by Colm Toibin
He could imagine her now taking a gulp of her drink and staring into the false gas fire as though life had made her sad. In the silence that followed the tape came to an end.
‘That’s it,’ Cassidy said. ‘I can’t leave the tape with you. I’ll have to bring it back before it’s missed.’
‘Did they tell you to play it for me?’ he asked.
‘Who?’
‘The bosses.’
‘I’m doing you a favour,’ Cassidy said. ‘Your ma is a squealer.’
‘Thanks,’ he said, and handed Cassidy the money in an envelope. Cassidy plugged out the cassette player and put it back into his briefcase.
HE ALWAYS parked the three cars he used in unlikely places not associated with him or his like. Early that evening he checked he was not being followed. He walked into a city centre car park and then waited, out of the sight of the CCTV cameras, on the top floor, which was open to the sky and often empty, to see if anyone would appear. When, after ten minutes, he had not been disturbed he walked down the stairs and out into the street, and caught a taxi to where one of his cars was parked. That night he drove out to the mountains, stopping regularly and pulling into a siding to see that no one was coming behind him. It was only nine thirty. He wanted to be back early enough in the city not to be noticed. Once off the main road there was no traffic; any car on the lookout would see him now, he would have to be vigilant, ready to turn back if there was the slightest suspicion that he was being followed. When he finally stopped the car and turned off the ignition, there was absolute silence, a silence that came to him like power. If anyone approached or moved, he would hear them. Until then, he was alone.
He could work in peace. He had a shovel and a large torch hidden under the back seat of the car. He knew where he was, everything was carefully marked. As long as he was alive these paintings could easily be brought back to the city. Were anything to happen to him, they would never be found, they would remain unseen for ever. Joe O’Brien knew the general area where they were buried but not the exact spot. He walked up a small clearing until the ground to his left began to slope away. Then he counted seven trees and then turned right and counted five more, and just beyond that there was a rough space overhung by trees.
Even though the ground was soft, the digging was not easy. He stopped after each heave and listened for sounds, but he heard only stillness and a mild wind in the trees. Soon, he was out of breath from digging. But he enjoyed working like this when he did not have to think and let anyone else bother him. He wished he could do this all night so that his mother’s voice could be erased from his memory. It was not the voice on the tape that seemed to seep through the great guard he had placed around himself. It was an earlier voice, more shrill and more insistent, a voice that he had managed most of his life never to think about or allow into his conscious day.
There were strange gaps when he tried to remember that morning in the court, the time the judge sentenced him to complete his education at Lanfad. For example, he had no idea how he got to the court. He thought that he must have been collected by a Garda car, but he had no memory at all of that. He did not think that he went there by himself, and he had no memory either of a summons, or how he knew that he must go to court that day and not any other. His life at home in the short period before Lanfad was a blank to him now as well. He had no memory whatsoever of his mother mentioning the court or the trouble he was in.
What he remembered came after the sentence as the Guards got ready to lead him away. No other defendant had yet appeared in the dock, the social workers and the probation officers and the solicitors were busy with files and papers. The judge was waiting. All of this was clear in his mind. There was maybe a minute of this and then the Guards motioned him to follow them. There were no handcuffs or anything like that.
As he moved away from the bench with the Guards, his mother appeared from nowhere. She was, he saw, in a bad mood. Her hair was untidy and her coat was open. She began to shout. He stepped back until he realized that she was not shouting at him, but at the judge.
‘Oh, God Almighty, O Lord, what am I going to do?’ she screamed.
There were too many people around her for the Guards to get to her quickly. She was pushing her way towards the bench.
‘He’s the best son, the best boy, oh don’t take him, don’t take him from me, don’t take him from me.’
That became her cry as the Guards grabbed her and tried to prevent her moving closer to the bench. Her arms flailed about her. When they seemed to have caught her, she got free of them by letting them have her coat. Then she became even wilder.
‘Give him a second chance, your honour.’
One of the Guards held him to the side as the other Guards gathered to stop his mother moving any closer to the judge. They had her now by the arms and they turned her and marched her through the crowd as she shouted at them to leave her alone. When she saw him as she passed, she tried to free herself so she could touch him, but he moved away from her. She was shouting all the time. When they put him into the van, she banged on the windows, but he was careful not to look at her. He did not want to see her as they drove away.
During his years at Lanfad, she visited him every few months. She was belligerent with the brothers when she arrived, and she always had to be dragged away from him at the end. In the middle part, where they were facing each other across a table, she said nothing much, but sighed and tried to hold his hand until he pulled it away. She sometimes asked him questions but he never told her anything. When the brothers instructed him to write to her to tell her when he was getting out, he gave her the wrong date in the letter. He came home on his own, and soon he drifted away. He did not see much of her until Billy got into trouble. The only way he could see Billy was by seeing her. He had begun then to give her money.
