Peeling Oranges (23 page)

‘Thanks.’

‘No, I mean I really liked her. I couldn’t make the funeral, okay?’

‘Okay.’

We lie for a while looking up at the high ceiling and I can sense minds diverging, bifurcating into different roads.

She turns towards me and draws her finger along the line of my moustache.

‘It’s funny,’ she says, smiling impishly.

‘What’s funny?’

‘Your moustache. It’s a different colour in the daylight.’

‘I didn’t think you noticed such things.’

‘Just like Gearóid’s,’ she says, ‘carrot-red.’

‘I know.’

‘You know?’

‘Yes. I know now; but
you
knew all along.’

‘People in the Liberties knew. They respected your mother and Gearóid, but there was always a danger that someone would let the cat out of the bag.’

‘The cat?’

‘You know what I mean. You think your mother stayed on in Rathfarnham just for the fresh air?’ She laughs. ‘Or did you ever wonder why you were packed off to boarding school?’

‘And why didn’t
you
let the cat out of the bag?’

I’m annoyed. I don’t like being duped, especially by someone near to me.
Near to me.
Is that the phrase? Surely inadequate. Someone... one who means something to me. Does she mean something to me? Like my own heart, the wattles of my making.

‘I only found out after you went to Spain, after I joined the “movement”.’

‘And you told me nothing?’

‘You weren’t the only one, Derek. There were others like you.’

‘Like me?’

‘Recruits.’

‘Is that what I am?’

She laughs. ‘You were a hard nut to crack.’

After a moment she looks at me – a look of solicitude. ‘You got on fine, the two of you, didn’t you?’

I hesitate.

‘Derek.’

‘Like a house on fire,’ I say.

***

The rain has stopped, leaving a sweet smell from the grass as I climb towards Cave Hill. The cliff side of the hill wears a profile called ‘Napoleon’s Nose’. Each nostril is a cave. The climb is strenuous, but I am glad for the exertion. To feel the physical in me. I welcome the prickly briars stabbing at me. The stones are loose underfoot. Free, individual.

Sinéad says people come here to shout at the world, when all the pressures of life get too heavy to bear. Here they can hide from bullets and taunts and imagine man as a nomad once more without boundaries. Here my mother could have shouted out her pain. I think of her story, of the barber, Labhras Loingseach, telling his secret to a tree. Here to the cliffs I shout my secret now: ‘DEREK FOLEY WAS BORN OF RAAAAAAAAAAPE.’

My echo resonates through the hillside, its decibels undulating like bats chasing their own reverberations into unknown wombs.

‘Derek.’

It’s MacSuibhne’s voice, weak, coming from the top of the hill.

I make my way up, following trickles of blood, to the ruins of a fort.

He is sitting with his back against a weeping wall, in a pool of blood, the revolver by his side.

‘How did you manage to get up here?’ I say without pity, ignoring his wound.

‘I managed like all pilgrims. This is the place.’

‘Your house of shells,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘Forget it.’

‘I tried to plug myself.’

‘The great warrior was scared,’ I say.

He groans. ‘Why did you do this to me? Why don’t you just finish me off?’

He looks at the gun.

‘Ever since the time she hid this in her knickers I couldn’t stop thinking about it. But she wouldn’t let me do it. It wasn’t right, she said, unless we were married, and then afterwards she was faithful to that non-man, all the time faithful.’

‘Where did you leave the Prod?’

‘When you threw the gun...’

(When I threw the gun, after I had shot him, yes, like the discarding of something that had completed its task, its course of history run. But it’s not over yet; here it is peaking up again).

‘...he made to come at me,’ MacSuibhne is saying, ‘so I shot him point blank through the temple; what you should have done. Don’t leave measures half done. Please...’

He proffers the gun which I decline. ‘How can you call it rape?’ he says. ‘Shouting out like that. It wasn’t rape. It was an act of love. It was so strong, the feeling was so strong. You know what I’m saying? You’re a man…’

‘What’s a man, Gearóid?’

‘Don’t start that. I saw you with Sinéad, the two of you in the car. She’s a good girl. Totally committed. With Martha and me, what we did, it was against the Church. She would’ve been a scarlet woman. That’s why I had to...’

‘Bullshit. You’d have me kill a man on the basis of your lies. You sold me out, your own son…’

‘I wanted you with us, Derek.’

I spit on the ground. ‘Why don’t you just say you fucked her, just like you did with Peg?’

‘What?’

‘You heard me.’

‘With Peg it was just…’

His head slumps into his chest.

I shake him.

‘It was the world we lived in then,’ he says weakly.

‘You acted against my mother’s will.’

‘It wasn’t against her will. It was against her conscience.’

His chest heaves. I think he’s going. What should I do? I feel a panic rising. I hadn’t intended to kill him, no matter what. I hadn’t intended to kill anyone. Should I get help? Put myself at risk? A greater risk? Fuck the consequences. Is it too late? Find Sinéad; just tell her everything. Or should I run? Is this the destiny? Guts and blood pouring out?

‘Part of your life…’ he splutters, struggling for breath, ‘ruined… with me… all… two loves…’

His words are fading. His left hand has become invisible under a red seepage.

‘Here,’ I say, proffering a handkerchief. He unsticks his hand from his stomach and blood spurts out like water from a leaking hydrant.

I look at my own hand as something strange, something autonomous. Did that organ do such a thing? The mind, joined to a corporate system, can it discriminate between actions? Or sometimes does it just look on?

‘Maybe, with Sinéad…’ he says.

‘Easy,’ I say.

His breathing comes fitfully.

‘You know wha...what I really resented about Foley?’ he says, ‘it was his...his way with words. If I only had had the words...’

‘You had no shortage of words,’ I say.

‘Different tools. We used different tools. Who is to say who was the more honest?’

