Bravado By William Trevor

 

   BRAVADO

by William Trevor

The leaves had begun to fall. All along Sunderland Avenue on the pavement beneath the beech trees there was a sprinkling, not yet the mushy inconvenience they would become when more fell and rain came, which inevitably would be soon. Not many people were about; it was after midnight, almost one o’clock, the widely spaced lampposts casting pools of misty, yellow illumination. A man walked his dog in Blenning Road in the same blotchy lamplight, the first of autumn’s leaves gathering there also. An upstairs window opened in Verdun Crescent, hands clapped to dismiss a cat rooting in a flower bed. A car turned into Sunderland Avenue, its headlights dimmed and then extinguished, its alarm set for the night with a flurry of flashing orange and red. The traffic of the city was a hum that only faintly reached these leisurely streets, the occasional distant shriek of a police siren or an ambulance more urgently disturbing their peace.

Less than half a mile away, the night was different. Young people prowled about outside the Star night club, its band—Big City—taking a break. A late shop was still open, a watchful Indian at the door noting who came and went. A few cars drew away, but more remained. Then, with a thump of such suddenness that for a moment it might have been taken for a warning of emergency or disaster, music again burst from the Star night club.

By half past one this neighborhood, too, had quietened. The bouncers at the Star drove off, couples made their way to the dark seclusion of the nearby canal bank. Others stood about, groups forming and dispersing. Locking up his shop, the Indian was argued with, and abused, when demands for alcohol and potato crisps were refused. The last of the parked cars were driven off.

Two youths who were friends went together, undaunted by the prospect of an hour’s walk to where they lived. One was in shirtsleeves although it was chilly, the arms of a red anorak tied around his shoulders; the other wore a black woollen jersey above ragged jeans. They talked about the girls they had come across on the dance floor, one in particular, well known to them both, the others strangers. They talked about their intentions for the future: in the Merchant Navy and in car sales, an uncle’s business. These were the changes that were soon to come about, when education ended, when so much they had known for so long was to be left behind forever: the Brothers and the lay teachers, the cramped desks scratched with entwined initials and hearts and arrows, all they had learned of self-preservation and of survival’s cunning. There was, in their conversation, an absence of regret.

They paused in their walk while the anorak was unknotted and put on and zipped. Their evening out had been a good one, they agreed while this was being done. “Kicking,” one said. “Big City can do it.” They walked on, talking about that band’s touch of genius.

With his mobile telephone close to his mouth, the Indian loudly demanded the police: his usual ploy at this hour, speaking to no one. His tormentors swore at him, then tired of their invective and went away. Five there were, two of them girls, neither of whom had taken part in the abuse, which had surprised him, for girls were often the worst. He kept an eye on the five when they moved off in a bunch, causing an oncoming car to slow to a crawl as they crossed the street. Then he locked his shop, thankful that there hadn’t been an incident.

“How ya doin’?” Manning shouted at the driver of the car. He drummed on the bonnet with his fists and, joining in, his companions—but not the girls—did the same. The car kept moving, then stopped and reversed. It went another way.

“Could you beat that?” Manning laughed, watching the car from the middle of the road. He was tallest of the bunch, his reddish hair falling over his forehead in a floppy shock that he was said to be proud of. An air of insouciance distinguished his manner, was there again in the lazy saunter of his walk, in his smile. Manning led when he was with Donovan and Kilroy, which he was most of the time, and was tonight. Aisling was his girl, fair-haired and pretty, with expressive blue eyes, younger than Manning by more than a year. The second girl wasn’t known to the others; earlier she had asked which way they were going and then if she could go with them, because she lived in that direction. Francie she was called.

Aisling clung to Manning as they walked. With his arm round Francie, Kilroy tried to slow her down, in the hope of setting up an opportunity for something when they had fallen far enough behind. But Francie kept up a steady pace. She was small, often called a little thing, but deliberate and determined in her manner. She, too, was pretty, but less dramatically so than Aisling, whom Manning liked to describe as drop-dead gorgeous. She denied that she was, but Manning’s regular repetition of the compliment did not displease her.

