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Authors: Gerard Whelan
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interest in me – for my poor parents’ sake, he said. I need hardly tell you that it wasn’t an interest I welcomed.
My mother would always make tea for Phil Murphy when he called, as he did once a week or so, for a social visit. She’d serve it in the best china at the good table in the parlour , and give him a big plate of lardy cake to go with it. Phil Murphy loved my mother’s lardy cake. Crumbs of it would stick to his moustache as he ate, and every now and then he’d lick them off with a flick of his thick red tongue. He was really a huge man, very tall and bulky, with red face and hair and a big, drooping red moustache that hung over his top lip like a fringe. His neck was red too, thick and fat and red. In our parlour he’d carefully take off his cork-linedhelmet and put it daintily down among the tea things on the table. From the collar up then he was red, and from the collar down he was the dark bottle green of his uniform. He and my mother would discuss me over the tea, while I sat sullenly listening and pretending not to. Sometimes I’d glance up slyly, but Phil Murphy’s cool blue eyes would always catch me.
They always talked about me as though I wasn’t there.
‘You’d think he’d have more sense all the same,’ Phil Murphy would say to my mother. ‘Sure, there’s not one of them boyos that hasn’t had kin in trouble – brothers and fathers and, aye, probably grandfathers. And the women are no better. They’re a bad lot up there in Irishtown, ma’am. Criminality runs in their very blood.’
‘I’ve tried everything,’ my mother would confess in despair. ‘Even beating him does no good.’
‘I suppose at their age, now, it’s mostly harmless enough,’ Phil Murphy would say. ‘But it will be very different in a couple of years. What’s play in a child isn’t always so playful in a young man. What’s play for a child can land a young man in the law-courts. And it wouldn’t be a nice thing for his father to have to write about his own son in the court reports in your own paper. And then, of course, you’d wonder even now what some people would be thinking, seeing such a respectable child running wild with the dregs of the town.’
He had, I knew, put his finger on the core of my mother’s problem. In the end her worries had nothing todo with me at all. What really worried her was how my doings might reflect on her, and on her social standing: what would the other ‘decent’ people think of her, letting me loose in the streets with the despised ones? By ‘decent’ people my mother meant the merchant and professional classes of the town – the sort of people she came from. Most of them, like herself, were the descendants of people who’d run the same businesses before them, a little clutch of families who’d controlled the town since the last century. Such people viewed the residents of Irishtown with an open hostility made up of suspicion, dislike and contempt. In their hearts I suspected they viewed everyone like that, but in the case of Irishtowners they took no trouble to hide it. I knew that these merchants – all pillars of society, pillars of the Church, pillars of the local councils and societies for the improvement of this and that, and notorious, some of them, for their slyness and penny-pinching, their deceit and their greed, some even owning the rundown hovels where my friends were forced to live – viewed my friends and all belonging to them as the scum of the earth. I got angry whenever I thought about that, so I thought of it as little as I could. My loyalty to my friends got me in enough trouble; I dreaded to think how my mother might react if she ever found out what I really felt about the ‘decent’ people whose good opinion she so fretted over.
Phil Murphy would linger on these occasions of tea and cake. In theory he had duties to perform, but they couldalways wait. He had a good life as the police sergeant in our town. The police had it easy
My mother would always make tea for Phil Murphy when he called, as he did once a week or so, for a social visit. She’d serve it in the best china at the good table in the parlour , and give him a big plate of lardy cake to go with it. Phil Murphy loved my mother’s lardy cake. Crumbs of it would stick to his moustache as he ate, and every now and then he’d lick them off with a flick of his thick red tongue. He was really a huge man, very tall and bulky, with red face and hair and a big, drooping red moustache that hung over his top lip like a fringe. His neck was red too, thick and fat and red. In our parlour he’d carefully take off his cork-linedhelmet and put it daintily down among the tea things on the table. From the collar up then he was red, and from the collar down he was the dark bottle green of his uniform. He and my mother would discuss me over the tea, while I sat sullenly listening and pretending not to. Sometimes I’d glance up slyly, but Phil Murphy’s cool blue eyes would always catch me.
They always talked about me as though I wasn’t there.
‘You’d think he’d have more sense all the same,’ Phil Murphy would say to my mother. ‘Sure, there’s not one of them boyos that hasn’t had kin in trouble – brothers and fathers and, aye, probably grandfathers. And the women are no better. They’re a bad lot up there in Irishtown, ma’am. Criminality runs in their very blood.’
‘I’ve tried everything,’ my mother would confess in despair. ‘Even beating him does no good.’
‘I suppose at their age, now, it’s mostly harmless enough,’ Phil Murphy would say. ‘But it will be very different in a couple of years. What’s play in a child isn’t always so playful in a young man. What’s play for a child can land a young man in the law-courts. And it wouldn’t be a nice thing for his father to have to write about his own son in the court reports in your own paper. And then, of course, you’d wonder even now what some people would be thinking, seeing such a respectable child running wild with the dregs of the town.’
He had, I knew, put his finger on the core of my mother’s problem. In the end her worries had nothing todo with me at all. What really worried her was how my doings might reflect on her, and on her social standing: what would the other ‘decent’ people think of her, letting me loose in the streets with the despised ones? By ‘decent’ people my mother meant the merchant and professional classes of the town – the sort of people she came from. Most of them, like herself, were the descendants of people who’d run the same businesses before them, a little clutch of families who’d controlled the town since the last century. Such people viewed the residents of Irishtown with an open hostility made up of suspicion, dislike and contempt. In their hearts I suspected they viewed everyone like that, but in the case of Irishtowners they took no trouble to hide it. I knew that these merchants – all pillars of society, pillars of the Church, pillars of the local councils and societies for the improvement of this and that, and notorious, some of them, for their slyness and penny-pinching, their deceit and their greed, some even owning the rundown hovels where my friends were forced to live – viewed my friends and all belonging to them as the scum of the earth. I got angry whenever I thought about that, so I thought of it as little as I could. My loyalty to my friends got me in enough trouble; I dreaded to think how my mother might react if she ever found out what I really felt about the ‘decent’ people whose good opinion she so fretted over.
Phil Murphy would linger on these occasions of tea and cake. In theory he had duties to perform, but they couldalways wait. He had a good life as the police sergeant in our town. The police had it easy
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