15
The atomic bomb
brings the men home from every quarter of the earth because the war is not so much over as stunned back into history, and Eneas must be nimble and quick with the employment columns in the newspapers and smell out something to put food in his belly. He’s getting older no doubt and his illness is on his army record so there isn’t a kaleidoscope of happy jobs open to him. At length he finds a job digging in Africa.
Africa in his Sligo head before he goes to Africa is a strange little tinful of fourpenny thoughts. Darkness, but when he gets there, a sun brighter than the creation of the earth. Primitive, but after a few days in Lagos it’s a sort of a Sligo, but bigger, and alive as a Yankee port. So his fourpenny ideas aren’t worth fourpence.
He belongs now the while to the East African Engineering Enterprise Company, with his contract signed and sealed in London, and his next three years indentured more or less to their efforts to bring water into regions catastrophically dry. For if there are to be farms, proper farms with proper European crops, fantastically long canals must be constructed by the EAEE and its indentured men, weird straight canals and bizarre twisting ones joining Muslim districts to Christian and Christian to pagan, good water crossing borders as swift and covert as flightless birds. Men of strength are needed, who can dig like blessed dogs, and have eyes in the backs of their heads like Grecian mythological for whatever tremendous dangers might bear down on them. So Eneas is told at each official juncture, at each signing and briefing and, he might say, preaching session. For Africa makes Bible spouters out of everyone, even the passionate engineers of the EAEE.
He wakes one morning at normal cockcrow in his wooden quarters in Lagos. Already he feels after a mere few weeks of tin cups and strong wine like a Lagos man, and it is just as well. Because this day is the day of his ascent upcountry to the canal works. Into his sun-stiff shirt and simple trousers and on with his stout shoes and then shaved and then a bit of already familiar food and onto the rough trucks and away. In the fashion of a human man.
At his heart, not diminished by the space of time banging about London, or the long sea-miles of the sea voyage, leaning on rails, playing poor cards in the steerage spaces, engaging in endless spieling talk about nothing with a variety of unlikely passengers bound for a hapless Nigeria, at his heart, a soft bird in a nest of dry moss, Roseanne, the flash of her linen dress, her dark easy breasts, every door in the mansion of her good self flung open, and a veritable bevy of owls and wild birds bulleting in and out, rattling the sashes with such screeches and yells of love, by God …
The elderly truck leaves the dwindling city. He’s in mostly with a bunch of Lagos men, so there’s seven pairs of shoes tipping against another seven, each side of the vehicle. The road throws them about familiarly, but it’s not minded, there’s laughter. On top of the truck ride the bound spades as new as gifts, jostling slightly. And the tin container of water bangs about and surges where it hangs from the tailgate. Eneas is missing Roseanne surely, but against that is the wide freshness of this southern clay and the sky so soft and clear it’s a sort of happiness to look at it from the darker shelter of the awning. He suddenly thinks of himself running into the Garravogue and passing drenched through Sligo and he laughs out like a madman. It isn’t taken as madness but more likely spirits as high as the other men’s spirits.
For a good long while after, Eneas is examined by the quiet face of the man opposite him. It’s not offensive.
‘Well, I’ve seen you before, brother,’ says the man finally, almost striking one of his own knees like in a music-hall skit. ‘Do you remember where that was?’
‘I should,’ says Eneas, ‘But…’
‘It’s not so long ago, brother,’ says the man. ‘A year maybe, maybe more.’
‘Is that so?’ says Eneas, but he can’t recall it. As a matter of fact his head is addled in the matter of recent days, and those days further off are in a general state of rebellion.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘don’t you remember? On the boat to Ireland that time.’
‘On the boat to Ireland?’ Eneas says, incredulous.
And any of the other men listening laugh at his surprise.
‘I wasn’t expecting you to say that,’ he say s.
‘I suppose not. Don’t you recall it?’
‘I don’t … I should … These are hard days. The old head…’
‘Of course,’ says the man. ‘How come you’re riding here with us, going digging?’
‘Have myself indentured now to the company for three years, whatever’s in store for me, I don’t know.’
‘Pretty tough work but you look like you can handle it.’
‘I hope so!’ he says, and the other men laughing again. ‘Snakes for breakfast, fevers for lunch, and savages for tea. That’s what we say.’
