Authors: James Lawless
‘I’m very sorry to hear that, Jack,’ I say.
‘God grant that the other one will be all right.’
‘Is she in hospital?’
‘I don’t know. I’m waiting for confirmation. You know about Gearóid?’
‘Yes.’(Does he mean, do I know he’s dead or do I know he’s my father? Obviously the former, but the ambiguity is there; he won’t come out with it).
‘Did you see the car on TV?’ I say
‘Was it hers?’
‘Hard to tell.’
‘Oh my God. I’ll have to go up there and get her. Will you come with me, Derek?’
‘I can’t.’
‘What do you mean you can’t?’
‘I can’t. I’m sorry Jack.’
***
They have the funeral. They got the body down somehow with or without Sinéad’s help. (How did they cross the border? How did they avoid detection? Experience. Years of slipping into darkness). I keep thinking of Sinéad now missing an eye, the pain she must have gone through. For what? But maybe this calamity will change her, make her a different person when she gets back, if she gets back; make her see. Or else enrage her. The funeral in Dublin is a big affair as I predicted it would be with press and TV cameras. It stops the traffic in the streets as the cortège makes its way towards Glasnevin cemetery – starting off at the Liberties of course, pausing for a moment outside the flat where he was born near the Woodburn shop, passing by Saint Patrick’s Park with its bench and its statues of stone. People in their hundreds line the streets saluting, blessing themselves or just looking in awe at the huge procession. All the Liberties’ folk are there: old Mrs Chaigneau who is a greatgrandmother now with a walking stick, Jack Ó Súileabháin, Aunt Peg and... Sinéad (yes it is she; she made it down no thanks to me). Sinéad with a patch over her left eye, marching in a guard of honour with other soldiers of destiny in uniform and black berets, alongside the coffin which of course is draped with the tricolour.
I didn’t let on to Jack, but I was very put out when he told me about Sinéad losing an eye. I didn’t let on because I was still angry with her for the way she had duped me all that time, and the way he undoubtedly had duped me too. But now, looking at her, I want to rush over to her, to hug her, to tear that stupid uniform off her and take her away with me to some place, anywhere, Spain maybe. But I know Sinéad in Spain would be like a fish out of water, just like Luisa if she were brought over here.
So, instead, I stand among the crowds as unobtrusively as I can, glad of the human camouflage. And I think of the irony of it all: my hiding now from Gearóid who hid from me all his life. I feel nervous (the Northern exhilaration was shortlived). I feel that at any stage now someone in authority is going to come over and arrest me. Call my bluff.
The game is up, Mr Foley. I’m arresting you for patricide. Patricide, eh? You’ve got the wrong play. You’re looking for Oedipus. He’s in the Greek play down the road. Besides, where’s the evidence? The Protestant. The Protestant? Gearóid killed him. No, he escaped. He is a witness. He saw you. Even if he did escape it’s only his word against mine. Only his word, Mr Foley. Look around you. Look at all those people mourning the death of their great warrior. Their hero. It’s all their words, Mr Foley, all their words against yours. And Sinéad Ní Shúileabháin. What about her? Did you really think you could hoodwink her? Do you really think that she did not know what happened in that redbricked house? Come now, Mr Foley, you’re not a liar; you’re no good at that sort of thing; you should leave that to professionals. There are people like that? Like what? People who carry their sins visibly on their faces like medieval penitents. You’re one of those. There’s no hiding for you, Mr Foley. You think it will all just pass off now and that will be the end of it.
‘Who was the guy?’ an onlooker, a young man in the crowd says, startling me.
‘The guy?’
‘In the coffin.’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, and I wonder what Gearóid would have made of being referred to as the ‘guy’.
‘He was a freedom fighter,’ someone says, an elderly man in a tweed cap and coat. He is the same man who was looking out to sea the time I went swimming with Sinéad. The one who had no respect for the seasons, or maybe I’m imagining it; maybe it’s just that all old men in grey tweed caps and overcoats look the same.
