The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty Read Online Free Page A

might as well have tried to find the entrance in an Arab’s tent, Jonno avowed afterwards, a notorious difficulty in desert life. He got that out of a book — or buke , was his better word. Despite his erudition, she kept squirming Jonno’s hands away. Eneas put his own hand in for the heck of it and in the veritable tangle of Jonno’s fingers thought he felt something. He was truly surprised and all he could think of was that something unlikely had happened, unlikely but desirable, like seeing a rabbit in the door of its burrow and the creature for a change not running in immediately, not fearing his approach.
    Oh, he cherished that moment. He felt something like a blow on the back of the head. Some great hand of Destiny, like they’d be saying in the flicks, clutched the column of his spine and yanked at it. For a year he had been dreaming of such a matter. He had tried to picture the tropical harbour of long leaves and hot storms that he imagined a woman’s sex might be. Suddenly he docked there, briefly.
    Now he sits with her in the high grass, alone, without Jonno, because Jonno is off cutting turf on Mrs Foley’s patch of bog the far side of Knocknarea, that her bloody uncle left her, for the specific torturing of Jonno Lynch, but no matter, a man bows to his fate as best he can, and it is one of those dry and polleny June evenings with a rake of sunlight still to come. His heart is new halfpennies, all the more so as he imagines poor Jonno labouring. Not that he would fear the labour himself, he might like it, but Jonno is ever the town boy. He looks at her mousy hair and the nose and the breasts in her gansey that seem to shout of their own accord somehow, and now and then casts a glance at her skinny legs, and prays for courage. He wonders hard to himself why he is so overcome with fright and silence and uselessness and a sense of his own youth in her presence.
    ‘Do you remember that old time at all,’ he says, ‘with Jonno and meself in the summerhouse, do you?’
    ‘I do,’ she says, ‘and I do because I was mad that night to go and pee and nather of you boys would let me, it was cruel.’
    ‘Did you have a need to?’ he says, choking with sympathy, it being a particular curse on himself, a weak bladder and no courage either to declare it in many a pressing moment but a moment often crowded with other people.
    ‘Why,’ he says, ‘I never knew, the whole time.’
    ‘Boys never do know anything, boys are too busy with their roving hands.’
    There is truth in this. Then he thinks to himself maybe she is a noble sort of a person after all, if he could reform her. He might, and if he knew where to start he would.
    ‘Jane,’ he says, ‘where do you stand with hollyhocks?’ ‘How do you mean, hollyhocks?’ she says.
    ‘Hollyhocks, do you care for them?’
    ‘What are they like?’ she says, reasonably.
    ‘Flowers, you know, my father grows them mightily there in his garden under Midleton’s and I would be now proud and happy to give you a bunch maybe going home if you liked, Jane.’
    ‘My mother wouldn’t stand for me bringing flowers into the house,’ she says. Quite noble in her demean.
    ‘Why?’ he says.
    ‘Because she married an American.’
    He is puzzled now, greatly.
    ‘What’s that?’ he says.
    ‘She married an American my father, you know, and she will not allow herself pleasures now since he left us and not two pennies to rub together.’
    He laughs. Two pennies for Tuppenny Jane.
    ‘What’s humorous?’ she says, very sharp.
    ‘Nothing,’ he says, laughing, secure, comfortable.
    ‘You’re cack-cacking there at me,’ she says, ‘and your own mother not better than me, in the upshot, really. I won’t say I’m a good one. But she’s no different.’
    He is silenced.
    ‘You see,’ she says, ‘the long gawping mouth on you now. You don’t laugh so loud when it’s your own ould Mam is the topic and the figure of raillery.’
    ‘How is she?’
    And he wants