Saints and Sinners (2 page)

The same drudge (he continued) every day, but they talked and yarned to keep the spirits up. They would talk about everything and anything to do with home. One lad caused riots of laughter when, out of the blue, he announced that turnips needed the frost to taste sweet. He got christened Turnip O'Mara instantly. Nicknames meant for greater camaraderie, down there in the trenches, a brotherhood, us against them, the bull of a foreman and the contractors and subcontractors, who were merely brutes to us—downright brutes. We might chance upon treasure. The legend was that someone had found a Roman plate worth hundreds, and someone else dug up a wooden box with three gold crosses, which he pawned. All we found were the roots of trees, embedded and sinewy, the odd coal bill, and rotten shells of gas piping that German prisoners of war had laid in the 4os. On Thursdays a Cork man arrived in a green van to hand out the wages, his bodyguard, also a Cork man, wielding a cricket bat in case of robbery. Men felt like kings momentarily. I got four pounds, which I had to hand over to my father, who also made me write a letter to my mother to say how happy I was and how easily I had settled into life in London. So much so that she wrote and said she hoped I would not acquire an English accent, as that would be faithless.

I really knew nothing of London (Rafferty said, apologetically), nothing except the four walls of the room, the broken springs of the bed, the street that led to where the wagons and lorries picked men up, and the big white, wide chapel with three altars, where the Irish priest gave thunderous sermons on a Sunday. I was full of fears, thought everything was a sin. If the Holy Communion touched my teeth I thought that was a mortal sin. After Mass we had a cup of tea in the sacristy and biscuits dusted with sugar. Sundays were awful, walking up and down the streets and looking at the dinginess of the shop fronts and dirty net curtains in upstairs windows and the old brickwork daubed black. My father went off very early of a Sunday, but I never knew where to.

We had one book on the small shelf in our room. It was by Zane Grey. I must have read it dozens of times. I was so familiar with it that I could picture swaths of purple sage and cottonwood in Utah, outlaws, masked riders, and felons trailing each other in the big open ranges, one area peculiarly named Deception Pass. I think I swore that I would go there, because I missed the outdoors, missed roaming in the fields around home and hunting on Sundays with a white ferret. My poor mother was writing at least twice weekly, pleading with my father to come home, saying that she could not mind children, do farmwork, and take in washing, and, moreover, that she was suffering increasingly from dizziness. Eventually my father announced that he was going home, and shortly before he did, something happened. We were in the room, and the landlady called my father to the telephone, which was in the kitchen. I thought that maybe my mother had died, but no, he came back in whistling and smiling, handed me two and six and told me to go to the Italian restaurant on the high street and stay there until he picked me up. I lingered for three hours, but no sign of him. The place was shutting. They were putting chairs up on the tables, and a woman waited, the mop already sunk in a bucket of water, to wash the floor. When I got back, the bedroom door was locked. I knocked and waited and knocked, and my father shouted at me to go down the hall, into the back garden. Instead I went towards the hall door. Not long after, a tall, blond woman, wearing a cape, emerged from our room. She was not a patch on my mother. The way she picked her steps, so high and haughty, I could see that she thought herself way above us. She threw me a strange condescending smile. My father went mad when he saw where I was standing. He said nothing, just drew me into the room by my hair, pulled my pants down and beat me savagely. He kept saying the same thing over and over again as he was belting me—"I'll teach you ... I'll teach you honor ... and I'll teach you obedience ... and I'll teach you to respect your elders. I'll teach you I'll teach you I'll teach you," raving mad at having been found out.

A good bit after my father went home (Rafferty continued), I started going to the pub. I was feeling more independent then. I'd go to the Greek cafe that had been renamed Zorba and have rashers and eggs and fried bread. The kitchen was behind the counter, and the Irish lads had taught Zorba to forget the kebabs and stuffed vine leaves and master the frying pan. Then I'd go straight across to The Aran pub, pure heaven, the warmth, the red table lamps, the talking and gassing, getting a pint, sitting down on a stool, without even exchanging a word. Weeknights were quiet, but weekends were rough, always a fight, because everyone got drunk. The fights could be about anything, a girl, a greyhound, grudges, because a foreman had got rid of six men in order to hire men from his own parish, one wrong word, you know, and the punches started. First inside the pub, then in the vestibule and finally out onto the street, the two heavyweights vowing murder and the crowd of us on either side of the pavement egging them on, not unlike the time of the gladiators. When things got really bad and they were near beat to a pulp, someone, usually the landlord, would call the cops. If two cops came on foot they did nothing. They stood by, because they wanted to see the Irish slaughter one another. They hated the

Paddies. When the Black Maria pulled up, the two men with blood pouring out of them were just thrown into the back, to fight it out before they got to the station. That's what gave us a bad name, the name of hooligans.

