A stone of the heart imm-1

by John Brady

  "Sounds like Loftus talking," Minogue said. "Tell me, was the Commissioner ever in the army himself?"

  Kilmartin hesitated.

  "Matter of fact, now that you mention it, he was. In the early fifties. Did an unusual thing, changed career. Paid off."

  "The contacts are always there," Minogue observed delicately.

  "Look, Matt. That note-I know about it-is from a crank or some yo-yo who didn't like Walsh. As for his Da's importing fruit and the like, well you can't get much for bananas on the drug market here. Walsh wouldn't know one end of a reefer from the other. Neither would the young lad, God be good to him. It's just a student thing. You know how the papers would lap up any stuff like that though. That's Loftus' peeve, I'm sure."

  "One of the boy's professors told me he had an interest in the effects of various drugs," Minogue said.

  "Ah," Kilmartin sighed. "Well, that's how I tend to think about it meself. He probably wanted to have something ready to say to his pals if they were poking fun at him for not smoking up. A debate maybe. He was well able to talk, by all accounts."

  Neither man spoke for several seconds.

  "Be that as it may, though," Minogue said quietly, "Loftus won't be the one to determine whether police work should or shouldn't pursue something, no matter how far up the bog it might look."

  "Absolutely," Kilmartin said. "But listen. Maybe you did rub Loftus the wrong way, maybe a personality thing. The Commissioner is wondering if maybe your own views on things aren't squeezing in on things a bit."

  "You mean Loftus and where he works? The old school tie stuff and the gentry beyond in Trinity? No."

  "It's been a rough year for you, Matt, more than a lot of people could take. Wouldn't you prefer to work on another angle? Look, I can get Connors to do the legwork for you. He's a smart lad. He has his wits about him."

  "No thanks," Minogue said, in the quietness which seemed to fill the room after Kilmartin's remarks.

  Kilmartin turned back to the pleasantries. He did not want to leave any friction in his wake. He suffered for his understanding, however, with the knifing pain in his bowel as well as with the knowledge that Minogue read his strategies.

  CHAPTER SIX

  With no plan in his head, Minogue went to Trinity College. Driving into the centre of the city, the buildings passed him in a grimy, purgatorial progression. The rain greyed everything. Women's stockings had splash marks on them. Motorists were drowning people at the streetcorners. The buses seemed to go even faster than usual. Tramps stood sodden in the streets downtown, their hair matted on their foreheads. The parking practices of Dubliners were bad enough on days you could philosophise about them, but today they were three deep in Leeson Street. Grafton Street was blocked.

  Walking from his car finally, Minogue felt the gloom approach closer. No doubt it would meet him and swallow him whole in the room. Burying Walsh today. What a send-off in this downpour. Minogue shivered.

  Closer to the door of the room he had been assigned, Minogue had a little change of heart. He headed off toward Agnes' rooms.

  Breathless after three flights of stairs, he tapped at her door. He heard footsteps inside. She opened the door and smiled faintly.

  "Well, Sergeant. Come in."

  She was dressed in black and grey. The outfit was a size or two too big for her, probably borrowed. The dark colours made her face even paler.

  Minogue stepped in. Sitting at the table was Allen, uncharacteristically dressed in a jacket and tie.

  "I was just about to leave," Allen said, rising. He turned to Agnes.

  "I'll be back at a quarter to. The car is parked up near Pearse Street Gate."

  "Sit down, will you, Sergeant. Will it be tea?" she asked. Minogue was taken with the accent again: sot dine.

  "I had hoped to carry on our conversation from yesterday, Agnes. But if I'm intruding…" he trailed off.

  "Not a bit of it."

  "Well," Minogue began, "Yes, tea would be grand."

  He felt his heart pushing still after the climb. Agnes lit the gas, walked back into the room and sat across the table from Minogue. A picture of two people dressed up as clowns on their way out to a party hung on the wall behind her. It was at dusk and the two figures were dwarfed by the black branches of a winter coppice. Between the branches was a sky of light blue which fell imperceptibly to cream behind the trees. Miraculously, a moon held the stillness and peace without a trace of a message for the astonished Minogue. A Rousseau?

