Eileen left her son playing with the scarpering rats, as the man in the high-vis jacket wound the cable round the trunk of yet another beech tree. The rats disturbed her, but every boy in the cul-de-sac was involved in the chase. And playing, after all, was what boys were meant to do, even boys who were crossing the threshold into something else. He was growing, a little taller now than the others of his gang, but it was sweet to see him become the boy she remembered once more, even if it took the game of Rat Catcher, Rat Pulveriser, whatever they would call it, to do that. She crossed back over the football pitch to her bungalow, among the privet hedges by the number 30 bus stop, and began to prepare dinner.
She started to peel potatoes to cut them into chips. She thought chips might work the same trick, remind him of the boyhood he was so obviously moving past, bring him back to it, albeit just for an hour or a day or two. Beef stew was the normal dinner on a Thursday, but she knew that chips, beans and sausages were the boy’s favourite, and thought to surprise him with just that dinner. And if the wind died down, perhaps after dinner they would both of them walk down to the bathing place by the concrete wall and swim. The day was hot enough, the sun was shining; it was only the wind that gave that unseasonal feeling, brought the white caps to the sea on the horizon. They had always enjoyed the closeness of that ritual of theirs, the stroll down by the inlet, the walk over the wooden bridge, then the strange business of undressing, she in the women’s shelter, he in the men’s. She kept a watchful eye on him there, since she had heard stories of the adult males who swam there. Some of them she knew by name, hardy perennial types like her who swam throughout the winter, but others came and went, sat in the shadows of the curved concrete shelter, and seemed more intent on gazing on lithe young bodies than immersing themselves in the waters. She had heard stories; she didn’t fully believe them, but yet. But yet. Grown men could do strange things, things that were unwritten in her book of life. A neighbour’s child, for instance, had transformed from a charming freckle-faced boy into a sullen, withdrawn adolescent, and it was only after his death, in a stolen car crashed on the way towards the West, that rumours spread about ‘the incident’. Eileen didn’t know, and didn’t want to know, the details of the incident, but it involved the sand dunes beyond the shelter, and some acquaintance that started here, inside it. Some acquaintance with what was termed a ‘stray man’. The word ‘stray’ affected her deeply, so deeply she refused to think about it. So whatever the pleasure of their swimming rituals, she kept a watchful eye on him at all times.
Jim wasn’t one for swimming, she reflected, as she heated up the corn oil for the chips, and sliced the cellophane wrapper on the Denby’s sausages. A little self-conscious about his pale skin, he would cover his body in a veritable burka of towels before emerging in the old-fashioned Speedos he would never let go of, the red bolts of lightning decorating the sides of the hip. He would stand in the shallows, contemplating things, before finally making what he called the ‘corpus immersus’, splashing around in one or two strokes, then retreating to the cement steps, where he would begin a series of Boy Scout stretches.
So you can imagine her surprise when, after Jim had returned and Andy blundered in from his waste-ground antics, after all three of them had consumed the unexpected treat of chips, beans and sausages and Eileen suggested a walk down by the sea wall and maybe a swim, Andy nodded gravely and Jim took a last gulp of tea and came out with an enthusiastic, ‘Absolutely!’
So, absolutely it was. She removed three towels from the hot press and wrapped their swimming things separately in each of them, handed each of them their rolled bundle and in no time at all, all three of them were walking down the gentle slope from the 30 bus stop to the vista of sea below.
The wind had died a little, the sea was an uncertain sea-green, but there were no white caps, thank God. She could do a slow breaststroke without those flurries of blinding spray in her eyes.
She took Jim’s arm and slipped her hand through the elbow of her growing son and found that, to her quiet surprise and delight, he didn’t flinch or withdraw in that adolescent horror she had read so much about. No, he allowed her arm to sit there, quite happily in the crook of his, the only resistance being the gentle rocking of his gait, the soft scrape of his hoodie.
So they were a family again, a proper family, she was gladdened to think, and she wondered how she could have imagined it otherwise. He was a growing boy; some kind of withdrawal was what Jim would have termed ‘par for the course’.
