The Wake (And What Jeremiah Did Next)

by Colm Herron

  The head definitely improved as we came near Antrim and even though I had to listen to taunts like One Fenian no vote and Tell the pope to give you a pill and some of the cops shouting abuse as well it was all starting to pass me by like the proverbial idle wind. Though Antrim itself wasn’t exactly a bag of fun with crowds of loyal Ulstermen I suppose you could call them heaving away at us trying to push us into a river. But it was mostly no bother to me because I’d got Aisling to stay well back and to the side — I thought it was the least she could do seeing I’d come on the march with her — so we were never exactly in harm’s way.

  We stayed in some friendly hall the first night, don’t ask me where. I hardly slept because we had to lie on the floor and use our coats as pillows. I wouldn’t have minded too much if I’d got holding Aisling but Frances parked her big ass between us and I didn’t feel up to trekking round it in the dark. What made things all the more sickening was just before dawn I heard this moaning and grunting coming from some place over to my left and there was no mistaking what it meant. Life can be one bastard.

  The second day it was we picked up the man from Toome. That’s what me and Aisling still call him. The man from Toome. We call him that but we don’t really know if he was from Toome. All we know is, he joined the march there and he smelled like a haystack and nobody knew him. And he was one of those people you couldn’t tell what color he was. Usually you can tell. Most Protestants have Protestant eyes and a way of talking that gives them away but with this guy you didn’t know if he was a real supporter or a Trojan horse because he had eyes that were hard to pin down and he never spoke to anybody, not that I heard anyway.

  The thing was, nobody realized he had a small bag of pepper in his pocket. Well, nobody realized till he emptied it in some Royal Ulster Constabulary men’s eyes the next day when they were trying to block our way outside Dungiven.

  What happened was, when the cop in charge was telling Michael Farrell — he’s the leader of People’s Democracy — that they’d got reports of a large angry crowd at the next fork in the road that were planning to attack us meaning we’d have to take a four mile detour along muddy country lanes to avoid them somebody got a passing driver to check it out and he came back and said all was there was a collie dog and two wee girls playing skipping. Farrell told this to the cops but they just stood there stony-faced as if he hadn’t spoken. So somebody organized us to link arms and the idea was to walk forward through the police cordon without using violence, just exercise our right to march legally and if something was in our way well we’d just walk through it.

  But then the oddest thing. When the RUC and us were glaring each other down a car pulled up and it was Pearse being driven to the airport. He got out when he saw me and came over. He was looking not too bad for someone who was supposed to be on his way to an early grave, that was the word from Big Bill Braddock anyway. “Hey Jerry boy, what in under God are you doing here with this crowd of wankers?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say because some of the wankers definitely heard him. Ignoring my non-reply he went on: “There’s only one way to sort out this bloody circus of a so-called province and that’s the gun, boy, the old bomb and the bullet. These people only understand one thing and that’s brute force.”

  “You think so?” I said this quite loudly trying to hit the right sort of reasoning tone with Aisling listening linked onto one arm and Eamonn McCann, listening too I’d say, linked onto the other. I half looked round and McCann’s jaw was jutting. What the fuck’s going on here? it was saying.

  “How’s Eamonn?” said Pearse throwing a big smile that I think was supposed to disarm but which wasn’t returned. He leaned to my ear then and whispered: “Look at history would you. Tell me one case —”

  “Right Jeremiah, ready?”

  This was a calculated interruption by McCann but it was going to take more than that.

  “There’s never been a case —”

  “It’s all right for you saying that,” I told him over my shoulder, starting to be pulled forward. “You’ll be in Manchester watching Georgie Best and them and we’ll be the ones caught up in it here.”

  “Wouldn’t pay to look near them. Hey, I must go. You know I got a reference from Father McGaughey out of the Long Tower?”

  “Did you right enough?” There was a thin blue line of smoke rising straight up in the air from behind the cop that was pressed against me nearly like it was coming out of his helmet. Chimney probably. Or something burning in a field.