You see (he said apologetically), you had to be tough, on the job and off the job, even if you were dying inside. That's how the sensitivity was knocked out of us. But it was still there, lurking. One night in the bar (and here his voice grew solemn) I saw grown men cry. It was like a wake. They were a gang from Hounslow, and they came in shaken and sat silent, like ghosts. Something catastrophic had happened, and they were all part of it, because they saw it with their own eyes. A young man by the name of Oranmore Joe was up on the digger when the hydraulic gave way and the lever slipped. He didn't realize it for some seconds, not until he saw the big steel bucket full of earth hurtling through the air and crashing on top of a fella that was standing underneath. Knocked him to the ground and cut the head off him. Bedlam. Foremen, building inspectors, cops, a blue plastic sheet put around the scene, and men told to go home and report for work the next morning. Not seeing it (Rafferty said), but hearing about it, at first haltingly and then in a burst brought it to life, the awful spectacle of a severed head and the young man's eyes wide open, as one of them put it, like the eyes of a sheep's head in a pot. The worst of it was that Oranmore Joe and J.J., that was the young man's name, came from the same townland, and Joe had actually got him the job. Was like a brother to him. A collection was taken in the pub to send the remains home. Lads gave what they could. A pound was a lot in those days, but several pound notes were flung into the tweed cap that had been thrown onto the counter. From that night on (Rafferty lamented), Oranmore Joe was a different man. He wouldn't get on a machine again. The company bought a new machine, but he wouldn't get up on it. He took ground work. He'd sit in the pub, pure quiet, just staring. Lads would try to cheer him up and say, "No problem Joe, no problem, it wasn't your fault." Except he believed it was. We'd see him thinking and thinking, and then one evening he comes in, in the navy blue suit and the suitcase, whistling, walking around the pub like a man looking for his dog, calling, ducking under the stools and the tables, and then we hear what he's saying. He's saying, "Come on J.J., we're going home," and we knew, we knew that he'd lost it, and we wouldn't be seeing him again. A goner. "Not one, but two lives lost," Rafferty said, gravely.

In the winter of 1962, two years after his father had gone, he almost had to follow. The snow began to fall on St. Stephen's Day and continued unabated for weeks. All outdoor work ceased. Roads and pavements were iced over, the ice so thick that it would break any sledgehammer, and the trenches were heaped with snow. Men were laid off without pay and many headed for the boat. His landlady, a woman from Trinidad, gave him a few weeks' grace, and as luck would have it, he met up with Moleskin Muggavin in the pawnshop, where Rafferty was pawning a pair of silver-plated cuff links with a purple stone. Moleskin was looking for men to do renovation on a hotel over in Kensington. The work was altogether different. Feeding sand, gravel, cement, and water into a hopper, the knack being to get the mixed concrete out before it settled, while it was still fluid. He and Murph, a two-man band, easier, as Rafferty said, than shoveling the blue clay of London and no foreman. Moleskin was boss, walking around with a pencil behind the ear, slipping out to the pub and the bookmaker's from time to time, since he fancied himself a keen judge of bloodstock. After work Rafferty accompanied Moleskin to a cocktail bar that adjoined a casino. It was there, as he said, that he got the liking for chasers. Moleskin was on first names with all sorts of notorious people and, moreover, had a friendship with a divorcee who lived in a big white stucco house with steps up to it. Every evening around nine or ten they repaired there, with bottles of porter, and the divorcee, in peacock-colored dresses and ropes of pearl, would be waiting for Moleskin. Pairs of brown felt slippers were inside the door, as their boots were crusted with snow and wet ice. The brown felt stuff (as he said) reminded him of a tea cozy they had at home, the same material, with a white thatched cottage embroidered on it. Large rooms leading off one another, carpeted heavens. A party was always in full swing, people dancing and sitting on each other's laps, the cocktail cabinet thrown open and, as a particular feature, Moleskin standing by the piano, to give a rendering of "I'm Burlington Bertie, I Rise at Ten-Thirty." At midnight, a girl dressed as a shepherdess would enter, ringing a glass bell, announcing supper. All sorts of Austrian delicacies, Wiener schnitzel, goulash, apple strudel with spicy jams, and, in deference to Ireland, boiled pigs' feet and cabbage.

