Her dead husband opened the door and stood over me as I turned over on the floor where I’d dropped.
—Who the fuck are you? he said.
He was in his khaki uniform, a Dublin Fusilier. There was nothing tin or rusty about him, although the poker in his hand had seen better days.
—Who the fuck are you, yourself? I said.
He had the poker hanging over my head and I was wearing his trousers and jacket. I was sober now and hoping to Christ he didn’t remember them.
—I’m Annie’s husband, he said.—Who the fuck are you?
—Who the fuck is Annie? I said.
My arm saved my face from the poker. He had a fierce swipe, for a dead man.
—That’s Annie, he yelled, and pointed at her with the poker. She was sitting on the mattress. She didn’t look worried or scared. She knew me: I wasn’t going to let her down. I looked at the mantelpiece but my father’s leg was missing.
—Where’s Nellie? I said.
—She’s up in her room behind the wallpaper, he yelled, and he got ready to let me have it again.
He’d been away for three years; back from France, back from the dead, he needed to be in charge. And here was me, proof of his wife’s infidelity, of the waste of those years and mud, wriggling on the floor under him, caught and stupid, a big, strapping lad, in a jacket that delivered a familiar smell when he whacked it with the poker, while he’d been away, spitting away his life for every country in the world except Ireland.
I could have killed him. I was armed for it. But I stayed on the ground and gave him the chance to reject the proof between his feet. I did the decent thing; I acted the eejit. I saved Annie and her husband.
I looked around me.
—This isn’t Nellie’s room, I said.
—Who’s Nellie?
The voice was softer, clinging to the chance.
—I’d show her to you, I said.—If she was here. I’m in the wrong house.
—Which house should you be in? he said.
—I’ll never drink again, I said.—That’s the problem. I’m no good with houses when I’ve drink on me.
He stood away, to let me up. I let myself stagger, although I’d never been more sober.
—Sorry about this, I said.—Am I after getting yis out of bed?
And I noticed that the hand not holding the poker wasn’t there, and I knew that he was home for good: I was homeless again.
—What colour’s your front door? I asked.
—Black, said Annie.—When it’s anything.
—Ah, there, I said.—So is Nellie’s.
—Most of the doors in Dublin are black, said her husband; we were friends now.—You’ve your work cut out for you, pal. Finding your Nellie.
—Ah sure, I said.—She’ll know where I am. Everywhere except where I should be. I’ll wait till I’ve my head back and I know what’s what.
—Not here, you won’t, he said.
—No no, I said.—I’m off. Sorry for disturbing yis. If it happens again you’ll know it’s only me.
—Cheerio, said Annie.
—Cheerio, I said back, and I hoped she’d hidden my da’s leg in a very good place, in a place where a one-handed man would never find it.
I wandered.
I walked the city until it was time to walk to work. I walked in circles and bigger circles, over the Easter Week rubble that hadn’t been shifted yet, over the hidden rivers that turned my blood to running steel, through Cowtown, along the canals. That night and the nights after, I walked every square inch of Dublin and looked on every step for my mother. I hadn’t seen her in years. I’d run out of basements to search. One day she was where she always was, face pressed to the black sky, the next day she’d vanished, not a hint or child left behind. I couldn’t fool myself into thinking that my father had come back for her. I still looked, sometimes in the weird hours before day when I was numb and unable to think properly. I’d turn corners, expecting to see her, a lump on the steps smothered in children. I looked for her shadow in the windows of the South Dublin Union. I climbed into Glasnevin Cemetery and tried to feel her as I crawled among the paupers’ graves. And, on the nights when I had to lie down, I even visited Granny Nash.
—Where’s Mammy, Granny?
—God knows; the eejit.
Head in the book. Nose sliding down the valley between the pages.
Don Quixote de la Mancha
.
Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
Looking for spells.
—Have you seen her?
—Not at all.
She didn’t see me lying down on the floor.
—She should never have married the fella with the leg.
