After the Lockout (20 page)

There is no telegram, no man in Darkley offering ridiculously generous wages. They know their value, like the capitalists they are. Turlough smiles at me and I want to smash his fucking face in. I nod in acquiescence but I have to walk away and go and stand by the wall, holding on like a passenger gripping the rails of the deck and trying not to be seasick. I'm not sure how long I'm standing there before I hear a commotion. Maggie climbs over the wall into the Poor Ground and, safely on her feet, storms over to the work site and grabs young Knipe by the ear.

‘Why aren't you in my classroom?' she demands, dragging him by his lughole away from the ladder he was holding for John McDermott, who cries out in protest. Maggie pays him no heed. She leaves young Knipe standing by the wall nursing his ear, and moves quickly towards another young fellow. ‘Peter McWilliams, do you think you're going to improve your atrocious grammar
with a hammer in your hand?' she says as she slaps the lad hard across the face. The crack rings loudly.

‘I'm sorry, Miss Cavanagh, I told the boy he could come with me for the day,' says the boy's father but Maggie shakes her head sternly and he turns away, shamefaced.

‘Every single one of you who should be in school, if you're not lined up against that wall in ten seconds flat, I'll turn your hands to leather,' she cries, and as I move gingerly towards her, she gives me a withering stare. ‘One. Two. Three. Four …' The schoolboy volunteers are lined up against the wall in considerably less than ten seconds, and Maggie leads the hangdog phalanx back up the street. I hop over the wall and follow them. She stands by the door of the National School and ushers them all inside, keeping a furious eye on me as I approach. ‘You stole half my class,' she says.

‘There's an education to be had outside these walls, you know. They can learn a lot in a few days working with me.'

She shakes her head. ‘Jesus Christ,' is all she says as she slams the schoolhouse door in my face.

As I trudge back down the street, I see Charlie watching from his window. Smirking bastard. Who is he to judge me? How many has he widowed and orphaned? Every day the headlines say the war is being won but the small print carries the names of the dead, and the lists are long. Workers killed by workers. People like Charlie killing people like himself. And he
volunteered
. Volunteered to kill fellow workers for king and empire and capital. What if they'd sent him to Dublin for Easter Week? What if he'd seen me in his crosshairs: would he have hesitated? Would I? Comrade Lenin must have friends who disagree with him, or even abhor him. And surely he has some allies who are
scoundrels he'd otherwise cross the street to avoid. Politics is not about friendship, it is about alliances of interest. This is only truer of revolution. Revolution is often incompatible with human concerns like friendship or love. Let Charlie abhor me if he must. But I wish it was Charlie standing by my side now, not the Moriartys. Not those parasites.

At dusk on Wednesday the pentagonal, timber-framed skeleton of the building is complete. We're ahead of schedule. I'd thought it would've been Thursday or even Friday before we got to this point. As we're knocking off for the day Aidan Cavanagh comes up to me and shows me an inside page from the
Armagh Guardian
. There's a Charlie Chaplin show at the Cosy Corner picture house, the new place on Russell Street. He says Maggie mentioned in passing how much she wanted to see the show. I doubt she wants to see me at all, but it is Wednesday. Better to assume the invitation in the condensation of the car window still stands, than risk standing her up.

When I call to the house, Aidan answers the door with a conspiratorial nod. I show him the bunch of daisies. ‘Very nice, she'll like them,' he says. ‘Maggie! Door!'

I lick my palm, pat down my carefully combed hair, finger my tie nervously. I never wear a tie but Pius talked me into it. No woman of calibre will take seriously a man who doesn't wear a tie, he reckons. Better to have one and need it than need one and not have it, I suppose. I'm fidgeting as she appears at the door. She gives me a look that demands I state my business quickly.

‘It's Wednesday.'

She folds her arms.

‘I have the cart waiting. I have money for two tickets to the pictures, two hot water bottles and two dinners at the Rainbow Café.' I jut out my arm, inviting her to take it.

‘You can't be serious.'

‘I made sure none of your pupils were working on the site today. I even chased a couple of young ones I found mitching off up the road there.' She eyes the daisies sceptically as I hand them to her, but she does take them. She holds them to her nose.

‘I have far too much to do here to be gallivanting to the pictures,' she says sternly.

‘No you don't, we're mad to get rid of you for one night,' says Aidan, sticking his head around the parlour door, and the giggles of all Maggie's eavesdropping siblings explode from inside the house. She turns vengefully but Aidan shuts the parlour door before she reaches it. She's flustered.

‘It's Charlie Chaplin. You'll love him. He has the funniest walk,' I say, and taking a step back I do the little waddle I've seen in the pictures. Maggie tries not to, but she lets a little titter escape her. She tries to reassert her poker face but she can't help it. I do the little waddle again and she laughs. I jut out my arm again.

‘But I haven't a stitch to wear,' she says.

‘I'll wait here, you go and get yourself ready.'

She reasserts her serious face once more, and raises her eyebrow. ‘Why should I go with you, Victor?' she says.

‘Because you love me.'

The words hang in the air like gun smoke after a volley of muskets.

‘You love me,' I say again, and her lip trembles.

‘You love me.' A tear materialises like a jewel in her eye and escapes down her cheek.

‘You love me.'

