The Speckled People (22 page)

On the train home everybody thought it was part of the Easter commemorations and that every boy in Ireland was turning green. I wanted to be as Irish as possible so that I would never have to be German again. I wanted to belong to the saddest people and not the people who killed the saddest people. At home I tried to speak Irish to my mother again but she didn’t understand a word, so then I sat at the window while she was working, and I pretended that I was the newsreader, like the man at the window in Béal an Daingin. I waited for my father to come home from the station and told her all the people going by.

There’s Miss Ryan going east now to get minced meat
for herself and her sister. There’s Miss Hosford going east, too, on her bicycle and nobody knows where she’s off to at this time of the day with a rucksack on her back. They say that Mrs MacSweeney’s niece is getting married soon in Dublin. They say that one of the Miss Doyles nearly got married to a stranger once, but she’s happier now living with her sister till death do us part, and reading to each other every evening after dinner from an indecent book by James Joyce. Here are the Miss Lanes coming out and looking up at the Irish flag hanging from the front window of our house, and they think they’re in the wrong country altogether. They look around the garden to make sure that nobody has kicked a football into their country and say that it’s a shame more Irish people didn’t die fighting the Nazis. They say the Irish were cowards because they didn’t fight against the Nazis, but they forget that the Irish fought against the British. There’s Miss Tarleton coming out now picking up bits of paper in her front garden and wondering why my mother didn’t die fighting against the Nazis. But she doesn’t know that my mother lived against the Nazis instead. They say that Miss Tarleton hates the bees more than the Irish language, except that they’re good for the loganberry harvest. They say that Miss Tarleton went into the butcher’s shop one day and asked Mr Furlong what the picture of Patrick Pearse was doing in the window beside all the meat. He said it was time to die for Ireland and she said that meant it was time to kill for Ireland, but my father says they’re both wrong because it’s time to live for Ireland and be Irish. They say that Mrs Creagh once went over to England for horse racing at Cheltenham and somebody asked her if the Irish still kept pigs under the bed, and she said it wasn’t half as bad as having the pigs in the bed like they do in England. Here’s Mr Clancy going
down to the Eagle House and he once had a big argument with my father in the street. My father told him we were trying to be as Irish as possible. Mr Clancy said he was just as Irish as us and didn’t speak a word of Irish. He said Irish was the ‘aboriginal’ language and no bloody use to anyone any more. So then my father told Mr Clancy he would soon be outnumbered and Mr Clancy said my father better have a lot more children. Here’s my father coming around the corner saying that nobody is going to stop us speaking Irish or make us take down the Irish flag from the window until we feel like it. My father and Mr Clancy are going towards each other on the pavement and you think there’s going to be a big fight and blood on the ground, but my father is not one of the fist people and neither is Mr Clancy, and they both nod to each other politely as they pass by.

One morning my father woke me up early and showed me the newspaper. He still had shaving cream on his face and he was breathing fast from running up the stairs. He opened the paper wide and pointed at a picture of Dublin after a bomb. It was a bomb for Ireland, he said. I rubbed my eyes and looked at the picture, but I didn’t know what was happening until he read it out to me. It said that Nelson’s Pillar had been blown up during the night. I remembered going up to the top of Nelson’s Pillar once with Eileen and now it was gone and nobody would ever go up again. My father slapped the paper with the back of his hand and said the empire was crumbling. At last all the things the British left behind are disappearing, he said. At last we’re living in our own country and telling our own stories and speaking our own language. When I went to school I saw hundreds of people standing around looking at the remains of Nelson’s Pillar. There were no buses going up and down the street any more because
there was rubble all over the place. The windows were broken and there was glass everywhere. People couldn’t go shopping that day or pass by to get into the GPO either. I saw a shoe shop with glass all over the new shoes. I looked up and saw the stump of Nelson’s Pillar like somebody’s arm cut off. Nelson’s head was on the ground and the dust of the empire was all around.

I keep thinking this didn’t happen.

