There’s Tom Pháidin Tom going east now with his bicycle and his dog behind him, the man at the window said. Sometimes the woman of the house would ask questions, too, like what Tom Pháidin Tom was thinking about, and she was told that he was thinking he had spent long enough in his own company on the bog for one day, and he was going east up to Teach Uí Fhlatharta to buy pipe cleaners and tobacco for himself. The man at the window knew who was going by and who was not going by. He knew what everybody was saying in Connemara, and all the conversations that were going on in England and America even, as far away as Boston. I see the sagart, Father Ó Móráin has not gone up to see the Johnson family yet about their son in Birmingham. Páraic Jamesey must have gone up to Galway on the bus for the day, because they say he’s great with a nurse from Inishmore working in the Galway regional hospital. They say that Patricia Mhuirnín Leitir Mochú is getting married in the spring in America, to a stranger.
The man at the window could tell who was up at Teach Uí Fhlatharta and what stories they all had. He knew that Tom Pháidin Tom was buying more than pipe cleaners because his dog was coming back from the east already and that meant Máirtín Handsome was surely up there as well and Tom Pháidin Tom would not be going home until it was late, unless Peigín Dorcha went up after him with her dark hair. He knew what all the living people were saying and also what all the dead people were saying in the graveyard. He knew that Tom Pháidin Tom’s brother Páidin Óg was calling out from the grave, saying that his throat was like a dry stick and that if he was still alive and hadn’t drowned out of Ros a Mhíl one day, then he’d be up there in Teach Uí Fhlatharta and nobody, not even the priest or the Pope in the Vatican or Éamon de Valera himself would get him out until he had sung ‘Barr na Sráide’ and the ’Rocks a Bawn’.
One night I had to go up to Teach Uí Fhlatharta with a blue and white milk jug. The man of the house was not allowed to go up himself because the priest had told him never to go east or he would never come back west again if he did. So then I had to go east for him and he told me to be careful on the way back not to spill a single drop. It was dark and as I walked along the road towards the lights of Teach Uí Fhlatharta, I knew that the man at the window was telling the man of the house about me. There’s Dublin Jack going in the door now carrying the jug with the blue and white stripes and there’s Dublin Jack taking out the money and buying sweets instead, but that was only a joke.
Teach Uí Fhlatharta was a big shop with everything you could buy, like jam and sweets and things like cement and wood, too. There was lots of smoke and lots of tall men in wellington boots standing at the counter, all talking at the same time. They were telling all the stories in Connemara as far away as Boston. I saw Tom Pháidin Tom laughing and smoking a pipe that had a lid on it for the rain. I stood behind them waiting for a while and looking at the new brushes and buckets hanging from the ceiling, until one of the men turned around to take the jug from me. He told the man behind the counter to fill it up to the top because Dublin Jack was very thirsty. I put the money up on the counter and, when the jug was full, they passed it down to me and told me to hold it with both hands. There was cream on top to stop you from seeing what was inside the jug, but you could smell it. Then one of them came over to open the door, and I walked back slowly in the dark without turning the jug upside down or meeting any ghosts or falling down in the ditch or getting swallowed up by the ground and never seen again. I didn’t spill a single drop. But when I got back, the man of the house looked into the jug for a long time. He asked me did I drink half of it myself, but the woman of the house told him I didn’t. The man at the window wanted to know if I saw anyone with a tweed cap turned backwards and that was Máirtín Handsome. Then the man of the house drank from the side of the jug and started telling a ghost story that happened to himself one time when he was coming home from Teach Uí Fhlatharta in the dark.
When I was going back to Dublin again, the woman of the house went out and caught a chicken for me to take back with me on the train. She put it into a bag and tied it with a ribbon so that the chicken was looking out at one end and some feathers were coming out the other. I knew that the man at the window was still talking about me long after I was gone. There’s Dublin Jack on the train now with the chicken beside him looking out the window at the stone walls going by. There’s Dublin Jack going home more Irish than anyone in Connemara, talking to the chicken in Irish and giving it a bit of his sandwich.
After that we started going to a new all-Irish school in Dublin with the Christian Brothers. Every day we had to get a train into the city and walk past Nelson’s Pillar and Cafollas and the Gresham Hotel. Everything at the new school was done through Irish – Latin, algebra, hurling and even English. The Christian Brothers wore black with a white collar and white chalk marks around their shoulders. One of them had brown fingers and smoked a piece of chalk all day in class, until his lips were white from talking. He asked me to read out a piece in a book and the whole class had to listen. He said it was a miracle how a Dublin boy could become so Irish. He escaped out of the classroom and took me by the hand, flying down the stairs three at a time and leaving all the other boys behind fencing with rulers. He said I had to go around and read in front of the whole school. I had to go to every classroom and show them what a native speaker was like, and the principal said I should be on television as an example of how history could be turned back.
