Authors: James Lawless
‘The call?’ she says.
‘No, no, not that type of call. All the other times in school and in the different societies, they were sort of artificial, as if they were made up, not real you know. But when I met Luisa I felt something...’
‘What?’ she says.
‘Like I was being called to help in some way to try to right some of the injustices in the world.’
‘And what did you think
we
were doing?’
‘No, I mean it was something bigger…’
‘Bigger?’
‘I mean something wider, something universal, something beyond nationalism, and it was just spontaneous, the feeling I had; you know what I’m saying?’
‘No, I don’t,’ she snaps.
‘She was abused terribly.’
‘Why are you telling me this, Derek?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You do know.’
I look at a girl with sunlight in her hair and cotton wool in her hand dabbing the cavity where an eye once was, and I ask myself is there always an ulterior motive for telling each other things?
‘Well, maybe I was wondering the way Gearóid had contacts over.’
‘Over?’
‘In Spain. I know it was a long time ago, but I was just wondering if there was any chance you also might know some people.’
‘What if I do? You expect me to ask them to rescue a prostitute. Is that what you want?’
‘Her pimp is the fascist who tried to murder Gearóid.’
‘What?’
‘When he was sprung out of the Spanish jail. Did Gearóid ever tell you?’
‘He’s the one? I mean are you sure?’
‘I met him. I went to his house. He lives in Cuadro on the
Costa Brava
. His name is Javier Jiménez. He tried to…’
‘Tried to what?’
‘Let’s say he made overtures towards me.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘He runs a male vice ring as well.’
Sinéad stops dabbing her eye and looks at me. It’s like one of my mother’s quizzical looks.
‘What do you want?’ Her tone is abrupt, official.
‘I want to free Luisa from him.’
‘Look at me,’ she says. ‘Just look at me.’
‘You owe me,’ I say coldly.
Sinéad sighs like someone overcome by events, someone exhausted.
‘I can’t guarantee anything.’
I tell her that she’s known as
La Santa
and where she lives. When I say the number 47B she says, ‘The Rathfarnham bus from town.’
‘That’s right,’ I say.
She smiles. ‘The bus for home.’
***
People are sitting in parks and gardens around Rathfarnham like cows in the meadows in the heat of midsummer, listening to the birds chirping in the trees or in the eaves of suburban houses, when I ask Sinéad to marry me. That’s what other people are doing. Sinéad stays indoors in a darkened room (the sun streaming through her sitting room window had begun to irritate her eye, and she was forced to draw the curtains, at least that’s what she said). Why do I ask her to marry me? I suppose I think that by marrying we can compromise (I mean isn’t that what marriage is? Isn’t that what life is?) in some way on our different perceptions of the world. Oh and love, yes, that has to come into the equation too, if I only knew what it was.
But she refuses. ‘You know I can’t,’ she says. ‘But it’s all different now,’ I say (thinking of her missing eye) ‘It’s all different now?’ she says. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘And what do you mean by that?’ ‘I mean…’ ‘Go on, say it,’ she says, and a tear, a real tear this time, begins to show in her good eye. ‘No, I don’t mean that,’ I say. ‘I mean…’ ‘I know what you mean,’ she says. ‘But it’s okay; it’s what anyone would say; it’s what anyone would think but it makes no difference. You know what I’m married to, Derek Foley, for better or worse,’ and the tear extricates itself from her duct and flows freely down one side of her face.
***
Sinéad scans the newspapers every day for news of the North, and after a couple of weeks I see how restless she can become.
‘I’m needed to represent the “firm”, she says one afternoon when I call on her. She is standing at the door of her house with a duffel bag on her shoulder.
‘Sinéad, you can’t go up there, not in your condition.’
‘Watch me,’ she says.
***
For the next few weeks I mope about the house thinking of her. I haven’t the inclination to tackle that old stump in the garden anymore. I just leave it there, let the weeds grow around it. I feel like leaving everything. She’s gone, I keep saying to myself. She has refused me. There is nothing more for me here. I should be lost somewhere in Europe, where my mother always wanted me to be (if the truth were known). I will give in my notice at the university. Ireland is joining the EEC. They’ll be looking for more diplomats to fill their burgeoning posts. I’ll be just following family tradition. And history will be good (it will have a future after all, despite what my mother said). It will look good on my CV.
I watch television, the news and political commentaries on the North (it won’t go away; and the worry is there, no matter what). The British army has entered the Bogside. There is talk of ‘no go’ areas. I imagine her spending her time sitting, waiting in cars in dark lanes, eating from takeaways, suffering with her artificial eye, in constant danger (how can the heart take that, being in a state of permanent alert?). It is no life for a woman, least of all a woman with a handicap; it is no life for anyone. But what is that to me now?
