Collected Stories

An Evening with John Joe Dempsey

In Keogh’s one evening Mr Lynch talked about the Piccadilly tarts, and John Joe Dempsey on his fifteenth birthday closed his eyes and travelled into a world he did not know. ‘Big and little,’ said Mr Lynch, ‘winking their eyes at you and enticing you up to them. Wetting their lips,’ said Mr Lynch, ‘with the ends of their tongues.’

John Joe Dempsey had walked through the small town that darkening autumn evening, from the far end of North Street where he and his mother lived, past the cement building that was the Coliseum cinema, past Kelly’s Atlantic Hotel and a number of shops that were now closed for the day. ‘Go to Keogh’s like a good boy,’ his mother had requested, for as well as refreshments and stimulants Keogh’s public house sold a variety of groceries: it was for a pound of rashers that Mrs Dempsey had sent her son.

‘Who is there?’ Mr Lynch had called out from the licensed area of the premises, hearing John Joe rapping with a coin to draw attention to his presence. A wooden partition with panes of glass in the top half of it rose to a height of eight feet between the grocery and the bar. ‘I’m here for rashers,’ John Joe explained through the pebbly glass. ‘Isn’t it a stormy evening, Mr Lynch? I’m fifteen today, Mr Lynch.’

There was a silence before a door in the partition opened and Mr Lynch appeared. ‘Fifteen?’ he said. ‘Step in here, boy, and have a bottle of stout.’

John Joe protested that he was too young to drink a bottle of stout and then said that his mother required the rashers immediately. ‘Mrs Keogh’s gone out to Confession,’ Mr Lynch said. ‘I’m in charge till her ladyship returns.’

John Joe, knowing that Mr Lynch would not be prepared to set the bacon machine in action, stepped into the bar to await the return of Mrs Keogh, and Mr Lynch darted behind the counter for two bottles of stout. Having opened and poured them, he began about the Piccadilly tarts.

‘You’ve got to an age,’ Mr Lynch said, ‘when you would have to be advised. Did you ever think in terms of emigration to England?’

‘I did not, Mr Lynch.’

‘I would say you were right to leave it alone, John Joe. Is that the first bottle of stout you ever had?’

‘It is, Mr Lynch.’

‘A bottle of stout is an acquired taste. You have to have had a dozen bottles or maybe more before you do get an urge for it. With the other matter it’s different.’

Mr Lynch, now a large, fresh-faced man of fifty-five who was never seen without a brown hat on his head, had fought for the British Army during the Second World War, which was why one day in 1947 he had found himself, with companions, in Piccadilly Circus. As he listened, John Joe recalled that he’d heard boys at the Christian Brothers’ referring to some special story that Mr Lynch confidentially told to those whom he believed would benefit from it. He had heard boys sniggering over this story, but he had never sought to discover its content, not knowing it had to do with Piccadilly tarts.

‘There was a fellow by the name of Baker,’ said Mr Lynch, ‘who’d been telling us that he knew the ropes. Baker was a London man. He knew the places, he was saying, where he could find the glory girls, but when it came to the point of the matter, John Joe, we hardly needed a guide.’

Because, explained Mr Lynch, the tarts were everywhere. They stood in the doorways of shops showing off the stature of their legs. Some would speak to you, Mr Lynch said, addressing you fondly and stating their availability. Some had their bosoms cocked out so that maybe they’d strike a passing soldier and entice him away from his companions. ‘I’m telling you this, John Joe, on account of your daddy being dead. Are you fancying that stout?’

John Joe nodded his head. Thirteen years ago his father had fallen to his death from a scaffold, having been by trade a builder. John Joe could not remember him, although he knew what he had looked like from a photograph that was always on view on the kitchen dresser. He had often wondered what it would be like to have that bulky man about the house, and more often still he listened to his mother talking about him. But John Joe didn’t think about his father now, in spite of Mr Lynch’s reference to him: keen to hear more about the women of Piccadilly, he asked what had happened when Mr Lynch and his companions finished examining them in the doorways.

‘I saw terrible things in Belgium,’ replied Mr Lynch meditatively. ‘I saw a Belgian woman held down on the floor while four men satisfied themselves on her. No woman could be the same after that. Combat brings out the brute in a man.’

‘Isn’t it shocking what they’d do, Mr Lynch? Wouldn’t it make you sick?’

‘If your daddy was alive today, he would be telling you a thing or two in order to prepare you for your manhood and the temptations in another country. Your mother wouldn’t know how to tackle a matter like that, nor would Father Ryan, nor the Christian Brothers. Your daddy might have sat you down in this bar and given you your first bottle of stout. He might have told you about the facts of life.’

‘Did one of the glory girls entice yourself, Mr Lynch?’

‘Listen to me, John Joe.’ Mr Lynch regarded his companion through small blue eyes, both of which were slightly bloodshot. He lit a cigarette and drew on it before continuing. Then he said: ‘Baker had the soldiers worked up with his talk of the glory girls taking off their togs. He used to describe the motion of their haunches. He used to lie there at night in the dug-out describing the private areas of the women’s bodies. When the time came we went out with Baker and Baker went up to the third one he saw and said could the six of us make arrangements with her? He was keen to strike a bargain because we had only limited means on account of having remained in a public house for four hours. Myself included, we were in an intoxicated condition.’

‘What happened, Mr Lynch?’

‘I would not have agreed to an arrangement like that if it hadn’t been for drink. I was a virgin boy, John Joe. Like yourself.’