Everybody was proud of me and I liked being Irish. But I knew all the boys in the school were laughing at me. Nobody really wanted to be that Irish. If you wanted to have friends you had to start speaking to yourself in English, so that nobody would call you a mahogany gaspipe or a sad fucking sap or think that you were from Connemara long ago. You’d never get into the Waverley Billiard Hall speaking Irish. You had to pretend that you had no friends who lived long ago like Peig Sayers. You had to laugh at Peig Sayers so that nobody would suspect you were really Irish underneath. You had to pretend that Irish music and Irish dancing were stupid, and Irish words smelled like onion sandwiches. You had to pretend that you were not afraid of the famine coming back, that you didn’t eat sandwiches made by your own mother and that you had an English song in your head at all times. You had to walk down O’Connell Street and pretend that you were not even in Ireland.
There were celebrations everywhere in Dublin for the Easter Rising. It happened fifty years ago and my father said it should happen again because Ireland would never be free until we had more of our own inventions. He said the Irish people were forced to repeat their history because of all the things the British left behind. And one day we saw the Easter Rising happening again in front of our own eyes. They were making a film of it and I saw Patrick Pearse coming out and surrendering with a white flag before he was executed by the British. There were pictures of Patrick Pearse in the windows of shoe shops and sweet shops. The shops had Irish flags, too, and copies of the proclamation which we all learned off by heart. We sold Easter lilies and there was hardly a single person in the city who wasn’t wearing one. In school a man came from the Abbey Theatre to put on a pageant and we got parts as croppy boys or redcoats and died every night. On the buses there were little torches and swords and all the lamp-posts in the city had flags so that everybody would remember how great it was that the Irish were free to walk down any street in the world, including their own. Nobody was telling the Irish when to get off the bus. Some people still thought it was the British empire coming back every time a bus conductor asked them for their fare. And some people thought it was the Nazis coming back every time an inspector came on to ask for their ticket. But the flags and the special stamps and the pictures in all the shops were there to remind everybody that the Irish were not the saddest people in the world any more, they were laughing now and nobody could stop them.
One day the whole school was brought out to see a film called Mise Éire which is the Irish for ’I am Ireland’. Some of the boys in the class were asking was Sean Connery in it and was there
a woman smoking and blinking and wearing nothing under her dressing gown. But it wasn’t that kind of film. There were no horses either rising up and whinnying. It was mostly about the Easter Rising, with black and white pictures of windows smashed and bullet holes in the walls. There was lots of big music that sounded like big country music from the end of a Western film and made everybody feel strong in their stomach. There were two boys standing guard and protecting the grave of O’Donovan Rossa with hurling sticks. There were people marching through the streets with hurling sticks on their shoulders and a deep voice saying ‘Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.’ It didn’t matter that James Bond wasn’t in it because Patrick Pearse was in it instead, and even though he got killed in the end, he put up a good fight.
I had new friends in school and one of them had a brother who worked in a gardening shop. One day he brought a bag of green dye into school that was used to mix with fertiliser, so that everybody would know it was not to be eaten. At lunchtime, we were not let into the Waverley Billiard Hall yet, so we brought the bag of fertiliser over to the new garden of remembrance across the road from the school. Then I had the idea to throw the dye into the fountain for Ireland. It turned green before we even got a chance to get back out of the garden again and the guards were sent for. The problem was that anyone who touched the dye had green hands and green faces, so it was easy to tell who did it. I tried to wash my face in the public toilets near the GPO but every time I put water on my face it turned even more green. There was a lot of trouble at school because I walked into the class late with my face all green, and I thought I would be expelled, but nothing happened because they said it was the right colour at least.
On the train home everybody thought it was part of the Easter commemorations and that every boy in Ireland was turning green. I wanted to be as Irish as possible so that I would never have to be German again. I wanted to belong to the saddest people and not the people who killed the saddest people. At home I tried to speak Irish to my mother again but she didn’t understand a word, so then I sat at the window while she was working, and I pretended that I was the newsreader, like the man at the window in Béal an Daingin. I waited for my father to come home from the station and told her all the people going by.
There’s Miss Ryan going east now to get minced meat for herself and her sister. There’s Miss Hosford going east, too, on her bicycle and nobody knows where she’s off to at this time of the day with a rucksack on her back. They say that Mrs MacSweeney’s niece is getting married soon in Dublin. They say that one of the Miss Doyles nearly got married to a stranger once, but she’s happier now living with her sister till death do us part, and reading to each other every evening after dinner from an indecent book by James Joyce. Here are the Miss Lanes coming out and looking up at the Irish flag hanging from the front window of our house, and they think they’re in the wrong country altogether. They look around the garden to make sure that nobody has kicked a football into their country and say that it’s a shame more Irish people didn’t die fighting the Nazis. They say the Irish were cowards because they didn’t fight against the Nazis, but they forget that the Irish fought against the British. There’s Miss Tarleton coming out now picking up bits of paper in her front garden and wondering why my mother didn’t die fighting against the Nazis. But she doesn’t know that my mother lived against the Nazis instead. They say that Miss Tarleton hates the bees more than the Irish language, except that they’re good for the loganberry harvest. They say that Miss Tarleton went into the butcher’s shop one day and asked Mr Furlong what the picture of Patrick Pearse was doing in the window beside all the meat. He said it was time to die for Ireland and she said that meant it was time to kill for Ireland, but my father says they’re both wrong because it’s time to live for Ireland and be Irish. They say that Mrs Creagh once went over to England for horse racing at Cheltenham and somebody asked her if the Irish still kept pigs under the bed, and she said it wasn’t half as bad as having the pigs in the bed like they do in England. Here’s Mr Clancy going down to the Eagle House and he once had a big argument with my father in the street. My father told him we were trying to be as Irish as possible. Mr Clancy said he was just as Irish as us and didn’t speak a word of Irish. He said Irish was the ‘aboriginal’ language and no bloody use to anyone any more. So then my father told Mr Clancy he would soon be outnumbered and Mr Clancy said my father better have a lot more children. Here’s my father coming around the corner saying that nobody is going to stop us speaking Irish or make us take down the Irish flag from the window until we feel like it. My father and Mr Clancy are going towards each other on the pavement and you think there’s going to be a big fight and blood on the ground, but my father is not one of the fist people and neither is Mr Clancy, and they both nod to each other politely as they pass by.
