‘Thieves! Robbers! Anarchists!’ he cries. Idiot obviously knows nothing about anarchism. Aidan Cavanagh looks to me with confusion. Sean taps his finger against his temple. Faces appear at windows along the street. ‘Those are my ladders and I want them back. Or are you going to strong-arm me in front of everyone?’ Charlie wails. He looks like he might break down in tears. Seeing a grown man lose the run of himself so completely is unedifying for everyone. He approaches, close enough to hit me with his cane, and says: ‘You can’t just take a man’s things.’ He’s almost sobbing now, as the rain batters his cheeks, but as he speaks, lamentably, pathetically, he loses his balance. He tumbles forward and plants his cane into the ground too successfully: it remains upright and he almost impales his armpit on it. I move in to try and catch him but not quickly enough and he falls forward on his stump, his entire body weight pushing it down into the mud. He shrieks with pain and all around, men turn away and wince. I pick him up and hold him in my arms. He pants as though he couldn’t catch his breath and his eyes are wide as two-bob bits. He looks at something behind my shoulder with naked dread. ‘Oh Jesus, my heart, I can feel my heart, can you not feel my heart? It’s going to jump out of my chest,’ he whispers, his terror terrifying, but there’s nothing behind me, nothing that should scare him so. It’s pitch dark save for the dim lights of lanterns while beyond, in the miserable rain, the new stanchions stick up out of the Poor Ground like the giant legs of an upturned table. Charlie convulses. Turlough, Sean, Aidan, all the men, they all look at me as though I should know what’s to be done, but I have nothing. The rain falls hard on Charlie’s forehead and, looking into his manic eyes and trembling limbs, I want more than anything to tell him I’m sorry.
‘Stand aside. Let me see him,’ a voice commands and, feeling a hand on my shoulder, I move away without protest. Benedict kneels down and takes Charlie in his arms; gently, gingerly he cradles him and pushes the hair from his eyes and forehead. Father Daly stands with him, and, when Benedict signals, the young priest picks Charlie up and carries him towards the Parochial House. He’s stronger than he looks, that Father Daly.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ I say.
‘I’ll take care of him from here,’ the bishop replies.
By the end of the month you have fifty thousand men from all trades with you. Sister unions in England send essentials on supply ships and help with the strike pay. Each man on strike gets ten shillings a week. Not much, but enough to survive the duration. You know the bosses are rattled when a police contact reveals there’s a bench warrant out for Big Jim; if he comes to Dublin he’ll be arrested. But he’s already in Dublin, holed up in a secret location only you and a few others know. You hit the streets and make sure all of Dublin knows that Big Jim Larkin will address a monster meeting on the street they call Sackville and you call O’Connell the next Saturday, warrant or no warrant.
O’Connell Street is black with strikers and supporters. Murphy has handed over his Metropole Hotel to the peelers for the day, and there’s hundreds of them there. They’re supposed to be keeping their eyes peeled but they’re too busy stuffing their faces with cucumber sandwiches, the fat, corrupt bastards, to notice when a very tall, broad, angular lady in a peacock hat walks into the foyer. A uniformed ‘porter’ follows with her luggage. The peelers step aside for the ‘lady’ and they don’t look at you at all. You’re just the bag-carrier, not worth noticing. Big Jim walks quickly and, it must be said, gracefully up the stairs to a room on the first floor. Below on the street they must be bemused to see a lady in a peacock hat appear at the balcony, until the lady throws off the disguise and growls, in that familiar voice, for workers of all nations to unite. The crowd goes half demented. Big Jim’s voice rises and falls like a trumpet. He is a great soloist, his register the melody, the roar of the workers the chord. The workers respond. Finally they’re hearing something worth listening to. They cheer when cheering is right and listen silently when silent listening is needed. They raise up their heads, perhaps for the first time in their lives. His words will stay with all who hear them.
‘This great fight of ours is not simply a question of shorter hours or better wages. It is a great fight for human liberty, liberty to live as human beings should live, exercising their God-given faculties and powers over nature; always aiming to reach out for a higher betterment and development, trying to achieve in our own time the dreams of great thinkers and poets of this nation – not as some men do, working for their own individual betterment and aggrandisement.’