One day I had to collect Bríd from school because she was homesick. The wind was howling in her chest so I had to go into the girls’ school and bring her home. I had to go up the stairs past the glass cage with the stuffed birds and knock on the girls’ classroom. They opened the door and I saw Bríd sitting down with three girls and the teacher around her. Her face was white and she was breathing with her mouth open. Her hair was wet from sweating and they were wiping her face with a towel, but she was happy and she smiled because I was there to take her home. I picked up her schoolbag and took her by the hand and we walked down the stairs very slowly. She was holding on to the banisters and sitting down sometimes to take a rest with her head down and her hair in her face as if nothing mattered any more.

When we got outside I had to carry her because she couldn’t walk. She was leaning forward and stopping all the time to hold on to the railings, so then I hung the schoolbag around my neck and gave her a piggyback up to the bus stop. On the bus I got her to lie down on the seat like a bed with the schoolbag as a pillow, but she got up again, because she was coughing and crying for air with her arm around me. I knew she wouldn’t be able to walk home
from the bus, so I asked the conductor if he could get the bus to bring her home. He was clicking the money in his hand and said he wasn’t allowed to do that, but then I told him that my sister was going to get sick and he talked to the driver. So the bus turned up at the Eagle House and all the people were lost because they had never been up that street before on a bus. The conductor explained that the bus was an ambulance now. He was still clicking the money in his hand to see if anyone hadn’t paid their fare, but then he sat down like a passenger himself, until the bus got to our street with the red houses and the driver stopped because it was impossible to go any further. I told him it was all right because we lived in number two and that wasn’t too far. Then the bus conductor carried Bríd as far as the front door and afterwards everybody was talking about the lost bus, because it took so long before it turned around and drove back down to catch up with the main road again.

The doctor had to come and we went down for the red medicine and twisted glucose sticks. Bríd took only one spoon because she wasn’t able to swallow and the second spoon dribbled down her chin, down the outside of her neck instead of inside. My mother tried to make her go to sleep with a song about a donkey who said he was better at making noise than the cuckoo, but she kept sitting up in bed and trying to run away. So then we carried the bed down to the kitchen to make sure that she wouldn’t be lonely upstairs. She fell asleep for a while and we walked around the house very quietly as if there was a cake in the oven. When my father came home he knew what to do. He sat on the bed and stroked her head. He got her to swallow another spoon of medicine inside her neck, and even when we were going to bed, he was still sitting there with her, trying to make her smile and asking her puzzles like the
one about the man who came to a fork in the road and had only one question to ask. He gave her lots of clues, but she still didn’t know the answer and he had to tell her in the end. We could hear her breathing up and down all through the house, and sometimes she was crying and putting her arm around my father to beg him to help her breathe.

‘It’s all right,
Tutti
,’ I can hear them saying all the time. ‘It’s all right,
mein Schätzchen
, it’s all right.’

The man named Gearóid still comes to our house sometimes on Saturdays and he says the only thing that would help Bríd is goat’s milk. He comes in his Volkswagen and says we’re a true Irish fireside and we should be drinking goat’s milk anyway. He wants my father to start making speeches again and to write for the newspaper
Aiséirí
, like he did long ago. Everybody knows that the
Aiséirí
office is on Harcourt Street because you can see the blue Volkswagen outside every day with all the newspapers on the back seat, and sometimes you can see a goat tied to the railings as well to show the people of Dublin that the Irish are not afraid to be different. Gearóid keeps a goat in the city and we keep bees in the city, to remind people not to be so afraid of the country. My mother thought the goat was coming out to our house in the back of the Volkswagen but Gearóid said it would only eat up all the copies of
Aiséirí
, so the next time he came out he brought a canteen full of goat’s milk instead and my father gave him a jar of honey in exchange.

