O’Hanley forces himself to smile. Without Stephen, he would be lost. Unlike some of the other volunteers, Stephen is not a former student. He is a boy of the lower orders, to be certain, but as with the finest legionaries in the armies of Rome, he is made of the noblest stuff. A young man of faith and courage, plying his father’s trade with bonesaw and cleaver, amidst the blood and entrails of beasts, while waging war with a pistol or Thompson gun for O’Hanley and the scattered remnants of the First Dublin Brigade IRA. Such boys as Gilhooley, the butchers and blacksmiths, are forging a free, independent and holy nation of Ireland, subject, of course, to the guidance of a few remaining men like Felim O’Hanley and, at a stretch, de Valera. His smile darkens at the thought of Dev. Silent Dev, who has left him stranded and practically unarmed in this vast bog of traitors.
‘Never mind. Sit down. We can’t have the van outside longer than is necessary.’
‘Sure I could be talking to one of the daughters, couldn’t I? As far as the neighbours are to know.’
‘Mrs Dempsey’s daughters would hardly talk to the likes of you, Stephen,’ O’Hanley says. He sits down on the single chair and indicates the bed with its tucked blankets and creased sheets. Like a monk’s bed or a prisoner’s.
‘I only meant …’ Stephen stammers.
‘… Never mind. What is the word from Murphy? The two lads I sent have yet to return. Have you seen Nicholas or Robert?’
‘I waited at the meeting place but neither of them came.’
O’Hanley is silent for a long moment. ‘No matter,’ he says. ‘They don’t know where this house is, even if they’ve been lifted. We’ve been careful about that, haven’t we?’
The Haddington Road house containing the hidden garret belongs to the Dempsey widow, and is shared by her daughters and, now, O’Hanley and his young charges in the anti-Treaty IRA. Mrs Dempsey is as radically anti-Treaty as any of them, motivated by the death of her son, an unfortunate Dublin Brigade Volunteer who’d been tortured and shot dead by Crown forces in the days following Bloody Sunday.
The manner of his death had ensured a closed-casket funeral for the lad and that Mrs Dempsey will never accept that her beautiful son had died for the flaccid capitulation that is the Treaty. Hers is now a safe house, the room purpose-built to hide her son in the Tan War and never used, now occupied by O’Hanley.
‘Were you able to see Murphy yourself?’
Gilhooley frowns. ‘Of course not. What if I was followed back here? When I learned Nicky and Robbo hadn’t reported in, I telephoned his room and said only, “how much”? He asked could he not deal with you in person, and I told him “no” and that was that. He didn’t like to do it by telephone at all.’
O’Hanley says, ‘Which is why I sent the boys to arrange a meeting, but it can’t be helped now. And how much does he want?’
‘Thirteen thousand.’
‘Robbery.’
‘I know, but … he said the lot of it—guns, ammo, gelignite and detonators—is on a ship in Southampton waiting for us, but it’s going to cost. He said he’s people to pay.’
‘Murphy said all of this on the telephone from his rooms? Surely he’s aware that the switchboards are crawling with spies …?’
‘He called them units. Like they were … I don’t know. Chairs or sweeping brushes or something.’
O’Hanley thinks in silence for some time. ‘And the other operation. We’re certain about the train leaving tonight?’
‘As certain as we can be. Mullen and Patterson are part of the guard, and I spoke with them only yesterday. That train’s carrying more than thirteen grand by far. Borrowed off the English to pay the Northern lads. There must be five hundred of them, training out in the Curragh camp, and they have to be paid so’s they don’t jump ship and join us like half the fellas in the Free State army … Sure, it’s several months’ wages, so it won’t be divvied out all at once. It was one of Collins’ stunts before he was killed. He rigged it so them Ulster lads are kept on a long rope, paid over time for doing nothing rather than joining us in the real fight. They’re the only lads in the whole of Ireland guaranteed to get their wages on time, just for staying out of the fight.’
