by Siobhan Dowd
‘Where did that come from?’ he said to Padraig.
‘Colm Fahey this time. You’re one popular man.’
Fergus plumped down. ‘I’ve had enough beer. I’ll stick with the chaser.’
‘Sure?’ Padraig picked up Rafters’ pint with an expression of boozy satisfaction.
‘If I have another bubble, I’ll burst,’ Fergus said. ‘Swear to God.’
‘That reminds me. Have you heard the one about the Catholic man from Sligo?’
Fergus groaned. ‘God. No.’
‘Your man was blowing bubbles through the wee ring you get with those bubble-solution yokes. You know the kind?’ Padraig mimed the action by making an O with his finger and thumb and blowing through it.
‘I know. What then?’
‘He keeps trying to get the perfect bubble and cursing when each bubble bursts. So this Derry guy who’s watching him, a Proddie, goes, “Why d’you keep cursing and taking the Lord’s name in vain?”’
Fergus laughed. Padraig had the Reverend Ian Paisley’s voice off to a T.
‘And d’you know what the Sligo fellow says?’
‘No. What?’
‘You’d curse too if your condoms kept bursting.’
He screamed with laughter at his own joke. Fergus grabbed his side, groaning. He slapped the tabletop. ‘Where the hell did you get that one from?’
‘I made it up.’
‘Jesus, Padraig. You’ll be wasted on electrical engineering.’ They clinked glasses and Fergus took a swig of the whiskey. As it went down his gullet, its warmth swelled inside him, like bread rising. He looked around the bar. The place was full to bursting now. The smoke in the air, the carved wood of the snug, the jaunty windows and round bowls of light were a consolation in a vale of tears. He took another sip of whiskey and smiled.
‘Tell us another, Padraig. Keep them coming.’ Somewhere out there, he thought, Cora was on her way back from Omagh, with her short-cropped hair and surely another round of the kissing to come. Here at his side was Padraig with his crazed jokes, with all Drumleash standing him drinks and the exams done. He didn’t care if he was half cut–‘stocious’, as Uncle Tally would say. When Colm Fahey got out his accordion, Fergus bellowed out The Siege of Venice! Everyone thumped approval. Colm nodded. Soon the whole bar was mad, delirious with the clapping, the toe-tapping, the laughter. The night spun like a top. Colm’s fingers flashed over the buttons and the keys. And the smell of starvation was nowhere, gone, obliterated somewhere in the beat and the golden glow of the whiskey.
Twenty-nine
Things got better before they got worse.
The morning after he stole our goats, Boss Shaughn was found dead in the lough, drowned. On his head was a fierce gash.
He hit it on a rock falling from his boat, drunk out of his skull, people said. This cold, foggy winter would drive anyone to drink.
Others whispered, Someone thumped him and dumped him.
Even I wondered, Did my own Da do it?
Da said nothing.
Boss Shaughn’s body was carried to the greensward at the head of the lough and buried there in accordance with our custom. Then Rur took over the leadership of the land. He gave us our goats back. He made atonements to the people Boss had robbed. Rur said the payments could resume in the summer, with backlogs written off.
But still spring didn’t come. The cold murk lingered even when the bluebells should have been and gone. Crops failed. People got hungrier. Old folk died. Mam’s baby died. And the whispering got louder.
A crime has been committed with no recrimination. The gods are punishing us.
At another funeral, I saw Boss Shaughn’s widow eyeing me across the sward. She spoke words to her daughter with a spiteful slant to her eyebrows.
I’d never believed in the gods taking an interest in our small lives, but even I started to pray to them for the sun to return.
A day came when narrow fingers of light grappled through the cloud. I went up the mountain and looked down on the settlements: bonfires, men tending the animals, barren, brown fields. I’d a glimpse of Rur’s tall, fit frame, doing the jobs with the other men. He caught sight of me up there and, to my delight, downed tools and climbed up to me.
‘So, Mel. What’s new?’
Just then a full beam of sunlight prised its way out, like the first daffodil. I pulled off my bonnet and shook my hair loose. I undid my belt and then the knot of my shawl and stretched out my arms.
