Chapter 4 #17
Ignoring the hissed command of the warden to get back in his place, Tomás began to draw.
From under the tip of the chalk, he brought forth lines, straight and curved, intersections, cross-hatchings.
Behind him, he sensed people gathering around him, felt their gaze and their interest, felt it gradually dawn on them that what was emerging on the wall was the workhouse in which they were currently standing, seen from above.
The driveway, the dormitories, the workshops, the gravepit, the river that coursed past. Never mind the people begging outside, the starving inmates within: none of them existed in this stark, factual version.
He made paths, doorways; he slanted buildings one way, then the other, making the whole workhouse focus on one point at its centre, the yard.
Without looking around, on the neighbouring stone, he began a quick sketch of a deep lough, pooled in the V of a valley, with high mountains on either side, through which was winding a long, wretched road.
“Remarkable,” he heard someone say, and he turned.
They were all standing in a semicircle around him. It was, he divined, the officer who had spoken.
“Doesn’t look very strong, however,” the officer murmured. “We do need them to be hale and hearty.”
“Oh, he is, I can tell you that,” the warden cut in. “He’s used to hard work, all my boys are, and this one has his numbers and his letters and—”
“Name?”
“Tomás,” the warden supplied.
As the sapper peered at Tomás’s teeth, and examined his hair for lice, the officer put his head on one side.
“Thomas,” he said, renaming him with a casual and proprietorial sweep of his palm. “Does he speak the Queen’s English?”
“I do,” Tomás piped up.
“As well as the local lingo?”
Tomás nodded. Only when he was being led to the warden’s office did he realise that he had succeeded: the job was his.
He couldn’t comprehend what this all meant, what would happen now: there were white spark-holes in his vision and his fingers were tingling as if deprived of circulation.
The warden was up ahead, saying to the officer in the long coat that he was losing a worker, a fine worker, and happy though he was to be of service to them, could they see their way, etc.
Tomás had begun the day oakum-picking in a workhouse and ended it as a chainboy for the redcoats.
He was allowed to bed down in the barracks’ stables, up in the loft space, and he could arrange the bales of sweet-smelling straw into whatever shape was most comfortable for him.
A soldier told him to get some sleep because they would be up at dawn and would be marching twenty miles by noon.
They found him a pair of boots, and a cap, and gave him scraps from the mess kitchen: a half-cooled plate of stew, a hunk of bread.
It was the finest meal he could ever remember eating.
As he lay in the straw, he eyed the length of chain, a jointed serpent made of metal links, which had been laid beside him.
His job would be to carry it and take care of it, to lay it out nice and straight for the surveyor chaps, to push its metal teeth into the ground to hold it fast, he had been told.
Folded into his hand were several chips of chalk from the workhouse.
He had looked for Phina, in the sewing room, before he left, but couldn’t find her.
He had seized the arm of another girl and pleaded with her to tell Phina he’d gone, taken away by the surveyors.
Tell her, he urged, his face scarlet, that I’m sorry but I had to go.
Tell her I’ll be back. I’ll be back for her.
As they cross the river, Liam allows himself to feel the first tinge of relief. They are nearly home, five streets more, perhaps six.
He and his father take the winding passageway up from the dockside, Tomás’s laboured pace making Liam want to urge him on, like a horse. They turn left, then left again.
The vista of the Lanes, where Liam has lived all his life, opens out before them, and he could cry out with relief: the wide cobbled street, criss-crossed every three or four tenements with narrower lanes, where more brick buildings are crammed in, like teeth.
Railings run along the fronts; most of the street doors stand open; women in aprons with babies on their hips talk across the stairwells to each other; and the expanse of cobbles is filled with children running back and forth, skipping, fighting, playing hopscotch, swinging on a rope that has been knotted to a gas lamp.
Liam would like to throw his arms around these railings, these gas lamps, these children, all of it. The familiarity of it all makes his eyes prickle. Surely if anything can restore Tomás to his former self, it will be this.
For the entire journey back to Dublin, through the low-lying central counties, Tomás has barely raised his eyes from the mesmerising turn of the cart’s wheels.