  The place was very neat without being fussy. Minogue noticed that all the books were shelved alphabetically. Rain beaded the window. Drops broke away with the help of gusts and they gullied down the glass. A faint smell of gas came from the kitchenette. It was mixed with a light staleness of age, maybe a trace of bedwarmth. Nobody smoked here.

  "You'll be off soon then, Agnes?"

  "Dr Allen's giving me a lift out to the funeral. So…"

  "I'm still trying to figure out details, so I am. Every little thing can have a bearing. I don't know if this is the day to be pursuing it though."

  "I can try in the next twenty minutes or so. I'm in one piece now. I can't say about this afternoon though," Agnes said. Her voice had the questioning quality which Minogue was familiar with from listening to Northerners. Hers had none of the suspicion or dare-me he associated with the talk he heard in that accent. He was quite mesmerised by her voice. The silence finally jolted him back from staring at the poster.

  "Em. Agnes, did Jarlath ever discuss things to do with drugs with you?"

  "Drugs?" she asked. Drugs. She shook her head, not taking her eyes from Minogue's.

  "He wasn't that type of person. I would have known," she added. "Jarlath talked about a lot of things. I'm not sure I was listening to him all the time. It wasn't what he said or anything, it was more that he liked ideas, liked a listener."

  "He had notebooks that were stolen. Would you know anything about what he used the notebooks for?" Minogue asked.

  "Well, he wrote down ideas. He was full of them. Anything really, I suppose. Quotations, references maybe… He said it made him look organised, like Woodward and Bernstein, documenting everything," Agnes said.

  "Who?"

  "The men who blew the whistle on Nixon. The Watergate thing. Jarlath was very interested in that stuff. He wanted to get a scoop, he said. He used to joke about it. He'd keep me in suspense, you know, pretending he had found out something big and I'd be dying to know. It'd turn out to be a yarn, having me on. He had a sense of humour. People didn't see it very often though. They didn't give him much of a chance. He'd have me on the edge of the chair with it, and it'd turn out to be something like the Provost's cat peed on his shoes. Silly, but he did it for laughs. He wasn't the way others here thought of him, you know."

  "Yes, your president beyond in the Students' Union mentioned Jarlath's interest in the journalism," Minogue said.

  "Mick Roche? Not too complimentary, I'd suspect," Agnes said wryly.

  "Not really. Said Jarlath had potential," Minogue said.

  In between talking, he could hear the kettle gathering strength. Soon it would whistle. It dawned on Minogue that he liked this room. He would like to try this other life out for a while. Going to lectures, chatting, making friends, reading. To be this age, to be going to libraries, to be in touch. Minogue wanted to do silly things, to make mistakes.

  Agnes went to the kitchenette to make the tea. Minogue listened to the numerous domestic sounds. His mind reeled effortlessly back to his own youth. Had he had a youth? Maybe that's what it is, he speculated: he didn't have a youth and he spent his adult life trying to make up for it. He didn't mind being thought of as a bit eccentric. It served as well as any other dressing. Over the years he had watched some grey creep in, even into his beard. Kathleen had bought him an electric razor. With some fascination he observed the dust of hairs which he blew out the bathroom window. His hands had lost their strength. His shoulders weren't back. Stairs reminded him of his age. H
is few friends looked old sometimes, straitened, very usual.

  Minogue had gone all the way through school to the Leaving Certificate. He and his brother, Mick, had run the farm. Their father could do little enough after the bouts of TB. The boys were a new generation in the Irish Free State. The war on the continent had brushed them in their early teens. Big things happening abroad, the names of battles and towns and generals coming across the wireless. The Local Defence Force hanging around in ditches trying to look fierce at the occasional roadblocks. Cars were scarce on the roads.

  The Christian Brothers had done their anointed task and Minogue had endured. He could almost carry on a conversation in Latin. At least he could entertain a few Romans with recitations from Livy. He remembered the stupidest things even yet: which forms took the subjunctive, expressions like iter fecerunt, Hannibal with the vinegar, breaking boulders in the Alps.

