The Barracks by John McGahern Read Free Book Online Page A

clattered overhead on the ceiling and she blew out the lamp and followed him to their room.

2
    T he alarm woke her out of a state that wasn’t deep enough to call it sleep. The night was still outside, and the room in total darkness with the blind of the one window down, the air raw with frost. The evenings of the wet February had gone; Lent was in, the days closing up an early Easter.
    By sheer force of instinct and habit she reached across the shape of bedclothes that was Reegan and stopped the clock’s dance on the table. Then she fell back, though she knew it could only make it harder than ever to rise in the end, as tired as if she’d never slept. Reegan hadn’t woken; his elbow brushed her as he changed sides, the surface of his sleep no more than trembled by the alarm.
    â€œIf you go to bed tired and wake up tired,” began to twitch like a nerve in her mind, and stayed there in its mystifyingrepetition till she fixed it among the ad. columns of many magazines and newspapers, “If you go to bed tired and wake up tired drink Bourna-Vita.” She grimaced in recognition and settled herself deeper in the warmth. There had been another night of frost, she could tell by the air on her face. She didn’t know how she’d managed to get up since the frosts came, but even before then it was becoming a more desperate struggle with every fresh morning.
    A few more minutes, she told herself, she’d stay: Reegan hadn’t woken: there was no noise of the children stirring in the next rooms; but, oh, the longer she enjoyed the stolen sweetness of these minutes the more it had to become a tearing of her flesh out of the bedclothes in the end. And she used to love rising into these March mornings, to let up the blinds gently in the silence and find the night not fully goneand the world white with frost. She’d unbolt the door to break the ice on the barrel with the edge of the basin and gasp with waking as her hands brought the frozen water to her face.
    The mornings of these last weeks had been one long flinching from the cold and the day, what used to be the adventure once all changed to the drudgery she could barely get herself to face. She’d ask for nothing better than to lie on in bed and not to have to face anything, but these small reprieves she gave herself were always adding up till she rose in the last minute and the mornings were all a rush.
    Suddenly she remembered: this was not any morning, it was the morning of the Circuit Court. She’d set the alarm for early, for twenty past seven. The room was still pitch dark, nothing was stirring.
    How had she lain there for even these few minutes without it entering her mind? She had even checked his clothes the last thing in the kitchen the night before, and it had been on her mind between the fitful snatches of sleep she’d got during the night. Here she’d been playing a game of rising and it was a court day. Her dread of the cold and her weariness were gone in a flash: she was out of bed and dressed and moving through the dark to the door without being conscious that she’d managed to rise. She didn’t let up the blind or shut the bedroom door fully so as not to make noise. She could hear Reegan’s breathing as she left. She would not wake him until she was ready.
    The house was quiet as death and dark as she came down, her slippers loud on the hollow stairs, her hand sliding down the wooden railing to guide her way; when it came against the large round knob at the bottom her foot searched out for the solid concrete. Here she could touch the dayroom door. She could hear nothing behind the shut door, but the smell of Mullins’s smoked Woodbines came. She trailed her fingers along the wall as she came up the hallway to avoid knocking against the collapsible form that was laid against it. When she let up the blinds a little light came in. The bare whiteness of the field sloping down to the river and the