He was still digging, working quickly and mechanically, stopping for a second so that he could concentrate harder, and keep other thoughts at bay, when every so often the spade hit the hard frame of one of the paintings. It was tough work then to pull them out. They were protected by masses of plastic sheeting. He laid them all out, filling in the hole again. Then he left the shovel down and walked back to the car. He remained still for as long as he could, checking that there was no one else around.
It struck him for a moment that he would be happy if everything were dark and empty like this, if there were no sound at all in the world and no one living to make any sound, just this stillness and almost perfect silence. He would be happy at the thought that it might go on for ever like this.
He carried the paintings to the car. He would leave them with the others in the attic of Joe O’Brien’s neighbour’s house. Still, he felt depressed about them, and sorry he had ever stolen them. The idea that he had no power over them or the Dutchmen or Mousey made him feel in danger, but it also gave him a strange fearlessness, a sense that he could do anything now if he got the opportunity. He felt an extraordinary surge of energy as he drove back into the city.
Once the paintings had been stored safely, he walked down through the south city to his house and let himself in quietly. He took his shoes off and left them in the hall. The others had all gone to bed. Silently now, he made his way up the stairs, glad this was a new house where the stairs did not creak.
He opened the door to the room which Lorraine shared with her sister and went in. She was still in a cot and he could see from the landing light that she was fast asleep. He knew not to touch her, not to stroke her face, because he did not want to wake her or disturb her in any way. Looking at her like this was enough. He got down on his knees so he could be closer to her and he stayed there for as long as he could watching his daughter. Then he tiptoed away and closed the door to the room without making a sound.
IN THE morning he went to see his mother. She was usually wrecked in the morning, half-dressed, smoking one cigarette after another, drinking cups of cold tea. When she opened the door to him she walked back into the sitting room w
ithout greeting him.
‘I brought you money,’ he said.
‘Sit down.’
‘I won’t stay.’
‘That’s all right.’
She began to cough and once she had finished, she suddenly seemed better, more relaxed.
‘I’d make you tea, only—’
‘I don’t want tea,’ he said.
‘I’d say you’re very busy.’
‘Ma, I have to say something to you.’
‘Oh, say away.’
‘You’re not to be talking about me to people. You could get us all into a lot of trouble.’
‘I know that well. I hate idle talk myself. There’s too much of it.’
‘You’re not to be talking about me,’ he said, his voice quieter and his tone more direct than before.
She sipped her tea.
‘You might be better to quit that drinking altogether,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to tell them in the Dock to keep an eye on you.’
‘They’re afraid of their lives of you. You should keep a mile away from them.’
‘Yeah, good, well, I’m going to tell them to serve you one or two, and that’s it.’
‘They wouldn’t go against me.’
‘You should stop drinking.’
‘Oh, we all should stop doing something.’
‘And, Ma, you should never say anything bad about Billy to anyone.’
‘About Billy? What would I say about him? My own son. Lord have mercy on him.’
‘Nothing, that’s what you would say about him, Ma. Nothing. Do you get that?’
‘Something bad? Are you saying I said something bad?’
‘Yeah, you said something bad about him and I heard it back.’
‘Don’t believe—’
‘I believe it all right. Are you listening to me? I’ll take action against you if I hear another word. Do you get me?’
‘You should stop blaming yourself for Billy.’
She looked at him and shook her head.
‘You have yourself eaten alive about it. It wasn’t your fault,’ she said.
‘You keep quiet now. I don’t want to hear another word against him.’
‘Give over. It wasn’t your fault, son. No one blames you.’
‘Anyway, I’ve said what I had to say.’
He stood up and left a wad of money on the table.
‘I’ll go now. But I don’t want to hear any more yapping from you.’
‘You are very good to look after me the way you do.’
ONCE HE HAD left her house, he knew that he could not do business again with Mousey Furlong. It was as though he had gone to his mother’s house to be washed in the use of reason. As he walked away, he felt that he was thinking clearly for the first time in months. He also, as he moved towards the city centre, had that lovely feeling that he had become oddly invisible. No one, he believed, saw him or noticed him; no one would remember him. He was, he felt, at his most powerful.
He would burn the paintings, all of them. He was sure that was the right thing to do. With Joe O’Brien, he could manage a spectacular robbery, and they could pay off their two accomplices then, having warned them not to ask for the money before they got it, but having explained to them too that the paintings could not be sold, the risk was too high. If they did not see this as wisdom, then Joe O’Brien could help them to do so.
