Sullivan, page 15
Everybody liked him. Nobody ever saw Pi frowning. He minded babies and he bedded drunks and he came between drunken husbands and their wives with great harmony and no injury to himself. Pi didn’t seem to have any vices. His main vice was that he was so palpably enjoying life, and that was the feeling you always got from him.
So, he thought with a sigh, the best thing to do is not to tell him that I’m going at all, just to go, and it will save the both of us from all sorts of feelings. Also, he decided, I will go tomorrow, morning.
He went back to the somnolent place. It reminded him of the first time he had come to it. The day was almost the same. The sun was shining from a sort of harvest sky. You could hear mowing machines humming in the distance like mechanised bees, and in the few fertile meadows on each side of the morass of a river you could see men rearing the hay into tramp cocks. Some of the ladies were sitting at the doors of their caravans, sleeping with their mouths open, or knitting or embroidering. The men were in the village drinking or doing a bit of business. The dogs were lying with their tongues lolling. He was greeted with a nod or a wave. They never took to him like they took to Pi, now. His going would not even leave a ripple in the pool of their lives. Just the donkey-engine man might be sorry to see him go because he would have to collect money as well as looking after the so-and-so asteriskical benighted music machine.
Inside in the tent he gathered his few bits and pieces and put them into his bag. The minute he had done this he felt completely alienated from the Carnival. He lay down and looked out at it through the open flap and wondered what had come over him and his ambition that he had let so much time pass over his head. He must have been sunk in a colourful inertia. Well, that was over now. His vision was clearer. He seemed to be looking at the place with a clearer eye. It was tawdry if you looked at it that way. The caravans wanted painting and the booths wanted cleaning and some of the people could do with a cleaning too. Some of them.
Then he saw Pi coming through with a staggering and wildly singing Johnjo hanging on to him and laughing and singing. The sleepers came awake to regard the spectacle. ‘Love you, Pi,’ he would say and bend over and kiss Pi avidly on the cheek. You could see Pi pulling away his head from the fumes and closing his nostrils. ‘All right, Johnjo,’ he would say. ‘All right, Johnjo.’ Johnjo flings his free arm wide then and sings: ‘From the shores of Salamanca came the wild Arabian tide’, a few lines and he would kiss Pi avidly again.
Pi called: ‘Hey, Sullivan, give ’s a hand with him, will you, for the love of God.’
Sullivan went towards him, laughing.
Johnjo tried to change his affections, but Sullivan wouldn’t take any of them. He turned him around and hoisted him and carried him over to the usual place behind Bo’s caravan where he placed him in the shade. He lay there placidly now, breathing deeply and soon sleeping.
Pi was looking down at him bitterly.
‘You know what that means,’ Pi said. ‘Everybody knows what that means. Well, I’m not going to do it, you hear. I’m just not going into that barrel and I don’t care who knows it.’
He shouted this up at the open window of Bo’s caravan. Sullivan knew that Bo was in there listening. But there wasn’t a peep out of him. Later on, Sullivan thought, he will emerge, his old-looking creased face twisted into an ingratiating and heart-breaking look of complete helplessness, and Pi will end up in the barrel.
‘Certainly,’ said Sullivan. ‘Nobody will get you into that barrel, Pi.’
It was a pity they did.
Sullivan saw Bo working on Pi. He didn’t have to hear a word of it, he just saw him working, the spread hands, the shrugging shoulders, the dark eyebrows raised, the hands brought to the chest in a gesture of infinite appeal. He saw Pi’s face, adamant, unflinching, unmoving, stony, and then he saw it breaking down, to indecision, and hope and defence and retreat and attack and retreat and sympathy and eventual reluctant agreement. I should have told Pi, Sullivan thought, to save himself a lot of emotions and just agree.
Pi went into the barrel, and was up and down like a jack-in-the-box and the balls were clumping on the canvas wall behind, and Sullivan knew when the night was half-way through that he couldn’t walk out like that without letting Pi know that he was going. It was the least he owed to Pi. What was he trying to do anyhow? – save himself a bit of heartache, not Pi. Pi wouldn’t mind as long as he knew.
