No Country for Young Men

by Julia O'Faolain

  ‘I can understand them going back,’ she told Grainne ‘because they’ve nowhere to go. This isn’t a permanent home for them. How could it be? But they could get jobs. Not good jobs but jobs. Something to tide them over. They don’t go back from need. They go back because they’re addicted.’

  Grainne began to laugh. ‘Addicted to men?’

  ‘To violence. It’s addictive. I’ve learned that There’s an excitement …’ Jane looked knowing and Grainne had an insight into the women’s dislike of her. Her experience was unearned and her advice clinical. Yet she was no doctor – just a woman like themselves. She never laughed, probably from respect for the unhappiness all around her. The battered women, though, laughed at the drop of a hat.

  ‘Ah well, strife’s better than a lonely bed,’ said one of them when she heard that Grainne was going back to her husband.

  ‘Cormac will be pleased anyway,’ Jane conceded. ‘This trip hasn’t worked out for him. Will you be sending him back to his Irish school?’

  ‘Oh, I think so. He hates the English one.’

  ‘You’re not afraid that he may fall under bad influences again? His great-uncle’s?’

  One reason for taking Cormac to England had been Grainne’s anxiety when, some weeks before leaving Dublin she found a stack of IRA papers under his bed and subse quently discovered that he had been attending meetings of a junior club affiliated with Sinn Féin. Michael’s uncle was to blame.

  Where was Cormac now anyway?

  She stood up, leaving her beauty-case to hold her seat, and walked around the deck, then down a gangway into a room full of juke-boxes and slot machines. No sign of Cormac. She tried a cafeteria and TV room where a few teenagers lounged. Further on, people were queueing to buy duty-free cigarettes and beyond them was the bar. Cormac could hardly be there, could he? He was under age. She walked in anyway, deciding to have a tonic water to help swallow some aspirins. Ten-thirty a.m. The boat had been at sea no more than an hour and a half but the place was already awash with beer, the counter sticky with it and half-drunk glasses on every table. She took her tonic to an empty one, counting four men asleep before their tankards as she passed. Probably they had been up all night, travelling from London, Manchester, or Birmingham to meet this early boat. They were recognizably Irish navvies. She had seen their like doing roadwork all over London. Blowzy, chubby, and the worse for wear, like angels fallen from some baroque ceiling, stripped to the waist in warm weather and stunned by the vibrations of their pneumatic drills, theirs was the fate with which recalcitrant Irish students had been threatened from time out of mind. ‘Work,’ she remembered teachers warning young boys, ‘eat your books, pass your exams or you’ll end up digging the streets of London.’ Girls might be expected to end up on the streets but the less delicate threat was rarely voiced. Rocked by the boat’s movement, one of the sleepers’ heads twitched across the table until his hair was soaking, like sedge, in a ring of beer.

  On her other side, four young labourers were telling jokes. They leaned pink heads together to whisper, then, in unison, like the opening petals of a flower, leaned outwards to guffaw.

  ‘A queer wan, wha?’

  ‘Fuckin,’ fuckin’, fuckin’, fuckin’ …’

  ‘Dja get it, though? Didja?’

  Three were on Guinness. The fourth wore a pioneer pin – badge of total abstinence. Extremes, thought Grainne, we go to extremes. Were these the sort whose wives ended up in Halfway Houses?

  ‘Caught you!’ Hands over her eyes.

  ‘Cormac! Where have you been?’

  ‘Looking for you. All over. I came here last because I didn’t think you’d taken to the bottle.’ He grinned. ‘What’s in that? Gin?’ He tasted it. ‘Tonic’ How boring Buy me a coke?’

  *

  Air which could have been coming from a deep-freeze chopped at James’s ankles and a blink of sudden sleep made him dream he was walking through a supermarket with Therese past the frozen pies and dinners. He was jet-lagged, hungry, and in doubt as to where he was. A nose blew in the darkness and he remembered O’Malley. O’Malley had been offering to sell James his grandaunt.

  ‘To a Hollywood tycoon like yourself,’ O’Malley had kept urging, ‘it’s small change. She’s priceless. One of a kind.’ The aunt, he assured, was a live source for which any historian should be ready to give his eye teeth.

  ‘Shit!’ James’s feet slid on something slippy. ‘I need a taxi.’

  ‘You won’t get one round here. Come home with me and you can phone for one. I’d give you a lift,’ said O’Malley, ‘but I’m grounded.’

