Two Kinds of Blood

by Jane Ryan

  He was a narrowminded buffoon.

  ‘Wha’ are you looking at? Yellow streak of piss!’ said Amina.

  For a small woman she had a commanding voice.

  Tom Ryan’s hyphen brow rose. ‘Potty-mouth,’ he said.

  Laughter burst out of me and Amina’s shoulders shook.

  ‘Big girl’s blouse!’ she said.

  ‘They don’t get out much,’ I said.

  It was a good opening and I had to start somewhere. My store of knowledge was about to be increased after a quick dive off the deep end.

  ‘I don’t know much about burqas so I’m going to ask questions? That OK?’

  I was hunching in on myself, trying to make my six foot smaller and racking my brain for a frame of reference. I’d known some Muslim students in Trinity, but no one had worn a hijab never mind a burqa. We’d all been so self-consciously indolent, leaning against the handrail outside the Lecky drinking Diet Coke and smoking, talking with the swagger of the young about feminism and communism, while living off the allowances our parents gave us and allowing the boys to rate the girls. How would Facebook have sprung to life if we hadn’t?

  Amina was silent and I was damned if I was going to start a conversation with ‘some of my best friends are Muslim’. I hoped there was more to me.

  ‘You’re direct for an Irish person. This is a niqab not a burqa. I wear it Gulf-style. The top is designed to fall right down to my eyelids and I wear an eye mesh too, common in Saudi Arabia but not many other places. A burqa is different – it covers everything in a single garment, including your eyes. So it can’t be taken off in public. My dress is different – you can see my eyes when I lift this gauze. In fairness, most niqabs don’t have eye-veils or gauzes.’

  ‘So yours is a more extreme version?’ It was a bad choice of words and I nearly gave myself whiplash backpedalling. ‘Sorry, I meant a more traditional or –’

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Amina. ‘I do wear a more fundamental dress. Most Irish Muslims don’t wear anything like this.’

  After a moment or two she took off her badge and handed it to me.

  ‘Thank you.’ I peered through the plastic. The photographer’s workmanship was poor, leaving Amina’s features indistinct. ‘Were you born in Ireland? You sound Irish.’

  ‘No, I came in 1999 from Bosnia. I was five. My homeplace was Bjeljina.’

  ‘Veg-ul-gina?’

  She gave a gentle shake I took for laughter. ‘Close enough.’

  ‘Can’t have been easy.’

  ‘It wasn’t a party. Your liberal press said children lined the route to our direct provision centre waving flags of welcome.’

  ‘Did they?’

  ‘Oh yes, but then they closed their doors when the television cameras went away and complained to their local county councillors about dirty refugees being dumped on them like landfill.’ She looked at me, forcing her face up to an unnatural angle. ‘Do you remember it?’

  I was only fifteen at the time. ‘A little. I remember politicians and the media being happy Ireland was taking refugees.’

  Amina snorted. ‘Congratulating yourselves! I was in direct provision for three years and our family was lucky.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m not going to go on about it, but Irish people believe they have a talent for welcome. Your national narrative is built on it, but underneath the plastic-paddy smiles you are slippery as salesmen and calculating as an ASBO teenager who wants to get out on a Friday night.’

  I’d hate to see fury if this was Amina’s attempt at light banter.

  ‘Steady on! That’s some amount of people to insult in one go. Give yourself a chance. You’ll get around to everyone at some point.’

  She gave a loud, barking laugh. A strange sound from someone so petite.

  ‘Is a niqab comfortable?’

  ‘Allah tells the children of Adam that he has bestowed upon us a garment to cover our shame.’

  It was said with good humour, so I chanced a reply in the same tone. ‘You don’t strike me as someone who needs advice on what to wear. Your dress is as much a form of protest as modesty.’

  ‘You think?’ said Amina.

  She sounded surprised.

  ‘I’m the only member of my family who wears niqab. My sister doesn’t wear anything, and my mother wears a hijab, a headscarf.’

  She pulled me towards the ladies’ toilet. Once inside she checked the blue wooden cubicles, banging each door right into its adjoining wall. When she had established all were empty, she unclipped the veil of her niqab. She had swirling depths to her eyes out of the shadow of her veil, porcelain skin and her nose was raised at the tip, as though it had caught on something in her mother’s birth canal. She offered me her hand again.