She listened to him now, saying he didn’t intend to set foot in the Star again, objecting to the way the shaven-headed bouncers had frisked him for miniatures. They had taken one from him and afterward said they hadn’t: they thought they owned you, louts like that. “Did you ever do a line, cowboy?” he called across Aisling to Donovan

“Amn’t I doing a line with Josie Flynn?”

“You eejit!”

Laughing again, Manning sounded drunk, Aisling thought. Not very, but a little. She’d been drunk once or twice herself but hadn’t liked it, everything slipping about, and the way you felt in the morning.

“Did you ever, though?” Manning pressed, offering Donovan a cigarette.

Donovan said he had of course, many a time, and Aisling knew all this was for her and for the girl who’d tagged along, whose name she had forgotten. “Awesome,” Donovan said, he and Manning lighting their cigarettes, sharing the match. No one else was a smoker.

They were going by the dye works now, where Manning had once climbed over the high spiked railings. That had been for Aisling, too, and a girl called Maura Bannerman. The security lights had been triggered and through the railings they had watched Manning roaming about, from time to time peering in at the downstairs windows of the lumpy red brick building that was said to have been a lunatic asylum once.

Behind her Aisling heard Kilroy telling the girl he had monopolized about that night. At the top of the railings, razor wire was woven through the spikes, he said, adding to the hazards: none of them knew how Manning had done it, especially since he was a bit drunk then, too.

Kilroy had slit eyes that aptly suggested an untrustworthy nature. Donovan was considered to be dense. Almost as tall as Manning, he was bulkier, clumsy in his movements, slow of speech. Kilroy had a stunted appearance, accentuated by oiled black hair sleekly brushed straight back, making the top of his head seem flat. Aisling didn’t much like either of them.

The first time she’d been in the Star—the first time she’d seen Manning, no more than a face in the crowd—she had admired him. He’d noticed her interest, he told her afterward, he said she was his kind, and she didn’t hesitate when he asked her to go out with him. Mano he was called, in the Dublin manner. Martin was what his family called him and Aisling thought of him as that when she was in her convent classroom, and every night before she went to sleep. She and he were an item, he said, which Aisling had never been with anyone before.

“I’d give a thousand bucks for a snort,” he was saying now, his voice slightly raised, a laugh in it again. “Where’d we get ourselves a snort, cowboy?”

Donovan said maybe Dirty Doyle’s, Kilroy suggested Capel Street. It was a kind of play, Aisling knew; Martin Manning doing the big fellow, her father would have said. She had become used to it ages ago.

They reached the quiet streets, St. Stephen’s Church at the corner of Goodchild Street, the shadowy sprawl of trees on either side of Sunderland Avenue ahead of them.

“Who’re those geeks?” Donovan suddenly exclaimed, and they all stopped, not knowing at first where to look. When he pointed they saw the red anorak.

“It’s bloody Dalgety,” Manning said.

The two parted in Sunderland Avenue, Dalgety turning into Blenning Road. On his own, he went a little faster, but paused when he noticed that one of the garden gates he was passing was invitingly open. He went through it and crossed a lawn to a corner near the house where he couldn’t be seen from the windows. He urinated in the shadow of an eleagnus bush.

Making their way from the night club, they had once or twice been aware of voices behind them but, engrossed in conversation themselves, hadn’t looked round to see whose they were. Dalgety couldn’t hear the voices now and imagined that whoever they belonged to had gone in some other direction. A light hadn’t come on in the house, which sometimes happened when you found a garden that was convenient for the purpose he had used it for. He unzipped his anorak because he’d noticed that the teeth of the zip hadn’t been properly aligned. While he was zipping it up again he was struck, a blow on the right side of his head. He thought that someone had come out of the house, and was thinking he hadn’t heard the front door opening when the next blow came. He stumbled and fell, and a foot smashed into his jaw when he was lying on the grass. He tried to stand up but couldn’t.

