1999 (4 page)

His mother was the rebel.

When she followed Barry outside she noticed that he was limping. “It's a long drive to Dublin,” she said.

He patted his car as she would pat the neck of a horse. “Apollo will take care of me.” He loved the car, which owed its nickname to the U.S. space programme. Space travel interested Barry. A lot of things interested Barry.

She watched him stow the rifle and two boxes of cartridges in the boot of the car and cover them with photographic equipment. The length of his folded tripods was sufficient to conceal a rifle barrel.

Barry slammed the lid of the boot and walked to the front of the car. “I'll see you when I see you,” he said casually.

“What do you think will happen now?”

“Ursula, you know as well as I do the IRA won't take this lying down. The Army's not the force it once was, but the Brits can't shoot innocent Irish people and walk away. Not anymore.” A muscle twitched in his jaw. “They'll pay for what they've done.”

Ursula thought of all the things she wanted to say to him. She settled for, “Mind yourself.”

“You too,” he replied. He pressed the back of his hand against her cheek, just for a moment. Then he got into the car. A firm foot on the accelerator sent the Austin Healey roaring down the laneway.

Ursula stood watching until it was swallowed up by the hedgerows.

“I love you very much,” she whispered into the empty space where her son had been.

As he raced through the small towns and villages that dotted the route to Dublin, Barry kept the car radio tuned to RTE. He did not need a news presenter to tell him that change was in the air. The sleepy backwaters of rural Ireland were coming awake and clusters of men were gathered outside every pub and post office, talking angrily, punctuating their conversations with fists shaken in the air. As he drove through Monasterevin, Barry shouted out the car window, “Up the Republic!” Reckless words to utter in public: a favourite slogan of the outlawed IRA.

They elicited a loud cheer.

Less than twenty-four hours had elapsed since the bloody afternoon of January 30, 1972, yet already Ireland was being transformed.

The energy and optimism of the 1960s had proved to be an exception. Afterwards Ireland had reverted to the sad grey decline it had endured since the end of World War One. Political patronage was endemic. The Dublin middle class, devoted to the type of bureaucracy inherited from Britain, ran the country. They turned their backs on both the world and the rest of Ireland. What the poet Patrick Kavanagh had derided as “the evil genius of mediocrity” was promulgated as the highest level of achievement to which an Irish person might aspire. Anything else was “getting above yourself.”

The Hallorans had often displayed a propensity for getting above themselves.

Barry's showy little sports car screeched to a halt in front of the yellow brick house shortly after four in the afternoon; a miracle considering the condition of Irish roads. With a twist of his hand Barry switched off the headlamps. Even at this hour the night was drawing in. The first of February—St. Bridget's Day—was officially the first day of spring in Ireland, but that was tomorrow, and tomorrow seemed very far away.

When Barry got out of the car his left leg refused to bear his weight at all. With a terrific effort he forced his body to his will.
Don't give in to it. Never let the bastards win.
One step, two; he was moving again. Moving through the pain and past it.

As he mounted the front steps he called, “Séamus! Séamus, are you here?”

The door opened to reveal a statuesque young woman wearing a blue cardigan and a woollen skirt. Her shoulder-length hair was the colour of dark bronze. Her expression was one of extreme disapproval. “Stop shouting, Barry! We're not deaf.”

“Is he here or not?”

“Hello, Barbara,” she said. “I'm glad to see you, Barbara. Have you a kiss for me, Barbara?”

He brushed past her into the house. In the cold blue dusk of February Barbara had turned on the overhead light fixture in the front hall, revealing the boldly patterned carpet that climbed the staircase into a realm of shadows. At the foot of the stairs, mahogany doors black with old varnish opened into the parlour and the dining room. To the left of the front door a tall clock ticked away the minutes; on the other side a wooden coat tree staggered like a drunk after midnight beneath the weight of a motley assortment of male outerwear. A curtain drawn across the far end of the hall created a private alcove for the telephone.

Barry went to the foot of the stairs and called, “Séamus? You up there?”

Séamus McCoy peered down from the first-floor landing. “Seventeen?”

“
Is mise,
”
^*
Barry replied in Irish. “Come on down.”

McCoy was a middle-aged man with a tidemark of grizzled hair around an otherwise bald head. He wore thick spectacles and appeared frail, but beneath his clothes was a wiry body of exceptional durability. McCoy had survived both a hard life in the IRA and a gruelling bout with cancer.

