The Canal Bridge by Tom Phelan

Author:Tom Phelan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade
Published: 2014-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

COMING HOME

Billy Simkins

dear mrs Hatchel,

if you had a son by the name of Cornelius Hatchel killed in the war write back to me. I would write to you about him if he was your son, he was called Con and his middle name was Francis, my name is Billy Simkins 62 Fairmount bldv Mansfield Beds England.

Signed,

Billy Simkins

Jer Meaney

I was the one who seen him first the day he come home. I mean, I was the first one seen him and knew it was Matthias. People over at Marbra Station must have saw him, and at the Dublin station too, but they only seen him the way you’d see someone you don’t know; just another person, unless of course the person had something wrong with him, like a glass eye or only one arm or a burnt face, like the Hodgkins one behind her mask.

But there wasn’t anything wrong with Matthias’s body when I caught up with him on the Bog Road, no wooden leg like Mick Nolan, no shakes like Ownie Egan roaring in his house in the middle of the day or night, his burned lungs making him sound like a calving cow in trouble—frighten the shite out of you—and eyes bulging forever against the green gas snaking across no man’s land, screaming at it to “Stay away, stay away, ya hure,” shouting, “Piss on me hanky, piss on me hanky, will someone for the love of Jazus piss on me hanky? I’ve not a drop left in me.”

That was the first time, on the Bog Road, I ever saw Matthias by himself. It was always Matthias and Con and the girl Kitty since they were small childer down at the Canal. The Hatchel triplets. Poor Con didn’t come back at all—buried a million miles away, in France somewhere, too far for anyone to go and cry at his grave, may the Lord have mercy on him.

By the walk of him from behind, it never crossed my mind it was Matthias—he’d always walked with a bit of a stoop to the left, and this fella was as straight as a telegraph pole. And when I did pass him and looked back, it still took me a second to recognize him. Compared to the well-fed Matthias that left Enderly to join the army, he was a skeleton: sunk eyes, grey hair made all the greyer with the fierce black eyebrows, cheeks sucked in like when you bite into a sloe after your mother telling you not to, so purple you couldn’t stop yourself. Matthias was twenty-two years younger than myself, but he looked twenty-two years older.

Of course, he wasn’t wearing the uniform. I wouldn’t have been wearing it myself neither, if ’twere me, never knowing when you’d run into a Fenian or some other bugger who’d give you hell for joining the army—“Took the king’s shilling, didn’t ya?”—accusing you, not asking you a question at all. Ireland had changed since Matthias went off to join up. Them lads in Dublin

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