In the beginning Paddy got along well enough with Johnny McBride after he turned up at the boarding house, though he had his reservations. It was not the first time he had allowed someone to stay over. There was a young Englishman called Henry whom he particularly liked. Henry seemed to have a bit of a chip on his shoulder, but when Paddy got to know him he thought he understood his problem better. Henry was a child migrant, he said, meaning that he’d been sent off to New Zealand without any choice in the matter. He was just a kid and was despatched straight to a farm, treated like a slave and lived in a shed at the bottom of the farmer’s vegetable garden. He got hidings if he didn’t milk the cows fast enough. God knows he’d never seen a bloody cow until he reached New Zealand. Henry stayed a couple of times, a seaman now on a coastal scow, a Teddy boy when he was in port, his clothes so sharp he could walk in a fashion parade, Paddy thought. ‘I don’t know why I was sent out here,’ Henry said. ‘After my parents got divorced they stuck me in a foster home.
But I liked it there, it wasn’t too bad. Next thing I know, my father signed papers saying I was to be put on a ship and sent out here. I don’t really know who I am and nobody wants to tell me.’
‘I know about those we’ans,’ Paddy told him. ‘There were some on the same ship as me coming out here, miserable-looking little buggers. I felt kind of sorry for them. I was having a great time.’
‘I never asked to be transported. You’ve got no idea the things that happened to us kids. Mind you, we didn’t know what was in store for us on the voyage out. Some of the farms we landed up on, this country ought to be ashamed of itself. Your choice to emigrate, not mine.’
‘Yeah, I guess so. I figure you’re right about that.’
Henry was ironing his trousers, intent with perfecting a razor seam, while they had this conversation. ‘You don’t sound so sure.’
‘Sure I’m sure,’ Paddy had said easily. It was best to believe in this, to tell himself it was true. It was meant to be a great adventure, and there was not really a lot to complain about, especially now he had a real girlfriend. He might get used to living in New Zealand and not in Ireland. Although, dreaming ahead, perhaps she would like to go and live in Ireland. Well, chance would be a fine thing, but he couldn’t help but imagine showing her the old town, taking her on the train to the countryside. Grand that would be, yes it would. For now, he had a roof over his head, enough to eat, as many girls as will listen to his chat-up line, though his mother would say they’re a bunch of hussies. Not that he was chatting up any more girls now there was Bessie. He’d told her she was his girl, the only one. It was all very new, this feeling of being in love, and he had to remind himself now and then to keep his eyes to himself. He wished Bessie would stay with him some nights, but she wasn’t free to come and go, he understood that. The hostel where she lived was called Rocklands Hall, a big old mansion set among trees out at Epsom. He once called for her there and felt as if he should be looking for the servants’ entrance, it was so grand. The chatter and laughter of girls filled the stairwell. Before Bessie left with him, he had to meet the matron. She eyed him with cool appraisal: only very special girls stay at Rocklands, her look seemed to imply. That was a night when there was nobody but him staying at 105 Wellesley Street. Later Bessie lay on his bed, her body like a pale flung star. ‘I wish I had somewhere better to take you,’ he said.
Still, 105 was where he lived and he liked to have company in the big empty boarding house, not to have to listen to the creaking boards in the night and wonder whether there was an intruder and whether he would have to bang someone over the head, or get clobbered himself. Henry was a decent bloke, wild like all of them and fired up when he was on the piss, but he was up first most mornings with a fry-up for breakfast. When he went back to sea, the house felt ghostly again, night shadows dancing on the window panes as cars passed, the hooting of their horns leaving trailing echoes in the dark. July was cold, and rain settled over the city so that some nights he couldn’t hear himself think for the sound of it pounding on the iron roof. On Sunday mornings the bells of St Matthew’s woke him, reminding him he had promised his mother he would go to church when he came to New Zealand but never once has he done that. Sunday in Auckland turned his stomach: so pious, the pubs shut, Queen Street so quiet you could shoot a gun straight down the middle and nobody would come running.
And yet, when Johnny McBride turned up on the doorstep with his suitcase, Paddy wished straight away he hadn’t told him he could come. There was something he couldn’t fathom about McBride. He was big, perhaps six two in his socks, his shirt bulging with muscles, but he wasn’t given to standing to his full height, rather in a slouch with his head dropped between his shoulders. Like Henry, he said he was between ships, coastal vessels for the time being, but soon he’d be on something bigger, one of the ships going to England. And he was buggered if he’d be coming back.
‘Are you one of those migrant we’ans?’ Paddy asked. Johnny had this strange hybrid accent, part American, part cockney.
‘Never you mind where I come from,’ Johnny said. ‘Where I come from, that’s my business, you know. I don’t ask you questions and you don’t ask me. We straight on that?’ His face set in a scowl.
