Judith tried for charity but found only contempt. Reasons why these women were the way they were, like an insanity plea at a murder trial, left them stripped of dignity. They were ignorant. Brutalized. Only horror could rouse them. Random happenings were all they saw in the revolution. Its aim was beyond most of them. In church, doing the stations of the cross, they stared at the red streaks crudely painted on the Christ figure’s plaster flesh. The redemption for which they prayed was unreal to them. Heaven, they said, and threw their eyes upwards and sighed. The crucifixion, God help us, yes. Then. Now. Sorrow. Joy. One was as unrelated to the other as two tickets in a sweep-stake. You might get the good one. More often you got the bad. There was no doing anything about it, was there? Not a thing you could do, so carry on, gabble prayers, comfort yourself by thinking how much worse, the Lord between us and all harm, things might be. Not one of them could cook.
Outside, in the sunlight, the spokes of passing bike-wheels spun like knives.
*
Judith asked her sister, ‘Is Sparky here to bring money to the lads? Doesn’t their money come from America?’
‘How would I know?’ Kathleen asked. ‘They don’t shout things like that from the roof-tops. Sparky’s here as an “observer”.’
‘The time Owen went to America they said he’d gone to get money.’
‘They go for support. Different kinds. They tried to get the Yanks to put Ireland’s case before the Peace Conference in Paris. That was no go, so they tried for other kinds of help – money too. Why are you interested anyway?’
‘Would they smuggle the money here in a bag or something? Or would they leave it over there in the bank?’
‘What a babby you are, Judith! Can’t you see that any lad blethering about that sort of business would be likely to earn a tombstone before his time?’
*
Grainne was taking tea with her grandaunt. A plateful of Huntley and Palmers’ milk-and-honey creams lay on the table.
‘Have one, Aunt Judith.’
The old lady did, absently.
Grainne was disappointed. Greed, she had reasoned, was the only appetite open to nuns and, hoping to cater to her her great-aunt’s, she had gone out of her way to please.
The damask cloth had not seen the light of day since her mother had died. Ditto the Cork-silver sugar bowl which was shining unaccustomedly after being treated with Silver Dip. Grainne, if left to herself, was as apt as not to put the sugar pack on the table. Today, she had been stimulated to make worldly things look good to this exile who had been thrust so unceremoniously back into the World.
Convent-educated, Grainne knew the importance nuns placed on etiquette. It provided rituals for dealing with those who might have no knowable values.
Nothing, moreover, displeased nuns more than seeming nunnish. They preferred assessing worldlings by the World’s own codes.
She remembered being quizzed when she was a senior girl about the mini-skirt in which a past pupil had turned up to a reunion. ‘Is that the fashion?’ asked a nun, meaning ‘is it socially acceptable outside?’ and Grainne, aware of the nun’s predicament, since snobbery, being worldly in a sinful sense, needed careful negotiation, had given a helpfully informative reply.
Concern with form must have disappeared now that the nuns themselves had taken to wearing hybrid black and white, like old-time parlour maids. Aunt Judith, however, a victim not a promoter of this state of affairs, should surely relish the old graces?
‘More tea, Aunt Judith? Another biscuit?’
The biscuit was, to Grainne’s mind, more luxurious than caviar. Caviar had not appeared in her childhood and she classed it with things first come across in adult life, like driving tests, foreign travel, hysterectomies, and drink. It appealed to her moderately and did not thrill her at all. Huntley and Palmer biscuits, on the other hand, had existed in the nursery. From thrift or principle, her parents had always bought them mixed. There was only one chocolate biscuit, a few creams and a single jam-inlaid shortbread wheel, to what seemed like dozens of plain biscuits. To merit the fancy, you had to eat your way through the plain. The jammy wheel, Grainne’s favourite as a child, had reminded her of the red Cellophaned window in her box of building blocks. You held it to your eye to watch the world go red. It was the most interesting brick, just as the wheel was the most interesting biscuit, and pleasure had remained tied in her mind to something red and rare and sweet and luminous. To buy a whole box of jam biscuits seemed as profligate still as it would be to buy a building-block kit containing nothing but windows: a capricious anarchic gesture which she had made this afternoon. Since her aunt seemed unmoved by the offering, she must, she felt obliged to admit, have done it for herself. With a shiver of glee, she ate a third red wheel as it struck her that now there actually were buildings constructed entirely, or apparently entirely, of coloured glass. Particularly, she remembered reading, in Southern California.
