearable to be there and to have half my mind filled with the chill and the gloom and the thick silence of our cottage. I hated Seanie Shaper for having a father like that and not even knowing his luck.
MY FATHER never drank a drop until the day the probate was finished on Granddad’s farm. Paulie Jackman sent off a cheque that same day to the Revenue for the inheritance tax. He handed my father Granddad’s savings in cash. Then my father went to Ciss Brien’s and ordered a Jameson and a pint and drank them down and vomited them up and Ciss herself, who was still going strong that time, gave him a sog into the mouth of her experienced fist for himself. It took him months to train himself to be a drinker. He never wavered from his goal. He paid no heed to pleas or censure. He was laughed at and talked about and watched in wonderment by the old guard of Ciss’s front bar; here was a man they always knew yet hardly knew at all, a quiet son of a small farmer who was never known for intemperance or loudness, a cute fucker they all thought, and he drinking out a farm. They loved him, or loved the thought of him, what they thought he was: a man who could easily have had a good life who chose instead their life: spite and bitterness and age-fogged glasses of watery whiskey in dark, cobwebbed country bars, shit-smeared toilets, blood-streaked piss, and early death. He could have helped it but didn’t. They couldn’t help it and loved him for being worse than them. He was the king of the wasters. He bought drink for men he didn’t like and listened to their yarns and their sodden stories. He gave an eye filled with darkness they could mistake for desire to women he thought were only common whores. The day he spent the last penny that was got for the land he stopped drinking. It took him nearly five years to drink out the farm and when it was done he never took a sup again. He wasn’t a drinker at all, really. The old guard were heartbroken after him. They couldn’t understand it; he never looked at them again.