Authors: James Lawless
‘An execution,’ he repeats sternly. And then more gently adds, ‘I was just sitting there thinking about what I’d done. The snow was falling, and you appeared in shirtsleeves. You kept staring at me. I wanted to go over to you, to put my coat around you or something.’
He looks at me with pitiable eyes. I don’t tell him I remember that moment. Why should I? I could blow him away. Youth always has the trump card against age.
I look outside the park at a woman in a blue headscarf selling flowers from a cart near the cemetery gate.
‘There’s something else,’ MacSuibhne says, ‘I want you to know, Derek.’
‘More lies,’ I say. Sullenly I sit, tensing myself, waiting for some other clanger.
‘I killed your father,’ MacSuibhne says.
‘What? I thought you said...’
‘No, I mean your legal father.’
‘He died of a heart attack. Stop fucking me about.’
‘After I got Martha’s – your mother’s letter…’
‘My mother didn’t write that.’
‘The original one I mean.’
‘She wouldn’t have described things that way.’
‘What?’
‘She wouldn’t have been so crude. And besides, my mother kept copies of her letters, so how come I didn’t see this one before?’
‘She didn’t want you to see it. She wanted to protect you. She forced me to swear never to tell you or show it to you while she was alive.’
‘Show me the original.’ I feel emotion breaking in my voice.
‘Will you listen to me. You’re upset. I told you the original was old and torn. I threw it away. Look, sometimes things have to be said. And it was the same with Foley; she wouldn’t tell him either. So
I
had to tell him.’
‘You went all the way to Spain to tell him that?’
‘Yes. You know what Foley was up to?’
‘Of course I know.’
‘Can you imagine it?’
I don’t answer. My head is light.
‘We found out that he went missing on Thursdays.’
‘We?’
‘Yes. My comrades and I.’
‘The future ETA?’ I say.
‘Shh.’ He looks around. ‘Fuck sake, Derek,’ he whispers.
***
I get up from the bench and walk along the tarmacadam path, treading down the pulped leaves, stepping over puddles. MacSuibhne follows, addressing my back.
‘You couldn’t have mistaken him,’ he is saying. ‘He stood out with his hump sticking through his jacket and his leather briefcase suspended from his arm: the roving ambassador ha ha.’
‘He saved your life,’ I say, turning around.
‘He was just acting on orders. Besides, my life…’
‘Your life,’ I say sarcastically. ‘The Cause. I know.’
‘Cut it out, Derek.’
I breathe in deeply as I walk along, glad for the coolness of Irish air.
‘I tell you though,’ MacSuibhne continues, ‘I put the wind up him. He thought he saw a ghost. I let him know, Derek, in no uncertain terms that he’d made a fool of Martha from the outset. I told him before you say “I do” you have to say “I can”.’
‘Oh that’s good,’ I say. ‘That’s very, very good.’
‘You don’t deserve her,’ I said. Oh, I told him and I kept telling him over and over. I watched him loosen his collar. Huge beads of sweat like glass balls stood out on his forehead. The sun beamed down on us. His face went red.’
My head is beginning to spin.
‘When I explained to him about the Protestant gang, what they did to your mother, he just took this almighty seizure.’
***
I’m a two year old with my mother in Madrid waiting for ‘Daddy’ to come home. Did my mother know what Gearóid had done to her husband or what her husband was up to on those Thursday nights? Did señora Martínez tell? Maybe the money she gave me that time I went to visit her was pity money, like the blood pesetas I gave to the old Spanish man.
‘After all this... this street theatre?’ I say coldly, trying to be dispassionate, as if what he is claiming has no direct bearing on me, ‘you just walked away.’
‘There was nothing I could do.’
‘Of course not,’ I say mockingly. ‘You had done all you could.’
‘I never told Martha. She’d enough on her plate.’
‘With her bun out of the oven.’
He looks at me quizzically. ‘Fuck sake, Derek.’
