The Trick of the Ga Bolga, page 3
Now he could get an alien smell above the sea smell, heavy and sickening as the smell of rotten fish from the bottom of an old boat. He pulled the shoulders onto the rock, and before he could get the legs out of the water, he vomited. With tears in his eyes from the stress of retching, he lit a match. The drowned man was in the uniform of an officer of the Royal Navy, and the face was like no face he knew. The nose was eaten away, the left eye socket empty, the teeth bared as if caught in a last rictus of effort. The cheeks were swollen. They could have been the cheeks of a man with mumps, and the left hand was missing, chewed rather than cut off at the wrist. The face was the face of war itself, part human, part monster, with a prehistoric skull showing through the greenish skin. With his left hand over his nose, he searched the pockets of the tunic. He drew out a slim leather wallet, then walked quickly up the slope without once looking back at the sea.
At home he opened the wallet, which contained some papers and a ten-shilling note. The drowned man was not an officer but a rating on the HMS Cepheus. He came from Mappowder in Dorset, his name was John White, and he was now nameless in Skelpoona between sea and land. Wondering if he should remain so, Coote warmed a rusty flat-iron in the ashes and pressed the wet papers and the ten-shilling note between two handkerchiefs. In the back of the wallet was a letter from a girl called Angie with an address in Sturminster Newton:
Dearest John,
You asked me last week where I’d put it, but I haven’t got it and never had it. I said that you yourself must have it, and when I went to bed, I dreamt that you’d put it in your pipe and smoked it! Next morning, when I asked you what it meant, you said, “Someone’s put you in the pudden club and it isn’t me.” You’d never say a thing like that in real life, you’re too nice. I miss you night and day. If you don’t find it, don’t worry. And don’t be braver than you need be.
Love and kisses,
Angie
For a long time he sat at the table reading and rereading the cryptic note. Then he reread his own letter to Philip Woodwind, tore it up, and buried the pieces in the warm ashes with the tongs.
Chapter 2
The morning was calm. Before breakfast he stood in the doorway, seeking in the solid bulk of Screig Beefan peace, placidity and the sanity of the ordinary. Doing things for himself was one way of maintaining his grip on the small change of living, which even in extremis kept many a man on the rails. He boiled another pollack and poached an egg in a saucepan for breakfast. He had neither coffee nor tea, so he strained the water in which he had boiled the fish and drank it to wash down the last of the black bread. From the window he watched the Proker ride past on his donkey, followed ten minutes later by Salmo and his rheumatic dog. He knew that they were making for Skelpoona. He went out to the byre to milk the cow.
“There’s a dead man on Leic na Mágach,” a young woman called from the road. “His boat was sunk. Everyone is there and the priest as well.”
“I’m Consolata O’Gara,” she said, when he caught up with her.
“Does that mean you’re the schoolmaster’s daughter?”
“The schoolmaster is my father.”
She smiled as if she were prepared to admit that he was her father, though not that she was his daughter. Coote could see immediately that she was too unworldly and independent-minded to care what he thought of her.
“Did you milk Alex yet?”
“I milked her last night.”
“How much did she give?”
“More than I expected—two jugfuls.”
“She’s holding back on you. She used to give Cormac half a bucket. If you don’t milk her properly, she’ll go dry before her time.”
“Two jugfuls will do me.”
“I’ll show you how to get round her, that’s if you want me to.”
“Please do,” he said, thinking that he’d rather take lessons from her than from Salmo or the Proker.
The dead sailor, who was stretched on a door with a sheet over him, was surrounded by a ring of men and women, among them a pint-sized priest reading Latin from a book. After a while he stopped reading and led the group in a gabbled Our Father and Hail Mary.
“Is he one of ours, Father?” Salmo asked.
“No, this one’s for Minister Hazlitt.”
“You saw it in the book?” Salmo inquired.
“I saw it in his bloated face.”
The priest put his stole in his pocket, and, as he turned to go, asked one of them to go up to Straid and tell the minister about his unfortunate fellow-Protestant.
“He was a countryman of yours,” the Proker told Coote. “A man by the name of Enright, Richard Enright. Father McNullis says he was a lieutenant-commander.”
“How does he know?”
“The dead man was carrying a wallet. Ned Curran found it next to his skin. He gave it to McNullis, who put it in his pocket, notes and all.”
“Banknotes?”
“Over three hundred pounds,” the Proker winked. “He handed back a tenner and told Ned to share it between every house in Garaross. Timideen said it was the most charitable deed since the Good Samaritan.”
“Rather irregular, I should say.”
“Not even an Irregular would do it, Mr. Coote.”
As he walked home, he overtook Father McNullis, who was talking to a big, handsome woman at the well.
“I don’t think we’ve met.” The priest offered him a hand that was whiter and softer than his own. He was no bigger than Timideen, and he exuded the self-confidence of a man for whom the delights of this world are only a foretaste of truer delights to come.
