Goodbye to the Hill Read online

  ‘It’s little wonder yer old before yer time,’ she said. Then, smiling suddenly, she growled at me, ‘Yer father’ll kill you if he sees it.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Ma, he won’t,’ I said, ‘and thanks, Ma.’

  I tore up the old magazine, but I kept the picture of Janet in my pocket. When it got badly torn from being folded and unfolded I got some sticky paper from the post office and stuck it together at the back. Finally, another kid nicked it off me, but I couldn’t prove it, so that was the end of it. Not that it really mattered, because by then I was starting to put into practice all the things I’d been thinking about for so long.

  Mrs. Kearney was the beginning, I suppose, but I’m not blaming her. It was bound to have happened, anyway, before very long. She just made it a lot easier than running after the young ones who lived on The Hill.

  I was over fourteen and I was tall, even though I was only as broad across the chest as a kipper. I still did the paper round and I worked as much as I could with the box cart. It served no longer as a stagecoach. Now it was strictly a commercial vehicle and I tended to several gardens at two bob a lawn. I also cleaned windows and washed the odd motor car and on Saturdays I did a full days work in a butcher’s shop for five shillings.

  This was fantastic money for one day, but as I had to work twelve hours, from eight to eight, you can imagine the state I was in. Like, with the papers to be delivered, as well as pushing the carrier bike around with all those Sunday dinners in the basket, but, the upside was that I loved to ride the bike so much that I didn’t care. And Jimmy the butcher was a decent skin. He always gave me a wrap up when I finished, which meant that we had a good stew at home on a Sunday with all the bits of meat, cut-offs, he’d had left over.

  For the afternoon paper round I used to get a couple of kids to me help me. I’d give them a deuce a piece for doing most of the work, having flashed down to the shop on the bike, pick up the papers, then split them with the kids. I’d do as many as I could on the way back to the shop, leaving them to clear up the rest, telling Jimmy I’d been to the bog or something and he never once said a word. He didn’t care once I got all the meat delivered.

  It was a joint of roast beef that took me to Mrs. Kearney’s. I hadn’t seen her before, but I’d heard Jimmy, and the apprentice Slattery talking about her. This time, well, I think they must have forgotten that I was in the shop.

  ‘She likes good meat, that Mrs. Kearney,’ Slattery said.

  ‘You’re right there, boy,’ Jimmy laughed. ‘There’s not a woman fonder of good meat than Mrs. Kearney.’

  He grinned at Slattery. ‘That’s how she got them big head lamps and them lovely child-bearing hips,’ and he laughed as though somebody was tickling him.

  Poor Slattery smiled all shy at that. He was from the bogs, green as a head of cabbage with his freckled face and a head on him like a turnip. You couldn’t help feeling sorry for him.

  Mrs. Kearney herself open the door to me when I got there with the meat, and the minute I saw her I knew what Jimmy had been talking about earlier when he said headlamps. God, they were nearly bursting through the wool of her jumper and I got such a start that I nearly dropped the meat on the doorstep.

  She had big teeth like a horse, but she was a fairly good looking woman even if she did wear glasses. I couldn’t take my eyes off her swollen red jersey and I was shaking something terrible as I handed her the meat. There was a hot sting in my bowels too and I was thinking that I’d do it in my trousers if I wasn’t careful.

  ‘What’s your name?’ The way she said ‘your’ made it sound as though my name, whatever it might be, was going to be very important to her. I was still shaking with nerves, but I had a feeling that there was a chance with this woman. I’d heard all the bigger guys on The Hill talking about what they did with woman and, afraid or not, I was itching to do something. The fact that Mrs. Kearney was probably old enough to be my mother didn’t make any difference to me.

  ‘Maguire, Ma’am. Paddy Maguire, I’m from Rathmines.’

  ‘There’s a good lad.’ She smiled at me full blast. ‘Would you care for a cup of tea?’