‘I’m that way, certainly, Mr Lynch.’

‘We marched in behind the glory girl, down a side street. “Bedad, you’re fine men,” she said. We had bottles of beer in our pockets. “We’ll drink that first,” she said, “before we get down to business.” ’

John Joe laughed. He lifted the glass of stout to his lips and took a mouthful in a nonchalant manner, as though he’d been drinking stout for half a lifetime and couldn’t do without it.

‘Aren’t you the hard man, Mr Lynch!’ he said.

‘You’ve got the wrong end of the stick,’ replied Mr Lynch sharply. ‘What happened was, I had a vision on the street. Amn’t I saying to you those girls are no good to any man? I had a vision of the Virgin when we were walking along.’

‘How d’you mean, Mr Lynch?’

‘There was a little statue of the Holy Mother in my bedroom at home, a little special one my mother gave me at the occasion of my First Communion. It came into my mind, John Joe, when the six of us were with the glory girl. As soon as the glory girl said we’d drink the beer before we got down to business I saw the statue of the Holy Mother, as clear as if it was in front of me.’

John Joe, who had been anticipating an account of the soldiers’ pleasuring, displayed disappointment. Mr Lynch shook his head at him.

‘I was telling you a moral story,’ he said reprovingly. ‘The facts of life is one thing, John Joe, but keep away from dirty women.’

John Joe was a slight youth, pale of visage, as his father had been, and with large, awkward hands that bulged in his trouser pockets. He had no friends at the Christian Brothers’ School he attended, being regarded there, because of his private nature and lack of interest in either scholastic or sporting matters, as something of an oddity – an opinion that was strengthened by his association with an old, simple-minded dwarf called Quigley, with whom he was regularly to be seen collecting minnows in a jam jar or walking along the country roads. In class at the Christian Brothers’ John Joe would drift into a meditative state and could not easily be reached. ‘Where’ve you gone, boy?’ Brother Leahy would whisper, standing above him. His fingers would reach out for a twist of John Joe’s scalp, and John Joe would rise from the ground with the Brother’s thumb and forefinger tightening the short hairs of his neck, yet seeming not to feel the pain. It was only when the other hand of Brother Leahy gripped one of his ears that he would return to the classroom with a cry of anguish, and the boys and Brother Leahy would laugh. ‘What’ll we make of you?’ Brother Leahy would murmur, returning to the blackboard while John Joe rubbed his head and his ear.

‘There is many a time in the years afterwards,’ said Mr Lynch ponderously, ‘when I have gone through in my mind that moment in my life. I was tempted in bad company: I was two minutes off damnation.’

‘I see what you mean, Mr Lynch.’

‘When I came back to West Cork my mother asked me was I all right. Well, I was, I said. “I had a bad dream about you,” my mother said. “I had a dream one night your legs were on fire.” She looked at my legs, John Joe, and to tell you the truth of it she made me slip down my britches. “There’s no harm there,” she said. ‘Twas only afterwards I worked it out: she had that dream in the very minute I was standing on the street seeing the vision in my brain. What my mother dreamed, John Joe, was that I was licked by the flames of Hell. She was warned that time, and from her dream she sent out a message that I was to receive a visit from the little statue. I’m an older man now, John Joe, but that’s an account I tell to every boy in this town that hasn’t got a father. That little story is an introduction to life and manhood. Did you enjoy the stout?’

‘The stout’s great stuff, Mr Lynch.’

‘No drink you can take, John Joe, will injure you the way a dirty woman would. You might go to twenty million Confessions and you wouldn’t relieve your heart and soul of a dirty woman. I didn’t marry myself, out of shame for the memory of listening to Baker making that bargain. Will we have another bottle?’

John Joe, wishing to hear in further detail the bargain that Baker had made, said he could do with another drop. Mr Lynch directed him to a crate behind the counter. ‘You’re acquiring the taste,’ he said.

John Joe opened and poured the bottles. Mr Lynch offered him a cigarette, which he accepted. In the Coliseum cinema he had seen Piccadilly Circus, and in one particular film there had been Piccadilly tarts, just as Mr Lynch described, loitering in doorways provocatively. As always, coming out of the Coliseum, it had been a little strange to find himself again among small shops that sold clothes and hardware and meat, among vegetable shops and tiny confectioners’ and tobacconists’ and public houses. For a few minutes after the Coliseum’s programme was over the three streets of the town were busy with people going home, walking or riding on bicycles, or driving cars to distant farms, or going towards the chip-shop. When he was alone, John Joe usually leaned against the window of a shop to watch the activity before returning home himself; when his mother accompanied him to the pictures they naturally went home at once, his mother chatting on about the film they’d seen.

‘The simple thing is, John Joe, keep a certain type of thought out of your mind.’

‘Thought, Mr Lynch?’

‘Of a certain order.’

‘Ah, yes. Ah, definitely, Mr Lynch. A young fellow has no time for that class of thing.’

‘Live a healthy life.’

‘That’s what I’m saying, Mr Lynch.’

‘If I hadn’t had a certain type of thought I wouldn’t have found myself on the street that night. It was Baker who called them the glory girls. It’s a peculiar way of referring to the sort they are.’

‘Excuse me, Mr Lynch, but what kind of an age would they be?’

‘They were all ages, boy. There were nippers and a few more of them had wrinkles on the flesh of their faces. There were some who must have weighed fourteen stone and others you could put in your pocket.’

‘And was the one Baker made the bargain with a big one or a little one?’