‘Mel?’ he laughed. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m catching the sun,’ I said, ‘to keep it here with us.’
Rur chuckled. He sat down and patted the limp grass beside him. I sat down.
‘Do you know what they say about you, Mel?’
‘No.’
‘They say you’re a spirit from the Sidhe. And I’d say they’ve a point.’
I punched him. ‘I don’t believe in no Sidhe, Rur. That’s baby stuff. I believe in now. That’s all there is. Here and now. Today.’
Then my hand travelled over and found his. He ruffled my hair like I was a pet. We sat together in the weak sun, watching the banks of cloud shift, showing up silver glints of the lough.
‘I loved a girl once,’ Rur said.
‘Did you?’
‘Yes. She was beautiful. Too beautiful. My father sent her away to the Brannans down south. He sold her. On account of her fine eyes.’ He looked intently at me. ‘Beauty comes at a price, Mel.’
I stroked down my hair and rolled my eyes. ‘Don’t I know it.’
Rur chuckled and chafed my hand.
We sat in silence. But silent words are the loudest.
‘Rur,’ I said, putting on my bonnet. Down on the lough shore, I saw Rur with a stone, held aloft, with his father in a drunken sleep in his boat.
‘What?’
‘I see it now.’ I pointed down to the water.
‘What do you see?’
I smiled. ‘What might have been.’ I turned to him. ‘What has been, maybe?’ I picked up the two strings of my bonnet and showed how the two lines could cross.
‘What about what will be?’ Rur said.
I shrugged. ‘That I don’t know.’
Rur tied my bonnet strings up in a knot. ‘Go on home, Mel. Look after yourself. And your family. And your goats.’
So I went back over the mountain and the sun shut its door on the world. I smiled. I held the life of the person I loved most like a frail moth in the palm of my hand. But it was safe there. Safe always.
Fergus woke from sleep, his fingers chasing a sensation of butterfly wings passing over his face.
He started, scratched his nose. It was a current of air coming from somewhere.
His head thumped. He remembered the beers and the chasers, the swaying urinals, the madcap jokes.
He sat up, groping for the coverlet. It had slid off him onto the floor during the night. Then he gasped. The draught was coming from the door. It was open, with a ghost standing at it.
‘Jesus.’
‘Fergus?’
The ‘s’ slithered over to him, making him breathless. ‘Cora?’
‘Shh.’
Now he could see the white of her oversized T-shirt, the slope of her shoulders, a pale glimmer of nose.
‘You’ve the exams finished?’ she whispered. She stepped towards him.
He nodded. ‘Cora?’
‘Shh. Mam’s just the other side of the wall, remember.’
His heart was hammering it as she got into the bed, pulling the coverlet up and over them both.
‘Smells like a brewery in here,’ she giggled.
He groaned. ‘We were out celebrating. A real session.’
‘We tried to phone you this afternoon from Omagh. But there was no one in.’
‘We were out visiting—’
‘Visiting?’
‘Nobody. Nothing.’ He felt her hand searching for his. She was trembling. ‘Are you cold?’
Their fingers interlocke
d. ‘Frozen.’
He drew her into a firm clasp.
‘Cora?’
‘What?’
‘I’ve no–you know what. Protection.’ He’d been falling around laughing about condoms all last night, but now Cora was next to him he couldn’t say the word.
‘I’ve it all organized, Fergus.’
‘But, Cora?’
‘What?’
‘I’ve not ever. You know. Never—’
‘’S fine. We can just lie here, if you like. Together.’
His head thumped. Joe with his conkers would be on the third go-round by now. He ran his hands over her ribs and waist and hips. There wasn’t a spare inch of flesh anywhere. Then she turned and they lay like they had done in his dream, two quiet question marks. His hands and fingers traced her skin. She breathed deeply. When he reached her jaw line, he felt a trace of wet.
‘You’ve been crying,’ he said. Her shoulders shook. She buried her head in his armpit. ‘Cora? What’s wrong?’
‘Oh, Fergus. It’s Mel,’ she said.
‘Mel?’ Strange fragments of a dream came back to him. ‘I was dreaming of her just now.’
