Unspoken

by Gerard Stembridge

  Outside the cathedral Colonel Seán’s hand politely signalled him to wait. Another discreet whisper told him that An Taoiseach and the ex-Taoiseach were now beside him. The coffin was being placed in the hearse. Éamon heard a ferocious clicking of cameras and then, quite suddenly, a kind of silence. Not the silence of a vast, spreading valley, empty of humanity, but of a great crowd in an urban soundscape; a feeling of breath held, of words unspoken.

  The ordeal was nearly over. Éamon was familiar enough with the city to know that the journey to the cemetery would not take long. At the graveside, he would stand, erect as always, listening to a familiar threnody composed of prayers for the dead, Amhrán na bhFiann, and a twenty-one-gun salute. After that, he could shuffle back to his prison cell.

  Gussie Strong could just about make out the familiar figure of Dev in his viewfinder. He had managed to climb a wall and sit himself on a pillar at the far side of the square so he could see clearly over the heads of the crowd. But now there was another problem. At this distance, his lens was so wide it showed the entire front of the cathedral so, when the coffin and all the mourners came out, everyone looked so small it was impossible to tell who they were. Dev was the only one he could identify because, even so far away, the old bastard had a shape to him that was different from everyone else. Gussie was raging. Until now he had only ever shot stuff for the family or some local event like the St Patrick’s Day parade. He’d brought his camera to work a few times because he hoped to sneak out and grab footage of some of the famous people who were always arriving at Shannon Airport, but on the day Jayne Mansfield visited he was caught and told he’d be fired if he ever brought the camera into work again. This funeral was his first real chance to shoot an event with famous people at it, even if they were only politicians. Gussie knew the funeral would be the main headline on the television news tonight and wanted to compare his shots with the ones the professionals got, and secretly thought he could do better. It was too late now. Even if he tried to push his way through to the front of the crowd the hearse would probably have left by the time he got near enough, and anyway, with such a crush, there wasn’t a hope in hell of getting a clear view. So he stayed where he was and just kept shooting at all the tiny people getting into tiny cars and slowly driving away from the church.

  *

  Baz Malloy had left Rossaveel early and arrived in good time. The nearest parking place he could find was on Sexton Street. As he walked back towards the cathedral he thought about what exactly he wanted to shoot. He had already satisfied himself that he was not here to atone, in some obscure way, for thinking ill of a man who had subsequently, tragically and prematurely, passed on. Nor had he any interest in recording the formal ceremony, the slowly passing hearse, the tricolour-draped coffin, the weeping widow, the mound of floral tributes, the mournful faces of cabinet colleagues. Let the official news cameramen do that. Baz wanted to shoot faces in the crowd; reveal how ordinary people behaved at such an extraordinary event. Could the lens discover their true thoughts?

  It was easy to get through the crowd-control barriers at Mulgrave Street because he had an impressive-looking camera on his shoulder and he flashed his old RTE staff card. Baz was surprised at how many people had gathered. Crowds were lined on both sides of Cathedral Place down to where he could see the funeral cortege begin its journey. Ahead of him, Mulgrave Street was packed as far as it was possible to see. He realised immediately that, with the cortege moving slowly, it would be easy to keep ahead of it, finding faces, capturing reactions as they watched Dom’s remains pass by. He chose a first position on the corner of Mulgrave Street and Cathedral Place and scanned the crowd on a tight lens. People were chatting amongst themselves, some jigging a little because they had been waiting so long in the cold. He panned and stopped, arrested by the face of a man in his late twenties with longish fair hair. The man appeared to be alone – at least he was not talking or listening to anyone. There was something deeply sad about his face in repose. And photogenic too – although of course it was faces of character that Baz was after, not beauty. Still, there was something oddly compelling about this delicate face. Why did he look so sad? It felt like an odd question to ask about someone at a funeral but, after all, the fellow was not a participant, just a face in a crowd of onlookers. The cortege had not even approached yet. Had this striking young man been so deeply affected by Dom’s death, or was he preoccupied with some other melancholic thought? Perhaps his face always had this quality. Baz was strongly tempted to stay focused on him until the hearse passed, but reminded himself that he was not in search of the unusual, the extraordinary, l’étranger in the crowd. So he panned away from the young man, looking for more typical subjects.