‘She was medium-sized, boy.’

‘And had she black hair, Mr Lynch?’

‘As black as your boot. She had a hat on her head that was a disgrace to the nation, and black gloves on her hands. She was carrying a little umbrella.’

‘And, Mr Lynch, when your comrades met up with you again, did they tell you a thing at all?’

Mr Lynch lifted the glass to his lips. He filled his mouth with stout and savoured the liquid before allowing it to pass into his stomach. He turned his small eyes on the youth and regarded him in silence.

‘You have pimples on your chin,’ said Mr Lynch in the end. ‘I hope you’re living a clean life, now.’

‘A healthy life, Mr Lynch.’

‘It is a question your daddy would ask you. You know what I mean? There’s some lads can’t leave it alone.’

‘They go mad in the end, Mr Lynch.’

‘There was fellows in the British Army that couldn’t leave it alone.’

‘They’re a heathen crowd, Mr Lynch. Isn’t there terrible reports in the British papers?’

‘The body is God-given. There’s no need to abuse it.’

‘I’ve never done that thing, Mr Lynch.’

‘I couldn’t repeat,’ said Mr Lynch, ‘what the glory girl said when I walked away.’

John Joe, whose classroom meditations led him towards the naked bodies of women whom he had seen only clothed and whose conversations with the town’s idiot, Quigley, were of an obscene nature, said it was understandable that Mr Lynch could not repeat what the girl had said to him. A girl like that, he added, wasn’t fit to be encountered by a decent man.

‘Go behind the counter,’ said Mr Lynch, ‘and lift out two more bottles.’

John Joe walked to the crate of stout bottles. ‘I looked in at a window one time,’ Quigley had said to him, ‘and I saw Mrs Nugent resisting her husband. Nugent took no notice of her at all; he had the clothes from her body like you’d shell a pod of peas.’

‘I don’t think Baker lived,’ said Mr Lynch. ‘He’d be dead of disease.’

‘I feel sick to think of Baker, Mr Lynch.’

‘He was like an animal.’

All the women of the town – and most especially Mrs Taggart, the wife of a postman – John Joe had kept company with in his imagination. Mrs Taggart was a well-built woman, a foot taller than himself, a woman with whom he had seen himself walking in the fields on the Ballydehob road. She had found him alone and had said that she was crossing the fields to where her husband had fallen into a bog-hole, and would he be able to come with her? She had a heavy, chunky face and a wide neck on which the fat lay in encircling folds, like a fleshy necklace. Her hair was grey and black, done up in hairpins. ‘I was only codding you,’ she said when they reached the side of a secluded hillock. ‘You’re a good-looking fellow, Dempsey.’ On the side of the hillock, beneath a tree, Mrs Taggart commenced to rid herself of her outer garments, remarking that it was hot. ‘Slip out of that little jersey,’ she urged. ‘Wouldn’t it bake you today?’ Sitting beside him in her underclothes, Mrs Taggart asked him if he liked sunbathing. She drew her petticoat up so that the sun might reach the tops of her legs. She asked him to put his hand on one of her legs so that he could feel the muscles; she was a strong woman, she said, and added that the strongest muscles she possessed were the muscles of her stomach. ‘Wait till I show you,’ said Mrs Taggart.

On other occasions he found himself placed differently with Mrs Taggart: once, his mother had sent him round to her house to inquire if she had any eggs for sale and after she had put a dozen eggs in a basket Mrs Taggart asked him if he’d take a look at a thorn in the back of her leg. Another time he was passing her house and he heard her crying out for help. When he went inside he discovered that she had jammed the door of the bathroom and couldn’t get out. He managed to release the door and when he entered the bathroom he discovered that Mrs Taggart was standing up in the bath, seeming to have forgotten that she hadn’t her clothes on.

Mrs Keefe, the wife of a railway official, another statuesque woman, featured as regularly in John Joe’s imagination, as did a Mrs O’Brien, a Mrs Summers, and a Mrs Power. Mrs Power kept a bread-shop, and a very pleasant way of passing the time when Brother Leahy was talking was to walk into Mrs Power’s shop and hear her saying that she’d have to slip into the bakery for a small pan loaf and would he like to accompany her? Mrs Power wore a green overall with a belt that was tied in a knot at the front. In the bakery, while they were chatting, she would attempt to untie the belt but always found it difficult. ‘Can you aid me?’ Mrs Power would ask and John Joe would endeavour to loose the knot that lay tight against Mrs Power’s stout stomach. ‘Where’ve you gone, boy?’ Brother Leahy’s voice would whisper over and over again like a familiar incantation and John Joe would suddenly shout, realizing he was in pain.

‘It was the end of the war,’ said Mr Lynch. ‘The following morning myself and a gang of the other lads got a train up to Liverpool, and then we crossed back to Dublin. There was a priest on the train and I spoke to him about the whole thing. Every man was made like that, he said to me, only I was lucky to be rescued in the nick of time. If I’d have taken his name I’d have sent him the information about my mother’s dream. I think that would have interested him, John Joe. Wouldn’t you think so?’

‘Ah, it would of course.’

‘Isn’t it a great story, John Joe?’

‘It is, Mr Lynch.’

‘Don’t forget it ever, boy. No man is clear of temptations. You don’t have to go to Britain to get temptations.’

‘I understand you, Mr Lynch.’