So they walked. Jim talked about oranges from Seville, apples from New England, strawberries and raspberries from Donabate and Balbriggan, about a new contract Intercontinental Preserves was managing for the SuperValu chain. And it was odd, Eileen thought, the attachment he had forged with his employers, as if their brand, their values, their future even, was interconnected with his. They were just his employers, after all, and she could even now remember a time in which he didn’t go on so much about marmalade. Marmalade and jam and various brands of fruit curd. If he had found employment in a bank, she wondered, would all the talk be about interest rates and negotiable loans? And she had to smile wryly to herself then and think that, knowing Jim, it probably would. She looked down at his brown shoes, beside her coloured espadrilles, and noticed Andy’s boots, moving in time with both of them, and saw flecks of blood on the toecaps.
She had a mental image then, and she couldn’t escape it, of a rat crushed beneath his Doc Martens. He had chosen those boots himself, olive-green leather with the wine-coloured stitching. He had wanted the green ones, not the black. Another image came, of a boot flailing through the air, sending a bloodied, broken-backed rodent back to the hole it had scurried from. She shivered, with almost a wave of nausea, wondering what happened to his pride in his Doc Marten boots, the toecaps more than flecked, streaked with lumps of blackish goo.
‘They were pulling the beech trees down,’ she said, ‘below the football pitch—’
Andy finished for her.
‘And you’ll never guess what came out of the roots?’
‘What?’ Jim asked.
‘Rats,’ Andy said.
‘Rats?’
‘Rats,’ Andy repeated. ‘Hundreds of them.’
‘I suppose it makes sense,’ Eileen murmured, ‘when you think of it. Those old roots, buried in the ground for a hundred or so years. They would grow their own colonies, wouldn’t they?’
And another involuntary image came. Of subterranean tunnels, burrowing rats scraping their way beneath the football pitch, underneath the bus stop, carving a honeycomb of rat-holes beneath the bungalow itself.
‘Is colony the word,’ Jim asked, ‘for a collection of rats?’
And her heart sank for some reason. She recognised the didactic tone. Jim was too old when she’d had Andy. Maybe they were both too old.
‘I mean, Andy, you can talk of a flock of geese, a murder of crows, a charm of larks. Collective nouns, actually, are an interesting study, in and of themselves.’
At least he had moved on from preserves.
‘But rats? A pack? A plague?’
She imagined tiny feet scraping beneath the kitchen floor.
‘It was a whole city of them down there.’
This, from Andy. And his voice had positively deepened lately. Maybe it had dropped, with his other bits and pieces.
‘Not only a city. A whole race of them. Big ones, small ones, baby ones . . .’
‘The boys had fun, chasing them. But I have to say, Andy, I hope you never touched one of them—’
‘With my boot, only. I tried catching them, but Jesus, they were fast.’
‘Andy—’ Jim remonstrated. And Eileen had to admit, he did give excellent example.
‘What?’
‘Jesus has nothing to do with rats.’
‘No?’
‘And I know we don’t go to mass, but there are people who do.’
‘Oh. I see.’
‘Each time a tree came down, they swarmed out—’
‘Maybe that’s it,’ Jim enthused. ‘A swarm of rats. We can check when we get back.’
‘Check?’
‘In the OED.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Come on, son, you know what that is. Porcupine, portcullis, Portumna. The Oxford English Dictionary.’
And Eileen bit her lip as she walked. She hoped Andy’s appetite for reading wouldn’t sink and lose itself in this adolescent swamp, which she knew, instinctively, was approaching.
The swim, when they arrived at the shelter, was uneventful. She didn’t have to worry about Andy in the men’s since she could hear his father huffing and puffing his way through his ritual of disrobing. And when Andy emerged, skinny and light-footed, with the baggy swimming trunks she had bought for him in TK Maxx, she marvelled once more at how this element had entered her life. He had an elegance all of his own; he stood, ankle-deep in the water, with his free foot touching his knee, like a thin stork. And he sank that magical body slowly, the way he always had, one or two intakes of breath, then a rush of rapid strokes that took him far out into the centre of the bay. It was all she could do to keep up with him. But she did manage it, and soon they were both treading water, their backs to the great dockland derricks behind, their faces towards the string of cement shelters, where Jim was only now making his way into the water.
She turned, looked at her son’s sleek head disappearing like a seal beneath the waves, and thought she should do her utmost to treasure moments like this. The more the boy grows into adulthood, the rarer they become.