Tuesday

He went back up the street at half past two, in his socks.

Mr Hrynko had made him. At twenty past two Mr Hrynko had taken the pencil on its string and written on the last clean corner of the paper bag, GO. YOUR FATHER. I HAVE THE TELEPHONE, and underlined GO, and Tom had looked at it and not moved, and Mr Hrynko had stood up out of his chair and put both his big hands under Tom’s arms the way you lift a child off a wall and lifted him up out of Mrs Hrynko’s chair and walked him to the door, and unbolted it, and opened it, and put him out on the step, and patted him on the back, once, flat, and shut the door.

Through the glass, Tom had watched him go back round the counter and sit down again under the lamp, very straight, with his hands on his knees, and look at the telephone.

Four houses. The cold flags under his socks. The blue light in every window, still. A cat on the wall outside the Larkins’, on the chip in the wall at the height of a boy’s arm, looking at him go past with its eyes.

The green door. The hall. The kitchen.

His father was at the table where he had left him, very straight, with his hand on the paper, over the word in the margin. He looked up at Tom in the doorway, and at his socks, and nodded at the chair.

Tom sat down.

He put his bandaged hands on the table. He put his arms on the table. He looked at the portable television on the counter, which was still on, still with no sound, the night man at his desk and the four places from the air and the letters crawling along the bottom. He thought he would watch it for a while, until it was light, and then he would think about what to do.

He did not remember putting his head down.

---

He did not dream. Or he did, and it had no sound in it, so it was the same as not.

---

When he opened his eyes the window over the sink was grey.

Not light. Grey. The first grey, the colour before anything, coming into the square of the window over the sink from the yard, over the backs of the houses on the next street, so that he could see the shape of the window and the shape of the tap and the shape of a mug on the draining board and nothing else in the kitchen, and the blue light of the television on the counter had gone pale in it, thin, like a lamp left on in the morning.

He was at the table. His head was on his arms. His cheek was on the bandage on his left hand, and the bandage was wet where his mouth had been. His neck hurt, under the gauze, and his back, and his hands, and the place behind his eyes, and his ears, which did not hurt so much as feel full, both of them, packed, as if somebody had pushed wet cotton into them a long way.

He did not move at first. He lay with his head on his arms and looked at the grey in the window, and let himself know where he was. His father’s kitchen. Bay Ridge. The table. It was the second of May.

He remembered all of it at once. It came the way a wall comes down: not in order, all of it, together, on top of him. The ceiling coming down as green and gold leaves. The place where the newsstand had been. The steward line. At lunch. The light again. Frank’s fist on his sleeve, opening. The woman in the bus company’s uniform. The old red banner going past with a woman on it and the stitches swinging in the corner. Teresa’s cold hands on his face. BOTH DRUMS. The face on the screen with the corner of its mouth going in. The trolley. The hand. The thumbnail. SUNDAY. YOU BRING THE BREAD. Three faces with nothing in them. WHY. The cream telephone that did not ring.

He lay under it and let it be on top of him. He did not try to get out from under it. He did not think he could.

Then he lifted his head.

---

His father was at the table.

He had not gone to bed. He was in the same chair, very straight, in the same cardigan, and the paper was in front of him still, and his hand was not on it. His hand was on the windowsill.

The kitchen window that looked onto the yard was beside the table, and on its sill there was a wireless. An old one, cream, with a dial, like Mr Hrynko’s telephone; it had been Tom’s grandfather’s and had sat on that sill all Tom’s life, and nobody listened to it except his father, early, for the weather, before he went on the steel, and now in the mornings out of habit. His father had it on. He had it turned round on the sill so that the front of it faced him, and he was leaning towards it, a little, which he did not do, which his back did not let him do, with his ear close to it, very close, as if it were somebody whispering.

He was listening.

Tom watched him listen. He could not hear the wireless at all. He could see his father’s face, in the grey from the window, close to the cream front of the wireless with its dial, listening, the long brown face very still, and the pale blue eyes not looking at anything, looking at the yard through the window, at the grey, and listening.

Then his father’s face changed.

Not much. He was not a man whose face changed much. The eyes moved. They came off the yard and went to the wireless, to the dial, as if the dial could tell him something the voice had not, and stayed there. And his mouth, which was a long straight mouth that did not do anything most of the time, did something at the corner. Not the thing Tom’s mother’s did, or Frank’s, or Teresa’s. Something else. Something Tom had seen it do perhaps three times in his life: at Frank’s christening, and the day Tom passed out of the academy, standing at the back of the hall in his good jacket with his hands behind his back, and the day his own father died.

He reached for something on the table. An envelope. Tom saw it: a gas bill, from the pile on the end of the table where the bills went, opened, with the bill taken out of it and the envelope left. His father turned it over to the back, the blank side, and took the pen.

It was the pen Tom had left on the table. His mother’s, from her top pocket, the one he had written WHY in the margin with.

His father wrote.

He wrote slowly. He wrote the way he did everything, one thing at a time, without hurrying, because hurrying was how you lost the line. Tom watched his hand move. The long brown hand with the knuckles standing up, Frank’s hand, on the back of a gas bill in the grey light, making letters, which Tom had seen it do perhaps a dozen times in his life: on birthday cards, under his mother’s writing, Dad; on the form at the academy, James Keane, father; on the slip for the local, every year, for the dues.

He put the pen down. He pushed the envelope across the table to Tom.