  Brendan Barry, entirely unaware that he had been under the scrutiny of a camera lens, was actually thinking about Gavin Bloom. He had, quite suddenly and inexplicably, felt lonely. Everyone around him seemed to be chatting, exchanging easy clichés about Dom, what a character he was, what a loss he would be to the city and the nation, how sad for his wife and children. Brendan had wanted his own wife and child to come with him today but Elizabeth would not hear of Ian going. It wasn’t good for him, apparently. What wasn’t? Reality? He was sick of this bullshit and pretence. When Gavin Bloom came into his head he wondered, at first, why him, out of all the men who passed his way? Though he had been with him more often than anyone else in the last two years, he had never thought of this as meaning anything. Maybe Brendan thought of him now because he knew Gavin would be a good laugh at an occasion like this, although of course such a thing could never happen. It was unimaginable, the notion of the pair of them standing together, part of a crowd in his own town, chatting away, like they’d done in Bartley Dunne’s or as they rolled back to Gavin’s flat, holding each other upright, laughing like lunatics.

  Along with everyone around him Brendan automatically blessed himself as the coffin passed and remembered how, years before, as a young, inexperienced and rather fragile night manager, he had to help haul a crazily drunk and belligerent Dom away from poor old Mattie, the night porter. It took three of them, himself and two Party associates, to subdue him. Brendan remembered hanging on his back, simultaneously terrified and excited. Dom had been like a bucking bronco. Later, when he got home, he woke Elizabeth, partly to tell her the story, partly because of an urgent desire to make love. That definitely dated it. If they were still having sex, then Ian would have been only an infant. So long ago. The hearse had disappeared. Dom had passed on. Only then did Brendan recall that on the night he first met Gavin, Dom had been there too. Strange. He made up his mind to find an excuse to go to Dublin as soon as he could.

  *

  There was no one else in the house now. All was silent. Francis was in his mam and dad’s bedroom staring at a mound of loose change on the windowsill. Pennies, threepences and even the odd sixpenny piece – chickens and rabbits and greyhounds. Every night when his dad came home from work he always emptied his pockets and threw the coins onto the silI. He might do this for a few nights before sorting and counting them. Francis, still brooding about his Hardy Boys book, had remembered this money and gone in to see what was there. It was quite a big pile. If he took sixpence his dad wouldn’t even notice, and sixpence was all he needed. After all, if the Minister hadn’t died he would have been at school today and his mam would have given him sixpence for bus fare. So it wasn’t really stealing. But was it so hard to wait one more day? He could buy The Secret of Wildcat Swamp on Thursday instead. But he had been counting the days and saving for the last three weeks. All he had thought about was going to O’Mahony’s straight after school tomorrow. He was only sixpence short. He looked at the mound of coins. There were loads of pennies and plenty of threepences but not many sixpenny pieces. If he took three pennies and a threepenny piece and, if he removed them very carefully without disturbing the pile, then no one would know. But Francis couldn’t stop a question coming into his head. Would Frank and Joe steal money from their father, Fe
nton Hardy, the renowned private investigator? He knew the answer was no. But it wasn’t the same thing at all because Frank and Joe never seemed to need money. They drove a car and had their own motorboat and a phone in the house as well as a shortwave radio. He couldn’t imagine the Hardy Boys ever being short of sixpence for anything.

  Francis thought of the cover picture of The Secret of Wildcat Swamp, with the wildcat on the rock above Frank and Joe, waiting to pounce. He thought of having the book in his hands and couldn’t stop himself reaching out to lift three heavy brown pennies from different parts of the pile. He saw a little silver threepence that looked easy to dislodge. He plucked it out, stuffed the coins in his pocket and ran out of the bedroom.