There is silence, a momentary reprieve for warring warriors to lick their wounds. But all the time his lips are moving (or is it a nervous twitching?), silently rehearsing the next act.
After a while he says, ‘You know I’m the real exile, Derek, more than Foley ever was.’
‘And what was Tomás?’
‘Tomás was tragic.’
‘I still have his revolver.’
‘What?
You
have it?’ His eyes light up like old globes recharged. ‘I thought by now that would be in the museum with Markievicz’s
mauser.’
He looks at me. ‘I could rig up a silencer for it.’
‘What?’
‘If you want to use it.’
‘Use it?’
‘To hit the Prod.’
Am I hearing him? Am I hearing what he’s saying? I’m not drunk; the air has cleared my head. There is no avoidance; no cover to hide under.
‘Will you take the oath?’
‘No oath,’ I say.
‘No?’
‘Never.’
***
I walk through the streets of the Liberties, lost in labyrinths of myself. Just as our language is lost. Without direction, in a permanent state of civil war. We are incarcerated in our buildings, our streets and our factories. We cannot see any road ahead. We are afraid to undress the body or the mind. We travel about in top coats or heavy shawls, rendering ourselves invisible.
And yet I am drawn back to these streets time and time again. I hear the sound of bells, my first music, always ringing true. I pass by the cabbage patch in the old Huguenot cemetery and see the cabbages with their white hearts like skulls luminous in the gloaming. And with first name familiarity, I greet Kevin and Patrick and Francis and Thomas. But within their maze I am still searching for a door which grants entrance to a world of light, a world of knowing, where one can rest, having completed the puzzle.
I wend my way out of the little streets where children are playing pickie-beds or taking their lives in their hands by swinging around a lamppost on a rope. Some are skipping and singing: ‘Green, white and yellow, your mother met a fellow.’ I cautiously circumnavigate Bride Street. The name. Superstition is a religion. There are things one can’t shake off.
I wander into the wider light of Dame Street, and ultimately into the cold surname formality of O’Connell Street. I pass the
Angel of Courage,
sitting at the base of the Liberator with the 1916 bullet hole in her left breast. I think of the stonebleeding breast of an angel, the chalk-bleeding Virgin, the paintbleeding heart of Jesus, all there to protect me, to give me solace, but not one is made of flesh.
It is dark when I return to the Rathfarnham house. It is cold and alien. Tainted. I don’t want to touch anything. Even the bedclothes in Patrick’s study feel dirty, and I kick them off and shiver, staring into the night. I long for a brother or sister. I am envious of those big families in the tenements. Numbers suffocate loneliness. Loneliness breeds in an empty house.
I long for Sinéad. I want to tell her about me. I want to talk to someone or something other than the night, to tell her about this guy up there in the North, this... this rapist (how hard it is to say the word)... his seed (those damn tears begin to flow again). I can’t tell her, I know that; I can’t tell Sinéad, for the telling would impair her image of my late mother and of me. Coercion doesn’t alter facts. Sinéad would run a mile from me if she knew I was a scion of the Orange foe.
So what am I to do? Pretend to be converted; pretend my pursuit of the paramilitary is based on purely ideological grounds. Didn’t he blow up Catholics? Isn’t that reason enough to go after him? Mustn’t a
tit
always follow a
tat
?
Sorrow focuses the mind. Or else unhinges it.
***
In Northern Ireland the orange spreads itself into flags and sashes and banners which parade to the pounding of drums.
I carry a satchel with a long shoulder strap. Inside the satchel my mother is resting. Her bed is hollowed out of a book. It is warm and secure. It has a steel sentry silently standing guard.
The train moves swiftly towards Belfast. Sinéad had phoned Rathfarnham to commiserate on Mam’s death. She had been arrested on the day of the funeral for throwing a petrol bomb at British soldiers, but was released soon afterwards. She claims Catholics are being treated unfairly by soldiers and the RUC. She says it’s all about marches.