  Now if there was one thing I never did it was drink tea. Ma always had a packet of cocoa in the house for me, and even when I’d gone to Balbriggan with the boys’ club I’d taken my own packet of cocoa, and I’d drank nothing else for the whole weeks holiday. I just couldn’t put tea down without the feeling that it was going to come straight back up again.

  ‘I’d love a cup ma’am, please,’ I said, and nothing was further from my mind than cocoa.

  ‘Come in then,’ she said, ‘come in and I’ll stick the kettle on.’

  The house smelled nice and the kitchen seemed as big as our whole flat. It was all spotlessly clean. The paint work was all new-looking, and even the lino on the floor was shining enough for you to see your face in it. I liked it very much.

  She put the kettle on the gas stove and I sat down. She stretched up to put the meat in a wall cupboard and her skirt went up a bit and I was warm all over. She turned around then and looked at me.

  ‘What’re you going to do when you’re older, Paddy?’

  ‘A landscape designer, ma’am,’ I said, thinking of one of the gardens that I looked after in Cowper Road. I didn’t mean it for one minute but, I thought it would sound better than a bus driver or the like.

  ‘And a lady-killer too, I’ll bet,’ she said, smiling. ‘You’re a very good-looking young man.’

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I was very nervous, so nervous that it wouldn’t be easy to talk at all, let alone make this kind of chat. Suppose I was kidding myself, anyway, that the woman was just giving me a cup of tea. I’d be in right trouble and Ma was bound to hear about it. It might be as well to get up and go. But, I couldn’t find the will. I was a prisoner, just looking at her chest, so big and so round, and my trousers getting tighter every minute.

  ‘You’re shy, Paddy. Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you shy.’

  ‘Oh, you didn’t, ma’am, you didn’t at all. I’m a bit worried about the bike, that’s all.’

  Oh, is that all? Oh, don’t worry about that. It’s perfectly safe out there.’

  When she poured out the tea I took a mouthful, hoping that it would help me relax a little. The minute it hit the inside of my mouth I wanted to throw up.

  ‘Excuse me, ma’am, can I use your toilet, please?’

  ‘Of course you can Paddy. It’s upstairs. I’ll show you where.’

  I walked behind her up the stairs and it was though she had a pendulum in her skirt. God, it was agony to watch. She opened the bathroom door and when I went in she followed.

  ‘It’s all in the one,’ she said, indicating the bath and the lavatory pan. I stood there, but she didn’t make a move to go out. She bent over the bath and began to put some clothes that were lying in it into a bundle. I didn’t move. I just stood there waiting for her to go, knowing at the same time that she wasn’t going to. There was excitement and fear running through me. I knew something was going to happen, I could feel it. I also knew that I wasn’t going to be sick and that I couldn’t take a piss to save my life.

  She straightened up from the bath and taking me by the arm she drew me against her. I was hypnotised, and even if I’d wanted to I couldn’t have stopped her from pulling me close. She put her arms around me and she kissed me on the mouth, pulling me hard against her body, and I came, fiercely upon myself, for the first time in my life.

  I shook from it, and she must have known, for suddenly her arms were cuddling me and she was different to the way she’d been, only seconds before. She pressed my face gently against her breasts and it’s impossible to describe the feeling I knew. I thought for a second that I was going to cry, but I held it back. No woman except Ma had seen me do that. I had to get out of there and I felt she understood that to
o. She was kind to me, and anyway she probably knew that I’d be back before very long.

  There was a change in me from that moment in the bathroom. It’s hard to explain. I didn’t look any older, yet I could feel the change, almost as if I’d never be a kid again. It was like turning a bend in the road. Something is behind you, but it isn’t there any more and different because of that.

  There were fellas on The Hill who claimed they’d been in bed with women lots of times, but they still looked the same to me. They didn’t even sound different or act at all strange, so why should I feel odd after what had happened? I couldn’t figure it out at all but I just knew that I’d never be the same again.

