I hear a call as someone enters the pub: ‘An Phoblacht — Republican News! An Phoblacht — Republican News!’ I turn; it is Slime Sloane. It is a weakness in the IRA that they allow arseholes the glory of association. Are we that desperate? It is a flaw that proves time and time again to be fatal, and it fucking annoys me. Sloane doesn’t see me. I look behind to see that only Bobby Boyd is keeping cover at the door. I rise quickly and take the back of Sloane’s leaning leg. As he falls I catch him, turn him, march him to the door, and throw him out onto the pavement. Boyd has already scarpered.
‘You’ll pay for this, Donnelly,’ Sloane says, as he rises. ‘You’re a dead man.’
I walk to him, grab him, and talk into his ear. ‘I don’t think so, Slime. Good people haven’t died for dickheads like you to ride the bandwagon. Now fuck off.’ Well, what can I say? I know I should have ignored him, but this guy just pisses me off. He’s too much to take.
I return to the group and relieve the tension by telling a few school stories of Sloane. Later, as the drink settles, there is talk of Britain and Ireland, of colony and rebellion. I don’t contribute much. After the politics and history, we leave the pub and go to a nightclub, where we dance until early morning, and afterwards we sit in the small lounge in the hotel. Sebastian has had too much to drink and is unwell. Conor and Frank help him to his room, and then they go home. Kate and Big Robbie have disappeared, and I am left alone with Flossie. She is a big, chatty girl with big blonde hair and big red lips. She is all talk, she is all curves, and she is all flushed flesh. In the absence of others, desire — which has peeped from the shadows all evening — steps forward. I stand and I take her by her hand, and we ride the elevator to her room. The door is still closing as I push the blouse over her shoulders, as she unbuckles me, and I am lost to the pleasure and the frantic hunt. I push her across the carpet. I fold her meaty body over the bed as I take her from behind.
‘Hello, English girl,’ I say, as I come out of her and run my hands down her shoulders, her back, and her hips, her raised arse offered and ripe.
I ease between the two halves of the round as she takes a quick breath, and as I enter, the breath catches in her throat before suddenly leaving her.
‘Jesus Christ, Johnny,’ she says, when I finish and roll onto the bed beside her. ‘You might have asked.’
‘Well, chicken,’ I say, as sleep takes me, ‘that’s the price you pay for empire.’
A question for Anna
‘ARE YOU GOING TO THE DOCTOR? WHAT ABOUT THOSE HEADACHES? Are you looking after yourself, Johnny? Please be careful with the drinking.’
I am at home with my sister. Anna worries excessively about my head. After the fall and the hospital and the burying of Cora, it was Anna who attended to my convalescence at home. For Anna, like most, my broken head was easier to deal with than my broken heart. With my head, she felt that she could do something tangible, say something useful, help. But my heart? I’m not sure about repairs for that kind of stuff. I think some broken things cannot be fixed.
But in many ways, I am a new man. In many ways, I am not the person I used to be. Just days ago, the surface of my skin was covered with a completely different set of cells, all of which have since died and flaked off. Just months ago, I had a completely different bundle of red blood cells flowing through me. Constantly, my body regenerates, replacing old cells with new ones. I am not alone. I am not superman. This renewal is shared with the rest of the species. But my brain is different. Not different from the rest of the species, but from the rest of my body. At birth, my brain came fully equipped with one hundred billion nerve cells. That’s a lot of cells to get your head around — literally. There are more cells in my brain than there are grains of sand on the long beach at Schilling Hill. Again, I am not alone. Again, I am not superman. This wonder, too, is shared with the rest of the species. The same can be said for pitiful Bobby Boyd — and that really is difficult to get your head around. And because the human brain is so complicated and has so little capacity to regenerate it is vulnerable to the effects of damage. This I learned in the hospital as doctors spoke of ‘acquired brain injury’.
