Liam Pat heard the floorboards replaced. He stepped back into the passage off which the door of the room opened. Together he and Feeny passed through the hall and climbed the stairs to Liam Pat’s room.
‘Pull down that blind, boy,’ Feeny said.
There was a photograph of Liam Pat’s mother stuck under the edge of a mirror over a wash-basin; just above it, one of his father had begun to curl at the two corners that were exposed. The cheap brown suitcase he’d travelled from Ireland with was open on the floor, clothes he’d brought back from the launderette dumped in it, not yet sorted out. He’d bought the suitcase in Lacey’s in Emmet Street, the day after he gave in his notice to O’Dwyer.
‘Listen to me now,’ Feeny said, sitting down on the bed.
The springs rasped noisily. Feeny put a hand out to steady the sudden lurch of the headboard. ‘I’m glad to see that,’ he said, gesturing with his head in the direction of a card Liam Pat’s mother had made him promise he’d display in whatever room he found for himself. In the Virgin’s arms the infant Jesus raised two chubby fingers in blessing.
‘I’m not into anything like you’re thinking,’ Liam Pat said.
‘Mr McTighe brought you over, boy.’
Feeny’s wizened features were without expression. His priestly suit was shapeless, worn through at one of the elbows. A tie as narrow as a bootlace hung from the soiled collar of his shirt, its minuscule knot hard and shiny. He stared at his knees when he said Mr McTighe had brought Liam Pat from Ireland. Liam Pat said:
‘I came over on my own though.’
Still examining the dark material stretched over his knees, as if fearing damage here also, Feeny shook his head.
‘Mr McTighe fixed the room. Mr McTighe watched your welfare. “I like the cut of Liam Pat Brogan.” Those were his words, boy. The day after yourself and myself went round to him the first time wasn’t he on the phone to me, eight a.m. in the morning? Would you know what he said that time?’
‘No, I wouldn’t.’
‘“We have a man in Liam Pat Brogan,” was what he said.’
‘I couldn’t do what you’re saying all the same.’
‘Listen to me, boy. They have no history on you. You’re no more than another Paddy going home for Christmas. D’you understand what I’m saying to you, Liam Pat?’
‘I never heard of Mr McTighe till I was over here.’
‘He’s a friend to you, Liam Pat, the same way’s I am myself. Haven’t I been a friend, Liam Pat?’
‘You have surely.’
‘That’s all I’m saying to you.’
‘I’d never have the nerve for a bomber.’
‘Sure, is there anyone wants to be? Is there a man on the face of God’s earth would make a choice, boy?’ Feeny paused. He took a handkerchief from a pocket of his trousers and passed it beneath his nose. For the first time since they’d entered Liam Pat’s room he looked at him directly. ‘There’ll be no harm done, boy. No harm to life or limb. Nothing the like of that.’
Liam Pat frowned. He shook his head, indicating further bewilderment.
‘Mr McTighe wouldn’t ask bloodshed of anyone,’ Feeny went on. ‘A Sunday night. You follow me on that? A Sunday’s a dead day in the city. Not a detail of that written down, though. Neither date nor time. Nothing I’m saying to you.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘Nothing, only memorized.’
Feeny went on talking then. Because there was no chair in the room, Liam Pat sat on the floor, his back to the wall. Child’s play, Feeny said again. He talked about Mr McTighe and the mission that possessed Mr McTighe, the same that possessed every Irishman worth his salt, the further from home he was the more it was there. ‘You understand me?’ Feeny said often, punctuating his long speech with this query, concerned in case there was incomprehension where there should be clarity. ‘The dream of Wolfe Tone,’ he said. ‘The dream of Isaac Butt and Charles Stewart Parnell. The dream of Lord Edward Fitzgerald.’
The names stirred classroom memories for Liam Pat, the lay teacher Riordan requesting information about them, his bitten moustache disguising a long upper lip, a dust of chalk on his pinstripes. ‘Was your man Fitzgerald in the Flight of the Earls?’ Hasessy asked once, and Riordan was contemptuous.