“You look like the backside of hell,” Barry said when his friend reached the foot of the stairs.

McCoy squinted up at Barry's unshaven face. “You're no oil painting yourself.” Years spent in the south had not blunted his sharp-edged Belfast accent.

“That's what travelling on our bad roads will do for you,” Barry said nonchalantly. “On the radio they claim the authorities are worried about anti-British demonstrations. I thought you might be in one today, Séamus.”

“Not me, I've been waiting for you. Besides, Dublin's pretty quiet—for now anyway. People are still trying to get their heads around what happened.”

“How did you know I wasn't one of the casualties in Derry? None of them have been named as far as I know.”

“Not yet,” McCoy confirmed. “But I wasn't worried about you,
avic
.
^†
They couldn't kill you with an axe.” He laughed a little too loudly.

Barry responded with a devil-may-care grin. “I'm glad to hear you acknowledge that I'm immortal.”

“And I'm glad the two of you find this so amusing,” Barbara snapped.

“You have to laugh or you'd cry,” McCoy told her. “That's life in the real world.” He took his shabby crombie overcoat from the coat tree and pulled a chequered cap from one of its pockets. “Seventeen, you too shattered to ramble down to the pub for a pint?”

“Let's go.”

McCoy dropped his gaze to the dried blood on Barry's coat sleeves. “You might want to change that first.”

Barry shrugged out of the stained coat. Before he could take another from the coat tree Barbara stepped in front of him. “What about me?” she challenged.

A man had once remarked that she was spectacular when she was in a temper. Barbara never forgot it; she never forgot any personal remark about herself. Now she tossed her hair with a theatrically angry gesture and fixed blazing hazel eyes on Barry. “If you think you can come flying in the door and head right out again without so much as a by-your-leave, Barry Halloran, you have another thing coming!”

He reached around her for a coat. “I don't have to ask your permission.”

“But I thought we were…”

“Thought we were what, Barbara?” he asked as he put on the coat.

“Well. You know.”

“I don't know. And this isn't the time.”

“When is the time?”

Instead of an answer, Barry laid a hand on McCoy's shoulder and steered him out of the house.

Barbara slammed the door behind them.

She was trembling with an emotion she would never allow him to see. Deep down, she was afraid of Barry. Not afraid he would hurt her physically—he would never hurt a woman. But afraid he would see through her defiant facade to the insecurities and imperfections she tried to keep hidden.

So she challenged him over and over again to be sure her fortifications were intact.

“You'll pay for that later,” McCoy warned Barry as they walked to the car. “The wee lass likes to be ignored about as much as a cat likes to get wet.”

“I can't think about her now, Séamus. She'll have to be on the long finger for a while.”

A cold wind was rising. The two men turned up their collars as they walked to the car. McCoy eased himself into the passenger seat and leaned forward to squint at the gauges on the dashboard. In the gathering darkness they were unreadable. “Is there enough petrol in this yoke?”

“I filled it on the way up from Clare.”

“You went to the farm before coming here? You've had a hell of a long drive since yesterday afternoon, then.” McCoy did not ask why Barry had gone so far out of his way. It was his custom to wait for people to tell him what they wanted him to know.

Before being swallowed up by Dublin, Harold's Cross had been a country village. It still possessed a village green and a baroque Victorian necropolis called Mount Jerome Cemetery. There were more pubs than churches; a ratio Irish men considered highly desirable. On this evening Barry bypassed the local pubs. He crossed the Grand Canal by the Portobello Bridge and drove the short distance to the Bleeding Horse instead.

The Bleeding Horse Pub occupied a two-storey brick building dating from the eighteenth century. Although it lacked the impressive antiquity of the Brazen Head Tavern, which had been purveying drink to Dubliners for seven hundred years, the Bleeding Horse had its own cachet. It was owned and managed by staunch Irish nationalists, and offered a place where like-minded men could exchange news and views without fear that a paid informer was listening.

Such informers were not necessarily British.

A dense cloud of cigarette smoke billowed out to meet Barry and McCoy when they opened the door. “Damn that smells good,” said McCoy.

“You're off the fags for life, remember?”

“A man can dream,” McCoy replied. “First shout's mine.” He reached into his pocket as he headed for the bar.

Carrying pint glasses brimming with dark, creamy-headed Guinness, he and Barry made their way to a table at the back of the pub. Four other men sauntered over to join them. The youngest of these was considerably older than McCoy. The four had become “hurlers on the ditch”; commentators on a game they were no longer able to play.