When the merry-go-round was filled and winding he jumped off the platform and went over towards the jack-jumping Pi. I will call him out of the barrel, he thought, and tell him now. That was Sullivan, impulsive. Couldn’t it have waited until the evening was over and they were in their tent and the night had folded? Not Sullivan.
Over he goes and stands there. There were two men throwing balls at Pi. They were big fellows. They had obviously come from the hayfields. One of them was leaning on a two-pronged pitchfork. He wore no coat. His shirt-sleeves were rolled. His muscles were rippling in the forearms. There was still some hayseed in his dark hair. His teem were big and white and he was laughing so much that Sullivan thought they must have had a porter jug in the hayfields. Because none of these people were given to laughing much. His companion was a bit older than himself, a black man needing a shave. He threw his last ball and it was then that Sullivan caught Pi’s eye and beckoned to him.
It was a mistake. Pi came up and said ‘What?’ and the fellow firing still had a ball in his hand and flung it gleefully. Pi sensed it He had a good instinct. Sullivan saw consternation on his face and then he was gone and the ball fluffed his hair as he went down. This seemed to incense the black man. He hopped over the rope and he went up and bent into the barrel and he fished for Pi and held him up in front of him and then bent down behind him and roared: ‘Now, Jack.’ He was strong. He was holding Pi half out of the barrel, helpless in the grip of his hands. The man with the fork grabbed one of the wooden balls from the tray and flung it at the wriggling Pi. Pi saw it coming straight for his face and just managed to turn his head. It hit off the side of his head in a glancing blow and bounced away. Sullivan heard it. The laughing Jack reached for another ball and at the same time Sullivan and Bo and the still half drunken Johnjo jumped the rope and went for the fellow who was holding Pi. Sullivan got to him first, caught him blindly by the shoulder and struck out with his fist as he half rose. He hit him again and again and his knuckles hurt him, but he was blind with rage. Bo swarmed on him then and Johnjo fell on him and Sullivan turned at a shout and saw the other fellow coming for him with the two-pronged fork raised. He heard women screaming. Your man flung the fork from him like you would fling a spear and he was very close to Sullivan. It was Pi who shouted and it was Pi who half leaped out of the barrel in the fork’s path, and they all saw the prong of the fork hitting him on the cheekbone and penetrating, and the barrel overturned with his weight, and himself and the fork sticking in his cheek went down on the grass.
There was nothing Sullivan could have done. He was half turned when the shout came. He hadn’t time to turn on his feet. He was looking at that fork coming towards him like a bullet and there was nothing he could do about it.
The night seemed to stand still. The fellow who flung the fork stood still. The fracas behind Sullivan ended. He bent over Pi. One side of his face was streaming with blood. Sullivan caught the smooth handle of the fork and pulled. He could feel it leaving the skin.
‘Pi, Pi!’ said Sullivan.
‘I’m sorry, listen, I’m sorry,’ the fork man was crying. ‘I didn’t mean it, it was only a joke, only a joke.’
Nobody paid any attention to him. They were gathered around Pi. Sullivan had his head on his knees, trying to staunch the blood with his handkerchief. It had pierced his cheek, the prong of the fork, like a needle in a piece of cloth.
‘All right, all right,’ Pi was saying, ‘ all right.’
Bo was on his feet. He was practically crying with rage. Two of the men were holding him. The black man had joined Jack. He was rubbing a bloody nose. They were very confused. They didn’t want to be in the limelight at all. They were very sober men. They edged away into the crowd that was now running up to surround the barrel. Bo finally stopped fuming and swearing.
‘You are all right, Pi, aren’t you? Sure, you are all right. Tell me you are all right.’
‘One thing, Bo,’ said Pi, holding the handkerchief to his face, the blood seeping through it and staining the fingers of his hand. ‘No more barrel. You hear. No more bloody barrel.’
They got a doctor. He fixed it up. You’ll have a scar like a German officer, he told Pi.
The whole of the male Carnival chorus was scouring the place for the two men. They didn’t find them. It was fortunate they didn’t find them. Nobody thought of calling in the police. This was private business. But who started it, who started it?