‘It’s not just the injury caused by the initial trauma and the action of the brain inside the cranium; the damage from bleeding and augmented pressure within the enclosed skull can indeed be more consequential,’ said the doctor to Kathleen Donnelly. Oh, sweet hallelujah, I thought. ‘Whatever the injury,’ the doctor continued, ‘the material, cognitive, and behavioural effects can be multifaceted and complicated and may, I suggest, require monitoring and treatment.’ Mam nodded away to him like a buck rabbit doing the business, but the doctor might as well have been speaking Japanese.
I didn’t need any monitoring or treatment. I just got better quickly, and everyone kind of forgot about my head and moved on with the other things that people move on with. Everyone, except Anna. Everyone, except Anna and me.
‘Do you ever wonder, Anna, about how our brain works, about how we come to think the things we think?’
‘Do you mean you, Johnny? Or the rest of us?’
‘I mean us all, Anna.’
A nun in the park
I AM AT HOME IN DUNDALK FOR THE WEEKEND. IT IS DRY AND IT ISN’T TOO cold, and in the early afternoon I sit with Clara and watch television.
‘Hey,’ I suggest, ‘let’s get the bikes out and go for a spin.’
Within five minutes, we are on the Ramparts Road and heading for town. We take Distillery Lane, Jocelyn Street, and Roden Place. We cycle along the pavement at the Town Hall, on alongside the courthouse, and on we go around the benches of the Market Square — where I can’t help remembering Cora — and on into Clanbrassil Street, and north to Church Street and Bridge Street, and there we turn east along the river. The tide is in, and the water is high and wide. I pass Siobhán McCourt, who is out running — she does this athletics stuff — and I stop and chat, and she insists on joining our modest adventure. So she sits on the bar of my bicycle and teases me, and we continue as a threesome to the park. We decide to go in and let Clara cycle around; it will be safer than the roads. A nun is entering the park as we reach the gate. She greets us all and says hello — I know her, as she is part of the same rosary militia as Mam. We return the greeting with smiles, and allow her to enter before us, and I watch her as she goes away from us with the light load of certainty carried in her gentle stride.
To fight life’s battles, the Irish have two weapons in their arsenal. The first of these is the Mass, which is used as a kind of marker for any beginning or occasion or end. There are Masses for arrivals, weddings, and funerals — although I’ve never really understood the appropriateness of a Mass for a funeral, when the recently deceased gets but a brief mention in an event that celebrates another thing altogether, although nobody seems to mind but me — and there are the peculiar Irish Masses for the opening of a new football field, or club or community centre, or a new bus, or a fishing boat, or a factory, or anything at all. At school there were a gazillion Masses for all kinds of stuff: beginning of term, end of term, mid-term, for those students beginning, for those students leaving, for visitors, for exams, for more exams, for all the important saints, for all the Irish saints, for holy communions, and for confirmations. It was mad stuff altogether. And then there is the House Mass for no particular reason at all, other than a change of scenery perhaps. It’s a bit of a travelling road-show, that one, like the Mission Mass that travels parish to parish and carries a bite, and lets the priests go those extra few yards into ecstasy and deliver the threat of damnation. And there is the Annual Novena, when half the country descends on Saint Joseph’s for nine days, with Masses running around the clock, and stalls outside selling everything but Coca-Cola and popcorn. The Irish would be lost without the Mass.
The second weapon in the national arsenal is the rosary. This is a very useful weapon, as it can be carried concealed, needs
no preparation, and can be whipped out pretty much anywhere and without any notice at all. The Mass is for everyone, but the rosary attracts the fundamentalist in the way that any kind of communal chanting seduces the vulnerable. Mam is a big fan, and belongs to a group who gather in Saint Joseph’s to pray for the sins of the world and to end all vices, heresies, wars, vanities, and misfortunes through the intercession of miracles, the Celestial Court, and the abundant, divine mercy of God. You couldn’t make it up, and I have to admit that it does add to Mam’s vocabulary. The nuns of the local convent attend this group, and Mam has them around to the house every month. I try to avoid being home for these visits, as the thing can descend in no time from a cup of tea and cake to Mother Marys and Sacred Mysteries, and it’s not good to be caught up in those.
