Closing his eyes again, O’Keefe dredges up a coherence of events as best he can.
A pub. A darkened laneway. A woman’s laughter. Windmilling punches thrown and the smashing of glass. O’Keefe opens his eyes, checks his knuckles and breathes a sigh of relief to find them undamaged.
‘What day is it?’ he asks, and feels a dart of shame in the asking.
His father is reading The Irish Times, and he looks up over his reading glasses.
‘Monday,’ his father says, and in saying it, his face goes blank, in the same way it had when he’d opened the door to O’Keefe. He then holds the newspaper out at arm’s length, as if it wondering at its purpose. There is a long moment of confounded silence before O’Keefe’s father folds the paper with a flourish and scans the front page. ‘Monday, yes. You’ve been here since yesterday early. Your mother nearly fainted when she saw the state of you.’ He smiles again as if this amuses him. ‘We’d the doctor in—the young Jewish lad from up the road; a fine lad and knowledgeable about medicine from the Continent. He told us to watch over you, but that you’d live if you didn’t die.’
‘Solly, you mean, Da?’ O’Keefe says, puzzled by his father’s forgetfulness, but aware that his own thoughts are sluggish and slow in the aftermath of his spree.
His father’s face returns the puzzlement. ‘Solly?’
‘Harold Solomon, Daddy. Solly …’
His father’s brow buckles in sudden fury, and terror washes through O’Keefe. What did I say? And as quickly, his father’s rage is gone and there is fear in his expression and then something else. Embarrassment, O’Keefe decides, closing his eyes against it, wishing his father would smile again.
After some moments of silence, O’Keefe asks, ‘Where’s Mam?’
‘Your mother’s sleeping now. She’s the knees nearly worn off her with the praying.’
O’Keefe attempts a weak smile at the thought of his mother, on her knees in prayer, rosary beads hurtling through her fingers like the links of an anchor chain through a cat’s eye. An image from his childhood as common as any other he has of her, his mother hard at the rosary. ‘They seemed to have worked. The prayers …’ O’Keefe says, and something in the corner of his mind darkens—a shadow passing through his memory—and he is no longer smiling.
‘They do betimes,’ his father replies, looking away to the window as if recalling all the times when prayers had gone unanswered.
In his reverie, his father’s face goes slack and then brightens suddenly. ‘Peter’s due back from college soon, of course. And Sally, as well, with that friend of hers,’ he says, smiling and nodding.
‘But Peter is …’ O’Keefe stops himself for a reason he does not understand. He studies his father’s face and is unable to read it. It is as if a stranger is wearing a mask of gormless, glad perplexity that resembles his father but is not like his father at all. He decides he has misunderstood his father’s words—that he is dreaming after all—and closes his eyes again to the mercy of sleep.
Some time later that night, O’Keefe awakens and it is dark in his room and his father is no longer there but he can hear his voice, deep and grave somewhere below in the house. And the voice of another man, something menacingly familiar in the tone of it, speaking with his father, his father’s voice now raised in sudden anger. A door closing and then his father and the man speaking again, outside the house, and O’Keefe wonders if he is dreaming—hopes that he is—but knows that he is not and that his father has always taken guests outside when he wanted to speak of private matters. Of matters he did not want his wife to hear. But before long it is his mother’s voice O’Keefe hears as well, outside with the men. He closes his eyes and prays that his father and the man are not speaking about him. He thinks of the blankness in his father’s face, and remembers that he has come home to ask after his health. A dark shard of fear wedges itself beneath O’Keefe’s ribs, and for the first time in as long as he can remember he prays, and does not feel a fool doing it.
The shadow of fear is still there, but it is mostly at bay because it is his mother who comes to him in the morning, bringing sweetened tea and scrambled eggs, bread and butter and a bowl of custard. He thinks of his father’s words from the day before. He is certain now that he had heard him correctly. And Peter’s due back from college soon. And Sally. The fear returns.
