17

Jack Mooney put a bottle of whiskey on the table. ‘I’m off to my bed but stay as long as you want.’

Jimmy reached for money.

‘No,’ Jack held up his hand. ‘That’s on the house.’ He looked at me: ‘I’ve got ten of them and I still sweat the same as the first time. I tried to find a smile for him but my face felt frozen. ‘Thanks for everything, Jack.’ I said, with feeling.

It was half past seven when Jimmy let Dr. Ryan into the pub. He put his bag and his trilby on the table: ‘Your wife is fine, but I’m sorry to say your baby, sadly, was still-born’.

Jimmy put a drink in my hand, his look telling me that he was pretty devastated too, while Doctor Ryan drank a large neat whiskey as he stood looking down at me.

‘There’s no easy way to tell a man what I’ve had to tell you, Mister O’Neill. It’s got to be said and all the flowery speeches on earth won’t help the man who has to listen.’

I nodded and drank the whiskey, grateful to him for dispensing with the flannel, the bullshit that changes nothing.

‘As long as Jenny is ...’

‘Jenny, your wife, she is fine, I promise you.’

Tom pulled out a chair and the doctor sank onto it looking very tired and seeming greyer in the head then when I saw him earlier.

‘What? Eh. Was it a boy or a girl?’

‘It’s often better not to know,’ he said, looking at his glass.

‘I’d like to know, thank you.’

‘A boy,’ he said, and drank his fresh whiskey down.

‘Can I see Jenny now?’

He nodded: ‘She’ll be asleep for hours...she is sedated, but you can see her.’

--------

‘What happened to your hand?’ Jenny held my hand so carefully, propped up in Pat’s bed, deep, dark circles under her eyes.

I found a grin for her. ‘Don’t you remember the tenor that wanted to eat you?’

She took my hand carefully, her fingers touching mine below the bandage, calm from the drugs and her hair was brushed, and she had made up her lips.

‘Dr. Ryan said you wanted to come in earlier.’

‘I wanted to tell you what you mean to me, but you were out like a light.’

My mind remained in awe of her giving nature as she sent her concern for me to me, without labouring it.

Oh what a woman you are. My mind was whisper to me all the things I dare not say at this time. The doctor has told you all, you know our child is wherever unborn babies go. And you’re dealing with your loss, and trying to protect me from mine, and you are going to be alright, and I don’t have to say a word.

She touched my wounded hand and she said, ‘That awful man. I wonder if he and my husband might have been related.’

‘I hope not,’ I said. ‘Look at what his face did to my hand.’

She smiled a little and I leaned over to kiss her gently on the mouth: ‘I love you, Missus O’Neill.’

‘The doctor thought we were married...I said to him, my husband wants a son.’

‘I am your husband...’

‘You are, your really are, now.

‘I always was, you fool.’

‘But not so much as now...for all that we found, this is our first loss together, and you love me still.’

‘ You know that.’

She nodded her head in a careful way: ‘I know it, and I’ll never be afraid again.’

I took her face in my hands. ‘Well, know it. Know it so that you can shout it out and tell the world. I love you, I love you and I can’t imagine my life without you.’

‘Even though, I’m like a big cow.’

‘I’ll kiss them and suck them back to normal. I love your enormous tits, I love them, and that’s that.’

For a moment she looked really serious and then she said: ‘I’m thirty three.’

I grinned: ‘You’re kidding right! I’d have said at least forty four.’

She laughed: ‘Not my breasts...my age.’

‘Are you trying to make me mad?

She shook her head and I said: ‘Right then, shut up. I love you.’

‘When you’re forty, I’ll be fifty two.’

I pulled a face, mocking anger. ‘You’ll cost me a fortune for braziers with all that weight.’

‘I’ll never mention it again because I know it will never matter.’

I kissed her, gently, but drawn to a passionate spot inside myself, ashamed almost, to be thinking of how long it would be before we could make love again.

She kissed me again and held me for another few seconds. ‘I’ll sleep like a top, thanks to you.’

‘We’ll talk about everything sometime. This isn’t the time.’

She nodded. ‘Bless you, Tony...’ As she spoke she was reaching under her pillow. ‘I have something for you.’

I opened the large handkerchief and looked at the wad of five pound notes. ‘I carried it with me ever since you gave it to me.’

I put the money in my pocket and kissed her one more goodbye.

What’s the good of making plans, I thought. I walked to the hall and when I was sure there wasn’t anybody else there, I let the tears come without knowing for sure just why I was weeping like a baby.

