He wasn’t in the same league as those musicians, he said, but he’d been turning up for so long that nobody put any pass on him. Once he found the session, life in Dublin was forgotten. There was magic in the music. You walked in and saw people you knew and others you hadn’t seen for a decade, all playing a set together. The music might dip for the slightest half note as they nodded and he’d take his pipes out and wait for a switch between reels to join in. There was no music like it, which could be played by five or twenty-five players. Even a poor player like him could be swept up inside a tune and not sound out of place.
For a moment we had both forgotten about Luke. Now we heard a thud as he jumped from the wall, carrying my jacket. Luke told the driver to return to the hotel in Glasnevin. He placed the jacket on my knee and I checked that the card of pills was there. I didn’t want to take it in the car. I took his hand and squeezed it.
‘You were a while,’ I said.
He nodded and I knew I’d get no more information. The radio had been ripped from the dashboard, but there was a ghetto-blaster on the passenger seat. Luke was silent. I just wanted to go back to bed and not wake up till it was time to take the plane back to London. The driver was quiet too. At the first traffic lights he rooted for a tape which he stuck into the ghetto blaster. Piping filled the car, so low it was hard to hear over the engine. The recording was crackly, made with rudimentary equipment decades ago.
‘When the cock crows it is dawn,’ Luke announced. I stared at him, not sure who he was talking to, then realised it was the name of the tune. The driver glanced at Luke in the rear-view mirror, surprised, and raised the volume slightly.
‘That’s Seamus Ennis,’ Luke added.
‘You’re right.’ The driver nodded.
‘Seamus always said his own father played it far better.’
‘He did that,’ the driver agreed. ‘His father had great fingers for a piper, by all accounts. You knew Seamus?’
‘I’d visit him the time he had the mobile home out in the Naul.’
‘There’s few bothered to visit back then.’ The driver shook his head, remembering. ‘The High King of Irish Pipers dying by himself in a shabby caravan in some field.’
‘That’s the way Seamus wanted it,’ Luke replied. ‘He’d no real will left to live. Many is the time I found him at death’s door from drink, willing himself to die.’
‘Hundreds of tunes died with Seamus,’ the driver said. ‘You can’t just write down the notes and think the tunes live on.’
We were travelling back along the coast road. It was hard to keep track of their conversation. I closed my eyes and listened to the music as they spoke about some piper and story-teller who died in poverty and another old man who’d been the greatest sean-nós singer ever, yet was forced to earn his living as a bell-hop in a New York apartment block.
Hours earlier I had thought that Dublin’s crime world was like a secret society. But now traditional music seemed even more so. The driver questioned Luke about names of players as if suspicious of his accent and background. I remembered Liam Darcy saying how unusual it was for someone like Luke to hang around Irish music. Yet, listening to Luke talk, his journey from being a young hood selling stolen televisions to sitting in the inner circle at sessions made sense, because the cornerstone of his transition were the things closest to any young man’s heart – easy money and sex.
Luke explained that at eighteen he had fallen for a girl whose family ran a local hardware shop. Her parents hated Luke and his background, but the girl had dragged him out at weekends to their house at Laytown where musicians from Louth and Cavan gathered for sessions. Luke stood out because of his accent and clothes. He told the taxi driver he hated the music at first, associating it with her parents. But there was one old fiddler, Jamie O’Connor, whose company he enjoyed and who often gave Luke a lift to Dublin. Since his death, O’Connor had been elevated into an icon of the purity of Irish music, but Luke claimed he actually made his living for decades playing in two-bit jazz bands before sensing a change in the wind with the Clancy Brothers and half the country’s sheep being stripped for Aran jerseys. The driver laughed, telling Luke how O’Connor had once tried to drive his taxi away, convinced it was his own car.
‘That was Jamie for you,’ Luke agreed. ‘If something as simple as a horse could find its way home he could never understand why something as complex as a car couldn’t.’
