girl he had turned away from because his mother had sent him a Virgin Mary from her dreams? Mr Lynch was not an honest man. It was a lie when he said that shame had kept him from marrying. It was his mother who prevented that, with her dreams of legs on fire and her First Communion statues. Mr Lynch had chosen the easiest course: bachelors might be gloomy on occasion, but they were untroubled men in some respects, just as men who kept away from the glory girls were.
‘Isn’t it nice cake?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘This time next year you’ll be in the sawmills.’
‘I will.’
‘It’s good there’s work for you.’
‘Yes.’
They ate the two pieces of cake and then she cleared away the dishes and put them in the sink. He sat on a chair by the range. The men who’d been loitering outside Kelly’s Hotel might have driven over to Clonakilty by now, he thought. They’d be dancing with girls and later they’d go back to their wives and say they’d been somewhere else, playing cards together in Kelly’s maybe. Within the grey cement of the Coliseum the girl who’d been given the box of chocolates would be eating them, and the man who was with her would be wanting to put his hands on her.
Why couldn’t he say to his mother that he’d drunk three bottles of stout in Keogh’s? Why couldn’t he say he could see the naked body of Mrs Taggart? Why hadn’t he said to Mr Lynch that he should tell the truth about what was in his mind, like Quigley told the truth? Mr Lynch spent his life returning to the scenes that obsessed him, to the Belgian woman on the ground and the tarts of Piccadilly Circus. Yet he spoke of them only to fatherless boys, because it was the only excuse for mentioning them that he’d been able to think up.
‘I have this for you,’ she said.
She held towards him an old fountain pen that had belonged to his father, a pen he had seen before. She had taken it from a drawer of the dresser, where it was always kept.
‘I thought you could have it on your fifteenth birthday,’ she said.
He took it from her, a black-and-white pen that hadn’t been filled with ink for thirteen years. In the drawer of the dresser there was a pipe of his father’s, and a tie-pin and a bunch of keys and a pair of bicycle clips. She had washed and dried the dishes, he guessed, racking her mind to think of something she might offer him as the surprise she’d invented. The pen was the most suitable thing; she could hardly offer him the bicycle clips.
‘Wait till I get you the ink,’ she said, ‘and you can try it out.’ From the wireless came the voice of a man advertising household products. ‘Ryan’s Towel Soap’, urged the voice gently. ‘No better cleanser.’
He filled the pen from the bottle of ink she handed him. He sat down at the kitchen table again and tried the nib out on the piece of brown paper that Mrs Keogh had wrapped round the rashers and which his mother had neatly folded away for further use.
‘Isn’t it great it works still?’ she said. ‘It must be a good pen.’
‘That’s a funny thing to write,’ his mother said.
‘It came into my head.’
They didn’t like him being with Quigley because they knew what Quigley talked about when he spoke the truth. They were jealous because there was no pretence between Quigley and himself. Even though it was only Quigley who talked, there was an understanding between them: being with Quigley was like being alone.
‘I want you to promise me a thing,’ she said, ‘now that you’re fifteen.’
He put the cap on the pen and bundled up the paper that had contained the rashers. He opened the top of the range and dropped the paper into it. She would ask him to promise not to hang about with the town’s idiot any more. He was a big boy now, he was big enough to own his father’s fountain pen, and it wasn’t right that he should be going out getting minnows in a jam jar with an elderly affected creature. It would go against his chances in the sawmills.
He listened to her saying what he had anticipated she would say. She went on talking, telling him about his father and the goodness there had been in his father before he fell from the scaffold. She took from the dresser the framed photograph that was so familiar to him and she put it into his hands, telling him to look closely at it. It would have made no difference, he thought, if his father had lived. His father would have been like the others; if ever he’d have dared to mention the nakedness of Mrs Taggart his father would have beaten him with a belt.
‘I am asking you for his sake,’ she said, ‘as much as for my own and for yours, John Joe.’
He didn’t understand what she meant by that, and he didn’t inquire. He would say what she wished to hear him say, and he would keep his promise to her because it would be the easiest thing to do. Quigley wasn’t hard to push away, you could tell him to get away like you’d tell a dog. It was funny that they should think that it would make much difference to him now, at this stage, not having Quigley to listen to.
‘All right,’ he said.
‘You’re a good boy, John Joe. Do you like the pen?’
‘It’s a lovely pen.’
‘You might write better with that one.’
She turned up the volume of the wireless and together they sat by the range, listening to the music. To live in a shed like Quigley did would not be too bad: to have his food carried down through a garden by a niece, to go about the town in that special way, alone with his thoughts. Quigley did not have to pretend to the niece who fed him. He didn’t have to say he’d been for a walk when he’d been drinking in Keogh’s, or that he’d been playing cards with men when he’d been dancing in Clonakilty. Quigley didn’t have to chew tea and keep quiet. Quigley talked; he said the words he wanted to say. Quigley was lucky being how he was.