Humiliated peelers with axes make splinters of the barricaded door. You signal to Big Jim that it’s time; a comrade throws up a rope from beneath the balcony and he shins down to the safety of ten thousand comrades. They have the Dublin Metropolitan Police but you have the Irish Citizen Army. The peelers are too late to catch him. They give you an awful hiding in the cells of Store Street that night, but it’s worth it.
Father Daly laid Charlie on the sofa in the kitchen while Stanislaus poured him a glass of water. Wide eyes and shallow breathing testified to Charlie’s terror but there was none of the violent writhing Stanislaus had seen in lunatics he had given Last Rites to. As Stanislaus poured water onto his audibly dry lips he fancied he could hear Charlie’s heart beating in his chest. The water was pacifying; Charlie’s breathing slowed and his eyes ceased their darting. Father Daly put a cushion under Charlie’s head and draped his overcoat across him like a blanket. Charlie shivered and pulled the collar of the coat up to his chin. Stanislaus told Father Daly to go and find Margaret Cavanagh.
‘It was so cold, the rain went through you. I couldn’t get a breath. My mouth was so dry, like I couldn’t even swallow,’ said Charlie, the poor lad babbling.
Thirty-one out of a hundred and seventeen Madden boys of military age had joined the British army in 1914; a large percentage if you excluded those who would have chosen the gallows first. John Redmond said Irishmen should fight for little Catholic Belgium and the rights of small nations, and Charlie’s late father had been a great admirer of Redmond. Charlie asked for advice, and Stanislaus told him of Cardinal Logue’s wise non-opposition to the war – true, in 1914 only a few dozen of Ireland’s three thousand Catholic clergy actively supported the war and got involved in recruitment, but even fewer openly opposed it. So like the others, Charlie joined up, believing he had the bishop’s blessing. Now, fourteen of the thirty-one Madden boys were dead. Sixteen remained in the field, but in the saddest recess of his heart Stanislaus knew the ratio had not finished shifting. Only Charlie had returned home so far, and to an Ireland changed by Easter Week. There would be no new recruits from Madden, Victor and his comrades had ensured that. The imperial dead would lie silently disavowed.
‘What were you and Victor arguing about?’ asked Stanislaus, and when the boy seemed unable to answer, Stanislaus put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed reassuringly. He went out to the kitchen and made a cup of tea with five spoonfuls of sugar. ‘For the shock.’ Charlie held the cup between his hands as though warming himself, and though the sweetness seemed to sicken him, drank every drop obediently.
‘Victor’s gone mad,’ he said at last. ‘People need to know the truth about him.’
‘All right, Charlie, don’t upset yourself now. Everything is going to be all right.’ Stanislaus paused. ‘But you’re right, people do need to know the truth about him. Otherwise, how will they know which side they should be on?’
Charlie nodded. ‘I’m on your side, Father.’
Margaret Cavanagh arrived brandishing her father’s medical bag. She brushed past Stanislaus and started fussing over Charlie. ‘Did you feel a tingling in your lips and fingers?’ she asked.
‘I don’t have shell shock. I’ve seen them that has it. I’m nothing like that.’
‘Did you find your vision getting blurry around the edges?’
‘I thought I was going blind.’
‘And the leg?’
‘It’s fine. It only hurt for a few minute
s.’
‘I’d better have a look.’