‘Sure, dead on.’
‘I’m no kid, all right? I’m twenty-four years old and nobody tells me what the fuck to do.’
Paddy felt himself flinch. ‘My landlady’s going to be back here very soon. You can’t stay too long because I’m not supposed to take in boarders.’ This was true, for Gladys had phoned the day before to say that her friend’s mother was recovering well and that, at the end of the month, she would be back and she hoped all would be in order.
Johnny backed off for a while after that. Paddy thought Johnny needed him more than he needed Johnny. He decided not to charge him anything after all, so then he wouldn’t be beholden to him for the money. One morning when Paddy was in the kitchen, he heard Johnny singing to himself in a harsh, boyish voice. He stood still and listened. It was a song he’d heard often on the boat coming out, but never quite like this, with such an edge of despair:
Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner
That I love London so
Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner
That I think of her wherever I go.
Paddy walked out to the front room, raising his voice to join in, but Johnny stopped short as soon as he appeared.
‘You know nothing,’ Johnny said. ‘Shut up.’
For a few days more, the lodger slid around the house, keeping himself to himself, sleeping late. He got up earlier one morning and cooked breakfast, sausages and bacon, with a good side of toast he’d made on the wire grill. ‘You see, I’m not just a pretty face,’ he said, presenting the meal with a flourish, a tea towel laid on the table as a place mat.
Paddy thought that actually there was nothing particularly good-looking about Johnny, his nose bent as if someone had punched him, his slicked hair thin for a person of his age, as if he would bald early. One of his front teeth was missing, and Paddy wondered what it must be like for a girl to kiss a man with a hole in his gob. Johnny had had a girl to stay over the night before, but she’d gone by the time they sat down to eat.
‘Mate, you’re going to have to push off,’ Paddy said.
‘You telling me to leave?’
‘I’ll get thrown out if the landlady catches you here.’
Johnny swept the plates off the table with his arm and stood up, leaning over Paddy as they smashed. ‘And what about me, punk? Where am I supposed to sleep?’
‘I told you it was just until you got yourself sorted. You’ve done nothing about it, have you?’
Johnny stood, wiping his nose. ‘I’ve got a cold,’ he said, his voice sullen. ‘Do you expect me to sleep under a bridge in my condition?’
Paddy was about to say that he might think about staying with the girl he was so friendly with, but he shut his mouth. He’d heard Johnny’s guttural shouts of enjoyment in the night. Plus, Johnny seemed to be spreading his germs as well as his charms.
Paddy could feel a cold coming on. His throat was sore and his head ached.
Johnny’s face was full of menace. ‘Another night then. Just one more, okay?’
Later, in the afternoon, Paddy walked into the living room and found Johnny cutting his toenails with a knife. ‘That’s bloody disgusting, you manky git,’ he said.
‘You going to fetch me a manicure set, darling?’ Johnny said, spitting the insult in the air. He crooked his little finger above the knife.
Paddy sat down opposite him. ‘This isn’t getting us anywhere,’ he said. ‘That’s a damn big knife.’
‘I always carry a knife, don’t you?’
‘I carried one for a bit in Belfast, yes. My da carried one too. But Belfast is different. I reckon the cops catch you carrying a knife here, you’re in trouble.’ The cops. The words fell from his tongue; he was beginning to sound like a New Zealander. Or an American gangster, like the way McBride talked.
‘You need a knife in a fight.’
‘I don’t like to fight. I only did that in school.’
‘Well, I fight, nothing yellow about me. I carry a knife and I use my feet. When you get a person on the ground you keep him there. I’ve done a bit of prize fighting, bare-knuckle stuff, and earned a decent purse or two. Yeah, I’m not a good man to cross, kiddo. Matter of fact, I like a bit of a rumble. I’ve never lost a fight yet. See, I don’t like people, I reckon most people are better off dead. If they get in my way that’s where they’ll be.’
‘Yeah, well maybe we should go and have a pint,’ Paddy said, hoping to break the impasse. Johnny was scaring him now, working himself up with spittle in the corner of his mouth. He could see the devil was in Johnny.
‘I was in the army,’ Johnny said, as if he hadn’t heard him. ‘The military cops put me in the slammer when I fought, but they never got the better of me.’
‘When were you in the army?’ Paddy asked. It was something that preyed on his mind. Rose told him before he left Naenae that if immigration caught up with him he’d be punished for breaking his bond and sent off to the army on his birthday, when he came twenty, the date just passed the week before — a fact he thought best to keep to himself.
‘Oh, years ago,’ Johnny said, offhand now. ‘Well, we might as well have that drink you were talking about.’