I salute the nun as she walks away on the left path to circuit the park clockwise, and we pedal right towards the bandstand. We get off the bicycles, and I sit with Siobhán on a bench while Clara plays behind us in the bandstand. Farther along the path, on another bench, a woman sits alone. There is a dishevelled look about her, and beside her is a supermarket shopping-trolley filled with plastic bags.
‘Parks attract the oddballs,’ I tell Siobhán. ‘As do churches and libraries. I think what attracts them is the opportunity to sit somewhere.’
‘But I run in the park. And I go to the library. And I even go to Mass on an occasion. Are you calling me an oddball, Donnelly?’
‘Not you, McCourt, no. But you know the type — men who talk to themselves, and women who keep cats.’
‘Women who keep cats?’
‘Yes. Not the woman with a cat or two, or even three — though three is borderline. But the woman with half-a-dozen or more. You know the type: troubled, unbalanced.’
‘That’s all right, then. But I can get troubled myself, now and again. And I need a bit of rebalancing, if you know what I mean.’
I laugh. ‘Siobhán, you are …’ I look to her face, where her eyes are wide open and her mouth carries that seductive draw of hers. ‘You are some lunatic.’
‘Yes,’ she says, rising, ‘but that’s what you like about me. Go on, admit it, Donnelly. You have a thing for me, don’t you? I know you want me — I see it in your eyes.’ And she runs off to chase Clara around the bandstand.
And she’s right. That is what I like about her. And, yes, I do think of her. And, yes, I do want her. But that’s normal, isn’t it? I sit and daydream in the park until I feel her approach again behind me.
‘All right,’ I say, raising my two hands. ‘I admit it. There are times when I see you there in Saint Joseph’s, when I’d love to bundle you into one of those confession boxes and slide the curtain. Or, even better, stretch you out on the altar and worship that lovely body of yours.’ And the thing is said as I am turning to give her my own dirty smile, and it cannot be unsaid or withdrawn, though I try. But it is too late. And the best I can do is to kill the smile, but even that is too late.
There is nothing to say now but the obvious. ‘Ah, hello, Sister Immaculata, it’s yourself.’
She gives me a look that the devout reserve for the worst class of sinners, and she bolts away, and I see that within the first stride the rosary beads have been released from concealment as she departs with another intercession to pray for.
Broken skies
DELANEY WANTS A CHAT, SO I AM HOME AGAIN AND ON MY WAY TO THE house near the town centre. Beneath a broken sky, I take a walk through Dundalk. I pull on a Carroll’s No. 1. I realise that these streets are etched into my earliest memories. I remember it was here that I walked with my grandmother. She was a great woman. She was born with all the good things: she was beautiful and warm, her only nature was kindness, and she was full of hope. But martyrdom is a cloaked jester. It pushes as many as it pulls. It allures and it deceives, it wears many forms, and to its charms many fall. Anna McMahon — my grandmother — was one who fell.
She was a pretty girl. Not just pretty, but she had a special quality that some girls have, though in each it can be different — girls can be tricky and slippery. I have a photograph of her as a girl, and she had a touch about her that was beyond Ireland. With her dark hair and her Spanish skin, she carried an allusion of other lands. She was a reader as a young girl. ‘That one always has her head in a book’, she told me her father would comment to others, he prouder of her reading than he was of her beauty. She read everything she could find in the town. She read of other worlds, and she dreamed of escape. She wanted love and adventure, but what she got was a baby in her belly and marriage to Charles Reynolds. She was just sixteen years old.
It broke her father’s heart that Anna ignored his desperate pleading. He begged her not to take with Reynolds; he warned her that Reynolds offered nothing but a false hope. But Anna was hungry for a journey, and she was too young to see the shallow depth of Reynolds’s charm. She let him take charge of her dreams, and Charles Reynolds erased those dreams from her life. He lost his charm, and she lost her hopes, as he took to the drink and she took to survival. She bore him twelve children, and love and adventure became very distant shores. But she refused to let Reynolds rob her of her intelligence, though he set about it as if it were his life’s purpose.
