The Death of an Irish Tinker

by Bartholomew Gill

  Back on the footpath now, rushing by the gates to Dublin Castle, Biddy could see a guard in the kiosk, and she thought of turning in. He too could make a phone call. There was even some class of guard office right there on the grounds, as she remembered. But would he or any shade believe her, a Tinker and former junkie, a pavement artist with a long record and now a tall tale? How long would it take her to convince them that what she said was true and send a car to the flat? Too long, she decided. And had she not learned never to trust the shades again? Not after what they’d done to her those first few months in the city when she was nine.

  Raped repeatedly, night after night, by the boys in the gang of Traveler children who were living by the dump in Ringsend, Biddy had hemorrhaged and fainted in the street. The shades took care of her all right; out of the fat into the fire. From the Richmond Hospital they took her to a “shelter” where she was molested every night by the superior of the place. To give the nun credit, she was gentler than the boys. Sometimes.

  Christ, a limo now poked out its bonnet at the top of the street. It was a Merc, long and black with tinted windows and an amber spotlight that the driver was playing along the footpath, as the car drifted toward her.

  Biddy nipped into the Castle Inn, the bar, not the lounge, and noted how conversations stopped the moment she appeared in the doorway. Sure, she must have color in her cheeks after all her running, but to appear hatless and coatless on such a bitter night and dressed only in a fisherman’s knit jumper and a long plaid kilt with her tangled blond tresses and two-color eyes, Biddy could be only one thing. “Knacker,” she heard somebody mutter.

  Her eyes darted first to the other doors: to the lounge, another in back of the bar that seemed to lead to a kitchen, and a third that was the men’s room. Next she scanned the crowd to see whose eyes were still on her good chest. Without her coat or chalk box she had no money, and she should ring up and warn Mickalou while she still had the chance.

  She turned to a middle-aged man who was sitting against the wall. A whiskey drinker who had on a good suit, he was probably some bureaucrat from the nearby City Hall or the Castle. “Please, sir, for the love of God, could you give me a bit of help? It’s a matter of life and death,” she whispered in a chesty rush, words that she had heard her mother and so many other Traveling women utter over the price of a bottle of milk, but here what she said was the truth. “May I fall down paralyzed dead, if I’m tellin’ you a word of a lie. I’ve to make a phone call. Two lives depend on it, and I came away without me coat and purse.”

  “You there, woman,” the barman called to her. “Out, out with yeh now! No beggin’ in here.”

  But she had fixed the man with her eyes that she knew would tell him truer than words. There was a long moment on which her entire life seemed to hinge, as the barman came around to put her out in front of the Toddler’s Mercedes and the man paused to decide. But his hand reached out and shoved a fifty pence coin toward her.

  “God love ye, sir. You’re a savior.” She turned toward the phone.

  “It’s not God’s love that I need tonight,” he said to a companion.

  “Being a sinning savior.”

  They had a laugh.

  In an undertone the barman said to her, “After that—out. Or I’ll toss you out myself.”

  There was no answer at the flat, which was good. Maybe Mickalou had not got home. On the other hand, maybe they had already lifted him. Their child, Oney, was being minded by the woman in the flat below, whose name was Morrisey.

  But when Biddy opened the telephone directory and turned to the M’s, she despaired when she realized that she did not know how to spell the name or the street—John Dillon—that the building was on. She had never attended school, not for a day, and nobody in her family could read.

  Her father was proud of it. “Buffer voodoo,” he called the written word. “I need only know where I am, when I am, and what’s bubblin’,” he once bragged when drunk. “The rest is pox.”

  Biddy was wasting time. Slamming shut the directory, she turned to see one of the Toddler’s murdering shades coming in the bar door, and she stepped back quickly into the shadows, then opened the door to the lounge.

  “Did any of yous see…” she heard him ask the bar in a harsh Joxer accent, as the door closed. For muscle the Toddler hired only North Side Dublin gougers, Mickalou had said. “The rougher the better. While he sounds like somebody off the BBC.”