  “I did.” He was shouting now. “That bastard Hourigan wouldn’t give me one seeing I only gave him two weeks’ notice so I went to Father McGaughey. Remember I worked in the Long Tower primary awhile when I came out of training?”

  “Ah, right.” It was downright indecent the way me and this cop were pressed together. Like the Embassy ballroom on a Saturday night.

  “Get rid of him for Christ sake,” whispered Aisling pulling me against the cop so hard his helmet fell off and got caught between his chest and mine.

  “Well, McGaughey had no hesitation. Sound man so he is. Makes you realize they’re not all bad. Listen, I’ll be in touch.”

  And that was him away. Anyway, most of the cops ended up in the ditch. Michael Farrell was explaining in a loud voice all through the push o war for the benefit of the TV cameras that we weren’t using violence, we were just exercising the legitimate right of legal marchers to walk on the road. The trouble was that some of the cops were being blinded by the man from Toome and I heard when I got to Derry that an RUC spokesman made a meal of it when he was interviewed on TV. So to this day I don’t know if the man from Toome was trying to help us or blacken us.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was going to tell you about the second day. It was on the second day that my bowels moved in a field behind the Ponderosa on the Glenshane Pass and my form lifted. Except that my feet were killing me, blisters and calluses and corns, the whole lot, I’ll never learn about what kind of shoes to wear. Still, all I could think of coming out of the field was lying beside Aisling again and that bitch wasn’t going to get in the way this time.

  The Ponderosa is a pub at the top of the Glenshane Pass about a thousand feet up. There’s a plaque on the wall inside it saying it’s the highest pub in Ireland and this massive boy with a broad Belfast accent that was drinking with Eamonn McCann was arguing away really loud saying he was in one down in Cork that was higher. Or maybe it was Kerry, can’t remember. “They’ve a lot to argue about,” I said to Aisling and Frances and Frances squeaked back “People need a break” but her tone of voice meant Give me a break.

  We slept in a hall in a place called Gulladuff that night and I still didn’t get near Aisling because Frances got two fierce looking feminists to come over and sit with us and they stayed of course and then, when we finally got bedding down, the way everybody lay made anything impossible.

  In the middle of the night I struggled between all these sleeping bodies to go outside for a pee and when I was shivering doing it this man appeared out of the dark and scared the life out of me and when he was at it he had a good look to see what I was up to, suspiciously good I thought, and then walked on past saying You’re all right there, carry on. I could nearly have sworn he had some sort of a rifle half over his shoulder but maybe it was a stick. Anyway he put the wind up me that much I was nearly doing a shit as well.

  When I went back in I could see a bit better with being out in the dark and I found my way to our place no bother. I looked to try and squeeze in beside Aisling but her and your woman Frances were that close together you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other started, so I kicked Frances sort of accidentally twice, one of the times I got her on the head but she didn’t budge. I couldn’t think of what else to do to express myself and then when I found my place it took me ages of course to get back to sleep.

  I was kind of groggy the next day and the only thing kept me going was that we were getting closer to Derry and Aisling’s flat
and I managed to put the thought that Frances would be there too out of my mind. We all went to the upstairs part of a pub in Claudy that night and I was slurring my words even before I got half way through the third pint. The whole lot of us had to leave together in case anybody got lost and somebody led us across the street and down this long alleyway to a big hall. I remember saying to myself holding Aisling’s hand that if I got to Derry alive I was never going to lie on a wooden floor again. Back, feet, neck, the whole lot of me was feeling it and all I wanted to do was go to sleep. I didn’t think I’d even be fit to make love in the unlikely event Frances would allow it.

  But I wasn’t getting sleeping for a while yet. There was a big stage at the back of the hall and before you knew it some self-appointed leaders were up on it, not Michael Farrell because he really was the leader, but these self-appointed ones that started spouting all this stuff about what they were going to do the next day when we got to Derry. I couldn’t make much sense of half of it but they weren’t going to let John Hume or anybody else from the Citizens’ Action Committee steal their thunder, that was for sure.

