by Kevin Barry
Chapter Five
MOTHER FIST AND HER FIVE DAUGHTERS
At the port of Algeciras, in October 2018
Time runs on odd bends here. There are days and nights you wouldn’t know where the fuck you are nor when. The people come and go. Their eternal faces; their lips moving silently across the seven distractions. Soon, again, the boats will come and go. When we move by water, our hearts are moved. We are complicated fucking machines. Now the hours melt one into the other at the port of Algeciras. For the fading Irish gangsters the long wait continues –
You know what I get to wondering, Maurice?
Tell me, Charlie.
About death, Moss.
Here we go.
Is it as raw a deal as they make it out to be?
Come again?
Is it not in some way an ease when she comes calling? The Black Angel? . . . Hush now . . . Listen? . . . The gentle flapping of her wings . . . You hearing it?
Charles?
Are we as well off out of it, Maurice? Is what I’m asking. With all the bollock-acting that do be going on?
I’m not seeing a picnic coming, Charlie. Death-wise.
You think it’s the end?
I’m not saying it’s the end. I’m just not seeing a picnic.
I have a happy enough view of the Big D. So happens.
What are you seeing down there, Charlie? At the end of the road?
I’m not seeing a meadow full of flowers. I’m not saying that for one minute. Not seeing a moonful bay neither. With all your old birds there, and they lined up, waiting on you, one after the other, in the peach of their youths. Their rosy cheeks and their glad little eyes. I’m not seeing that by any means. But what I am imagining, Maurice, is a kind of . . . quiet. You know? Just a kind of . . . silence.
Lovely, Maurice Hearne says. Restful.
When you think what we put up with in our lives? Noise-wise?
It’s a cacophony, Mr Redmond.
We come into the world on the tip of a scream and the wave of our poor mothers’ roaring.
Our poor mams with the straw nearly ripped out of the mattresses.
And the first thing we do? We start roaring and bawling our own selves. We open the lungs and let rip. We give it what-for. And how do we go out? At the far end of life? Often enough in the same way. Roaring out of us!
And what goes on in between?
Noise, Maurice. Nothing but noise and consternation.
You look for the quiet spaces in a life, Charles. And do you find them?
In your hole you do.
Or in love, maybe.
Maybe so.
I loved her, Charlie.
I know that. I’m very sorry.
For a long while. I knew her, you know? Cynthia. I knew who she was.
Do you think about where she’s gone to now?
I do, yeah. I’m not seeing a picnic, Charlie.
You mean, what if it’s just . . .
More of it.
On the far side. What’s if it’s just . . .
Noise?
*
A ferry boat lands in from Tangier. There is activity again across the Straits. A few ragged youths saunter drowsily across the terminal floor. They have the weight of Africa on their backs. They are watched with bead of eye by the mildly natty, mildly decrepit Irishmen.
Dilly Hearne?
Dill or Dilly?
She’s a small girl.
She’s a pretty girl.
Dreadlocks. Dog-on-a-rope type. That kind of an aul’ gaatch to her.
The men sit restlessly on the bench. They are at a high vantage atop the stack of their years. They are old enough for the long view in either direction now.
It got tricky, Maurice says. With Dilly. As she got older. By the time she was fourteen or fifteen? Slugging around the place with a leper face on. And the school she was at? The place really annoyed me, actually.
The Sisters of Perpetual . . .
Whatever they fucken were. I remember one day, Charles, at the height of it, a day when I seriously had other things on my plate. But it was irking me, you know? The idea of poor Dill at that school. So I got on the blower to the principal. I gave her an absolute leathering. I said listen now, missus, okay? I’m not saying I’m in charge of the uniforms at all. But do ye not realise what ye’re dealing with here? These are very open young people. They’re still being formed. These are young girls fifteen years of age. And the way ye make them go around the place in those horrible old uniforms? Awful shapeless skirts and jumpers, down to their ankles, like sacks on them. Ye’re trying to make these girls deny themselves! And they’re beautiful girls! You know what it is? It’s Catholic fucken hijab!
That was telling her, Maurice.
I’m not saying I was in any position to be getting up on my high horse. At the moment of speaking I was a mile off the coast of Clare with a half-tonne of Moroccan hashish in the hold. And the fear of screeching Jesus on me. And the water rolling and the boat listing . . . God help me . . . Pitching and rolling a mile out from Fanore . . . A morning of the winter, and there’s no sign of Charlie Redmond, nor his fucken lorry . . . And I’m thinking, Maurice? You’re too long in the tooth now for this lark . . . I was thinking, my daughter is the important thing now, she should be my . . . my focus, you know?
