The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (17 page)

‘Well, a person does.’

‘And this ailment of yours …’

‘I tell you,’ says Harcourt, ‘there’s worse things than buggering ailments and being fecked out of the army. It’s not easy to be at home. I didn’t want to hang about Lagos. Things have changed there, brother, it’s not my town any more. My father’s like an old cracked cup now that won’t hold water. Some days, my father, he thinks he’s the king of England. Confused old man he is now. He’s got the notes all jumbled in his head and he’s no use for the piano tuning. A sad sight. And that always troubles a son. Maybe I should be looking after him. But Lagos is full of wild men these days, wild-talking men. With the war over some men want great things, big things, and especially that big thing you have in your sweet country, and I’m talking about independence. And those sort of men don’t like my father’s sort and they don’t like me, who was in the army, you know, and leads a quiet life, and takes things as they come … Death-threats are all the fashion now in Lagos, let me tell you.’

‘This is a familiar story,’ says Eneas.

‘Yes?’

‘Familiar.’

‘Well, so maybe you know what’s going on for me so, I don’t know. You say it’s familiar to you. Good. That’s good.’

‘I wish I didn’t.’

‘Ah, yes. We all wish that. Goodnight, brother.’

‘Goodnight.’

The house of the chief engineer looks like the drawing of a house that a child makes with a door in the middle and a window each side of the door, except the roof is flat and the fact is the whole house can be dismantled and trucked on to the next site across the packed dry earth. The chief engineer has a houseboy in a fine suit a little dusty that has belonged in the past to the engineer possibly and is a cast-off of sorts, but finer than any clobber of Eneas’s. And the great man drives a big motorbike at the greatest speed he can muster, revving the throttle across the thorny spaces and creating in his reckless wake a wonderful flower, a bush of red dust. And indeed, the engineer’s greatest pride is a pot of roses that stands at the door of his movable house, and is watered and kept shaded from the worst ovens of the heat by the houseboy. At night when he looks in Eneas can vaguely see the waves of mosquito curtains billowing and the chief engineer is at that time of day decked out in his mosquito boots and fair play to him. The canal already exists on careful charts in the house which are brought down to the site hut in the mornings, rolled underarm like large batons. And such expertise is wielded you might say against the strange blankness of that district.

It happens that this person is an Irishman called Benson from Roscommon, so in the first week Eneas is sought out for news of home. Benson has style to him like a polished stone, an ordinary stone off the roads of Ireland, but polished. And he has great politeness, Eneas immediately notes, and is agreeable and not satirical as the jumped-up species of Irish or any people can be. Eneas is stopped in his digging and brought up to the hut and given a mug of best tea and it is as refreshing now as a bathe in asses’ milk, if that is refreshing, not just beautifying, as in the tales about Cleopatra.

‘So,’ says Benson, ‘another Irishman, McNulty, you say, well.,

‘That’s it,’ says Eneas and he notes in himself less of an ability to talk to this man than to Harcourt, still below sweltering with a ready shovel.

‘Yes, yes,’ says Benson, ‘you know, I worked with a man called McNulty some years back, from Sligo, when we were both employed up there on the Gold Coast. A very nice man he was. Jack McNulty, an engineer like myself. I don’t suppose he’s any relation of yours?’

Eneas is on the cusp naturally of saying my brother, but he doesn’t say it. No, he doesn’t.

‘I don’t think so, sir,’ he says, a little army fashion, a soldier speaking to an officer, a hint that Benson catches.

‘You were in the war?’ he asks.

‘I was.’

‘So was I,’ says Benson. ‘Bomb disposal. The engineer’s lot.’

Eneas is about to say, ‘Like Jack,’ but catches himself in time. He doesn’t know why he has denied his brother, as the saying goes, but he had better stick to the denial. Sure enough Jack did do some bomb-disposal work as far as he knows. You needed a quiet hand and a stout heart for that.

‘What did you do yourself, McNulty?’ says Benson.

‘Not much is the answer. I was — taken off the beach at Dunkirk. Well, in a kind of way. But sometimes, I don’t remember it.’

‘Where did you come from this time when you came out here?’

‘London.’

‘Poor old London. I hope they can rebuild her. And I say that not only from a professional point of view. Thank God the war is over. Thank God.’

‘Aye.’

‘You see that rose? Isn’t it a beautiful thing? “Peace”, is the name of it. It was bred in France and launched on the world on Armistice Day. Every rose has a name, you know.’ ‘I expect.’