They finished up drinking at the Albert and both of them were drunk when they turned up at Ye Olde Barn that evening. Paddy looked for Bessie, because some evenings she studied in the library and once or twice she had come along to the cafe to meet him, but it wasn’t a place she liked. The first time she’d come she’d been wearing a dress she’d made herself, pink cotton embroidered with daisies, with her cardigan over it. He saw girls looking sideways and raising their finely plucked eyebrows at each other. She wasn’t one of them. If Bessie had her way, they would go down the road to Somervell’s milk bar because she liked creaming sodas made with sarsaparilla, or that’s what she said. He thought it was because she didn’t like the girls at the cafe.
‘Don’t you mind that a fella killed his girl in here?’ he asked her the first time they went to Somervell’s. It was where Frederick Foster, the Englishman, had shot his girlfriend. The story was all over the newspapers, and it was just weeks after he and Bessie had got back together that the man had been hanged.
‘He said it was an accident.’ Still she shivered. ‘His poor mother, she came out here to try and save him. It shouldn’t be.’ He thought then that she had a tender heart.
Paddy yearned to bring Bessie to Wellesley Street again, but while Johnny McBride was there he wouldn’t do that, the place squalid and smelling of rancid fat, and Johnny’s toenails on the floor, wet cigarette butts in the ashtrays. It was like nobody ever taught him how to live a decent sort of life. But Paddy wasn’t going to clean up after him. Nor was he having Bessie slumming it.
The flu hit him next. Paddy stayed in bed, dosing himself on aspirin. He heard Johnny come and go but he didn’t have the energy to argue with him or the strength to confront him. The fever made him dream. His mother appeared beside him, holding a cool compress; he waited for it to descend on his forehead, but when he woke there was nobody there. He slept again and dreamt he was walking through late-autumn leaves in Antrim with a cold wind whipping his face, and, later again the same night, he was on a holiday one spring, the only holiday they ever took as a family, with his mam and his da and little Daniel at Ballycastle, looking towards the streaming headland, his feet surrounded by wild flowers. Daniel held his hand and looked up at him, his freckled face full of trust that his brother Albert would never leave him.
He woke again, sweat streaming off him, and got up to walk through the house to the lavatory out the back. It was quiet and the air dead still, and he thought Johnny McBride had gone, but when he looked through the open door of the room the other man had been occupying he saw his suitcase was still in the middle of the room, his skivvies strewn around. He opened the outside door, and the scent of flowers that had assailed him in his dreams rose up to meet him. A daphne bush stood in a patch of earth beside the house, the fragrance overwhelming. It reminded him of Rose’s garden.
The fever left him. He felt cool and cleansed, though his legs still wobbled beneath him. After that, he slept again for several hours, this time without dreaming. In the morning, he decided he was well enough to look for work again. He picked up three days of cleaning at the yacht club, making sure not to make eye contact with any of the women. He didn’t see the woman he’d poked in the washroom. When he was paid, he told himself he would really save this time and put money aside towards the trip home. Perhaps he would go and see his parents and Daniel and all, and come back. Bessie would wait for him. It confused him to think about this; he was in a muddle and he knew he needed more time to recover from the flu. Something had to change, but right now he couldn’t see what to do. Before he met Bessie he’d been wondering if he would be better off back in Naenae living with Rose. But now he thought there was no turning back, and besides the law would catch up with him, as Rose had predicted. Things could only get better if he resolved the problem of Johnny McBride. It was a place to start.
That evening Gladys Wallace, the landlady, phoned again. She would return at the end of the week, on Thursday to be exact, at around three o’clock. She hoped she would find everything spick and span. Her neighbours, who she talked to pretty well every week, had told her that although things seemed quiet at her address they had seen a few people coming and going. ‘You know what I said, Paddy, no sub-letting.’ He wondered if this was a veiled hint that she knew more than she was letting on.
‘You’ve got to get out. Don’t you have a ship to go to?’ he said to Johnny.
Johnny said that right now he wasn’t going anywhere. ‘Look,’ he said, trying an affable tone for a change, ‘the landlady’s not going to stay here, is she?’
‘How would I know?’
‘Nah, she’ll go back to her bloke and you’ll have the place to yourself again. Why don’t I just clear out while she’s here, and then come back?’
‘Friggin’ no.’ Paddy felt his temper boiling. He swore at Johnny then, shouting, ‘Fuck away off. I mean it, I’ll call the fucking cops on you.’
Johnny’s lip curled. ‘You won’t call the cops on me. You’ve got too much to hide.’
‘Get out, gob-shite, get — take your stuff and shove off.’
‘Go blow,’ Johnny said, standing with his fists in the air as if he were going to throw punches. Then, quite suddenly, he dropped his fists and walked out. His suitcase stayed in the bedroom.
Paddy thought he would be back, and was afraid. Johnny McBride, the other Johnny McBride, who lived in pulp fiction, wanted to kill people who stood in his way.
In the night his spine tingled with terror.