‘The massacre of the innocents,’ Feeny said. ‘Bloody Sunday.’ He spoke of lies and deception, of falsity and broken promises, of bullying that was hardly different from the bullying of Huxter. ‘O’Connell,’ he said. ‘Pearse. Michael Collins. Those are the men, Liam Pat, and you’ll walk away one of them. You’ll walk away ten feet high.’
As a fish is attracted by a worm and yet suspicious of it, Liam Pat was drawn into Feeny’s oratory. ‘God, you could be the Big Fella himself,’ Dessie Coglan complimented him one night when they were delivering the magazines. He had seen the roadside cross that honoured the life and the death of the Big Fella; he had seen the film only a few weeks back. He leaned his head against the wall and, while staring at Feeny, saw himself striding with Michael Collins’s big stride. The torrent of Feeny’s assurances and promises, and the connections Feeny made, affected him, but even so he said:
‘Sure, someone could be passing though.’
‘There’ll be no one passing, boy. A Sunday night’s chosen to make sure of it. Nothing only empty offices, no watchmen on the premises. All that’s gone into.’
Feeny pushed himself off the bed. He motioned with his hand and Liam Pat stood up. Between now and the incident, Feeny said, there would be no one in the house except Liam Pat. Write nothing down, he instructed again. ‘You’ll be questioned. Policemen will maybe get on the train. Or they’ll be at the docks when you get there.’
‘What’ll I say to them though?’
‘Only that you’re going home to County Cork for Christmas. Only that you were nowhere near where they’re asking you about. Never in your life. Never heard of it.’
‘Will they say do I know you? Will they say do I know Mr McTighe?’
‘They won’t have those names. If they ask you for names say the lads in your gang, say Rafferty and Noonan, say any names you heard in public houses. Say Feeny and McTighe if you’re stuck. They won’t know who you’re talking about.’
‘Are they not your names then?’
‘Why would they be, boy?’
Liam Pat’s protestation that he couldn’t do it didn’t weaken at first, but as Feeny went on and on, the words becoming images in Liam Pat’s vision, he himself always at the centre of things, he became aware of an excitement. Huxter wouldn’t know what was going to happen; Huxter would look at him and assume he was the same. The people who did not say hullo when he bought cigarettes or a newspaper would see no difference either. There was a strength in the excitement, a vigour Liam Pat had never experienced in his life before. He would carry the secret on to the site every morning. He would walk through the streets with it, a power in him where there’d been nothing. ‘You have a Corkman’s way with you,’ Feeny said, and in the room with the drawn curtains he showed Liam Pat the business.
Sixteen days went by before the chosen Sunday arrived. In the Spurs and Horse during that time Liam Pat wanted to talk the way Feeny and Mr McTighe did, in the same soft manner, mysteriously, some private meaning in the words he used. He was aware of a lightness in his mood and confidence in his manner, and more easily than before he was drawn into conversation. One evening the barmaid eyed him the way Rosita Drudy used to eye Dessie Coglan years ago in Brady’s Bar.
Liam Pat didn’t see Feeny again, as Feeny had warned him he wouldn’t. He didn’t see Mr McTighe. The man didn’t call for the rent, and for sixteen days Liam Pat was the only person in the house. He kept to his room except when he went to take up the sawn-through floorboards, familiarizing himself with what had to be done, making sure there was space enough in the sports bag when the clock was packed in a way that was convenient to set it. He cooked nothing in the kitchen because Feeny had said better not to. He didn’t understand that, but even so he obeyed the com
mand, thinking of it in that way, an order, no questions asked. He made tea in his room, buttering bread and sprinkling sugar on the butter, opening tins of beans and soup, eating the contents cold. Five times in all he made the journey he was to make on the chosen Sunday, timing himself as Feeny had suggested, becoming used to the journey and alert to any variations there might be.
On the Saturday before the Sunday he packed his suitcase and took it across the city to a locker at Euston Station, still following Feeny’s instructions. When he returned to the house he collected what tins he’d opened and what food was left and filled a carrier bag, which he deposited in a dustbin in another street. The next day he had a meal at one o’clock in Bob’s Dining Rooms, the last he would ever have there. The people were friendlier than they’d been before.
