Samhain
I AM AT HOME WITH THE DONNELLYS. LAST NIGHT, I WENT TO THE OAK tree and I sat on the low wall. This morning, I walked through the town. The Sunday gathering has convened, and in my distraction I have missed my exit, and I now sit among them at the kitchen table as the soup is served.
‘Did you see the head on Rose Hamill this morning?’ Mam asks, throwing the question across the table like a hopeful gambler rolling the dice. ‘First up to communion, she was, brazen as anything.’
‘Aye, himself wasn’t far behind,’ Dad responds, pulled from a daydream. ‘No shame at all. Came over and shook my hand on the way out.’
‘They’re not coddin’ anyone but themselves, them two,’ Mam continues. ‘And those young ones moping about on the steps again? Can they not go in and sit down like civilised beings? Outside like a bunch of dopes with the whole town gawking at them. God Almighty, is it too much to ask?’
‘I see that Joanne has the new place opened,’ Dad says across the table to Shauna, speaking of her sister who has opened a clothes store. ‘It must be exciting for her.’
‘She was always a great one for the fashion, that one,’ Mam adds.
‘Four years in college is a long time to waste to work in a shop,’ Shauna replies.
I look up, provoked by the pouring of bitter water on the enterprise.
‘She’d be better off going out and getting a job like the rest of us,’ Declan joins the pouring. ‘She’ll never make anything out of that caper.’
‘And you know who else I met on the way out?’ Dad asks, before continuing without waiting for an answer. ‘The bould Sam McComish. He says his youngest has got a start above in the brewery.’
‘That was some stroke to get him into the brewery,’ Mam says. ‘The bould Sam, he’s deadly.’
‘They had pull there,’ Shauna interjects. ‘Herself has a brother above.’
‘Well, that’s them finished,’ Dad says. ‘That’s the last one settled. And you won’t believe this, but Sam’s after taking the redundancy bundle from the job, and they are moving out to Lanzarote for six months every year. Lanzarote? Wherever the hell that is. The world’s gone mad.’
‘She was always shifty, that one,’ Mam says. ‘That’ll be her idea. She always had notions. Where is Lanzarote, Johnny?’
‘Spain,’ I tell them. ‘Well, it’s an African island that belongs to Spain.’ And Mam and Dad shake their heads in astonishment as if I have confirmed that the bould Sam McComish and the shifty one are moving to the Amazon jungle or Mars.
‘And Father Woods is putting together a trip to Knock,’ Dad tells, moving on from the Lanzarote news. ‘I said we’ll go. It’ll help fill the bus.’
‘I’ll let Hannah and Eddie know,’ Mam says. ‘Put the four of us down for it. It’ll be a day out. Will you come with us, Johnny?’
‘Will I come on a trip to Knock?’ I ask. ‘Are you mad? No thanks.’ And everyone laughs.
‘There’s the rain on,’ Dad says, as the first drops tap against the window.
The Sunday conversation continues as I drink tea and retire to my own thoughts, and I think of the girl below the oak tree.
Barnacles
FROM DUNDALK, I TAKE THE EARLY BUS TO DUBLIN. I WILL TAKE THE last bus back to Ennis so I have the whole day in the city with nothing to do. There’s magic in that. I have a coffee to kick the thing off and then I visit the bookshops. I walk around with no plan or direction. I have a fast-food lunch, which I regret like I always do: it only ever fills with a sense of dissatisfaction. In the afternoon, I visit the National Library, just to get a feel of the place, and I do the same in the National Gallery and the museums. And then I go to a pub.
I order a pint of porter. It’s not my favourite. In fact, I don’t really like it, but I’m feeling all Dublinish. I sit at the bar and lift a book from my backpack, and I’m in the third chapter when she mounts the stool beside me. She, too, orders a pint of the black, and she, too, lifts a book from her bag. The book is all Post-its and notes.
‘You know what his dad said of them?’ I ask her, ‘the first time he learned of Nora?’
She turns to me and shakes her head.
‘He said, “She’ll stick with him.” ’
She laughs, and a laugh early on is an important thing: it kind of sets the deal up. We read on, slipping the odd comment sideways, and when I order a pint each we put the books on the counter.
She is an American student, all the way from Pittsburgh, USA. Pittsburgh. I wonder what a place like that could look like, and she is spending a month in the city doing the book thing. She’s all groovy and cool in the way that girls with a comfortable heritage can be: edgy without any edge at all. But she is nice, really nice, and though she is intense about the book and stuff, I cannot help but like her. Girls!
At the end of the second drink, I have a decision to make. I put my book into my backpack. I put the Dunn & Co on over the blue scarf, and I pull the collar up.
‘I have a bus to catch,’ I tell her. ‘The western ocean calls. Can you hear it?’
She smiles through our disappointment. It’s a funny thing how you can miss someone you didn’t know an hour-and-a-half before. But it is true, and I don’t try to hide my own regret. I lean over and kiss her, and then I go.