  Larry had warned James about falling foul of the locals. Clearly he practised what he preached. Everyone James had met this evening seemed to be a friend of his. They were hearty fellows with faces out of cartoons by Grosz or Gillray who kept promising to take him to the best, oldest, or most typical Dublin restaurant as soon as they’d tanked up with enough drink to prepare them for the road. At various points James had piled into cars with them in pursuit of this quest only to disembark at the door of yet another pub. Hunger and jet-lag kept gaining on him until he felt ready to faint.

  ‘I need food,’ he said finally. ‘Now.’

  ‘We’ll fix that.’ O’Malley, into whose keeping he had fallen by then, coaxed a saucer of olives from the barman. ‘Eat up those,’ he told James. ‘They’re full of nourishment. Then we’ll go back to my place for a snack. I’ll just have another quick one. A bird never flew on wan wing. Am I right?’ he asked the barman.

  But the man’s good fellowship had run out.

  ‘He never flew on twenty neither,’ he told O’Malley. ‘It’s closing time and some of us have homes to go to.’

  The next James knew they were in the street, while the pub door closed them off from all amenities.

  ‘Here we go then!’ O’Malley, as though put in gear, collided with a lamp-post and, rubbing his jaw, set off in the opposite direction. ‘A hard man,’ he said, ‘a hard man!’

  ‘Are you sure you know your way?’

  ‘Ridiculoush!’ was the haughty reply. ‘Know thish shitty like the back of my …’

  ‘OK, take it easy.’

  ‘Short cut!’ O’Malley darted into traffic.

  James caught his elbow and together they negotiated a rainslick road. O’Malley, a time-waster he might have shunned elsewhere, had recommended himself in the first place as an exhibit. Later, he had taken charge. Now he was losing authority. But James held to his elbow. At worst, the man was a native guide to his own moist, subdued and saddish city.

  Images of this, or rather of its pubs, in which James had put in the equivalent of a short working day, washed through his mind like clothes through a washer. Plush, mottled like marked-down meat, rotated with stretches of linoleum, brass and a light bulb stuck behind a bottle of Crème de Menthe. A greyhound-racing calendar whirled slim dogs nose-to-tail in a pulsing circle.

  ‘When I got him,’ a voice connected with this, ‘he was no bigger than a snipe and I raised him on babyfood. But the bugger hadn’t the urge to win.’

  ‘They’re too intelligent,’ said another. ‘Sure a dog could nearly ride a horse for you. Would you knock yourself out chasing a mechanical hare?’

  ‘Jesus, I might, but.’

  ‘This place has great character,’ glossed a voice which James, in memory, assigned to Corny Kinlen, the man responsible for his present plight. Kinlen, a director of Radio Telefís Éireann, RTE, was to give advice on Larry’s film. RTE, Kinlen told James, hoped to serialize it if it wasn’t too blatantly Republican.

  ‘Tricky ground,’ Kinlen expounded. ‘We’re all Republicans, but it would take a fine instrument to assess the degrees of commitment. I’m delighted to see you. How’s Larry?’

  There had been a note at James’s hotel when he checked in, asking him to ring RTE and an hour later Kinlen was drinking with him in the hotel bar. He quickly put forth the notion that a foray into the city was the thing needed to get James into con
dition to work.

  ‘We’ll have a few jars,’ said Kinlen, ‘a dekko at the citizenry, take the local pulse.’ As Kinlen leaned against the counter, the flap of his jacket was nudged up, neat as piecrust, by the thrust of his ass. Clothes and body fell into place with the ease of habit. Barmen knew who he was.

  ‘I’m interested in your project,’ he told James. ‘Recording oral history before the old men die off. Why not? Well, there are reasons why not. Here. Now. In the minds of some.’ His eyes moved restlessly. ‘That’s why outsiders can do it and we can’t. I speak,’ said he, ‘as one stuck with imposing self-censorship if I am not to draw the governmental sword of Emergency Powers down on all our heads.’ Kinlen’s head had a semi-deflated look, as though it had set out to be eighteenth-century, rubicund and spherical, then shrunk. He had sandy hair, pale eyes, a small moustache.

  ‘The terrorists,’ he told James, ‘have appropriated the past.’

  ‘I’m just doing these interviews …’

  ‘Memory can be subversive.’

