Puckoon (5 page)
'Too late, Millie, too
late.'
The reply came in a long, damp moan.
Cool spindles of long-fingered rain
came
racing to the eager ground. Earth gurgled under the
delicious assault, the attarahent smell of earth and water wedded came wafting
from the ground.
Heavier and heavier it fell. Even at
this late hour, ducks on the village pond could be heard acclaiming the deluge.
The whole sky was a cullender of water. Again and again lightning hurried
across the sky, blossoming like electric roses; the temperature fell, the closeness
split, a great song of silence followed.
Millie was changing the bed linen,
spiders tested their webs and a drunk called Hermonogies K. Thuckrutes lay face
down in a gutter, singing softly.
' Good
, we
could have done with that little lot,' said O'Brien, looking out the pub
window.
Outside there was a strange muffled
sound. The pub door opened slowly, and there, reeling, smoke-blackened, and
smelling strangely of burnt rubber and singed flesh, was the near-carbonized
figure of the Milligan. The whole pub turned inwards as he entered. Someone
made the sign of the cross.
'Is it the devil?' said Blind Devine,
hiding his matches.
Milligan took his still smouldering
cap and hurled it the length of the room.
'Struck by
lightning!
That's all I needed was to be struck by bloody lightning!'
'Are you all
right
?
' asked Dr Goldstein, handing him his professional card.
' It
was
only the rubber tyres on me bike saved me from being electrified. It struck the
roots of a tree, bounced on ter me legs then travelled up to me head! Me hat,
look at me hat!' he said, picking up the charred relic.
'Here,' said Mrs O'Toole, 'drink
this.' She handed him a small measure of cheap whisky. Even in moments of
charity there was no need to be uneconomical.
Through all this commotion, through
all the thunder, singing and drinking, from the opposite wall two humans stared
unwinking at each other, eyes choked with mutual hate, fury and frustration.
She was Mrs Cafferty, he was known to
her as Mr Cafferty, and there's no divorce in Ireland.
But
enough of this.
Elsewhere important things were happening.
It was to be a solemn occasion.
As James Joyce says, ' real hairy'.
In a
brown and upstairs room at the Duke of Wellington Hotel '
quote ani.r.a.
leaflet
, was being'torn in two
by traters', the last word being in red. At every door and window, standing,
sitting, looking, listening, soldiers from both factions stood guard. Beyond
them, another perimeter of men set off as listening posts. With the
i.r.a
. about, nobody was taking any chances, least of all
the i.r.a. who were all home in bed. Rain was falling, and the men stood close
to the walls for shelter. Inside, several high-ranking, grim-faced Boundary
Commissioners from both sides faced each other across a giant map of Ireland.
On one corner rested a mess of empty
tea cups; half-eaten sandwiches, their edges curling, lay helpless in a thin
film of tea that trembled on the floor of the tray. Lighting the scene was a
mean yellow bulb covered with generations of fly specks. Across the map,
running from right to left, was a thick red pencil line that terminated just
short of the Atlantic.
It was the threatened new border. In
its path lay sleeping Puckoon. Points of interest and under discussion were
represented by a forest of little flags on pins, forever being displaced by
table-thumping members of the Commission. For ten whole days now they had
argued the last few miles of frontier.
Tempers were frayed, agreements
infrequent and weak bladders put to the test. Mr Haggerty was complaining about
the Ulster representatives' indecisiveness.
He was breathing heavily from a short
fat round body packed into a blue serge suit, every seam of which was under
considerable pressure from the contents. He lost his temper and - more
frequently -his arguments.
'You'll
a
ll
be in the Republic one day, so there,' he thumped the map with a fat furious
fist, displacing numerous flags.
Immediately, Mr Neville Thwick, a
thin, veiny, eel-like man with acne, deftly replaced the flags. He had
volunteered for the job.
Insignificant since birth, sticking
pins in maps gave him the secret power he craved. The walls of his attic
bed-sitting room were hung with treasured maps of famous battles, campaigns and
sorties. Solfarino, Malplaquet, Plassey, the Somme, the Boyne.