‘He must’ve been high up in the ranks with a turn out like this,’ the young man says.
‘He was the supremo,’ replies the elderly man. ‘Gunned down by a Protestant paramilitary.’
I am invisible. I brush away my footprints behind me as I retreat like those Untouchables in India. All trace of me has gone. I was never here. I was never anywhere.
I don’t hear the funeral oration. I’m too far away. I don’t hear the words but I can recite them verbatim just as I can recite the soldiers’ orders given in Irish. And when I hear the bugle sound and the volley of rifle fire, I know at least the ceremony part is over.
***
Sinéad is staying home for a while. Jack had gone up with some members of the ‘movement’ and brought her home in his own car. There was no trace of the Morris Minor, and I did not dare to enquire any more on that matter.
Since the funeral, Jack is trying to keep her indoors. He fusses over her like the mother she but briefly had, and to his surprise she appears to succumb. She stays in, nursing her eye, spending her time staring dolefully out the sitting room window. What does she see? I wonder, in my visits to her. Is she looking out for me? To see if I’m coming up the road? No, not me. She sees the modern Ireland, suburbia, asphalt and concrete. Or maybe she doesn’t see any of that. Maybe it’s just bombs and bullets she sees, and people crying in anguish.
I visit her most days despite Jack’s coldness towards me. Even though I told him about the shooting I was involved in (compounding what I already had told Sinéad about the manner of Gearóid’s death), and how dangerous it would be for me to return up there, he thinks I have no backbone. And his daughter doesn’t disagree. It’s funny, not a word was mentioned about the
trauma
of the shooting; and not a word either about Gearóid MacSuibhne, or the funeral, or about his being my father – what it means to
me
? What the effect of all the years of subterfuge had on
me
?
Jack keeps on about his daughter, understandably I suppose. He is very upset about her losing an eye. ‘Maimed,’ he says (to me of course, not to Sinéad), ‘maimed for life.’ He looks almost accusingly at me, as if I am the cause of it. ‘Thankfully the other eye is okay,’ I say. But he doesn’t answer me. He just walks away.
Sinéad has been fitted with a glass eye. She is sitting in a chair in the sitting room when I come in. She is holding a mirror and dabbing around her eye with cotton wool. The afternoon sun beams through the window catching the shine in her hair.
‘It’s sore,’ she says in English (Irish obviously being put on hold for a while).
You’re in exalted company now,’ I say.
She sighs. ‘What are you on about, Derek?’
‘Pearse,’ I say. ‘He had eye trouble too.’
‘You’re a cold bastard, you know that?’
‘What do you expect?’
I’m still smarting, despite her trouble, from what she did to me.
‘Oh,’ she shouts, putting her hand to her eye. ‘It’s loose in its socket. It keeps moving around. It’s going to fall out.’
‘It only needs adjusting,’ I say, and I notice the eye weeping, but of course the weeping is not the weeping of emotions (that’s not Sinéad’s scene), but the discharge from living flesh trying to accommodate glass.
‘Jesus, the force of that rubber bullet,’ she says, ‘it knocked me right down; they’re lethal. We’ll have to march against their use.’
‘You’re not marching anywhere for a while,’ I say.
She looks in the mirror. ‘The colour is quite good, Derek, don’t you think? The blue is quite a good match.’
‘It is,’ I say.
She takes out the glass eye.
‘What are you doing?’
‘It’s hurting me,’ she says, and I see the gaping hollow (how could I make little of such a thing?). And I think of the hollowed-out book lying somewhere on a Northern floor, and of Old Testament punishments like the gouging out of eyes, and how Patrick Foley was right when he claimed such things were still with us, but not only in Spain.
‘Those bastards,’ she says. ‘Look at me, Derek. Go on, say it, I’m repulsive.’
She is vulnerable once more just as she was on the radio with
Tadhg an dá thaobh.
Her defences are down, making her immediately attractive to me.
‘You’re not repulsive,’ I say.