‘Were you? What was she doing?’
‘I can’t remember. I was seeing the land, through her eyes. Settlements, cattle, fields. It was cold. And the lough was down there somewhere. You could glimpse it when the clouds shifted.’ He sighed. ‘No different from today.’
He smoothed her fringe over her forehead and got his lips up to hers. They started again on the kissing. He was inside-out with it, frantic. He’d to stop to draw breath.
‘D’you know what it’s been like since yesterday?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘It’s been Kissus interruptus.’
Cora giggled.
‘Now it’s Kissus continuus.’
‘You’re daft, Fergus.’
They had another long kiss. It was like running for his life.
‘So,’ Cora said.
‘So what?’ he gasped. The T-shirt was up around her armpits. The coverlet was tangled between them. It was hard to know whose limb was whose. He was about to explode.
‘D’you want to know what we found out? In Omagh?’
‘Yes. After another kiss.’
She pushed him off and pinched his arm.
‘Ouch.’
‘Shush.’
He untangled the coverlet and spread it neatly over them, his heart thudding so hard he could’ve sworn it would wake the whole house. There was a sudden creak through the paper-thin wall. Felicity. Waking? He froze, listening intently. The night went silent again.
‘Phew,’ he breathed out. ‘Did you hear that?’
‘Yes.’ Cora crept out of the bed. ‘’S too risky, Fergus,’ she whispered. She glided towards the door. Her T-shirt fell back into place.
‘Cora. Wait.’
She paused, touching the door handle.
‘What did you find out in Omagh?’
She shook her head, with a finger to her lips.
‘Please. Tell me.’
She crept back and sat on the edge of the bed. She sighed. Then she leaned over and whispered two words in his ear:
‘Wisdom teeth.’
He frowned, thinking it through.
‘You mean…?’
‘Yes.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Shh.’
‘I should have known it.’ Fergus’s heart raced. He slapped his forehead. All the mentions of Snow White and he hadn’t made the connection. Studying medicine and it hadn’t occurred to him. He remembered the strange hunch of Mel’s little body as he’d seen it in the abattoir, the plump, short arms and stout fingers. It was obvious all of a sudden. ‘She’s not a child at all. Is she?’ He sat up.
‘No.’ Cora took his hand and cradled it to her cheek. ‘She was a dwarf, Fergus. That’s why they killed her.’
With terrible clarity he saw the party of execution, leading Mel up the hillside, shouting and castigating her with a noose around her neck. Diamonds of frost sparkled on the stiff grass. The sun rose crimson over the horizon. Her small feet slipped and they yanked her on, threatening her with the naked blade of a knife.
‘The child time forgot,’ he whispered.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Mam’s thrilled. And Professor Taylor. You’d think they’d discovered America.’
‘Jesus. Poor Mel.’ He put his hand to his neck as if he could feel the noose, tightening.
They sat together, saying nothing. Outside, a grey dawn got under way. He thought of the long corridors of the H-block, the brown packets, the exam questions that had thrown him. He thought of Mel looking out over the glories of the morning mountain for the last time.
‘Cora?’
‘What?’
‘Stay. Please.’
She paused, listening intently, then nodded. As she got back under the coverlet, a chaffinch gave out its first hesitant trill of the day. Cora’s ribs pressed hard up against his. Then there was no sound or sight, just feeling, a pure toppling, free-falling swooooooosh, as of a sparrowhawk swooping down from the sky. He’d to clamp his teeth over his inner lips with the sweet agony of keeping silent. Suffering Saviour. Dying’s like this, he thought. Painful. Beautiful. You stretch out your hands. You meet it like a lover, on cruise-control to your coffin. And he heard all the priests of all his mass days intone the familiar words. In the midst of life, Fergus. In the midst of life we are in death.
Part III
FIGHT OR FLIGHT
Thirty
The funeral party fanned out from the open grave. Photographers, journalists, soldiers were thrown together with the mourners. Half of County Fermanagh was there. You could hardly move a leg.