  Turning around, Biddy expected to find the other one coming into the lounge from the street. Instead she found only an old woman finishing a pint. “If anybody comes in searching for me, for the love of God, don’t tell them I’m here. I swear on my child they’re not guards, and they’re only after murdering a man on Stephen’s Green. Now it’s me.”

  Biddy rushed to the back of the long dim room and toward the ladies’ she could see over a door. But the sign wouldn’t stop them; they’d look there.

  “The other door,” the old lady said. “Go down the stairs and out the back. Guards is scum.”

  Biddy had only closed the door when she heard, “She go t’rough here?” Then louder: “You—old one!—she go t’rough here? The girl. Blond, a Tinker. Which way?”

  “I’m deaf. I can’t hear you.”

  “Did a Tinker bitch go t’rough here?” he roared. “Fook wi’d me, and I’ll pop yuh!”

  “Is that a gun? Will you shoot me?”

  In the utter darkness Biddy had to feel her way down the stairway into the cellar that stank of rotting porter lees and rats’ nests. She heard the door to the loo bang open and then the metal doors of the toilet stalls. Finally the door above her went wide, and the stairway was flooded with light. But by then Biddy had found the back door.

  She waited to see if the man would start down, but when he didn’t, she stepped into the night and lit out, running as fast as she could through the dark side streets and laneways.

  CHAPTER 3

  Crush!

  AT PATRICK STREET, a main and well-lighted thoroughfare four blocks distant, Biddy paused until traffic eased before sprinting through the cadmium haze to John Dillon Street, which was hard by.

  There she concealed herself behind a parked lorry and waited for less time than she should but more than she could afford. When she was satisfied that there appeared to be nobody about or nothing unusual in the street, Biddy made her way around to the alley, scaled the wall, and dropped down into the back garden.

  At the kitchen door she listened to the sounds coming from the frosted glass panel of June Morrisey’s kitchen door. Among the voices of June’s five children, she could hear Oney, which meant that Mickalou had not stopped around to collect her and was not home. She rapped on the door.

  “Jaysus, Biddy, you gave me a fright. Did you forget your keys? Where’s your coat and hat?”

  Oney came running out to Biddy, who picked her up and hugged her within an inch of her life. There for a while she thought she would never see Oney again. But she’d have time enough for hugs and thanks when the three of them got clear.

  “I’m in big trouble, June.” Biddy stepped into the kitchen and began walking toward the hall door. “Someday I might be able to tell you about it. Right now I have to go upstairs, put some clothes together, and leave. We won’t be back. If Mick’s not back before I go, could you tell him—” Biddy racked her brain for what she could say that would not make June a party to what had happened but would make Mickelou understand that he too had to shift. There was no other way. “Tell him the g’ami shadogs is toreen, crush!”

  “What?”

  “It’s Gammon,” which was the Traveler secret language that was as old as there had been Travelers, Biddy’s grandmother had told her, and that was over a thousand years. Mickalou, who knew such things, said it had been spoken first like Irish and now like English, but with Gammon words that could be understood only by their own.

  Travelers used Gammon while buying or selling to buffers or in court or when shades were in
camp. It was also a way of telling a real Traveler from some traveling buffer. The sentence Biddy had said meant, “The bad police are onto us, clear out!”

  Biddy repeated the statement. “Can you say it?”

  June tried but only got a part of it right.

  “Maybe if you wrote it down for me.”

  June hunched her shoulders. “I don’t have a clue how to spell them words, but I’ll try.”

  Biddy carried the note upstairs with her and propped it on the kitchen table. She then threw together three kits, one for each of them, and poured all the money from the fish bowl into a plastic bag that she stuffed in her coat. It was all the money—less expenses—that she and Mickalou had made in the last few days and hardly enough to take Oney and her far from Dublin.