You made a fabulous dad, Maurice. In my opinion.
But then the mist kind of parted . . . And there were two headlamps . . . Burning . . . Just there . . . In the grey morning . . . Above the old pier, at Fanore . . . And there he was, Charlie Redmond, of Farranree . . . Like a man that would never let you down.
*
You think there’s an end in sight, Charlie?
Boats come in, the boats go out. She could make an appearance yet.
But what I get to wondering?
Don’t, Moss.
Is it pretty girls make graves?
We’d know. Somehow. At a gut level. If she weren’t drawing the wind no more.
You think she’s after hawkin’ us over?
It’s in her blood to be hawkin’ us. Her mother was the same way. Crooked as the day.
And a tongue on her, Cynthia. When I came back without the eye on me? From Tangier? She took one look, after all I’d suffered, and she said who the fuck do you think you are, Thom Yorke?
Never heard of him. Or hang about . . . He wasn’t a lame boy from Summerhill?
He’s the lad out of Radiohead, Charlie.
Never liked them. Whining bastards. And the amount of money the cunts are making? They should have the ukuleles out.
He have the one eye guzz on him.
Making any amount of money. And he whining out of him like a stuck goat? Should have his mambas out.
Do you think it made me handsomer, Charlie? In a peculiar way? The fucked-up eye?
It gave you a bit of character, Moss.
Sayin’ I had none beforehand?
You were bland-enough looking as a younger gent, Maurice, in fairness.
You’d say that for it. The ageing. It does give you a bit of sauce. In a peculiar way.
It’s the desperation make us saucy. Gents of a certain age. But as a matter of fact, Moss? For all the groaning out of us? For all we’d be whinging away like we’re stuck in the middle of Radiohead of a wet Tuesday? The fact is we’re in our prime. You and me? We’re three o’clock of a summer’s afternoon.
Hard to enjoy it, Charlie. I have an amount of guilt. Still.
Of course you have. On account of you nearly killed the girl.
Difficult to go there. Even yet.
I know, Maurice. I’m sorry.
*
From beneath the stones of the Algeciras dockside the humid air of reminiscence rises – it is one of the places of the earth designed for a good wallow.
My father?
Charlie Redmond smiles but sombrely. He looks to the high windows. He shakes his head in wonderment.
I reckon my father was the palest man in Cork
city, he says.
Which is saying fucken something, Maurice says.
He should have been a priest. He shouldn’t have spawned at all. It would have saved the world a whole heap of botheration. He believed in God and humble destinies. He believed this was but the Vale of Tears. We were only passing through.
He might have been on the money there, Charlie.
Retired of a Friday. Took a massive stroke the following Tuesday. Sixty-five years of age. He gets himself planted in the wet clay. A man that was never late for work a day in his life.
Old bones. Going by the like of my poor dad’s reach.
Those were hard times for you, Maurice. What were you? Eighteen? Nineteen?
It was after we moved to the new flat. College Road. By St Fin Barre’s. He wasn’t right in himself. He’d sit in a deckchair out at the front door and play Hank Williams records. The Hank was never a good sign. It was summer and it’d be nearly bright at eleven o’clock still. He’s in his deckchair. The mother bringing him out cups of strong tea. Hank is going for it on the Sanyo Music Centre. The mother operated on the principle that strong tea was your only man for nerves. The father was gone from the job by that stage. He was gone from the port of Cork.
When the work is done for? Charlie says. Throw a stick at it.
He was on the Disability. He wouldn’t sleep so much as a flea. He was in touch with odd elements, Charlie. I totally fucken believe this. He was like . . . a receiver. For strange fucken transmissions. The mother parading out to him with the sad little face and the mug of strong tea. Hank giving it plenty of the lonesome. Drinkers coming out of the Abbey Tavern across the road. Not a bother on them. Height of summer, bright at eleven bells, and my mother would be watching for the draw. We won’t know it now, she’d say, until there’s an old draw in the evenings, it’ll be closing in on top of us. For a poor man depressed as bejesus since the day he first peeped out, to have to be listening to that? But he knew well enough that lacking her he’d be sucking his thumbs in a locked room.
Marriage, Charlie says. Beautiful and cruel.