The goat’s milk didn’t help Bríd. She spat it out all over the bed clothes because it looked grey and tasted like pee-pee. Some people said Bríd should not be drinking milk at all. Some said she should be living in the mountains in Switzerland, not by the sea in Ireland, because it’s damp
and sometimes you can’t even look out the window. Miss Tarleton said Bríd would grow out of it because she had a really bad chest herself when she was a little girl, and look at her now, she’s 78 years old and she can’t remember the last time she had a cold or even a cough. But Bríd doesn’t want to be like Miss Tarleton when she grows up with two different shoes on. The Miss Ryans said Bríd should go on a pilgrimage to Lourdes or Fatima but you have to be in a wheelchair for that. A German woman, who was not allowed to come to our house because she was divorced, gave my mother eucalyptus oil. And Mr Furlong told my mother it was good to have asthma, because then you would never get malaria. But Bríd is still sick all the time and getting thin because she doesn’t want to eat anything any more, not even glucose sticks or cakes that my mother makes.

In the middle of the night the doctor had to come back again because she was trying to open the window and get air from outside. I woke up and heard her crying, begging my father for air, and my mother still saying ‘it’s all right,
mein Schatzchen
, it’s all right. Come back to bed now.’ Everybody was afraid because nobody in our house ever cried that much before. I got up and saw Bríd reaching forward with her mouth open. My mother and father were holding her arms on each side. I asked if I could help but my father told me to get back to bed. Franz and Maria were standing on the landing as well, and they ran back into bed as soon as they heard his voice. My mother came and told us to pray hard, so I listened to Bríd in the dark and prayed that the bad chest would come back to me instead. Then I heard Dr Sheehan’s voice downstairs in the hall. He said Bríd was an angel and a saint and he gave her an injection to make her go to sleep. The next morning she was still going up
and down all the time, but she was smiling again and my mother got her to eat some toast with jam.

Gearóid came again the next Saturday with the new
Aiséirí
. He’s always dressed in a brown tweed suit. His knees are bent even when he’s standing up, and, one time, me and Franz laughed because his trousers looked like they wanted to stay sitting down. He has bits of hair growing on his cheeks, too, where he stopped shaving, and a big smile when we answer him in Irish. He says Bríd is a
páistín fionn
, a blonde child, and really Irish underneath. She’s a fighter, he says. Then they go into the front room to talk for a long time about all the things that are not finished yet in Ireland, like still only one pop song in Irish about a goat that went mad and had to be stopped by the priest, and lots of other things like street names still in English and no parking fines in Irish. What if somebody wanted to break the law in Irish? Gearóid said they were going to put him in jail for not paying motor tax on the Volkswagen in English. They were going to put my father in jail, too, because he was waiting to pay a fine in Irish. My mother brings in the tea and we can hear Gearóid’s voice coming out under the door. He says he can’t keep writing all the articles in
Aiséirí
on his own, and he wants my father to write something big instead of just writing letters to the papers.

One day my father wrote a strong letter to the papers to prove that what they were saying about Cardinal Stepinac was wrong, that he wasn’t a Nazi at all and that he didn’t even hate any Jewish people, even though he was a Catholic. It was a big mistake to believe Radio Éireann, he wrote, because they only repeated the rubbish that the Communists in Yugoslavia were saying. They locked Cardinal Stepinac up in his house and put him on trial
because they felt guilty themselves. People who feel guilty point the finger, my father says, and they’re just putting the blame on Cardinal Stepinac for everything that happened in the concentration camps. There were lots more letters in the paper after that and a Protestant man named Hubert Butler from Kilkenny once insulted the Papal Nuncio, saying that Cardinal Stepinac was guilty because the Catholic priests in Yugoslavia baptised children before they were killed in concentration camps. Nobody in Ireland could ever believe that priests helped the Nazis to kill children and save their souls. Nobody could ever believe Catholic priests helped a big SS man named Artukovic to escape to Ireland after the war and live in Dublin for two years before he emigrated to Paraguay. My father says Cardinal Stepinac should be made into a saint, and Gearóid said it was a pity my father didn’t take up writing again because he was so good at making speeches and lighting matches and going around the country on his motorbike.