‘You don’t think so?’
‘No,’ I say, and then I kiss her.
***
‘Will you give it up?’ I say to her. We’re sitting on the brown dralon sofa, my arm around her, listening to starlings squabbling at the open window.
‘Give what up? she says, freeing herself from my embrace.
‘All this. The “movement”. Everything.’
She frowns. ‘That’s typical of you, always trying to undermine me.’
‘You know it’s not you I’m…’
‘I’m not a quitter, not like some people.’
‘But what life is it?’
‘The only life,’ she says.
‘You could go back to your studies.’
‘What good would that do? That won’t revolutionise anything. I’ve seen it happening with people when they get a bit of money or a qualification; they get sucked into the system and nothing ever changes.’
‘You mean me?’
‘Not just you. But you won’t change anything. Do you think giving lectures will change things?’
Jack pokes his head in the door. ‘Are you all right?’ he says to Sinéad.
‘I’m okay.’
He leaves the room without even glancing in my direction.
‘Jack,’ I shout after him but he doesn’t come back.
‘He’s annoyed with you,’ Sinéad says.
‘I know.’
She starts to cry.
‘Hey,’ I say, putting my arms around her, ‘what’s this?’
‘Why didn’t you go north with him when he asked you?’
‘How could I go north?’
‘He needed you.’
‘And who did I need all my life?’
‘He always spoke highly of you…’ she sniffles, and laughs through glistening tears…‘thought you were a grand lad when your mother told him about your getting the gold medal for history...’
‘She told him that?’
‘Oh I tell you,’ she says brightening, ‘pride is not the word, my Liberties’ boy. Jack said you were marked out.’
‘Marked out?’
‘It was in your genes, he said, and he…’ she pauses.
‘And he what?’
‘I suppose he felt a bit paternal towards you, you know in the absence of…’
‘Fathers?’ I say. ‘I had two. Why should he feel paternal towards someone who had
two
fathers. A bit of a waste, don’t you think?’
‘Stop it, Derek.’
***
I read in the newspapers that the IRA has a new role in society, or perhaps I should say a supplementary role – that of moral guardian. They’re cleaning up the drug dens of the city, leading vigilante groups wielding hurley sticks or baseball bats. They’re clearing out the prostitutes’ warrens too – the IRA don’t like pimps; they’re anti-vice in every way. They’re injecting terror into the hearts of junkies and pushers and pimps. The
gardaí
don’t stand in their way. Why should they? It takes some of the pressure off them. They’re merciless especially with the pushers and the pimps who sometimes are one and the same. They kneecap them, or the vigilantes beat them real badly. You see them going around the city. It’s like a telltale mark. The pusher or the pimp is the one with the limp.
It’s becoming an international thing, an international brotherhood and sisterhood. Former terrorist groups, former anarchists, even, are becoming the new right, the new moral arbiters. It’s like the world is going too far east.
I tell Sinéad about Luisa. I don’t know why exactly. I have a vague notion why but I’m not clear as yet. I feel I have to confide in someone about her. I have to speak about my meeting Luisa to confirm that the encounter was real – the only tangible element was the cross and chain – and not some dream manufactured from an old musty magazine in a diplomat’s drawer.
‘A prostitute?’ she says.
‘Forced,’ I say. ‘She was forced into it’(just as my mother was forced, I was almost about to add).
Sinéad looks at me suspiciously. ‘And what, may I ask, was the Liberties’ boy doing with a prostitute?’
I relate the story, or part of it at least.
‘Don’t tell me now,’ she says before I have finished, ‘you fell in love with a prostitute with a heart of gold.’
‘It wasn’t love I felt; it was guilt. There was something about her, something vulnerable. I felt bad leaving her. It was like… did you ever feel you were called on?’
‘Called on?’
‘Yeah, maybe something like what your dad was saying about me (for I had been thinking about his words –
marked out
, but more about my mother’s words and her experience as a young girl in Camden Street). It was the first time I felt it.’