  The odd teacher along the way indulged him. He read out parts of the Aeneid by gaslight at home in the kitchen. His parents listened with a reverence for the holiness that Latin brought to the house. His father would cough and say that Virgil borrowed his stuff from the Irish stories.

  They heard about camps for Jews on the continent. A lay teacher risked George Orwell, God forbid, and even loaned Minogue books by Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis. The wet fields waited for them in the spring. One of the fields might flood. A pig might get stuck in a dike. They bought a tractor, the talk of the townland.

  In school, the civics classes taught you codes of conduct. May brought the altar to the Blessed Virgin into the classroom, lilacs inevitably. The Catechism showed him how to answer hypothetical questions which a Protestant might ask you if you were in a bus, say. No opportunity for converting was to be lost. Minogue's mother thought that one of her sons might have a vocation for the priesthood. She fastened her hopes on Mick and he turned toward her hope. Minogue watched his sisters grow up, do civil service exams, go to dances, get a job in the bank and more. Minogue stayed on the farm while Mick deliberated.

  More cars appeared on the roads. There was a change in the music at the dances. Minogue began to favour pints of stout and he found that he was well able to drink them all evening in the pub. Coming home on the lane, the drink tidal in his belly, he'd stop for a piss in the ditch. He'd hear the rustlings in the hedges when the stream stopped. Swaying in the dark, he'd be pissing on his shoes as he looked up for stars. He was twenty and tired of waiting.

  At night he'd hear the cattle lowing or the hens being disturbed. Up at six, the clang of the milking buckets, a cigarette in the mouth early, the rhythmical swish of the teats squirting into the bucket.

  What decided it finally was not his father's deteriorating condition or his own frustration. Rather, it was the questioning of his brother by the Garda one evening. It was a casual thing, to look as if they were doing something about the IRA. Mick came home late. He was triumphant, Minogue realised. He had been questioned in the barracks in town about his connections with the IRA, a proscribed organisation. It didn't matter that it was moribund, maintained by diehards and barstool heroes. Mick had found his vocation, Minogue understood. Ireland was to be his religion.

  Maybe, as Mick accused him, it was the books he read. Books full of pessimism and anti-religious feeling. Maybe it wasn't fashionable to be devoted to your country anymore, Mick would sneer. Youth? Mick didn't have it either. Curious though, Kathleen had remarked after they had all met at a neighbour's funeral years later, Mick didn't seem to age.

  Minogue tried his hand at bartending in Dublin. His mother wanted him to do the Civil Service exams. He spent a lot of time in the libraries. He saved money for a trip to America. He met Kathleen O'Hare who was new to the Civil Service. She poked fun at his accent, knowing his irritation to be waxing love. He in turn complained about Dublin people. She teased out his plans. She said she had to be fair with him, not to lead him on, because if he was serious about America, she couldn't go. Her family needed her and America frightened her, she admitted.

  "You're nobody there, Matt," she'd say.

  Minogue was reading the Frenchman, Sartre, and he felt that he wouldn't mind being a nobody for a while. Maybe a holiday in America, Kathleen said.

  She had been very fair to me, Minogue thought. He was determined to repay her honesty with a loyalty the intensity of which surprised him. Minogue didn't fancy himself as a man who went in for the lovey-dovey stuff, but not because he wanted people to think he was a hard man. He would be happy with loyalty and company. Within a year, he was through the Garda training in Templemore, surprising himself even more by doing well at it. They married. With the America money and Kathleen's economy, they saw themselves into a new house in Kilmacud. Minogue didn't mind it at all, not even the cliff-heights of a mortgage.

  In that same year, Minogue's father had died, leaving Mick the man of the house. Their mother grieved for a long time. The doctor called it reactive depression. Minogue's sisters and their husbands called on weekends. One sister, Maura, gently asked him what he thought about her moving to Canada and how would their mother take it. Families grew. Something was stirring in the country, money.

  Kathleen delivered a baby boy, Eamonn, a big hairy child. Eamonn died unaccountably some seven months later, forgetting to breathe, it seems. The death precipitated the worst years of Minogue's life. For all their cleverness, the poems and the books meant nothing after that. Kathleen overcame her dread and went to see a psychiatrist. Minogue was helpless, encumbered. They promoted him to detective.