Eneas has that sense of his answers getting shorter and shorter but he can’t help it. He feels he said too much when he mentioned Dunkirk. It gave him a fright to say the name. Maybe he hadn’t been at Dunkirk and certainly oftentimes he knows he wasn’t. Just as surely at others he knows he was. Looks like he has a choice of memories for the same times here and there. Not so good. Anyway, discretion, discretion. Of course he thought of Roseanne when the topic of the roses came up, but what would be the use of mentioning Roseanne to Benson? He would like to answer Benson like a civilized man but he can’t afford to. Roscommon after all isn’t so far from Sligo in fact neighbours it and if he has travelled so far for safety he must play it safe with Benson now. Maybe he doesn’t altogether like the mother-of-pearl buttons on the man’s shirt and the well-cut jacket and the general air of power and happiness — well, whatever the general air of the man is. Poor old Jack, with his mountainous problems, there was a time when he would have been proud to acknowledge Jack, educated, officer, and to talk about Sligo to any man who could share an understanding of its beauties and dangers, but somehow something has changed. He still sees instantly the grievous bulk of Knocknarea rising massive and elderly in a filthy rain, or the rain-browned pavements of the town, when the word Sligo sounds like a holy bell, but, something nevertheless has changed. It isn’t just the famous threats of Jonno and O’Dowd and those hurtling shadows along the riverbank, but some inner urge now to privacy, to peace even it could be said. He doesn’t believe any more in one man fishing fact and remembrance from another man. He’s happy to drink the tea. He’s happy to say nothing. He couldn’t care less whether anyone followed him out here to shoot him. What an achievement that would be, to trail him across half the world, traipse upcountry here and execute the notorious enemy of the Irish people. Well, his blood would freeze and he would shit his pants if he saw them coming, because fear is an animal that lives in a man separately, and pokes its head out at will. No, it is that fear so long endured and the nature of his life with that fear as his companion animal that seem to have changed him, altered the man himself. Eneas McNulty. Maybe he should change his name he thinks, except it’s very hard to trust a forged passport and anyway he believes that this fear long suffered has changed his face, changed the lines on his hands, his fingerprints, the imprint of his very soul pressed temporarily on the earth. The fear has become something else, could he dare call it a strength, a privacy anyhow. A sort of privacy private to himself, a house with a private garden.

‘Maybe you should get back to your work,’ says Benson kindly when that odd minute of wordlessness passes, kindly, at ease even, but with that strange definite air that an employer can always muster, even smiling a little. Let him laugh at him if he wishes, if he thinks Eneas McNulty is funny. Well, he is funny, a forty-six-year-old creature with a bleary face that can’t answer a pleasant question about Ireland and denies his excellent brother.

‘Yes, sir,’ says Eneas, grateful for the tea and grateful to be gone. An oddity. A singular man. An anecdote for Benson.

Curious old earth they dig from the first wild talk of the birds in the thorns to the deeps of silence when the rackets and whistling and cheering of the insects stops and sheets of darkness plunder down over the plain and claim the numbed countryside. Day by day the new spades gather hoards of scratches and scores and grow old in their hands. Nevertheless there is pride in Eneas for the strength of his back, and he digs as if carelessly or careless of the task but he’s fit and good for it. Harcourt not so much as he because Harcourt is really a head man. It’s Harcourt’s brains that are his pride. Eneas must conclude that Harcourt is truly a wise man in that he speaks elegant as a judge and opines on many a matter and has driven already the shadows from some dark questions bothering Eneas these dozen years. Harcourt believes that as a person is but briefly on the earth it behoves him to look about and understand the nature of the great puzzle of life. That a person could never know for why he is upon the earth and yet he might for a moment feel the light of heaven pierce down upon his head, for a moment, a moment, and have a little suggestion, a little touch of the sugar of heaven. Harcourt evidently scorns religion and priests after all despite his early comments though he has a broad knowing of them. Because religions and priests offend his idea of heaven, in the main. And he is fond of displaying to Eneas in the privacy of their near bunks the various amazing and ancient practices of some of the more lonesome people of Nigeria. His own mother, it appears, came from a group of excellent people that until the arrival of the British into the then private districts of her native realm — sometimes chopping off hands and heads for the sake of discipline and terror — were wont to give the credit of greater life to the dead ones, and called themselves in fact by the names of the dead and believed themselves to be mere shadows and the haunters of the huts of the Great Living — to wit, the eternal dead. Stances removed by the ascendancy of Harcourt’s family into the colder and notionless regions of the piano-owning classes of Lagos. And also that human life was a sort of first death before the great death, to wit, Life itself.

