by Lia Mills
A pulse thudded in my neck. ‘What would it mean,’ I asked Isabel, ‘if the Germans were here?’
‘One army’s as bad as another,’ Isabel said.
I looked at her with dislike. Mother could have been right about her, after all. ‘But if both sides are here …’ It was too obvious a thought to finish.
Sackville Street was a scene of wreckage. The air still smelled of fire. Children sifted through the rubbish, gathering scraps of wood. Strips of cloth were caught on spikes of barbed wire.
To avoid the guns, we walked east, then south, east again, then south again, discussing every turn, making dogleg tracks through backstreets and lanes where the atmosphere was one of aftermath: stunned, withheld. Doors, where there were doors, were open to the street. Shadowy figures moved around inside, a few people leaned on doorjambs or squatted against sun-warmed walls, talking in low voices. Lines of limp, drab washing stretched across the street overhead, from window to window. The monkey inclined people to be friendly.
Tishy spoke to him in high, bossy tones. ‘Look at the state of the place,’ she lectured. She hitched him up higher when he threatened to slide down her hip.
‘Do you want me to take him for a bit, Tishy?’ I asked. ‘I promise I’ll give him back.’
I took the animal from her. He was lighter than I’d expected, and his hair was stiffer. He held on to my coat, front and back, bunching the material in his fingers. He swayed along, tilting his head this way and that, while Tishy skipped alongside, humming a tuneless song.
On Abbey Street, brand-new bicycles and motor-cycles were tangled together to make a barricade, about eight feet high. Small boys tugged on a bicycle. It made a harsh, screeching sound, but wouldn’t budge.
‘I wouldn’t go that way.’ The speaker wasn’t much older than us, but her teeth were blackened stumps. She was sweeping glass and debris into mounds, away from the road. ‘They say the British has the Customs House, beyond.’ She coughed, and spat. ‘Bad cess to them.’ She went back to her sweeping.
We took a side street to the quays. Butt Bridge looked clear. We edged up to it slowly, our backs to the quay wall. A trade union banner hung, limp, over the door to Liberty Hall, alongside a green one. The building was strangely still for one that was said to be crammed with revolutionaries, armed to the teeth. The windows were blank.
On the far side of the river, a man in a small crowd of bystanders waved a piece of white cloth. I caught Tishy’s sleeve to hold her back. She turned and took Paschal. I’d a strange impression of loss when his weight was lifted from me.
‘Are they calling us on, or warning us not to try it?’
A woman shook her fist at us, or at the house behind us. I looked back over my shoulder. A shadow moved at an upstairs window in Beresford Place. ‘They’re watching the bridges.’ It was like speaking lines from a book – or one of Liam’s earlier letters.
‘Who?’ Isabel asked. ‘I mean, which side are they?’
‘Does it matter?’ Lengths of metal jutted from the parapet of the railway bridge above us. I nudged her to look.
‘We could go back.’
‘If they were going to shoot us, they’d have done it by now.’ I wasn’t at all sure about that, but I didn’t want to turn back. Some stubborn nerve had set in me, driving me on.
Tishy decided it, stepping on to the bridge ahead of us. We edged out after her, then picked up our skirts and ran as best we could. ‘Go on, segocia!’ someone called. There were cheers and applause when we reached the other side. Tishy made a little curtsey to our audience and on we went.
We turned and turned again, passed under the railway bridge at Westland Row without incident. The station entrance was blocked.
We’d been told there’d been trouble there, but we saw no sign of it. Relieved, we planned the rest of our route. All going well, I’d stop in at the hospital and tell Frieda where her sister was, make a detour to enquire about Eva, then follow them to Isabel’s house.
At the top of the street, we paused before crossing the road. ‘It’s eerie, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘So still.’
As if to contradict me, a motor-car came out through the back gate of Trinity and accelerated towards us. We waited for it to pass so we could cross, but it bumped to a stop beside us, a little Vauxhall. A tall man unfolded from the passenger seat. ‘Ladies,’ he said. ‘The streets aren’t safe. You should be at home!’
‘We’re on our way there now,’ Isabel said.
