After the Lockout

by Darran McCann

  ‘Something has come up, boss. Something unforeseen. It’s the bishop,’ says Turlough.

  ‘At mass tomorrow. He’s going to denounce you,’ says Sean.

  ‘He’s going to tell everyone you are to be excommunicated,’ says Turlough.

  ‘That everyone should shun you.’

  ‘That anyone working on the People’s Hall will be barred from the chapel.’

  ‘Turned away from the altar.’

  ‘Maybe even excommunicated themselves.’

  ‘That mightn’t bother you, but it’ll scare the hell out of people around here.’

  ‘Or put the fear of hell into them.’

  ‘Nobody wants to be a heretic.’

  ‘This is serious stuff, Victor.’

  ‘We could be the only ones left here tomorrow.’

  I don’t know what to say. I look at the People’s Hall and for the first time I’m afraid it might never be completed. This might be as close as I ever get. ‘How do you know about this?’ is all I can think to ask.

  ‘We know everything that goes on in this town,’ says Turlough.

  I run home, not even stopping for a smoke despite the painful stitch that stabs at my side before I’m past the Parochial House. I want only to be home. Even if we get the hall finished, people might boycott the céilí. What a humiliation that would be for us.

  Who am I fooling? The humiliation will be mine. I dash up the road, up the lane, and make it home quicker than I’ve managed since my school days.

  ‘Pius! Daddy!’ I cry. ‘Daddy, where are you? I need to talk to you.’ I open the door of the bedroom. Inside, Pius lies slumped across the bed, his feet dragging on the floor. He hasn’t even managed to collapse properly. Poteen is spilled across the floor, an almost empty bottle lies on its side, telling of Pius’s afternoon and his broken vow. I check in case he’s dead, but of course it’s a stupor, so I put him into the bed and sit in the armchair beside him. I sit there for a long time, two or three hours or more in the pitch black. I’m ready to talk to my father now, I wish to God he would wake up. Excommunication. Even the word sounds like a particularly vicious kind of amputation. Benedict is as formidable as the collar he wears, and I’ve seen men who fought like lions against earthly kings fall to their knees before one of those collars. I wish I could talk to my dad, but I’d settle for just anyone right now. At this hour, there’s only one person I can call on, God help me.

  I enter the barn as quietly as possible, God forbid anyone should see me, and light the storm lantern, which hangs exactly where she said it would. Light flickers across the dim, opaque barn. I wonder whether I ever truly intended to keep the promise I made to myself not to come here. Maybe it was always inevitable. How long before she’ll see? I take the watch from my pocket. Twenty-three minutes past twelve. Almost midnight by the new imperial time that people are too spineless not to acquiesce to. Fat king George gets his extra labour and people just go along with it. If ever a revolution was needed … The barn door opens. Ida comes in and closes it noiselessly behind her. She faces me with a flamboyant flick of her tousled hair. Her eyes flash in the intermittent light of the storm-lantern. ‘It’s you. I knew you’d come,’ she says.

  I make no reply, no move, no gesture, as she comes closer. She’s been asleep, or lying in bed at any rate, and hasn’t even stopped to fix herself before coming to me. She opens her shawl. Her breasts heave up and almost out of her under-dress, and she looks down at her body, then up through her lashes to me, as though issuing a challenge; I should get on with taking what surely I have come for. I reach out my left hand to her right, and my right hand to her left, and slowly, gently, I pull them together, closing over the shawl. ‘I’m not here for that.’

  She’s surprised. She tugs the shawl tightly around her shoulders and steps back. ‘There’s no charge, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ she says, and my expression must convey how appalled I am at the suggestion. ‘What do you want, Mr Lennon?’ she demands, and I’m surprised to realise she’s embarrassed.

  ‘Benedict is going to denounce me from the pulpit in the morning. He’s going to try and have me excommunicated.’

  ‘I thought you were an atheist anyway?’

  ‘But excommunication … I have turned away from the church, but it’s just that …’ I’m struggling, I don’t have the words. I don’t understand myself.

  ‘You signed up to be the Prodigal Son, not Lucifer.’

  ‘He’s going to denounce anyone who stands with me.’

  ‘What are you coming to me for?’

