“Wouldn’t you do some sightseeing?” Theo asked.
“I’ve been before. When I took that year off before college and went to Australia. I stayed in London for a month at the end. Did the whole tourist thing – Buckingham Palace, Oxford Street, Covent Garden. I even went to Wembley for the first FA Cup final after it reopened, d’you remember?”
“When Chelsea beat United.” Theo grimaced. “How could I forget that disaster? Bloody Drogba.”
Neville laughed. They had come to the Arch now.
“D’you see that now, Theo? That’s another piece of Africa here in Dublin.”
Theo stopped and looked up.
“You’re mad, Neville. There’s nothing African bout that eyesore. It’s just another ugly colonial yoke?”
“Yes, and no. It’s for the lads of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. They fought against the Boers in South Africa. That’s all their names underneath and those are the battles on the front there.”
They moved in closer, ignoring the people weaving in and out of the park under the arch and through the gates on either side. Gates with no walls, Theo thought. Pointless really.
“See,” Neville pointed. “Hart’s Hill, Ladysmith. Those are the names of battles. Mind you, there were Irish fighting on the side of the Boers too. Including your man, John MacBride.”
“The one that married Yeats’ squeeze, Maud Gonne?”
“Yeah, the very one,” Neville nodded. “He was shot just over at Kilmainham after the Rising. Bet you didn’t know about his South Africa gallivanting, did you?”
Theo had to admit he didn’t. Neville was always full of these little snippets of information.
“You should be a tour guide, Nev. You could put on a flat cap, thicken up that posh accent of yours, and you’d rake in the cash.”
Neville laughed again but Theo thought there was a space where the heart of the laugh should be.
“Maybe I will yet. I’m doing Arts so the world’s my oyster. No job or any job. That’s our mantra.”
They were under the arch now and Theo was mouthing the names of the dead soldiers: O’Shea. Walsh. Young. O’Reilly. He wondered what they made of South Africa. Did they feel as out of place there as he did here or was it different if you were part of something as big as an empire? You could just remake the new land so that it fit yourself, surely.
“Is there any kind of memorial thing in Rwanda for what happened?” Neville asked as they moved on into Grafton Street, walking up the middle to avoid the window-shoppers with their dawdling and drifting.
“There are, a few actually. But they’re not like the ones you have here – statues and arches and the like. One, just outside Kigali, is a church where a few thousand people were killed. They’ve got all the clothes, with the dried blood and everything, hanging inside on the rafters and on the benches, and then all the weapons – the machetes and knives and other things – are out the front and the skulls and bones at the back. There was a school there too, with a little kitchen beside it, and the walls are still red there because they smashed the kids’ heads against them. That’s what I saw anyways on the Internet. I guess there’s no sugar-coating what happened, so why even try?”
Neville was silent for a moment.
“If you ask me, it’s better that way. That’s the problem here. We always make out that war and death are somehow glorious. Monuments and statues and pretty gardens as if it wasn’t all just blood and guts and horror. You’d get some tourists now who’d be dead excited that you can still see the marks from the bullets fired in 1916 on the arch there, or even at the GPO, or the bit that’s left of it. Better the way your lads have done it. Skulls and bones. That’s what it really means. Maybe if we put those kinds of monuments everywhere people’d be less inclined to start killing again, less of the Rambo antics.”
“You mean scare the bejaysus out of people by showing them what kind of savages they can be?” Theo asked.
“Yeah, that’s it. Call a spade a spade and a skull a skull.”
They walked in silence for a while. There was a busker in a checked shirt and jeans on the corner of Duke Street, belting out ‘Where the Streets Have No Name.’
“Were you scared of dying that time?” Neville asked now and all the ranting had gone from his voice. “Did you think about what it’d be like, you know, when you were out on your own in the bush?”
“I don’t think so,” Theo said slowly.
He felt like this was the question Neville had been waiting to ask all afternoon. There was a weight to it, like he’d pulled it, roots and dirt and all, from the ground.
“I don’t remember much. I know I didn’t want to be hurt and hurting was what they were best at. They used guns and grenades, in some places, but the bodies I saw when I was on the run… they were wrecked, cut up, bits missing. Like the whole place had become a giant butcher’s shop.”
Theo had to stop and squeeze his eyes shut against the images that were flaring into life in the dark corners of his brain. There was no point revisiting them – what purpose did they serve? It wasn’t like they could be a deterrent to anything here. Dublin might as well be in a different universe. He opened his eyes and they landed on Neville’s hand. Anyway, you couldn’t do it to everyone here. You couldn’t wipe out say Dublin or Galway or Cork, or in fact all of them, because that’s how many people you’d have to kill to even come close to matching what had happened back there, back then. It was inconceivable here, standing on a street corner, in the August sunshine, with a guy singing about a kind of apocalypse that made good music but real bad life.
“I didn’t think much about dying, if that’s what you mean?” he said now.
“Yeah, I suppose it is,” Neville said. “I guess you were too little to think about there being nothing. About the actual moment, I mean. Whether it’d be something you could or could not do.”
“What do you mean?”
