Moving

by Aubrey Malone

We used to live two doors away from the Town Hall so most nights I went to sleep listening to music – The Everly Brothers, Elvis, Petula Clark, Acker Bilk and Buddy Holly singing ‘Everyday’ in that hiccupy voice he had. Sometimes they had live bands that played old time waltzes. Our local singer was a man called Jack Ruane. He had a band that went around the country playing gigs. He used to learn off the latest hits and sing them to the younger jivers. I could almost feel the reverberations of the floorboards when couples danced on them. As the nights wound to a close I started to hear other sounds – drunks fighting on the street, taxis picking up people to bring them down to Belleek and Bohernasup, over-enthusiastic men trying to make dates with the girls they danced with. Sometimes I looked out the window of my bedroom and saw couples kissing at Fahy’s corner, or lone figures slinking away in the dark if the night hadn’t worked out the way they wanted.
The Aherns lived between us and the Town Hall but my father said they were rough and we weren’t to play with them. Pascal Ahern used to eat worms. He always laughed when he picked one up. He’d say, ‘Look what I’ve got,’ with a big grin on his face. He had protruding teeth so we called him Goofy. We didn’t say this to his face because we knew we’d get beaten up by him if he heard us.
The Connollys lived across the street . They’d come from England originally. Sorcha was the beauty of the family. She’d made a record once called ‘Doonaree.’ Whenever she sang it everyone went quiet. It had a haunting quality about it and so had she. I was always too shy to talk to her but I’d see her at the door of her house going in and out after school or bringing in messages to her mother. Her father owned a garage and sometimes I used to see her at the pumps taking money from the drivers for petrol. She looked like the film star Jeanette McDonald. She was a pure spirit that reminded me of an angel on earth. Any man that was lucky enough to marry her, I thought, could never want anything else in life.
I went to the pictures a lot of nights. The Estoria was just up the road from us.My father was friendly with Mr Mulligan, the manager, and he got us free passes for it. Sometimes I went to see the same film over and over just to use them up. I remember seeing The Dirty Dozen four times one week, going in at different times every night just for the fun of it. We knew the projectionist as well. His name was Paddy O’Hara. He lived on Lord Edward Street and was obsessed with football. Sometimes he cut the films short if he had to get home early to watch a match on the television. I always hoped he didn’t want to get home early if there was a cowboy film on. Once or twice he left the window of the projection room open. By some trick of the light you could see the moving images reflected on the wall of the building opposite. That was almost as exciting to us as being in the cinema.
When we weren’t at the pictures we played football almost non-stop. Sometimes we went down to Belleek for games but mostly we just played on the street. This was our main football pitch. We didn’t think of things like goalposts or winning games, we just kicked the ball wherever we liked when it came to us. Sometimes it got stuck under the cars that were parked on it or between the footpath and one of the tyres. That always delayed the game. There were often cats under the cars as well. They squawked when the ball hit them, or maybe just squawked anyway.
Another game we played was ‘Three to get in.’ That was up against Silvie McConn’s gate. He’d painted it green years ago but the paint was all flaked off from the ball ramming against it. He used to give out stink to us if he saw us but he was away a lot so that wasn’t much. He was a commercial traveller who brought shirts and other things to Castlebar. You’d see them in the back of his car on hangers, dozens of shirts that were all exactly the same just sitting there. At tea-time our mothers appeared at various doors and called us in. Usually we didn’t go. Some of us had to, the ones who’d get beaten if they didn’t, but I wasn’t one of these.
My parents were gentle people. My mother came from a hunting family in Roscommon. We had the walls of our house painted black and yellow, her riding colours. My father drank too much but most people’s fathers seemed to do that as far as I could see. It was an accepted fault. He was a solicitor who worked from home after his office burned down in Bridge Street. His new office was really just the dining-room. He had a big hole put in the wall between this and the kitchen and my mother used to put cups of tea into it when he was seeing clients. We called it The Hatch. I used to be able to fit my whole body into it when I was young if I crouched over but then I got too big.
There was a mahogany table in the room as well. Sometimes we took the files off it and used it to play table tennis. After we were finished playing we had to put the files back again in the same order as they were before so he wouldn’t get annoyed. He didn’t get annoyed often but when he did you weren’t allowed leave the house.