Eneas lies in the sunken dark of the tent and listens because Harcourt pleases him and he is greatly affected by the friendship that Harcourt bestows on him, him, an unwanted or extra Irishman as it were. Though Eneas has his own weeds of pride quite proudly growing about his soul, yet his simpler heart needs the balm of another person’s bountiful friendship, which he thinks is the nature of Harcourt’s admirable and continuous talking. Some slight academy of interesting and twisting thoughts takes place under the starry tent, and if Eneas is beyond healing truly, yet he settles further into peace, and things in his head find their places, hammer to its niche, sextant to its shelf and box, and he is fiercely content to dig the canal for Benson of Roscommon, and hear wisdom from Harcourt of Lagos.

16

The days of letters
are well gone now, and the only touch he has against his mother must be in dreams, and truth to tell his dreams are poor things really and he has a contempt for them. But now and then some nights she flits through in strange guises, whether as the avenging crone of old dreams, or the bright flame of an aisling that he has no need of, and rises unbidden from the paltry bog of his sleeping brain. He knows that she and all her world will die, and her secrets too, and he knows that all traces of even his own days will be pulled from the streets of Sligo, and the names of the shops will change again, and someone’s premises here and another’s there will suffer the great iron ball, and he knows that in that sense he is already dead, that time has already taken care of him. There is the living breathing world of Ireland with De Valeras and the sons of powerful men taking power as they come to age. It’s all the old story over again except this time the rich man is themselves in a motorcar and a house on a respectable road. Well, he must not worry about politics, he’s beyond them now. He has never been for politics, only the flotsam of its minor storms.

And he thinks back a little over his life and where he was born and he wonders did he make such a hames and a hash of it after all? Didn’t he just live the life given him and no more side to him than a field-mouse as God’s plough bears down to crush his nest? He thinks maybe it was a mistake as such to join the police that time, but what else was he to do, hang about the corners of Sligo and harass the widows as they went by? By the mere fact of being willing to be killed for his ‘crime’ he is beyond his ‘crime’. Enemy of the Irish people. He wishes he could keep in touch with Teasy away there in Bexhill in her convent and the wonderful network of roads about for her to beg along, but … He loves that Teasy, though, he believes.

But he wishes, ah, he wishes now sometimes all the same that he had been born a simple farmer’s son far from the devious town and had taken that farm to himself in due course and farmed it and got the grass off it yearly and been good at the work, yes, and married a lass of small means, and rowed through the winters with her, and brought up his sons and daughters, giving out to them the while, and trying to set a path of stout wood across the dreary bogs and verdant meadows of a life. And when he wishes for those things his body feels heavy against the digging, and Africa’s colours leak from her, and he might be a dog locked in a lightless room without water or food or walking.

Then his brain really rattles and he has to dig faster to fling out the demons from the red earth, so dry and deep in the channel of the canal, whose water waits two hundred miles upland still locked in the bright waters of the lake.

He knows Benson dreams of the day when the locks at the lake are opened and the water bursts forth and fills the trench in its three hundred miles and carries rich moisture down to lands that will fall back into fertility from the shock, lands that know only segments of inches of rain betimes, or great crushing sweeping deluges that last an hour or two and pass away higher to the Muslim districts. He knows Benson dreams of that because he himself would if he had the gift of those drawings, his own brother’s gift indeed.

And in his heart somewhere between sleep and waking, in the dark pit of his heart, he senses to his grave discomfort the moil and torrent of the distant water pressing somehow to be released, impatient and mocking. He knows the water lies far north of him and his blessed heart, but it’s a confusion so peculiar that he half believes he is a sort of Nigeria with northern water and southern drought. And when his mind latches onto dryness, he sees there, dotted about, the dirty backs of mountain sheep in the hammered reaches of Sligo hills amazing his inner eyes — so there is worse confusion, bareness, wet, dryness, Africa, Ireland. And it isn’t so pleasant when the mind won’t put things in their correct places, dragging such dirty sheep into an African day dream. And now being wordless more or less apart from a grunted thanks or a hello, even bit by bit, hour by hour, with Harcourt, his poor head becomes all the more afflicted not by visions, not by things that John of Patmos might have cherished in his visionary cave, but by useless fragments of past and present, as if a joyless hammer has struck the template of his head and partly ruined it, bent it, buggered it up rightly.

Thankfully his arms and legs and such aren’t too heedful of his difficulties and they swing and settle and do as good as ever.

