by Roddy Doyle
The car had stopped. I heard the head beside me yawning. An elbow to his neck, and I could have been out of the car and zigzagging, running from the bullets.
But I didn’t want to escape. I couldn’t - and I didn’t want to. I was curious. More than curious. I liked these men; I’d missed them.
It was true. I felt good in the car. At home.
—Where are we? I asked.
I didn’t expect the answer, but I wanted to hear the voices.
—See if you can guess, said the hard man.
He opened his door.
The air that came into the car was cold. More sea. We’d hugged the coast, north. I was alert, wide awake.
I got out under my own steam; I pushed away the offered hand. I tried to stand straight, quickly. I managed it too. I knew I was being watched. There were new eyes there, new men watching the old man.
And I knew something else: I wanted in. I could feel it still down in me, still there. I’d been angry since the bomb; I knew that now.
But why did they want me?
I was still waiting. The men - I didn’t know how many now - had gone downwind. They whispered, spoke softly. Northern accents - I wasn’t sure of it.
The jumper still covered my face.The wind flicked at the sleeves but it wasn’t strong enough to lift the whole thing off me. I stood there for silent minutes. I’d been bombed, but I only really knew it now, and knew it as a rage I could master and depend on. A useful, easy rage. They’d nearly killed me. They’d killed thirty-three people. The loyalists, the U.V. - whatever the fuck they were. And the British - someone had whispered that, as I lay on the bed in the hospital. The British had been behind it. But I only heard it now, the voice of a girl. Meaning had arrived, months after the bomb.
I stood there and I didn’t doubt.
Shoes through grass. Fag smoke arriving. I was surrounded.
—Henry.
Another new voice. A Belfast voice.
—A chara.
—You can see me, I said.
The jumper was off, and I was looking at a tall man with a beard. I made sure I didn’t need to squint.
—My God Almighty, he said.—It’s great to finally meet you.
The smile was big, but controlled. Everything about him was under tight control. The beard, the eyes. The teeth were perfect, too big and even. I’d never seen teeth that white in a Catholic mouth before.
He’d smiled, and the other men smiled. Six men. I immediately spotted the ones who’d brought me. I’d been good at this before, telling a man’s worth by the shape of his head. The two Dublin lads were standing off to the side. They’d done their job; they weren’t the big men in this company. They smiled at me - old pals. I nodded back. They’d looked after me well, no hard feelings. I didn’t smile.
I looked back at the man with the beard. The strength was in his chest, inside the Aran sweater: here was a man who’d built himself while he’d done his time. Here was a man who’d been interrogated and had given them nothing. A man who’d had his teeth kicked out and hadn’t even bled. He’d got himself a bigger, whiter set and he’d smiled back at the fuckers the next time they’d pulled him in. He was young, in his twenties, but there was nothing young in him.
He held out his hand. I took it. The manly grip, all that shite. Big spades softened by gun oil.
(You think it was Adams. But it wasn’t. It was a different man. Adams was in Long Kesh, in Cage 11, becoming Gerry Adams. He’d be in there for another three years.)
—A chara, he said again.
They were probably the only Irish words he knew. My friend. My bollix - I pushed back the sarcasm; I didn’t want it. I looked back at him.
The other men drew a bit closer. I shook hands with them all, the Dublin lads at the back of the queue. In my day, Dublin had been the centre of the new place we were making. This wasn’t my day.
—Do you know who you are, Henry? said the man with the beard.
He didn’t want an answer. He had his own.
—You are our republican dead, he said.
No one laughed. No one smiled.
—Back from the dead, I said.
—Exactly, aye. The real thing.
—I’m not the only one still alive, I said.—There are hundreds of them. Us.
—Ach, but. Those lads have always been around. We grew up with them. Good men, many of them. But comical. Shrunken wee lads. It’s hard to separate the real thing from the chancers.
He smiled.
—But you’re Henry Smart.
—What do you want?
—See now? he said.—You’re not on for flattery. I can see that. You’re still active.
I tried not to look flattered.
—Nothing, he said.—We don’t want anything.
—So you’ve brought me for a picnic, I said.
He laughed. They laughed.
—Good man, he said.
He laughed again.We were all friends, beside the sea. He stopped laughing.
—You want something, I said.
—Aye. We do. But we know.
He stared at me. He let me match the stare; he let me join.
—We don’t have to ask, he said.
He was right.
But he did ask.
And I nodded.
They drove me back to Ratheen. I sat in the front passenger seat this time.
—Where are we?
—Balbriggan.
—The Tans burnt it.
—That’s right.
—It hasn’t recovered.
—It isn’t the worst, said the driver.—I’ve a brother lives out here. He says it’s alright.
—I’ve a cousin of mine out here too, said the man behind me, in the back.
—What’s he think?
—She. I don’t really know her that well. I chatted to her a bit at a wedding there last year. My sister, like. Got married. But the cousin. She said she lived out here.
These were the Dublin men I was with. I was already ashamed of them. I was on my way home, but half an hour before I’d been sitting on a rug with three big men from the Provisional I.R.A.’s Army Council while we ate republican sandwiches and I listened to the one big man explain my part in the long war.