  ‘I don’t know. There was no-one else.’ I pause a moment and take her in. She’s easy to talk to. There’s nothing at stake. ‘Somebody asked me recently why I’m socialist. I couldn’t answer her but I can answer you. I watched the bosses starve a hundred thousand families for the best part of a year. And when we had the bosses beat, it was the priests that finished us. You have never conceived of such cruelty to so many people for so long. God forgive me if I ever make peace with that.’

  ‘I know exactly what you mean,’ she says. ‘Victor, you were at the GPO. The way people talked about you, I thought you’d be eight feet tall. You were a hero. They still want you to be a hero. They haven’t definitely decided you’re not one yet. If you stand against the bishop now, a lot of people will be torn, for a few days, at any rate.’

  There’s wisdom behind those black-as-coal eyes. I must force people to choose sides. They’ll likely fall back in step with the Church after a few days, but those few days and that confusion are there to be used. The iron is hot. If he denounces me from the pulpit, I’ll denounce him from the pews. By the time everyone calms down the People’s Hall will be built and we will have triumphed, and maybe that’ll mean I’m not a false prophet after all. Maybe that’s what prophets are: people who keep a fiction going long enough for it to become true. I thank Ida. She opens her shawl once more, but I shake my head.

  ‘I’m in love with the schoolteacher,’ I say.

  Maggie comes to the door in her night-dress. ‘Do you know what time it is?’

  ‘I’m so sorry for destroying everything. It makes me so sad, but it’s in me and I can’t help it and this time tomorrow I don’t know where we’ll be so I want to tell you now, before whatever happens tomorrow, that I love you and I don’t ever remember not being in love with you and only you.’ I pull her into my arms and our lips come together as though every future kiss hinges on this one. Her lips are so marvellously soft, it’s like they’ve never been kissed before. I open my mouth French-style and she opens hers too, thrusting in her tongue like there’s something in my mouth she desperately wants. Suddenly she withdraws her lips and steps back, looking dazed, but she takes my hand and leads me inside. Closing her bedroom door behind us she turns with eyes wide and dilated and throws her arms around my shoulders. I clinch her waist tightly and move her onto the bed. She pulls me down towards her as my hands fumble stupidly, throwing aside her shawl and undoing her petticoat. He skin smells warm and earthy and moist and her nostrils are splayed wide, and she kisses me angrily as I lift up her skirt and try to untie her knickers. Little beads of sweat form on her brow. I look into her eyes for a sign that what I want, she wants too. ‘Let me,’ she whispers. She undoes the knot, lifts her hips from the bed and slips her undergarments past her hips, her knees, her ankles, and down to the floor. I undo my belt buckle, unbutton my trousers. She opens her legs and I lower myself into her. It takes a moment but we get there. She’s warm and wet, and she holds me tightly. All the time, we peer into each other’s eyes. Sometimes she smiles, sometimes she moans gently, I suppose I do too, but mostly we whisper to one another, over and over, the words ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’

  When it’s over we hold each other for hours. It’s deep in the night when she lifts her head from my chest and looks at me. ‘You still have my heart, Victor. Take care with it this time,’ she says. And I’m gripped with the strangest sense that I’ve done something terrible
to her.

  It was late and he had to rise early, but Stanislaus wanted to read through his notes once more. He had said the Feast of St Margaret of Scotland was a Holy Day of Obligation and no voices had been raised to suggest it wasn’t, so at nine o’clock the next morning the chapel would be full and they’d all be anxious to hear what he had to say. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted Victor to be there: it might be best to denounce the ruffian to his face, but his reaction couldn’t easily be predicted. Stanislaus hoped the sermon was enough to rescue the flock from the demagoguery of a madman. He considered making it starker but forced himself to put down the pen. The sermon had pleased him earlier, before the brandy had warmed his blood. Best to trust that judgement now.

  ‘No compromise between the man defending his home and the arsonist,’ he read aloud. Overdue fighting words. He had the pulpit, he had the authority of the Holy Church and the righteousness of God on his side, yet he had wasted days paralysed at his window watching Godlessness wrack the parish like disease in the body of a loved one. They had almost finished their shrine; a tumour on the landscape. He sipped from his glass. Mrs Geraghty had given him a look when he’d asked her to pick up some more brandy, he had run out already. What business was it of hers? By any but Old Testament standards he’d had a long life and lived through many battles. He had one more in him, then never more. Tomorrow he would declare his parish for Christ and defy anyone to dispute it, but younger men like Tim Daly, with their softness and liberalism, would have to carry on the fight.