We struggled through the plays for the next ten days, using girls from the local dramatic society to fill small parts, this gaining us the families of our young actresses which added a few quid into the kitty, which we took on the grounds that every little helps. Obviously, we had to tamper with scripts to make things work and all in all, we came through this touch time in pretty good shape, but I can assure you that one and all, we sighed in relief when Jenny came back to work.

My hand was still strapped up but it didn’t bother me now that I’d had the tooth pulled out of it. Dr. Ryan had laughed when, having lanced my hand, he found one of Toomy Darcy’s teeth embedded in it. ‘If the local dentist gets to hear about this, I could be in trouble,’ he joked, while I shook my head in sheer bloody amazement.

The extraction didn’t hurt me much but I made the mistake of watching the operation, and afterwards I’d been so sick that my stomach was sore for days.

My foot had been tender too, for a week, but that soon mended itself without any help from anybody.

I saw Toomy Darcy by going down to the cottage where he lived with his mother. She told me, in great detail, of the ‘six blackguards’ that had attacked her son, ‘and him blind from drink’, but, when the old girl left us, her big bad-in-drink-son extended his handn and asked me to forget it, that he was sorry for his behaviour. He was drunk anyway, but, he hadn’t known that Jenny was my wife, or that she was expecting a child, and he was so contrite that I couldn’t tell him we had lost our baby.

His right eye was beginning to open up, but his doctor had told him his jaw would be in splints for a bit longer. We said goodbye as I was leaving and I nearly passed out from the pressure on the spot where his tooth had been lodged, He had enough problems without concerning himself with that.

-------------

We moved westward to be nearer Joe Dominick and the booth he was minding for us. About three weeks, Jimmy reckoned, and we could go and pick up our summer theatre. ‘Right on the coast, this year, Tony, slap bang on the beach, or as near as we can get. And the punters can come in their bathing trunks if they like, just as long as the come and part with some of their readies.’

The weather was milder in early May and it really began to look like summer was on the way in. It was a hot month for sure as Jennie finished the course of tablets to dry up her milk, the food that our son never tasted, and I found her doing sit-ups one day in the digs.

‘I want my figure back,’ she answered to my look of what the hell is going on.

She grunted, forcing herself to do one more. ‘How am I ever going to hold onto you if I just let myself go?’

‘We’ll, I’ll tell you,’ I kidded. ‘You see, you open your arms and your legs and when I’m in there, you close around me and that’s how you’ll hold me.’

‘Oh, Tony, don’t,’ she begged, ‘don’t even get me thinking about it. I’m going crazy enough as it is.’

She put her arms around me: ‘It must be murder for you.’

I pushed her away gently: ‘Not if you don’t tease me,’ I said, suddenly realising that I was speaking the truth. In all the weeks since we’d last made love, I hadn’t wanted sex. ‘You’ve bloody well ruined me for other birds, do you know that?

As long as you love me, I wouldn’t care if you did have other women.’ She smiled, and then she said. ‘But all the same, I’m glad you haven’t anybody but me.’

I wanted to kid her, to tease her with the idea that I’d only had the odd one, but, she was so soft and gentle, so vulnerable, that I couldn’t do it. I kissed her forehead: ‘It just doesn’t arise.’ I stopped. ‘And that’s not a pun...there just wouldn’t be any point.’

She held me. ‘I’ve done that to you?’

‘Yes, you bitch, that’s what I said, you’ve ruined me, you have stopped me sharing myself around, all those poor girls gasping. You should be ashamed of yourself.’

‘You just wait until the weekend, she vowed:, her eyes on my face: ‘I’m going to kill you, ride you to death.’

She ground her teeth, happiness bursting out of her pores. Then she said quietly: ‘That is, if I can wait that long.’

She came out of the doctor’s surgery and waved at me, I got out of the truck and she ran and threw herself at me, her arms around my neck. ‘It’s all systems go,’ she whispered, ‘every thing is fine.’

‘Oh, my baby.’ I kissed her passionately for the first time in a million years. Her lips were on my mouth and I held her tongue gently, savouring the taste of her love for me. ‘I adore you.’

We were in the truck and our lips were glued together, our desire a palpable thing, going at it so heatedly that Jimmy in the back passenger seat of our old truck, began groaning.

‘Do you have to go right now,’ Jenny asked me.

I nodded. ‘We have to go right now, love, yeh.’

‘But I want you now.’

‘Jesus!’ Without looking you could imagine Jimmy with the eyes thrown up to heaven: ‘Have you ever heard the likes of it in all your puff.’

‘Jenny love, you can’t have me now. Jimmy and me, we have an important errand to attend to.’

Jenny sighed and threw a fast prayer; ‘Oh, please make tonight come quickly, please, please, please.’