  *

  The official funeral disappeared into the cemetery. Baz did not attempt to follow. It was over now, as far as he was concerned. He slumped on the edge of the O’Grady monument at Munster Fair Tavern. He placed the Éclair carefully on the ground between his legs and rubbed his aching right shoulder. The experience of the last twenty minutes had been a strange one, woven from a complex mosaic of faces. He had moved along Mulgrave Street just ahead of the hearse, his eye pressed to the viewfinder most of the time, scanning the crowd in search of interesting subjects. It was on-the-fly, seat-of-his-pants, cinéma verité, but he had managed to grab a truly fascinating random sample of the inhabitants of this tough old city. Certain faces and reactions lingered in his mind. The old fellow, with a shock of white hair, and ears that were almost the length of his head, who didn’t seem to be aware of the tears spilling down his broken-veined cheeks. A trendy young one with a brand-new short-cropped hairdo and dangly earrings got so lost in her sorrow that she forgot about the cigarette burning away in her hand. A little kid with a mournful face, perfect for the day that was in it, kept nervously biting his lip and looking up at the adults around him as if needing to be reassured that the whole thing was not his fault. And Baz had filmed so many more, two rolls of faces etched with genuine grief and sense of loss. It was, looking at it in one way, quite mad. None of these onlookers knew who this dead man really was. It was quite probable that most of them had never met or spoken to him. Of course, in truth, they were not mourning the death of an actual man at all, but of a persona they really did know, a persona called Dom. He was what Yeats had described: ‘Character, isolated by a deed, to engross the present and dominate memory.’ Baz knew now he had been obtuse ever to ask himself who the man really was. It was entirely the wrong question. The crowds that gathered in sorrow had got it right. They understood that it wasn’t just the man who had passed on, the flawed, complex human that almost no one could claim honestly to know, but that their favourite character, Dom, had died too. He was gone and something had gone with him. Perhaps all those faces Baz caught on camera looked bereft because they sensed that it was Hope lying in that hearse, under that tricolour.

  Twenty-seven: June 6th

  The plan had been to take off somewhere for the day. Wicklow. Brittas Bay, if it was warm enough for swimming. Gavin would organise a picnic. There were lots of secluded dunes if the notion took them. Brendan said he expected to reach Dublin around midday. When he arrived at the flat, Gavin was ready with food and swimming gear but had just one request. The radio news had said the American embassy was opening a book of condolences for Robert Kennedy. Ballsbridge wasn’t really out of their way. They should go and sign it. Brendan shrugged and said, ‘Why not?’

  Both men were surprised at the length of the queue that snaked round from the embassy building up Clyde road, almost as far as St Bartholomew’s church. Brendan’s immediate reaction was that they should forget about it and go, but Gavin felt they might as well wait, now that they were here. People continued to arrive and soon at least another hundred were behind them. All along the line there was this mood for talking. Everyone saying the same things over and over: another Kennedy dead, so soon after Martin Luther King, something dangerous in the air. The chat rippled freely through the crowd. Gavin, used to engaging with strangers, was enjoying himself hugely amongst all these like-minded people so, when he first noticed Brendan’s unease, he assumed it was only because the line was not moving. After fifteen minutes, word trickled back that the embassy wouldn’t be letting anyone in until two o’clock. Brendan immediately said they should go. Now.

  It was only thinking about it afterwards that Gavin understood more fully why Brendan had not liked being in that queue of people, out in the June sunshine, yapping on about Kennedy and King, the May riots and Vietnam. It was because it had dawned on him that all the people around them had recognised and taken for granted what he and Gavin were – a couple. And whereas Gavin was beginning to sense how much he liked this situation, Brendan already knew he did not.

  The line finally began to move, but still far too slowly. When, after another half an hour, it was clear that it would be at least as long again before they got to sign the book, Brendan muttered that, at this stage, they could forget about Brittas because by the time they got there it would be more or less time to turn around and go home. Gavin, feeling the need to adopt a similar whispered tone, said no big deal, they could do something else. Brendan said what? Gavin said whatever, relax, they could decide. Brendan said, fine, he’d go and relax over a pint in Paddy Cullen’s and wait for Gavin there. Gavin said, surely, having stayed this long he might as well hang on. Brendan said he’d prefer to hang on in the comfort of Paddy Cullen’s. Gavin wanted to shout after him as he walked away, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. He also wanted to scamper after him, but wouldn’t let himself do that. Alone now in the queue, he stopped chatting with those around him. Had they noticed this humiliating incident. Were they sniggering quietly?