She stroked his cheek before she lifted the overcoat from his legs. The bandage was spattered in mud but there was no sign of blood seeping through. ‘This dressing is filthy,’ she scolded as she rolled it away. ‘Tell me if it gets too painful.’ She removed the last of the bandage to reveal a hairless, featureless mound of flesh stretching a few inches below his knee. ‘You’re lucky, the skin hasn’t broken,’ she said, which Stanislaus thought astonishing, so fragile was the flesh drawn across the stump of the absent limb. It was like the skin of a drum stretched so tightly it would surely puncture with the first beat. Stanislaus had seen a broken-down stump once. It was all boils and sores, and it bled and wept and cracked. Charlie was lucky. He pulled the coat further up over his face to hide his tears, and Stanislaus felt for the pale, skin-and-bones boy. Father Daly brought a basin of soapy water and a sponge, and Miss Cavanagh washed Charlie’s stump. When it was clean and smelling of Lifebuoy, she took a fresh bandage from her medical bag and, holding the stump with one hand, unrolled the bandage in a criss-cross pattern with the other, starting at the bottom and working up to a point a few inches above the knee. Stanislaus lifted the dirty bandages and stuffed them in the range door to the fire. ‘These are only fit for one place,’ he said. ‘Miss Cavanagh, will you look in on him from time to time, to see to his bandages?’
‘I will,’ she said.
‘He really shouldn’t be living alone. He needs someone to look after him.’
Stanislaus led Father Daly out of the room, leaving Miss Cavanagh and Charlie Quinn alone together.
Mercifully, the rain hasn’t penetrated the tarpaulins around the feet of the stanchions, so the cement has set and they stand steady as stone pillars now. Sean gets half the men to keep making the timber frames while Turlough gets the other half up ladders, affixing the completed frames to the stanchions. By noon, a discernible shape is beginning to emerge. However, I count only thirty-five men on site this morning, eleven down on yesterday. If we keep losing men, we’ll have no chance of completing work by Saturday. I ask around, to see if anyone knows where the missing men are, but no-one seems to know. I stand by the wall of the Poor Ground and watch as the clanging of the bell at the National School presages an out-flowing of schoolboys and schoolgirls onto the street. Four young fellows of about eleven with satchels on their backs walk past. Turlough calls over a skinny, gangly lad with a mess of red hair. ‘Come here, young Knipe, till I talk to you. Where’s your da today? Why’s he not here?’
‘He said he wasn’t coming today.’
‘And why was that now?’
‘My ma says the priest is against the whole thing and he said he isn’t going to go against the priest.’
‘We haven’t heard a word from the priest about anything. If he was against it, wouldn’t he come down here and say so?’ I say.
‘You know who this is, don’t you?’ says Turlough to the young lads.
Young Knipe’s face lights up and his mates nod their heads excitedly. ‘Victor Lennon.’
‘Why don’t you lads come in and help us? All the men are doing it,’ I say.
‘You hear that, lads? This man stood up for his country and stuck his finger in John Bull’s eye. Now he’s asking you, will you do your duty for your country or will you not?’ cries Turlough, and the lads clamber excitedly over the wall. Turlough stops young Knipe. ‘You go to the schoolyard and round up as many of your mates as you can. Tell them there’s work to be done, far more important than oul schooling.’
Soon enough we have twenty-five boys holding ladders, carrying timber and hammering nails. Sons hold ladders and pass tools up to fathers who, under the enthralled inspection of their heirs, work all the harder. I’m not thrilled about taking them out of school, but the virtue of the goal mandates imperfections in execution. The whole thing runs smoothly and we make spectacular progress. I owe everything to Turlough and Sean; without them everything would fall apart, and I tell Turlough as much.
‘Well now, I was meaning to mention this,’ he says. ‘We got a telegram this morning. There’s a man in Darkley, a man I’ve done work for before. He wants us to build him a new cattle shed, but he needs it immediately. Needs us to start tomorrow. I haven’t replied yet but he’s offering four pounds. God knows that’s a lot of money to us, Victor. There’s so little work in the country at the minute.’
‘I gave youse two pound.’
‘Very generous it was too, Victor. And you know, myself and Sean believe in what we’re doing here, really we do. We believe in you. You’re a great man, Victor. So I’ll tell him to keep his four pound, we’re staying here and finishing this hall. If you can match it.’
There is no telegram, no man in Darkley offering ridiculously generous wages. They know their value, like the capitalists they are. Turlough smiles at me and I want to smash his fucking face in. I nod in acquiescence but I have to walk away and go and stand by the wall, holding on like a passenger gripping the rails of the deck and trying not to be seasick. I’m not sure how long I’m standing there before I hear a commotion. Maggie climbs over the wall into the Poor Ground and, safely on her feet, storms over to the work site and grabs young Knipe by the ear.
