Irregulars

by Kevin McCarthy

  He stops in the dim, gas-lit hallway, letting his eyes adjust. The Achill is located on a laneway off the Smithfield markets, not far from where he pilfered the potatoes and onions for his sisters, what …? Yesterday? The day before? He has lost track of the days since he fled Uncle John Keegan and the suited men at his tenement. Since then, he has been sleeping rough, going with punters behind the market pubs for a bob or two, doing things he had thought he was finished doing when he’d discovered what could be done with a knife. With the few coins he earned he had eaten fish and chipped potatoes wrapped in newspaper from an Italian shop, using the rest for a bottle of fortified wine to drink against the autumn night. Now he is stiff and tired, craving proper rest and in need of money. And a knife.

  The Achill is nothing like its beautiful Mayo island namesake. A doss-house, plain and simple—one step up from the poorhouse—a former lying-in hospital for women. It is one of the meaner of such establishments in the city, catering to single men who pay nightly for a dormitory bed and flea-sparked blanket. Clean sheets, when available, cost extra. A meal in the canteen, also extra, knife and fork available for a rental charge. Showers, located in the basement, extra again. But it is warm and dry and Jeremiah knows he can kip safely here. Once he’s inside, he need not pay for a bed and cozying around one of the coal stoves in the common rooms is free. A fella is meant to be eighteen years of age to bed down here, Jeremiah well knows, but he looks old enough if he wants to and has seen younger lads than himself behind these walls. More often than not, down in the showers.

  He delays thinking of this and approaches a group of men gathered against the wall under one of the gas jets. His stomach growls. There are four men, one of them sitting on a bench built into the wall, the other three standing around him. Jeremiah takes out a cigarette as he approaches. He had dipped the packet from a man he’d serviced the night before, and now he has a flaring memory of the scent of sour beer, stale vomit and the bleachy taste of the man’s goo, his hand rummaging the punter’s pockets, coming out with half a box of Player’s and a broken-toothed comb. The cigarettes cost nearly as much as the punter had paid him for his suck.

  ‘Any yis have a light?’ he asks, sidling up, the cigarette dangling from his mouth. The men are mostly old enough not to be dangerous—broken-down dipsos, men in their thirties and forties, muscle eaten away and withered by drink, making them slump in on themselves, looking ancient and worn. Too slow by half to be a hassle, Jerry thinks, even without a blade on him. Yet.

  ‘Who’s the youngfella then?’ the seated man asks, looking up at him, and Jeremiah corrects himself. This fella could do harm. Go easy with him, so.

  ‘Thomas,’ he says. ‘Tommy Fallon’s the name.’

  The man on the bench smiles, and Jeremiah can smell the reek of waning stout and whiskey rising from him.

  ‘A light is all. Have me an auld puff and then head down for a wash. Let the smoke take the edge off the hunger before me kip.’

  ‘No scratch for grub, youngfella?’ the seated man says, still smiling but something dark in his eyes under his dirty cap, heavy brows.

  ‘Not a bean,’ Jeremiah says. He has used this story before. It is his way of innocently announcing where he will be and what he needs, to the kind of men who might like to find him. It is safer this way. Courting fellas who might not want it could be ropey, some of them hating a lad for what he’s offering, others hating him for maybe wanting what he offers but despising themselves more for wanting it. And there are always those who hate a lad for charging for what they think is their right to take for free. No matter the reason, getting it wrong could earn a youngfella a bad beating or worse. Jeremiah had once seen a boy in the basement, a fella younger than himself, badly pulped for kneeling in front of a man who’d been eying him through the steam. That lad had read the signals wrong and paid for it with pints of his claret, spinning down the hair-gnarled drain of the doss-house showers.

  ‘No bean for a feed, so,’ the seated man says, striking a match off the stone bench seat and offering it to Jeremiah, holding Jeremiah’s eyes with his own until understanding has passed between them. ‘I may have a wash meself,’ he says, letting the match burn down to his thick, calloused fingers before blowing it out.

  ‘Nothing like a wash,’ Jeremiah says, as he moves off from the men, ‘for to keep a body clean.’