As well as being a solicitor he was a commissioner for Oaths. There was a sign outside the door saying that. I never knew what it meant. I used to think it was something to do with oats, or farmers. People often came to the house to have things signed and he came in with the Bible and had them swear over it. He usually dressed in pinstriped trousers and a black jacket with a grey waistcoat underneath it. He wore studs in his shirt and always had a garter on his elbow. He had a special knife that he used for opening envelopes.
If he was going out for a night he always wore a white scarf even if it wasn’t cold. He often brought me to the Estoria. There was a red velvet cushion kept specially for me there because I was too small to see the screen without it. Mr. Mulligan used to put it on the seat for me, winking at my father as he did so.
His favourite actor was Edward G. Robinson. He called him Edward Robinson, without the G. He often wore a white scarf in his films, especially when he was playing a gangster. My father had the same stocky build as him. Maybe he was trying to be like him with the white scarf.
Sometimes there were priests from the college at the films. They didn’t like us to be out late at night but if I was with my father, which I usually was, they didn’t say anything to me. They were always nice to me when he was there but they’d be different the next day at school, telling me it wasn’t acceptable to be out late at night instead of doing my homework.
I hated school. I cycled down to the college every morning expecting to get beaten for little or nothing. I always had a knot in my stomach going down the Killala Road and across the bridge. The chain had a habit of coming off and I used to get oil on my hands trying to fix it. I had a cloth I kept in my pocket to dry them because you’d get slapped if your hands were dirty going into class.
There was a big hill up to the college. If I was tired from being at a film the night before I’d get off the bike and walk up to the top of it. Then I’d park the bike at a rack where you could slide the front tyre in. Gerry Granahan was usually there before me with a cigarette in his mouth. ‘Here. Have a puff,’ he’d say. I didn’t like smoking but I couldn’t say that to him or he’d make fun of me. I tried not to cough as I inhaled because that would have given the game away.
In the classroom you’d get leathered for not knowing history dates or irregular Irish verbs. One of the teachers had a set on me. We called him Punk. He pulled my locks and threw chalk at me, and sometimes the duster. He didn’t like me because I was a townie. He preferred the country boys, boys who cycled in from Attymas or Bohola with shit on their shoes after being up at 6 a.m. to milk the cows on their farms.
Punk was our geography teacher. He had a globe that he plugged into an electric socket. When he did that it lit up from the inside. I loved looking at it but I didn’t know any of the countries on it except for Ireland and England. Geography was my worst subject. If Punk asked me where the Ox mountains were I’d hardly have been able to tell him, even though you could see the tip of them from one of the school windows. I had no sense of direction, even getting lost sometimes if I had to carry a message from one classroom to another.
He always said I was ‘away with the fairies’ when he was talking and I probably was. My mind was on other things when he gave his classes, like Sorcha Connolly or some of the other girls from the convent that we used to see walking down by the church in their gymslips or their gabardine coats. I could never answer his questions about silage or fishing, his favourite hobby, or a dockyard in Cork run by a man called Verolme that he seemed to be obsessed about. I wrote down what he said about all of these things in a little notebook I had but sometimes I couldn’t even read my own handwriting. He compared it to a spider walking across a page one day. Everyone laughed when he said that. You always had to laugh when Punk made a joke or you’d get slapped, even if the joke was in Irish and you didn’t understand it. He was our Irish teacher as well. His nephew was in the class too. He was from a Gaeltacht area in Donegal and was a fluent speaker. He was set up as our model but one of us could ever come close to him.
Every day when I came home from school I’d have a long face on me and my parents would ask me what was wrong with me. ‘Have you done something/’ they’d say, ‘Have you got into some kind of trouble?’ I never told them about Punk. My day began when school ended. It was like two parts of two totally different worlds. The days were hell and the nights were heaven. Every Wednesday we had a double period of Punk, Geography being followed by Irish. That was my worst morning and the knot in my stomach was always worse then.