Collins had brought a division of the IRA from the partitioned North down to the Curragh Camp to train under the Free State army when Ulster had become too hot for them. The northern volunteers would not agree to wage war as part of the Free State army against their former comrades in the anti-Treaty Irregulars, but had agreed to accept Free State army wages for promising to remain on the sidelines of the conflict until the IRA could once again unify and launch itself against the loyalist north as a whole. When Collins was shot dead in August, any such hopes of reunification seemed to die with him.
O’Hanley says, ‘Your contacts, Mulally and Patterson, are they the only ones guarding the shipment who are sympathetic to our cause?’
‘They wouldn’t ask any others. But they’ll sneak away and join us on the raid.’
‘And you can trust these moonlighters? Serving in the Free State army and willing to help rob a Free State bank of Free State army wages?’
‘Sure, neither of them has been paid in three weeks, and yet Mulcahy has come up quick enough with the scratch to pay them Ulster men to sit on their arses. Mully and Patto only joined the Free Staters for the wage, and since they’ve only got it now and again, they’re more than willing to help. I’ll have to throw them a few bob off the take, but they’re game lads.’
‘And tell me again why they are holding the money in a bank in Newbridge and not at the camp itself? It seems odd that they would risk holding it in a civilian bank when they could guard it more closely in a barracks safe?’
Stephen smiles. ‘It’s because they can’t trust the Northern lads not to decide to advance themselves their wages and head back home to fight. Too many rifles around a camp like the Curragh, and the Free Staters don’t trust the Ulster men, or even their own troops, not to up arms and rob the money themselves. So they keep it close enough that it’s no bother getting it, but far enough away so’s to be out of temptation to the lads in camp with guns and notions.’
O’Hanley’s lips curl in a moue of distaste.
‘All of them mired in corruption, dragged into it by the traitors of the Free State,’ he says, though he knows in his heart that his own Irregular troops are often no better. There are more than a few hardened republicans among the ranks of the Free State Army, and just as many in the Irregulars, who don’t mind or understand the Treaty, and many of them willing enough to change sides when it suits. O’Hanley has heard of men fighting one day for the Free State and the very next for the Irregulars at the battle for Kilmallock in County Limerick, switching teams and swapping tunics at the first rumour of better—or any—wages or hot food on the other side. Corruption and chaos, the twin ghosts haunting this war. And here am I, O’Hanley thinks, consorting with them freely.
‘If you must have the moonlighters, have them, but I’d rather you used our own men.’
‘Sure, we’ll need more than myself and just those boys down there,’ Gilhooley nods in the direction of the sound of swatted tennis balls through the open skylight. ‘… to take that bank.’
Those boys are only a few years younger than you, dear Stephen. And yet, Gilhooley is right. They are not experienced enough or large enough in numbers to hit even an unguarded bank on their own. A sick feeling wells in O’Hanley’s gut. It has come to this. Using his boys for the kind of robbery that is as common as calving cows in the country. Like everyday brigands instead of the soldiers of destiny they aspire to be. He thinks back to what he has written in his journal. ‘… means and methods that may seem cruel and lawless …’
‘Take whomever you need. Will your brothers go, do you think?’
Gilhooley shrugs. ‘Dinnie has a babby now. Sure, he’d come along for some peace and quiet, if nothing else. And Ra
y will do it for the craic, never mind a few hours away from the auldfella and the shop.’
Stephen’s father is staunchly sympathetic to the republican cause. He had fought in Bolands Mill with de Valera in 1916, and had escaped internment when the fighting ended, his knowledge of the back lanes of Dublin far better than any of his pursuers. He’d returned to his butcher shop and drifted away from the movement, but he supported the cause with food, funds and sons when he could spare them.
‘You’ve guns enough, and your brothers at least have had some practice. And Mulally and Patterson?’
‘They’re grand lads. They can be trusted to do the job right if I tell ’em how.’
Gilhooley is little more than a boy himself, O’Hanley reflects. Eighteen, and yet so capable, loyal and brave. Rough, certainly, but a born leader.
‘Hit the bank then, Stephen, and may God guide and protect you.’
Stephen Gilhooley blesses himself and replaces his white butcher’s cap. ‘And you, Commandant O’Hanley.’ He holds out his hand and O’Hanley hesitates, inspecting the proffered hand for dried blood before he reluctantly takes it.