  28

  The house below his attic bolthole is quiet—the Dempsey women gone visiting, he assumes, his young soldiers in bed or yet to return from their duties with Gilhooley—and O’Hanley scratches in his journal by candlelight. The silence here at the top of the Haddington Road house is unnerving. It is as if he is alone in the city of Dublin—like Christ might have felt, midway through his forty days in the desert, he thinks—and he would welcome the company of one of the young men. Just to sit beside him on the bed while he writes here at his desk, exuding the musky smell of tennis sweat and stolen cigarettes. He has banned the boys from smoking as well as swearing, but he knows they do it anyway.

  His mind conjures a memory of his favourite soldier; a time when the lad had ascended to the attic to report some trivial matter and O’Hanley had asked him to stay. The memory is rich and vivid, with the soft sussing of the boy’s breath, strong on it the scent of tobacco; the boy’s arms thrown back and hands clasped behind the head in repose, pale skin under his arms .…

  O’Hanley closes his eyes and forces the image away, shame welling in his belly.

  He envies men who smoke, he thinks, as he gnaws at the skin around his thumb nail, a ruby pearl of blood rising up from the cuticle. Many of the priests in Maynooth had smoked when he was there, so surely it is a venal sin at most. There must be comfort in the searing balm of tobacco. A comfort he needs now. And he should let the boys smoke. They are doing the work of men for the country. He has often envied men who drink as well; envies them the easy laughter, the warm brotherhood and loosening of cares, though he knows an eight by ten foot attic room is no place for spirits or beer. Certainly he will court-martial any boy he finds drinking. Drink is the bane of revolution. Ireland locked in fetters for centuries, soaked in whiskey and the cause betrayed, time and time again, by men in their cups. No, he is blessed that he does not know even the taste of it. He inks his pen and returns to his journal.

  … that our Lord works in ways we cannot fathom. Even in writing this I recall the verse from my days in the seminary though it gives me little comfort. “What man can know the intentions of God? And who can comprehend the will of the Lord? For the reasoning of mortals is inadequate, our attitudes of mind unstable, for a perishable body presses down on the soul, and this tent of clay weighs down the mind with its many cares.”

  And don’t I have many cares? Thus, while I never waver, while my faith in Christ’s workings on behalf of a true and sovereign Irish republic can never be in doubt, it is in times such as this that I succumb to the temptation to question His means. This is not doubt. I have utter faith that He sees the rightness of our cause and that He has blessed me with the will and mettle of His holy spirit so that I, like my martyred brother Pádraig Pearse, may he rest in the arms of our Lord, might wage a war of purification and liberation for my country. But to my shame, I do doubt the ways in which He works. How am I supposed to wage this war from the confines of this safe house attic room where I have been ordered to stay? How am I to battle Mulcahy and O’Higgins and their Free State treachery when men of my own army are unwilling to fight for the cause because they are loathe to raise a hand in anger against their former comrades as was, apparently, the case in Limerick? I should be in Limerick now, presiding over a holy and liberated city, the first city of the new, blessed Republic of Ireland when instead Limerick is in filthy Free State hands and I am sentenced to what seems an eternity of waiting in this room. Unable to contact but a handful of my comrades, most having fled this city in shameful capitulation, I await news from Newbridge like the planner of any comm
on robbery. His means are a mystery to me and I can only beg forgiveness for the means I am forced to employ.

  Could I ever have imagined, seven years ago, teaching each day alongside Master Pearse, may he rest in God’s mercy, that I would be party to such deeds? That the young men I have chosen might shed precious blood robbing payrolls so that the sword of liberation might be purchased from the very hands of the oppressor? I …

  Again, the knock on the closet door that disguises the room. O’Hanley takes up the revolver from beside his journal. But the knock is correct, and he holds the pistol by his leg as he unbolts the two doors leading into his room.

  Smiling, Stephen Gilhooley enters and drops a leather travel bag at O’Hanley’s feet before slumping down onto the bed.

  O’Hanley crouches and loosens the leather straps binding the bag. ‘You came by foot I take it? The butcher’s lorry is hardly parked in front of the house at this hour?’ His voice is flat and dry.

