A Goat's Song

by Dermot Healy

  Catherine arrived that night at ten to the pier on Mullet only to find that the Blue Cormorant was working from further up the coast. Killalla they said. She called at Thady’s and found the house empty and unlocked. When she opened the huge door of her home place the interior was stone-cold and damp even though it was a warm June evening. It felt strange and unlived in. She wandered the rooms trying to find a place from where she could begin tidying. She found old turf in a shed and a bucket half-filled with coal by Maisie the previous autumn. She lit a fire in the upper bedroom and sat with a blanket round her.

  A gale was blowing sand around the peninsula when finally, at three, she climbed beneath sheets and eiderdowns warmed before the low flames. The bed was freezing. At dawn she drove across the isthmus and headed towards Killalla only to find that the Blue Cormorant had not docked there that night. She sat in the Lada outside the Bio-Energy clinic and wondered what to do.

  A fisherman, who was bad on his feet, passed by.

  “When do you think the Blue Cormorant might come in?” she asked.

  “They could be dropping off their catch anywhere,” he said. “There was talk of a great run up toward Sligo. You might try Rosses Point above in the County Sligo,” he said, trying to be helpful.

  She got into her car again, feeling both bemused and appalled by her circumstances, and drove towards Yeats’ county. She arrived at Rosses Point pier at noon. She was told to look out for a boat skippered by George Gillan, but except for a few small rowing boats there were no trawlers. When she asked around she was told that Gillan’s mother lived in the village. She went to Gillan’s shop and bought two bars of Bournville chocolate.

  “George’s been away two days,” Mrs Gillan explained, “but he’ll be in this evening at five.”

  “Was there another boat about?” asked Catherine, “called the Blue Cormorant?”

  The lady couldn’t say.

  She told Catherine to sit there on the chair in the shop till she rang to see could George be contacted at sea. When she came back she had a cup of coffee for Catherine in her hand. “No,” she said, “he knows nothing about the Blue Cormorant. The run, he said, is further North.” The two women drank coffee and ate buns in the little shop. “It’s a terrible life they have,” Mrs Gillan said, “but they know nothing else.”

  Catherine strolled round Elsinore House where the Yeats brothers had been raised. The roof had fallen in and the walls were daubed with names, kisses and obscenities. She walked the first beach, and the second beach, and the third, till across the strand she could see the woods of Lissadell. A red moon rose early in the sky. A stray dog befriended her.

  She stood again on the pier, and found that by now she knew every net and lobster pot. She walked down a newly laid scenic path that gave a view of Coney Island. The dog was with her still. Seagulls were perched on the head of the Iron Man, who looked strangely bisexual above the rising tide. When she came back to the pier she was embarrassed to find that the few men there had begun to recognize her.

  “If the fish are running,” she was told, “you won’t see the trawlers back tonight.”

  She sat in the car and watched the pier. As small boats would arrive she’d get out and watch them tie up, but still there was no sign of the trawlers. She drove to Dead Man’s Point and tried to pick out a boat making its way in from the sea. Returning, she cut the engine because she thought she heard the noise of another engine out at sea, but there was nothing. At eight the bay was dotted with the multicoloured sails of small yachts gliding in a perfect V towards the setting sun. And still the trawlers did not come.

  The stillness, with Ben Bulben in the distance and Knocknaree across the bay, was unnerving. One by one the lights appeared in the houses in the village, then on the prom all the streetlights came on. But still the salmon boats did not appear. She went into a nearby pub and ordered a hot whiskey.

  “It’s beautiful here,” she said to an old blue-eyed man who was stroking a blond labrador.

  “You get used to it,” he said.

  A small while passed.

  “W. B. Yeats lived here,” she said.

  “So did his mother,” replied the old fellow. “God bless us.” He looked her up and down. “And what are you doing here?”

  “I’m trying to find a fisherman,” she replied, “from Mayo.”