O’Keefe listens to his mother chatting, recounting street gossip—marriages, births, deaths, minor scandal—and he finds that if he closes his eyes and concentrates on her voice, he can fall under the comforting weight of the dream that has him still a boy; sick and off from school, his mother sitting beside him as she does now, Peter and Sally due home but not for a while yet; his father at the barracks and O’Keefe alone with his mother. Blessedly sick. A dream of times past so rare and precious and full of flat lemonade and scrambled eggs; bread and jam and Seville oranges and the sweet musk of his mother as she leans over to fluff his pillows, her hand on his forehead in search of fever.
His mother is oblivious to the fantasy, however, often mentioning the civil war that has ravaged Ireland these past months, flaring up in incidents of savagery almost unheard of in the fight for independence against the Crown that preceded it. His mother speaks of so-and-so’s boy—were you at school with him or was it Peter?—gunned down in broad daylight. Can you imagine? Reading from the newspaper now. Another bank robbed. Limerick shelled by Free State troops. And other stories—sotto voce over garden walls or in the bakery or butcher’s—that the newspapers were forbidden by the Free State government to tell. Tales of the bloody, vicious things Irishmen were doing to each other in the fight for a country to call their own. A Free State? A Republic? O’Keefe thinks, when he is lucid and in the present, that no notional nation state is worth the damage being done to the country and its people by the men who have claimed to be its liberators.
But now, as she speaks of these things, O’Keefe burrows deeper into the blankets and pretends that Peter and Sally will be home soon from school. Daddy home soon from the barracks for his tea. Mammy will be reading him Oliver Twist or Great Irish Legends and not newspaper stories about skirmishes and casualties and bloody-minded murder. Blessed illness.
Shame drives him up from the dream, and he rises to sitting in the bed. ‘I’m sorry I took so long to come back here, Mam. And the state I came in …’
‘Hush, Seán, don’t mind. We’re only happy to have you here, your father and I.’
O’Keefe is silent, and the guilt and relief he feels well up in him and his eyes brim with tears. ‘Thanks, Mam.’
‘Go ’way out of that, pet. Where can you come to when you need it but your home? Did you think we’d not have you?’
For a moment, O’Keefe does not answer. ‘I thought Daddy might … I don’t know.’
‘Your father’s different now, Seán,’ his mother says, and even in his condition, he can sense that she wants to say more.
‘I met Solly, in Rathmines last …’ he cannot recall the day, and shame stabs at his ribs, ‘… last week. He asked after Da and said he’d been in to see him.’
‘He was. Good auld Solly. And in to see you as well, saying how you were suffering from the most common of Irish illnesses and not to worry for you.’
O’Keefe smiles weakly, thinking of his father’s reaction when he had mentioned Solly’s name. The rage his father’s face had shown at the mention of the old family friend. A rage directed at himself.
His mother continues, ‘What a fine man he’s become. And such a doctor. All the best of the Jews and Protestants attend his surgery, you know, Seán.’
O’Keefe laughs a little at his mother’s casual snobbery. Only a doctor good enough for the wealthier of Dublin’s Jews and Protestants would do her and her own. She is aware of this snobbery, of its general but necessary absurdity, and winks at her son.
‘Is Da all right, Mam?’ O’Keefe asks.
>
His mother is silent for a long moment and her eyes are suddenly sad and tired. Like his father, she has aged. It is he who should be looking after her and, again, shame and guilt course through his blood.
‘You’re father’s not well, Seán, but not in his body. He’s fit as a fiddle, his heart would do an ox proud.’
‘What is it then?’ But O’Keefe recalls the blankness that had visited his father’s face, his need to consult the date on the newspaper’s front page; his talk of Peter and Sally coming home from college, and he knows. ‘He’s not well in the head, Mam? Is that it?’
His mother nods. ‘He forgets things. Simple things. And he gets frightened, at night …’ She looks to the open doorway as if his father might enter at any moment. ‘And gets so angry when he can’t remember something, Seán.’
‘What did Solly say?’
‘He sent us to a surgeon, one of the masters in the Mater. He has your father on cannabis tincture and other pills.’