He glanced back at the driver. ‘And home is …’
‘Herbert Park.’
‘It’s on our way. Will you take a lift?’ He grasped Isabel’s elbow. ‘Do. The streets are unpredictable.’
A burst of rapid gunfire came from the direction of the Green.
Isabel hesitated. ‘Katie?’
There was no sign of trouble here. There was no traffic, apart from the Vauxhall. It looked very small.
‘You go. I’ll walk.’
Isabel bundled Tishy and Paschal into the car.
‘But where are you going?’ The driver looked cross. I was holding them up now.
‘Just up to Baggot Street, to the hospital. It’s not far. I’m not worried.’
The two young men assessed the distance between here and there, exchanged a look. ‘I insist.’ The driver’s face was grim.
I got in, with little grace. Two minutes later I was struggling out again, outside the hospital, and Isabel was changing our plan. She’d see me at Percy Place, she said, once she’d shown her father she was still in one piece. The men said it might not be easy to move around for much longer; chances were the authorities would close the streets.
‘If that happens,’ I said to Isabel, ‘let’s both stay put, wherever we are. Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’
The car made off towards Pembroke Road. A sudden bang! set my pulse hammering, but it was only their engine backfiring as they picked up speed.
I stood on the pavement and looked up the shallow stone steps to the red and yellow frontage of the hospital, whose proper title was the Royal City of Dublin Hospital. Everyone just called it ‘Baggot Street’, except Eva and Bartley, who called it ‘The Hospital’, as if it were the only hospital in town, because Bartley worked there.
When Liam and I were around ten years old, we all went on an excursion to a bazaar in the RDS showgrounds to raise money for this hospital. The Gigas Bazaar was the thrill of that year. Mother kept the catalogue, in a drawer at home, glossy pages with portraits of various bigwigs and a list of stalls and patrons. Florrie was thrilled by the gondolas that glided through deep caverns lit with green and blue and gold. She and her friend Glenda would get to the end of the ride, rise from the scarlet cushions, disembark and go directly around to join the back of the queue. Liam and I were enthralled by Edison’s Animated Pictures of the Boer War: raised bayonets presenting a forest of steel. Horses prancing before they fell. How strange it was, we told each other, to think those men and horses were long dead now, but on film, they’d live forever.
The building was a fright. It was four, in places five, storeys over a basement, with a square porch jutting out of it and maybe fifty windows, some arched, some tall and narrow. It might have been planned to look busy, as a hospital should, but, surrounded as it was by plainer buildings, it only looked confused.
No use putting it off any longer. I dreaded seeing Frieda after yesterday’s fiasco, but I had to go in and tell her about Tishy.
The hall was busy with people in street clothes and bandages. I went to the porter’s desk. ‘I’ve a message for one of the nurses, Frieda Leamy. Could you find out if she’s free?’
I waited on a bench. A nurse came over to see was I all right. I told her I was waiting for someone. She eyed the bench. ‘There’s those who’d be better off sitting,’ she said.
I got up, guilty, and moved off into a corner. Not only useless but in the way. A door opened and Con came through it, his dark head bent to an older bald-headed man. Con was ta
lking, and the older man’s eyes were cast down, listening.
Frieda appeared on the stairs and hurried down, her face pinched and anxious. ‘Is it bad news?’
‘No, no, sorry, I should have said. Just that we have Tishy.’ I began to tell Frieda what I knew about the other children and the shop, but she stopped me.
‘I know! Jim, our porter, arranged a lift across town for me this morning. I just missed you. Mrs Clancy told me Granny has the two little rips that ran off – she said you’d been, you’ve got Tishy – where is she?’
‘Isabel’s taken her, to Herbert Park.’
‘That Maria! She’s useless. She shouldn’t have left Tishy on her own.’
‘I’d say Tishy wouldn’t leave –’
‘The monkey. I don’t know what Da was thinking when he bought him, but Tishy’s fierce attached. Your mother must have been thrilled. Will Tishy be all right with Isabel, d’you think? I had to come back, we’re full to bursting with casualties and expecting more.’
‘Casualties?’