Some of the other teachers weren’t too bad. Spud Murphy taught us science and he had an easy manner. His jokes were easier to understand than Punk’s. ‘If it was raining soup,’ he said to me once, ‘You’d be out with a fork.’ He used to let us play with little bits of mercury, running them up and down between cracks of the wood on our benches as if they were ball bearings. In the recreation hall afterwards – we called it The Wreck – we’d play push penny or read the papers that were strewn on the floor under the table tennis table. We never played table tennis because there was no net on it.
One day Gerry Granahan found a photograph of an African woman in The Wreck. It was in a magazine called National Geographic. She was naked from the waist up. It was the first time I’d ever seen a woman’s breasts. Up until then I never even knew they had nipples on them. Gerry told me he had other pictures like that if I wanted to see them. I didn’t know if I did. Pictures like that gave me bad thoughts. Sometimes I had those kinds of thoughts about Sorcha Connolly or some of the women in the cowboy films I went to in the Estoria with big breasts and plunging necklines. Punk said you could go to hell if you ‘entertained’ bad thoughts. I never knew what he meant by that. It seemed to me that I couldn’t do anything about them.
I went to confession to Punk some Saturday evenings. I was always self-conscious because I knew he’d recognise my voice and give me an extra long penance to do. One time I even had to say the whole rosary. But after telling my sins I always felt clean. It was as if something evil had been driven out of myself. I thought of my soul as a physical thing inside my body like a box with the bad thoughts like little devils running around inside it.
After school most days I used to play snooker with Michael Connolly in the Hibernian Hall. He was Sorcha’s younger brother. He was a year behind me in the college but I always liked hanging out with him because we thought the same way about things. We used to swap comics and bubblegum cards with soccer players on them. I was always looking for Jimmy Greaves and he was always looking for Danny Blanchflower. Sometimes he came up to our house and we recorded our voices on a tape recorder our aunt gave us. It had huge big spools on it. We used to imitate Punk’s voice and then play it back, laughing uproariously even though we didn’t sound like him at all.
Other times I’d go down to Michael’s house and listen to him playing the guitar. He liked Gilbert O’Sullivan and a band called Fairport Convention. He was really good on it. Going down to Michael was also an excuse It was also an excuse to see Sorcha. She was always knitting and saying ‘Fizz it!’ when she missed a stitch. If you were lucky she’d sing ‘Doonaree’ for you in that haunting voice.
The Hibernian Hall, or The Hibs as we called it, was beyond the Estoria at the end of Bury Street. There were mice in it but we didn’t mind. We used to chase them into holes in the wall with our cues. There were two snooker tables in the hall and also a card table. Old men sat there with cigarettes dangling from their mouths. They played a game called 110, a variation of 25. One of the snooker tables was fast and the other slow. The slow one had a better cloth so the good players always took that. Michael and myself were content with the fast one. It was fast because the cloth was worn away. At some parts of it you could even see the rubber showing through the green baize. When you hit the ball it was ages before it stopped moving. We used to joke that you could go home and make a cup of tea and it would still be moving when you got back.
People did boxing upstairs in The Hibs. We could hear them punching one another and breathing hard as we played. They stamped their feet hard on the floor. Sometimes it seemed as if they were going to come down through the ceiling. Bits of sawdust fell through cracks in it every now and then. If they landed on the table it made the balls move crookedly.
When I was in my fourth year at school my father retired. ‘There are too many solicitors in the town,’ he said to me, ‘and anyway I’m getting on.’ He was only 58 at the time. He was drinking more now and losing clients as a result. One night soon afterwards my mother told me I was being taken out of school. ‘Why is that?’ I asked her. ‘Because we’re moving to Dublin,’ she said. I thought she was joking but when I looked into her eyes and saw how worried they were I knew it was true. ‘I have to go to hospital,’ she said then. She said there was something wrong with her chest and that she had to have some X-rays to see what it was.
After that everything moved fast. I never got to do the Leaving Cert or even say goodbye to the people in my class. An auction was held for our furniture in the Town Hall and everything was flogged for a fraction of its value. I remember looking at all my father’s thriller books, the ones with the orange covers. They were stacked up on a cabinet we had and sold for a few pence to anyone who wanted them. Our furniture went too, and a carpet I liked even though it had a hole in it.