There is an explosion in Mulrooney’s pub in Belfast – it was known that there was an assembly of the IRA on the premises. Among those killed, are the owner of the pub and... I keep waiting to hear her name, Sinéad Ní Shúileabháin, the ‘black patched terrorist’, that’s how the English press refer to her now. She is no longer an anonymity. She has secured her place in the annals of myth. Is that not enough for her – to be a heroine in the eyes of her people and a villain in the eyes of the enemy? What more could anyone ask for? Is that not enough? I keep waiting; any minute now. I keep saying to myself, the next news flash will have her name on it. They don’t have the toll of all the dead yet; they’re still searching the rubble. What do I do? Write in my diary to keep my hands from shaking:
What can one expect? It has to be this way. It can be no other way. Ideologies, like words to music, fade. There is only the music now; now only the thought. Is that possible? I hear the church bells. But even church bells have their rhetoric.
***
I sit watching the television with my transistor radio blaring on my lap in case I miss out on anything in one medium. They have released more names of the dead. The owner’s two young children and several IRA people are named. No mention of Sinéad, no, not yet. Maybe in the late news…
The phone rings. It says three fifteen a.m. on the wall clock. I had fallen into a doze in the armchair. I pick up the receiver.
There’s a cackle in the line.
‘Sinéad.’
‘Can you hear me?’
‘Just about. Are you all right?’
‘Yes. You saw it on the telly?’
‘I saw it. You’re sure you’re all right?’
‘Yes.’.
Pause.
‘I wanted to tell you...’
‘Yes.’
‘About Spain. Everything is sorted.’
‘What did they do?’
‘Don’t ask, Derek. Just be thankful.’
‘Thanks,’ I say.
‘There was something else.’
‘What?’
‘That I was going to tell you…’
‘What was that?’
A pause. ‘Are you there?’
‘Yes,’
‘Well, what is it?’
‘I’m pregnant.’
‘Congratulations.’
‘What?’
‘Another one for the Cause. To add to all the other babies,’ I say coldly.
‘What other babies? There weren’t any other babies. That was just a theory.’
‘A theory?’
‘Yes.’
Another pause. The sound of her breathing. She’s waiting for my response. What can I say?
‘Are you glad then?’ she says.
‘Should I be glad?’ I say. ‘I mean how can I ever believe you, Sinéad?’
There are tears there. I know by her sniffling, there are tears there.
‘I was thinking of going away,’ I say.
‘When?’ she says with shock in her voice.
‘Soon.’
‘Where?’
‘Europe.’
‘Europe?’ She sighs. ‘Europe is a big place, Derek.’
‘I know.’
‘I…’
‘Yes?’
‘I would miss you.’
‘Would you really?’
‘You know I would.’
‘How do I know?’ I say teasingly.
‘Because I...’
‘Yes?’ (I’m holding my breath. Will she say the word?).
‘I love you. I mean I could love you.’
‘Could?’
I say. Are we backtracking now?’
‘Of course not.’
‘How come you’re only telling me this now?’
‘Maybe it’s the absence.’
‘You’ve often been gone longer.’
‘Maybe it’s the phone; maybe it’s easier to say things like that on the phone. But don’t start getting notions, Derek Foley. I don’t mean in any bourgeois sense of marriage and pram pushing and...’
‘I have a rocking cot,’ I say. (Why do I say that? Something unfulfilled springing out of the coils of my infancy).
‘What did you say? The line is very bad.’
‘I said I had a rocking cot.’
She laughs. An emotional laugh. ‘I thought you said you had a ‘rotten cough’.’
‘For the baby.’
‘It won’t be for some months, you know.’
‘But I have the cot anyway.’
The pause.
‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that gunfire I hear?’ I say anxiously.
‘It’s all right. It’s far away.’
‘You’re sure you’re all right?’
‘The way you fuss. I told you. We’ll be coming home soon.’
‘Yes,’ I say excitedly, ‘the two of you. I’ll be waiting.’
‘You’re not going away then?’
‘That depends, doesn’t it?’ I say. ‘Maybe it was just a theory as well.’
She laughs. (How good it is to hear her laugh).‘We should be talking in Irish, you know.’
‘Of course,’ I say, conscious of the emotion breaking in my voice, ‘of course we should.’
***
Early morning finds me standing in the back garden of the house, dishevelled, a coat thrown over my shoulders, sleep-starved eyes smarting at the sunlight. I’m observing a blackbird pecking at a shell. It hammers the shell on the half dug tree stump, shaking its head as it tries to extract the snail with its beak.
The elongated eye of the bird senses my presence. It retreats, carrying the shell into the privet hedge. I hold my breath, silent among the leaves. There are twigs and bits of dried grass and moss forming a nest, for a mother with her tweeting chicks.
I wish to gratefully acknowledge Dermot Keogh’s
Ireland and Europe: A Diplomatic History, 1919-1990
(Hibernian University Press, 1990) for throwing light on Ireland’s diplomatic links with Spain; Tony Farmar’s
Ordinary Lives: Three Generations of Irish Middle Class Experience, 1907, 1932, 1963
(Gill & Macmillan, 1991) for its illuminating record of the Eucharistic Congress; Kevin C. Kearn’s
Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History
(Gill & Macmillan, 1994) for its anecdotal accounts of Dublin slum life. I would also like to express my thanks to the staffs of the National Archive, of the Central Library, and of the Northern Ireland Tourist Board, Dublin.