  ‘Well, if you’re opposed to the project …’

  ‘Me? I oppose nothing. God help me, I don’t know what I oppose. Self-censorship,’ said Kinlen, ‘means you let the Inquisition inside your head and it paralyses you. You’re damned if you publish and damned if you don’t. Memory,’ he nailed James with his eye, ‘is the opposite of thought. What the hell, maybe that’s no harm? What I do know is that the thinking man keeps his mind open while the remembering fellow narrows and simplifies until the memory becomes as crude and bald as a Hallowe’en lantern. You’ll come up against this when you start interviewing your old-timers.’

  ‘Well, if memory is as you describe it,’ said James, ‘it can’t be very subversive.’

  ‘Wrong!’ groaned Kinlen. ‘You’re forgetting that other citizen of our land, the activist revolutionary You’ve had these chappies in your own state, so you’ll know that to them myths are ammunition and the past is the future. Myths are motor power. The turnip-lantern blows up like a bomb. Padraig Pearse was a prime example for he died hamming to his script which then became unassailable. De mortuis nil nisi bonum. He was inspired by the mass, a daily sacrifice, as every Irishman knows. A corrosive example. Cyclic. “One man can free a people,” wrote P.P., “as one Man redeemed the world … I will go into battle with bare hands. I will stand before the Gall as Christ hung before men on the tree.” Hubristic? Mad? But his death in 1916 did rouse an apathetic country. “Gall” means “foreigner”, by the way, and Pearse’s father was a foreigner and a maker of funerary monuments. The son made his best speeches by the sides of graves: speeches, I may say, unsafe to put out today on our national wavelengths. Have another?’

  James said he thought it was time to eat.

  ‘Coupla chaps you should meet,’ said Kinlen. ‘Haven’t shown yet. Give them another few minutes.’ Waiting for refills, he flashed cheery false teeth around the room. Tooth-work, James noted, was primitive in this pub. All around him were Draculas, Bugs Bunnies and hay-rake grins. A surprising number of drinkers seemed to talk fast and sotto voce out of the corners of their mouths. As intrigued by secrets as the next man, he tried listening but all he managed to make out could have been safely roared by microphone. Maybe self-censorship was a local game?

  ‘I’m talking,’ he heard a voice whisper, ‘of the man in the street.’

  ‘Which man,’ came the conspiratorial rebuttal, ‘in which street?’

  James wondered whether this might be a Republican pub. Maybe Kinlen had his eye out for veterans for him to interview. Larry had specified that these were to come from the ranks of the obscure and anonymous.

  ‘There’s no such thing,’ was Kinlen’s response to that. ‘In his own village no man is obscure, and, in the city, one half of the population poses for the other. This is the green-room of Europe,’ he instructed James. ‘Why? Because we lack the social indicators with which Englishmen are kitted out at birth. We lack them and we want them, as we want everything the old enemy ever had, good or bad, including social identity. Here, however, the criteria are easily rigged.’

  James guessed that the guy got verbal diarrhoea in pubs to make up for all that self-censorship from which he suffered on the job. He was coming back from the counter now with fresh drinks.

  Corny greeted a man some tables away who wore a pinstripe suit of Chaplinesque slovenliness and had a pale, sad, handsome face topped by a bristle of angry-looking hair. ‘That’s Michael O’Malley,’ he told James. ‘You’ll have heard of his grandfather, Owen? Michael’s a lush but great value when he’s not footless, which means he’s usually OK until about 7 p.m.’

  ‘Well, I’d be interested to meet him.’

  ‘Drink up and we’ll go over,’ said Kinlen. ‘To get back to the problem about getting the old hams to forget their learned lines, think,’ he invited, ‘how you’d sound yourself if someone from the media asked you to give your opinion on some current issue for “News At Ten”. You’d mumble, you’d be unsure. Most people are unsure. Revolutionaries aren’t. But these old buggers you’ll be talking to haven’t been revolutionaries for fifty years. If you get them sounding doubtful, you’ve got past the piety. I drink to doubt,’ said Corny, ‘and stutters and ums and ahs. Beware of the smooth-speaker and the loyal man. Loyalty,’ he dipped his lip in the well of his glass, ‘is one reason for the popularity here of the pun. The pun’s a verbal equivalent of the gun: a device unamenable to argument. De Valera’s opponents called his term in office “the devil era”. They called his party, Fianna Fail, “the Fianna failures” which, since fáil is the Gaelic for “destiny” – it rhymes with boil – is a bitter joke. Have you finished? Come and meet Michael O’Malley then.’ Kinlen stood up but was waylaid.

