Smoot had no answer to this and simply stared at her with disdain before turning back to his friend.
“Sure we’ll get along then, will we?” he asked, putting his hands in his coat pockets and nodding at my mother to dismiss her. “We’ll go to our lodgings and then for a bite to eat. I’ve had nothing but a sandwich all day and I could devour a small Protestant if someone was to pour a little gravy over his head.”
“Grand job,” said Seán, and as Smoot turned to lead the way, Seán followed two steps behind with his suitcase in one hand, while Catherine trailed a few feet behind him. Smoot, glancing around, frowned and they both stopped, placed their bags on the ground. He stared at them as if they were both mad before walking on and once again they both followed. Finally, he turned to the pair of them, his hands on his hips in bewilderment.
“Is there something going on here that I don’t understand?” he asked.
“Listen, Jack,” said Seán. “Poor Catherine here is all alone in the world. She hasn’t a job or much money to find one. I said that maybe she could stay with us for a few days, just until she gets herself sorted. You don’t mind, do you?”
Smoot didn’t reply for a moment and my mother recognized the mixture of disappointment and resentment on his face. She wondered whether she should simply say that it was all right, that she didn’t want to be any bother to either of them and that she would leave them in peace, but then Seán had been so kind to her on the bus and if she didn’t go with him now, then where would she go?
“Do you two know each other from back home, is that it?” asked Smoot. “Is this some game you’re playing on me?”
“No, Jack, we only just met, I promise you.”
“Hold on a minute,” said Smoot, his eyes narrowing as he looked at my mother’s stomach, which, five months into my development, was becoming round. “Are you…? Is that…?”
My mother rolled her eyes. “I should take an ad out in the paper,” she said, “for the amount of interest there is in my belly today.”
“Ah here,” said Smoot, his face growing darker than ever. “Seán, has this got something to do with you? Are you bringing this problem to my door?”
“Of course not,” said Seán. “I told you, we only just met. We were sitting next to each other on the bus, that’s all.”
“And sure I was already five months gone by then,” added my mother.
“If that’s the case,” said Smoot, “then why does she become our responsibility? You’ve no ring on your finger, I see,” he added, nodding toward my mother’s left hand.
“No,” said my mother. “And little chance of getting one now.”
“Are you after Seán, is that it?”
My mother’s mouth fell open in a mixture of laughter and offense. “I am not,” she said. “Sure how many times do we have to tell you that we only just met? I’d hardly be setting my cap for anyone after a single bus journey.”
“No, but you’re happy to ask them for favors.”
“Jack, please, she’s alone,” said Seán quietly. “We both know what that’s like, don’t we? I thought a little bit of Christian charity wouldn’t do us any harm.”
“You and your fucking God,” said Smoot, shaking his head, and my mother, strong woman though she was, blanched at the obscenity, for people, as a rule, did not use such words in Goleen.
“It’ll be only for a few days,” repeated Seán. “Just until she finds her way.”
“But there’s very little room,” said Smoot in a defeated tone. “It was just meant to be for the two of us.” There was a long silence and finally he shrugged his shoulders and gave in. “Come along so,” he said. “It looks as if I’m to have no say in the matter, so I’ll make the best of things. A couple of days, you say?”
“A couple of days,” agreed my mother.
“Just until you get yourself sorted?”
“Just until then.”
“Hmm,” he said, striding ahead, leaving Seán and my mother to follow.
The Flat on Chatham Street
As they walked toward the bridge, my mother looked over the side of the railings into the River Liffey, a filthy determination of brown and green making its way urgently toward the Irish Sea as if it wanted out of the city as quickly as possible, leaving the priests, the pubs and the politics far behind it. Inhaling, she pulled a face and declared that it was nowhere near as clean as the water of West Cork.
“You could wash your hair in the streams down there,” she declared. “And there’s many that do, of course. My brothers go to a little creek at the back of our farm every Saturday morning for their wash with a single stick of Lifebuoy Soap between them and they come back shining like the sun on a summer’s day. Maisie Hartwell was caught watching them one time and her daddy leathered her for it, the filthy article. She was after their mickeys.”
“The buses,” declared Smoot, turning around and plucking the butt of a cigarette from his mouth before grinding it out beneath his boot, “go both ways.”
“Ah now, Jack,” said Seán, and the disappointment in his voice was so touching that my mother knew immediately that she would not want to be on the receiving end of such a tone.
“That’s what we call a joke,” said Smoot, quietly chastised.
“Ha,” replied my mother, “ha.”
Smoot shook his head and continued on, and she was free to look around at the city, a place she had heard of all her life that was supposedly full of whores and atheists but that seemed much like home, only with more cars, bigger buildings and better clothes. In Goleen, there was only the working man, his wife and their children. No one was rich, no one was poor and the world maintained its stability by allowing the same few hundred pounds to pass back and forth from business to business, from farm to grocery store and from wage packet to public house on a regular basis. Here, though, she could see toffs in dark pinstriped suits sporting carefully constructed mustaches, ladies in their finery, dockers and boatmen, shop girls and railway workers. A barrister walked by on his way to the Four Courts in full regalia, his black poplin gown inflating in the air behind him like a cape, his white bobbed wig threatening to blow off in the breeze. From the opposite direction, a pair of young seminarians, weaving on the pavement with drink, were followed quickly by a small boy with a coal-blackened face and a man dressed as a woman, which was a creature she had never seen before. Oh, for a camera! she thought. That’d soften their cough in West Cork! As they came to the crossroads, she turned to look down the length of O’Connell Street and saw the tall Doric column that stood halfway along with the statue standing proudly on the plinth, its nose in the air so it didn’t have to inhale the stink of the people it lorded over.
“Is that Nelson’s Pillar?” she asked, pointing toward it, and both Smoot and Seán looked around.
“It is,” said Smoot. “How did you know that?”
“It wasn’t a hedgerow school I went to,” she told him. “I can spell my own name too, you know. And count to ten. It’s a fine thing all the same, isn’t it?”