‘Savages?’
‘Well, we’re all savages, truth to tell. What’s your name?’ ‘Eneas.’
‘Not so common.’
‘It’s a Sligo name.’
‘Sligo would be your home place?’
Eneas finds himself considering this.
‘Not your home place?’ says the man helpfully.
‘Well,’ says Eneas.
‘My name around here is Harcourt, because I was born down there in Port Harcourt, if you know that place.’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Big shipping port.’
‘That’s it,’ says Harcourt. ‘My father, he is a piano tuner and soon after I was born moved to Lagos to be near the pianos of the rich’ — now the other men are listening with their faces turned plainly on Harcourt — ‘and raised me up pretty good, sent me to school even, drove those Christian values into me. All with the shillings he earned, going from house to house, piano to piano, bigwig to bigwig. Not bad for a blind man.’
‘Not bad,’ says Eneas. ‘My father was in the music business too as matter of fact.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes — dance-bands, you know.’
‘Sure, brother,’ says Harcourt, and the truck takes a dip and bangs the men about for a few seconds. ‘Don’t know how we got talking about fathers,’ he says, laughing.
‘Well,’ says Eneas.
‘You play yourself?’
‘What’s that?’
‘You know,’ says Harcourt, ‘you play anything, tootling, or the like?’ And he fingers an imaginary trumpet for further illumination.
‘No, Jesus, no,’ says Eneas.
‘Ah, well,’ says the man. ‘I don’t tune pianos.’
The truck weaves on across its chosen course. The men are content to sit with their hands on their cotton knees and their bodies as loose as they can make them to accommodate the rolling and the toppling. Short deep-red bushes flash by in the torment of heat outside. Burning, burning, but the high yellow sky amiable, kinglike. Must be a fair strain on the axle, Eneas thinks. The truck is British-made, simple and robust, all perfect childish angles thrown against the chaotic terrain, the tyres uniting both, yielding, leaping, simplifying the elegant empires of rocks and burning bushes. Now he looks at the men one by one, wondering at their stories. Every face a life of words. Mothers’ sons. Maybe in trouble some of them like himself, because truly to go out into Nigeria to dig is pretty nigh kin to prison work. Only a desperate man, or a crazy, would go out. A three-year sentence of solitude, and hacking at the earth — thank God. In the Foreign Legion you’d be shooting at local men, here you could dig with them, ear to ear. He saw that film one time on a cold afternoon in Chester, Laurel and Hardy, and poor old Hardy rubbing his foot for ease and finding it was bloody Laurel’s foot! Almost a recruitment film for the Legion that was, the fun they had.
‘That’s — astounding now,’ says Harcourt. ‘Me meeting up with you again like this. Who’d put odds on that? But that’s how the world’s made, you’d have to conclude now and then.’
‘Certainly is,’ says Eneas. ‘Maybe I do remember you … The war years — only hash in the head now.’
Eneas wonders for a moment what the man Harcourt might have been doing in that far part of the world in those years but it isn’t a thought that bothers him. Every last thing was topsy-turvy those times, nothing in its place, people finding themselves in all sorts of queer localities suddenly, homesick maybe, knocked about, half daft in the head…
‘Hey, Eneas,’ says Harcourt. ‘You know how far it is to camp?’
‘Haven’t a God’s notion.’
‘Me neither,’ says Harcourt. The truck fumes on a halfminute. All crimes and sorrows, all mothers, histories, are hidden in the afflicted smoke. ‘That’s how I like it!’
Laughter again.
Moonlight brings Nigeria closer to Ireland. It might be Ireland because the night is still and quiet as a stone. The camp receives them with a mixture of officiousness and good humour. They have their bunks assigned to them and their hours explained and it is just the same as anywhere in the world except Eneas does notice the clash of wit and easiness between the new men and the old hands. The talk is very speedy and he doesn’t catch the gist of much of it and he knows these men would have the same difficulty if they were to find themselves of a sudden on the quays in Sligo, one single Negraman among a few dozen densespeaking Irish. But he’s glad now to be among the grubby tents with the toiling ditch of a canal reaching back up the night-encrusted plain. He eats some kind of vegetable stew with them, and they turn in like sailors on a becalmed sea, and it seems natural enough that Harcourt, the nearest thing to a fellow Irish, lays himself down on the bunk adjacent. Soon the room is a parliament of fireflies, the soft intensifying and dwindling whorl of cigarettes.