One morning my father woke me up early and showed me the newspaper. He still had shaving cream on his face and he was breathing fast from running up the stairs. He opened the paper wide and pointed at a picture of Dublin after a bomb. It was a bomb for Ireland, he said. I rubbed my eyes and looked at the picture, but I didn’t know what was happening until he read it out to me. It said that Nelson’s Pillar had been blown up during the night. I remembered going up to the top of Nelson’s Pillar once with Eileen and now it was gone and nobody would ever go up again. My father slapped the paper with the back of his hand and said the empire was crumbling. At last all the things the British left behind are disappearing, he said. At last we’re living in our own country and telling our own stories and speaking our own language. When I went to school I saw hundreds of people standing around looking at the remains of Nelson’s Pillar. There were no buses going up and down the street any more because there was rubble all over the place. The windows were broken and there was glass everywhere. People couldn’t go shopping that day or pass by to get into the GPO either. I saw a shoe shop with glass all over the new shoes. I looked up and saw the stump of Nelson’s Pillar like somebody’s arm cut off. Nelson’s head was on the ground and the dust of the empire was all around.
Twenty-six
I keep thinking this didn’t happen.
One day I had to collect Bríd from school because she was homesick. The wind was howling in her chest so I had to go into the girls’ school and bring her home. I had to go up the stairs past the glass cage with the stuffed birds and knock on the girls’ classroom. They opened the door and I saw Bríd sitting down with three girls and the teacher around her. Her face was white and she was breathing with her mouth open. Her hair was wet from sweating and they were wiping her face with a towel, but she was happy and she smiled because I was there to take her home. I picked up her schoolbag and took her by the hand and we walked down the stairs very slowly. She was holding on to the banisters and sitting down sometimes to take a rest with her head down and her hair in her face as if nothing mattered any more.
When we got outside I had to carry her because she couldn’t walk. She was leaning forward and stopping all the time to hold on to the railings, so then I hung the schoolbag around my neck and gave her a piggyback up to the bus stop. On the bus I got her to lie down on the seat like a bed with the schoolbag as a pillow, but she got up again, because she was coughing and crying for air with her arm around me. I knew she wouldn’t be able to walk home from the bus, so I asked the conductor if he could get the bus to bring her home. He was clicking the money in his hand and said he wasn’t allowed to do that, but then I told him that my sister was going to get sick and he talked to the driver. So the bus turned up at the Eagle House and all the people were lost because they had never been up that street before on a bus. The conductor explained that the bus was an ambulance now. He was still clicking the money in his hand to see if anyone hadn’t paid their fare, but then he sat down like a passenger himself, until the bus got to our street with the red houses and the driver stopped because it was impossible to go any further. I told him it was all right because we lived in number two and that wasn�
��t too far. Then the bus conductor carried Bríd as far as the front door and afterwards everybody was talking about the lost bus, because it took so long before it turned around and drove back down to catch up with the main road again.
The doctor had to come and we went down for the red medicine and twisted glucose sticks. Bríd took only one spoon because she wasn’t able to swallow and the second spoon dribbled down her chin, down the outside of her neck instead of inside. My mother tried to make her go to sleep with a song about a donkey who said he was better at making noise than the cuckoo, but she kept sitting up in bed and trying to run away. So then we carried the bed down to the kitchen to make sure that she wouldn’t be lonely upstairs. She fell asleep for a while and we walked around the house very quietly as if there was a cake in the oven. When my father came home he knew what to do. He sat on the bed and stroked her head. He got her to swallow another spoon of medicine inside her neck, and even when we were going to bed, he was still sitting there with her, trying to make her smile and asking her puzzles like the one about the man who came to a fork in the road and had only one question to ask. He gave her lots of clues, but she still didn’t know the answer and he had to tell her in the end. We could hear her breathing up and down all through the house, and sometimes she was crying and putting her arm around my father to beg him to help her breathe.
The Speckled People Page 21