‘And are they working?’
‘They were.’
‘Jesus, Mam.’
His mother smiles, and it is the saddest smile O’Keefe can remember her ever giving. ‘He’ll only get worse, the master says, until he’ll have to be committed, for his own safety.’
O’Keefe says nothing, contemplating his father in an asylum. He had been to such places as a constable, and decides that he will not have his father in such a place. No place for any man, let alone his father. He wonders for a bitter second how his mother can even contemplate doing such a thing, but then decides that she wouldn’t if she knew what they were like.
‘And is he aware of it, Mam? Of how ill he is?’
‘He is and he isn’t, and half the time he forgets. Sometimes he goes out and I worry he’ll be lost and never come back.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘He goes out with Maurice O’Toole most mornings. They go to train Mossy’s greyhounds. I’d be lost without Maurice, I would. He’s a saint, the man.’
Maurice ‘Mossy’ O’Toole, a retired G-Division detective, the same as his father.
‘Jesus, Mam,’ O’Keefe says. ‘Look, I’ll move back in and help you, let me do that at least. I’ve money, saved from my police wages. I’ll help you here.’
‘No,’ his mother says, standing. ‘Not that. You’ll not be a nursemaid. I’ve Mrs Devereaux and she’s a great help all these years. Especially now. She’s better with him than I am, still calling him “Sergeant”. And when he gets in his rages, they just seem to run off her back like rain.’
Mrs Devereaux had been with the O’Keefe family since she was a young woman and O’Keefe a boy. She had married many years ago, but had continued to do washing and ironing, cooking the odd time and cleaning the fire grates for the O’Keefe family, coming each day, though there was hardly enough for her to do. O’Keefe had always been fond of her, never more so than now.
‘Is she enough help for you, Mam?’
‘She is of course. The most capable girl … listen to me, girl, when the woman must be forty-five years old with grown children of her own. The most capable woman in Ireland and she’s a true blessing with your father. And your sister comes some days and that’s enough but sure, doesn’t she have the babby now?’
His sister and her baby he’s not yet seen. Guilt again beds down with the sadness in his heart. ‘What can I do for you and Da then? I want to be of some help. However I can …’
Again his mother is silent, as if deciding something. ‘There is something you can do for me … for your father. When you’re better …’
‘What is it?’
‘Not now. When you’ve your strength back, I’ll tell you. You sleep, now, love,’ his mother says, placing her warm hand on his brow. ‘It’s so good to have you home, Seán. Even if it was an ill wind that brought you.’
4
The messenger boy is no longer sobbing, but tears well in his eyes and run down his face when he blinks, his cheeks hot with shame because crying is not what proper soldiers of the Irish Republican Army do.
Nor do they wet themselves in terror, as he had done, in the back of the motor car as they brought him here, the man seated next to him letting out a roar when he felt the piss encroaching onto his side of the bench seat and driving his elbow into the boy’s mouth, cutting the boy’s lip against his teeth.
The messenger boy sniffs back blood and snot and tries to wipe the tears from his face with his shoulder. He cannot use his hands because they are cuffed so tightly behind him that he has lost all feeling in them. His legs are also bound with the belt from his own trousers, and the men have left him on the muddy floor with his back against the damp wall of this derelict cottage, the interior of which holds a cold darkness all its own, colder even, the boy imagines, than outside.
Shivering, unable to warm himself, he swallows back his fear and wonders how long he has been here, in the dark. And he wonders where the other boy has been taken. They had brought him in the car as well, the thief curled up on the floor of the Ford, resting their boots on him, digging their heels into his ribs, his balls, when he whimpered. The messenger wonders whether the other boy had pissed his trousers as well. Would serve him right if he had, the filthy, robbing gouger.
