Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry

Author:Sebastian Barry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

He needed a good lie-down.

He hadn’t eaten and he wasn’t hungry, but he reckoned that, like an old wintering bear, he could get by on his fat for a night. He was longing for sleep, he was longing for – what, peace? But there was no peace now and maybe rightly. The nine months alone had been like a pregnancy, and it had given birth to new thoughts, and new light on old thoughts, and this time now was going to be the time when he reared those thoughts. Wiped their arses, stuck plasters on their grazes, and sent them to school. He felt there was a great reckoning coming but he didn’t know what it was exactly. What face it would have, or the carriage that would bring it up the lane. There was emergency and difficulty everywhere, and he was no doubt terrorised by it, but with emergency and terror comes a test. He wondered could he pass it?

They had taken his toothbrush. Of course, in a real case of law, they couldn’t do that, it wouldn’t be admissible. How could you prove he alone used it? What about Winnie? But he mustn’t keep invoking Winnie. Inadmissible, the file-writer’s dreaded word. What Billy Drury was so good at avoiding, and probably O’Casey too as he drew up his files now. Somewhere, somewhere, he was drawing up his files. Putting everything in, just so, carefully framing, but not altering, oh no, too risky, composing the evidence, the interviews, so that no lawyer could get a hold of it, like a bloody puppy with your slipper, and make shreds of it. But among friends, among colleagues, just for the sake of elimination, to have taken his toothbrush without permission, should some old DNA survive in Billy Drury’s beautifully preserved evidence bags, in the far-away sixties, that was alright. He knew that. If they had asked him to pop over to forensics, in that wrecked little building they occupied, he would have had to say yes, no bother. And it was no bother. No bother.

The eternal fight in the solar system between night and day was being waged above him, he supposed, and it was dark as dark could be now, night was winning, but still, it was ridiculously early to be abed. Winnie would obey the weird notions of Mrs Carr, and trot off to bed at six, but Joseph – June called him Jo-Jo, but he couldn’t ever use that – always kicked up hell. He was one of those hellish children that came good in the end. No, that wasn’t fair, not hellish – hectic, he meant. Sometimes. June laboured at the rock face of his character and gathered something pretty good from it. The second he saw him after he was born, Tom thought: Uh-oh, trouble. It was just a voice in his head. June in the room beyond, panting and bloody, and the nurse ferrying this stocky baby down to the nurses’ station to be fed.

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