  ‘I’m no fool, for fuck sake.’

  ‘Your language, Stephen …’

  Gilhooley ignores him. He is still riding the heist’s adrenaline and is giddy with his survival and success. ‘I hopped a tram and then hoofed it. I was even stopped by a clatter of Free State troops and blagged my way out of bother. Staying with me

  auntie, I told them. Kicked out the gaff by the auldfella, says I. They never even searched me or the bag, the shower of bogtrotting bastards. They’d be leaking out on the Baggot Street footpath if they had.’

  O’Hanley silently forgives the young man his uncouth ways and opens the bag. Inside, bound in butcher’s string and packed under a selection of shirts and smalls are twenty odd wedges of sterling banknotes. The smell of it hits O’Hanley and he blesses himself. He feels a momentary flash of shame at his earlier doubts. This, he thinks, is how the Lord works. A surge of confidence rises in his chest.

  ‘How much is it?’

  ‘More than enough for Murphy’s gear. Fourteen thousand and a bit.’

  Gilhooley does not tell O’Hanley of the four thousand he has given his father from the take to pay off loans to suppliers to his shop and for a new refrigeration unit. His father has done his bit for the cause, and can use the few quid for the times that are in it. His brothers, too, have taken a taste but not so much as you’d know. Sure, Dinnie has a baby to feed and Ray needs his cut to pay the mothers of his now dead Free State army mates who tipped them to the job in the first place. Robbery costs, though no hope of Commandant O’Hanley understanding the notion.

  ‘And the boys?’

  Gilhooley leans forward on the bed now, his smile fading. ‘Dinnie and Rayo, the brothers, they’re grand. They made it back grand. The two lads I took from here …’

  ‘Yes?’ O’Hanley’s eyes cloud with concern.

  ‘One’s all right. He’s staying with the McKinneys in Inchicore for tonight. He’ll be fed and bedded down and make his own way back to the rendezvous point late tomorrow where I’ll collect him.’ The boys are taken to and from the Dempsey house in the back of the butcher’s van, so that if they are captured they cannot locate the house for Free State intelligence.

  ‘Who didn’t make it?’ O’Hanley asks. All his boys are precious to him, but he has lost two already this week. Robert and Nicholas and now another. He does not want to hear it but as ranking officer he must.

  ‘Little Alan Fenlon. He ate a bullet keeping sketch in front of the bank. We’d some bother on the job.’

  ‘Free Staters?’

  And here, Gilhooley laughs, little Alan Fenlon forgotten for the moment. ‘You’d not believe it if I told yeh.’

  O’Hanley closes the bag and sits back in his chair at the desk. He inks his pen again and scratches the date onto the top left corner of a separate journal entitled Operations. ‘Tell me,’ he says.

  ‘Seems like we weren’t the only fellas looking to knock off that bank. Bunch of English boys with rifles and shotguns were at it first.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And we plugged the lot of ’em, but Alan caught one in all the shooting. We got their Winchesters and two Colt automatics, you’ll be happy to know. One of them might have made it out but I hit him, sure as God. He won’t make it far.’

  O’Hanley says a silent prayer for the repose of the soul of little Alan Fenlon. Sixteen years old, the boy was. No matter, O’Hanley thinks, blessing himself again. The young soldier died in the service of his country and will take his place at the right hand of the holy Father in heaven.

  ‘I am happy, Stephen. Tomorrow, then, you’ll take the money to Murphy. Once we can arm them, our army will rise from their torpor and stagnation and …’

  Stephen Gilhooley listens for a minute to O’Hanley’s speech. He has heard it any number of times before. It is the one about the corruption that takes its seat in the hearts of Irishmen. Of demon drink and cowardly merchants dipping fingers in the smooth rubbed tills of petty shops but never finding a ha’pence for the cause of Irish independence.

  O’Hanley is a quare one, no mistake. Gilhooley has thought this since he watched the older man fight in the GPO and spotted targets for him during his days in the Tan War. O’Hanley is a killer, a patriot, a leader of men. But he is a strange bird. All the same, he keeps things lively, Gilhooley thinks, and he’s no man for half-measures; for surrendering half the country under the terms of a Treaty that any proper republican wouldn’t bother wiping his arse on. Gilhooley is no man for half-measures himself, and this is what he likes about O’Hanley, strange bird and all that he is.