Quigley had said that one night he looked through a window and saw the Protestant clergyman, the Reverend Johnson, lying on the floor with his wife. There was another time, he said, that he observed Hickey the chemist being coaxed from an armchair by certain activities on the part of Mrs Hickey. Quigley had climbed up on the roof of a shed and had seen Mrs Sweeney being helped out of her stockings by Sweeney, the builder and decorator. Quigley’s voice might continue for an hour and a half, for there was hardly a man and his wife in the town whom he didn’t claim to have observed in intimate circumstances. John Joe did not ever ask how, when there was no convenient shed to climb on to, the dwarf managed to make his way to so many exposed upstairs windows. Such a question would have been wholly irrelevant.

At Mass, when John Joe saw the calves of women’s legs stuck out from the kneeling position, he experienced an excitement that later bred new fantasies within him. ‘That Mrs Moore,’ he would say to the old dwarf, and the dwarf would reply that one night in February he had observed Mrs Moore preparing herself for the return of her husband from a County Council meeting in Cork. From the powdered body of Mrs Moore, as described by Quigley, John Joe would move to an image that included himself. He saw himself pushing open the hall door of the Moores’ house, having been sent to the house with a message from his mother, and hearing Mrs Moore’s voice calling out, asking him to come upstairs. He stood on a landing and Mrs Moore came to him with a red coat wrapped round her to cover herself up. He could smell the powder on her body; the coat kept slipping from her shoulders. ‘I have some magazines for your mother,’ she said. ‘They’re inside the bedroom.’ He went and sat on the bed while she collected a pile of magazines. She sat beside him then, drawing his attention to a story here and there that might be of particular interest to his mother. Her knee was pressed against his, and in a moment she put her arm round his shoulders and said he was a good-looking lad. The red coat fell back on to the bed when Mrs Moore took one of John Joe’s large hands and placed it on her stomach. She then suggested, the evening being hot, that he should take off his jersey and his shirt.

Mrs Keogh, the owner of the public house, had featured also in John Joe’s imagination and in the conversation of the old dwarf. Quigley had seen her, he said, a week before her husband died, hitting her husband with a length of wire because he would not oblige her with his attentions. ‘Come down to the cellar,’ said Mrs Keogh while Brother Leahy scribbled on the blackboard. ‘Come down to the cellar, John Joe, and help me with a barrel.’ He descended the cellar steps in front of her and when he looked back he saw her legs under her dark mourning skirt. ‘I’m lost these days,’ she said, ‘since Mr Keogh went on.’ They moved the barrel together and then Mrs Keogh said it was hot work and it would be better if they took off their jerseys. ‘Haven’t you the lovely arms!’ she said as they rolled the barrel from one corner of the cellar to another. ‘Will we lie down here for a rest?’

‘We’ll chance another bottle,’ suggested Mr Lynch. ‘Is it going down you all right?’

‘My mother’ll be waiting for the rashers, Mr Lynch.’

‘No rasher can be cut, boy, till Mrs Keogh returns. You could slice your hand off on an old machine like that.’

‘We’ll have one more so.’

At the Christian Brothers’, jokes were passed about that concerned grisly developments in the beds of freshly wedded couples, or centred around heroes who carried by chance strings of sausages in their pockets and committed unfortunate errors when it came to cutting one off for the pan. Such yarns, succeeding generally, failed with John Joe, for they seemed to him to be lacking in quality.

‘How’s your mammy?’ Mr Lynch asked, watching John Joe pouring the stout.

‘Ah, she’s all right. I’m only worried she’s waiting on the rashers –’

‘There’s honour due to a mother.’

John Joe nodded. He held the glass at an angle to receive the dark, foaming liquid, as Mr Lynch had shown him. Mr Lynch’s mother, now seventy-nine, was still alive. They lived together in a house which Mr Lynch left every morning in order to work in the office of a meal business and which he left every evening in order to drink bottles of stout in Keogh’s. The bachelor state of Mr Lynch was one which John Joe wondered if he himself would one day share. Certainly, he saw little attraction in the notion of marriage, apart from the immediate physical advantage. Yet Mr Lynch’s life did not seem enviable either. Often on Sunday afternoons he observed the meal clerk walking slowly with his mother on his arm, seeming as lost in gloom as the married men who walked beside women pushing prams. Quigley, a bachelor also, was a happier man than Mr Lynch. He lived in what amounted to a shed at the bottom of his niece’s garden. Food was carried to him, but there were few, with the exception of John Joe, who lingered in his company. On Sundays, a day which John Joe, like Mr Lynch, spent with his mother, Quigley walked alone.

‘When’ll you be leaving the Brothers?’ Mr Lynch asked.

‘In June.’

‘And you’ll be looking out for employment, John Joe?’

‘I was thinking I’d go into the sawmills.’

Mr Lynch nodded approvingly. ‘There’s a good future in the sawmills,’ he said. ‘Is the job fixed up?’

‘Not yet, Mr Lynch. They might give me a trial.’

Mr Lynch nodded again, and for a moment the two sat in silence. John Joe could see from the thoughtful way Mr Lynch was regarding his stout that there was something on his mind. Hoping to hear more about the Piccadilly tarts, John Joe patiently waited.

‘If your daddy was alive,’ said Mr Lynch eventually, ‘he might mention this to you, boy.’

He drank more stout and wiped the foam from his lips with the back of his hand. ‘I often see you out with Quigley. Is it a good thing to be spending your hours with a performer like that? Quigley’s away in the head.’

‘You’d be sorry for the poor creature, Mr Lynch.’