The enemy is everywhere, he thinks, Free State traitor bastards and street robbers; dippers and tenement scum like the lad with the fish-knife. When the Republic comes—the proper, goodo, decent republic the IRA had fought the Tans and Tommies for and not this half-arsed, cap-tipping Free State model sold to an ignorant people by Collins and Griffith and their mob of Crown stooges—they will clean up the streets right enough. No more dark lanes and mugger boys with knives. The streets are full of them, his mother has always said, and it flashes through his mind to tell his mother what has happened, how the two had tried to rob him. She was always on to him, when he was younger, about minding himself on the streets.
Tears well again in his eyes, and he swallows down the hard lump of sadness and fear in his throat. Another thing no proper soldier of the Republic would do: cry for his mammy when his prick is in the fire. Like his is now.
He sniffs again, and resolves to buck up and act like a soldier. No more tears, for the sake of all that’s right and holy. I’m fifteen years old, he thinks. Not some youngfella in short trousers mitching from school, but a scout, a messenger, a soldier of the IRA, Dublin Brigade, and now, a prisoner of war, no less. He is momentarily pleased by this realisation. I am a prisoner of war, he tells himself, thinking of the letter he will write his mother. Dear Mother, fear not for my safety. I am currently a prisoner of war ....
And he resolves to say nothing to the men who have brought him here, no matter what they do to him. The message to Mr Murphy in Burton’s Hotel had been delivered, as ordered, mouth to ear, and no evidence of this can be found on his person. So he will keep the head down, the mouth shut, no matter what they try on him. He is certain of this. He will make Commandant O’Hanley proud, he will, straightening his back against the wall and wishing he had a cigarette, though he has only recently begun smoking.
For some time he lets his mind wander in the dark, images of himself in the uniform of a soldier—in his fantasy it is a British Army uniform, as familiarity brings it to his mind first, and the army he fights for does not yet have one—of himself on a gallows, his eyes blindfolded, a rakish cigarette dangling from his lip, a fine, sweet weeping girleen dabbing at her eyes. He smiles to himself. A prisoner of war, I am. He only wishes his friend were with him. At least then he would not be alone in the dark. Even that thieving bastard of a robber would be company. Even him.
He wonders again what has become of the other boy, and as if his thoughts have provoked it, the thief boy begins to scream. The scream comes from outside the cottage and is piercing and girlish. One word is intelligible. The word is No.
The messenger boy shivers in the cold.
The tears overflow his eyes and run down his cheeks, and this time he does nothing to try to staunch them. Different images now parade through his head.
5
Jeremiah Byrne awakes cold and wet with dew. In the grey light of morning he peers out from the high grass in which he had finally, several hours earlier, lain down to sleep. His stomach growls as if to wish him good morning and remind him that he has not eaten in more than a day.
Groggy, he searches his memory for the last food he has taken, and in this searching, the frantic action of the previous evening lurches into his conscious mind. He sits up abruptly and scans the field of grass where he has hidden. It is a smaller field than he’d thought when he stumbled upon it in the darkness, bordered by a low hedge and the Howth Road, he thinks, not having known for certain what road it was at the time, but only that it would take him far away from the men and the boys in the lane off the quays.
Jaysusfuck, he thinks. Miles I must have run. And as he thinks this, he looks at his right hand, and sees that it is stained with dried blood. Not his own blood, he remembers. Another fella’s blood. And thank fuck for that.
Forced to cut the bastard, he thinks, when all he’d wanted was a root in the pockets and a pair of boots off the youngfellas they’d followed from the hotel.
Part of Jeremiah knows that he’s in it neck deep now, whether the fella’s dead or not, but another part of him can only hear the growling in his stomach, feel the parch in his throat. Giving the field a final scan and reassuring himself there is no one about, he stands and brushes the dew from his clothing, beating his thighs and stomach with his palms to get the blood flowing.
Blood flowing. He thinks again of the fella in the laneway and decides that he doesn’t mind if he had killed him. He’s hardly eaten in two days and that bastard had come between Jeremiah Byrne and a fine, slap-up nosebag, courtesy of them young lads in the lane.
Time to find Tommo, he thinks, hoping his friend had made it away when the bother kicked off. Find Tommo first, get his side of things straight and make sure his mate keeps his cake-hole shut.
Irregulars Page 3