Harcourt gives Eneas a pleasant smile for himself. A few of the men gather round a candle stub and flick a pack of grubby cards about. One of the players has a bruised face, three or four dark-blue flowers of bruises, a week or two old. But the storm of violence seems far distant from him now, because his wrecked face frowns and mutters over each shining hand of cards.
‘So, what were you doing there, in Ireland,’ says Eneas, ‘that time I met you?’
‘What did I tell you I was doing?’ says Harcourt, the ash from his cigarette beginning to gather unheeded on the chest of his long johns.
‘I don’t know, since I don’t remember it…’
‘You know Rice’s public house, at the top of Grafton Street?’ says Harcourt.
‘In Dublin?’ says Eneas, a little disorientated to hear those names out of God knew where in Nigeria, from the friendly mouth of a Nigerian.
‘I think I told you I was on holiday! I think I did. Yes, I did. And I think I told you that the priest at home, at home there in Lagos, because, though born in Port Harcourt I have to call Lagos home, since me and my father lived there so many long and busy years, but I told you that already — what was I saying, oh, yes, the priest — can’t remember what I was going to say to you about him … Well, brother, Rice’s. Now that’s a fine establishment. But on the first floor there of Rice’s was this little office of Army Intelligence. You won’t have known that, anyhow. I hope not!’
‘Army — which army?’
That’s right, you got your own army there in Ireland, don’t you? And it’s not like the army here, which is really belonging to Britain and His Majesty himself. No. But, during the war, and secret, as secret as any secret between girls, you know, well, His Majesty’s army kept a little office going there in Rice’s, for the gathering of information generally, in your sweet neutral country, information of invasions, and such like. And me, I was assigned, due to my indubitable talent for eliciting information in an easy and decent manner, I was assigned to travel between Belfast and Dublin on the trains and talk to servicemen in their civvies and the like and to talk to any foreigners, you know, that might like to be talked to and have information they might or might not be aware they had.’
‘By God — and did you gather much of interest?’
‘Of interest … I heard sad tales of wives deserted, of children displaced, I heard tales of love, and history. Men told me small dark secret things that would mean nothing to anyone but were eating them away. I heard of great things done by ordinary people, kind of astonishing things, lives rescued from districts of hell. I heard of women’s breasts cut off and I heard of things so terrible I don’t recall them, I don’t retrieve them from those times I was told them. Up and down on the Belfast to Dublin train, on the Dublin to Belfast, the friendly man, the madman, listening and I tell you, sometimes crying like a child, more often laughing, think of it, what an occupation. Yards and yards of things of interest, but, nothing of use …’
‘Just as well maybe — in Ireland.. .’
‘I don’t know what you mean maybe, but I know what you mean. I was long enough there to know what you mean and not know what you mean. Yes, sir, brother.’
‘There are many strange things about that war, and that’s another strange thing you’ve just told me.’
‘Haven’t you noticed how out-and-out strange as a rule the world is, Eneas, man?’
‘I have.’
‘And how so little of it illumines anything at all. How so little of it shines the least light on the smallest penny of fact or truth?’
‘That thought, that could be something in the Bible, Harcourt.’
‘Most likely is, brother.’
‘So how come you’re out here for the digging yourself, Harcourt?’
‘Eh?’
‘You know, Army Intelligence like you were, how come you’re digging out here? You know, you asked me the same question in the truck.’
‘Did I? See, force of habit. Put me in a moving vehicle and I ask questions I should maybe leave alone.’
‘Oh — I wouldn’t pry. God knows, a man must keep his own counsel. Goes without saying.’
‘Anyhow, Eneas, why I’m here is another story. It’s no mystery. Fact is, I was invalided out — even before the war ended, blast me. I always had — well, this medical problem. But I was able to keep it hidden for a long while. Then one day I failed to keep it hidden, hidden anyhow from the eyes of my officers. They were kind. But I was out, and then home after a while, and you know what the situation is now for work, and I couldn’t find any work using my head such as it is, so I’m out here using my body such as it is, and God help me …’
‘A person’s got to feed himself.’