‘People have been shot and killed.’ She said it calm and flat; we could have been talking about weather. It wasn’t the first time I’d felt the gap between my experience and hers. ‘Tishy’s no trouble. We’ll keep her ’til we can get her home.’
Over by the main door, the bald man shook hands with Con and left. Con turned around and caught my eye. I waved. He started to come over, but a nurse intercepted him.
Frieda was thanking me. ‘I owe you a favour. You should hurry on to Herbert Park. You don’t want to get caught up in whatever’s going to happen. It’s the queerest atmosphere I’ve ever known. I’ve to get back.’ She threw a glance towards Con, but the other nurse was urging him away. I watched them too. I’d half a mind to ask Con if he knew anything about Matt, because they were friendly, but he’d already gone, down a busy corridor.
I watched Frieda’s brisk ascent of the stairs. Everyone here was so purposeful. They all had urgent things to do, places to be, people who depended on them. But: casualties? How many and how bad, I wondered. Would the army come in and annihilate the men in the park and in the GPO and in the houses? Surely they’d put their weapons down and come out, as Captain Wilson said they would. Surely to God Matt wasn’t one of them.
I left the hospital and considered my options: left, to Herbert Park? Or right, across the canal bridge, towards Miss Moorhead’s nursing home, and Eva, just a few hundred yards away?
Miss Moorhead’s nursing home was a pinkish terraced house with a brown neighbour on one side, a red on the other. Its door was ajar. Miss Moorhead herself was out on the front step, looking up and down the street. ‘Where’ve you come from, dear? What have you seen?’
I described our journey across town, all we’d seen and heard. She clucked and tsked and shook her head at every word. ‘Nonsense, the Germans have nothing to do with it, it’s the Sinn Féiners. Daftest thing ever. Well. You’ve come at a good time, we’ve just finished with the dinners. Go on, up with you to see your sister, the poor lamb, but don’t go tiring her with all this carry-on. She’s not able for it. And don’t stay long, there’s a doctor coming.’
‘I won’t.’ I went past her into a tiled hall that smelled of cabbage with a faint underlay of carbolic, despite the open door. It was just on noon, and they’d finished with their dinners already? A vase of yellow silk geraniums stood on a semicircular table before the inner arch. The doors on either side of it stood ajar, giving glimpses of an iron bedstead in each, with a crucifix pinned to the bare white wall behind, a washstand in the corner. The two rooms looked identical, except that one was empty, while a person in a nightcap slept in the other, the face so old and wizened I couldn’t make out was it a man or a woman.
Miss Moorhead closed the hall door and directed me upstairs. Eva was in a room on her own, propped against a mountain of pillows, half sitting and half lying, in a high iron bed like the ones downstairs. A fine blue silk shawl draped around her head and shoulders gave her the look of a statue, ’til she saw me and her face came alive. ‘Hello, you,’ she said, as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world for me to materialize in front of her.
I kissed her clammy forehead. ‘Hello, yourself. How are you?’
‘Fine. I’m fine.’ She didn’t look it. Her skin had an unhealthy tinge and her eyes were bloodshot.
‘Miss Moorhead said there’s a doctor coming.’
She waved this away. ‘I’m only tired. Bartley says it’s natural.’ She took my hand. ‘I’m dying with boredom. And curiosity. What’s going on out there? Sit. No, not the chair, here. On the bed. Where I can see you properly.’
I took a jar of Florrie’s hand lotion off the bureau. ‘Want some?’ I unscrewed the lid and poured some lotion into her cupped palms, took some myself. The room sweetened with the smell of flowering almonds.
She rubbed her hands together and dipped her face to them. ‘She’ll be rich before we know it, once she and Eugene start their shop. There’ll be no living with her.’
‘Just as well we won’t have to.’ The joke fell flat in my own mind. It was no laughing matter. Once Florrie was married and gone, we’d be moving. I worked the lotion into my own skin, pushing in between the knuckle-bones and pulling on my fingers. ‘How are you, really?’
‘Tired.’ She winced, put her palms against her stomach. ‘Sore, today.’ A volley of shots from the direction of the Green turned her head to the window. ‘What’s happening? No one will tell me anything.’