  This guy Mickey Mulcahy that I know, fully paid-up leftwing loophead he is, seemed to be the main spokesman for these ones and it was obvious he fancied himself as some kind of orator. I have a dream that this country of ours will rise up. Christ. Martin Luther Mulcahy. It’s the firewater, I was thinking, that and probably joints half the day as well. He was calling John Hume and them traitors and collaborators looking for their place in the sun and what was the other thing he said they were doing, yes, that they were out to line their pockets with the queen’s shilling when it was our blood was going to be spilt.

  Bloody ridiculous, I thought, people with drink in them shouldn’t be allowed to just stand up there and influence people like that. I got to my feet really mad and was going to let Mickey know a thing or two but before I could open my mouth somebody else started. “I speak for the silent majority,” he shouted, “and I’m telling you now, it doesn’t matter who gets the credit. This is about ordinary people’s civil rights, not about Mickey Mulcahy feeling miffed.” I felt somebody pulling at my elbow then and Aisling all urgent whispered, “Leave it Jeremiah. Here, sit down,” and I lost my balance and fell half on top of her. “You spoke well,” she said sort of smiling and she had her hand on my leg, “but you were talking shite.” I didn’t mind what I’d been talking. I was beside her and she was handling me. She’d squeezed me in between her and Frances and your woman was sitting there with a face on her but there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.

  The speeches stopped a wee while after that and somebody put the lights out and then, heaven. Last day of the march coming up and it didn’t matter if the world ended sometime in the middle of it, nothing mattered except the night and the girl beside me. We didn’t speak, we didn’t need to, everything she did showed she was mine.

  +++++

  We were well fed in the morning, big doorsteps of brown bread and butter and bits of bacon on them. Somebody came round too with pots of tea and we drank in turn, I think there were about twenty cups to go round the whole lot of us but it was great. I’d been living on fish and chips mostly for three days so bacon was like caviar, not that I’ve got the least notion what caviar tastes like. Aisling looked brilliant in her duffel coat and dirty jeans as we started down the road past Desmond’s factory and I kissed her again, and then again and again until she pulled back embarrassed.

  “Cool it Jeremiah, they’ll be throwing us off the march.” Her face was so beautiful under the urchin hair I could have eaten it. But there was a problem and that was my feet. I’m talking about a big problem here. My heart wanted to walk with her forever but my feet were wrecked. She knew it too the way I was walking.

  “You’ll never be able to make it to Derry,” she said. “Maybe you should try and get something for it. There’s bound to be a chemist’s open in Claudy. What time is it?”

  “Twenty past ten. I saw one up the street there a bit but if I went back now I’d never catch up with the march.”

  “Of course you would. Sure I’ll go with you. I’ll treat your feet and then we can thumb a lift and we’ll be back with the march in no time.”

  Her eyes were burning blue in the morning light. Her gaze was open and loving and she was thinking only of me. I’d say if some genie had made us the offer of being together anywhere else in the world just then she’d have come with me no matter about her politics.

  “Right,” she said. “Frances, Jeremiah and me are going to get some ointment and dressings. I’d say we’ll probably only be about twenty minutes. We’ll catch up.”

  The dyke wasn’t pleased. “I don’t think you should do that,” she muttered.

  “Frances is right,” I said. “Yous go on. I’ll be with yous shortly.” I spoke in a mind made up way that wasn’t taking no for an answer. This was because the dust and sweat of three days marching was layered on top of a certain amount of ingrained dirt between my toes and I wasn’t going to have Aisling seeing and smelling that, not to mention touching it. It was all very well for Shakespeare to say love is not love that alters when it alteration finds but he never saw my feet.

