Saints and Sinners Read online

  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 divorcée 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 divorcée, 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.

  One appointment in March with my doctor had been switched to evening. The night was dark and foggy when I got out, and the warm lights of the pub were indeed inviting. The atmosphere was completely different from that of daytime. Such hub and gaiety that, as I entered, I already felt a little intoxicated. Moreover, it was packed. At a large round table a birthday party was in full swing, and a young, obese woman was literally submerged by bunches of flowers and basking in her role as guest of honor. I made my way to the counter where Rafferty was standing and ordered a glass of white wine. Once I had been served, he moved me along to a second counter, where no one was drinking, to avoid the crush. For a while we did not exchange a word. Instead, we studied the array of bottles that were stacked on the top shelf, with their proud labels in gold or black or russet, scored with ornate lettering and coats of arms, testaments to their long lineage. On the lower shelf were the bottles placed upside down, their necks fluting into the clear plastic optics. Every pub, Rafferty said, gave a different measure, and Biddy’s was popular because they gave five millimeters extra on a small whisky or vodka. Pondering this for a moment, he said that with drink the possibilities were endless, you could do anything or thought you could. Moreover, time got swallowed up, or more accurately, as he put it, got lost.

  A few years after his father went home, his mother died. His father, as he believed, had killed her, had worn her out. The telegram came with the sad news, and he set out, as he said, for Victoria Station, to catch Slattery’s coach that fetched passengers to the boat at Holyhead. Never made it. Went on benders along the way in various pubs, lads sympathizing with him and saying maudlin things, until the day had turned to night and the coach had left. I’ll always regret that I didn’t go, he said.

  It was quite a while after that the drink got a hold on him, but he knew it was all connected, all part of the same soup. He’d work for six weeks and then booze. Then he’d work the odd day, get a few bob to buy cider, and before long, he was loafing. Mattresses under the bridges, men from every corner of Ireland, gassing at night, talking big in their cups, then arguing and puking in the morning, delirium tremens, seeing rats and snakes, sucking on empty bottles.

  One morning (Rafferty continued), I crawled out from under a quilt to go and get a fix. Usually a few people were in the streets going to work or coming from night work, and they’d give you something, especially the women, the women had softer hearts. On the other side of the street I saw a woman in a belted white raincoat looking across at me. It was Madge, who’d married Billy.

  She came over, and I can still see her thinking it but not saying it, “You should see yourself, Rafferty, your dignity gone, your teeth half-gone, your beautiful black hair gone gray, and your eyes glazed.”

  I said, “How’s Billy?” and she said, “Billy’s dead and gone,” and her eyes filled up with tears. I could hardly believe it, Accordion Bill that had been such a swank, the two of them such swanks on the dance floor, winning medals and drinking rosé wine. Billy had left the building work after they got the franchise of a pub over in St. Martin’s Lane, which, as she said, was the ruination of him, of them. Then all of a sudden, she pulled a little notepad from her pocket and thrust it into my hand. This was the chance encounter he believed she had been waiting for, to meet someone from the old days, so that she could show it. Her history, jotted down at different times, often a scrawl and with several colored inks.

  “Badly beaten up again. Internal bleeding, rushed to hospital and nearly lost the baby.”

  “Bill not home for three days and three nights, searched up and down the high street, found him in an allotment with other blokes drinking cheap cider, didn’t even recognize me, brought him home, cleaned him up, washed him, shaved him, promised to get him new clothes when I got my pay packet.”

  “Billy wept in my arms half the night and I plucked up the courage and I asked him why did he drink like that and his answer was to blank things. I said what things. He said something happened, and that’s all he’d say. Something happened. Took it to his grave he did.”

  “Another time I wakened, and he was stuffing pills and whisky down my neck, half-unconscious at the time. He wanted to be dead and he wanted us to go together because we loved one another. ‘Go together,’ I shouted, and two young children in the very next room.”

  “His mother was an Aries. On her 70th birthday I got him the ticket to go home. I said have a drink, have a few drinks, but promise me you won’t get blotto, if you love me, promise me that, and he did and we hugged. He got to his sister’s house very early in the morning, and the little niece was pulling at him to put on a CD, and his sister went into the kitchen to put on the kettle when he collapsed in the doorway. Never wakened again.”

  I handed it back, and she said, “I still love him…. Will you tell me why I still love him, Rafferty?” I couldn’t. As she ran to catch the bus she turned back and shouted, “No one is given a life just to throw it away.” It done something to me. I went back to the tiny room beyond Holloway that a priest had got for me. I rarely set foot in it, because I preferred being under the bridges with the bums, but I went that morning. There was a mirror I got off a ship and seeing how I had fallen, I turned its face to the wall. I started to clean up, emptied things, worn tubes of toothpaste, eye lotion, old socks, and jumpers, and put them all in a bin bag. Then I got the Hoover from under the stairs and Hoovered, and I poured bleach into a can of water and scrubbed the windowsills and the woodwork. Standing in the shower, watching the pictures of little black umbrellas on the plastic curtain, I made this pact with myself. I couldn’t quit the drink. You could say that I half won and I half lost. I set myself a goal, one pint in the morning and two pints at night and not a drop more, ever, except maybe for a toast at a wedding.