  “You’ll have a hard job,” he said, “I’ve never met one myself.” He gave an insane peal of laughter without moving his lips, and wrapped the bar. “Service please,” he yelled.

  “I believe,” said Catherine, “that the Spanish landed up the coast.”

  “We ate them,” he replied. “And now they’re killing all the rabbits. There’s not one rabbit to be had.” They drank. He looked at her for ages. “He’ll not land here,” he eventually said, “whoever told you that was not well.”

  “No?”

  “No,” he said emphatically.

  “It’ll be Killybegs,” said the old fellow with relish, “before you’ll have him in your arms.”

  Jack lay on his bunk, the pad resting on his chest and his eyes closed.

  He had forgotten. Even as he had observed people he was forgetting their very essence. Except perhaps that there was always the possibility that somewhere in the future the naming might begin. But at that moment in time he doubted it. A face returned perhaps, not a face but an expression, not an expression but perhaps a reading of that expression, not what was in the thing observed but in the observer.

  The wrong thing named.

  And suddenly he was swept by a terrible fear of years having gone by which were filled with wrong meanings. He had been wrong from the very beginning. He knew nothing of the world. It had passed him by. It had all happened in another room.

  “Hi,” said De Largey quietly.

  “Yeah,” said Jack.

  “I think we’re coming in.”

  They threw the boxes of salmon onto the pier. Then pushed them on a trolley towards the icehouse. He was surprised to find that the sea had ceased to move beneath him. Thady and Hugh went down to sleep. Himself and De Largey headed towards the nearest pub.

  He tasted the pint of Guinness and held it to his mouth, then he took a long swallow. The minute he drank he thought of Catherine.

  “You’re enjoying that,” said De Largey.

  “I am,” said Jack. The small, quiet euphoria inside him made him bless the nothingness. I have Catherine, he said to himself.

  “What’s it like above now?” asked De Largey.

  “I don’t know,” said Jack, “what it was like before.”

  “It was all right, I suppose.”

  “You’d wonder why the war started if everything was hunky-dory back then.”

  “I didn’t say it was hunky-dory,” Theo corrected him.

  “Ye are all given to reminiscence in Belfast,” said Jack.

  “Would you say so?”

  “Yes, and of the worst kind.”

  “I see. Still and all,” said De Largey, “something bad may happen to you and then you’ll think everything was fine before that.”

  “Do you ever want to go back?”

  He laughed quietly. “No, I don’t want ever to go back,” said De Largey, “even if I had the choice. Although, to tell you the truth, I went back once. I won’t be so stupid the next time.”

  “I felt bad leaving Belfast, but then it was a relief as well.”

  De Largey stood as he often did, with his arms folded, taking the rock of the boat as something natural, something that was always underfoot. Even as he moved from the table to the bar it was the walk of a man used to a confined space that was constantly moving. He came back with the pints and put them down very carefully on the mats. His eyes were unflinching, sometimes looking very closely at the darkened window, sometimes looking very closely into Jack’s eyes.

  “What I reckon happens is a place moulds you,” said De Largey. “You grow up knowing nothing else. And one day you wonder when did it all start.
” They drank. “You’re probably guilt-tripping.”

  “Am I?” said Jack defensively.

  “That’s up to you,” said De Largey. “Do you want to know about guilt-tripping?”

  “Yes,” said Jack. “It’ll make a change from self-pity.”

  “I’ll tell you about guilt-tripping.” De Largey moved the glass in front of him to a new position. “It begins in jail.”

  29

  Guilt-tripping

  “That’s why they have jails. Jail makes all the difference. Prison can break ye, or ye can break out of prison. It depends on your experience of prison and on your experience of family life. I’d a wain but I’d no family life. But when I went inside I started guilt-tripping. From day one I was hung up on my son.

  “That’s what happens.

  “Ye’d expect that I’d be going over what I did to bring me there. It was nothing like that. I’d no guilt over being put away. In fact, I felt safe.”