*
The chaplain from the Juvenile Prison had dropped in to the Grateful Patriots’ Youth Club to pick up comic papers which the boys left for him when they’d read them. Patsy Flynn saved them in a cardboard box. Sometimes Patsy slipped in a few Republican papers which the chaplain had to discard.
‘Against regulations,’ he told Patsy. ‘My wankers wouldn’t want these anyway. Cheesecake and action is my fellows’ taste. Explosion and release. Same thing. They’re locked up so I suppose it’s natural.’
Patsy pursed his lips and took back his papers. He didn’t like dirty talk and neither had he ever liked priests. The combination confused him. This roughneck in the dandruffy polo-neck sweater was hardly like a priest at all. Patsy offered him a cuppa.
‘Oh, that’ll be grand,’ said the chaplain. ‘That’ll hit the spot.’ He was overdoing things, thought Patsy. Priests made you feel they thought they were Christ between thieves when they gave you a bit of their time.
‘Well, I’m out of a job,’ said the chaplain, who wanted to be called Mick. Patsy avoided calling him anything. ‘The nuns I was with have shut up shop. Said my last mass there last week and deconsecrated the chapel. Sic transit the glory of the other world.’
‘What happened to the O’Malley aunt?’ Patsy wanted to know. ‘Is she staying with the Michael O’Malleys for good or what?’
‘I doubt they’ll be able to handle her,’ said the priest, and blew on his tea. ‘She’s as mad as a brush. Thinks she’s privy to secrets of national importance. Her own words. She was always tormenting me to help her remember them. Something to do with money and an American. Therapy she wanted which was hardly my job. I sent her off with a flea in her ear. All delusions. The poor old cow hadn’t been out of the place in fifty years.’
‘She might know something all the same,’ Patsy remarked. ‘She’d have visits.’
‘Her brain’s addled.’
‘The government gun-runners at the time of the arms business of 1970 used a convent to hide the stuff.’
‘True,’ the chaplain admitted. ‘That was up near the border though. In so far as could be gathered. All kept deliberately unclear, wasn’t it, even at the trial? You might know though,’ he remembered. ‘The Captain was involved in that caper, wasn’t he?’
Patsy assumed an air of discretion. ‘He tells me nothing.’ He hoped this sounded less true than it was. ‘Close-mouthed the Captain is.’
‘Well, nobody can mind your business like you can yourself,’ said the chaplain. ‘I’d best be getting along. Thanks for the tea.’
Patsy watched him go with some gloom. He suspected the fellow of being a Republican courier between the prisoners and their mates outside. Young Republicans had no time for Patsy, holding it against him that he sometimes took a sup too much and got excited or even wept. If the little sprats had suffered for Ireland as he had – ten years he’d done in the nick, how many of them could say as much? – they might have had more tolerance. He didn’t like to see the Church going the way it was either. As a young man, he’d hated the institutio
n, picturing it as a huge beast which sat on the country’s neck and stifled its best energies. Priests then had held the place in a military grip and it was from them that Patsy had learned the importance of pomp and insignia. He’d gone to a clerical day-school and knew what it was to be regimented. Tie, cap, scarf, socks and the badge on your jacket gave you away. If you got into trouble on the other side of the county, it would be reported back to the head of your school and they’d be asking at the next jaw-session that the boy seen wearing our colours while fighting, indulging in horse-play, talking to girls or stealing from Woolworth’s please stand up and give an account of himself. Through the confessional, they kept tabs on your inner life until you finally nerved yourself to damn your soul and defy them. When it came to organizational techniques the Republicans were nowhere in comparison. Patsy’s hatred for the clergy had been an admiring one and now that they were disbanding, like a colonial regiment before the colony’s loss, he felt depressed. He had a nasty feeling that without the old bully to keep the tension up the country might go soft. Materialism and selfishness were creeping in. A lot of the young fellows who came to the club struck him as lacking in ideals. Big, overgrown louts who’d been fed too well in their childhood, they put muddy boots on the club sofas and treated Patsy as a servant. It seemed to him that they didn’t think of themselves as owing anything to anyone but themselves. The chaplain, whatever else about him, had ideals.