Mr Lynch said there was no need to feel sorry for Quigley, since that was the way Quigley was made. He lit another cigarette. He said:

‘Maybe they would say to themselves up at the sawmills that you were the same way as Quigley. If he keeps company with Quigley, they might say, aren’t they two of a kind?’

‘Ah, I don’t think they’d bother themselves, Mr Lynch. Sure, if you do the work well what would they have to complain of?’

‘Has the manager up there seen you out with Quigley and the jam jars?’

‘I don’t know, Mr Lynch.’

‘Everything I’m saying to you is for your own good in the future. Do you understand that? If I were in your shoes I’d let Quigley look after himself.’

For years his mother had been saying the same to him. Brother Leahy had drawn him aside one day and had pointed out that an elderly dwarf wasn’t a suitable companion for a young lad, especially since the dwarf was not sane. ‘I see you took no notice of me,’ Brother Leahy said six months later. ‘Tell me this, young fellow-me-lad, what kind of a conversation do you have with old Quigley?’ They talked, John Joe said, about trees and the flowers in the hedgerows. He liked to listen to Quigley, he said, because Quigley had acquired a knowledge of such matters. ‘Don’t tell me lies,’ snapped Brother Leahy, and did not say anything else.

Mrs Keogh returned from Confession. She came breathlessly into the bar, with pink cheeks, her ungloved hands the colour of meat. She was a woman of advanced middle age, a rotund woman who approached the proportions that John Joe most admired. She wore spectacles and had grey hair that was now a bit windswept. Her hat had blown off on the street, she said: she’d nearly gone mad trying to catch it. ‘Glory be to God,’ she cried when she saw John Joe. ‘What’s that fellow doing with a bottle of stout?’

‘We had a man-to-man talk,’ explained Mr Lynch. ‘I started him off on the pleasures of the bottle.’

‘Are you mad?’ shouted Mrs Keogh with a loud laugh. ‘He’s under age.’

‘I came for rashers,’ said John Joe. ‘A pound of green rashers, Mrs Keogh. The middle cut.’

‘You’re a shocking man,’ said Mrs Keogh to Mr Lynch. She threw off her coat and hat. ‘Will you pour me a bottle,’ she asked, ‘while I attend to this lad? Finish up that now, Mr Dempsey.’

She laughed again. She went away and they heard from the grocery the sound of the bacon machine.

John Joe finished his stout and stood up.

‘Good-night, Mr Lynch.’

‘Remember about Quigley like a good fellow. When the day will come that you’ll want to find a girl to marry, she might be saying you were the same type as Quigley. D’you understand me, John Joe?’

‘I do, Mr Lynch.’

He passed through the door in the partition and watched Mrs Keogh slicing the bacon. He imagined her, as Quigley had said he’d seen her, belabouring her late husband with a length of wire. He imagined her as he had seen her himself, taking off her jersey because it was hot in the cellar, and then unzipping her green tweed skirt.

‘I’ve sliced it thin,’ she said. ‘It tastes better thin, I think.’

‘It does surely, Mrs Keogh.’

‘Are you better after your stout? Don’t go telling your mammy now.’ Mrs Keogh laughed again, revealing long, crowded teeth. She weighed the bacon and wrapped it, munching a small piece of lean. ‘If there’s parsley in your mammy’s garden,’ she advised, ‘chew a bit to get the smell of the stout away, in case she’d be cross with Mr Lynch. Or a teaspoon of tea-leaves.’

‘There’s no parsley, Mrs Keogh.’

‘Wait till I get you the tea then.’

She opened a packet of tea and poured some on to the palm of his hand. She told him to chew it slowly and thoroughly and to let the leaves get into all the crevices of his mouth. She fastened the packet again, saying that no one would miss the little she’d taken from it. ‘Four and two for the rashers,’ she said.

He paid the money, with his mouth full of dry tea-leaves. He imagined Mrs Keogh leaning on her elbows on the counter and asking him if he had a kiss for her at all, calling him Mr Dempsey. He imagined her face stuck out towards his and her mouth open, displaying the big teeth, and her tongue damping her lips as the tongues of the Piccadilly tarts did, according to Mr Lynch. With the dryness in his own mouth and a gathering uneasiness in his stomach, his lips would go out to hers and he would taste her saliva.

‘Good-night so, Mrs Keogh.’

‘Good-night, Mr Dempsey. Tell your mother I was asking for her.’

He left the public house. The wind which had dislodged Mrs Keogh’s hat felt fresh and cold on his face. The pink wash on a house across the street seemed pinker than it had seemed before, the ground moved beneath his feet, the street lighting seemed brighter. Youths and girls stood outside the illuminated windows of the small sweet-shops, waiting for the Coliseum to open. Four farmers left Regan’s public house and mounted four bicycles and rode away, talking loudly. Your Murphy Dealer announced a large coloured sign in the window of a radio shop. Two boys he had known at school came out of a shop eating biscuits from a paper bag. ‘How’re you, John Joe?’ one of them said. ‘How’s Quigley these days?’ They had left the school now: one of them worked in Kilmartin’s the hardware’s, the other in the Courthouse. They were wearing blue serge suits; their hair had been combed with care, and greased to remain tidy. They would go to the Coliseum, John Joe guessed, and sit behind two girls, giggling and whispering during the programme. Afterwards they would follow the girls for a little while, pretending to have no interest in them; they would buy chips in the chip-shop before they went home.