The hotel work was expected to last at least nine months, but it unfortunately came to an abrupt end the day Moleskin socked Dudley, the boss's son, and flung him between the joists of a floor onto a bed of rubble. Dudley, in his Crombie coat and tartan scarf, would call unexpectedly to make sure we weren't slacking. He was a namby-pamby, always spouting about Daddy, every other word being Daddy. Daddy was a great man, a compassionate man. Daddy loved Ireland so much that he flew home every Thursday evening, so as to step on Irish soil and be reunited with wife and family. This particular day, when he said that Daddy deserved to have a plaque erected in his honor, alongside the liberator Daniel O'Connell and famous dead poets, Moleskin erupted and said to cut out the tripe.

After the fracas that ensued, he and Moleskin kept away from the London area for several weeks. Moleskin knew a man who kept a caravan above the beach at Hove, where they holed up, living on bread and sardines. Passing himself off as a landscape gardener, Moleskin got them piecework, and (Rafferty said) he was once more at the mercy of the shovel.

The last he saw of Moleskin was one evening in The Aran after the frozen ground had thawed and he was working for a different set of contractors, jumping on a blue wagon instead of a brown one (he said) . Moleskin arrived in a green trench coat and announced that he was leaving London to attend on a lady in Lincolnshire, then proceeded to borrow from all before him and promised to invite them for a shooting weekend.

At times over the years, Rafferty was put to work out of London. Once near Birmingham, where they were building a motorway, and another time outside Sheffield, for the construction of a power plant. The men lived in huge camps, sleeping on straw mattresses and fending for themselves in a communal kitchen. But I always (he said, quite shyly) missed Camden. Camden was where I first came, and though I cried my eyes out in the beginning and walked those hopeless sullen streets, it was where I had put roots down. The odd thing was that you can be attached to a place, or a person, you don't particularly like, and he put it down to mankind's addiction to habit.

It was only when he took his leave of me that I realized that darkness had fallen. The white clouds of a few hours earlier had sallied off, and a star flickered wanly in the heavens. People on foot, in cars, and on bicycles were hurrying with that frenzied speed that seizes them at rush hour, and Rafferty had nothing more to impart. I suggested buying him a drink, but not then, nor at any time in the year that I would come to know him, would he accept hospitality. His last vestige of pride.

After Christmas, in the pub, Rafferty was buoyant. He had had a haircut and was sporting a maroon silk handkerchief in the top pocket of his jacket. He had been "away," as he put it. Away was only a few miles north, but to him, confined to his own immediate radius, any journey was an adventure. I knew a little of his movements by now. He drank the one pint in Biddy Mulligan's each morning, returning in the evening to have his quota of two. In the day he walked and, as he said, could be a census collector, if only anyone would employ him. At noon he went to the Centre where he, along with several others, was given a cooked dinner and coffee. Roisin, the woman in charge, was a stalwart friend, and every so often gave him a jacket or a pullover, as consignments of clothes were sent from a Samaritan in Dublin, to help the downtrodden Irish in London. Sometimes he helped out a bit in the garden and was even enlisted by Roisin to give sound advice to other young men who might be in danger of slipping.

Christmas he had spent with Donal and Aisling at their pub in Burnt Oak. They were, he said, gallant friends. The pub shut early on Christmas Eve so as to entertain the visitors, which included him, Clare Mick, who lived over Fulham way, and Whisky Tipp, who had had a stroke, but luckily his brain wasn't affected. Also the lodgers upstairs, three Irishmen, a Mongolian, and a black. Pure heaven, as he put it. Up behind the counter and pull your own pint or whatever you wanted. The light in the pub dimmed, the steel shutters drawn, carols on the radio — "A partridge in a pear tree"—bacon and cabbage for the Christmas Eve dinner, and then, on Christmas Day, as he put it, a banquet. At the start of the dinner, Donal plonked a bottle of champagne in front of each guest, although he and Aisling never themselves touched a drop. What with the roast goose, potato stuffing, sage-and-onion stuffing, roast spuds, the children larking about, crackers, paper hats, jokes, riddles, and gassing, these dinners were unadulterated happiness. This was how you imagine a home could be, Rafferty said, his voice surely belying the melancholy within it.