Sullivan knew well who started it. Oughtn’t he to have learned long ago what his impulsiveness led to? But had he learned? No, he hadn’t learned.
He told this to Pi, accusing himself about what he wanted to tell him and how it could have waited until much later, what he was telling him now about the letter from Bernie. Wasn’t I always getting you into trouble, Pi?
Pi laughing and wincing. No, no. Tell you something, Sullivan. I’m tired of the Carnival anyhow. You are, but I thought you loved it. Yes, I do, I suppose I do in a way. It’s a way of life that appeals to me. But I want to be settled too. You know that. You get tired of going from place to place. So I tell you what, you go to Dublin, I go too. I’ll get some sort of a job there.
Sullivan couldn’t believe it. Happening like this. (But did it have to take a few pints of Pi’s blood to make it happen?) It didn’t really. It was because Pi had a letter from Bernie too. Pi often had letters from Bernie that Sullivan knew nothing about. It was none of his business. They were friends. Like Bernie, never said anything out, just sort of that now they had met again it would be good for them to be together.? Sullivan was odd. Sullivan was fond of Pi. Sullivan wouldn’t believe this but Pi gave him stability. All that sort of thing. And Pi knew damn well that Sullivan would be leaving and he was making up his own mind if he, Pi, really wanted to leave too, or if he was just going where he could be with Sullivan. They talked it out Sullivan was hopping with ambition. Sullivan was full of dreams again. Maybe I mightn’t have gone only for the barrel all the same, Pi told himself.
There was wailing in Bohan’s. Nobody wanted to see Pi going. They didn’t know whether to blame Sullivan or the pitchfork or Bohan and the barrel or Johnjo, a repentant, streamy-eyed, humble, penitent Johnjo, or what to blame. But Pi was going. He was kissed and cried over so much that Sullivan was afraid that from sorrow Pi would change his mind. He didn’t.
Bo himself drove them to the station in the van. He never let up on Pi. He had Pi wriggling. If it was the barrel, oh, great God, how sorry he was, and how he wasn’t going to leave that miserable poxed town until he laid his hands on the two bastards if he had to search for them night and day. Never again, he swore his oath, would Pi have to go into the barrel. No, no, it wasn’t that, Bo, just that a fella liked a change, honest. Was it more money? Didn’t he want more money? No, no, Bo, I swear it was just that a fella couldn’t be an old stick-in-the mud.
He only gave in finally when he stood on the station platform and watched the train away. He walked beside the carriage as the train pulled out and said, ‘Any time at all, Pi, that you want to come back to us, come back. Any time at all. We will all be waiting for you. Come back.’
Pi was leaning out of the window waving back at him. Bo looked small and the gaily coloured van looked incongruous against the grey building of the small station.
‘Nobody can stay in one spot all the time anyhow,’ said Pi. He looked odd with his face swathed in cotton wool and sticking plaster. He sat down on the hard seat. Dust rose from it. He rubbed his nose with the palm of his hand, gently because his face hurt him.
‘They were nice people,’ he said. ‘I hope other people we meet will be as nice as them. But nobody can stay in the one place all the time.’
Chapter Sixteen
Tony said: ‘Now you see how it all adds up, Sullivan. All the suffering and even Gregory. Can you even include Gregory in it?’
They could see one another in the mirror. Like old times, thought Sullivan, with an instant warm nostalgic glow.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I will even count in Gregory. I learned a lot from him, mostly trickery.’
‘The time will come,’ Tony said, ‘ when you will be glad of the trickery you learned from him. How many different parts have you played since I saw you doing the Shade of Diarmad? Can you remember?’
‘It’s hard to remember,’ said Sullivan. ‘ Say twelve different ones with you and about fifty with Gregory. Everything under the sun, lord and peasant, tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, all of them, priest and poet, but you cannot say that I distinguished myself since I came here. Look back at it; the biggest thing I did was an old farmer drinking a bottle of stout through the whole of an act.’