We were meeting early morning traffic, along a road of old-fashioned houses. Christmas lights lit up bare branches in the long gardens. Luke told the driver about a night when O’Connor drove him back from Laytown. The fiddler pressed his face against the windscreen, complaining of the mist covering the road. Luke had stared out at the beautiful summer’s night, before sobering up enough to grab the wheel and make O’Connor stop the car so that Luke could drive.
When they had reached the fiddler’s house in Santry at dawn, O’Connor brought Luke into the back garden. The ground had been dug months ago but nothing appeared to be planted. O’Connor had mumbled about Luke earning a fiver by ‘digging up the harvest’. Luke had laughed, then realised the fiddler was serious about something being buried there. An English hitch-hiker had gone missing months before and her body was never traced. The fiddler produced a spade and sat on the doorstep with a pint bottle of stout, giving directions as Luke uneasily set to work.
He wasn’t long unearthing the first of ten shallow graves. In each one five cheap German fiddles were buried, the plywood weathered by months in the soil. The fiddler had shaken the dirt off them and loaded up his car boot, before helping Luke to bury another fifty toneless fiddles from the crate in his living room. Luke tried to claim his fiver but O’Connor had cajoled him, with promises of more money, into heading off for the weekend. It grew into a tour of every fair in Ireland. I could imagine Luke, re-invented as Jamie O’Connor’s baby-faced grandson, tipping off earnest enthusiasts from Munich and Milwaukee about his grandfather’s spare fiddle that had been in the family for seventy years, but which, because of the hard times that were in it, he might be willing to sell privately, without a word to anyone else present.
Luke and the taxi driver were still laughing as we pulled up outside the hotel. I saw the night porter, peering out at the same girl he had let in several hours before. I glanced at Luke, knowing that, for a moment, he had forgotten about Christy’s funeral and the quagmire of responsibilities which had settled around him. He glanced at me and, for the first time, I saw envy in his eyes. For half a second it was as if Luke was about to tell the driver to re-start the taxi and head for whatever remote kitchen music was being played in. Then Luke stared at the night porter and his face changed. The driver chuckled away, oblivious to the altered mood.
‘These’s a queue of men could ring your neck over them blasted fiddles,’ he said. ‘There were hundreds floating around one time like splinters of the True Cross. I remember Miko Russell saying he couldn’t go abroad without seeing some poor unfortunate trying to bang out a tune on one, convinced it was his own clumsiness that made the fiddle sound so bad.’
‘That’s the funny thing,’ Luke said. ‘When O’Connor played on them before they were sold he could make them sing.’
‘Poor Jamie.’ the taxi driver shook his head. ‘A harmless oul divil always.’
‘The little bastards,’ Luke said with quiet fury. ‘How can any man be kicked to death and the courts call it manslaughter?’
‘Only Jamie would try to help a kid being beaten up on a Ballymun bus,’ the driver said. ‘Sure those youths didn’t know him from a hole in the wall. They waltzed in one door of Mountjoy jail and straight out the other.’
Both were quiet, remembering an event I knew nothing about. It was twenty past seven. Luke was late for his real world. My time was up, as it always would be. A snatched hour here, a furtive night there. The bed would be cold where we had lain, but I would wrap my legs around his pillow, convincing myself his scent was still there. Luke glanced at hi
s watch.
‘You kept the music anyway,’ the driver said.
‘It’s infectious,’ Luke replied, motioning for me to open the door. ‘Jamie was an old fraud but a great bloody fiddler too. The tourists thought he was the real McCoy and the other musicians enjoyed a good con themselves. The only people who objected were the officials at the Fleadh Ceols, trying to run him out of town. That was mainly snobbery because he’d been a tinker and they spent half their lives burning tinkers out of any halting sites within an ass’s roar of their own houses.’
I knew from Luke’s voice he was waiting for me to get out. The trouble was that suddenly I wasn’t ready to go.
‘You mean O’Connor was a tinker, a traveller?’ I asked, with something about my voice surprising both men.
‘That’s right,’ the driver said.
‘Were there many fiddlers who were travellers?’
‘A few. Travellers were outsiders, even when I was a boy, but certain families had the music and played it well.’
‘Did you ever hear of a traveller called Frank Sweeney?’ I asked and the driver shook his head.