‘Why aren’t you in my classroom?’ she demands, dragging him by his lughole away from the ladder he was holding for John McDermott, who cries out in protest. Maggie pays him no heed. She leaves young Knipe standing by the wall nursing his ear, and moves quickly towards another young fellow. ‘Peter McWilliams, do you think you’re going to improve your atrocious grammar with a hammer in your hand?’ she says as she slaps the lad hard across the face. The crack rings loudly.
‘I’m sorry, Miss Cavanagh, I told the boy he could come with me for the day,’ says the boy’s father but Maggie shakes her head sternly and he turns away, shamefaced.
‘Every single one of you who should be in school, if you’re not lined up against that wall in ten seconds flat, I’ll turn your hands to leather,’ she cries, and as I move gingerly towards her, she gives me a withering stare. ‘One. Two. Three. Four …’ The schoolboy volunteers are lined up against the wall in considerably less than ten seconds, and Maggie leads the hangdog phalanx back up the street. I hop over the wall and follow them. She stands by the door of the National School and ushers them all inside, keeping a furious eye on me as I approach. ‘You stole half my class,’ she says.
‘There’s an education to be had outside these walls, you know. They can learn a lot in a few days working with me.’
She shakes her head. ‘Jesus Christ,’ is all she says as she slams the schoolhouse door in my face.
As I trudge back down the street, I see Charlie watching from his window. Smirking bastard. Who is he to judge me? How many has he widowed and orphaned? Every day the headlines say the war is being won but the small print carries the names of the dead, and the lists are long. Workers killed by workers. People like Charlie killing people like himself. And he volunteered. Volunteered to kill fellow workers for king and empire and capital. What if they’d sent him to Dublin for Easter Week? What if he’d seen me in his crosshairs: would he have hesitated? Would I? Comrade Lenin must have friends who disagree with him, or even abhor him. And surely he has some allies who are scoundrels he’d otherwise cross the street to avoid. Politics is not about friendship, it is about alliances of interest. This is only truer of revolution. Revolution is often incompatible with human concerns like friendship or love. Let Charlie abhor me if he must. But I wish it was Charlie standing by my side now, not the Moriartys. Not those parasites.
At dusk on Wednesday the pentagonal, timber-framed skeleton of the building is complete. We’re ahead of schedule. I’d thought it would’ve been Thursday or even Friday before we got to this point. As we’re knocking off for the day Aidan Cavanagh comes up to me and shows me an inside page from the Armagh Guardian. There’s a Charlie Chaplin show at the Cosy Corner picture house, the new place on Russell Street. He says Maggie me
ntioned in passing how much she wanted to see the show. I doubt she wants to see me at all, but it is Wednesday. Better to assume the invitation in the condensation of the car window still stands, than risk standing her up.
When I call to the house, Aidan answers the door with a conspiratorial nod. I show him the bunch of daisies. ‘Very nice, she’ll like them,’ he says. ‘Maggie! Door!’
I lick my palm, pat down my carefully combed hair, finger my tie nervously. I never wear a tie but Pius talked me into it. No woman of calibre will take seriously a man who doesn’t wear a tie, he reckons. Better to have one and need it than need one and not have it, I suppose. I’m fidgeting as she appears at the door. She gives me a look that demands I state my business quickly.
‘It’s Wednesday.’
She folds her arms.
‘I have the cart waiting. I have money for two tickets to the pictures, two hot water bottles and two dinners at the Rainbow Café.’ I jut out my arm, inviting her to take it.
‘You can’t be serious.’
‘I made sure none of your pupils were working on the site today. I even chased a couple of young ones I found mitching off up the road there.’ She eyes the daisies sceptically as I hand them to her, but she does take them. She holds them to her nose.
‘I have far too much to do here to be gallivanting to the pictures,’ she says sternly.
After the Lockout Page 14