  Mickalou would have whatever he made that afternoon, which was always more than Biddy, and she rued the day that she let him talk her into a bank account. “Banks is for buffers,” she had complained. “What happens if we have to shift in the middle of the night?”

  Said Mick, “That was our other life”—when we were shooting dope, he meant. “This is now.” And them the King and Queen of the Buskers. “We’ll leave only when we want to. And when we do, our savings will give us the legs for shifting properly. We might even emigrate.”

  Even then Biddy had thought Mickalou had forgotten who they really were to the settled people who mattered. Just two poor Tinkers, who did not. To the lot of them, Tinkers were scarcely human. “Itinerants” was the word that they used on the telly. At first Biddy, like most of her people, had not known what the word meant, although it sounded bad. And was.

  Placing Mickalou’s kit on the table near the note, where he’d see it first thing when he came in, Biddy stopped for a moment to look around. There was the cooker they had scavenged together, the lino on the floor his father had put in, and all the Traveler detailing Biddy had painted over the doors and in the tiny sitting room in brilliant red and yellow, the Travelers’ colors. She’d painted horses’ heads, scrollwork, fruit clusters, and lucky horseshoes. They had even bought a wee budgie that was sleeping in its cage and they’d never see again.

  Biddy had been happier here than she had ever been in her life. In Mickalou she had found a man who was different from the common run of Travelers and muckers she had known—not selfish and brutal and demanding but kind and considerate and fun to be with. When she was not, it was as if there were a part of her missing.

  And then she also loved him because he loved—as she did herself—something that was not himself, that was “exalted,” he explained to her. For him it was Irish music and the bagpipe, which he worshiped beyond distraction; for her it was drawing where she could and did lose herself for hours on end. It wasn’t work.

  Jesus Christ Almighty and all the saints in heaven and sinners in hell, she prayed silently. Please help us through this. If you do, I’ll—Biddy did not know what she’d do, but she’d do something religious and deserving.

  She switched off the lights and had nearly closed the door, when she remembered IDs that she had been given along with the “effects,” the police had called them, of a friend she had gone into rehab with and who had hanged herself the day they got out. Beth Waters had no family that they could locate back in England, but she’d had a driver’s license and national health card. With those in her pocket, Biddy locked the door and rushed down the stairs.

  “Can’t you tell me about it?” June asked.

  “Believe me, it’s nothing you’d be wanting to know.”

  “Is it drugs?” “Again,” went unsaid, since Biddy had told June about the recovery meetings they went to nearly every day.

  Biddy shook her head and pulled two jumpers over Oney’s head, then added a thin jacket, a medium-weight jacket, and finally a stout winter coat. Traveling people had known, years before ski clothes came in, that layers kept you snug. The child was falling asleep, and Biddy picked her up in her arms.

  Biddy regarded her smaller, older friend, who had been so helpful to her. “If anybody calls round, guards even, say nothing. You don’t know me; you never did. Mick and me were just two Knackers who lived upstairs, and you’re glad to be rid of us.”

  June’s face was drawn in disbelief; settled people just did not leave like this. “But where are you going? Can I call you a cab?”

  Biddy shook her head. Cabs kept records, and cabbies took tips, the larger the better. The Toddler would only need to circulate the message that he had a hundred pounds for whoever knew where the “Tinker bitch” had gone, “the one from the top of Grafton Street. The blonde with the chalks and the pictures.” Biddy would make her way back to her people by herself and leave off her daughter. Then she’d quit the country altogether. It was her only chance.

  She handed June her key. “There’s the budgie. Don’t let her die. In two weeks, before the rent comes due, go in and take whatever you fancy. Or take it all and make a few bob. We won’t be needing a thing.”

  Tears popped from June’s eyes. “Then you’re serious.”

  Biddy shrugged and picked up Oney. It was what it meant to be a Traveler—even a straight, honest, law-abiding, working, bill-paying Traveler who was Queen of the Buskers. Nothing was permanent.