I went home crying that night and didn’t sleep at all when I went to bed. I left the window of my room open and looked out at the stars. You could get out onto the roof of the house from it and I did that in the middle of the night, sitting on one of the slates just above the evrun where you could see Gildie Ahern’s orchard. I knew it would be the last time I’d see it. We used to rob apples from it when we were children. One day Gildie chased after us with a pop gun threatening to kill us.
The next day my mother called me at dawn. My eyes were falling out of my head from the lack of sleep but I knew I had to get up. She gave me tea and toast and told me not to worry about anything. Upstairs I heard my father snoring. Neither of them had been at the auction. Instead they’d gone down to my cousins who lived across the river to discuss where we were going to be living in Dublin. They were going up there together on the train the next day because it went close to the hospital my mother was being admitted to.
A few hours later a station wagon pulled up outside our door and a man with red hair got out. He gave a look at my mother and then shook my hand. ‘I’m Seamus,’ he said, ‘I’ll be bringing you to Dublin.’ He was related to my cousins. My mother told me they were buying our house and the money was going to buy another one in Glasnevin where we were going to be living from now on. It was smaller than the one we were in but that was because everything was more expensive in the city.
Seamus took a bag I’d packed and put it in the boot of the car. My mother was crying so much she couldn’t say goodbye to me. She just closed the door and went back inside to wake my father.
I don’t remember much about the journey to Dublin. I can still smell the hot leather in the car Seamus drove fast and the towns whizzed by us almost as if they didn’t exist. We didn’t stop to eat but he had a flask of tea and some sandwiches that he gave us. There were two other people in the car besides Seamus and myself. One of them was a woman with a hard face who didn’t speak for the whole journey. The other was a man who’d lost his wife to cancer. I didn’t know anything about cancer except that it was a terrifying disease that had claimed the life of Michael’s uncle in Croydon in the 1950s. Hearing this man talk about it made the journey even more miserable for me than it might otherwise have been. It made me worry about my mother and what might be wrong with her chest.
When we got to Glasnevin it was getting on to evening. A strong wind was blowing. The clouds in the sky looked ominous to me. We pulled up in a cul-de-sac outside a house that had a palm tree in the garden. I saw a man in a tracksuit listening to a Walkman. A woman walking behind him was pushing a pram. A dog with one eye barked as we got out of the car. All the buildings around us looked the same. In the distance a factory belched smoke into the air.
‘Welcome to Dublin,’ Seamus said, smiling again. I knew he was trying to make me feel good but it didn’t work. Everything I knew had disappeared from my life, all the things from the house and all the people I knew as well. There would be no more free passes to the Estoria from Mr Mulligan, no more football games with Michael, no Sorcha Connolly to look at across the street, no music to listen to from the Town Hall as I was trying to sleep at night. My father said I’d be going to a good school but I didn’t care about things like that. All I could think of was my mother’s X-rays and having to face strangers in a school I knew I’d hate and wonder what to say to them because I’d be a misfit and a blow-in.
Seamus told the people in the car he’d be back in a minute. He walked me up the drive to the house. He turned the key in the door and led me in, taking my bag. As I was walking down the hall I banged my head off a lampshade that was hanging off one of the walls, which made him laugh.
‘Do you like the house?’ he asked me. I said it looked all right. ‘Don’t worry about anything,’ he said, ‘You’ll be fine.’ ‘Thanks for bringing me up,’ I said. ‘I can’t stay long,’ he said then, ‘I have to drop the other two off at Chapelizod.’ He pronounced it as ‘Chapelizard.’
After he was gone I went into the kitchen. It had an Aga cooker in it and there was a glasshouse to the side. I sat down and made myself a cup of tea. All there was in the fridge was a packet of Marietta biscuits so I had one of those. I drank the tea and wondered what the future held for me. Outside I heard some people speaking in Dublin accents, accents I’d heard only on television programmes before. They were rough and guttural and I didn’t like them. I knew I’d be hearing nothing else from now on.
I looked out at a little garden beyond the glasshouse and thought of Gildie Ahern’s orchard and the day he chased after Michael and myself with his pop gun. The sun was going down and the night coming on. After a while the phone rang. When I picked it up I heard my father’s voice. ‘I got her into a ward at last,’ he said, ‘I’ll be over to you in a while to tell you all the news.’