There were three hundred in scrolls
under his bed and scores more, carefully indexed, placed on every shelf and
ledge. He possessed his own pin-making machine, and a small triangular
printers' guillotine for manufacturing flags. Power, what power this
combination held!
Every night Mr Thwick would leave his
desk at Mills & Crotts bird-seed factory and catch the 33a tram to his
home. On arrival he would prepare tea and perhaps a one-egg omelette. After a
wash and shave he would place a battle-map of his choosing on the floor. From a
chest he would select a military uniform suitable for the period. Dressed so,
he would pace the room, making little battle noises with his mouth. Last Sunday
had seen his greatest victory. After much deliberation he had decided to
re-contest Waterloo. Dressed as Napoleon he placed himself at the head of the
French army of 600 flags. The thought of it had made him weak, he felt giddy
and sat down to massage his legs. After a measure of ginger wine, he felt
strong enough to continue. There followed a night of move and counter move.
Despite knockings on the walls from sleepless neighbours, he continued his
battle noises, thrusting flags hither and thither.
He force-marched a platoon of French
Chasseurs till their points were
blunt,
he reinforced
Blucher with a secret supply of mercenary flags from
threat to his flank. At three o'clock he played his master stroke. He thrust a
white flag right into the English H.Q.
Wellington and his staff were humbled
in the dust. To the accompaniment of the people around hammering with shoe
heels and brooms, he accepted Wellington's sword and surrender.
Then victorious to
bed with a hot water bottle and a spoonful of Dr Clarkson-Spock's Chest Elixir.
Next morning, dressed as a civilian, with very little resistance, Wellington's
conqueror was evicted by his landlady.
Living in the y.m.c.a. curtailed his
activities, but the present job kept him in practice until conditions changed.
After all, peace, as any good general
knew, couldn't last for ever, and the only way to en d wars was to have them.
'Mr Haggerty, sir.' The febrile,
castrato voice of Mr Meredith was raised in protest. 'Mr Haggerty,' he repeated,
as he rose to his feet. One could see how very old he was, how very thin he
was, and falling back into his seat, how very weak he was. 'Mr Haggerty,' he
said for the third time, his pale hands flapping like mating butterflies, ' I
protest at -'.
He stopped suddenly, eyes closed,
lids quivering,
head
back.
'Ahhhhhh - ahhhhh - '
A
pause, his face taking on that agonized look of the unborn
sneeze. 'Sorry about that,' he muttered, wiping his eyes.
'Now.'
He became stronger. 'I was saying th-atishooooo!' thundered the unexpected;
'ah-tishoooo!!' The convulsion shot his dentures the length of the room. Thud!
went
his head on the table, 'atishoo!' down went the flags,
in sprang Mr Thwick. 'Oh!' shrieked Mrs Eels, a set of heavy dentures landing
on her lap. Meredith lay back, spit-speckled, white and exhausted, his face
folded in two.
Mrs Eels returned his teeth on a
plate covered with her 'kerchief.
'No thank you, dear,' said the still
muzzy Meredith, 'I couldn't eat another thing.'
With his back to the map table and
accompanied by terrifying clicks and clacks, Meredith wrestled to replace his
prodigal dentures; finally, he turned to continue his speech, but remained
silent. Staring pop-eyed, he staggered round the room pointing to his mouth,
making mute sounds and getting redder and redder.
'Ahhhh!
I
see what the trouble is,' said Haggerty, pulling down Meredith's lower lip.
'He's put his choppers in upside down, someone fetch me a screwdriver.'
Mr Meredith's aide-de-camp, Captain
Clarke, called for a short pause while ' our spokesman's dentures are
readjusted and his dignity restored'. A regular soldier, he was known to his
subordinates as 'Here
comes
the bastard now'.
The phrenology of his mountainous
skull showed in contours through his military hair-cut. Erect and shining, his
immaculate uniform hid a mess of ragged underwear.
'No, no, no,' said Mrs Angel Eels,
'we've had enough delays, we got to finish this partitioning -today!'