He would take the paintings some night in his car, working alone, explaining nothing to anyone. He would find a special place for them, the emptiest place. He might even go out west towards the big stretches of bog, but he did not think so. He would stick to his mountains, to the great barren emptiness which lay south of Dublin. He would bring fire-lighters rather than petrol so that he could burn each one slowly, letting the canvases shrivel up in the flame, leaving Rembrandt’s sour old woman until last until it was a heap of ash. It would make a vivid emptiness in the space where it had once hung. The people who had come to look at it could look at nothing now. It hardly mattered. What mattered was the small flickering flame he would start in the night, a hissing sound as something old and dry was set alight, and then slowly, as he stood over it, the painting would disappear and then the frame would also begin to burn. He would go back to the city renewed, unafraid, smiling to himself at what he had done. He had the solution now. He was sure he was right.
A Song
NOEL WAS the driver that weekend in Clare, the only musician among his friends who did not drink. They were going to need a driver; the town was, they believed, too full of eager students and eager tourists; the pubs were impossible. For two or three nights they would aim for empty country pubs or private houses. Noel played the tin whistle with more skill than flair, better always accompanying a large group than playing alone. His singing voice, however, was special, even though it had nothing of the strength and individuality of his mother’s voice, known to all of them from one recording made in the early seventies. He could do perfect harmony with anybody, moving a fraction above or below, roaming freely around the other voice, no matter what sort of voice it was. He did not have an actual singing voice, he used to joke, he had an ear, and in that small world it was agreed that his ear was flawless.
On the Sunday night the town had grown unbearable. Most visitors were, his friend George said, the sort of people who would blissfully spill pints over your uillean pipes. And even some of the better-known country pubs were too full of outsiders for comfort. Word had spread, for example, of the afternoon session at Kielty’s in Millish, and now that the evening was coming in, it was his job to rescue two of his friends and take them from there to a private house on the other side of Ennis where they would have peace to play.
As soon as he entered the pub, he saw in the recess by the window one of them playing the melodion, the other the fiddle, both acknowledging him with the tiniest flick of the eyes and a sharp knitting of the brow. A crowd had gathered around them, two other fiddlers and a young woman playing the flute. The table in front of them was laden down with full and half-full pint glasses.
Noel stood back and looked around him before going up to the bar to get a soda water and lime; the music had brightened the atmosphere of the pub so that even the visitors, including those who knew nothing about the music, had a strange glow of contentment and ease.
He saw one of his other friends at the bar waiting for a drink and nodded calmly to him before moving towards him to tell him that they would soon be moving on. His friend agreed to come with them.
‘Don’t tell anyone where we’re going,’ Noel said.
As soon as they could decently leave, he thought, and it might be an hour or more, he would drive them across the countryside, as though in flight from danger.
His friend, once he had been served, edged nearer to him, a full pint of lager in his hand.
‘I see you are on the lemonade,’ he said with a sour grin. ‘Would you like another?’
‘It’s soda water and lime,’ Noel said. ‘You couldn’t afford it.’
‘I had to stop playing,’ his friend said. ‘It got too much. We should move when we can. Is there much drink in the other place?’
‘You’re asking the wrong man,’ Noel said, guessing that his friend had been drinking all afternoon.
‘We can get drink on the way,’ his friend said.
‘I’m ready to go when the boys are,’ Noel said, nodding his head in the direction of the music.
His friend frowned and sipped his drink, and then looked up, searching Noel’s face for a moment, then glancing around before moving closer to him to him so that he could not be heard by anyone else.
‘I’m glad you’re on the soda water. I suppose you know that your mother is here.’
‘I do all right,’ Noel said, smiling. ‘There’ll be no beer tonight.’
His friend turned away.
As he stood alone near the bar, Noel calculated that, as he was twenty-eight, this meant he had not seen his mother for nineteen years. He had not even known
she was in Ireland and, as he looked around carefully, he did not think that he would recognize her. His friends knew that his parents had separated but none of them knew the bitterness of the split and the years of silence which had ensued.
Recently, Noel had learned from his father that she had written to Noel in the early years and that his father had returned each letter to her unopened. He had deeply regretted saying in response that he wished his father had abandoned him rather than his mother. He and his father had barely spoken since then and Noel resolved as he listened to the music rising and growing faster that he would go and see him when he got back to Dublin.
He found that he had finished his drink quickly without noticing; he turned back to the bar, which was busy, and tried to capture the attention of John Kielty the owner, or his son, young John, as a way of keeping himself occupied while he worked out what he should do. He knew that he could not leave the bar and drive away; his friends were depending on him, and he did not, in any case, want to be alone now. He would have to stay here, he knew, but move into the background, remain in the shadows so that he would not meet her. A few people in the bar would know who he was, he supposed, since he had been coming here in the summer for almost ten years. He hoped that they had not noticed him, or, even if they had, would not have occasion to tell his mother that her son, two hundred miles away from home, was among the company, that he had wandered by accident into the same bar.