In the midweek, I have an afternoon off, and I take the Renault to the coast, and I sit on dark rock and run my hand over barnacles as, onto me and onto Ireland, the Atlantic rolls.
A Christmas carol
IT IS CHRISTMAS, AND I AM IN STATION ROAD. MILA HAS GONE TO Bremen for the holidays; Bella, Marcela, and Mick are gone, too. I am alone. On Saint Stephen’s evening, I walk to Brogan’s Hotel, where I stand at the bar and drink beer. The place fills, and I feel a hand on my arm.
‘Hello, lover-boy.’
I turn — it is Dervla Kerrigan. ‘Hello, Jezebel.’
We drink together in the packed bar, and later we go to the nightclub in The Queens Hotel, and afterwards I take her home to Station Road, where I lie her down on the double-bed until morning creeps around the curtain of the east window.
The slanted rain
IT IS THE FIRST DAY OF FEBRUARY, AND THE CHIEF SITS FACING ME IN THE small front room he has used as his study for forty years. Delores — she, too, now in her seventies — taps the door before entering, and leaves a tray of tea and biscuits on the low table between the two armchairs.
‘It’s great to see you again, Johnny,’ she says to me. ‘It’s been too long. You’re looking great anyways.’
‘You’re looking great yourself, Delores,’ I say. ‘There’s no stopping you.’
‘Away out foreign, he tells me he’s been,’ she says, turning towards her husband. ‘Germany. Isn’t it well for the young these days — they have the world at their feet. God, I remember when you came here first, Johnny, such a sweet boy, all fresh and eager, and no arse in your trousers.’
I am often struck by the difference in the couple. She is relaxed with her way and her tongue, and he is all collar and tie, articulate, pedantic, annoying.
‘Fifty years next year,’ she says to me, nodding at him. ‘Fifty years, Johnny. I could have been in and out twice for murder, and still be a free woman.’
‘But what fun you would have missed,’ I say.
‘It has been no fun at all,’ she says, indicating across the room. ‘Look at the state of him — it was like marrying a straitjacket. I’ve been a martyr. I’m not joking, Johnny. When my time is up, there will be a corridor of angels to greet me at the gates of heaven.’ And she leaves the room laughing.
‘She hasn’t lost it,’ I say, as she disappears.
‘She’s a holy show, John. You couldn’t let her out without a chaperone. Still, we all have our crosses.’
It will be ten years this year — since
I was twelve — that I have been coming to this room. First I came to learn. Then I came to talk. And then I came to speculate, to commit, and to plan. I was in my first year at secondary school when the history teacher told us to write an essay on twentieth-century Irish history. Any topic we liked, he told us. He gave us one week, and asked me to stay back the day we handed them in.
‘Now then, young Donnelly,’ he said, holding up the three foolscap pages and reading the title, ‘ “Britain 10–Ireland 0.”’ ‘Would you care to explain this scurrilous article?’ And so I did. I explained how ten IRA prisoners had died on hunger strike, and how it meant nothing and gained nothing. ‘But what about status and the right to wear their own clothes?’ he asked. ‘It doesn’t matter what they wear,’ I told him. ‘They will still be in a British prison, and British soldiers will still be on Irish streets.’ ‘But it hardened public opinion,’ he suggested. ‘It brought attention to the cause. It opened doors.’ ‘Attention fades,’ I told him, ‘and nothing changes, but those men will still be dead. And, by the end of it, people stopped caring — they got used to the dying, the big marches and protests were falling away, the black flags were torn and fading. And it opened no doors worth entering.’ It was quite a speech; I was only twelve. But I was on a roll, so I kept going. I lifted my head and looked into the grey eyes. ‘If they had waited and gone out and shot just one soldier each, instead of sacrificing themselves on a useless battle in prison, there would be ten more of us and ten less of them.’
He looked at me hard. ‘The word is fewer, John. And ten fewer of them.’
The private lessons began the next week. ‘Shows great potential’, he wrote to Mam and Dad. ‘He must be encouraged.’
At first it was all talk. Then he let me help on some minor missions — moving guns and ammunition from one hide to another. It was just the two of us; he was careful to keep me apart from the others, careful to avoid bringing me into contact with any other volunteer. ‘Never attend a march or a funeral,’ he told me, ‘and never sign your name to anything. Do you understand why?’ I told him I did.
Later, we made some attacks of our own. I was fifteen when we first killed together. It was an attack on an informer and his special-branch handler. We shot them both. I knew Delaney worked with others, too, especially on the bombs, but he kept me removed from all that. For years, we prepared our battle plan, and the plan involved getting the gun. And then in 1988 he lost two men, his two bombers. He never told me what happened. He never told me about that stuff; I learned it all on the News. His focus hardened on me after that. I told him that if he got the gun I would take ten of them — one for each of the hunger strikers — and put some right to that wrong. He got the gun. And when it came, and the plan was ready, we agreed to thin the contact, to bring no attention upon us. We set up our operation, our communication, and our means. The mouthy American came to train me, and afterwards we couldn’t let him go.