She had to lift her head while she turned the page. I heard the paper scraping across the tip of her nose.
—Him and his Alfie Gandon, she said.
—Who’s Alfie Gandon? I said.
—The cause of all their troubles, she said.—And they never even knew it, the eejits.
And that was all. She was in the book again and, by the time she got to page-turning time again, she’d forgotten I was there.
I started bringing her books. I’d take them off the stalls outside the bookshops and run. I’d dangle them in front of her and try to get her going. She’d read the title on the spine. Then she’d put the book on top of the others beside her or fling it over her shoulder.
—Read it already, she said.
Ivanhoe
hit the wall above the stove.
—What about this one?
I put it in front of her.
Mountain Charley, or the Adventures of Mrs E.J. Guerin, Who Was Thirteen Years in Male Attire.
—This’ll do, she said, and she put it on top of her pile.
—Who’s Alfie Gandon, Granny? I said.
—He thought he was a woman, she said.
—Who did?
—The Smart eejit, she said.—The wooden fella.
—Who did he think was a woman?
—Gandon.
—What woman?
—Oblong.
—Dolly Oblong?
—There’s only one.
The hoor, the madam, owner of the biggest and best brothel in Dublin. Her son-in-law’s former employer.
—Did Gandon dress like Dolly Oblong?
—Not when I saw him, she said.—The wooden fella was an eejit. Gandon walked past him every night of the week and he never saw him.
I was lost, but I knew that I was close. Close to what, I didn’t know. I took away what clues she gave me and let them fall apart and reassemble while I roamed the streets and alleys and waited to go to work. And before I turned for the docks, when the noises of the city waking up told me that I could go, I often stood at the railings of the big school and waited to see if Miss O’Shea would arrive early. It was a year since I’d seen her, since she’d walked out the Henry Street door of the G.P.O. But I didn’t see her. And on days when the stevedore didn’t want me I went back to the railings and watched the children and other teachers, nuns, priests and mothers. But I saw no brown dress or buttons, no boots or bun or basket full of books. She was gone. She was dead. Or working somewhere else. I started looking for her in the nights when I walked the city. I went further. Rathmines, Clontarf. Rathfarmham, Killester. Places where a rebel teacher might live.
Now that Annie was confined to barracks, the stevedore’s eye skipped over my name every four or five days. He had wives to ride, sons to employ. So I wandered the city in the daytime and waited. And every night, without fail or decision, I ended up in front of Dolly Oblong’s. I watched the sailors and locals coming and going, the fighters being thrown out, the guilty scurrying back into the dark, the shadows at the windows.
I saw the huge, glorious woman, Missis Oblong herself. I saw her glide down the steps, into a waiting car.
—
A Vindication of the Rights of Women
, read Granny Nash. —I’ll hang on to this one, she said.—The wooden fella loved the Oblong item.
I didn’t have to ask her any more: a clue for a book, that was the deal. I handed over a book; she handed over the information. I broke into a house on Merrion Square and walked out the front door at five in the morning with two matching suitcases full of books, all of them written by women.
Missis Oblong slid into the waiting car. There was a man with her and this man was, I found out from the bouncer of the kip across the street, the famous Mister Gandon. (My father, as usual, had been wrong. Dolly Oblong and Alfie Gandon were never the same person.—Mister Gandon speaks highly of you, she’d told him.—You are efficient. You are cautious enough not to ask questions, stupid enough not to care. He likes this.
—
She’s
Alfie Gandon, he’d decided.
Just there. It had thrilled him. He’d been overpowered by her and the bedroom when he’d been called up to her from his place on the steps outside; the carpet, the bed, that mountain of a gorgeous woman in front of him, the hair that was plenty for five or six women, the hint of the foreigner in her words, the peppermint that sailed from her mouth to him. She’d moved in the bed like a monument. She couldn’t have been that sensational without being equally brilliant and devious. He’d become devoted to a woman of his own making, as false as her teeth and hair. He’d fallen in love with my mother’s name, a woman that was never my mother; then he fell in love with another of his own creations, the Dolly Oblong that was also Alfie Gandon, a woman that never existed. —I am a businesswoman, she’d told him. And she was. She ran a kip house, a good one, and she made a packet. But she wasn’t Alfie Gandon. Alfie Gandon was Alfie Gandon. She’d passed Gandon’s messages on to her one-legged bouncer but she’d never composed them. She knew how to make money but she was just a big old tart who was too lazy to get out of bed more than once or twice a week.