  Chapter 3

  Things were happening all the time on The Hill. Babies were being born to people who couldn’t keep themselves. Old people were dying, most of them in poverty and loneliness, from which death could only be a welcome release. And all over the place governments were coming and going like snuff at a wake, and people were saying that this would happen and that would happen now that the war was over.

  None of this mattered to me; the war hadn’t cost me a thought; it was like I was getting hard, becoming immune to the sight of snotty-nosed, half-starved kids growing up in filth and squalor, so that the endless arrivals, the new screaming bundles, didn’t depress me. I’d seen, too, the old wagon take away enough paupers to enough quick-like burials to be used to that as well. Most of the poor oul’ bastards had never had the chance to live, anyway, meandering through a pointless grey existence, unrelieved by the least shot of colour. Death might be something new.

  Governments and politicians were just words and pictures in the newspapers that I delivered but never read. Voices from tall platforms making promises they had no intention of keeping. Strangers in good suits and white linen, pleading for the trust of other strangers, talking to them like friends but, making sure by the very promises they weren’t going to keep, that strangers they would always be. Catholic and Protestant alike, these hustlers, on the common ground of the platform, shared only an abhorrence of poverty, contempt for the helpless fools that were drowning in it, and the ability to tell lies as though they believed every word of what they were saying.

  I suppose I hated them. They were bloody vultures, just helping themselves to anything they could lay hands on. But, if I hated them, I didn’t blame them. Anyone else, given half a chance would do the same thing.

  I listened to what they said. I listened to everybody and I enjoyed doing it. I loved to get people talking about themselves. It didn’t matter to me who they were or what they did. Everyone had a story to tell and I lapped up every word. I was like a big sheet of blotting paper, just walking around soaking up everything.

  Each week now I did a few jobs for Mrs. Kearney. I looked after her garden and I cleaned the windows and she paid me well. You could tell she wasn’t stuck for a few shillings and with what she gave me and all my other numbers, and the paper round and the butchers on a Saturday, I was earning a nice few bob, even though I didn’t have a steady job.

  Mrs. Kearney kissed me every chance she got and though I thought it clever to be doing it, I didn’t think it was all that it was cracked up to be. I mean, when those blokes on the screen in The Stella kissed The Mot, they looked like they were in heaven. I wondered a few times would it have been any different if I’d been doing it with Janet Blair or Betty Grable.

  Then, one day, I had a chat with Harry Redmond and he soon made me realise that I wasn’t putting enough into it to get much out of it.

  Harry Redmond was a layabout and a tired layabout at that. He’d never been known to do a day’s work in his life, and though he was thirty six years old, his mother still regarded him as her little boy Harry.

  Anyway, as I say, Harry passed the time without ever having to take a job to relieve the boredom. He did go down to the Labour Exchange several days a week to put his name on the line, and he always bussed it back home on payday. And when people asked him what he did, he used to tell them he was an artist. Artist me arse! You can take my word for it, the only thing ever drew in his life was the dole.

  I bumped into him this day when he was coming out of the library. He was in the mood for a chat, so we sat down on a seat at the bottom of Leinster Road, by the Town Hall Clock, and he began to talk about women.

  I was willing to listen because I knew I needed help if I was to get the great thrill I was missing with Claire Kearney.

  The truth is he started off talking about horses - the mare had to be serviced by the stallion - this operation produced little horses that were called foals. I knew this already, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings after him taking the trouble to tell me, so I kept my mouth shut.

  After a while he got around to women and if there was any truth in what he said it wasn’t any wonder that he was always so tired looking. According to himself, there wasn’t a Scivvie in Rathmines that he hadn’t flung one up - his words, not mine - and that went for Rathgar and Terenure as well.

  He didn’t spare the details, and with him being a born story-teller, he had me so worked up that I’d have jumped on the bus and gone up to do the grass for Claire Kearney, only I knew she was up at the chest hospital visiting her husband.

  When Redmond stopped for a minute to roll a cigarette, I asked him a few questions. I was careful how I put them, not wanting him to think I was pig ignorant altogether, even though that’s exactly what I was. And to give him his due he did all he could to put me right.