‘You were both liars. Top of the class.’

He bids me to be silent by placing a bloody finger on his lips.

‘You know this place,
McArt’s Fort
? Do you know…?’

He gets a fit of coughing, making the blood spurt more freely (the handkerchief uselessly reduced to a bloody clot). I press my hand against his stomach. I can’t just stay here hopelessly, and watch a life ebbing away, no matter what. It was an accident. I never intended... ‘I’ll get Sinéad,’ I hear myself saying, ‘and we’ll drive you across the border to a hospital.’ (I can make up some story for Sinéad. They all do it. Why can’t I?).

‘Too late,’ he says, and gently, he squeezes my hand and lifts it away. ‘Seventeen ninety five… do you know what happened here?’

‘I know about Tone. I teach history.’

‘In this very spot… swore he would never rest until our country was made free.’

‘You’re part of it, Gearóid.’

Tears well in my eyes. My voice falters. I should be hating him but I can’t. Fuck sake, how to screw up a life.

‘I’ll get Sinéad.’ I say.

He beckons me back with a weak gesture. ‘I got drunk,’ he says.

‘What?’

He grimaces as he tries to straighten himself. ‘In forty seven I called to her house. She was sitting by the fire in a nightdress.’

He lifts the gun. ‘I asked her to put it in the same place where she did the day the Tans came when we were kids, but she wouldn’t. I just asked her, that’s all.’

His voice has broken into weeping. ‘She said I was mad. She told me to stop, that I was hurting her. Fucking drink. She never forgave me you know, never in her heart.’

His voice becomes fainter, barely audible. ‘All those things they said about me, I didn’t do the half of them.’

His head slumps into his chest once more. I wait for it to rise. ‘Gearóid,’ I say, nudging him. But his head does not come up.

***

He’s dead then, my father, I say to myself as I walk down the hill. What do I feel? I’m too numbed to know. Everything happened so quickly in the end. But there is no satisfaction in killing a man, that much I know now. I see an acorn on the ground. Does it retrace its path to the oak that discarded it? The manna of childhood, where is it to be found?

I return with Sinéad. I tell her that it was the Prod who got Gearóid. How easy it is to create a myth.

‘But I thought…’

‘We thought we had finished him off. It was when Gearóid was leaving. You know, the wasp’s dying sting?’

She looks at Gearóid with tearful eyes. ‘Why didn’t you stay with him?’ she says irately.

‘It was his wish,’ I say.

One lie always chases another.

I tell Sinéad to contact the ‘movement’. ‘They’ll look after him,’ I say, ‘it’s the least they can do.’

‘What do you mean
they
?’ she says. ‘He’s one of us. He’s your father.’

‘Don’t give me that,’ I say.

I see the disappointment in her face.

‘He’ll get what he always wanted,’ I say, ‘the full treatment, the tricolour, the rifle salute, the bugle, all fading nicely into a Celtic mist.’

‘Stop it,’ she shouts. ‘You’re so cynical. Aren’t you one of us at all?’

***

I can’t shake it off: the guilty feeling (the feeling that has struck since the numbness wore off, since having the words with Sinéad). I have betrayed my own tribe. I have done a despicable thing and there is no undoing it now.

I follow the Orange marches on television. Orange banners and sashes. A great sea of orange suffuses the screen. I listen to the beat of the Lambeg drum, beaten by men wearing what look like black chamber pots on their heads. I hear the sound of cymbals and a thunderous crescendo, as petrol bombs and stones are hurled into the air. A great symphony of fire and percussion. There are many conductors with their black batons which they wield with grace and artistry.

I turn off the sound when the dancers come on and I study the choreography. The simulated fight scenes, so graphic, the actors so convincing. Boys dressed up as soldiers firing their toy bullets. Men disguised as clergymen playing the parts of demagogues.

I think of religions as life-endangering, of hymn books and bibles carrying warnings: ‘Caution: contents highly inflammatory’.

And the sets: the boundary lines drawn in red and green, the wonderful curlicues of wire, the playfulness of tyres, and for the
adagio,
the symmetry of smoke spiralling into the air from the burnt-out shell of a Morris Minor.

A Morris Minor! A shudder. Could it be...? Calm down, Derek, I say to myself.

I think of the funeral impending. I hope he gets his send-off. Sometimes that’s all we prepare for: a good sendoff. Are they looking for me out there? I go to close the window. I look out at the Chestnut trees across the road with their leaves ruffling in the breeze? I imagine search parties; black beaked crows, swooping, hunting down a killer. I’m in a state of perpetual unease since that moment, lying low like Gearóid once did in the same house, reenacting his lies, his manufactured stories (‘They would never come this far south.’ But they are south; they are here). At least summer endows a remission from the university (will I ever go back there?). Everything is so tentative now; everything is in flux. Surely Sinéad will write or phone. Just to say things went okay. The clean up that I left her with. The comrades she would have to summon. I’m a cruel bastard, no matter what, leaving her as I did with all of that, all those shadows to contend with. No, she will not call. Why should she call? We parted coolly. I’m the craven man in her book. There was little time to talk. There was so much to do, she said, as she brushed past me. And I wanted to tell her about my mother and Gearóid. I wanted to tell her about coercion, what it means, how it affects a person, how it affected my mother and me, how it set the agenda for our lives. All those years. An adulthood and a childhood all burned out like an IRA bomb. But I can’t press this, I know, because she would start wondering (if she hasn’t already done so), about the real circumstances of Gearóid’s death. And the thought: would it be part of
their
agenda – would they murder a son for murdering a father?

***

The day after the marches I meet Jack Ó Súileabháin. He is distraught. He got a phone call from the ‘movement’ about Sinéad. One of her eyes has been put out by a rubber bullet.