So had Patsy. He was hollow with them, tenderly thrilled by his hopes for the country and it hurt him deeply that the IRA had no use for him. He was past it, they considered, and even the Captain did not take Patsy into his confidence. The Captain, to be sure, had to watch it and move with caution. Patsy appreciated that. He wasn’t the eejit some might think, even if campaigns fought in silent dignity by the faithful and the few in such battlefields as Brixton, Holloway, the Scrubs made him emotional in a way which embarrassed them. The Captain’s was the political end of things and had to be kept separate from the militant. Patsy did see this. The two had come close at the time of the government arms trial, spilling dangerously towards each other like chemicals from broken vials, and the Captain was now lying low. Patsy guessed, though, that he was secretly active. He had done some snooping in the Captain’s house where he sometimes did odd jobs, using the carpentry skills he had learned in gaol. He had no shame at all about this. His conscience was clear and his aim protective. The Captain could never say what he was up to. Like those politicians in America at the time of Watergate, he must preserve ‘deniability’. Patsy had noted the word with approval; it applied.
Thought of America brought back what the chaplain had just said about an American. Patsy had reason to take this more seriously than the chaplain did. For one thing people often dismissed him as soft in the head, so he wasn’t so quick himself to dimiss other people. The old nun could be bright as a bee under her eccentricity. Like himself. He was sharp enough, so he was. Whatever people might think. Sharper than that chaplain he bet. And he had certain knowledge that the Captain had American contacts which he didn’t shout about. There had been a fellow called Larry, who’d been staying at the Captain’s one time when Patsy was doing over the kitchen, installing new fitted cupboards and laying a floor of Italian tiles. They’d been in the front room talking about a film the Yank was making about the Troubles and Patsy had had a ringside seat. Heard every word. The Yank said he wanted photographs and memories of the Captain’s father. Patsy had listened, timing his hammer blows so as to sound industrious but picking up the thread of the talk. He’d got an idea that the two were up to more than making a film. Hard to put your finger on what it was. A tone, something about their timing. When you’d been in the nick you got sensitive to things like that. Anyway he got to thinking and, when you thought of it, what better cover than a film for bringing in loads of God knew what? Hardwear. Camouflaged. Why not? To be sure, he hadn’t breathed a word. What he was wondering now was whether this old woman, who had maybe got wind of what he’d got wind of himself, might be talking her head off. He’d have to get young Cormac to keep an eye on her and – wait a minute? Hadn’t the lad said something about a Yank wanting to interview her on TV? There was something to worry about. Plenty of people would go to any lengths to discredit the Captain, whom they feared might be the man to get rid of their piddling little neo-colonialist bourgeois nationalist system and bring a bit of nerve and justice to this distressful country. Patsy hoped to God he’d see the day the Captain did.
Meanwhile who was this second Yank? A CIA agent? Someone watching the other fellow? A journalist? That would be the worst. Maybe, thought Patsy, he’d better do a spot of investigating on his own. Young Cormac could be a source of information but better not tip the boy off about his own fears. Security, decided Patsy, secrecy and a close mouth were the order of the day. That was how the old IRB had functioned, a grand organization which, so he’d been told, had been the model for all the secret societies in Europe in the nineteenth century. The Celts had contributed more to history than they were ever credited with. Was it the wine cask they’d invented too, or was it trousers? He must remember to ask one of the history teachers that sometimes came by to give a talk at the club.
*
‘Long ago …’ said Judith vaguely.
Sometimes she seemed to unravel before your eyes like an old sock.
‘Tell me,’ Cormac encouraged her.
‘What?’
‘What it was like then. During the Troubles.’
‘They said we were … No,’ she corrected herself, ‘they, they were fighting for a new Ireland. For the future,’ she told him. ‘There were to be no false distinctions. Oh, they had high hopes. In fifty years’ time.’
‘That’s now,’ Cormac told her.
‘It is?’
‘Yes.’
‘And are there false distinctions?’ she wondered.