Theo was lost, his mind half in his own splintered reality and half trying to figure out where Neville was coming from with all these questions. They didn’t usually talk about the killing. They had, he supposed, in the beginning, when they were small. He must’ve told Neville something but he couldn’t remember how he’d described it. He hadn’t really understood what he’d seen then so God knows what kind of drivel he’d come out with. His memories had grown bigger over the years, swollen by the knowledge he’d picked up over here. For a while there, when he was about thirteen, or fourteen maybe, he had sought out all he could find about the genocide, sneaking off to the library to pour over microfilms of newspapers or to borrow books about it.
It was difficult to read those books. By then, he didn’t see himself in the descriptions of those who died, or the words of those who killed, or the prayers of those who survived. He read the books mostly as an Irish boy, but every now and then, a small detail – the smell of dead bodies sticking to the inside of nostrils, the whistling and singing that heralded the arrival of the killers in the morning, or the way the dried mud became like a second skin – would hit him like a stomach punch so that he had to drop the book, close his eyes, and breathe the demons out.
“I just wonder what it’ll be like, I suppose,” Neville said. “Stopping. Being nothing, having everything you were, all your thoughts, ideas, fears just disappear. Sort of makes a joke of the whole business. Why do we bother when it’s all going to be erased as soon as our minds are switched off?”
They had reached the top of the street and Theo had to go right to meet Cara.
“Sorry, sorry,” Neville mumbled. “I dunno why I thought you should… it’s just when I was waiting for them to take me out of that room and I knew I was for the high-jump, I got all panicky and started thinking of what it would be like to be gone. But of course, you wouldn’t know you were gone and that made me more scared so I had, I suppose you’d call it a panic attack, and now I can’t seem to shake that bleedin’ idea. It’s driving me mad.”
Theo didn’t know what to say. He didn’t
think much about death or only as pain and loss, not as oblivion. He’d been schooled too young in the mechanics of death, that was the problem. He’d had no time to think about its meaning, just how it would arrive. Neville came late to the idea and so there were more layers for him to sink into. Kids don’t think about after, just now.
Neville patted him on the shoulder. He was smiling again.
“Go, go on now. Cara’s waiting for you. Don’t mind my blathering. I’m… I’m just… I don’t know what I am.” He laughed. “But it’ll be grand. A break in London will do me good. Yeah.”
Theo said goodbye, made Neville promise to call him when he knew what his plans were, and headed off. He’d the uneasy feeling he’d failed his friend again. He should’ve had something better to say. He should’ve had some answer.
Then he saw Cara through the window of the café. She was reading a magazine, hair falling over her face. She lifted a page, smiled and tilted her head onto her hand, and there was such perfection in that one simple gesture. Theo wished Neville was with him because somehow he knew that what he was looking at was an answer.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It felt weird knocking on the front door of the house he’d grown up in but then, in some corner of Theo’s mind, knocking had always seemed like an odd thing to do. He’d not knocked on anything during his first seven years – he just walked through open doors shouting Muraho, as his parents had taught him. He hoped Cath was really okay about him staying. Technically, it was still Jim and Sheila’s place but even so. Technically, he wasn’t their child any more. He was his own man since his asylum had been granted. That’d been the theory anyhow. It was only now he was realising how big a lie it was. He’d never been his own man. He might never be. His childhood had seen to that. He’d thought he could build a new man, a different man, after he came here. But you could only layer over the past.
He’d only brought two bags. Mostly clothes, some books and his Lynott tapes. He’d have to clear out the flat later but he’d paid the rent ’til the end of August. Precious had already taken her stuff – the wooden mask that used to hang in the hall, the set of small ebony elephants, a few woven rugs in bright blues and yellows. She must’ve snuck in while he was out because he found her key on the kitchen counter. Such a flat, undramatic end: an ordinary key on an ordinary counter. As he looked at it, he realised he missed her laughter, her confidence, her body, and he felt bad for the way it had all gone down, but that was it. He wasn’t heartbroken and that made him feel even worse.
And now there was Cara, and it was too fast, too soon, and so right. She’d stayed the night at his place. A new beginning starting at the very end. He hadn’t planned it but after coffee, they’d gone to a pub for some food and then when they got to his place, she’d followed him in and he was so stupidly delighted. She’d got under his skin, for sure. It was her eyes, her face, the way she looked so alive when she was talking to him. He couldn’t break the attraction down to its base elements. It was not so much her features as her essence. The Cara-ness of her. When he’d kissed her, she’d kissed back and then giggled and he felt deliriously happy, like a kid at Christmas.
“Theo! I thought ye’d be arriving later.”
Cath ushered him in and they stood looking at each other. Every time they met, it was like they both needed a moment to relive that first meeting outside the camp in Tanzania, a tiny pause to dig the memory up, check again that it was real, and then slot it carefully back into place.
“Drop those bags there, come on through,” Cath said. “I’ll make us a cup of tea and then you can settle in. No need to show you around at least. Sure, I haven’t really done anything to the place since Sheila and Jim left. I brought my stuff downstairs and hung a few pictures and set out my ornaments and the rest of the crap I seem to have gathered over the years. I’ve ethnic-chic’d the bejaysus out of the place.”