Freaking out about me kept them going. I was a blessing. The freaking out gave them an interest in life. Maurice is going to wind up in Cork jail. What’ll he do, Noel? He might go to England. He’d be as well off, Noelie? Elsewise they’ll have a cot warmed for him in Cork jail, Ciss. My father. In his deckchair, at midnight, and Hank Williams Senior is wailing blue misery.
And Maurice can see it very clearly, even still, the summer night is pale, the late drinkers are still straggling from the Abbey, and his father is at the door, in his stripy deckchair, coming to his end, and bats at midnight thrill the cathedral eaves.
I think we had a heart-to-heart twice ever in our lives. Myself and the father. One time? It was that first winter on College Road. We were sat in front of the telly, Sunday afternoon, a football match, Highbury, it’s a December Sunday.
Rags of snow on the pitch. The players blue under the winter lights. Sunday afternoon at the flats – the waft of roasted meats, and kids all over the shop, bawling.
He looks at me, Charlie. Says, what are you going to do with yourself, Moss? And I could tell then that he was going, I could tell he was on the road home. I don’t know really, Da, I said. I might go to England yet.
It was Arsenal versus United. Bad-tempered and sparky. His father leaned forward and pulled up his socks. They watched the game steadily and they were careful not to look at each other.
You might be as well off, Moss, he said. Not saying England would be easy. It’s not easy there at all. Did I ever tell you about a rough turn I took in Wolverhampton? I mean before I met your mother even. Wolverhampton was bleak, Moss. The blacks were eating dog food. I took a bad turn. I didn’t know which end was up.
The light outside was pinched and mean at half past three. The familiar voice of the commentator soothed the afternoon like a drug. The world pressed in tightly on all sides but in simultaneous motion it opened out – this was a kind of breathing – and Maurice Hearne was nineteen years old. Out of nowhere and the London sky a wonder goal occurred at Highbury – it was a flying volley, an educated volley, from thirty yards. His father, without thinking, rose to his feet and applauded. Maurice smiled but he did not like the look of this move one bit. His father sat down again with a grimace. Maurice was already watchful of his own moods and changes, and he knew that this was not in itself a good sign. A tang of sibling absence inside was something not quite available to words. Out of nowhere and the winter sky came a statement from his father that cut to the muscle of the thing –
You’re not like my crowd at all, Maurice. You’re like her crowd.
He recognised the generosity in it, and the reassurance – he did not buy them.
And you’re nearly as well off, Moss.
A few weeks later, Charlie? We hadn’t seen Christmas out and the man was on a locked ward again.
Harsh, Maurice.
Smoke-grey bricks. Relic of Victoriana. The Bughouse. The green corridor that held three centuries’ pain and misery as deep. Maurice wasn’t allowed onto the ward itself. He was led to a visitors’ room that felt like an interrogation unit. The dampness and the peel; the intense hatred of civic Ireland. He waited and smoked. After a while a heavy male nurse brought his father in, shuffling. His father wept at the sight of Maurice. He was cut with small nicks where they had imprecisely shaved him.
Ah, stop that, Da, would you?
He reached across the table and made to touch his father’s arm – Jesus fuck – but something caused him to desist.
(Something? The land, the air, the sky; our church, our sea, our blood.)
Who the fuck’s after giving you them slippers?
Bigfoot, his father said.
The nurse brought a mug of tea and custard creams for his father. He ate them cheerlessly and quick, as though it were a penance, and the tea was gone in a few big farmer slurps. He was a country boy with his wires twisted all wrong. He should have never been let near a city.
Mam’ll be out to you tonight, I’d say.
There was an enormous clock on the wall and it slowed the moments remorselessly. He could ask his father how it had been for him but something would not allow it. He felt no fear as he looked across the table at the bombstruck man. His father had heard all the consternation of the heavens and he was still able to suck down custard creams.
Are you getting any sleep, Da?
Ah, I am, yeah.
I don’t think you need to be worried about me ever, Da. You know that, don’t you?
His father could not speak but nodded.
I wouldn’t be able for this, Maurice said. You’re stronger.
He walked back along the corridor with his father and the nurse. The afternoon traffic of the corridor. These poor blasted men in their stained pyjamas. The weepers and the chucklers. The moon-pale arses hanging out the back ends of them. The Martian glances. Whoever was shaving the poor fuckers had a sensational dose of the shakes.