Father Doyle’s voice led in prayer. The polished, ornate coffin gleamed in the sunshine on its trestles. Whoever had paid for the top-of-the-range model, it wasn’t the Sheehans. Fergus stood twenty yards away, his hands clenched, his eyes trained on the great Scots pine at the far end of the graveyard. ‘Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death,’ the crowd intoned. At the graveside Mrs Sheehan stretched a hand out over the waiting cavity. The Sheehan men, directed by undertakers, slid the coffin from the trestles over the grave. The lowering ropes were put in place. There was a hush. Nobody moved. A late July breeze got up in the surrounding trees, amid the questioning calls of crows.
Lennie Sheehan had died forty-five days into his strike. He’d caught an infection and died sooner than expected. The morning the news of his death broke, women across the North had taken to the streets with dustbin lids, crashing them down onto the tarmac, cymbals of protest. That was the new ritual. Would the dustbin lids of Drumleash ring out soon for Joe? Fergus wondered.
Joe clung on to life still, drifting in and out of consciousness, emaciated. The McCann house was already in mourning. Whenever the phone rang, everyone feared the worst. Previous plans to go south for a family holiday had been discarded. Mam and Da were hardly talking.
Just before Lennie’s coffin was lowered, three men in balaclavas topped by berets, in makeshift army uniforms, appeared from the far side of the church. They took position by the central mourners and fired a round of three shots into the air. Fergus had been expecting it. All the dead hunger strikers had been saluted in this fashion. Some had even been carried to their resting place by balaclava’d pallbearers. The police and army did not intervene.
The Provos’ volleys of gunfire set the crows cawing off the trees. Shots ricocheted across the valley, reverberating between the church and the mountain. Mrs Sheehan keened, then stumbled, almost as if she’d been hit. The British soldiers posted out on the surrounding road stiffened, their weapons at the ready. Fergus recognized Owain, stationed at the church gate. His face was pale, uncertain. His hands gripped his SLR. Fergus tensed. The whole cemetery teetered on the brink of something. Panic leaped through the crowd, like flame to a paper. There were swayings, rustlings, mutterings. One
false move, there’d be a bloodbath.
Then the moment passed. The Provos paused, looked at each other through their eye-slits. One gave a low command and they retreated the way they’d come. There was a familiar Drumleash slope to their shoulders. The gait of the last figure was eerily like Joe’s, as if Joe’s spirit had somehow escaped his prison hospital bed to do this last thing for his comrade in starvation.
Joe, Fergus thought. You’ll be next. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in two weeks. We’ll be here again, in this place. But this time we’ll be grouped around the McCanns’ family plot, under the great Scots pine.
Len’s coffin was lowered. Fergus heard his mam, standing behind him, start up the ‘Hail, Holy Queen’, her favourite prayer, under her breath. ‘To thee do we send up our sighs,’ she muttered, ‘mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.’ The words had made him giggle as a child. He’d gurn and smite his breast, enjoying their lugubriousness. Today they suffocated him. Prayers, mourners, rifles: he’d had enough. He stumbled away through the crowd.
Vale of tears is right. When this is over, the afternoon of Joe’s funeral, I am taking the ferryboat and getting out of here. For ever. He pictured the bouncing waves, the receding town of Larne, the trailing gulls. Then the first sighting of Scotland, the stepping ashore to a whole new life and country. Three Bs or not, I’m off. He pushed his way through the graveyard, past the seat where Michael Rafters had first recruited him with the packets, down the crowded gravelled pathway. By the time he reached the gate, the service was over. Everybody was leaving.
Owain stared at him as he walked by. Fergus raised his eyes to heaven, as if to say the world was a show. Owain half nodded, half grimaced and turned away. His superior barked the order to retreat.
Dog or rat, Fergus thought. Do what you’re told, or run free? Rather a rat, any time.
As he turned onto Drumleash’s main street, he noticed Michael Rafters lounging by a wall. He’d a small backpack at his feet, no doubt containing his balaclava and other Provo attire. For the past three weeks Rafters had been away. There’d been a welcome hiatus with the packet deliveries. He was back like a bad penny, his face brown as a nut. He emanated relaxation, as if he’d been on a world cruise. He’d probably been off to a Provo training camp in some foreign clime.