Theo set his bags down on the purple carpet. He remembered standing in the same place on his first day here. He’d thought his eyes were going to fall out of his head, there was so much to look at: the fancy clock on the wall with its gold hands, so many doors leading to unknown places, the stairs rising above him, the thick-leaved banana plant in a terracotta pot in the corner. So he’d focused instead on the purple under his feet, strange feet in white-and-red trainers that were pinching his toes. He’d stayed by the door, refusing to move while Jim and Sheila stood awkwardly in front of him, saying ‘hello’, and ‘welcome’ over and over. They spoke, he learned later, extra slowly and clearly but he’d understood the words no problem. It was everything else that he couldn’t get his head around. Starting with the purple carpet.
He peeked into the sitting room – same worn leather sofa, same bookcases but different books, and a new framed black-and-white map of East Africa on the wall over the small fireplace. There was also a thigh-high bongo drum in the corner where Sheila used to have a glass vase with silver-and-gilt-sprayed Christmas twigs all year around.
In the kitchen, still tiled blue above the counters and with the same green lino on the floor, Cath was filling the kettle – a different one, not the cream one he’d wondered at when he first arrived. This one was red and smaller. A single person’s kettle, making him think of cheap motel rooms, sad places for lost people.
But Cath didn’t look or sound sad, Theo thought, studying her as she pulled two bright ceramic cups out of the cupboard. Her hair was still blonde, even if the roots looked a little pale. She was maybe a bit plumper than she had been but the haunted look she’d brought back from Kenya in 2008 had left her eyes.
That’s when she’d moved in with Jim and Sheila and she’d just stayed on when they left for the wilds of Donegal. Something had happened on that last assignment and she’d decided to chuck it all in. Sheila had told Theo, in that low whisper she kept for global disasters or local scandals, that something had happened after the election: loads of people were killed and Sheila said there had been something to do with a church where some kids were burned alive, and that Cath had been nearby, and had got there too soon. At the time, he understood how Cath might have decided that she’d seen one too many churches turned into crematoriums. There was a tightness about her then, a tension that was all effort because she knew that letting go would mean she would fall to pieces.
Then one night, just over a year ago, after Jim and Sheila had gone to bed, he and Cath had opened a bottle of wine and sat on the sofa in the front room, and she’d said she just couldn’t do it any more, she’d no more to give.
“I was dead tired, Theo. I mean, I wanted to help, but… I’d started to hate everyone, even the kids who came round the car when we drove into the villages upcountry. They were adorable, of course, all smiles, and they just wanted to touch me and get a few sweets but I just couldn’t even smile at them any more. And it wasn’t their fault. It was the awfulness of knowing that no matter how many sweets I gave, or how many wells we dug, or how many schools we built, they’d probably still be there, begging for sweets, or plastic bottles or what have you, in ten years time. I was absolutely knackered by the whole thing and don’t even get me started on the violence there after the election.”
She’d started crying then and all he could do was hold her hand.
“So, what trouble are you in then, Theo?” she said now, putting the cups on the table that Jim had made himself. “It’s not for love of Aunty Cath that you’ve moved back here, is it now? Not so much as a visit for months, and now you’re my new lodger?”
“Long story, Cath.”
Theo paused. On the one hand, it’d be good to get it all off his chest, tell someone who wasn’t involved in the whole sorry mess. On the other hand, Cath was the very one who’d given him the second chance he now appeared to have screwed up. He didn’t want to disappoint her, though she probably had a fairly good idea already what he was involved in. The ten years between her and Sheila meant she’d always had a clearer notion of what Theo was up to over the years. She never snitched
though and so she had become something of a confidante. His go-to grown-up.
“I got in with some bad people,” he said, still debating how much to say. Fuck it, if he was going to tell her there was no point beating around the bush.
“Alright so, the truth is I’ve been selling drugs, just a little really, for a while now. And somehow, I fell in with one of the big players, well, not with him exactly but with his gang. Anyways, something happened. You remember Neville?”
Cath nodded and slowly sipped her tea. He couldn’t tell if she was shocked, mad or just disappointed. There was no going back now though.
“Well, they took him and hurt him because they thought he’d snitched to the cops, which he hadn’t. And that was it for me. I told them I’m out. Now, they’re a little pissed about that so I just thought it might be a good idea to lay low while the dust settles. That’s the long and short of it, Cath.”
For a while, she didn’t say anything, just kept looking straight at him. Not in a judgmental way but just looking. The silence was getting to him.
“You won’t tell Jim and Sheila, will you?”
He was suddenly unsure. When he heard his own confession out loud, it sounded more serious. Like something someone else had been doing. Or maybe he’d scared her. He should’ve left the whole Neville bit out of it.
She took another sip of her tea and ignored his question.
“Do you really think you’re in danger?”
“Nah. Okay, they hurt Neville but I can’t see why they’d come after me. It’s not like I did anything to them. I gave them back the… stuff and all. I’m paid up and they know I’m not going to the Gardaí. Sure, why would I? I’d only end up in jail too.”
“Who’s the player?” she asked, twisting a red-green-and-black bracelet round and round her wrist.
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