BEN BULBEN

The Dublin boys and the Connacht boys were fighting again. Over what Bernard wasn't aware and cared little, too focused on his dinner. It was always one of a few things, each as trivial and dim as the last, and all of which boiled down to ‘You're from there and we're from here.’ Likely, it came down to the simple utterance of the word culchie or jackeen.

Bernard didn’t get involved in these arguments, both for the fact Sligo was too far north of Connacht for either side to bother with him, and that he himself simply couldn’t be bothered. He was, frankly, sick and tired of these petty arguments between men who were all here for the same reason; forced by a need for work to leave their homes and venture into the British workforce for the promise of better wages.

Even with the uncertainty of jumping from job to job, city to city, middle-of-nowhere to middle-of-nowhere-but-somewhere-else, not knowing how long you'll be there or how well you'll be looked after, only having enough money to keep you going for maybe two weeks at any given time... It’s not a life most would choose, but it was preferable to whatever lay in wait at home.

But for all the good it brought, Bernard missed the simplicities of home — though he’d left for the same reason as everyone else, a desperate need for work, absence had only made the heart grow fonder. He’d become weary of the back-breaking work, he hated the conditions he worked in, he hated the cities, he’d even grown to hate the people who inhabited the same spaces as him; the pubs filled with the same faces every day, faces of men who would never return to their birthplace, be it through shame, poverty or arrogance, men who would rather slink off over the horizon to die like a dog rather than be seen by their families again, nosing out the least amount of dignity in death.

An elbow slipped against Bernard's arm, knocking both his train of thought out of his mind and the slice of ham he'd just managed to get onto his fork straight back off it again. Martin, a younger man from Lancashire who'd somehow ended up with this gang of Irish navvies, craned his neck to gawp over his shoulder.

‘What are they fighting about?’ Martin looked back between the two men sitting with him. ‘Should I — should we be concerned?’

‘Don't worry about it,’ Christy, a Kerryman built like an ox, mumbled through a mouthful of mash. ‘Just keep your nose out of it.’

‘What's a “Dublin Shackreen”’?

‘Why are you here, Martin?’ Bernard asked. ‘On this job, I mean. There's no other English working here.’

Martin blinked. ‘I needed the money. I weren't going to be picky.’

Bernard hmm'd in response. He couldn't fault him there.

‘I'd rather be out in the fresh air than cooped up in one of the factories, day-in, day-out.’ Martin now idly picked at the peas on his plate, having forgotten the ruckus that was still ongoing behind him.

He finally stabbed the fork down onto a single pea, sending a couple more flying in opposite directions. ‘And anything's better than being down the mines.’

‘Out in the frigid air, you mean. At least the factories and the mines might be warm,’ Christy said.

‘Only depending on how deep the mine is,’ Martin replied. ‘It gets colder first, then it starts heating up.’

‘Send me right down to the core. I'm tired of my hands cracking open with the cold.’

‘Maybe you wouldn't feel so cold if you worked a bit harder, Christy,’ Bernard remarked.

Knocking his chair backwards, Christy leapt up and pulled Bernard towards him by the collar. ‘Look, you—’

‘Are you two heading home for Christmas? You'll be warm then,’ Martin said casually. ‘I'll go back for a couple days, at least. ‘Til they all start depressing me again and I can't take them no more.’

Christy sank back down into his seat, releasing his hand from Bernard's shirt and using it to scratch the side of his face in thought instead. The fist Bernard had reeled back in response slowly returned to his cutlery.

‘I’d say so,’ Christy said idly. ‘I usually do. I've enough saved to stay home for a month without doing a stab of work.’

‘I haven't been home in years,’ Bernard mused. ‘I'm afraid if I go now I mightn't come back again.’ He looked up from studying the remains of his plate and saw two faces staring at him.

‘You're thinking of packing it in, Bern?’ Christy asked, voice low.

‘Ah, I—’

From behind them, a roar rose up from the gathered crowd, and a tremendous thump cracked through the floorboards.

‘I think the shackreen lost,’ Martin remarked.

*

Martin saw the two of them off in the train station, waiting to catch a train of his own back up North. He gave them each a roughly torn piece of notebook paper with a company name and address of a job in Birmingham where he might be working come January, if they wished to join him on their return.

The remaining two travelled together on the ferry as far as the port in Dún Laoghaire, where Christy left him with a few claps on the back and a reminder to keep him posted on what he decides to do. For the rest of his journey, Bernard was alone.

He didn't know what exactly he expected to feel; preferably anything, but try as he might, he couldn't conjure up any feelings of nostalgia, or excitement, or longing, or even loneliness. The towns and fields racing past the window blurred into a numb fog in his mind.

It was dark by the time he disembarked from the train in Sligo, and late into the evening by the time he had reached the end of the long walk along the road out of the town.

Under the shadow of Ben Bulben lay the same old house; the same old trail of smoke stretching from the same old chimney, from below which the light of the same old fireplace illuminated the same old dirty windows.

He walked straight in as he always had done, and his mother acted equally as though no time had passed, not even looking up from making dinner on the range as she told him to take his dirty shoes off.

Bernard remarked that it was a bit late to be having dinner, to which his mother responded that it was only for his father’s sake, who was working late this evening. The dreariness involved in sitting at the table while his mother simultaneously conjured up a stew and updated him on every death in the parish since his last visit, all while being badgered with questions of ‘Have you met any nice girls over there yet?’, compelled Bernard to put his shoes back on and say to her, ‘I'll talk to you properly later on, when Da is home, right?’, and headed back out the door and towards the nearest village.

Having a drink with some of his old mates would surely put his mind right. He had barely stepped foot into the pub when he was accosted by a familiar voice.

‘Get the fuck out of here Bernard, you’re barred.’

‘Ah come on Peadar, I’ve not been back in years.’

‘Fine!’ The grey-haired owner of the pub was already filling a glass. ‘Just this once. But one word out of you and you’re gone.’

Bernard slipped onto a stool at the empty bar, glancing over his shoulder to see who else was around. A number of men populated the darker corners of the little building, none of which Bernard was overly familiar with — except for his father, who grinned at him upon making eye contact and held up his drink in greeting from a table he shared with a few similarly scruffy looking men by the open fire.

Peader slid Bernard’s drink towards him. ‘How’s your sister? D’ya ever run into her over there?’

‘My sister? Is she not here?’

‘She’s been in England for the last 3 years, Bernard.’

‘Oh.’ Bernard paused. ‘Well, no one told me.’

Peadar watched him drink for a moment, one eyebrow raised. Bernard busied himself with looking over his shoulder.

‘How’s the rest of them? Francis, Michael, Joe, Steve Óg, those shower—’ he punctuated each name with a point of his finger at different chairs and tables across the pub; all now either empty or seating the worn older men he’d seen on his way in, ‘—They’d normally be in here this time of day.’

‘All gone.’

‘What? Died?’

‘No, not died, you stupid— ...Gone and done the same as you, off to England to find work,’ Peader sighed.

‘Right, right,’ Bernard eased slightly, or deflated; he couldn’t tell.

A chair groaned across the floor, and he looked back up in time to see his father bid his drinking partners farewell and waltz out the door, singing something about dinner being ready for him.

For a few moments he watched the door swing slightly in the draught, knocking against its frame where it hadn’t been shut in properly.

‘Peader,’ Bernard began, ‘You haven’t got a pen and some paper I could borrow?’

‘Only if you give ‘em back.’

Hunched over the bar, Bernard began to write a letter:

Dear Christy —

I’ll see you back in Birmingham.

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