The mystery to him is, though they slap his back and watch him and even converse hotly or mildly with him if one or other happens to be working by him, his fellows don’t pass remarks on his condition. Indeed he sings betimes whatever he has of songs, wordless tunes of his father’s, or bits of things he has heard on his travels, to give himself the appearance of self-command and normality. But even if he were to spend the day on his head and hands he doesn’t believe these men would find it remarkable enough to mention it. The condition generally shared is a certain physical strength, and as long as Eneas does his share of the digging he remains part of the curious sphere of the workforce, tracking back and forth across the clay in all the thousand journeys and mutations of a day. In this way every man is a vagrant star following his vagrant and allotted path through the firmament of the camp, though there may be no plus and minus to explain him.

And though his discombobulation grows indeed apace, and he can sense it always lurking inwardly, he searches for means in himself to ward off the rising of it. He imagines beyond the material of the tent a high blue-stricken Sligo sky, an autumn sky, fit for passing fast above the withering branches of maples and oaks and roaring out of it the story of Sligo, the thousand stories, the million, the countless, the numberless stars of the stories of Sligo and in that eternal Babel betimes he finds the sweet nut of rest, the ease in his limbs, the eyebright womb of proper ease.

And digs like a demon.

And Harcourt becomes second nature to Eneas and digs like a demon. Harcourt grows strong as a donkey and he digs, you have to admire his digging now. And the dry earth mounts each side of the channel and their canal lengthens southward. And when Eneas is worse than troubled, when the stricken part of his head worsens and in worsening forces the head downward onto Eneas’s chest like the neck is broken or under fierce strain, it seems to Eneas that Harcourt is digging for him, for his health, digging for it like a pirate digs for the gold on the bleak island of adventure.

‘What troubles you, brother?’ Harcourt asks. ‘Can you say anything at all in that silence of yours, brother?’

And Eneas barely can. Fear afflicts him, silence abets the fear. Sometimes he lays down his spade and shivers in the lengthening ditch, he shivers with an ague like malaria but it isn’t so simple. It isn’t mosquitoes are ruining Eneas, but the pressing down and piercing up of a life. He’s being run through from many an angle. Sometimes he yearns for the refuge of an English madhouse, for the refuge of youth even, of a fresh start. He is mortally exhausted sometimes by being this Eneas McNulty. The wicked idea strikes him that his would-be murderers were in the right, that there’s nothing to recommend him, that his life has been ill led, that he deserves tremendous and afflicting punishment. When he thinks this he trembles worse. He’s lost in a childhood state and he fears the displeasure of God the King of good and the Demon of evil. He lies fast in the bed of himself with the starched sheets binding his legs, and the ministers of God approach the bedroom of himself and will be in the window like a fiery bolt to accuse and torment him and he feels it will be well merited.

It’s Harcourt that brings him back to the simpler world. They go out one morning as usual to the digging area with spades on their shoulders and cardboard visors against the sun. The birds of Africa angrily call. All as usual, daily, the now familiar newspaper of sounds and sights that each man reads for himself in his own way. A day indeed when Eneas feels his own inclination to silence as a half-decent thing and he hovers on the ragged border of contentment. And they dig as is their wont and work and it doesn’t seem so pointless a business after all to be striving to realize the great dream of Benson. Or maybe it isn’t a great dream but a natural job of work, and if Benson was building a wharf in New Ross it would be all the same thing. Maybe it occurs to Eneas he makes too much of expert work, maybe he should lose that strange part of his soul that envies and worships the expert man. As he thinks this, suddenly Harcourt stops in the digging and begins to tremble. Now this could be Eneas himself and Eneas is doubly startled, and thinking he knows this ague lurches to embrace his friend. But Harcourt won’t stop at trembling but goes down on one knee on the brittle earth and leaps up as if kicked by the earth and falls about and then bangs back on the crumbling ground and shakes all his limbs at once, and a nasty looking bile or foam starts to bubble and froth from his lips. And Benson leaps down into the ditch and hauls off his own belt and shoves the thickness of it into Harcourt’s mouth, startling Eneas. The other diggers have stopped and are staring down at Harcourt silently with their chins at still angles as if all movement has gone out of the world except for Harcourt’s twitching and gurgling.

‘He’s having a fit,’ says Benson. ‘I’ve seen it before in one of my aunts. Epilepsy or the like. Mustn’t swallow the tongue. That’s the main thing.’

‘No, no,’ says Eneas, and he imagines Harcourt’s tongue going down the throat and into the belly to be digested as if it was the edible tongue of a cow after being boiled and skinned by his mother years ago in the house in John Street. ‘Mercy, mercy.’