Thursday, Friday, Saturday, announced the sign outside the Coliseum: His Girl Friday. As John Joe read them, the heavy black letters shifted, moving about on green paper that flapped in the wind, fixed with drawing-pins to an unpainted board. Mr Dunne, the owner of the grey Coliseum, arrived on his bicycle and unlocked his property. Sunday Only: Spencer Tracy in Boom Town. In spite of the sickness in his stomach and the unpleasant taste of tea-leaves in his mouth, John Joe felt happy and was aware of an inclination to loiter for a long time outside the cinema instead of returning to his mother.

‘It’s great tonight, John Joe,’ Mr Dunne said. ‘Are you coming in?’

John Joe shook his head. ‘I have to bring rashers home to my mother,’ he said. He saw Mrs Dunne approaching with a torch, for the small cinema was a family business. Every night and twice on Sundays, Mr Dunne sold the tickets while his wife showed the customers to their seats. ‘I looked in a window one time,’ Quigley had said, ‘and she was trying to put on her underclothes. Dunne was standing in his socks.’

A man and a girl came out of a sweet-shop next to the cinema, the girl with a box of Urney chocolates in her hand. She was thanking the man for them, saying they were lovely. ‘It’s a great show tonight, John Joe,’ Mrs Dunne said, repeating the statement of her husband, repeating what she and he said every day of their lives. John Joe wagged his head at her. It looked a great show definitely, he said. He imagined her putting on her underclothes. He imagined her one night, unable because of a cold to show the customers to their seats, remaining at home in bed while her husband managed as best he could. ‘I made a bit of bread for Mrs Dunne,’ his mother said. ‘Will you carry it down to her, John Joe?’ He rang the bell and waited until she came to the door with a coat over her night-dress. He handed her the bread wrapped in creased brown paper and she asked him to step into the hall out of the wind. ‘Will you take a bottle, John Joe?’ Mrs Dunne said. He followed her into the kitchen, where she poured them each a glass of stout. ‘Isn’t it shocking hot in here?’ she said. She took off her coat and sat at the kitchen table in her night-dress. ‘You’re a fine young fellow,’ she said, touching his hand with her fingers.

John Joe walked on, past Blackburn’s the draper’s and Kelly’s Atlantic Hotel. A number of men were idling outside the entrance to the bar, smoking cigarettes, one of them leaning on a bicycle. ‘There’s a dance in Clonakilty,’ a tall man said. ‘Will we drive over to that?’ The others took no notice of this suggestion. They were talking about the price of turkeys.

‘How’re you, John Joe?’ shouted a red-haired youth who worked in the sawmills. ‘Quigley was looking for you.’

‘I was up in Keogh’s for my mother.’

‘You’re a decent man,’ said the youth from the sawmills, going into the bar of Kelly’s Hotel.

At the far end of North Street, near the small house where he lived with his mother, he saw Quigley waiting for him. Once he had gone to the Coliseum with Quigley, telling his mother he was going with Kinsella, the boy who occupied the desk next to his at the Christian Brothers’. The occasion, the first and only time that Quigley had visited the Coliseum, had not been a success. Quigley hadn’t understood what was happening and had become frightened. He’d begun to mutter and kick the seats in front of him. ‘Take him off out of here,’ Mr Dunne had whispered, flashing his wife’s torch. ‘He’ll bring the house down.’ They had left the cinema after only a few minutes and had gone instead to the chip-shop.

‘I looked in a window last night,’ said Quigley now, hurrying to his friend’s side, ‘and, God, I saw a great thing.’

‘I was drinking stout with Mr Lynch in Keogh’s,’ said John Joe. He might tell Quigley about the glory girls that Mr Lynch had advised him against, and about Baker who had struck a bargain with one of them, but it wouldn’t be any use because Quigley never listened. No one held a conversation with Quigley: Quigley just talked.

‘It was one o’clock in the morning,’ said Quigley. His voice continued while John Joe opened the door of his mother’s house and closed it behind him. Quigley would wait for him in the street and later on they’d perhaps go down to the chip-shop together.

‘John Joe, where’ve you been?’ demanded his mother, coming into the narrow hall from the kitchen. Her face was red from sitting too close to the range, her eyes had anger in them. ‘What kept you, John Joe?’

‘Mrs Keogh was at Confession.’

‘What’s that on your teeth?’

‘What?’

‘You’ve got dirt on your teeth.’

‘I’ll brush them then.’

He handed her the rashers. They went together to the kitchen, which was a small, low room with a flagged floor and a dresser that reached to the ceiling. On this, among plates and dishes, was the framed photograph of John Joe’s father.

‘Were you out with Quigley?’ she asked, not believing that Mrs Keogh had kept him waiting for more than an hour.

He shook his head, brushing his teeth at the sink. His back was to her, and he imagined her distrustfully regarding him, her dark eyes gleaming with a kind of jealousy, her small wiry body poised as if to spring on any lie he should utter. Often he felt when he spoke to her that for her the words came physically from his lips, that they were things she could examine after he’d ejected them, in order to assess their truth.

‘I talked to Mr Lynch,’ he said. ‘He was looking after the shop.’

‘Is his mother well?’

‘He didn’t say.’

‘He’s very good to her.’

She unwrapped the bacon and dropped four rashers on to a pan that was warming on the range. John Joe sat down at the kitchen table. The feeling of euphoria that had possessed him outside the Coliseum was with him no longer; the floor was steady beneath his chair.

‘They’re good rashers,’ his mother said.

‘Mrs Keogh cut them thin.’