My father was a gobshite.)
But who was Alfie Gandon?
Mister Gandon was a businessman, and one of our own, the bouncer from across the street told me. He was a Home Ruler and a Catholic, not like most of the tail-coated fuckers who robbed the people blind and called it business.
—He’s a landlord and a killer, said Granny Nash.—Now give it here to me.
I’d let her see the spine:
The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself
. I’d noticed something: she got excited when the books were by women. That was why I’d spent hours in the library in Merrion Square while the owners slept above and their servants slept below me, filling the suitcases with only the works of women. She was repaying me now with better and more information.
Mister Gandon had his first bootstraps on a ribbon around his neck, the bouncer across the street told me, to remind himself of where he’d come from. Mister Gandon had joined up with the Sinn Féin crowd and, now that they had him, we wouldn’t be long in getting the English to pack up and go home.
He was elegant, I could see, small but properly shaped, still managing to dominate the solid men who hopped out of his way when he left and arrived. He was much smaller than Missis Oblong but fitted perfectly beside her as he slipped into the car after her.
—Alfie Gandon says Hello, said Granny Nash.
—What does that mean, Granny?
The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole, in Many Lands.
I put it on the table in front of her.
—Alfie Gandon says Goodbye.
—And what does that bloody mean?
—Alfie Gandon says Hello, she said.—And you mind your mouth in front of your poor granny.
I was patient. I stored it up and waited for it to fall together. I’d enough stolen books hidden away in the Tobacco Store to keep the old witch fed and talkative for another couple of months.
I was down and homeless but there were days when I was welcome to warm my feet quickly at Piano Annie’s fire. On mornings when the stevedore didn’t want me I ran back up to Summerhill, past Annie’s. If there was a wooden leg in her window it meant that she was waiting for me. She never had to wait for long. While she played on my back the new songs from America she was picking up off the gramophone, the stevedore was giving work to the only one-handed docker in the world.
—How does he manage? I asked.
—How do
I
manage? said Annie.—Don’t bother taking your boots off. I’m expecting a little visitor.
And she showed me how to play the piano standing up. She was as enthusiastic as ever but necessity was forcing her to play by the one fast rule:
—More than three minutes is waste.
She was out from under me; she left me holding myself up against the door with my forehead, gasping for the first indoor breath my lungs had had in days.
—More than three minutes is dangerous, she said.—Out you get now till I hide your oul’ fella’s leg.
—When can I come again?
—You’ll know, she said.
Three days later the stevedore ignored me again and I saw Annie’s dead husband marching off to the docks. Lugging bananas one-handed wasn’t so hard and he’d never have to shovel phosphorite. I was happy for him and by the time he got to the Inner Dock, before he’d the sack on his back, Annie was fingering my back with one of her American songs -
Sooooo send me away
- good man, good maaaan -
with a smile
. You finished before me there, Henry, my lovely lad.
—I’m a fast learner, Annie.
—If you can get out of here as fast we’ll be a very happy couple.
I didn’t want to go yet.
—Is he good to you, Annie? I said.
—Which he?
—Your husband.
—He’s grand, she said.—He’s had a hard time these years. He finds it hard. Go now.
—What about a walk?
—Don’t be stupid, Henry. Go on.
I knew I’d never be at home in Annie’s house again. I missed her.
Letters of a Javanese Princess.
I slid it under the old witch’s eyes.
—How come you can tell me so much about Gandon but nothing about your own daughter? I said.
She shoved the book back at me.