Now a number of the other men have climbed out of the ditch and are talking softly to each other and shaking their heads because it’s an ill sight and possibly an evil one. They’re saying the clay is dangerous or the water or the company food maybe, the same thought going through Eneas’s mind, unworthy but unbidden. Now Harcourt is quiet enough except his eyes are up under his lids somewhere and occasionally he gives a massive jerk. The heads of the workers shake at each spasm. No, no, no. And then Harcourt is up with a jerk and the fit is on him again and he waves his arms and flails his legs like a dancer, like a dervish, and you’d swear, swear he knows the dance, and even likely hears a personal music proper to the dance, and he twists and leaps with tremendous poise and balance till he’s down on the clay again and spasming and gurgling as before. And the leather belt has flown out long since and Harcourt is struggling now with the depth of his fit, and Benson has his hand in Harcourt’s mouth and is trying to hold on to the root of the tongue to prevent it turning back on itself in a murderous rictus and stoppering up the precious breath of Harcourt. Then the wretched fit passes away, and Benson holds Harcourt’s exhausted head in his lap and strokes the fevered face and seems to be talking to him gently with all the terrified susurrus and low voice of a mother. Eneas watches and thinks of his brother Jack reading in sacred privacy if that is the term to his daughter in the night-swallowed bungalow in Sligo. And such evident tenderness, accidental, necessary tenderness in Benson towards Harcourt, sweeps against Eneas also not hurting him as Jack did but roughly illuminating him. And the engineer stroking the face of the afflicted man quells the demon momentarily that feeds at the core of Eneas. In an hour Harcourt is able to stand with assistance and go back shaken and solemn with sometimes trailing legs to the speckled tent.

Harcourt lies in like a ruined man on the thin yellowed pallet of his bunk, lies back still at last and lets out a breath as lonesome as a mountain peak.

‘Easier for you now?’ says Eneas. ‘That easier?’

‘It’s easier now, brother, don’t mind me. Just a broken donkey of a man.’

‘That’s a wicked thing was running through you, Harcourt, man.’

‘It will not be difficult for you now, brother, to see why I was let go from the English army, with this sort of carry-on afflicting me,’ says Harcourt, not without relish, relishing also some deep breaths, a deep well of gladsome breaths rising to flatter him, to inflate his life.

‘No,’ says Eneas. ‘No. But all the same, a man might expect better of the King’s army.’

‘No one minds illness invisible. If a foul cancer were eating my heart, and my face was fair and open the while, it would be no matter. But with this leaping and foaming disease … Wasn’t always so violent. You could charge money in to see me now when it’s a-hold of me.’

‘That Mr Benson seemed to know the drill.’

‘Well, is that so?’ says Harcourt.

‘He didn’t scorn to comfort you, you know.’

Til thank him for it.’

‘I’d better get back to the ditch. I’ll see you later.’

‘Maybe I’m in the right spot after all.’

‘How so?’ says Eneas, turning, turning.

‘With you and buggering Mr Benson to look out for me…’

‘Maybe so …’

A clearer head and a quieter heart engines Eneas McNulty back out to the delving and flinging of red clay. Whether things are good or bad he cannot say, but at the least his eyes are seeing true, or so he hopes and trusts. Better the world as it is, than other worlds his mind may prefer. That he knows. God keep Harcourt fast to the rocky earth, he prays, nonetheless.

He sits, Eneas, at the mouth of the tent where Harcourt has been consigned, for the sake of safety, religion and fear. A poor lamp burns within and makes the old material of the field tent into a larger lamp, sitting like a bubble of light in the limitless darkness. And fireflies occupy themselves in the ragged dark and echo the ferocious display of stars. There are too many stars for comfort, and the extent of the world has no limit. The tent is moored to the extreme of the diggers’ camp, and the great blank of night starts at the lips of Eneas’s boots, he feels. He hears Harcourt breathing lightly in the mercy of sleep.

Someone, a pair of someones, is causing a ruckus in the middle of the camp. Eneas is disturbed as a nurse might be, watching over a child ailing in the worrisome night, or a person needing quiet for some secret function, a prayer perhaps. Two tall men half lit by the wayward lamps and half concealed in the old cloths of darkness. Whatever light there is celebrates the shouting faces. They are too far away to understand and anyway he thinks it might not be English they are using to orchestrate their fight. Now the matter passes from words to deeds, and the men punch at each other, softly at first, pushing really, then firmly, then fully, then murderously. Other men come out into the domain of light and watch. Eneas fearfully regards them, fighters and watchers.