  ‘Amina Basara, Bosniak.’

  ‘Bridget Harney, ex-barrister at law and all-round South Dublin girl.’

  ‘Posh and privileged? With private-school education?’ said Amina. A hit of twinkle to ease the stark facts as she dropped my hand.

  ‘Guilty as ‘chorged’.’ I gave her my best South Dublin vowel-switching, nasally accent.

  ‘You’re hurting my ears. When I first arrived, I was baffled by all these distinctions. Even now, having been in this country nearly two decades, I’ll never understand why Dubliners believe the world revolves around them – and their viewpoint that people from Cork feel entitled, that Galwegians think they’re spiritual and bohemian, while everyone else is a culchie.’

  ‘You’re not a culchie, you’re from Clondalkin – that’s a category all on its own.’

  She clapped her hands and snorted out a laugh, a steam-train puff in the cold air.

  ‘Here’s to protests in our own time.’ She paused. ‘I should tell you I asked to be stationed with you.’

  My eyes widened.

  ‘Human Resources in Revenue are so politically correct now they spend most of their time rewording their own newsletters. I could have asked for a detail on the Detective Chief Superintendent’s staff and I’d have got it, but I sent you information and it was acted on. We got somewhere, no?’

  There was a timidity about the way she phrased her question, at odds with the cloaked provocation of her dress.

  ‘That was you? I thought it was someone called Amy.’

  ‘A–M–I – you can only put three digits in for your name on that system. But you liked my work?’

  ‘Yes, I did. Thank you.’

  I set my stall out. ‘I’m not going to pretend I understand your choice to wear the niqab, don’t understand some of my own choices, but it’s your decision. And that decision shouldn’t preclude you from working with dignity in a tolerant environment. Everyone’s entitled to that.’

  ‘I agree.’ She gave a playful smile, then became serious. ‘You asked about my niqab . . . can I ask you about your dead partner? What was she like?’

  I didn’t mind the question but couldn’t put Kay into a few short sentences, so settled for details.

  ‘We were friends from the first day of basic training in Templemore. She softened something in me and I hardened something in her.’

  Amina saw through my words. ‘She was a big part of your life.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did you become a garda? I’m not saying you aren’t a natural fit in here, but they,’ she indicated to the squad rooms outside, ‘talk about you. The barrister who plays at being detective.’

  I sucked on her words for a good ten seconds. Silence didn’t flap Amina.

  ‘Have you ever been in the Criminal Courts of Justice?’ I said then. ‘Watch them swooping out of the bar council before court begins its afternoon session, a clique of crows coming from a single doorway on the fifth floor. Circling down on some of the most poor, deprived, and sometimes depraved members of society.’ I made a clicking noise with my tongue. ‘It was too removed from any kind of truth and I wanted something else – possibly as badly – the freedom to choose, not to follow my father into the bar, but to be a garda. To make my own decisions
no matter who I offended. I struggle with the “you can be as different as you want, as long as it’s our kind of different” thinking that prevails. It’s just another form of control.’

  Amina nodded. ‘Me too, hence my elaborate niqab.’

  ‘Bet that’s fun to put on in the morning.’

  Amina threw her head back and laughed.

  Chapter 14

  The coastal Dublin Area Rapid Transit to Booterstown was laden with tired bodies, rank breath from hungry stomachs and peppered with alcoholic exhalations from lunchtime drinkers. I made my way through the sticky mass and out of the station. The marsh was full, a rare sight, and its briny tang mixed with the soft rain falling. I didn’t have a coat so broke into a trot up Booterstown Avenue, making a left at the top onto my road. My flat-soled shoes slapped off the shiny pavement in a tap-dance rhythm. I reached our house and keyed in the gate code, walking into the grounds of my family home. So much room for two people.

  Nata was at the door in a fur coat and a full face of make-up.

  ‘Mr Justice Harney, he eaten,’ she said.

  Nata gave my father his full title, as though she were senior counsel making a motion.

  ‘Off on a date?’ I said. ‘You’re all glammed up.’