  It wasn't until six years later that Kathleen conceived again. Minogue felt frightened being an expectant father again. None of their acquaintances joked with them. Minogue had been marked as different already.

  Iseult was a different baby from the start. Kathleen took heart. The coldness leaked out of Minogue. As if to remind them that it wasn't chance, Daithi was born the following year. Minogue was always watching. He was careful not to live for his children but his determination was manic. They would have university, the loan of the car, good teeth, pocket money, clothes, French, parties, books. Fearing his own intensity, Minogue immersed himself in it all the more.

  As they grew, Minogue wondered-but didn't much care about-his promotion. He became a detective sergeant. Others passed him on the ladder.

  Optimism seeped into Ireland in the sixties. One evening he watched civil rights marchers being beaten up near Derry. Was that still going on? He knew vaguely that the civil rights people were Catholics and that the Unionists controlled the North. The police beat up the marchers. That Paisley lunatic and his huge lips and mouth sneering on the television, a hysteric from another century. A new IRA appeared in the streets. Minogue was relieved. The people he worked with and the people he met were glad too. There were rumours of sending in troops to Derry to protect the Catholics. Hooded bodies turned up in ditches. Bombs demolished shops and factories. Men were shot to death at their doors. Troops went berserk. Petrol bombs arced lazily and burst in the night on the evening news. British Ministers recoiled at the hatred. Minogue's brother called in and had a glass of whisky.

  "Majority my foot. How is it that a country that's held up to be the birthplace of parliamentary government can give in to a crowd of seventeenth-century bigots who represent about two percent of the population of Great Britain. How is that, can you tell me?"

  New laws and courts, armed guards and the army at trials. The word'terrorist' showed up in the news a lot. The old guard of the IRA, well clear of Belfast and Newry and Derry, lauded their northern heroes. Mick exhilarated in talk. He was well-to-do now. The country was to join the European Economic Community although Mick didn't agree with the move in principle. Still, Mick was not an activist, Minogue knew. Mick was for Ireland going it alone and his zeal couldn't countenance socialism. He couldn't approve of guns from Libya or Russia or from the madmen in Germany.

  The brothers met intermittently at hurling matches. In Hayes' Hotel in Thurles, they^d be pressed together by the swell
of men trying to get to the bar, eager for pints after the game. Both locked into the throng of countrymen in the streets and pubs of provincial towns. Minogue would catch sight of his brother through the struggling mass; the strong smells of his own youth-the porter, the cowshite, the hair oil-rising up around him. They never quarrelled.

  Minogue knew that his brother knew more than he'd tell. The mannered ambiguity and the lifetime's practice with evasion meshed the two men. Ah, Minogue thought sometimes as the stout hit his stomach, we have the same sisters and mother and father, isn't that the strangest thing? How's things Matt? Grand and how's yourself and yours? Can't complain, Matt, back to the wind. And how's Kathleen and the two children? Good, thanks be to God. Not thanks be to God at all, to Kathleen probably.

  Minogue had felt a God in the singed grass at the side of the road, in the slowness of things winding down. The young fellow with the scattered blots and freckles of blood thick all over his face and everything silent and slow and slower as the smoke moved off. Minogue had spent a long time thinking about it in hospital. It was never fear really, more a surprise, especially so because there was something so familiar there at the time. It was like a face maybe. Maybe like those Zen fellas, a face he had before he was born. Not smiling or puzzled or anything at all really, more a feeling that something was there. A watchful presence, interested and disinterested at the same time. Great calm, silence. Maybe a trace of regret as it receded. Life marches on, each wave of people full of themselves, but less so as they get closer to the edge with the years. Then it's our turn.

  Lying in the hospital bed, Minogue had imagined all the life, plants and animals, all the plankton in the sea, all the organisms in his body. This small hating island off the coast of Europe… There were people dying of hunger elsewhere, without the time or the energy to be on their mad summer marches, without any dirty little pubs to plot in. Ah, but that wasn't the half of it even. People are nice here a lot of the time. More inane phrases drifted by Minogue and he'd turn aside to sleep.