  What did Victor Lennon know of famine? Stanislaus had seen famine. And he had seen how the Church had saved the nation from mental and moral collapse afterwards. What is there but the cloth and the bottle, after holocaust? Even yet the nation had not begun to understand its trauma: how could it, having been cleaved from its language by the rusty blade of ethnocide? Having but a mercurial relationship with the brutish new tongue? Victor Lennon and the likes of him were toying with issues deeper than they knew. They were asking too much of a bewildered amputee of a nation, the surviving sibling of a murdered twin.

  Someone was at the front door. Stanislaus looked at the clock but it was a blur in the darkness. He heard Father Daly explain that it was long after a decent hour but soon, footsteps on the creaking staircase were followed by a light, apologetic tap on the study door. Father Daly stuck his head inside. ‘I didn’t know if you were still up. It’s so dark in here, can I turn up the lamp?’ He waited a moment and, hearing no objection, turned up the main lamp, bringing light where there had been a vague glow. ‘Smoky too,’ he said.

  ‘Who the hell is at the door now?’ Stanislaus demanded.

  ‘Charlie Quinn wants to see you. I told him to come back tomorrow but he seems very determined.’

  ‘That boy keeps appalling hours. Tell him to come in.’

  Maggie is gone from the bed when I wake but she’s outside the bedroom door, fussing around and making sure all the Cavanaghs are ready for mass. The clock on the wall shows a quarter to nine and I’m ashamed to have slept so late but thrilled to be where I am. I pull on my trousers and shirt, and I’m washing my face in a basin of clean water left thoughtfully on the dresser when Maggie comes in. Neither of us knows what to say so we share a nervous giggle, and drying my face quickly, I sweep her into my arms and kiss her. She pushes me away with feigned mortification. ‘What if someone comes in?’ she says, but I’m not fooled. I seize her again and plant my lips on her till she’s well and truly kissed. Her resistance revives when she realises I’m manoeuvring her towards the bed. ‘No, Victor, I have to go to mass,’ she whispers, and I’m about to reply but she silences me with a finger to her lips. ‘Wait till we’re all gone to the chapel before you let yourself out. And please don’t let anyone see you.’

  We kiss again and she straightens herself. She opens the door and she’s about to leave when I say: ‘You can’t marry Charlie. You have to marry me.’

  She closes the door and stands inside with her back to me for a moment. Facing the closed door, I fancy she wears a rueful smile as she whispers, as if to herself: ‘If I could talk to myself when I was ten … Charlie and Victor … What would I say?’ She turns to face me. ‘I don’t think I’d be in the least bit surprised.’ Her expression is that of the officious schoolmistress now, no longer the lover. ‘I won’t be a widow in some Dublin tenement.’

  ‘What are you talking about, widow?’

  ‘You said marriage. Marriage means a future and a home. I won’t be mistress to a man married to a cause.’

  ‘Och, Maggie, I’ve asked you to marry me. Are you saying yes or no to me?’

  She opens the door. ‘I’m saying yes to you. But only if we stay here. Both of us. You need to let me know if you can say yes to me.’

  After she’s gone I wait a short while before letting myself out of the house into the empty street. The vacated homes and suspended workplaces are eerie in their silence. All the parish is enclosed behind the granite walls and mahogany doors of the chapel, and the sound of their incantation is at once massive and distant, suggestive of great clamour without drowning the song of the sparrows. The incanting grows louder as I get nearer. No-one has ever before heard of St Margaret of Scotland and it’s no Holy Day of Obligation, but Benedict has issued a summons and that’s the end of it. Sucking down a lungful of air, gently and quietly I open the church door.