8
The Sheriff Street tenements where Jeremiah Byrne lives are two streets away from the Liffey quays. The buildings show grime-blackened brickwork and are hunched closely together, soaking up the daylight, forcing the autumn sun to fade its way up alleys, over chipped steps and onto the soft, grassless soil of fetid common yards. Jeremiah feels the chill of shadow as he shortcuts the warren of lanes leading to his home.
Like all Sheriff Street residents, Jeremiah knows every rat-run, every hidey-hole in the area. Residents pass through the open doors of neighbouring buildings and beat paths across what were once leafy gardens to access particular streets or dwellings. There is very little that is private in the tenements and, in this, Sheriff Street is no different from the rest of tenement Dublin. Outdoor toilets are shared, as are water pumps. Laundry lines are strung across lanes from building to building. Food, when it is scarce in one family and plentiful in another, is shared. Families of up to fifteen living in one room. Glass in less than half of all windows.
Jeremiah comes to the building that houses his family’s flat, and climbs the cracked and hollow-worn front steps, entering through the doorway that has been without a door since before he was born. On the coldest, wettest days of winter, sheets of scrap wood from dock pallets are sometimes nailed together and propped in the empty doorframe against the wind and sleet, and this is guarded by residents so that it will not be taken by neighbouring tenants for firewood. The fanlight at the top of the doorway is free from any pane of glass, and serves only to funnel winter winds into the building more efficiently. Years before, some resident had vainly stuffed rags in several of the empty gaps where now they sag like oily clots, blackened by time and smoke and cooking grease.
Sixty odd people share the Georgian house that had once been home to a single, wealthy family and several servants. Jeremiah’s flat was once a bedroom in this house. It is shared by his mother and her sister, his own four sisters and six male and female cousins and, occasionally, by his uncle. Of the children, Jeremiah is the oldest and the man of the family during times when his uncle, a carter, thief and opportunistic extortionist, is serving one of his numerous, if too short, prison sentences. Jeremiah knows that his uncle is free at the moment—has been for the past two weeks, though he has seen him only once briefly in that time—and says a small prayer. It is something he does rarely, and even then does it with the utter conviction that it is a useless practice, but he does it now; prays that his Uncle John Keegan has been lagged for something, anything and is not home and won’t be for a long time. He mimes a sloppy sign of the cross as he mounts the patchwork wooden stairs to his flat.
He fears his Uncle John. There are few in the tenements who don’t. But he fears more for his sisters when the man is around, and this is what has brought him home, if for only a few hours. It never occurs to him that it might not be safe to return home for any other reason.
‘Jerry! Ma, Jerry’s home!’ One of his sisters greets him as he reaches the first floor landing outside the flat.
The girl is six years old, as blonde as her brother and she hugs him tightly. Jeremiah hugs her back, something warm and liquid flooding his insides; the first touch of another human being since he’d stuck the knife in the fella in the laneway.
‘Sarah, pet. How’s me dote?’ he says, wondering briefly, as he has done in the past, if it was her hair, being so much like his own, that makes her his favourite. They are the only two of his mother’s five children who have blond hair, and Jeremiah also wonders if they share the same father. It is a question that can never be answered, and so is never asked, though many times, on the docks or on the streets of the city, Jeremiah will see a man with hair like his own and wonder, Is that me da? Mine and Sarah’s da?
‘I’m grand, Jerry,’ the girl says, pulling away from him and taking his hand. ‘We got a flitch of bacon! Ma got it. I don’t know how she got it, but she got it and she told me fuck off and don’t be asking questions but we got it. Bacon, Jerry.’
Jeremiah knows how she’d got the bacon, and the butcher knows too, he thinks, and so will the butcher’s missus when she gets the itch. He musses Sarah’s hair and then smooths it back into place, his fingers lingering for a moment on the faded, frayed ribbon in her hair.
The poor thing could have a new ribbon, for jaysus sake, he tells himself. Next time I’m out I’ll reef it out of the hair of the first girl I see. A young girl could have a new fuckin’ ribbon at least.