  “I once asked a man about that,” said Jack.

  “And what did he tell ye?”

  “He told me about propaganda.”

  “Propaganda’s one thing. It fucks ye up. We’ve all had to live with that. No one wants it. But it’s necessary. Propaganda’s one thing. Shootin’ someone is something else. They don’t tell ye that. In a shootin’ there’s the passenger and there’s the motivator. The passenger might do it easy – the actual shootin’. He’s the one who can break in prison. But the motivator is the opposite of that.

  “I suppose, that’s what I was – a motivator.

  “It doesn’t matter who pulls the trigger. The deed starts way back, but the responsibility rests with all of ye. Ye cannot get away from that, but in a way there’s no one person actually can say: ‘I was the man.’ Ye can see the actual event in your mind’s eye, yes. But it’s not the killin’ that upsets ye. It’s where it leaves your family if ye get caught. And ye could be away, say, seven or eight years. And the lack of a father at home starts ye guilt-tripping.

  “When they write about politics they get thon aspect wrong. In the papers they’re always wrong about the domestic life. That’s where it begins, and that’s where it ends. Let no one tell ye different. The personal life. When ye’re inside, your whole personal life assumes enormous proportions. Outside ye were committed. Your personal life didn’t exist.

  “Inside, all that activity has come to an end.

  “So you start guilt-tripping. And the Brits know that. The easier they make it for you, the worse it becomes. You dream of your girlfriend or your woman and children all day long. And you have to offset that. That’s why the military life in some way must continue. That’s one thing. But something more important emerges. The spiritual life. In the blanket protest you had four to five hundred men cocooned in the one place. They had nothing but themselves, so they had to rely on spiritual strength. Out here there are so many distractions. See here, where I’m sitting, I can look out the window. I can go out and be a part of that – of what’s outside. But inside you get to know the value – not of what’s out there – but who’s in there beside you.

  “So demotivation can be compensated for by comradeship. I had trouble with that. I wanted to lie there and guilt-trip. But comradeship increases your beliefs. So the men alongside you become your family. This stops the guilt. And those men represent for you in a spiritual way what ideals you started with. When you started out you knew you might be killed but the date was uncertain. You hoped that your beliefs were in good hands. When you are inside you know – you realize for the first time – what you are fighting for, and you can start to understand in a different way, than before, how you might die.

  “Bobby Sands knew he was going to die. The first day he refused food he was setting the date. He came round to thinking he would be the sacrifice. When it came to the turn of the rest they argued. It should have ended with him. Now they knew it was going to be a protracted process, a protracted struggle. I don’t think any one of them knew they were going to die.

  “And so we began to despair.”

  “Despair of what?”

  “Dying in prison. No one wants to die in prison.”

  “Do you still despair?”

  “I still despair. You begin to think the Brits won’t back off. And the widows are left. You get sick of seeing the wrong people killed. Periodically something will spark off that self-doubt. That’s how it begins. I met people like me when I was active and they were not. And they’d come to me and say: ‘I’m not doing anything now.’ They had to say that, because if they did anything in the past they thought when they looked at me: ‘He’s thinking that I’ve done nothing.’

  “So they had to tell me all they’d done. You see, they were guilt-tripping.

  “But when I jacked it in, I offered no apologies. The illusion is that if you disappear off the scene you will not have the strength to continue with your life. That your life will be wrecked afterwards. But look what happened to the Republicans after the Civil War – genuinely active men were released from the Curragh camp, and they went to the States. But it was not into oblivion. They are responsible for the Irish Revival over there.

  “Soldiers everywhere wake up and find the war is over. They go back to their jobs. They’ve done terrible things, but it’s over.”

  “What terrible things?”

  “You make mistakes and you regret them. Worse still, soldiers carry out the mistakes other people make. And have to live with it. That’s the hard part.”

  “And you?”