“Aha,” said McCoy. “The usual suspects.” He acknowledged each man in turn. “Luke, Patsy, Brendan, Danny.”

Childhood tuberculosis had left Luke with a hollow chest that he unconsciously protected by drawing his shoulders forward. He was stronger than he looked, however, and the little schooling he had received from the Christian Brothers had not been wasted. He could quote reams of poetry in both Irish and English and was much in demand late at night in the Bleeding Horse. “We heard you were in Derry,” he said to Barry.

“I was in Derry.” Barry was hoarse with weariness. The others leaned forward, eager to catch every word. Among these men Barry Halloran had a reputation.

“Was it as bad as they say?”

“Worse.”

“Did any of the paras get a shot at you?”

First Barry allowed himself a deep drink of Guinness. His taste buds savoured the rich malt tempered with just the right degree of bitterness before letting it slide down his throat.
Like silk,
he thought, as he always did. He put down the pint glass and wiped the foam from his upper lip. “I was carrying my professional photographic gear, Luke, so they could tell I was a journalist. They left me alone just as they did the television news team that showed up. In fact, I think they were glad to see us.” His lips curled in a sardonic smile. “My guess is, the soldiers believed we'd make them look heroic on camera.”

“Heroic me arse,” sneered Patsy, a stringy little man like a bantam rooster fallen on hard times. In his younger days Patsy had worked in a boning parlour. As the result of an accident—common enough in those establishments—while boning out a sheep's neck, he had lost the thumb on one hand. Now he obsessively stroked his jaw with the remaining thumb.

When he spoke Patsy's accent betrayed his native tenements of Summerhill in North Dublin. “I'm after watchin' the pitchers on the telly in me other local. Like a feckin' war it was. All them poor sods runnin' and screamin' and a priest bent over double wavin' a bloody handkerchief to keep the feckin' Brits from shootin' 'em while they carried a dyin' boy outta the road.”

White-haired, bushy-browed Brendan—whom women still described as “a fine figure of a man”—spoke like the college professor he once had been, before his politics got in the way. “The level of outrage here is astonishing,” he said, “given the apathy people in the Republic have previously shown to the suffering of their northern counterparts. The
taoiseach
^*
has recalled our ambassador from London and declared February second as a national day of mourning.”

“Jack Lynch must have made that announcement through gritted teeth,” said Barry. “His government has done everything it could to prevent people in the Republic from knowing how much the Catholics in the north are being persecuted. What you call apathy, Professor, is ignorance more than anything else.”

Luke bristled. “Aren't the Catholics up there Irish too? Half the people on this side of the border have relatives north of the border, myself included. I'll never understand how our government can abandon them.”

“That's easy,” said Danny. A burly, dark-visaged individual from the Kerry mountains, he walked with a John Wayne swagger that predated
The Quiet Man.
Danny never discussed his past and invariably sat facing the doorway with his back to the wall. If seating to his requirements was not available, he stood. “Lynch and his crowd are too cowardly to stand up to the Brits,” he said in a disgusted voice. “That's your answer.”

Barry pushed his glass away. There was not enough anaesthetic in it to numb either the pain in his leg or the memories in his brain. “If only things were that simple,” he responded. “But politics on this island have muddied the waters to the point where nothing's simple. Every politician has his own personal agenda we know nothing about.”

Brendan said, “That's why Sinn Féin adopted a policy of abstentionism years ago. After the Treaty, Sinn Féin decided politics was too corrupt to be involved in anymore.”

“They were probably right,” Barry agreed. “Just look at who's attracted to politics these days. When whole Catholic neighbourhoods in the north were torched by loyalists in '68, Ian Paisley claimed the houses went on fire because they were loaded with petrol bombs. He said the Catholic churches were attacked because they were arsenals and the priests were handing out submachine guns to their parishioners.
¹
Adolf Hitler proved a man can attract a big following if he peddles hatred loud enough and long enough. Encouraging sectarianism has built Paisley a political power base.”

“Which Big Ian calls, with no apparent sense of irony, the Democratic Unionist Party,” Brendan interjected. “But they're not unionists in the sense that unionism represents a legitimate desire to remain part of the United Kingdom. In university circles I have met some very decent unionists: well-educated and thoughtful people. I respect their feelings even if I don't agree with them.”