“The dead Englishman went to Minister Hazlitt, so it’s only fair that I should have you. Which school of prayer do you belong to, his or mine?”
“Neither. Or, more to the point, none.”
“You’re fair game, then. Rest assured that I consider it my duty to bag you,” the priest smiled.
“You’ve got the dead man’s papers, I believe,” Coote said, when the big, handsome woman had gone off with her bucket.
“Yes, I have. Sergeant Blowick will be wanting them, I’m sure.”
“And the money?”
“That was a godsend. It couldn’t have come at a better time. I’m going to build a new bridge with it. The County Council, you see, refused me public money for the job.”
“What about the dead man’s family? Don’t they have a claim to it?”
“The dead man is now in a place where no family can help him. I can, though. A word at court is better than a pound in the purse. I’ll say Mass once a week for the repose of his soul.”
“What if the police ask you to hand over everything?”
“Here the police only enforce the law, they don’t make it.” He gave a roguish laugh and left Coote nonplussed in the road.
At home Coote looked through John White’s papers and the letter from the girl called Angie. Four men went by, carrying the dead man on a door, their faces averted from the smell. Was he John White or Richard Enright? Surely it did not matter. It would be folly to see in a man with two names and two identities a manifestation of one’s own insecurity. There must be a simple and practical explanation. Enright could have been a spy posing as John White. That might explain why he’d kept White’s papers in his tunic pocket and his own next to his skin. Or he could have been a friend who was carrying White’s papers in order to return them to the bereaved Angie. The obsessive mind must not be allowed to grind itself out of touch with external reality. The sensible thing was to forget both White and Enright and allow Minister Hazlitt and Father McNullis to get on with it. One would read over the body and the other would use the money to erect a bridge rather than a headstone.
“I’ll show you how to milk her now,” Consolata called through the door.
First of all she scratched Alex behind the ears, then stroked her neck and dewlap. When Alex was at her ease, she sat on a three-legged stool with her head against the cow’s flank and milked with both hands so that each succeeding spurt made different music in the pail from the one that had gone before. After a while she gave the pail to Coote and said that there was as much again to come. He milked exactly as she had shown him until the pail was half-full. Then she got a tin pandy from the house and did a round of the teats again for what she called “the strippings.”
“The strippings are the last and richest of the milk at each milking. You should keep it separate from the rest because it’s too good to mix.”
“And what should I do with it?”
“If you want to be strong, you should drink it.”
She laughed as if there were no denying it. She wasn’t strikingly pretty, but she was pleasant looking, and whatever she said seemed to have the force of common sense while she was saying it. When she’d gone, he told himself that he could read her like a book. She was open and sensible, not in the least mysterious, the kind of girl who would bring you an ounce of tobacco from the shop and remember to give you the right change in the bargain.
He spent the rest of the morning digging the field behind the garden and thinking about the dead man’s face or what was left of it. Sometimes he thought of Salmo and the Proker, and when he thought of them he drove the spade deeper into the ground. He also thought of Timideen O’Gara and Father McNullis, all of them limpets on a rock clinging with sea-cold suckers.
The field had been under corn the previous year. The soil was sandy and loose, not too hard to dig, but by noon his back was stiff and the skin of his forearm red from chafing against his knee as he levered up each spadeful and split it with the side of the blade.
“It’s only my first day,” he told himself. “If I drink the cow’s strippings and don’t weaken, I shall be as hardy as the best of them by harvest time.”
Just before lunchtime Salmo came up the road carrying his dog in a back-creel. He did not want yet another conversation about seed potatoes, but Salmo was already in full flow.
“I’m sorry about last night,” he said.
“Never mind, it’s of no importance.”
“I wouldn’t like you to think that I was spying on you. I saw something going round your gable, and I stopped for a minute because I knew it was the Proker. I went over to look and before I could say Jack Robinson he had me nobbled. I’m stronger than he is, but I’m a peaceable man, and I want you to know the truth. He’s as cute as a fox. He blamed me for the very thing he was doing himself. The badness was on his mind, he didn’t have far to look for a lie.”
“Why are you carrying your dog?” Coote wanted to forget the Proker.
“He won’t stay at home, and he’s too old to walk. You can see for yourself. His eyes are closing and there are bald patches on his legs and tail. He’s over sixteen; that’s ninety-six for a man.”
“It would be a mercy to put him down.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you knew how I got him. I was coming home from a fair in Ardara and I met a servant boy going out to drown a pup. He didn’t want to do it, but he had his orders, so he asked me if I’d take him. I said I would and he told me his name was Kifflog. Before he was a year old he began worrying sheep, and I thought I’d have to put him down. Then I said to myself that if I were a he-dog, I’d prefer to be alive and quiet than completely dead. So I got a knife and cut him, and he’s been as quiet as a lamb ever since. Ah, Kifflog and myself are close. When you castrate a pup, a ram lamb or a bull calf, you have a special relationship with them forevermore.”