  Aisling looked up at me and I thought for a second she was going to cry. “Go now then,” she whispered. “The sooner you get it done the better. We don’t know what’s up the road.”

  “Just in case I miss you,” I said, “how about we arrange to meet in Derry?”

  She nodded. “Where?”

  “City Hotel. What, four o’clock?”

  She nodded again and then she unbuttoned her duffel coat and held me against her in a full-length arms around my neck embrace that wasn’t far off making love over again and it was as if she had me up in the air and I couldn’t feel my feet. It went on for the time it took the marchers to pass us and they whooped and clapped as they passed. One man One girl and You Shall Overcome and Aye ye boy ye they were shouting and hands were ruffling my hair. Then she was away and everybody with her.

  I hobbled up the street to the first chemist’s I saw and got what I needed. The girl behind the counter seemed to know I was a marcher and when she saw the way I was walking she offered to treat me herself. Good-looking girl too but I had my pride. About fifty yards down the road I found a place to sit, a low wall beside a trickling stream, and I went about fixing myself the best way I could. Then I got to my feet again and started to walk. It was agony. Whatever I’d done I’d made it worse. After a minute or two I found a hen-toed way of going that was just about bearable. But it’s funny how your feet can be nearly killing you and you can still take in certain things, like sunlit dapples I saw on garden grass under a holly tree. It was the most amazing midwinter I ever remember, more like the middle of spring. Usually the snow was on the ground at the start of the year but I’d never seen anything like this, a mild sun warming me on the fourth of January. I made my way to the bottom of the street hen-toeing along like the lame boy in the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The lame boy left behind while Michael Farrell led the wonderstruck Marxists into the mountain never to be seen again.

  A car drew up alongside of me and I heard the voice asking “Are you one of the marchers?” Frisson of fear. What do I say?

  “I’m okay thanks.” That should do. Walk on. Look straight ahead. I walked on and looked straight ahead. He came after me, easing up towards the footpath, first time in my life I’d been curbcrawled.

  “Here, hop in.” Legs wobbly below the knees and a rush of something all the way down inside. I looked behind me. I couldn’t see anyone, not a soul in sight, it was as if Claudy had emptied. Christ.

  “I see you’re limping. You were in the march, weren’t you? With Aisling O’Connor? Hop in and we’ll catch up with them in no time.”

  “How do you know Aisling O’Connor?”

  “Aisling? I met her in the Grandstand Bar in Derry one time before the fifth of October march. There were representatives from about half a dozen political organizations
there I think but she sort of stood out. Fiery girl. I’m in the Civil Rights Association.” He reached his hand across towards the open window. “My name’s Frank Gogarty.”

  I looked at him properly for the first time. Clean-cut, friendly, gentlemanly. He was trying to help me. I shook his hand.

  “Thanks, I will take a lift if you don’t mind.” I opened the door and got in. “Sorry for being so suspicious. It’s just that, you know …”

  “Don’t apologize. You’re right to be careful. Having trouble with the feet?”

  “It’s my own fault. I didn’t come prepared. I’m Jeremiah Coffey by the way.”

  The car eased off. “Pleased to meet you. I don’t think any of us did. Come prepared. How could you in this country?”

  The seat felt so good I could have slept on it. The radio was playing soft music, volume low. Something from Brahms maybe, I love Brahms, didn’t get a chance to listen right with him talking though.

  “I drove down from Belfast this morning just to keep an eye on what’s happening. I think these students are amazing. Are you a student?”

  “Naw, that’s all behind me. I came because I …”

  Why had I come? Not for civil rights anyway. For Aisling. The whole lot of the rest of them could go to hell.

  “I think we all come at this from different directions. One of the spurs or I should say two of the spurs for me were Conn and Patricia McCluskey.”

  “Right?” I’d never heard of them.

  “Yeah, they started the Campaign for Social Justice you remember. They’re an example to us all so they are. Never give up, that’s their motto. And always thinking outside themselves.”