  ‘Agh, coat is fake, hope date not,’ she said. ‘You should try a new man? Be good for you. You spend too much time at job, no enough meeting men.’

  Nata gave me a wink and squeezed my arm, a banded platinum ring on her middle finger. I hoped it was from her new boyfriend. She saw me looking and threw her eyes skyward.

  ‘Is fake too, TK Maxx. Maybe one day real thing. Left nice stew for you.’

  ‘Thanks, Nata.’

  Her presence warmed our house and I was so grateful for her scraps of mothering. I thanked the economic crisis in Moldova that had sent Nata to Ireland. Then felt guilty for such selfishness as she bustled off.

  My father was in the kitchen. His routine hadn’t changed much with the event of my mother being taken into residential care. He visited her every day in the nursing home and was home for his walk in the nearby park with Ted, my retired assistance dog, too soft for the K9 unit. Dinner was at 5pm – any later and my father believed his digestive system would be under pressure.

  ‘Judge,’ I greeted my father but stayed standing warming my backside against the Aga eating a hot bowl of paprika stew laden with chunks of chorizo, white beans and black pudding, Nata’s cassoulet.

  ‘Sit down, Bridget. You’ll get stomach-ache eating standing up. And you’re wolfing your food.’

  Ours was a complex relationship.

  My father gestured to the eating area in our kitchen, an alcove with ample room for a holiday of caravans. Cosy it was not. I walked over with a slouch, the moody teenager my father’s voice had reduced me to, and he followed me in.

  ‘How was Mum today?’

  ‘Good.’ He gave a precise nod. His economy of movements always fascinated me. ‘I believe she’s settling in. Elizabeth has a current penchant for jigsaws which is good according to the nursing staff. Help her keep whatever mental functions she has and perhaps slow down the degenerative nature of the disease. I bought some on my walk this morning, from the craft shop in the shopping centre.’ He looked at a stack of boxes. ‘We might start off with the easier ones and progress.’

  ‘Good idea, Judge. I’ll go down tomorrow.’

  ‘You can’t go down on a daily basis, Bridget. The weekend is fine. You’re a good daughter, your mother knows that.’

  But she didn’t. Most of what she knew was lost in the toxic matter clogging the branches of her brain, green worms at the centre of the tree. She had described her head as gunk-filled years ago, when we could laugh together, when we had no dread of dementia and the pain it would leave at our door.

  Ted snuffled in and licked my shoe, then my hand as I popped a sweet silver of pork-skin into his mouth.

  ‘Dog has the run of the place,’ said my father. ‘To your basket, sir!’

  Ted slunk away, injured but reeking of adoration, and sat in one of the many baskets my father had dotted around the house, to facilitate them being in the same room at all times.

  Dad’s ears were becoming fleshier over time, peach begonias stuck either side of his head, but his face was still as large as ever, no harrowing with age for him. He was still a tall man but had a stiffness of gait suggesting a problematic hip. Not bad for someone who was seventy-five. There were times when he was more vigorous than me.

  He cleared his throat as though something unpleasant had lodged there. ‘Richie Corrigan wants to visit your mother. In the nursing home.’

  I stopped mid-bite, the food tasting of ash.

  Richie Corrigan. Family friend. My mother’s lover. Seán Flannery’s solicitor.

  ‘Does he?’ Anger roiled around my insides.

  ‘We have to consider what your mother might want.’

  My anger popped, deflated by the pinprick of her years-long affair with Richie Corrigan.

  ‘As you wish, Judge.’

  He scraped a dry hand over his face and up into his hair. ‘It’s not what I wish at all, Bridget, but we can’t be . . .’ he struggled for a word to normalise the situation, ‘unkind.’

  ‘No more than four times a year and one of us has to be present.’ I was scrabbling for control – if I could size and shape something, I could deal with it. However, my usual classification methods weren’t protecting me from the pain on my father’s face.

  ‘Agreed, I’ll inform the nursing home,’ he said.

  It was wrong, Richie Corrigan exploiting my father’s sense of fair play.

  ‘Do you want to go to France to see Beatrice Corrigan?’ I kept my tone quiet and devoid of emotion.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I thought, maybe . . .’