He escaped into the house from Salmo’s extravagant ramblings. Everyone he met seemed to be competing for his skeptical ear, when all he desired was the tranquillity to find the right direction alone. Over lunch he tried to figure out the best way of dealing with Salmo and the Proker. He didn’t want to acquire a reputation as a starchy Englishman, aloof from the common concerns of his neighbours, and neither did he wish to be drawn into a running feud between two prickly bachelors. As he looked out of the window, the big, handsome woman went by on a bicycle. He now knew where she lived, and he also knew that she was so strong that cycling uphill was no effort. The rear wheel of her bicycle vanished round the corner, leaving a kind of vacuum in his mind that the white-loined cow coming up the road did not manage to fill.
“I came here,” he said, “to find unity of experience, to escape from the criticism and counter-criticism of the split self that continues to refuse wholeness and reconciliation. I am a man of many part-selves, and such a man can be absent from what other people see as ‘his life’ for days, even weeks, on end. In Dublin people realised that I was absent and thought me stand-offish. Here I must try to maintain an illusion of presence by maintaining the illusion of participation. I shall listen to Salmo, Timideen and the Proker and nod now and then in agreement. I shall become a mute figure in the landscape seen from far away, a fisherman on a rock in the evening, Ned Curran in Poll a’ Dubh-Lustraigh, observed but still unknown.”
The following week a family of tinkers from Mayo pitched their tent where the road was widest above the water called the Deán. The man sat on an old saddle in front of the tent, smoking his pipe and making tin cans. The women of the townland came with vessels of all sizes to have them mended, and men who lacked a woman came too. The Proker had a new leg put in his skillet-pot, and Salmo had a new pandy made for milking. One evening Coote went down to the tent with a leaking saucepan and found Salmo trying to buy one of the tinker’s horses, a sorry-looking animal with big, yellow eyes, knock-knees and cracked hooves.
“All he needs is six weeks’ constant grazing to put the sheen back in his coat,” the tinker was saying.
“It will take money and more weeks than six to make a working horse of him.” Salmo turned as if to walk away.
“You can have him for a fiver, if you don’t expect luck-penny.” The tinker, with unconcerned finality, picked up his soldering iron.
“I’ll gave you four pounds if you give me four bob back.” Salmo walked off and Coote followed him.
“You can’t be serious. That wind-broken old nag is only fit for the knacker’s.”
“If I had him, the clover of the Wide Park would soon put flesh on his bones. I’ll go back in a minute and then you can ask us to split the difference.”
After an hour of haggling, Salmo bought the horse for £4 17s 6d and Coote went home with his soldered saucepan. He made two rubber eels from a piece of inner tube he had found on the road and tied four or five flies from sheep’s wool he had plucked off the wire fence below his house. He made the flies to different lengths, because he wasn’t sure which length was best, then he spent an hour searching for live eels in the Deán, because he wanted to test them against the artificial eel to see which was the more killing. He became so absorbed in what he was doing that he forgot about Salmo and the horse; he even forgot about the Proker.
At six he went over to the sea and found a little inlet with a flat rock he could stand on at high water. He didn’t know the name of the inlet or if it was noted for fishing, but he killed two good-sized pollack with the rubber eel at tide-turn. The sky was cloudy and twilight came quickly, turning reefs and rocks into blurred shapes among vague shadows. He put on one of the flies because he thought the fish might see the white of the wool better than the red of the rubber in the thickening light. A sea bird he did not recognise flew low over the water with its neck outstretched. As it melted into the dusk, he had a distinct impression of a salty smell all round him and of a man fishing from another rock further up the inlet. It was only an impression, an eerie sense of an alien presence. When he turned his head to make sure, there was no one there and the salty smell had gone.
He knew that he shouldn’t stay, but, as if he had no alternative, he continued casting. Though he kept his eye on the water below, trying to anticipate where the white fly would appear each time, he couldn’t help glancing sideways, half-longing to see something and at the same time dreading what it might be. Then, as a dying fish fluttered in his bag, his heart froze between beats. He put up his rod. Above him the cliffs were dark against the lighter sky. There was no one looking down and no one fishing below. He snatched his bag from the rock and, without once glancing back, hurried up through the grey, misshapen boulders.
When he reached the top, he sniffed the wind. There wasn’t even a hint of salt. With a sense of relief he looked down on melting shadows blurring the edges of rock and water.
“Wherever I go I’m followed,” he said. “Even in this place of isolation it is not possible for a man to be alone. But it’s all too possible to feel lonely.”
After supper he wrote another letter to Philip Woodwind, in which he omitted to mention what was uppermost in his mind, the drowned sailor and the grey fisherman. He was convinced now that he had seen something, because the shape he recalled was grey. If he’d seen nothing, he reasoned, he would not have seen a colour. Though he tried and tried, he could not say what was grey—beard, hair, skin or clothes.
He thought he might read his book, but his mind was not on the Great War. He was almost relieved, therefore, when the Proker walked in without knocking.
“Have you heard the news, Mr. Coote?”