  It was then they heard the front door to the building open and men’s voices in the hall. One was Mickalou’s, and he was speaking loud and Tinker-theatrical, as if to warn her. “Amn’t I after tellin’ yeh now she don’t be home? There’s not a light showing in the flat. I can bring you, now, to where she might be. I know the pubs, the spots. She’ll take the wee drop, yeh know, and it’s there she must be.”

  Hearing Mickalou’s voice, Oney woke up and cried out, “Mickey, Mickey!” which is what she called him, before Biddy could clamp a hand over the child’s mouth.

  “We’ll have a look for ourselves, if you don’t mind. Lead the way, like a good chap.” Biddy didn’t have to peek out to know; it was a soft, intelligent-sounding voice. Neutral in accent but maybe a bit Yank. The Toddler.

  Biddy did not know what to do: stay where she was or go out the back, the way she had come in, and chance the alley. But could the Toddler have covered that too, thinking she might bolt?

  Now they heard footsteps climbing the stairs and the jingle of keys as Mickalou opened the door. “See, look for yourselves.”

  There was a pause and more moving about, as the two “cops”—Biddy supposed—searched the flat. Because they heard the Toddler plain, when he said, “What do we have here?”

  “My kit.”

  “You’re off, then? Where to?”

  “See me folks.”

  “And where would they be?”

  “In the North.”

  “Where in the North?”

  “Campin’ in the North. I’ll have to ask round to catch them up.” Ask other Travelers, Mickalou meant, although he was only being dodgy. His parents were camped near Glenties in Donegal, far to the west of Dublin.

  “And this. Could you tell me what this says?”

  It was the note, Biddy was certain.

  There was another pause, in which they could hear things being tossed about deeper within the apartment.

  “I dunno. She leaves me notes, but she can’t write. She’s illiterate, not a day of school in her life. But isn’t it the thought that matters?” It was just like Mickalou: There he was in danger of his life, yet he was having the Toddler off.

  “Now here’s an interesting word, toreen. What does toreen mean?”

  “Beats me. Like I said, it’s gibberish. And crush. Now, there’s a good word for my situation.” Mickalou went on loud down the stairs, as though telling Biddy what she should do because he’d heard the baby and suspected she was in with June. Crush meant “clear out.” “It’s how I feel, Tod. You pull me off the street, you sit on me, and all I hear is Biddy. What she do? How’d she offend you? Tell me, so I can make it right?”

  “Ah, my young friend. You’ll do that and more, if we don’t find her soon.
But not to worry. I have faith in you. Weren’t we once partners? Now, come along. We’ll visit these ‘spots’ you spoke of.”

  Biddy despaired at leaving Mickalou with the Toddler, but there was no other choice short of giving up all three of them. Also Mickalou had an easy way of getting on with people, even the likes of the Toddler, whom, after all, he had once worked for. And finally Mickalou was a party to none of what had happened there on the corner and knew nothing about it. Why would the Toddler want to harm him?

  Thanking June with her eyes, Biddy made straight for the kitchen door, which she opened quietly. She stepped out, waved once, and fled through the back garden.

  The alley was empty and led to a quiet street and another alley and so forth—all places that Biddy had begged, door to door, in years past. It was her one advantage: knowing how to move through the city in a way that no car could follow.

  Yet she had the feeling that she was being followed. All the more so when, at Harold’s Cross a long mile distant from John Dillon Street, she chanced to step out of the shadows and wait for a bus that would take her to Tallaght, where she did not know what she would find.

  The Toddler or her parents or, worse, both.

  CHAPTER 4

  Caw

  Dublin

  November

  WINTER CAME EARLY that year with cold winds and lashing rain that began in September and scarcely let up for whole weeks on end.

  By November Dublin was blear and chill, as though a permanent pall had fallen over the city. Conversation was muted, voices were hushed, and even lifelong Dubs seemed beset and without hope that the short days would ever brighten.