‘I can’t say I have,’ he replied. ‘Sweeney isn’t really a traveller name.’
Luke coughed and I sensed his mood change but this was important. I just wanted him to wait five minutes.
‘Frank Sweeney,’ I repeated, speaking quickly. ‘An old tinker from Donegal. I’m sure he’s long dead. A right bastard but he played the fiddle well. You never came across him?’
‘Come on, Tracey,’ Luke said. ‘Stop playing games, I’m dead late. I’ll phone the hotel when I can.’
But I wasn’t going to be told when to go. Here was my father’s world and I wanted to know more.
‘I never ventured much into Donegal.’ The driver ignored Luke. ‘They’ve their own style of fiddling, more like Scottish music, because that’s where they went for work.’
‘Last Night’s Joy,’ I said. ‘I’m told that’s a tune Frank Sweeney especially liked playing.’
‘It’s a reel I’ve heard Donegal men play,’ the driver said. Luke stared at me, but differently from before. Up to now he had thought I was prevaricating, inventing questions out of pique to delay him. But the name of the reel had flummoxed him. I was his English mistress, slotted into the Sunday night compartment of his life. Now I had revealed part of me which he didn’t know about. It was unexpected and therefore I had slipped outside his control.
‘Who’s this Sweeney fellow?’ Luke demanded suspiciously. ‘You never mentioned him before. You know there’ll be trouble if I don’t get to the funeral in time.’
Before I could answer the driver started laughing, unconcerned by Luke’s impatience. He gave me confidence. I didn’t care if Luke’s whole family were waiting, I wasn’t a wind-up toy.
‘Last Night’s Joy,’ the driver said. ‘Sure that and The Black Fanad Mare are tunes he’s famous for. I never heard him called Frank Sweeney, but I suppose it’s his name. Whoever told you he was a tinker?’
‘You know who I’m talking about?’ I held my breath. Even Luke sensed the tension in me.
‘I think I do,’ the driver said, ‘but I’m not sure you do.’ He looked at Luke. ‘Translate it. Frank Sweeney, do you not see? Proinsías Mac Suibhne. I heard him once say that Last Night’s Joy was the first reel he learnt, from the lilting of a neighbouring woman when he was a boy.’
Luke looked from me to the driver in exasperation. ‘You’re just paid to drive, pal,’ he said. ‘This girl wouldn’t know Mac Suibhne if he bit her. She’s getting it up for me. She was never even in Ireland before.’ He glared at me. ‘It’s half seven. You know I can’t be late. What’s all this messing for? You’ve never heard of Proinsías Mac Suibhne, have you?’
‘No,’ I said. I had never intended things to come out like this. ‘The guy I’m talking about was a Donegal traveller. A cheat and a coward who played the fiddle.’
‘Mac Suibhne travelled,’ the driver explained, ‘but he was no traveller. Travellers are never welcome. Even when they mended pots and kettles they were barely tolerated. But Mac Suibhne is like a prince, you understand? You’d be honoured to have him stay in your house. He has his circuit of little places, away from towns. He spends a few days in each and people come to hear him. His whole family were like that for generations. But Proinsías is the best of them. I’d dance from here to Cork if the man came down to play for us.’
I should have felt excitement but instead I had a sense of dread. ‘But surely he’s dead for years?’
‘I never heard that he died?’ The driver looked at Luke, then back at me. ‘You must be wrong, child. That man will have a cardinal’s funeral.’
Luke opened my door and put a hand on my shoulder to push me out. ‘You know I have to be gone,’ he repeated. ‘Get back into the hotel. You said you’d never heard of Mac Suibhne. How could you, when the man spent his life hiding up in the hills? Even locals can’t track him down. What’s it to you if he’s alive or dead?’
It was the force of Luke’s hand which caused me to crack.
‘He’s my father,’ I said. Luke stopped pushing and stared as though I was deranged.
‘Right, that’s it,’ he snapped, ‘just get the fuck out. I’ve had enough of your games.’
‘Leave the child alone,’ the driver warned, with such aggression that I realised Luke had irritated him throughout the journey. ‘Can you not see she’s crying?’