—We’re in it for the long haul and we want men who know what that means. We might be old men or even old dead men before the British realise that the time has come to go. Old empires are stupid. You know that.
The other men stayed back and leaned against the cars, and looked north and south. There were guns near if the Guards or the Special Branch came at us through the dunes or along the flat stretch of road. I could feel the stiff grass under the rug as the man with the beard told me who I was and who we all were.
—We’re the legitimate government of Ireland, Henry, he said.—And you’re the living proof of that.
He breathed deep, and his chest pushed against the Aran sweater.
—This is a great day.
The other men nodded.
—Aye.
—It’s a strange one, though, he said.—Have you thought about this, boys?
I knew he was saying something he’d said before, and the boys had heard before; he’d rehearsed it with them.
—If it hadn’t been for that bomb. If the U.V.F. hadn’t parked the car there.
He looked at me now.
—We’d never have found you.
I knew: I’d have to be wary again, and scared. Because he was lying.
What about the priest? I wanted to say, to catch him out and prove I was more than their link to our glorious past. He’s been looking after me for years. And what about the teachers? I knew now, they’d been keeping an eye on me, waiting.
—Enough, he said.—We can’t be sentimental. It’s a long way home, especially the long way we’ve to go the night. Crossing that scar across our land.
He was talking about the border.
I didn’t groan when I sat up off the rug. I let them watch the leg, and ho
w I owned and manoeuvred it.
—It’s not the same leg, is it, hey?
—No.
—Still. It’s powerful.
We shook hands. We even hugged. He held my shoulders and looked at me again, like a proud father sending his eldest off to his first day’s work.
He spoke and, again, it sounded like something he’d rehearsed.
—Tiochaigh ár lá.1
It was dark when the car slid out of the country onto the streets. I was tired but I’d never sleep again. I was a hero and a fraud, elated and a bit terrified.
They dropped me at the house. I didn’t have to show them where it was. I half expected - I fully expected to see the priest sitting there when I turned on the light. But the house was empty.
I sat there till daylight. You got me wrong. It wasn’t too late. I could tell McCauley or the priest; I could go up to his house. I could put them right and tell them: I hadn’t been elected to the First Dáil. I hadn’t been there in January 1919, in the Round Room of the Mansion House, when the Dáil had ratified the 1916 Proclamation and adopted the Declaration of Independence.What they thought I was, I wasn’t: the sure, tight link, the man who’d actually voted. There was no Henry Smart M.P. The day of the vote, I was cycling through Roscommon and a wall of sleet; I was going through Strokestown, to Rusg, and the house that would give me my wife. Further east and south, in Soloheadbeg, Dan Breen shot two rozzers, the first official killings of the War of Independence. And back in Dublin, hands were raised - most of the elected men and women were either on the run or in jail - and Ireland became the Republic. I was always on the run and I’d done more than my share - but it didn’t matter. They thought one of the raised hands in the Mansion House had been mine. They were wrong. But these men were never wrong.
I stood up and looked out the window. There was nothing out there. I put on the kettle.
I’d thought they were after a mascot. When the man with the beard told me I was their republican dead, I thought they’d parade me, bring me to the odd meeting. Bodenstown, and the other holy places. I was ready to argue - I could still fight, I was still a soldier. An old man was like a pregnant woman; he could slip through any checkpoint. I’d be useful, vital. But I’d listened, and the realisation came, the reminder - the man with the beard had actually said it: this was religion. They thought I was Moses, someone who’d actually spoken to God. I wasn’t a symbol: I was an old, rediscovered fact. The eleventh commandment.
But I was a lie. And a bigger, more frightening lie because I was keeping it to myself. Hang on, lads. I could have put the hand up and confessed. I wasn’t in the Dáil, I never stood for election. I was only seventeen. They wouldn’t have shot and buried me in the dunes. (I found out soon enough, those dunes and other dunes and ditches and bog holes were filling up with renegades and informers, men and - worse, and new - women who got in the way, joining all the informers we’d thrown into the same holes nearly sixty years before.) I’d still have been useful. A veteran, recently wronged, an old man still hungry for freedom. Whatever they wanted me to be.
But I’d said nothing.
Because I’d wanted it. Despite the mistake, and the lie that it quickly became. And the danger. The fresh death sentence it would become if it stayed unsaid. I wanted to be who they thought I was.
And I was. I was the Henry Smart they’d been told about by their fathers and grandmothers. The man with the beard had looked at my leg: he knew who I’d been. I was Henry Smart.
But I knew. I’d learnt it years ago. It was religion and, so, it was madness. It was the sanctity of the words. Republic or free state. Choose the wrong one and you were damned. Choose the right one and you were dead. It couldn’t be both and it couldn’t be neither; I knew that too, even when I’d got out of the country. But at least back then, at the dawn of fuckin’ time, it had been a real decision. It had been a vote.
It had been a vote, but never my vote. Hands were raised and counted. But not my hand. I wasn’t in the Mansion House. And that was all that mattered. I was their walking legitimacy, but - for now - I was the only one who knew it was a lie.