There was a murmur of approval. She
glowed inwardly at their acceptance.
She was a true daughter of the
revolution, a tireless worker for the Party, sexually frustrated and slightly
cross-eyed, the last two having something in common. At forty-one years of age,
she now sat bolt upright, her black dress fastened high under her neck down to
the floor, worn like a chastity armour that sealed her from all harm, and
pleasure.
Her late husband, Frederick Mortimer
Eels, had been a professional circus midget. Twice nightly he was fired
from a
cannon into a net. That and cleaning out the
elephants was his job, though he only got billed for the former. Angel had met
him by accident. She ran over him in her gig. Born with an abnormal fear of
men, Angel saw in Frederick all the innocence of boyhood. Lying in hospital
under drugs from the accident, Frederick had proposed to her.
Courting her in public was difficult,
as she towered over him by three feet, and he made a point of only meeting her
on the side of a hill.
As the wedding day approached Fred
Eels was seized with a sexual phobia.
'Ha, ha, ha,' said the doctor,
'there's no need to worry, Fred. I've known far shorter men marry far taller
women and they've had a perfectly normal sex life. Of course,' he added, 'you
won't have anybody to talk to.'
Love does something. At the wedding,
Angel, for all her plainness, looked beautiful, and even Mr Eels looked and
walked a foot taller. It was not to last. The honeymoon was fatal. Trying to
change a light bulb in the bridal suite, Fred balanced on a chair and table,
fell back in the dark, broke his neck, and died.
The funeral, tho' purple sad, seemed
a grim joke. The child-sized coffin lowered into the man-sized grave.
'I'm sorry, Father,' an embarrassed
grave-digger apologized, ' I thought it was her husband.'
' It
is,'
whispered the priest.
'They must have buried him doubled
up,' the digger told his wife that night.
' Some
people will do anything to save money.'
Since then, fifteen long years ago,
Mrs Eels had no other love, but she had visited many, many circuses. In that
time, frustration had snowballed and was thundering down the slopes of desire.
It was a strange thing to be a widow and a virgin; secretly there were times
she would have loved to have run naked down O'Connell Street, shouting 'I've just
slept with a nigger man and this is me lunch break.' All this was now
sublimated in the false zeal of a female patriot.
By levering hard with the screwdriver
and smashing four teeth, Haggerty had managed to release Meredith's dentures.
Till now, monkey-faced Mr Ferguson
had said little; now, drawing a breath he spoke in a sing-song manner.
' May
I make
a suggestion ? We only have this bit here to partition and the pubs close in an
hour. Why not let's all put one hand on the red pencil and draw a line that
falls naturally and peacefully into
place ?'
As he spoke his nose twitched,
violently, an affliction from the Boer War. His regiment had camped near Spion
Cop; the area was strewn with spherical white rocks like tennis balls. Issuing
from his tent one morning, he saw three soldiers throwing a rock around.
' Over
here,' shouted the enthusiastic soccer player.
It sailed towards
him,
he removed his hat, jumped, headed it and fell smiling and unconscious.
That's when it started. Mr Ferguson
didn't mind. It got him out of the fighting with a disability pension. Twice
annually he would report to a medical board who decided whether the affliction
was diminishing. The day before these occasions, he would soak his nose in
arnica and pull a tight elastic band over his head and down under his nose,
thus holding it in a contracted position all night. The moment before the
medical, he would remove the band, and the nose, sensing its freedom, shook
with terrifying flexibility. So well had it behaved last time, the Board had
increased his pension by a half.
But back to now.
On a show of hands, they accepted his
suggestion. In what was meant to be a solemn moment, all hands held the pencil
and pulled slowly across the map. All was
silent,
the
room was filled with suspicion. Occasionally a gasp rent the silence as they
all strained for the advantage.
'Steady, someone's pulling to the
benefit of Ulster.'
'Lies, all lies.'
'Who gave that jerk?'
'Ah! I felt that.'
' Swine
!'
Finally the pencil reached its
destination. Faces broke into relieved smiles, and a series of rapid unplanned
handshakes ensued.