Aisling watched from the road. Francie looked away. In the garden, standing back at first, not taking part, Donovan moved forward when the boy was lying on the grass. Kilroy stayed with the girl. Nobody spoke while the assault was taking place, not in the garden, not on the road.

Aisling wondered what the boy had done, what insults had been exchanged in the Star or before that, how he had offended. Something of the headiness of the night club seemed to be there again, something of the music’s energy, of the wildness that was often in a face as it went by on the dance floor before it was sucked into the suffocating closeness of the crowd. Still nobody spoke when they all moved on, in a bunch again.__

“Oh, leave me be!” Francie suddenly cried out. “Just leave me, would you!”

She pulled herself away from Kilroy’s grasp, fiercely taking exception to the attentions she had allowed before. “Lay off of me, will you.”

“Behave yourself, cowboy.” Manning’s rebuke came lightly, and for a moment as he spoke Aisling saw the white gleam of his teeth. He knew how best to intercede. He was good at that. She’d often noticed how in an instant he became serious when seriousness was called for.

And she’d noticed how he didn’t hesitate to do what he felt should be done. There would be a reason for what had happened.

Kilroy muttered. He desisted for a few minutes before he tried again, and again was crossly rejected. In Charleston Road Francie scuttled off, not saying good night.

“Hoity!” Kilroy remarked.

Aisling didn’t think so. The girl who’d asked if she might walk with them had been upset, taken by surprise when so suddenly the incident occurred. Knowing too little about the strangers she’d fallen in with, she hadn’t been able to make allowances, or sense that there would be a reason. Being pawed about by Kilroy might even have seemed too like the violence in the garden—you couldn’t blame her if she’d felt frightened. Aisling would have herself.

“Dalgety’s a pain,” Manning said when she asked why Dalgety had been duffed up.

“Forget it,” he said.

“I never heard that name before,” Aisling said. “Dalgety.”

“Yeah, a nerd’s.”

Conversation lapsed then, but as they passed the entrance to the Greenbanks Hotel Donovan began on a story about his sister, how she was going to a shrink and hated it so much she often didn’t turn up for her weekly sessions.

“A guy comes on heavy,” Donovan said. “You end up with a shrink.”

Nobody commented; Donovan did not go on. The interrupted silence held for a little longer and the talk, when it began again, was different. So that was it, Aisling reflected, not saying anything herself. She felt relieved, aware of a relaxation in her body, as if her nerves had been strung up and no longer were. This Dalgety had upset Donovan’s sister, going too far when she didn’t want him to, his persistence putting her in need of psychiatric care. And the anger Aisling had witnessed in the garden touched her, what had happened seeming different, less than it had been while she watched.

“See you, Mano,” Donovan said. “Cheers, Aisling.”

She said good night. Donovan turned into Cambridge Road, and soon afterward Kilroy turned off, too.

“Was he all right?” Aisling asked then.

“Who’s this?”

“Dalgety.”

“Christ, of course he was.”

They went to Spire View Lane, where they always went when it was as late as this. “You’re a dazzler tonight,” Manning whispered, slipping his hands beneath her clothes.

She closed her eyes, kissing him back, his early-morning stubble harsh on her chin. The first time she had experienced that roughness it had excited her, and every time since it had.

“I’d best be getting back,” she said, not that she wanted to get back anywhere.

A dog came sniffing at them, some kind of small breed, black or gray, you couldn’t tell in the dark. Someone whistled for it and it ran off.

“I’ll walk you over,” Manning said, which he always did when she had to go. He lit a cigarette, as he always did, too. The smoke would get into her clothes and she’d be asked about it if there was anyone up, although usually nobody was.

“I looked back,” Manning said. “He was up on his feet.”