  After signing the book, Gavin left the embassy and began walking towards Paddy Cullen’s, but at the bridge he stopped, bewildered, angry, the truth of the situation becoming clear. Brendan Barry had been uneasy for exactly the same reason Gavin had been content. There was no point in pretending otherwise. So what was he to do about that? He didn’t know why an approaching number 8 bus, heading towards the city centre, prompted an immediate decision, but as he ran across the road waving it down, all Gavin was sure of was that he didn’t feel like seeing Brendan at that moment. Possibly ever again.

  *

  If she lived to be a hundred Ann would never understand why Mary Storan got most of her groceries in Curtin’s. The prices they charged! Worse, she kept a book, so it cost her even more. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t afford to pay cash – Mikey earned more than Fonsie. Why not do a weekly shop at Winston and Besco’s, pay cash and get everything cheaper? If she only bothered to organise herself, she could be like Ann and go on Tuesdays for the double Green Shield stamps. But there was no talking to her. Ann, waiting just inside the door, watched the eldest daughter of the Curtins unhook the old copybook with Mary’s name on it. It drove Ann mad to look at Dympna Curtin, with her scraggy orange hair and a nose on her like a bird’s beak, calling out every last item, for the whole shop to hear, as she wrote it into the copybook: ‘Two packs Craven “A”, cottage loaf, half-pound of cooked ham, one tin of Batchelors…’

  Mary said, ‘Thanks Dympna,’ and picked up her shopping bag. ‘Thanks indeed,’ Ann thought, ‘thanks for robbing her.’ Of course she bought the odd thing in Curtin’s herself when she was stuck and she knew the children bought penny sweets and ice-pops, but that was it. Glad to be getting out, she turned and saw, through the glass panel of the shop door, Francis walking up the road towards her.

  ‘Look at him.’

  Francis was now very near the shop. Ann put her hand on Mary’s arm to stop her leaving.

  ‘What? What’s up?’

  ‘He’s coming home from school. Why isn’t he on the bus? Why is he walking home?’

  Mary was surprised at how agitated Ann seemed to be getting. As Francis passed by, she pulled back to make sure he didn’t see her, then she opened Curtin’s door and peeped out after him.

  ‘Su
re, Ann, I often see him walking home. He passes the flat.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I see him walking in to school as well, the odd time.’

  ‘What!’

  Mary wondered if she’d opened her big mouth a bit too wide, but honestly, what harm was there in the child walking home from school? Sure he’d be nine next week. Was Ann afraid he’d get knocked down or what?

  ‘I thought you were getting him to do it to make sure he got a bit of exercise.’

  Ann had now left the shop and was watching her youngest disappear up the road.

  ‘But I give him his bus money every day, every single day. And you see him walking in to school as well as walking home?’

  ‘Well, a few times. But I mean, it’s not doing him any harm is it? Here, come on and we go back for a cuppa.’

  By the time Mary got her to the flat and made the tea, Ann had revealed the whole story. On the previous Wednesday night, while Fonsie and the boys were glued to the telly watching Manchester United in the European Cup final, Ann had decided this was a good time to do a proper clean-up of the boys’ room. All these Hardy Boys books that Francis was obsessed with were thrown everywhere, of course, and she was stacking them neatly when, whatever way she looked, she noticed the price on the inside cover of one of them: seven and six.

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph! I never knew they were that dear, Mary. And he has seven of them. Now, one he got from Marg Strong for Christmas but he bought the rest himself. Six Hardy Boys books? At seven and six each? Where did he get the money? Of course, I said nothing about it to Fonsie, but God forgive me, Mary, I started thinking, what if he was stealing them out of the shop?’