I looked around to make sure Miss Moorhead wasn’t in earshot. ‘Rebels have taken buildings all over the city. Sackville Street is in bits, between fires and looting.’ I hesitated, unsure what to say next. We’d heard so many different things on our way across town this morning, there was no knowing which version of events was true. She looked worn out. Miss Moorhead had said not to tire her. On the other hand, if I was in Eva’s place, I’d want to know whatever there was to know. I wouldn’t want people to lie to me. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘This is what I’ve heard by way of explanation, you take your pick.’ I hammed it up, for her, talking up the rumours and counting them on my fingers. ‘The Kaiser is beyond in the Gresham, but they can’t give him his breakfast because the cook didn’t report for work this morning. They say he’s getting very cranky, no telling what he might do. Some boys were playing Cowboys and Indians and lost the run of themselves. There’s a submarine stuck in the mud at Grand Canal Dock. The Pope has committed suicide in Rome, in sheer despair at the treachery of the Irish. Robbers, armed to the teeth, have taken over every post office in the country, they’re after any first-day-of-issues they can find –’
‘Stop!’ She was laughing, holding her stomach. ‘Be serious.’
‘Miss Moorhead says it’s the Shinners’ handiwork.’
‘Were you nervous on the way over?’
‘No, but there’s a strange atmosphere, right enough.’
A spasm of pain twisted her face. She pushed the covers down off her stomach. She caught me looking. ‘Peculiar, isn’t it? You’d nearly think I was going to have a baby. Look.’ She pulled up her nightdress. Her skin was distended, with dark blotches that looked like broken veins. ‘Feel it.’
When I touched it, her stomach was taut as a ball. The last – the first, the only – time I’d touched her that way before was when she was expecting Alanna, and had pulled her blouse and skirt apart in just this way, to show me what it was like. I’d felt something like a tiny bubble ripple against my palm, as Alanna turned inside her. There was no movement now. I took my hand away.
‘It wasn’t this bad last night,’ she said. She adjusted her nightdress. ‘What other news?’
I told her about Mr Briscoe, the auctioneer, and the offer of a job. ‘Can’t you just hear Mother? “No daughter of mine!” ’
‘ “A shop?” ’ Eva intoned.
We laughed, but not for long.
‘When can you go home?’ I asked.
‘It was meant to be tomorrow, but �
��’
We both looked at the small mound of her belly. Miss Moorhead’s voice could be heard down in the hall, recounting some disaster, and a man’s voice in response. ‘Bartley.’ Eva’s face relaxed. ‘He said he’d come, if he could get away from the hospital.’ She sat up straighter and settled the covers over the bulge at her waist.
I had to be quick. ‘Eva, remember you once warned me against Con Buckley? You said you knew things I didn’t know. What things?’
‘Why?’
‘I’m curious, that’s all.’ I didn’t believe what Frieda had said, thought less of her for saying it. I wouldn’t give it credence by repeating it, especially not to Eva, who could damage his career, even without meaning to.
‘I don’t remember.’ She looked at the door, expectant. ‘Money, I think. Gambling, something like that. He runs around with a shower of high-flyers, Katie.’
We heard Bartley’s footsteps on the stairs. He came straight to the head of the bed and kissed Eva’s forehead, murmured her name. He looked at the shape she made under the bedclothes, then at me. ‘Katie. Miss Moorhead says you’ve been here half an hour. It’s too long. You’ll tire her out.’
I’d never disliked him quite as much as I did then.
‘Don’t be hard on her. She’s done me a world of good.’ Eva squeezed my hand. ‘Better than medicine.’ Her head sank back into the pillow and her eyes slid shut. They looked bruised.
I was taken aback by the sudden change, as though she’d been making herself bright for my benefit and the effort had cost her. ‘I’ll go.’
‘Wait, I’ll see you out.’
I didn’t want him to, but, short of saying it straight and causing a row that would do Eva no good, I couldn’t stop him. He clearly had the run of the place. I went quickly downstairs, wanting rid of him, but he stopped me in the hall and brought me into the empty front room, shut the door.