“Bernadette rang,” a note for her in the kitchen said, “and Sister Teresa about knowing your part for Thursday.”

No one was still up or there wouldn’t be the note. Aisling made cocoa and had biscuits with it, sitting at the table with the Evening Herald, then pushing it away. She wished it hadn’t happened, but thought about Hazel Donovan and before she finished her cocoa wondered if she really wished it.

She might have slipped him but she hadn’t, and she remembered now not wanting to. “The hard man,” his friends said when they greeted him, knowing him well, as she did, too, his daring, the way he took chances. “Aw, come on,” he had urged, the time he gave her a lift on the bar of his bicycle, when they were caught by her father coming toward them on a bicycle, too, his veterinary bag hanging on the handlebars. “Don’t ever let me see the like of that again,” her father stormed at her when she returned to the house. Being his favorite made being caught all the worse, her mother explained. Neither of them approved of Martin Manning. They didn’t understand.

She washed the mug she’d drunk her cocoa from at the sink and put the lid on the biscuit tin. She picked up Sister Teresa’s typed sheets and went upstairs. “Scenes from Hamlet” was Sister Teresa’s title for the monologues she had put together, the first time she had attempted something that wasn’t a conventional play. “ ‘There’s fennel for you,’ ” Aisling murmured, half asleep already, “ ‘and columbines . . .’ ”

At No. 6 Blenning Road, the elderly woman who had lived alone there since she was widowed seven months earlier was roused from a dream in which she was a child again. She went to the top of her stairs, leaned over the bannister, and shouted in the direction of the hall door, asking who was there. But all that happened was the ringing of the doorbell again. It would take more than that, she told herself, to get her to open her door at this hour.

When the bell ceased there was a banging and a rapping, and a voice coming from far away because she hadn’t had time to put her hearing aid in. Even when the letter box rattled and the voice was louder she still couldn’t hear a word of what was said. She went back to her bedroom for her hearing aid and then trudged down to the hall.

“What d’you want?” she shouted at the letter box.

Fingers appeared, pressing the flap open.

“Excuse me, missus. Excuse me, but there’s someone lying down in your garden.”

“It’s half past six in the morning.”

“Could you phone up the guards, missus?”

In the hall she shook her head, not answering that. She asked whereabouts in her garden the person was.

“Just lying there on the grass. I’d call them up myself only my mobile’s run out.”

She telephoned. No point in not, she thought. She was glad to be leaving this house, which for so long had been too big for two and was now ridiculously big for one. She had been glad before this, but now was more certain than ever that she had made the right decision. She thought so again while she watched from her dining-room window a garda car arriving, and an ambulance soon after that. She opened her hall door then, and saw a body taken away. A man came to speak to her, saying it was he who had talked to her through the letter box. A guard told her the person they had found lying near her eleagnus was dead.

On the news the address was not revealed. A front garden, it was reported, and gave the district. A milkman going by on his way to the depot had noticed. No more than that.

When Aisling came down at five past eight they were talking about it in the kitchen. She knew at once.

“You all right?” her mother asked, and she said she was. She went back to her bedroom, saying she had forgotten something.

It was all there on the front page of the Evening Herald ’s early-afternoon edition. No charges had been laid, but it was expected that they would be later in the day. The deceased had not been known to the householder in whose garden the body had been discovered, who was reported as saying she had not been roused by anything unusual in the night. The identity of the deceased had not yet been established, but a few details were given, little more than that a boy of about sixteen had met his death following an assault. Witnesses were asked to come forward.

Aisling didn’t; the girl who had tagged along did. The victim’s companion on the walk from the Star night club gave the time they left it and the approximate time of their parting from one another. The night-club bouncers were helpful but could add little to what was already known. The girl who had come forward was detained for several hours at the Garda station from which inquiries were being made. She was complimented on the clarity of her evidence and pressed to recall the names of the four people she had been with. But she had never known those names, only that the red-haired boy was called Mano and had himself addressed his two companions as “cowboy.” Arrests were made just before midnight.