I drank the Nescafé. I even tasted it. I ate the cornflakes. I did most of the things that were normal. I made sure I had my keys and I went to work. I knew I was being watched.
I had no idea how they’d made the mistake. I’d be able to point that out, if I lived long enough.The mistake was theirs, not actively mine. They’d jumped to their own quick conclusions. The old I.R.A. man in hospital. A familiar name. Henry Smart? The Henry Smart. Not a name from the history books, but spoken of in the right, tight circles; old men passing it on down to the little lads, the gun runners of the future, around the tables of the republican clubs, singing and crying, eyes closed. The Bold Henry Smart. They looked at the photo on the front page, the old bandaged man sitting up in the bed, defiant. Was that the same man who’d smacked the Big Fella? The same. The man who never gave in or gave up - that’s him. The man who was elected to the First Dáil. I could hear the conversation, up in Belfast. Some shell-shocked oul’ lad got his rebels mixed and I ended up one of the anointed, the last man standing. Fuckin’ Moses. The link to God. And what about the time before the bomb? The mistake was older than the bomb. But that didn’t matter.
I opened the school gate, and realised it was Saturday. The day off. The hall was being used, but not till later, a cake sale, for a parish trip to Lourdes.The woman in charge - I couldn’t remember her name; I hadn’t paid attention - would be collecting the key from my house. Going to Lourdes felt like a good idea. I could hide among the mad and the lame. I’d done it before; there was nothing to it. I could limp to France, and disappear.
I locked the gate and walked back through the village.
I was being watched.
I thought about Lourdes and the Spanish border, and the woman who was organising the trip. I worked on the limp as I went; I gave it a swing. I’d need a new passport. My old one was American and long out of date. I had money in under a floorboard. I’d make sure it looked like I’d be coming back. The school was full of Provisionals. The parish priest was a Provisional - and my plan was in tatters already. The priest would be going with them, half a planeload of his sick parishioners. He’d be flaying them with the rosary. We’d end up sharing a room, or even a fuckin’ bed.
I’d ask the woman, whatever her name was, which of the priests would be carrying the holy water on the trip. I’d go if he wasn’t the one; the parish was young and had three priests. The old church had been abandoned to bingo; the new church across the new Main Road was a huge thing that was packed five, six times every Sunday. If I couldn’t escape to Lourdes, I could take the boat to Holyhead or Liverpool. I wouldn’t need a passport. I could go back the way I’d gone in 1922.
I was near the house. I was struggling. I wasn’t acting. I was an old fool, caught again.
I’d go back down to the hall while the sale was in full swing and I’d buy a cake. I’d help them clean up after. I’d talk to the woman, charm her; I’d even ride her to get onto the plane for Lourdes.
I brushed my teeth. I polished the boots and the leg. I thought about leaving the front door open. Come in, come in, it’s always open. The bit of heat helps the lumbago. But the door was never open. There was no garden or gate; it was straight onto the street. It would have been like living in a stationary boxcar, sitting at the door while the rest of the world rolled by. The door had always been shut. I couldn’t change that now.
There were two boats a day to Liverpool. I could get on the bus, going into town. I hadn’t been in town since the bomb, but no one else knew that.
I had money. I could reach it without climbing out of my chair. I owned nothing that was worth bringing with me, nothing that wouldn’t fit into some of my pockets.
I sat there. I made myself sit there. They’d find out the truth, and they’d come after me. I wasn’t going to Liverpool and I wasn’t going to Lourdes. I’d take what was coming. There was no reason
to run, other than to save my life. But I’d lived it. I’d lived most of it running - no more of that. I was angry again, ready to shout back.
The knock came, and it was grand. I knew the soft tap of a woman’s knuckles. It wasn’t a man with a gun, or a man pretending he didn’t have a gun. It might have been a woman with a gun but it was definitely a woman. She knocked again. I got up and went to the door, to meet her.
But I met a different woman.
—Two and two? I said.
She didn’t answer. But she didn’t look surprised.
—I’m here for the key, said Missis O’Kelly.
—I was expecting the other one.
—The other one?
—I don’t know her name.
—We’re a committee, she said.
—Grand, I said.—Come in.
She didn’t.
I stood well back. The door was as wide as I could make it.
—Come in.
She leaned in a bit closer - she hung over the step. Her forehead might have been under the roof, but that was all.
—The kettle’s on, I said.
—There’s a bit of a rush.
—I miss you.
I thought I was falling; there was nothing beneath me. I was naked, sad.
—I miss you too, she said.—We’re ridiculous.
—I suppose we are, I said.—But fuck it.
She smiled, although she didn’t want to.
—Come in, I said.
—No, she said.—I really can’t. I came for the key, you see.
—That’s right.
It seemed like years ago, my plans to seduce her pal on the committee and run away to Lourdes. I was in a different life.
—They’ll be waiting for me, she said.—The other ladies.
—Yeah.
—At the school.
—We can’t have that.
I picked the keys off the table and took the big one she wanted off the ring.
—There you go.
—Thank you.
—No problem, I said.—She said something about yis finishing up at half-five.