  29

  Nora Flynn says yes. She tells O’Keefe she’d only be delighted to share a drink with him and isn’t she dying with the thirst and gumming for a nail? She appears to regret saying this, and O’Keefe catches her sudden shyness and tells her that he is of the same mind himself.

  They decide on the Shelbourne Hotel bar, O’Keefe sipping Jameson and Nora Bombay gin and tonic water with a slice of lime. It is a nice touch, the lime, O’Keefe thinks, and is glad they have come here. The Shelbourne has been all but taken over by members of the new Free State government—Dáil representatives from country constituencies holed up in Dublin as much for their own safety, O’Keefe imagines, as for any legislative purpose—but the hotel retains its grandeur. O’Keefe wonders will it continue to be Mecca for the Protestant Ascendancy in this newly independent Ireland—hosting its débutante balls, hunt club dinners and wedding parties for the former ruling class of the country—as it has been for the past hundred years. He wonders will there even be an ascendancy any longer. He has heard of Protestants burnt out of their homes, some murdered. Many, he has heard, are selling up—or are trying to—and heading home to England. O’Keefe catches himself. Home. Many of these families had been in Ireland for centuries and are no more English than he is. Yes, many may have kept flats in London and married into families across the water. But not all of them, and not all Irish Protestants are wealthy landowners. He remembers the small farmers he would meet in West Cork when he served there in the RIC, poor as any of their Catholic neighbours. And how many regular coppers who had served alongside him had been Protestant? Many, and many fine men. He hopes the new Free State government will remember this, despite the treatment being meted out to Catholics in Belfast and the newly partitioned northern counties.

  Nora returns to her seat across from O’Keefe. ‘Marble!’ she says. ‘The whole of it, from the stairs to the sinks is all marble.’ She smiles as she speaks. ‘I can’t believe I’ve never been in here before.’

  They have already spoken of Nicholas, and O’Keefe’s difficulty in finding the boy, O’Keefe omitting details of his employer and her business, and Nora agrees with him—though what would I know?—that the boy will most likely turn up when he tires of the hard bread, the strange beds and damp ditches of the guerrilla fighter. Or when he misses his mother enough. She asks him if he has discovered anything about where
he might be and he tells her no. He lowers his voice when he says it, and tells her that the boy is reputed to be working for Felim O’Hanley. The very man himself. Her eyes widen, and he is pleased with himself for sharing this vaguely scandalous nugget with her. Taking her into his confidence.

  ‘He’ll turn up,’ she tells him again, ‘please God, none for the worse, when he’s good and ready.’ They raise their glasses to it.

  O’Keefe smiles back at her. ‘I’ve only been in here myself once before, for a friend’s wedding.’

  ‘A happy union?’ Nora says, taking a sip of her drink.

  O’Keefe turns away. ‘He … died. He was killed at the Somme. God knows why he went at all. Why anyone did.’

  ‘At least he had the happiness of a fine wedding here. And a fine wife, I’m sure.’

  O’Keefe senses the effort she makes to be cheerful and smiles. ‘He did. He had that.’

  They speak now of other hotels, of weddings they have attended. Of meals served and speeches made by drunken fathers and best men. Of the dresses and the cost of things. They smile and laugh as they speak.

  She tells O’Keefe when he asks her that she has worked in Burton’s Hotel for the past year and a bit, and before that as a typist in Dublin Castle. Nothing interesting about it but it’s paying work, she tells him, and O’Keefe tells her about his life in the RIC and how he is unsure of what to do now. He had taken the job of finding Nicholas, he tells her, as much for something to do as anything. He does not speak of his father’s illness. Instead, he tells her he has plenty of savings, because it feels important to him that she knows this. More than enough to tide him over until he finds proper work, whatever that will be, when he finishes this job for Mrs Dolan. ‘And I could always hire myself out,’ he says, ‘to people who don’t want somebody found.’