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ The words were like old beetles. He saw them in his mind’s eye, dead and blackish on a white window sill. Her mind was a mess. It was like a bran tub at a fair where you paid for a grope and might come up with a prize. Equally, you might come up with an old cabbage stalk. She had known heroes though. He looked in her pinkish eyes for flashes of old steel.
‘You knew Sparky Driscoll, didn’t you?’ he insisted. The name excited him: Sparky. You thought of hooves striking sparks on a road. ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.’ ‘Paul Revere’s Ride.’ Sparky had been a Yank. Sparklers. Fireworks. The blue muzzle of a gun sticking from a bush. He had died in an ambush. An arms purveyor. ‘Can’t you remember anything?’ he asked.
‘I’m trying,’ she said humbly. ‘They gave me shock treatment, you know. Electric shocks. They impair the memory.’
‘Why?’
‘Maybe I knew some secret thing?’
This interested Cormac. ‘You should do exercises,’ he told her. ‘Every day. I’ll help you,’ he offered. She was interesting: one of the dead generations. He might do a project on her for school. ‘I suppose you know prayers,’ he said. ‘You should try something more challenging. For the memory. Mnemonics. We make them up to help us through exams.’
‘Sparky,’ she remarked, ‘said the means justify the end.’
‘It’s the opposite.’
She agreed. ‘Most people put it the other way round but Sparky said that to show you had a right to fight for a better life you should start leading it at once.’
‘Did he mean be religious and that?’
‘He meant be happy.’ She giggled. ‘Americans think people should. They say it’s a right. Imagine.’
‘You’ve probably got it wrong,’ Cormac told her. ‘Think of something else to rest your brain. Then try and remember.’
She said she would take his advice.
7
James valued clarity but clarity was lacking in this misty city. It was lacking too in what people said.
‘What-t-t?’ they wondered and their ‘t’ was a
whistle of air leaked between tongue-tip and palate. ‘What’s that-t-t you’re asking?’
‘About Sinn Féin, is it-t?’
‘I asked if it was the same thing as the IRA?’
‘It is and it-t isn’t,’ whistled whoever he’d asked. ‘Head and hand, hand and head – how can you separate-t-te them?’
‘Would you say they had much of a following?’
‘It-t-t’d depend what-t you meant by “following”.’
‘Do people support them?’
‘What would you be meaning by “support-t-t”?’
After a while, doubts seemed to steam like wet flies inside his own head and he looked regretfully back to days when he had known where he was and what about. The seasons when he had been on his college football team had, from that point of view, been the time of his life.
He missed the purposefulness which had been his as long as living for the team had conferred significance on trivial acts and virtue been measurable on the bathroom scales. Members of the IRA must, he imagined, live similarly focused lives. He would have liked to meet some of them but Larry was all against the idea. James was to keep right away from those guys. His job, Larry impressed on him, was to get in well with media people in Dublin and do his research. Look out for the equipment that would be arriving shortly. No controversial stuff, right? Right, said James, but balked at spending hours soaking up liquor with men from whom he felt deeply alien in a physical way. He described the journalists’ flushed, deliquescent faces in letters to Therese, adding that he imagined them leaving a track of cholesterol in the buttery air and polluting it with their breath.
This was only half a joke. James, on an instinctive level, equated physical with spiritual health. He had, after all, spent his teen years thinking of his body. Treating it like an animal in training, he had forced it daily and beyond the point of pain to do knee-bends, sit-ups, push-ups, dives, and flips. It must suffer if it was to improve and his lust for improvement had for a long time focused on it, rather than on his mind or bank balance. It was the sort of urge which people in other times and places – here? – might channel into religious or military disciplines. For James, at his peak, his body had been his incarnate soul and when, in his reading, he came on words like ‘voluptuous’ or ‘sensual’, he knew that they did not apply to the feeling he had for his flesh. Their softer applications did not describe the feeling he had for women’s flesh either. He liked this hard. Nothing thrilled him like a girl’s thighs arching over him in a triumph of fitness. While she moved, his fingers would probe the muscle meshed deep and slippery in her buttocks. Later, seeing her scissor through water or leap, with tanned flourish, across a tennis court, he would relive the blind, tactile pleasures of their bedroom. These experiences were spare and immediate. He met few sexual rebuffs.
No Country for Young Men Page 15