  ‘Howaya, Corny, me aul codger, whose ear do I catch ya bending?’

  A cut-watermelon face danced close and the shout decreased in volume. ‘Do you know Enda McHugh?’ Cut Watermelon nodded at a second, fattish face, pallid and simmering like a milk pudding over a slow flame. The second man seemed in the grip of uncontainable rage. A tic leaped in his cheek. His mouth retracted. It was the first time James had seen someone do the opposite of smile.

  ‘He knows you,’ said Cut Watermelon.

  ‘The whitener of the government sepulchre,’ raged Milk Pudding. ‘Who doesn’t?’

  James, embarrassed, stared beyond the pair to where O’Malley was intoning something about classical Greece.

  ‘Talking about puns he was,’ commented Cut Watermelon. ‘I heard! Puns and guns! Nearly got one off himself. Fella’s getting creative!’

  ‘Have to be creative,’ said Milk Pudding, ‘how else could they run the news department they have at RTE?’

  ‘The male next-of-kin,’ O’Malley was saying, ‘was responsible for unmarried females till the day they died.’

  ‘You refused,’ Milk Pudding challenged Kinlen, ‘to let “The Late Late Show” interview Sinn Féin spokesmen!’ Milk Pudding looked on the point of flying apart. Words erupted up his throat in spurts. ‘Free speech,’ he managed, ‘how are ye?’

  ‘Sinn Féin,’ said Kinlen, ‘are a front for the Provos, i.e. for terrorists. We make no apology for refusing to give them publicity.’

  ‘Shit-scared, aren’t you? Of the government? Of Sinn Féin? Of your own shadow? Pissing in your cavalry-twill West-Briton’s pants? Why not admit it, Kinlen? Tell the truth and shame the devil?’

  James wondered whether there would be a fight. He was in better shape than the men baiting Kinlen. On the other hand, might they be armed?

  ‘Christ,’ said O’Malley, ‘has just repudiated his bride in the person of my aged aunt whom I, as next-of-kin, am obliged to take in. This country hasn’t advanced beyond the social welfare system of ancient Greece.’

  ‘What’s that gurrier saying about the country?’

  Milk Pudding turned on his side-kick. ‘Stop distracting me. I want to ask this fellow about the RTE evening news. Did you see it tonight?’ he asked Kin
len, and shook like a vibrator inside the stiff sheath of his suit. ‘Did you?’

  ‘The Church, which used to run the loony bins, is lying down on the job.’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ said James. ‘I think I should go and eat.’

  ‘No Northern news,’ said Milk Pudding. ‘People can die up there …’

  ‘… between two stools,’ declaimed O’Malley, ‘with a cold wind blowing up our collective arse.’

  ‘Are you listening? They can commit mayhem and murder and all RTE will show is the football scores for Manchester United.’

  ‘I’ve had enough.’ Kinlen beckoned James towards O’Malley’s table. ‘Silence is golden,’ he remarked to Cut Watermelon.

  ‘So is horse manure.’

  ‘Wasting your breath,’ came in a fierce hiss from behind their backs.

  James had to exercise restraint on himself to keep from glancing around.

  Kinlen introduced him to a large, energetic-looking woman who was intent in argument with O’Malley, then to O’Malley himself who had become intent on his drink.

  ‘We’ll go and have a meal in a little while,’ Kinlen promised James, and turned his back on his tormentors who had followed him almost to the table and were now standing some feet away, glowering. ‘We might go to the Yacht Club.’

  ‘Bourgeois crapology,’ shouted Milk Pudding, waving an evening paper about. He held it rolled like a club.

  ‘A working class divided down the middle,’ said the woman, looking up at him suddenly, ‘is not the same as one that isn’t. Will you grant that, Enda?’

  ‘Who divided it?’ Milk Pudding demanded. ‘Who? Who?’ He used words like missiles and his accent, James recognized, having heard the same one on television in America, was from Northern Ireland. His mouth was tensile in the midst of his boiling face. ‘In whose interests is it to pit worker against worker, Catholic against Protestant? The fucking, bootlicking lackeys of capitalism, that’s who. The media. Bastards like Kinlen and other establishment journalists in this place. Ah fuck,’ he said furiously, and putting his newspaper weapon into his pocket, he strode out of the pub.