‘She’s had a lot to drink,’ Luke said. ‘She has a colourful imagination.’ He lowered his voice to address me like a wayward child. ‘Stop stringing the man along. Go on back to your room and get some sleep.’
‘What age are you?’ the driver asked, over Luke’s head.
‘Twenty-two.’ As I spoke Luke lost patience and physically pushed me from the car. I stumbled on the kerb and he reached out to help me stay upright.
‘Leave her alone, you hear?’ The driver was angry. I knew he’d be no match for Luke, but he looked willing to give it a go.
‘I told you she’s drunk and playing games,’ Luke snapped. ‘She’s just some cheap English tart trying to cause a scene and keep me late for my brother’s funeral.’
‘Lay another finger on Mac Suibhne’s girl and I swear to God I’ll flatten you.’
Luke snorted as though he had two lunatics to contend with. ‘You know Mac Suibhne never left Donegal or looked at a woman for all I know.’
The night porter opened the door, sensing trouble. I saw him as a blurred figure because I was crying. For all of Luke’s talk and all my excuses these were words I’d waited for months to hear: cheap English tart. That’s all I was to him and all I would ever be. It was what my mother had been too, to Sweeney or Mac Suibhne or whatever they called him. I felt naked, as if the porter was staring at Luke’s fingerprints brazened on my clothes over my tits and arse. I could imagine him thinking this is the same tart who arrived with another bloke a few hours ago, she must be a cheap foreign whore. I hardly heard what the taxi driver was saying.
‘You’re a Dublin blow-in, pal. That’s all you’ve ever been. You never heard the rumours over twenty years ago. Mac Suibhne was hiding out in Dublin. I saw him myself once with some girl with long hair and a straw hat. Look at the state of the child. A fool could see she’s telling the truth. Now get the fuck out of my taxi and find yourself another one.’
I couldn’t bear the thought of Luke being stranded here and me having to deal with him, now or ever again.
‘Please,’ I pleaded with the driver, ‘I don’t want him here. Take him away.’
The cab door was still opened. Luke stared out, bewildered by what had happened. He opened his mouth to speak. The driver put his foot down and the door swung shut as he sped away. The porter had come down. I sensed him behind me but when I turned he wasn’t looking at me in a sleazy way at all.
‘Come inside, love,’ he said quietly, ‘you’ll catch your death. I’ve the kettle on for the early breakfasts. You’ll know you
’re all right once you’re able to sit up and eat an egg.’
I didn’t want anything to eat, but five minutes later when I sat crying in bed, holding the pill which had caused all the trouble in my hand, the porter arrived with tea and toast and an egg. He looked so concerned that I had to dry my eyes and try to eat it. He had brought an Irish newspaper to take my mind off things. It was folded on the tray, but I could make out the headline: Another Dublin Gangland Murder.
FOURTEEN
IT WAS GRANDAD PETE who had rescued me from Dublin. He had been searching the city for forty-eight hours when I was finally caught shop-lifting. When I disappeared first I might have been a well-dressed English girl, attracting no notice as I concealed items under my coat. But by now I was indistinguishable from the rest of the gang. Henry Street was their morning beat, followed by the amusement arcades and cheap restaurants off Talbot Street. I would never go near the hotel my mother had booked us into. Martin could sense my fear when we approached it and I would run away as he cursed and herded the others after me.
They called me a daft bitch but always followed. If they had accepted me only grudgingly, their loyalty was like the glue holding our lives together. We were outlaws, running the gauntlet of security men with walkie-talkies in shop doorways. Whatever money could be robbed or wheedled from fences was spent that same day. When we could afford to, we ate in a café called Philomena’s, in the late morning before other customers might object. Every meal was the same: mounds of white bread already buttered, Coke and Fanta and plates of cold meat and chips. The young waiter shared his cigarettes with us, sitting up on the next table to urge the others to go back to the families they’d run away from or to think about school. Nobody minded him. They knew that he wasn’t a real adult and he was our friend. Martin laughed at him, but if we had a pound left over he would leave it as a tip.
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