‘His speeches had passion,’ Gearóid said to my mother. ‘He had them throwing their hats up.’

It’s good to hear people saying that. It’s good to think about my father standing up on a platform with crowds of people around him in the street throwing their hats up and not caring if they ever came back down again. It’s good to like your own father otherwise you won’t like yourself very much either. You want to believe that everything your own father says is always right.

‘
Aiséirí
,’ Gearóid said. ‘Resurrection. What about the daily uprising?’

My father smiled and said he was still waking up for Ireland every morning, but he was very busy with other things, too, at the moment, like beekeeping and making German oak furniture and reading about how to cure
asthma without listening to doctors. He was starting to translate a German book as well that Onkel Ted gave my mother about training children without sticks. He was also trying to write more letters about Cardinal Stepinac not helping the Nazis to kill children, as well as trying to write an article about Guernica to say that the painting of screaming cows and legs in the air by Picasso might be a masterpiece, but maybe it wasn’t the Germans who did it. Gearóid says the Irish spent a long time building stone walls and saying the opposite and pretending the British were not there, and my father is a real Irishman with a gift for being against. He holds his fist up in the air and says my father could make anyone believe that day is night. He turns to my mother and winks at her because she is the audience and she says it’s good that people in Ireland can’t be kept quiet.

‘Remember the article they tried to ban,’ Gearóid said.

‘What article?’ my mother asked.

Gearóid punched his fist down on the side of the armchair and told her that my father once wrote a great article about the Jewish people in Ireland. He said they tried to stop them from printing it. They threatened to close down the office in Harcourt Street. The police came and took away lots of documents, but they were not afraid of going to prison and they went to confession and printed the article on the front page, because
Aiséirí
is the Irish for not sitting down.

‘Did you never read it?’ he said. ‘It was very well written. Very balanced and fair-minded. Maybe it didn’t even go far enough.’

After that my mother was very upset and she didn’t even do the washing-up. She was using the silent negative all the time. She told Bríd she was going back to Germany. She
said she was going to pack her bags and take Bríd with her to a place where she would be able to breathe.

There were lots of doors slamming in our house after that. Bríd jumps in bed when the door of the front room bangs shut. Sometimes we get a fright as well when there’s a draught and the back door bangs shut in anger of its own accord. I know where my father is by the sound of the last door banging. One day I started slamming doors as well, but he said that wasn’t allowed and it’s not too late for him to get the stick and take me upstairs and close all the doors so that nobody will hear. My mother reminds him that he’s translating a book about punishing children without sticks, so then he puts on his coat and slams the front door, and everybody thinks he’s gone away and never coming back. Everything in the house rattles and then stays quiet for a long time. Then one day I told everybody I was leaving and slammed the front door from inside. It was a joke just to annoy them. I hid behind the oak trunk in the hall so that everybody thought I was gone for ever, but then Bríd started crying and my mother said she would start banging the doors, too, one day, then we would see how funny it was. And one night she did it. It was very late but she did it really and truly. My father came back and slammed the door of the front room without eating his dinner. He sat there staring at all the patterns in the carpet. My mother didn’t want him to feel sorry for himself, so she went in to sit beside him and put her arm around him like a friend for life. She wanted him to say that he made a mistake, but he just pushed her away. Then she stood in the hall and put her coat on slowly. She went out and closed the front door very, very quietly, as if she was leaving us and going back to Germany for ever.

‘Jaysus, what the Jaysus,’ I said. Nobody ever heard a
door closing so much before in their whole lives. It was so quiet that you could hardly even hear the click of the lock, and this time we were really afraid that she would never come back. This time the silence was bigger than after the loudest bang. I ran to the window upstairs and looked out, but she had already gone around the corner out of sight. I thought I should run after her. But then I waited. The whole house waited for her to come back. And when she came at last, everybody was happy, even my father. He said he would never slam doors again as long as he lived.