  “A woman,” he said, looking at me almost bashfully, “a woman can do something to a man that cuts deep. Madge did it, and so did my mother.” The night before I left home for good (he went on) my mother decided that we would pick fraughans for a pie. They are a berry the color of the blueberry, but more tart, and they grew in secret places far up in the woods. It was one of those glorious summer evenings, the woods teeming with light, with life, birds, bees, grasshoppers, a sense that the days would never be gray or rainy again. We were lucky. We filled two jugs to the brim, our hands dyed a deep indigo. For some reason my mother daubed her face with her hands and then so did I, and there we were, two purple freaks, like clowns, laughing our heads off. Maybe the laughing, or maybe the recklessness emboldened her, but my mother squeezed my knuckles and said she had something to tell me, she loved me more than anything on this earth, more than her hot-tempered husband and her two darling daughters. It was too much. It was too much to be told at that young age, and I going away forever.

  At times, he said after a long silence, he had toyed with the idea of going home, to visit the grave, when he saw Christmas decorations in the shop windows and raffles for Christmas cake, or got the cards from his sisters, who were now grown up and had married young and moved away. Except that he never went. “If I went home I would have had to kill him,” he said, his sad gray eyes looking into mine, unflinchingly.

  One Sunday in summer I was enlisted to help at a car-boot sale in a warehouse outside London. Adrian had organized it, so as to collect money to send deprived children to the seaside for a week’s holiday. I was assigned to the bookstall—mostly tattered paperbacks with their covers torn off, a few novels, and a book about trees and plants indigenous to the Holy Land, pictures with panoramic views accompanied by beautiful quotations from the Bible. Rafferty was impresario, steering people to the various folding tables, to ransack for bargains. The offerings were motley—winter and summer dresses, worn blankets, quilts, men’s shirts, crockery, car tires, and stacks of old records.

  A young nun, her blue nylon veiling fluttering down her back, did brisk business selling cakes, pies, loaves of bread, and homemade jams that had been, as she proudly said, made in the mother house of her order. The other stand that drew a crowd was a litter of young pups in a deep cardboard box, mewling and scampering to get out. They were spaniel and some other breeds. One child, whose birthday it was, lifted his favorite one out, a black and white puppy with a single russet gash on the prow of its head, and as the father handed over two coins, numerous children clamored for a pet.

  Though business was not great, Adrian pronounced it an out-and-out success. We packed the unsold stuff and swept up to give some semblance of cleanliness to the place. As we were being driven back to London in a van, Rafferty asked courteously if I would care for a drink before setting out for home. We got dropped off in a part of London that neither of us was familiar with and that was anything but inviting. Blocks of tall, dun-colored flats veered towards the sky. They were of such deliberate ugliness their planners must have determined that those who would live in them would do so in unmitigated gloom. A scarlet kite flew above them, sailing in its desultory way, now and then flurrying, as if a sudden swell of wind had overtaken it, and we could not but express the hope that it would never return to the ugly ravine whence someone, perhaps a child, had dispatched it. Nearby was a playground, more like a yard, bordered with a line of young poplars, beyond which youths yelled and shouted at one another as they played different ball games, the taller ones converged around a basketball net. Dogs ran around, barking ceaselessly.

  We could see the sign for a pub, but the entrance eluded us. It was tucked in between a Catholic church, which we recognized by the cross on its gray-blue spire, and a community center for youths, but though we went up and down several flights of concrete steps and under dark, foul-smelling concrete archways, we kept returning to the same spot. A young Irishman in shorts offered to be of assistance, but said we must first have a peep in the window of the Catholic church, because the altar, brought from Europe centuries previous, was priceless. The church was locked, as evening Mass had been said. We looked through a long stained-glass window and saw an empty room with only a few pews. The altar, set back from the wall, had intricate sprays of gold leaf and was flanked with stout gold pillars. He was a most talkative young man, and pointing to the vista of flats, he listed the crimes that were rife there. He was a community worker and helped the local priest, whom he pronounced his hero. With ebullience, he produced a map of the area, where, with green drawing pins, he had highlighted the scene of three murders, all connected with drugs. Then he descanted, as might an aficionado, on the type of drugs that were being sold, their quality, and the astronomical prices they fetched. He asked us to guess how many languages were current in the neighborhood and then answered for us, over twenty languages, and the Irish no longer in the majority, many having gone home and many others having become millionaires.