He pulls his sister back by the hand before entering the flat. ‘Is Uncle John Keegan in, Sarah? Tell us quick ’fore I go in.’
Sarah shakes her head, the joy of the coming meal and her brother’s return washing from her features at the mention of her uncle’s name. ‘No, he’s out, Jerry, but he’ll be back, he will. He’s carting on the quays. He’s not in jail no more, Jerry.’ She looks up at her brother, her grip tightening on his hand, fear and worry in her eyes. A lump rises in Jeremiah’s throat at the thought of the man. The thought of him harming a hair on her head, the bastard. Her or any one of his sisters, nieces or nephews. The way he had harmed him. The beatings were only the half of it.
The bastard. His mother and aunty—Jeremiah couldn’t give a ha’ penny ride for either of them. But the little ones. He wishes now that he hadn’t left his fish-knife stuck between the ribs of that fella in the lane the night before; thinking how he might have used it on his uncle, given half the chance.
He lets Sarah lead him through the tacked-up sheet that serves as a door into the one-room flat where his mother is sitting on the dwelling’s single chair at a table fashioned from a packing crate. She is drinking tea—Jeremiah thinks it is tea—from a cup with no handle. She wears her hair tied back, a thick swatch of grey at her crown from where her hair has grown since she last had it dyed the shade of brown she favours when she has the money. In front of her on the packing crate table, blood seeping through its wrapping of day-old newspaper, is the lump of bacon.
His mother turns as he enters, watches him as his youngest sister and two of his nephews now hug him and hang from his legs and arms, asking what he has brought for them. He smiles and tells them he has nothing for them.
Without speaking, his mother returns to staring out the open window at drying clothes dangling in the soft autumn air on a line that bridges the building across from their own.
‘Ma,’ he says, ‘I’m back and all, I am.’
His aunt emerges from behind a stained sheet hanging from a rope that divides the flat’s sleeping and common space so that his mother and aunty might have a modicum of privacy when they have brought punters home. They usually work in the alleys and lanes, but sometimes they bring their work to the flat if the chap has paid for a warm roll instead of one up against a wall. His aunt delivers the greeting her sister has
refused to give.
‘And do you be wanting a medal, so? For your troubles?’
‘Aunty Pauline,’ Jeremiah says, lifting one of his sisters, Delilah, aged four, from where she is clinging to his leg. He nuzzles her hair with his face and, as he withdraws, spots a louse—one of many hundreds—clinging to an unwashed strand of the girl’s hair. He takes it between his fingernails, drags it down the length of the strand and crushes it. He scratches the girl’s head for her, serving only to awaken the remaining lice, causing the girl to begin scratching herself. He sighs—Home—scratches and feels the stirring of the lice in his own hair, under his arms, in his pubic hair.
‘Gone how many days and come back with nothing but his goldilocks and no pot to piss in even,’ his aunt says, not looking at him as she speaks, bending to feel the tea kettle hanging in the fireplace, feeling it cold. Then, to his mother: ‘And you, it’s my day for the chair, Madam Jump-up. You had it only bleedin’ yesterday.’
‘Fuck off away with you,’ his mother says, not taking her eyes from the window. His mother is the younger of the sisters, but pays the bulk of the rent on the room, and is thus its mistress when Uncle John Keegan is away. When he is present, Aunt Pauline and her husband rule the roost.
‘And you,’ his mother says, finally turning to Jeremiah. ‘You out gallivanting and see fit to come back skint as you left us. You think the world and her mother’s here to put food in your gob? You may hump off with that hoor of an aunty of yours if you think so much as one hot drop of fat from this bacon will wet your lips.’
‘You can keep your bacon. You didn’t spend the money I brought in last week on bacon, I know bleedin’ well, but.’
His mother looks at him now as if noticing him for the first time, some fear in her eyes that fades as quickly as it has come, thinking herself mistaken in fearing this boy she has reared. Not a man yet, still a youngfella, her Jerry. ‘You’ll not be minding what I spend on what, sonny buck. I’ll skelp your arse soon as I did when you were a nipper, don’t you think I fuckin’ won’t.’
Irregulars Page 5