  ‘A woman gets the same kick out of it that a man does,’ he said, running his tongue along the edge of a cigarette paper. ‘if it’s done right. That’s why they love it so much.’

  It made sense when you thought about it, but up to then I hadn’t done so. I’d taken it for granted that women only did it to please men, or because they wanted babies. I just hadn’t ever considered that they might be doing it for the pleasure.

  ‘The whole secret is,’ he scratched a match on his shiny trouser leg, ‘to make sure they come the same time as you do. If you don’t do that you’re wastin’ your time.’

  He told me how he worked this, and I thought he must be a very cool customer altogether to be able to think while he was doing it. The minute Claire touched me my head was full of little explosions and it took me all my time just to keep breathing.

  Redmond went on to talk about using your tongue when you kiss women and how you should play with them when you were going to give them one. He said they all liked it if you played with them first, and I drank in every word, all the time wishing Claire wasn’t above at the feckin’ hospital.

  By the time Harry got up off the seat to go home for his square meal, as he called it, I felt very much the wiser. And when I went up to Claire’s the next day, I tried to keep in mind he had said.

  I felt the surprise in her when we kissed. For the first time I opened my mouth and I could feel the warm breath of her and I knew what it was like to kiss and be kissed in return.

  She took me to bed that day and though I hardly did the sheets any good, at least I didn’t want to cry after the first time. I wanted to stay there in the warm bed, with her arms wound tightly about me, and I did for the whole afternoon.

  Claire seemed to be delighted with me and I enjoyed myself. When I finally left her house she gave me five shillings, and I hadn’t even cleaned the windows. When I walked down the road I was eight feet tall and all shiny and new, and the two half crowns felt like cartwheels in my pocket. I got a shock though when I saw the time, and I knew I’d have to get a move on if I was going to get the papers delivered.

  An empty taxi came cruising down the road. I put up my hand and it stopped, the driver with a look of surprise on his face. Not many people hailed cabs in Dublin, not if they were dressed like me.

  ‘How much down to The Avenue?’ I asked politely.

  He seemed lik
e a fairly decent oul’fella and he grinned at me with his clear gums.

  ‘Two bob,’ he said, trying it on.

  ‘Ah,’ I said, in my best poor mouth, ‘I only have nine dee.’

  He gave me an old fashioned look so I spoke up quickly.

  ‘I was up seein’ me grannie. She’s dyin’ y’see, and I stayed longer than I should’ve. I didn’t like to leave her, ye see. Now I’m late to do me paper round.’

  ‘Ye’ for ‘you’ and ‘me’ for ‘my’ deliberately stuck into the chat to try and make it sound poorer. He looked at me for a few seconds and then reaching over he opened the door.

  ‘Jump in,’ he said. ‘I’ll run ye down for the nine pence.’

  He put the car into gear and I’ll say this for him, he got a move on for such a gummy old guy. He didn’t say much, just kept chewing on his gums and spitting out the window as if he had a filthy taste in his mouth. I asked him to stop before we got to the paper shop. It wouldn’t do to let Lady Muck see me getting out of a taxi. She might decide that I was nicking things that belonged to her. I reached into my pocket for the nine pence and I tried my hardest to look poor and helpless.

  ‘How much do you get a week for the paper round?’

  ‘Five shillings and ten pence, but I do mornin’ and evening paper rounds’.’

  ‘Bastardin’ robbers,’ he snorted; ‘should be strung up, the lotta them.’ He shot a big gollyer out of the window. ‘You hang onto the ninepence. I didn’t put the flag down anyway.’

  ‘Ah, thanks a million, sir. Yer awful decent!’

  Then I was out of the cab and away down to the shop like a bullet before he got the chance to change his mind.

  That evening I sang my head off right to the last paper on the round, and when I got home for tea I couldn’t wait to get it over with and be out again. The five shillings was burning a hole in my pocket.