The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry Page A

she’ll be fearful of him and rightly. Because it is far and without people over here, it is not like Enniscrone where the summer children swing back and forth on the huge swingboats and swimmers venture everywhere on the sunny acres. This is not a spot that visitors seek out, but a different matter, golden and windy and left alone. The sunlight is laying fresh strands of gold in her hair, he can see them, he thinks they must be solid were he to touch them. And he would love dearly to touch them, put his body close to her, quietly, welcomed, healing. Yes, he would. But instead he turns about to head back behind the dunes and across the wet sand and weeds betrayed by the tide, as his Mam might say.
    He sets his left foot down in the normal thoughtless process of his stride and lets a bellow out of him to shame an ass. He doesn’t like to think of himself as a bellower, but the bellow rises and is out and gone before he can think about it. He lifts his foot from the sand and there’s blood dropping out of the sole of it and when he puts his hand gingerly into the sand he pulls up a long shard of glass, dark green glass off of a lobster float maybe, though it would be a hard job and a long one to smash a lobster float, he knows, the glass is that thick. You could throw a lobster float down a gully on to a rock and it wouldn’t break for you. You could be desperate for it to break, and it wouldn’t. What is he on about, sure the blood is ruining the sand and if the sand was a carpet there’d be hell to pay to the housekeeper.
    Now Christ in His mercy, his shouting has alerted the woman, and she is over by him now, fearless and mighty after all. He shows her his bloody foot and by the Good Lord, she tears off her sweater and her shirt, puts the sweater back on herself with a show of her breast that almost dries the flow of blood in his foot, because he feels the blood rushing to the back of his head. Now he is dizzy and rocketing, it may be the loss of blood, but he thinks not, truly. She binds, the dear girl, his foot with the lovely shirt or should it be blouse you’d say about such a thing, light and starched and pleasant with a printing of forget-me-nots on the collar, he notices.
    ‘You don’t want to put a thing like that on my old foot,’ he says.
    ‘It’s nothing,’ she says, ‘just a rag. Two summers ago sure I bought that old thing.’
    ‘Well, it’s very good of you, mightily so, to trouble yourself.’
    ‘Aren’t you a wounded man, God help us? Come on and we’ll see if we can’t hobble back to the road.’
    And she’s strong at his side and more or less carries him hopping but poorly to the sea-wall and the tarred road and fetches a lift for him off of a car heading back into the town. She puts him in the car but doesn’t get in herself.
    ‘Thanks, Mr Murphy,’ she says to the driver, and it doesn’t surprise him that she knows him, she probably knows everybody, because of her beauty. And away he goes with her blouse about his foot and yet the drops of blood venturing out on to the sandy floor of Mr Murphy’s Ford motorcar. But Mr Murphy is blithe enough and with her instructions no doubt ringing in his head drives Eneas to the public nurse, driving nimbly by clutch and brake, like a dancer, like a dancer. The roads and the town slide by, and Eneas is indifferent to his foot.
    ‘You wouldn’t know that girl’s name, by any chance, would you?’ he says.
    ‘Vivienne,’ says Mr Murphy, ‘Roche’s daughter, the stonemason.’
    ‘Roche’s, over by the old bridge?’
    ‘That’s it.’
    ‘Sideburns ‘Aye…’
    A little cup of silence gratefully drunk.
    ‘You’ll be contacting her again, I suppose,’ says Mr Murphy pleasantly.
    Eneas says nothing but his blood, so busy and disturbed of late, rushes into his ears.
    ‘Just to thank her, of course,’ says Mr Murphy mercifully.
    ‘Yeh, yeh,’ says Eneas. ‘Surely.’
    They’re not far now from bandages and hooks. Mr Murphy stops