THEY BROUGHT ONE OUT ALIVE. 5.40. RADIO. J.

---

Tom read it.

He read it twice. Then he looked up at his father, and his father was looking at him, across the table, in the grey, with the wireless on the sill beside him still on and his hand back on the sill beside it.

Tom took the pen. He wrote under it, on the back of the gas bill.

WHERE?

His father looked at it. He shook his head, slowly, the way he had shaken it at WHY, once to the left and once to the right and back. I don’t know. Then he picked up the pen again, and under Tom’s WHERE he wrote one more line.

THEY DIDN’T SAY. ONE. ALIVE.

Tom looked at it.

He did not know who. He did not know which of the four places, or how old, or man or woman or child, or what they had been doing at the moment it happened, at twenty-three minutes to eleven or a quarter to twelve or ten past twelve or a quarter past, or how they had lived under whatever was on top of them for eighteen hours, or more, in the dark, with no sound. He did not know anything about them at all. He did not know their name.

He held the back of the gas bill in his bandaged hands and looked at the four words his father had written. ONE. ALIVE. He thought of the shoe on the floor of the Lexington passage, on its side, with nobody in it. He thought of the girl in the school blazer standing in the middle of the junction with nothing in her face. He thought of the hat in the road, upside down, like a bowl, with the dust in it. He thought of the woman in the bus company’s uniform and his jacket on her side and her hand on his wrist.

ONE.

He folded the envelope, and put it in his shirt pocket, behind the label, with the two forms from the clerk and the glove packet with the doctor’s writing on it.

---

There was a bird.

He saw it. Outside the window over the sink, in the yard, on the fence, in the grey: a small brown bird, a sparrow, with its head on one side, and then its beak open, and its throat going, very fast, the way a bird’s throat goes when it is singing as loud as it can.

He could not hear it. He watched it sing. He watched it for a long time, its throat going, its head going from side to side between the bursts, on the fence in his father’s yard in Bay Ridge in the grey at a quarter to six on the morning of the second of May; and it went on and on, the only thing awake on the street, the way the bird in the court in Sunnyside had been the only thing awake yesterday morning at a quarter past five, when he lay in the dark with his hand on the alarm and let it ring under his hand because there was nobody in the flat to wake.

---

His telephone buzzed against his chest.

He felt it through the shirt pocket, behind the label and the forms and the glove packet and the gas bill. He took it out. One bar, the same as outside the laundromat. And a message.

It was from Teresa. It was in capitals; it always was.

KEANE. ON THE ISLAND. EDDIE HOME 3AM. HES ASLEEP IN HIS CLOTHES ON THE KITCHEN FLOOR WITH THE DOG. I CANT MOVE HIM.

COSTELLO RANG THE HOUSE ON THE LANDLINE AT 4. THE HOUSE RANG ME. GC IS THE CORDON NOW. SOLDIERS ON THE OUTSIDE, US ON THE INSIDE. HE WANTS EVERYBODY WHO CAN STAND. WEDS 7AM. THE HOUSE.

YOU CANT STAND. YOU CANT HEAR. THEY SHOULDNT HAVE YOU.

There was a gap in it, a line of nothing. Then:

COSTELLO SAYS COME ANYWAY. I SAID HED SAY THAT. T.

He read it twice. He put the telephone face down on the table, next to the gas bill envelope, and put his hand flat on top of it, and kept it there.

---

He looked at the kitchen door.

Not the door to the hall. The other one, to the yard, at the end of the kitchen by the sink, the back door, which nobody used except his father, early, to go out and look at the sky before he went on the steel; and beside it on the lino, where his father had set them at half past eleven last night, upright, side by side, with their toes to the door.

His shoes.

They were black.

He looked at them for a long time in the grey from the window. They had been white at midnight, and grey, and on the toes and the laces something dark that had dried. They were black now. Black all over, all the way down, the toes and the heels and the welts, every inch, and the laces had been taken out and washed, he could see it, and threaded back in, every eyelet, and done up loose, the way you would leave them for somebody whose hands could not do a knot. And in the grey light coming in through the window over the sink, as he looked at them, the first light of the day came over the backs of the houses on the next street and in through the glass and across the kitchen floor, and touched the toes of the two shoes, and they shone.

He looked at his father.

His father was looking at the wireless. He had his hand on the sill beside it, and his ear towards it, listening, as if there might be more; and on the table by his elbow, where Tom had not seen them in the dark, there was the tin, and the brush, and the cloth, the old ones, the ones from the drawer under the sink, the ones Tom had been given at twenty-two when he passed out of the academy and had taken to the flat in Sunnyside and done his shoes with every Sunday night for four years in front of the television; except these were the other ones. The first ones. His father’s own, from the steel, from forty years of boots. The cloth was black. The tin was nearly empty.

His father did not look round.

Tom sat at the kitchen table in his uniform, in his socks, with his hand flat on his telephone, and looked at the shoes by the back door with the first sun on their toes, shining, the way they had shone at a quarter to six yesterday morning on the edge of the bed in Sunnyside, before any of it, when he had done them again, quickly, so that an old man at the top of the Lexington passage would look at them and say better.

He thought of Mr Pettiford under his chair, with the blood running down through the white on his face, holding the joke up for him like a light. Officer.

He thought: Wednesday. Seven. The house.

On the windowsill, his father leaned closer to the wireless, and listened.