‘The name is McGillahee. Better known as McGillahee’s Brat. Brat, for short.’
‘Brat,’ I said. ‘Smith.’
He gripped my hand hard with his tiny fingers.
‘Smith? Your name fits nothing. But Brat, well, don’t a name like that go ten thousand leagues under? And what, you may ask, am I doing down here? And you up there so tall and fine and breathing the high air? Ah, but here’s your drink, the same as mine. Put it in you, and listen.’
The woman was back with shots for both. I drank, watched her, and said, ‘Are you the mother—?’
‘It’s me sister she is,’ said the babe. ‘Our mother’s long since gone to her reward; a ha’penny a day for the next thousand years, nuppence dole from there on, and cold summers for a million years.’
‘Your sister?!’ I must have sounded my disbelief, for she turned away to nibble her ale.
‘You’d never guess, would you? She looks ten times my age. But if winter don’t age you, Poor will. And winter and Poor is the whole tale. Porcelain cracks in this weather. And once she was the loveliest porcelain out of the summer oven.’ He gave her a gentle nudge. ‘But Mother she is now, for thirty years—’
‘Thirty years you’ve been—!’
‘Out front of the Royal Hibernian Hotel? And more! And our mother before that, and our father, too, and his father, the whole tribe! The day I was born, no sooner sacked in diapers, than I was on the street and my mother crying Pity and the world deaf, stone-dumb-blind and deaf.
Thirty years with my sister, ten years with my mother, McGillahee’s brat has been on display!’
‘Forty?’ I cried, and drank my gin to straighten my logic. ‘You’re really forty? And all those years—how?’
‘How did I get into this line of work?’ said the babe. ‘You do not get, you are, as we say, born in. It’s been nine hours a night, no Sundays off, no time-clocks, no paychecks, and mostly dust and lint fresh paid out of the pockets of the rambling rich.’
‘But I still don’t understand.’ I said, gesturing to his size, his shape, his complexion.
‘Nor will I, ever,’ said McGillahee’s brat. ‘Am I a midget born to the blight? Some kind of dwarf shaped by glands? Or did someone warn me to play it safe, stay small?’
‘That could hardly—’
‘Couldn’t it!? It could! Listen. A thousand times I heard it, and a thousand times more my father came home from his beggary route and I remember him jabbing his finger in my crib, pointing at me, and saying, ‘Brat, whatever you do, don’t grow, not a muscle, not a hair! The Real Thing’s out there; the World. You hear me, Brat? Dublin’s beyond, and Ireland on top of that and England hard-assed above us all.
It’s not worth the consideration, the bother, the planning, the growing-up to try and make do, so listen here, Brat, we’ll stunt your growth with stories, with truth, with warnings and predictions, we’ll wean you on gin, and smoke you with Spanish cigarettes until you’re a cured Irish ham, pink, sweet, and small, small, do you hear, Brat?
I did not want you in this world. But now you’re in it, lie low, don’t walk, creep; don’t talk, wail; don’t work, loll; and when the world is too much for you, Brat, give it back your opinion: wet yourself! Here, Brat, here’s your evening poteen; fire it down. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse wait down by the Liffey. Would you see their like? Hang on. Here we go!’
‘And out we’d duck for the evening rounds, my dad banging a banjo with me at his feet holding the cup, or him doing a tap-dance, me under one arm, the musical instrument under the other, both making discord.
‘Then, home late, we’d lie four in a bed, a crop of failed potatoes, discards of an ancient famine.
‘And sometimes in the midst of the night, for lack of something to do, my father would jump out of bed in the cold and run outdoors and fist his knuckles at the sky, I remember, I remember.
I heard, I saw, daring God to lay hands on him, for so help him, Jesus, if he could lay hands on God, there would be torn feathers, ripped beards, lights put out, and the grand theater of Creation shut tight for Eternity! do ya hear, God, ya dumb brute with your perpetual rain-clouds turning their black behinds on me, do ya care!?