‘They’re best thin. They have a nicer taste.’

‘Mrs Keogh said that.’

‘What did Mr Lynch say to you? Didn’t he mention the old mother?’

‘He was talking about the war he was in.’

‘It nearly broke her heart when he went to join it.’

‘It was funny all right.’

‘We were a neutral country.’

Mr Lynch would be still sitting in the bar of Keogh’s. Every night of his life he sat there with his hat on his head, drinking bottles of stout. Other men would come into the bar and he would discuss matters with them and with Mrs Keogh. He would be drunk at the end of the evening. John Joe wondered if he chewed tea so that the smell of the stout would not be detected by his mother when he returned to her. He would return and tell her some lies about where he had been. He had joined the British Army in order to get away from her for a time, only she’d reached out to him from a dream.

‘Lay the table, John Joe.’

He put a knife and a fork for each of them on the table, and found butter and salt and pepper. His mother cut four pieces of griddle bread and placed them to fry on the pan. ‘I looked in a window one time,’ said the voice of Quigley, ‘and Mrs Sullivan was caressing Sullivan’s legs.’

‘We’re hours late with the tea,’ his mother said. ‘Are you starving, pet?’

‘Ah, I am, definitely.’

‘I have nice fresh eggs for you.’

It was difficult for her sometimes to make ends meet. He knew it was, yet neither of them had ever said anything. When he went to work in the sawmills it would naturally be easier, with a sum each week to add to the pension.

She fried the eggs, two for him and one for herself. He watched her basting them in her expert way, intent upon what she was doing. Her anger was gone, now that he was safely in the kitchen, waiting for the food she cooked. Mr Lynch would have had his tea earlier in the evening, before he went down to Keogh’s. ‘I’m going out for a long walk,’ he probably said to his mother, every evening after he’d wiped the egg from around his mouth.

‘Did he tell you an experience he had in the war?’ his mother asked, placing the plate of rashers, eggs and fried bread in front of him. She poured boiling water into a brown enamel teapot and left it on the range to draw.

‘He told me about a time they were attacked by the Germans,’ John Joe said. ‘Mr Lynch was nearly killed.’

‘She thought he’d never come back.’

‘Oh, he came back all right.’

‘He’s very good to her now.’

When Brother Leahy twisted the short hairs on his neck and asked him what he’d been dreaming about he usually said he’d been working something out in his mind, like a long-division sum. Once he said he’d been trying to translate a sentence into Irish, and another time he’d said he’d been solving a puzzle that had appeared in the Sunday Independent. Recalling Brother Leahy’s face, he ate the fried food. His mother repeated that the eggs were fresh. She poured him a cup of tea.

‘Have you homework to do?’

He shook his head, silently registering that lie, knowing that there was homework to be done, but wishing instead to accompany Quigley to the chip-shop.

‘Then we can listen to the wireless,’ she said.

‘I thought maybe I’d go out for a walk.’

Again the anger appeared in her eyes. Her mouth tightened, she laid down her knife and fork.

‘I thought you’d stop in, John Joe,’ she said, ‘on your birthday.’

‘Ah, well now –’

‘I have a little surprise for you.’

She was telling him lies, he thought, just as he had told her lies. She began to eat again, and he could see in her face a reflection of the busyness that had developed in her mind. What could she find to produce as a surprise? She had given him that morning a green shirt that she knew he’d like because he liked the colour. There was a cake that she’d made, some of which they’d have when they’d eaten what was in front of them now. He knew about this birthday cake because he had watched her decorating it with hundreds and thousands: she couldn’t suddenly say it was a surprise.

‘When I’ve washed the dishes,’ she said, ‘we’ll listen to the wireless and we’ll look at that little thing I have.’

‘All right,’ he said.

He buttered bread and put a little sugar on the butter, which was a mixture he liked. She brought the cake to the table and cut them each a slice. She said she thought the margarine you got nowadays was not as good as margarine in the past. She turned the wireless on. A woman was singing.

‘Try the cake now,’ she said. ‘You’re growing up, John Joe.’

‘Fifteen.’

‘I know, pet.’

Only Quigley told the truth, he thought. Only Quigley was honest and straightforward and said what was in his mind. Other people told Quigley to keep that kind of talk to himself because they knew it was the truth, because they knew they wanted to think the thoughts that Quigley thought. ‘I looked in a window,’ Quigley had said to him when he was nine years old, the first time he had spoken to him, ‘I saw a man and woman without their clothes on.’ Brother Leahy would wish to imagine as Quigley imagined, and as John Joe imagined too. And what did Mr Lynch think about when he walked in gloom with his mother on a Sunday? Did he dream of the medium-sized glory girl he had turned away from because his mother had sent him a Virgin Mary from her dreams? Mr Lynch was not an honest man. It was a lie when he said that shame had kept him from marrying. It was his mother who prevented that, with her dreams of legs on fire and her First Communion statues. Mr Lynch had chosen the easiest course: bachelors might be gloomy on occasion, but they were untroubled men in some respects, just as men who kept away from the glory girls were.

‘Isn’t it nice cake?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘This time next year you’ll be in the sawmills.’

‘I will.’

‘It’s good there’s work for you.’

‘Yes.’

They ate the two pieces of cake and then she cleared away the dishes and put them in the sink. He sat on a chair by the range. The men who’d been loitering outside Kelly’s Hotel might have driven over to Clonakilty by now, he thought. They’d be dancing with girls and later they’d go back to their wives and say they’d been somewhere else, playing cards together in Kelly’s maybe. Within the grey cement of the Coliseum the girl who’d been given the box of chocolates would be eating them, and the man who was with her would be wanting to put his hands on her.