  Young men stand solemnly inside the door. Turlough and Sean are among them. They nod as I nudge through. Aidan Cavanagh greets me with eyes that implore me to peace. There’s standing room at the top of the centre aisle, staring straight down the spine of the church to the altar. The pews are packed, and on the altar Benedict mumbles the mumbo jumbo. He’s facing away from the congregation so I don’t know whether he knows of my entrance. Everyone else knows. Whispers ripple through the seated ranks like the thrill a prize-fighter’s arrival sends through a crowd previously unsure the fight would go ahead. TP McGahan brazenly takes notes from the back pew between prayers. He’ll have to explain his lateness to work on a day that is not holy anywhere outside Benedict’s teetering realm, but his Protestant boss and Protestant readers will enjoy a yarn about quarrelling Catholics. Kate McDermott gives me a look that is positively hostile. Charlie turns away after the briefest second, as if he can subject himself to the sight of me no longer. Pius kneels with his forehead on clasped hands, while Maggie kneels in the same posture. I look at her auburn ringlets, her delicate shoulders, her graceful neck. She turns to look at me, something desperate in her eyes. She mouths something, but I can’t make her out. She simplifies: ‘Please. Victor. No.’ A few seats over, Ida Harte ogles me with maniacal glee. Father Daly the Sinn Féiner fixes me with a stare. I’ve met a thousand green-orangeman like him, all with the same prejudices and inconsistencies of thought. Though the dog collar is novel, I will say that.

  ‘Per evangelica dicta deleantur nostra delicta,’ Benedict intones, and the congregation mumbles its part of the call-and-response routine like somnambulant parrots. He puts down the chalice, bows at the tabernacle and walks to the pulpit. I fancy he stalls for a second as he spies me, standing square on and looking straight down the aisle at him. Benedict mounts the stairs of the pulpit slowly, deliberately, and shuffles his papers below the marble lectern, taking time to compose himself. Someone breaks the silence with a hacking cough that seems loud as gunshot. Benedict looks up.

  ‘Most of you will have read about the terrible events in Russia. Some small number of anarchists claim to have affected a revolution in that vast and benighted nation. Time will reveal whether the lawful and moral authorities will return their country to peace, and we must pray that they shall, for the revolutionists do not believe in Christ.’ He pauses and looks down the aisle at me. He speaks well, the old bastard. Clear and commanding. ‘They wish to destroy all forms of religion, these Bolshevists. They are not all Jews, but they would all be Christ-killers. They would give their country over firstly to the kaiser, and then to the devil. Th
eir talk is of equality but their business is the murder of priests.’

  The congregation shifts in the pews and Benedict affects another skilful pause. He leans forward and continues. ‘In this country, we remember Blessed Oliver Plunkett. We remember how we were hunted and hanged for our fealty to the one true faith. We remember when our loyalty to the Holy Father was called treason by others. We know that freedom of faith is not a right but a hard-won and easily lost prize. I am old enough to remember the old folk speak of the Mass Rock. I remember old priests telling of their lives as fugitives. These were heroic men, criminalised for their vocation. Those hellish days, in truth, happened only a moment ago. Only our vigilance prevents their return. The faithful in Russia are confronted with that reality this very day.’

  He pauses for a long time and casts his eye around a congregation planted in rapt silence. The thrust for my jugular is coming, I can feel it, but for Maggie’s sake I will remain silent.

  ‘And yet despite all this, people in our midst applaud the Bolshevists. Some people in this country and in this very parish feel quite relaxed about such an attack on the faith. The evidence of this is plain to see in the temple of wood and tin being built in the Poor Ground, just yards from this holy place.’

  Unrest washes through the church. There’s naked shock in the eyes of men who’ve worked by my side all week. They only want a bit of a dance on Saturday night to celebrate the footballers. He’s telling them that hammering a nail through tin at Madden Poor Ground is like hammering one through flesh and sinew on a bloody cross at Calvary, and I don’t think the congregation wants to shoulder it. Unless I miss my guess, Benedict is over-playing his hand.

  ‘Many of you have helped build that monstrosity with the most honest motives, and have no truck with any wicked Russian creed. My good news to you this morning is that it’s not too late to turn away from those who would mislead you. I say to you, in the name of the Lord, I will not stand idly by and watch an agent of evil lead my flock as lambs to damnation. Victor Lennon, you are the corrupter. You are the serpent. You choose to rule in the Poor Ground rather than serve in heaven,’ Benedict says, the scorn oozing like slime from the pulpit. He’s staring at me, daring me to the struggle. I do not avert my eyes from him, but for Maggie’s sake, neither do I speak. ‘Your empire, your soviet, is built on the bones of the damned, where no respectable Christian will touch it.’