There were two things which delighted her. One was the news that I was coming north
at last
, and the other was the slap on the face which Bernadette Devlin gave in the House of Commons to Home Secretary Maudling for his smug attitude towards Bloody Sunday. She wasn’t sure which of these two things delighted her more.
I told her we were seeking an elderly Protestant paramilitary who had just been released from prison, and that he posed a threat to Southern Catholics. We needed her help to track him down. To my surprise, she said she already knew about the matter and would pick us up at the train station.
Gearóid sits across from me in his dirty grey trench coat as the train chugs along. For a moment I see my aunt Peg glaring at a stern woman who has broken my flag. The train gives an occasional shriek, like an Indian on a warpath, announcing to the green fields, to the indifferent cows and sheep, that we are on our way, and that the world had better watch out.
‘Tickets please.’
‘Just a wee second,’ says Gearóid. ‘I’ll get them for you naah. Aye, ’tis a fine day surely.’
The ticket collector moves on, punching holes. His metal puncher like a wrist expander, stretches sinews as his hand opens and closes.
‘What’s with the accent?’
Gearóid smiles. ‘It comes with the job.’
‘Were you arrested in sixty six?’
‘Sixty six?’
‘It was in the news.’
‘They tried to nab me for the Pillar. Couldn’t prove it.’
‘Why didn’t you just topple Nelson?’
‘What?’
‘You could’ve left the Pillar alone.’
‘Not a sinner was harmed in that operation,’ he says proudly.
‘Forget it.’
Gearóid got the silencer to fit the revolver. Some friend of his, some expert in steel had done the job. He procured bullets. He asked no questions (didn’t mention the oath again, for the time being; he’ll be coming back to it no doubt in his own time). We had practised for an hour shooting chips off a Wicklow mountain. All he said after it was, ‘You’re sure you can handle it now?’ The tone: like a father to his kid who has just mastered a bicycle.
Who is my father? How can I ever know which one? One of the others perhaps, the ones plugged by Gearóid. But this one, the one who got away, he also played his part. But I’m not a murderer. I’ll not murder him – what Gearóid wants me to do, to finish off his business which he now has made my business. I’ll not murder him despite all he is reputed to have done to my mother. But I will emasculate him; be sure of that; that would only be fair after all. That would only be justice. No need to tell Gearóid these things.
I look across at him. He looks tired, old. Even older than what he looked at the funeral. Pale, anaemic like a vampire in daylight. I am amazed at his nonchalance, his indifference to detection. After all those years, why expose yourself now? He shows how chuffed he is that I’m accompanying him north by smiling, creating in his face a new physiognomy.
***
It is dark and misty when Sinéad collects us at the station in her Morris Minor. She has changed to Northern plates. All you need is connections. Sinéad has connections. The car is not out of place up here. There are many faithful Britishers who profess loyalty to a Morris Minor, just like Hitler did to his Volkswagen.
‘I hope we’ll have enough petrol,’ Sinéad says anxiously in Irish, hardly greeting me (so like my mother), acting like it’s all prearranged; the parts assigned.
‘The Arabs aren’t helping us,’ Gearóid says.
I open the window of the car. The streets smell of burning rubber. There are echoes of shouts, muffled, and the barking of dogs coming through a silence that’s like vapour, shrouded, secret.
A drizzle begins to descend
I see a soldier in camouflage standing at a shop. His greens and browns would make him a chameleon among trees, but against a background of plastic neon light, he is an incongruity. Only his boots blend with the night. A walkie-talkie hangs from his frame to communicate to some other world, to tell how the animals are behaving in this sodden place.
Sniffer dog. Barbed wire. You don’t ask people to point out the way. ‘Pointed out’ has a different meaning up here. It means a rifle at your head.
Sinéad dims the headlights. Sinéad was always good at dimming lights. Besides, it’s the law up here. It’s so British soldiers won’t be dazzled. They could get confused like rabbits. Rabbits with guns.