Liam might have suspected that his father was angry with him but for the way he clutched at his hand, even while they walked, almost as if Tomás were the son and Liam the father.
Tomás is still gripping it now, and Liam wishes he wouldn’t.
He wants to extract his hand, retrieve his arm before any of the lads see it and rag him for it—a boy of his age, holding hands with his da.
As they round the final corner into the Lanes, Liam tries to ease his fingers away, but his father’s grip convulses and tightens, as if he is a man afraid of getting lost. Liam feels shame then: what does it matter if the other boys see, when this is his da and he needs him?
“We’re home,” Liam says, his voice creaky with disuse, for it is dispiriting to keep up a one-sided conversation, and he’d given up trying many miles back. “Da, look—we’re here.”
To Liam’s dismay, Tomás shows no sign of having heard him or of even noticing where they are.
Liam comes to a stop. All the way home, during all those miles and miles of trudging across wet ground and rocky places, he had kept the hope alive that this would be the moment his father would come back to himself: here, at the mouth of the Lanes.
“Da?” he says again.
He remembers his father telling him once that the Lanes had been built for wealthy people, that once upon a time each of these houses would have been home to just one family.
Liam had laughed, not believing him, because nowadays there was a family, sometimes more, crammed into each room.
But his father had insisted, said it was true that cities, like everything else, were subject to the forces of change.
As he had spoken, his hand had been drawing on a scrap of paper a rough sketch of the place, the wide main street, the narrow lanes across it, like rungs on a ladder.
“Da, will you look? We’re—”
Liam’s query is cut short because a person—short, swift, barefoot—is barrelling towards them, hair flying, mouth open in a joyous yell.
Rose hurls herself towards her brother and her father, arms pinioning their knees, hands gripping sleeves and hems as she proceeds to scale the edifice of her father, a cat up a tree, climbing until she is aloft, one leg over his shoulder, shouting at the top of her lungs for Enda and their mother, yelling to all around that her da and Liam are back.
Liam, finally released, turns to their father, curious to see how he will take this.
Tomás drops their bundles in surprise, and for a moment, he doesn’t move.
Then his hands tremble their way to Rose’s back, to the wild spring of her hair, as if he needs to check that this child is real, not just some apparition.
Rose is gabbling, in a rush of words—something about a dog, or perhaps a doll, and cabbages and a baby.
“A baby?” Liam says.
“…and Mammy told us it wouldn’t come out unti—”
“Rose, Rose,” Liam cuts across the torrent, “are you saying that Mammy’s to have a baby? A new baby?”
Rose looks down at her brother and nods, delighted with her task of imparting the news. “It’ll be my baby brother or sister. We don’t know which yet. And it won’t be borned for a while, Mammy says.”
Liam glances at his father. Tomás’s face is wearing a strange expression, like that of a man hearing a distant strain of music.
“Da?” Liam says. “Did you hear that?”
Tomás frowns, clears his throat, as if he might speak, Rose perched on his right shoulder, her arms held out, like an acrobat’s. This, Liam thinks, might be the very thing to coax his father out of his shell: another baby in the family.
His father eases Rose to the ground, gives her head a cursory pat.
Rose is still talking, about a loaf of bread Mammy has made, tugging Tomás by the hand towards their tenement, and Liam has suddenly had enough of it all.
Leave his father to Rose, to their mother, to the news of the new baby, he has had it with trying to take care of him.
He edges sideways, away from his father, first one step, then another, and it is the furthest he has been from him for days now, and what easement he feels as the distance increases. All the while, his eyes are scanning the street, the groups of children, for the tall, gangly figure of Enda.
She must be here somewhere—she has to be.
Nothing can keep her in the house in the hours between school and supper: not their mother’s appeals for help, not even the exercises from the schoolmaster, which Enda likes to do later, with awe-inspiring speed and concentration, before bed.
Liam wanders up the street, one hand trailing rhythmically along the railings, the other shoved into his pocket. Wherever can she be?
This street and its alleyways are Enda’s domain. His sister rules it as a fierce but fair monarch. No child will stand alone here, waiting to be asked to join a game. No one is hit or cuffed. No one is made fun of for having no shoes or for wearing torn clothing.