Nothing that belonged to him remained in his room, or in the house, when he left it for the last time. Feeny said to clean his room with the Philips cleaner that was kept for general use at the bottom of the stairs. He said to go over everywhere, all the surfaces, and Liam Pat did so, using the little round brush without any extension on the suction tube. For his own protection, that was. Wipe the handles of the doors with a tissue last thing of all, Feeny had advised, anywhere he might have touched.
Shortly after seven he practised the timing again. He wanted to smoke a cigarette in the downstairs room, but he didn’t because Feeny had said not to. He zipped up the sports bag and left the house with it. Outside, he lit a cigarette.
On the way to the bus stop, two streets away, he dropped the key of the house down a drain, an instruction also. When Feeny had been advising him about cleaning the surfaces and making sure nothing was left that could identify him, Liam Pat had had the impression that Mr McTighe wouldn’t have bothered with any of that, that all Mr McTighe was interested in was getting the job done. He went upstairs on the bus and sat at the back. A couple got off at the next stop, leaving him on his own.
It was then that Liam Pat began to feel afraid. It was one thing to have it over Huxter, to know what Huxter didn’t know; it was one thing to get a smile from the barmaid. It was another altogether to be sitting on a bus with a device in a sports bag. The excitement that had first warmed him while he listened to Feeny, while he sat on the floor with his head resting against the wall, wasn’t there any more. Mr McTighe picking him out felt different now, and when he tried to see himself in Michael Collins’s trench-coat, with Michael Collins’s stride, there was nothing there either. It sounded meaningless, Feeny saying he had a Corkman’s way with him.
He sat with the sports bag on the floor, steadied by his feet on either side of it. A weakness had come into his arms, and for a moment he thought he wouldn’t be able to lift them, but when he tried it was all right, even though the feeling of weakness was still there. A moment later nausea caused him to close his eyes.
The bus lurched and juddered through the empty Sunday-evening streets. Idling at bus stops, its engine vibrated, and between his knees Liam Pat’s hand repeatedly reached down to seize the handles of the sports bag, steadying it further. He wanted to get off, to hurry down the stairs that were beside where he was sitting, to jump off the bus while it was still moving, to leave the sports bag where it was. He sensed what he did not understand: that all this had happened before, that his terror had come so suddenly because he was experiencing, again, what he had experienced already.
Two girls came chattering up the stairs and walked down the length of the bus. They laughed as they sat down, one of them bending forward, unable to control herself. The other went on with what she was saying, laughing too, but Liam Pat couldn’t hear what she said. The conductor came for their fares and when he’d gone they found they didn’t have a light for their cigarettes. The one who’d laughed so much was on the inside, next to the window. The other one got up. ‘Ta,’ she said when she had asked Liam Pat if he had a lighter and he handed her his box of matches. He didn’t strike one because of the shaking in his hands, but even so she must have seen it. ‘Ta,’ she said again.
It could have been in a dream. He could have dreamed he was on a bus with the bag. He could have had a dream and forgotten it, like you sometimes did. The night he’d seen Feeny for the last time, it could have been he had a dream of being on a bus, and he tried to remember waking up the next morning, but he couldn’t.
The girl next to the window looked over her shoulder, as if she’d just been told that he’d handed her friend the box instead of striking a match for her. They’d remember him because of that. The one who’d approached him would remember the sports bag. ‘Cheers,’ the same one said when they both left the bus a couple of stops later.
It wasn’t a dream. It was the Examiner spread out on the kitchen table a few months ago and his father shaking his head over the funeral, sourly demanding why those people couldn’t have been left to their grief, why there were strangers there, wanting to carry the coffin. ‘My God! My God!’ his father savagely exclaimed.
It hadn’t worked the first time. A Sunday night then too, another boy, another bus. Liam Pat tried to remember that boy’s name, but he couldn’t. ‘Poor bloody hero,’ his father said.
Another Dessie Coglan had done the big fella, fixing it, in touch with another Gaughan, in touch with the lads, who came to parade at the funeral. Another Huxter was specially picked. Another Feeny said there’d be time to spare to get to Euston afterwards, no harm to life or limb, ten exactly the train was. The bits and pieces had been scraped up from the pavement and the street, skin and bone, part of a wallet fifty yards away.