What escape Anna managed was confined within the town of Dundalk. She studied the town’s story and streetscape, and years later she transferred this to me. When I was young, she took me for walks through the streets of the town as she delivered tender lectures, hard facts of history wrapped in a soft tale — who lived and who had lived, who had done what and who had done what to them, the injustices suffered here, and the battles for Ireland there. She knew every street and building, and she had a story for them all. She never tired of telling the same yarns, and I never tired of listening. In the olden days, she would say, townsfolk spent their days here around market stalls and fairs: ‘There was great comings and goings altogether. But there would have been a lot of horseshit about. I mean real horseshit. Not the kind your grandfather comes out with.’ And we would both laugh at that. She told me that joke a hundred times. I could see it all then, as if I walked that market myself. I can see it all now. But those days, like Granny Reynolds, are gone.
Boggy fields
I AM ALONE WITH MY BOOKS IN STATION ROAD, AND AS I READ I RUN MY left index finger along the scar by my left eye.
It’s all falling apart now, Bob says.
‘It is not. We remain on target.’
Target? What target? What are you on about?
‘To free Ireland.’
He laughs. Ireland is free.
‘Not all of it.’
Depends what you mean by free, then. Is life in Leitrim so much better than in Fermanagh?
‘That’s not the point.’
It is the point. It’s just not your point. Isn’t that the truth?
‘Ireland has a right to its own self-determination. All Ireland.’
Self-determination? Well, you’d know all about that. Ready to kill again, are we? Have you no shame?
‘Shame for what?’
Not for what. For who.
‘Cora didn’t understand the necessity of battle. Maybe that comes with having a pure heart.’
Is that a fact? And what about your heart?
‘Fuck off, Bob.’
It is late February. I am in Crossmaglen, and the gun is set. I am ready. I have given the time and labour to master the elements of my craft — my other craft, sniping, not carpentry. Delaney drilled me through the training, and he drilled me again and again and again. ‘The ability to shoot,’ Delaney said, ‘will make you good, but knowhow in the field will make you great. And it will keep you alive. Nous, cunning, and field-craft will win the day over gullible squaddies. You be the fox, John, and those soldiers will be chickens in a henhouse. You just wait your moment, and some stupid bastard will always leave a do
or open.’ And so I learned how to invade the enemy, how to get inside the range, how to find ground and to know that ground, how to survive in that ground and maintain the shot, how to observe everything, how to absorb everything, how to see without being seen, how to mask the attack, how to plan the escape, and how to get away. I learned that how to get in and how to get out are as important as any other thing, and that without this preparation the best shot in the world will not succeed in what I do. And, at all times, I have options on a way out. I have read of German snipers in Normandy who shot from church steeples — and with great effect — on the attacking allies. But those snipers made a fatal mistake: they left only one route out — down the steeple — and when this was eventually choked, the German was dead. The Japanese snipers shooting from trees made the same mistake. I studied their mistakes. I studied everything; I studied long. And, in this pursuit, I was a good student. ‘Don’t make second place’, the American told me. ‘Second place is a body bag.’
I take the shot, and a pink spray bursts into the morning air.
It is lunch time on Saint Patrick’s Day. In every village, flags are flying, children are marching, pubs are full of drinking and singing, while I am lying in the mud of Forkhill waiting on the lead of a patrol to move towards the junction of Church Road and Bog Road. Finishing a conversation with a local, he steps into the crosshairs. And I kill him.
It is May, and I am at the long table on Station Road, helping her with her study.
‘You don’t love me,’ she says, my German girl.
‘I absolutely love you.’
‘Not like her. You don’t love me like you love her.’
I hold her in the bed that night as she sleeps on me. I hold her body and I touch her hair and I kiss her head. But how do you love someone more?
A Mad and Wonderful Thing Page 16