She takes a little while to get ready but when she reappears at the door, I see she was lying about not having anything to wear. She wears a blouse, coat, stockings, shin-length dress showing off a bit of ankle; all black, save the occasional white trimming here and there. All pristine, classy, conservative even, except for angular, vivid red shoes. I help her climb onto the trap, and she remarks that she hasn't seen it for years. We've done well to salvage it, she says. I admire her hat; it's one of those ones shaped like a bell that I've only seen the most up-to-date girls in Dublin wear. Maggie keeps up, it seems.

‘It's called a cloche,' she says.

‘Clash?'

‘Cloche.'

‘Claw-she.'

‘It's French.'

‘Well, you look beautiful,' I say, and she
does
look beautiful. As we head out of Madden and onto the main Armagh road I steal glances at her and catch her stealing an odd glance back in my direction. My eyes are drawn especially to her shoes. They do strange things to me. Narrow heels and dainty uppers. I swear it's as exciting as if she's not wearing any clothes at all.

‘What was the name of that picture I read about, did you see it, the one about the negroes?'

‘
Birth of a Nation
?'

‘That's it. Did you see that one? Was it good?'

‘I wouldn't shy away from calling it a work of art.'

‘Really? I thought the moving pictures were just little entertainments? Like this Charlie Chaplin; he was in the music halls before he went to America, wasn't he?'

I shake my head. I don't know.

‘I read that somewhere. He's actually from England. You'd hardly call a music hall comedian an artist, would you? Falling down and hitting your head doesn't make you Sir Henry Irving.'

If I ever see her without her clothes, I'll ask her to keep on those shoes. I can see it clearly in my head: Maggie, naked as a statue save for the red shoes. Maybe in stockings too. No. Too much like a Monto girl. Or Ida. Maggie's better than that. Though maybe it'd heighten the effect? I'll give it some thought. I look at her, demure in black save red shoes and caramel skin, and in my mind's eye see her on her back, panting desperately, her skin flushed and pink now, the red shoes still on her feet, up behind my ears somewhere, and then she turns into Ida and I can't shake the image from my mind even as we arrive in Armagh, even as we sit down in the Rainbow Café, even as Maggie pokes at her salmon and I devour my bloody beef.

‘Penny for them,' she says.

‘More than they're worth.'

She places a forkful delicately into her mouth and I try to put the vexing thoughts from my head. I'm conscious that I've said little.

‘In ten or twenty years there'll be no more plays and all the theatres will replace their stages with screens. Who wants to
watch somebody prancing around a stage when you can watch red Indians or moving trains or whole battlefields on a screen?' I say.

‘Will we still have books?'

‘People won't need them when they can go and look at reels of film. You take
Birth of a Nation
. In three hours you learn more than you would in a dozen books. Of course there'll still be books in libraries, for academics and historians and such.'

She drops her knife and fork and they clank loudly on the plate. She looks annoyed, emotional even. ‘You were always so zealous about everything,' she says. ‘I don't want reels of film to replace books.'

I put my hand on hers and squeeze it. ‘We will always have books.'

The doorman stands before the heavy, iron-clasped Tuppenny Door of the Cosy Corner Picture Palace. He surveys the long queue stretching down Russell Street and glances impatiently at his watch, as if willing the second hand to move more quickly. ‘If you don't stop pushing and fuck away off from my door, youse aren't getting in,' he snaps to some young fellows near the front. Maggie is worried the seats will sell out, since the line is so long, but I wink and crook my arm and we skip past the crowd to the queueless splendour of the Shilling Entrance, enjoying the jealous glances as we go. An elderly doorman with silver hair and gentle eyes touches his cap and opens the varnished mahogany and glass panelled door.

‘Good evening, Madam. Good evening, Sir,' he says as we step into a marble foyer. Maggie looks like she's going to laugh. I point her to the glass cabinet of the refreshment stand.

‘But I just ate.'

‘This is what people do at the pictures. They get little treats. Apparently in America they have a confection made of corn, and you can eat it for hours without ever getting full.'

‘I suppose they would have something like that in America.'

She looks up and down at the mint imperials, the chocolate raisins and the Yellowman, and in the flicker of her eyelashes I see the fearless and guileless girl I once knew, for whom experience was the purpose of life. I don't know anyone else I'd say that about.

‘That's a florin,' says the man behind the box-office glass brusquely. His impatience is downright impertinent. It's not like there's a mad rush of people queuing behind me, and I don't look out of place among the well-dressed people here. I drop the coins noisily and take our tickets with a humph. Maggie orders chocolate raisins and two cups of hot chocolate, and I get her a hot water bottle. She says she doesn't need it, but women always get cold in the picture house, even in the summer. The usher takes us in and points his torch to the cushioned seats inside the red rope. Behind the rope are rows of hard benches filled with Tuppenny Door folk, and it's strange not to be among them, fighting for elbow space or for standing room at the back. It's strange to be sitting among the enemy in the cushioned seats, but it strikes me that maybe sitting on this side of the red rope mightn't necessarily prove you are the class enemy. For every bourgeois seeking distance from the unwashed, there's probably a working man just trying to impress a girl. Girls
are
impressed by such things. Maybe if they get the vote they'll become less trivial. I stretch out my legs. It is nice in here, it must be said.