  “My war is over. And I stayed on. I answer to no one and yet I keep a foot in with the Provos for some day I might need them. I don’t blame the leadership – I’ve heard enough people doing that. I don’t blame the organization. I’ve given my best. That’s what’s happened. I’ve given my best and I’ve nothing more to give. When you’ve seen active service it’s hard to accommodate other things. That’s why I go out on the boats. That’s why I’m here with you.

  “My struggle now is in 42 Duke Street, Ballina.”

  “My wife always played a more important role than me,” said De Largey. “She had to make many decisions. Same as an RUC-man’s wife. It’s always a problem for them. So I owed it to her one day to check out. I had a decision to make. I could have jumped bail, but I didn’t. I went through the trial. My sacrifice was going to prison. Then one day they left the back door open. I came south to Sligo in an old ice-cream van.

  “I didn’t know where I was. I was afraid to go out. I walked round the town of Sligo for four days then I went back to the room they’d got for me. I took an old armchair and placed it against the wall so that I could get the same angle on the sky that I was used to in prison. These guys would come round and they’d try to get me to go out to discos. I thought they were joking.

  “I just wanted to stay in the room.

  “Then one day I took the Belfast Express from Sligo. I told no one I was leaving, and when I came back no one knew I’d been away. I stepped out into Great Victoria Street from the bus station and for a minute I couldn’t get my bearings. So I went straight to St Peters. I used to be an altar boy there.”

  “Why?”

  “This happens. There’s nothing you can do about it. You know it’s stupid but you do it. It’s a sort of a homesickness. For normality. I went to see my mother who had suffered a stroke. Then finally I saw my wife. I met my son. It must have been three years. And in the street where I used to live there was a carnival on. I couldn’t believe it. There were five thousand people dancing to a reggae band off the Falls. It was unreal. I had dreamed of returning home there so often I couldn’t believe what I saw.

  “I contacted no one in the organization. They’d not have been very helpful. I was acting the idiot.

  “I was two days in West Belfast and the whole time there was a carnival on. One minute there’d be this silence you can get in a city, the next the music would start up. I found it hard to relate to that – people dancing in the Falls till
two or three in the morning.

  “Then I went South again. I went back to my room. The guys called but I couldn’t stand their company. All they were looking for was diversion. Up to their eyes in diversion. I was driven demented. I couldn’t even bear the box after a while. I had it up to here with the sexual problems of the plain people of Ireland. After a while I began to believe that Gay Byrne was getting a bit like Mr Magoo. One day I went to Dublin. I wanted to straighten things out. I’d arranged to meet someone in Parnell Street. And I imagined I saw a Brit on the street. I stepped into a shop and asked for a packet of fags though I don’t smoke.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “Whatever patterns the pedestrians were making on the pavement made me think the Brits were there.

  “I stood in the shop unable to walk out until slowly it came back to me that I was in Dublin. That was when I heard the accent of the woman asking me was anything wrong. But still I wasn’t sure. I was confused. So I stepped out, ready to make another sacrifice. That’s how bad I was. I thought they had come to shoot me. But somehow I knew it was all right. The Brits just became the ordinary people of Dublin walking about doing their business. Then I knew I was finished. It was all over. But it was all right somehow. I started walking among them. By the time I reached the Shakespeare Bar in Parnell Street I must have travelled through my whole life.

  “‘I know that I’m not going home,’ I told the guy.

  “He said I should take it easy, think about it a while longer. But I was adamant. So he said, OK.

  “‘I know that I’m not going home,’ I told him. ‘So I want my family down.’

  “Well he looked at me and he said nothing. He knew. So I organized bum passports. We arranged for flights to be booked in a new name they gave my wife and son and me. They had a duty to me. It was in their self-interest to protect their activists. So about a month later I’m standing at Dublin Airport with my wife and son. The De Largey family fly to Athens. De Largey, I liked the name. And we were happy. But at odd moments I was disturbed by the fact that this was not a normal holiday. It came down to that precisely – what was normal and what was not.