After the Lockout. Darran McCann

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Charlie follows me onto the Number 14 tram. My old route. Once upon a time I knew every tram driver in Dublin but I don’t recognise this young, ignorant-looking fellow with the shirt collar too small on him. He yanks the handbrake too sharply and rings the bells like he’s Quasimodo. Everything about him screams non-union. A bastard scab. We sit down among the well-heeled, law-abiding south-siders and trundle past Carson’s house, the Stephen’s Green and the College of Surgeons, still pocked and scorched by bullet and fire. Ladies in expensive fabrics promenade prettily beneath the awnings of Grafton Street. They’re carrying parasols. In Ireland. In November. Businessmen, bankers, professionals in starched collars walk stiffly around College Green, Trinity College, Westmoreland Street. Little boys and girls strut after their parents in collars and jackets and short pants, and there’s a fat Metropolitan peeler on every corner watching protectively over the oppressing class. We cross the Liffey to the north side, where the oppressed live. The Kapp and Peterson building stands on the corner of Bachelor’s Walk and the street they call Sackville and we call O’Connell, unscathed and alone like a cigar stump in an ashtray. Further up, the shell of the General Post Office stands at the centre of a square half-mile of rubble. I look at Charlie. At where his leg used to be. I shake my head. ‘What possessed you? Home Rule? Rights of Small Nations?’

      ‘Can’t say it was. Can’t say I even understand what any of that stuff means.’

      ‘Little Catholic Belgium then, being raped by the Protestant Hun?’

      ‘I didn’t give a damn about Belgium nor about the Hun either. I just wanted to see what this Great War was like. I wanted to get a gun, see a bit of the world, and feel like a grown man.’

      The bastard scab announces the Nelson Pillar and we hop off, electric cables crackling overhead. We reach Montgomery Street. Canvas awnings promising Meats, Drugs, Tobacco or News shade the broad pavements of Monto and gentlemen in fine suits walk quickly with their heads down, hoping not to be seen. A gang of malnourished, barefooted gurriers, none more than ten or eleven, idle by the corner and eye us suspiciously. There’s an army of gurriers in this city, I see them all the time, trying to huckster a living either side of the tram line. Some beg, some pick pockets, some shine shoes or hawk early editions of The Herald. These lads are typical: bony and dirt-caked with narrow, cynical slits for eyes and cigarettes clamped between black teeth. ‘Have you a penny to give these lads?’ I say, and Charlie stops to rummage in his tunic. I take a couple of pence from my pocket.

      ‘Ah, keep your money, mister. You’re Citizen Army, aren’t ye?’ says one of the gurriers. I nod. ‘We’ll not take an’ting off you, but we’ll take it off your man.’ He points to Charlie, ‘John fucken Bull, wha?’

      Further up the street two women lean out of a ground-floor window of a tenement. One of the women is big and brassy and could be anywhere between thirty and sixty. Her face is painted white, her lips are scarlet and her head is covered by a raven-black wig, stacked high and precarious. The other one is only a young thing. She’s painted and dressed up the same but that only makes the contrast all the more obvious. The usual combination: an old whore for the young lads fresh up from the country with dreams and virginities intact, and a young floozy for the older men. Working girls festoon most of the windows around here.

      ‘Come on in till I wet yer willy mister,’ jeers the old whore, cupping her hands around her chest. We walk on. The young floozy catcalls after us, are we men at all at all. Peggy O’Hara is leaning out the bottom window of the tenement I live in. Peggy is our tenement’s old whore. Charlie’s appalled that I live here, he can’t hide it.

      ‘Howya, Victor. Who’s your friend?’ says Peggy, pushing forward her young floozy, a pretty wee thing, perhaps fifteen with big, bewildered brown eyes and cheeks plastered preposterously in rouge. ‘Dolores here’s a real patriot. If he’s a friend of yours, she might do him a discount.’

      ‘Only a discount, not a free go, for a national hero?’

      ‘Look around you, Victor. Youse heroes have damn near put us out of business.’

      She’s right. This place used to be black with soldiers, all loose change and aggression, looking for a good time in the red-lit windows of the Second City of the Empire. But the soldiers are confined to barracks now. Of course the high-end houses for the rich are still here, and go out the back of any pub on a Friday night, you’ll see the bottom end of the market relieving careless working men of their pay packets; but the servicemen were always Monto’s bread and butter. The Monto girls have cut down more British soldiers with knob rot than all the generations of rebels ever managed with muskets and pikes.

      ‘Better to die on your feet than live on your knees,’ I say.

      ‘I make my living on my knees.’

      I have to laugh. Whores are my favourite capitalists. They’re the most honest, and often among the smartest. Every smart whore I’ve ever met has the same dream: to own her own place and run her own girls. Peggy O’Hara’s only complaint about the grinding boot of capital is that she’s not wearing it.

      We don’t go inside. No detours, Mick said. ‘It’s an eye-opener around here, isn’t it?’ I say.

      ‘I’ve been here before,’ Charlie replies. ‘I was billeted at Beggar’s Bush before they sent us to France. СКАЧАТЬ