Aisling read all that the next morning in the Irish Independent, which was the newspaper that came to the house. Later in the day she read an almost identical account in the Irish Times, which she bought in a newsagent’s where she wasn’t known. Both reports referred to her, describing her as “the second girl,” whom the Gardaí were keen to locate. There was a photograph, a coat thrown over the head and shoulders of a figure being led away, a wrist handcuffed to that of a uniformed garda. The second arrest, at a house in Ranelagh, told no more. No names were released at first.

When they were, Aisling made a statement to the police, confessing that she was the second girl, and in doing so she became part of what had happened. People didn’t attempt to talk to her about it, and at the convent it was forbidden that they should do so; but it was sometimes difficult, even for strangers, to constrain the curiosity that too often was evident in their features.

When more time passed, there was the trial, and then the verdict. Acquitted of murder, the two who had been apprehended were sent to jail for eleven years, their previous good conduct taken into account, together with the consideration, undenied by the court, that there was an accidental element in what had befallen them: neither had known of their victim’s frail, imperfect heart.

Aisling’s father did not repeat his castigation of her for making a friendship he had never liked: what had happened was too terrible for petty blame. Beneath an intolerant surface, he could draw on gentleness. “We have to live with this,” he said, as if accepting that the violence of the incident reached out for him, too, that guilt was indiscriminately scattered.

For Aisling, time passing was stranger than she had ever known days and nights to be before. Nothing was unaffected. In conveying the poetry of Shakespeare on the hastily assembled convent stage she perfectly knew her lines, and the audience was kind. But there was pity in that applause, because she had unfairly suffered in the aftermath of the tragedy she had witnessed. She knew there was, and in the depths of her consciousness it felt like mockery and she did not know why.

A letter came, long afterward, flamboyant handwriting bringing back the excitement of surreptitious notes in the past. No claim was made on her, nor were there protestations of devotion, as once, so often, there had been. He would go away. He would bother no one. He was a different person now. A priest was being helpful.

The letter was long enough for contrition, but still was short. Missing from its single page was what had been missing, also, during the trial: that the victim had been a nuisance to Donovan’s sister. In the newspaper photograph—the same one many times—Dalgety was dark-haired, smiling only slightly, his features regular, almost nondescript except for a mole on his chin. And, seeing it so often, Aisling had each time imagined his unwanted advances pressed on Hazel Donovan, and had read the innocence in those features as a lie. It was extraordinary that this, as the reason for the assault, had not been brought forward in the court; and more extraordinary that it wasn’t touched upon in a letter where, with remorse and regret, it surely belonged. “A guy comes on heavy,” Donovan, that night, had said.

There had been a lingering silence and he broke it to mention this trouble in his family, as if he thought that someone should say something. The conversational tone of his voice seemed to indicate he would go on, but he didn’t. Hungry for mercy, she too eagerly wove into his clumsy effort at distraction an identity he had not supplied, allowing it to be the truth, until time wore the deception out.

After the convent, Aisling acquired a qualification that led to a post in the general office of educational publishers. She had come to like being alone and often in the evenings went on her own to the cinema, and at weekends walked at Howth or by the sea at Dalkey. One afternoon she visited the grave, then went back often. A stone had been put there, its freshly incised words brief: the name, the dates. People came and went among the graves but did not come to this one, although flowers were left from time to time.

In a bleak cemetery Aisling begged forgiveness of the dead for the falsity she had embraced when what there was had been too ugly to accept. Silent, she had watched an act committed to impress her, to deserve her love, as other acts had been. And watching, there was pleasure. If only for a moment, but still there had been.

She might go away herself and often thought she would: in the calm of another time and place to flee the shadows of bravado. Instead, she stayed, a different person, too, belonging where the thing had happened