Jimmy was snorting like a stallion in heat.

‘I love you,’ Jenny said, getting out of the truck I got the engine going and she was still waving as I took it away on our most important chore of the year.

‘That’s living, Tony, that’s really living.’

I nodded, smiling to myself, thinking how good life could be. And with the sun shining and a long summer before us, with Jennie loving me as she did, any wonder it seemed to me that the trees were singing as we headed along the road to Joe Dominick and the booth.

‘We came through, Jimmy!’

He passed me a cigarette: ‘Touch and go there for a while.’

I laughed, nudging him with my shoulder. ‘Get out of it, you old bastard, didn’t do us a bit of harm,’

‘Speak for yourself. Once or twice, I felt like packing it in.’

‘Bull...’

He cut across me. ‘No. Joking apart, I got so fed up at one stage that I nearly slung my hat at it.’

‘Ah, you weren’t serious.’

‘I’m not so sure. And no bullshit, I’d never have made it without you.’

‘Bollox!

‘Good team, us.’

I pulled a half bottle of Courvoiseur out of my jacket. ‘I’ll drink to that.’

Jimmy chuckled: ‘You need an excuse.’

I passed the bottle back to him again. ‘Keep a drop for Joe.’

----------

When the noise of the truck didn’t bring Joe Dominic out to greet us, I thought that maybe he was in a drunken stupor, but, when I jumped down from the running board, I just knew something wasn’t right.

There was no lean-to-shelter by Joe’s cottage. The flat dray trailer was there, right where we had parked it. But the wooden shelter was gone and there was no sign of our booth on the trailer.

The canvas roofing lay crumpled with the sack of nuts and bolds and braces in the middle of it, but that was all.

I turned to Jimmy. He stood looking down at the canvas, his face the colour of cigarette ash, and he was shaking his head, as though doing that would change the scene that his eyes didn’t want to believe.

He followed me into what had been the cottage, through the hanging of old canvas that served as a door. The place was empty and there was little of nothing of the two windows left.

There wasn’t a single piece of timber, in any shape of form, left in the one roomed cottage. Not so much as a table and chair, even the window frames had been chopped out, while hunks had been gouged out of the solitary support beam that no longer had much roof left over it. But there was no shortage of ash, there was ash everywhere as Jimmy said, his voice coming from some very pain filled location: ‘He chopped it up, along with everything else, he chopped up our fucking booth!’

I bent down and took up a handful of ash. Somewhere in it was part of the booth we had built as our Summer Theatre, and our poor, crazy old mate, Joe Dominick had burned the whole fucking thing in his fight to survive the worst winter in God knows how many years.

‘The poor bastard, he was freezing to death.’

‘Poor bastard, my arse,’ Jimmy hissed, like someone holding down a serious pain. ‘He did well to clear off for I would have killed him.’

‘He was only trying to stay alive, Jimmy.’

‘Fuck him and staying alive. Jesus! We only got through our worst ever fucking winter because the booth was keeping us alive.’

‘And while it was doing that for us, burning up the wood was doing the same thing for Joe. Like it, or not, saving you and me and the gang, and Joe hopefully alive somewhere, I’d say it was worth it.’

Jimmy looked like he was going to throw himself at me but his eyes flipped over and he just stormed out of the ruined cottage, while I got a cigarette going, hoping to find a way to get him grounded again.

I found Jimmy outside, sweeping dirt and rubbish off the canvas that was the roof of our Summer booth. Without looking at me, he said: ‘I know you’re right, Joe had to try and stay alive, like the rest of us.’

‘You can bet he was freezing the death when he burned out booth.

‘I know, and I’m sorry it has to end this way, when we had so much feeling for getting a real break in the booth this summer.’

‘Well, we were going to have a few days rest anyway before we opened the booth. We’ll build a new one. We have the roof. You’re standing on it.’

‘Sure,’ Jimmy looked at me as though he was thinking I had lost my mind. ‘And what’ll we use to run up this booth you have in mind? Were you thinking bull rushes or what?

I shook my head, wondering if this was why my son had died before he lived.

‘With the baby’s money,’ I said.

‘Baby’s money?’

‘I gave it to Jenny when she first told me she was pregnant. She gave it back to me.’

‘You’re saying we build a new booth?’

‘Well, Christ, we’re not playing stuffy halls all summer if I can help it.’

Jimmy’s face came back to life: ‘How much have you got?’

‘About a hundred and fifty quid,’’

Jimmy was fully present now- his mind adding and doing whatever it did when money was involved.

‘We can make it bigger with that money, if you’re serious.’

‘I’m always serious where money is concerned.’