The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry

Bull, spick and span, but for those fatal waterworks. Oh, freshly, stubbornly, he laughs in the street.
    His heart lightens. He has the world before him after all. The sorrow of leaving is yes also the joy of going forth or borders each upon each.
    And he hastens home to Sligo, with all the speed and trust of the swallow seeking the first fringes of summer. There is a wildness in him to see his Pappy and his Mam, and maybe even a lesser wildness to view his siblings. And there’s a rip in his head where Jonno Lynch’s friendship once was, and he’d like to patch it. So, away home with himself he goes.

 
    5
    Maybe he is wrong to have come back, he doesn’t know. The men that were soldiers have come home too — to a brief spit of celebration and a wide, deep sea of idleness. Great friendships and even sorrows dissolve in the meagre eternity of daily life. Veterans still in their twenties gum up the alleyways of Sligo and their eyes sometimes are as blank as their days. And it’s no better in England herself where the very heroes of Passchendaele and the Somme have survived to become the mighty fools of England with only time on their hands and something in their bleak he arts as devious as a cancer. Eneas sees all this clear enough. It’s written all about, in the measly faces of wives as they bargain for single rashers, for awful cuts of meat, for blackening wings of spinach. Maybe Eneas feels a thousand years of life have passed in himself, mysteriously. Fellas his own age look older and bleaker than him though, without the darkness of weather that he has on his face. He can’t find a niche in the world of Sligo to slot himself back into — not just a niche for living in, but a niche of time itself. The sea has put a different clock into him. He’s always got the wrong time in Sligo.
    And the war finishing was only the signal to the hidden men of Ireland to brew their own war, and sometimes in the ironic song of Ireland those selfsame cornerboys so recently out of the King’s uniform leak away into the secret corners of the town to drill and become another kind of soldier — dark, uniformless, quick-striking like the patient heron by the spratty stream, men to menace and harm, if they can, the huge confetti of troops scattered over the island in the old wedding of death. Troops of course composed of ordinary Irishmen. Their recent brothers in the ruined fields of France. And other men that kept their hands clean of the European war are inclined to get blood on the selfsame hands in a war for the old prize of freedom for Ireland.
    And Eneas knows that Jonno Lynch is one such, because two weeks home in Sligo he passes Jonno Lynch in Main Street and gets no nod or word. Now Jonno Lynch is the man he most wanted to see, because having knocked about the world he has a notion that he might be a fitting friend for him again, the two of them, one the sailor and the other the man of — business affairs, could he say? They could pick up now where they left off at school, and be going about, and have the odd quiet drink here and there like gents, and be dandy, be easy and open-hearted. Why not? And he has gone round to Mrs Foster’s hovel but by heavens she is dead of an embolism in the back of her knee and all her charges scattered into Roscommon and further. And across the town in O’Dowd’s premises he gets short shrift from the lassie on the counter, who will tender no information and take no messages. So it is left to chance, the smallness of the town and the will of God to bring Jonno Lynch along Main Street in a very, well, surprising blue suit, with a thread of quite striking green running down it, the latest fashion Eneas guesses of New York or suchlike. And he crosses the cart-cluttered street easy as a jackdaw, and tries to intercept his bosom pal, but his bosom pal presses on past him like he was only another stranger to negotiate on the thoroughfare.
    ‘Jonno,’ he says, ‘it’s me, Eneas, back from