  ‘Tit for tat?’ said my father. ‘No, there was never anything there. On my side.’

  He shook his head and changed the subject.

  ‘How was work?’ he said.

  This was safe ground for us, but thoughts of my new position drained me further.

  ‘Oh God, I forgot to tell you! I’m now an advisor to the Supers on the Policing Authority. DCS Muldoon asked me.’

  The Judge snorted and I cracked a smile.

  ‘The price of getting back to detective?’

  My father was not one for sugar-coating.

  ‘Yes, Judge.’

  ‘Graham Muldoon is a canny man – he knows I can help if you get stuck.’

  I raised an eyebrow, not at the veracity of his statement, but at his total lack of humility.

  ‘What? What have I said now? It’s of use to have a retired President of the High Court at your disposal.’

  ‘True, Judge.’

  ‘Tell me who’s on the board?’

  His eyes were bright, brimming with affection, but his love was an ambigram revealing itself only in reflection. So it was that my father and I could only connect during the impersonal, the personal too encoded without the mirror of my mother.

  ‘The Honourable Mr Justice Michael Denby,’ I said. My father liked judges, sitting or retired, to be given their due. ‘Emeritus Professor Sheila Ramsey, Dr Neil Moriarty.’

  ‘Denby’s a good man, got a solid head on him. Commercial. Don’t know Ramsey, I’ll put a few feelers out. Watch Moriarty. He’s a career civil servant and as slippery as they come, worked in law reform for twenty years and changed nothing. Not as easy as it sounds. He’ll say nothing at the meetings, wait for the minutes to come out, then back he comes when he’s nit-picked every document. Any senators?’

  I told him of a smug retailer appointed to the authority.

  My father chuckled. ‘The fellah in favour of upward-only rental contracts? People mightn’t find him so charming if they knew how many rental properties in our large cities his holding company owns. He’ll be fun.’ My father scrunched up his face. ‘What was his slogan? Your mother always said he had the best corned beef.’

 
He was relaxed and it gave me a lift.

  ‘You might go through your mother’s reading room, take her some books? She can’t concentrate long enough to read, but you’ve a beautiful speaking voice and she’d enjoy listening to you.’

  In times gone by I’d have taken umbrage, understanding the comment to mean I was wasted if not using my voice debating as a barrister in court.

  ‘My intonation’s all wrong from years on the bench,’ he said. ‘Too dramatic.’ He sighed, looking old, his store of lustre diminishing.

  ‘Sonorous, Dad. And Mum loved listening to your cases – she would go to your summations, particularly when you were prosecuting. Of course I’ll read to her. Should have thought of it before.’ A door opened in my tired mind, my unseen mother turning the handle. ‘I might read some of her correspondence, the letters from her cousin in Canada, the woman in the convent?’

  ‘Oh yes, Sister Finbarr. Good idea. I’d say the older letters. The nurse says the present isn’t as familiar to her but she remembers many things about her girlhood.’

  ‘I’ll have a dig around in her bureau. Unless you’d prefer to, Judge?’

  ‘No, no!’ He looked scandalised. ‘I never went into your mother’s reading room. It was private. Even though she’s not here anymore I feel it incumbent upon me to respect her privacy.’

  He’d become pompous again, as though my mother’s reading room was full of sanitary towels and other ‘woman’s things’ as he’d once called my tampons when he’d happened upon a packet in the downstairs toilet.

  The door to my mother’s reading room was locked and I put my hand up to the top of the door ledge and scrabbled for the key. It swung open and I stepped into the room. It was the essence of my mother, her amber smell mixed with Amalfi lemon. I stood for a moment and breathed her in.

  My mother had documents stuffed everywhere. In a huge rolltop desk were household bills, manuals, Revenue returns and any amount of bank statements. Some I recognised – the old ICS building society – others such as Nasda Holdings meant nothing to me. This was my mother’s work correspondence.

  In an antique writing bureau with delicate rosewood legs I found bundles of letters tied with ribbon, my own from boarding school tied in pink, my father’s fastened in red and packets of other letters tied in forget-me-knot blue. The irony wasn’t lost on me. I hoped Mum would remember some of these letters.