‘It’s all waiting. You waited, somewhat impatiently,’ said Tony, ‘but here is your chance now in a good part in a good play. To-night’s the night. After to-night. Brother Sullivan, there will be no more of “ the carriage awaits without”, and may I say that I thought you took it all well. You were more impatient long ago, weren’t you? You wanted to be a comet, but you didn’t have the fuel. Where did you learn the patience, Sullivan?’
‘You don’t know me, Tony,’ said Sullivan. ‘I’m not patient. I’m burning up.’
‘You see,’ said Tony, carefully shading the hard lines under his cheekbones, ‘the good days are gone, Sullivan. That’s why I say you need the trickery. Those lovely days long ago, when you could go on the stage with your heart on fire and you could act with your heart. You have to have that burned out of you with boredom. The parties of the long ago, the amateur intrigue, all that you must lose. The happy hobby. You remember that’s what it was, Sullivan? You remember?’
‘Yes,’ said Sullivan, ‘ I remember, Tony. I remembered you often, and the others, when I was with Gregory. Those were gentle days. But you don’t want to go back to them. If you are a man how can you be a child?’
‘We might be better to be children,’ said Tony.
‘You’re not happy,’ said Sullivan.
‘I’m happy as they go,’ said Tony. ‘All I did was to change from being my own boss, from being a moulder, into a mouldee. And in the process I’m moulding myself. Maybe I can’t cope with all that goes with professionalism, the vanity leading to hatred and burning bile, a knife in the back, frustrations, false smiles, with sometimes rare flashes of love and companionship. Am I drinking too much, Sullivan?’
Sullivan didn’t answer.
Tony was drinking too much. Maybe Tony should never have left what he was. He had more money now and no responsibility, but his eyes were clouded.
‘Maybe you think too much, Tony,’ he said.
‘Think, drink, don’t they go hand in hand?’ Tony asked. ‘I am often tortured with the idea that we as actors are not necessary. We are the clothes to dress another man’s dreams; cavorters to other men’s laughter and tears. Suppose that all the actors in the world were to be killed overnight, what would the world miss? Nothing much. Just entertainment.’
‘Tony,’ said Sullivan, ‘this is a first night. It’s the first night of a good play and I have a good part in it and you have a good part in it, and to-morrow maybe we’ll get good write-ups, and even with the help of God and the critics we might get a raise in salary. Let us think of that and not be gloomy before we have cause to be.’
‘You have a glow about you, Sullivan,’ said Tony, meeting his eyes in the mirror, ‘that I envy. A special glow. It’s the first-night glow, and the glow of a fellow who knows he can be successful. Maybe I am gloomy, Sullivan, because I know that you are about to be very successful. That hurts me, that it is possible I might be jealous of your success; that this gruesome professionalism has reduced me to that, even about you. If such is true, Sullivan, I ask your forgiveness, and I know I should not have taken that last drink. But lately I get so nervous. I say: I simply cannot put a foot on the stage unless I am bolstered. I usedn’t to be like that, Sullivan?’
‘No, Tony,’ said Sullivan, and his heart was heavy. ‘The Tony of long ago was a martinet about drinking in the theatre. No man on the stage is his own master if his speech is a split second behind his mind, and that’s what happens when you drink. You think you never acted as well as then, but you are not acting well. You were never like that.’
‘See,’ said Tony, ‘ my corruption has begun and I don’t know why. Why should I be sad? Listen, Sullivan, you have another glow. I can spot that. Nobody can fool me on that. There is a glow all over the other glows. Is it so?’
‘Don’t know what you mean, Tony,’ said Sullivan, the bright flame burning inside him, and wondering at the perspicacity of Tony. It was just like him to get two things on top of him at the same time: a sinking in his stomach at the thought of his part, and a burning of his heart at the thought of Bernie; to see her, touch her, feel her eyes on his own, big eyes, so clear and so collected, with a flame of incipient desire at the back of them. He couldn’t tell Tony about it: that to-night he would see her, that even now the wheels of the train were clacking out the rhythm of her name and his own, depending on the ears there were listening to them.
They heard the first gong booming, and Sullivan’s burning heart went down into his stomach, and as he applied the powder to his make-up he hurriedly scanned the dog-eared script resting on the bench in front of him.