‘For answer the sky wept, and my mother did the same all night, all night.
‘And the next morn out I’d go again, this time in her arms and back and forth between the two, day on day, and her grieving for the million dead from the famine of fifty-one and him saying good-by to the four million who sailed off to Boston…
‘Then one night, Dad vanished, too. Perhaps he sailed off on some mad boat like the rest, to forget us all. I forgive him. The poor beast was wild with hunger and nutty for want of something to give us and no giving.
‘So then my mother simply washed away in her own tears, dissolved, you might say, like a sugar-crystal saint, and was gone before the morning fog rolled back, and the grass took her, and my sister, aged twelve, overnight grew tall, but I, me, oh, me? I grew small. Each decided, you see, long before that, of course, on going his or her way.
‘But then part of my decision happened early on. I knew, I swear I did! the quality of my own Thespian performance!
‘I heard it from every decent beggar in Dublin when I was nine days old. ‘What a beggar’s babe that is!’ they cried.
‘And my mother, standing outside the Abbey Theater in the rain when I was twenty and thirty days old, and the actors and directors coming out tuning their ears to my Gaelic laments, they said I should be signed up and trained!
So the stage would have been mine with size, but size never came. And there’s no brat’s roles in Shakespeare. Puck, maybe; what else? So meanwhile at forty days and fifty nights after being born my performance made hackles rise and beggars yammer to borrow my hide, flesh, soul and voice for an hour here, an hour there.
The old lady rented me out by the half day when she was sick abed. And not a one bought and bundled me off did not return with praise. ‘My God,’ they cried, “his yell would suck money from the Pope’s poorbox!”
‘And outside the Cathedral one Sunday morn, an American cardinal was riven to the spot by the yowl I gave when I saw his fancy skirt and bright cloth. Said he: “That cry is the first cry of Christ at his birth, mixed with the dire yell of Lucifer churned out of Heaven and spilled in fiery muck down the landslide slops of Hell!”
‘That’s what the dear Cardinal said. Me, eh? Christ and the Devil in one lump, the gabble screaming out my mouth half lost, half found, can you top that?’
‘I cannot,’ I said.
‘Then, later on, many years further, there was this wild American film director who chased White Whales? The first time he spied me, he took a quick look and…winked! And took out a pound note and did not put it in my sister’s hand, no, but took my own scabby fist and tucked the pound in and gave it a squeeze and another wink, and him gone.
‘I seen his picture later in the paper, him stabbing the White Whale with a dread harpoon, and him proper mad, and I always figured, whenever we passed, he had my number, but I never winked back. I played the part dumb. And there was always a good pound in it for me, and him proud of my not giving in and letting him know that I knew that he knew.
‘Of all the thousands who’ve gone by in the grand Ta-Ta! he was the only one ever looked me right in the eye, save you! The rest were all too embarrassed by life to so much as gaze as they put out the dole.
‘Well, I mean now, what with that film director, and the Abbey Players, and the cardinals and beggars telling me to go with my own natural self and talent and the genius busy in my baby fat, all that must have turned my head.
‘Added to which, my having the famines tolled in my ears, and not a day passed we did not see a funeral go by, or watch the unemployed march up and down in strikes, well, don’t you see? Battered by rains and storms of people and knowing so much, I must have been driven down, driven back, don’t you think?
‘You cannot starve a babe and have a man; or do miracles run different than of old?
‘My mind, with all the drear stuff dripped in my ears, was it likely to want to run around free in all that guile and sin and being put upon by natural nature and unnatural man? No. No! I just wanted my little cubby, and since I was long out of that, and no squeezing back, I just squinched myself small against the rains. I flaunted the torments.
‘And, do you know? I won.’
You did, Brat, I thought. You did.
‘Well, I guess that’s my story,’ said the small creature there perched on a chair in the empty saloon bar.
He looked at me for the first time since he had begun his tale.
The woman who was his