Why couldn’t he say to his mother that he’d drunk three bottles of stout in Keogh’s? Why couldn’t he say he could see the naked body of Mrs Taggart? Why hadn’t he said to Mr Lynch that he should tell the truth about what was in his mind, like Quigley told the truth? Mr Lynch spent his life returning to the scenes that obsessed him, to the Belgian woman on the ground and the tarts of Piccadilly Circus. Yet he spoke of them only to fatherless boys, because it was the only excuse for mentioning them that he’d been able to think up.

‘I have this for you,’ she said.

She held towards him an old fountain pen that had belonged to his father, a pen he had seen before. She had taken it from a drawer of the dresser, where it was always kept.

‘I thought you could have it on your fifteenth birthday,’ she said.

He took it from her, a black-and-white pen that hadn’t been filled with ink for thirteen years. In the drawer of the dresser there was a pipe of his father’s, and a tie-pin and a bunch of keys and a pair of bicycle clips. She had washed and dried the dishes, he guessed, racking her mind to think of something she might offer him as the surprise she’d invented. The pen was the most suitable thing; she could hardly offer him the bicycle clips.

‘Wait till I get you the ink,’ she said, ‘and you can try it out.’ From the wireless came the voice of a man advertising household products. ‘Ryan’s Towel Soap’, urged the voice gently. ‘No better cleanser.’

He filled the pen from the bottle of ink she handed him. He sat down at the kitchen table again and tried the nib out on the piece of brown paper that Mrs Keogh had wrapped round the rashers and which his mother had neatly folded away for further use.

‘Isn’t it great it works still?’ she said. ‘It must be a good pen.’

It’s hot in here, he wrote. Wouldn’t you take off your jersey?

‘That’s a funny thing to write,’ his mother said.

‘It came into my head.’

They didn’t like him being with Quigley because they knew what Quigley talked about when he spoke the truth. They were jealous because there was no pretence between Quigley and himself. Even though it was only Quigley who talked, there was an understanding between them: being with Quigley was like being alone.

‘I want you to promise me a thing,’ she said, ‘now that you’re fifteen.’

He put the cap on the pen and bundled up the paper that had contained the rashers. He opened the top of the range and dropped the paper into it. She would ask him to promise not to hang about with the town’s idiot any more. He was a big boy now, he was big enough to own his father’s fountain pen, and it wasn’t right that he should be going out getting minnows in a jam jar with an elderly affected creature. It would go against his chances in the sawmills.

He listened to her saying what he had anticipated she would say. She went on talking, telling him about his father and the goodness there had been in his father before he fell from the scaffold. She took from the dresser the framed photograph that was so familiar to him and she put it into his hands, telling him to look closely at it. It would have made no difference, he thought, if his father had lived. His father would have been like the others; if ever he’d have dared to mention the nakedness of Mrs Taggart his father would have beaten him with a belt.

‘I am asking you for his sake,’ she said, ‘as much as for my own and for yours, John Joe.’

He didn’t understand what she meant by that, and he didn’t inquire. He would say what she wished to hear him say, and he would keep his promise to her because it would be the easiest thing to do. Quigley wasn’t hard to push away, you could tell him to get away like you’d tell a dog. It was funny that they should think that it would make much difference to him now, at this stage, not having Quigley to listen to.

‘All right,’ he said.

‘You’re a good boy, John Joe. Do you like the pen?’

‘It’s a lovely pen.’

‘You might write better with that one.’

She turned up the volume of the wireless and together they sat by the range, listening to the music. To live in a shed like Quigley did would not be too bad: to have his food carried down through a garden by a niece, to go about the town in that special way, alone with his thoughts. Quigley did not have to pretend to the niece who fed him. He didn’t have to say he’d been for a walk when he’d been drinking in Keogh’s, or that he’d been playing cards with men when he’d been dancing in Clonakilty. Quigley didn’t have to chew tea and keep quiet. Quigley talked; he said the words he wanted to say. Quigley was lucky being how he was.

‘I will go to bed now,’ he said eventually.

They said good-night to one another, and he climbed the stairs to his room. She would rouse him in good time, she called after him. ‘Have a good sleep,’ she said.

He closed the door of his room and looked with affection at his bed, for in the end there was only that. It was a bed that, sagging, held him in its centre and wrapped him warmly. There was ornamental brass-work at the head but not at the foot, and on the web of interlocking wire the hair mattress was thin. John Joe shed his clothes, shedding also the small town and his mother and Mr Lynch and the fact that he, on his fifteenth birthday, had drunk his first stout and had chewed tea. He entered his iron bed and the face of Mr Lynch passed from his mind and the voices of boys telling stories about freshly married couples faded away also. No one said to him now that he must not keep company with a crazed dwarf. In his iron bed, staring into the darkness, he made of the town what he wished to make of it, knowing that he would not be drawn away from his dreams by the tormenting fingers of a Christian Brother. In his iron bed he heard again only the voice of the town’s idiot and then that voice, too, was there no more. He travelled alone, visiting in his way the women of the town, adored and adoring, more alive in his bed than ever he was at the Christian Brothers’ School, or in the grey Coliseum, or in the chip-shop, or Keogh’s public house, or his mother’s kitchen, more alive than ever he would be at the sawmills. In his bed he entered a paradise: it was grand being alone.