My code name became Cúchulainn. I call him Chief; he likes that. ‘They know about me, of course,’ he told me. ‘It’ll be a heavy file. I’m too long in the game. But they must never know about you, John — absolute nobody. Not even our own side; especially our own side.’ He told me how he wanted to do things differently; how, by introducing a sniper into the battle, he could make it happen.
‘You must take great care,’ he warns me again today. ‘SAS units are floating around like waste in a sewer. There’s a big push for information. MI5, as well as the Special Branch, are running their own touts; people in the town have been approached.’
‘Informers, the scourge of Ireland,’ I say, and turn to look out at the weather. Outside it is wet, and the wind drives the rain in hard angles against the window. ‘Nothing in Ireland is straight,’ I continue. ‘Even the rain falls at a slant.’
He turns and he, too, looks out at the weather.
‘They can’t be tolerated,’ I continue. ‘Is í ding di féin a scoileann an dair.’
‘It is a wedge of itself that splits the oak,’ he translates, and he gives me that thin smile of his. I watch him, knowing I have him on this one: Is í ding di féin a scoileann an dair is an Irish phrase the Chief himself had taught me years ago.
He tells me to relax, that the Devil himself doesn’t know who the shooter is, but he cautions me again to be careful. He tells me that there are two IRA sniper units preparing in South Armagh, that there is a Belgian FN, and maybe another couple of Barretts on the go.
‘Maybe?’ I ask him.
He ignores me. ‘They will shoot all before them, John, and most likely won’t hit a damn thing. Still, it’s good cover for you. They are planning to shoot out of cars, vans, trucks, horseboxes, everything. They have a platform built into a 626. But their scouting is useful, and they are finding good, dead ground for us. We’ll let them plough ahead with their efforts — it’ll keep the Brits busy, it’ll give us a clear run, and we’ll sneak in under all the noise. We’re going along nicely now.’
I drink my tea, and lift a biscuit off a white plate. I tell him I have seen Sloane and Boyd around town selling An Phoblacht. ‘There is no need to include people of that sort,’ I tell him. ‘It doesn’t do the movement any good.’
He laughs at my annoyance. ‘But there is a need. An army is in need of its foot soldiers. They cannot all be generals. They cannot all be champions — some need to be laid down as foundation for the common good.’
I don’t agree that this should include Sloane and Boyd, but I say nothing.
I turn to the near wall and look on a copy of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic that hangs there. It is an aged print encased in a simple wooden frame. The print has dropped on one side, and so sits at a slight angle within the frame. I have long noted that it is the only thing in this house or about Delaney that is not perfectly neat and aligned, but I know it is also the only thing Delaney possesses that belonged to his father. Apparently, the print has been off-square since it was first mounted, and I guess the Chief feels it’s not for him to change it. People can be peculiar about stuff like that.
Irishmen and Irishwomen: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom … We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people. In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty … We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God, Whose blessing we invoke upon our arms, and we pray that no one who serves that cause will dishonour it by cowardice, inhumanity, or rapine. In this supreme hour the Irish nation must, by its valour and discipline and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the common good, prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called.
How many times have I sat here and read those words?
‘Are you sure you want to go on?’ he asks, reeling me back into our conversation. ‘You’ve done your bit already. You’ve made your mark.’
I shake my head and brush some biscuit crumbs off the Dunn & Co, and we talk about Ennis and Germany before he questions me again.
‘There would be no harm, John, in quitting now. Thatcher is gone. There’s talk of peace; things have changed.’
‘Nothing has changed,’ I reply, and he silently nods.
I tell him I’m near set to go again, but I don’t tell him more. I never tell him much in advance of a shooting. I never phone or write. I seldom visit. When I am ready, I let him know what I need, and when and where. He takes care of supply and transport. When I need a car, one will be waiting. When I need a bicycle, one will be wai
ting. If I needed a fish or a goat, one would be waiting. I find the target, the route in, and the route out. I have a reserve exit plan in place. Getting in is no good if I can’t get out; we have enough bloody martyrs. He is the only one to join me on a mission. If he needs to get a message to me between contacts, he will intercept me. It was his idea that I take the apprenticeship in the engineering works. He said that the training, facility, and location would provide opportunities. He was right.
I say my farewells and leave, and, as I walk away from the Chief through the slanted rain, I think again to that wet day in the woods — the first day he let me kill on my own. I had been walking alone, pushing through heavy weather, the day he intercepted me in the street.
‘Time to fly the nest,’ Delaney said as I sat into the car, a different car to the Chief’s own. And a different car meant action.
‘A unit has been spotted above in Ravensdale Forest. They’re watching the road.’
‘Why are they watching the road?’ I asked, and he ignored me as if he hadn’t heard the question.
‘Who spotted them?’ I asked.
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