Big Ben was chiming eight when he got off the bus, carrying the sports bag slightly away from his body, although he knew that was a pointless precaution. His hands weren’t shaking any more, the sickness in his stomach had passed, but still he was afraid, the same fear that had begun on the bus, cold in him now.
Not far from where Big Ben had sounded there was a bridge over the river. He’d crossed it with Rafferty and Noonan, his first weekend in London, when they’d thought they were going to Fulham only they got it all wrong. He knew which way to go, but when he reached the river wall he had to wait because there were people around, and cars going by. And when the moment came, when he had the bag on the curved top of the wall, another car went by and he thought it would stop and come back, that the people in it would know. But that car went on, and the bag fell with hardly a splash into the river, and nothing happened.
O’Dwyer had work for him, only he’d have to wait until March, until old Hoyne reached the month of his retirement. Working the mixer it would be again, tarring roofs, sweeping the yard at the end of the day. He’d get on grand, O’Dwyer said. Wait a while and you’d never know; wait a while and Liam Pat could be his right-hand man. There were no hard feelings because Liam Pat had taken himself off for a while.
‘Keep your tongue to yourself,’ Mrs Brogan had warned her husband in a quiet moment the evening Liam Pat so unexpectedly returned. It surprised them that he had come the way he had, a roundabout route when he might have come the way he went, the Wexford crossing. ‘I missed the seven train,’ he lied, and Mrs Brogan knew he was lying because she had that instinct with her children. Maybe something to do with a girl, she imagined, his suddenly coming back. But she left that uninvestigated, too.
‘Ah sure, it doesn’t suit everyone,’ Dessie Coglan said in Brady’s Bar. Any day now it was for Rosita and he was full of that. He never knew a woman get pregnant as easy as Rosita, he said. He didn’t ask Liam Pat if he’d used the telephone number he’d given him, if that was how he’d got work. ‘You could end up with fourteen of them,’ he said. Rosita herself was one of eleven.
Liam Pat didn’t say much, either to O’Dwyer or at home or to Dessie Coglan. Time hung heavy while old Hoyne worked out the few months left of his years with O’Dwyer. Old Hoyne had never risen to being more than a general labourer, and Liam Pat knew he never would either.
He walked out along the Mountross road every afternoon, the icy a
ir of a bitterly cold season harsh on his hands and face. Every day of January and a milder February, going by the rusted gates of Mountross Abbey and the signpost to Ballyfen, he thought about the funeral at which there’d been the unwanted presence of the lads, and sometimes saw it as his own.
All his life he would never be able to tell anyone. He could never describe that silent house or the stolid features of Mr McTighe or repeat Feeny’s talk. He could never speak of the girls on the bus, how he hadn’t been able to light a match, or how so abruptly he realized that this was the second attempt. He could never say that he’d stood with the sports bag on the river wall, that nothing had happened when it struck the water. Nor that he cried when he walked away, that tears ran down his cheeks and on to his clothes, that he cried for the bomber who might have been himself.
He might have left the bag on the bus, as he had thought he would. He might have hurried down the stairs and jumped off quickly. But in his fear he had found a shred of courage and it had to do with the boy: he knew that now and could remember the feeling. It was his mourning of the boy, as he might have mourned himself.
On his walks, and when he sat down to his meals, and when he listened to his parents’ conversation, the mourning was still there, lonely and private. It was there in Brady’s Bar and in the shops of the town when he went on his mother’s messages. It would be there when again he took charge of a concrete-mixer for O’Dwyer, when he shovelled wet cement and worked in all weathers. On the Mountross road Liam Pat didn’t walk with the stride of Michael Collins, but wondered instead about the courage his fear had allowed, and begged that his mourning would not ever cease.
A Friend in the Trade
They fell in love when A Whiter Shade of Pale played all summer. They married when Tony Orlando sang Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree. These tunes are faded memories now, hardly there at all, and they’ve forgotten Procol Harum and Suzi Quatro and Brotherhood of Man, having long ago turned to Brahms.
Selected Stories, Volume 2 Page 28
