by Roddy Doyle
I was tired. I was cold.
—I don’t know.
I was holding the steel bar that ran across the back of his seat. He put his hands down on mine.
—Find out.
Francis Hughes died on the 12th of May, after fifty-nine days. The light he kindled will never burn out. Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara died on the 21st of May, after sixty-one. I sat alone beside my wife’s bed and wondered - I suddenly wondered - if that was what she was doing. She was on strike and she wouldn’t wake till the others had died and Ireland was free. The eye was open to let me know: she was waiting.
It made sense. But I knew it wasn’t true. I’d found her on her kitchen floor. She’d been put there by a stroke, not a decision. But it still made sense. I held her hand for the first time in weeks. I thought I felt slight heat; I thought something moved - a muscle - in behind a finger. I didn’t like the hunger strike as a tactic but it was honest - it was absolutely clear. The striker chose silence, emptiness, the step forward into nothing. Nothing was better than what was on offer. It was full freedom, or death.
I’d often wanted to die. I’d crawled to my own grave in Monument Valley, but only because I hadn’t wanted to live. But these were young men. They weren’t tired of life, or beaten by it. They were giving it up, refusing to continue. Refusing to exist. And their silence impressed me more than anything I’d met since Citizen Army men ran out the side door of the G.P.O. and took the bullets for the men who were right behind them. Now, again, I felt it; men I admired were dying for me.
Men and a woman.
I was thinking through my hole. She was an oul’ one in her nineties, doing what all old women did if they made it that far - dying.
I felt her slap across the back of my head. You’re the go-boy, Henry Smart. I squeezed her hand.
She was dying - she was already dead. Her hand didn’t sweat.
I heard no feet, but I turned.
My daughter was at the open door. She didn’t fill it - she was another woman on hunger strike. She was gaunt, striking - skinny. Bone angry. Looking in at me and her mother.
My daughter. I couldn’t see Saoirse. It wasn’t fair - I knew that. Saoirse was a child I’d loved fifty years before. This grey-haired woman wasn’t her. There was nothing there, not a trace of the child or the girl.
—D’you remember going to see The Gaucho? I asked the woman who’d stepped into the room.
—Yes, she said.
She dragged a chair across the floor and put it beside mine. She sat beside me. We looked at her mother.
I’d never hated the English. I’d never killed a man because he was English, or British. It would never have made sense.
Then Thatcher came among us. Thatcher. Spelt c.r.o.m.w.e.l.l. Spelt that way in 1981 by people who didn’t like Sinn Féin or the I.R.A., by people who were disgusted by the hunger strikes and dirty protests, who changed direction whenever they heard a northern accent. Thatcher was our greatest success of the campaign, our most potent weapon. The Iron fuckin’ Lady. We invented her.
She’d been Prime Minister across the water since 1979, but I’d missed her arrival. If Miss O’Shea had ever mentioned her, I couldn’t remember it. If she’d ever appeared on the screen while we watched the news on a Saturday night I didn’t know. Then I was back in the fold and up on the backs of lorries and the name was hissed, all over the country. Thatcher. It was a name to stop a man in the middle of his ride, the name that made faces crumble into fast and ugly rage. It was weeks before I knew she had a first name.
We finally met in 1981, in June.
—Crime is crime is crime, said Margaret Hilda Thatcher.
—A cunt is a cunt is a cunt, I said.
—It is not political, said Margaret Thatcher.
—Oh yes, it is, said Henry Smart.
I shouted it from the back of a lorry. It got a cheer and - a rare thing in those months - it got a laugh. I waved to the faithful and lifted the new wooden leg as high into the wet air as I could manage. It was chipboard, darkly varnished. It would have broken under the weight of a small child, but it was made for an old man with a small child’s muscles. (The humiliation of it, when the I.R.A. engineer explained it to me, like your man in the James Bond films, before he handed it over. I was tempted to skull him with it but I knew it would have broken on his head. This, by the way, was the same man who had invented the fertiliser bomb.) I finished. I’d earned my soup - two protest rallies, two dashes across the country. I’d done well. But I felt a strong, mean hand on my arm and I was quickly dragged aside; I was pulled off the back of the lorry.
There was a ban in the Republic on broadcasting anything said by members of Sinn Féin - the ban was called Section 31. But I was their face and voice - one of the few voices - because I wasn’t a member of Sinn Féin and, with the big old head on me, with the rheumy eyes and see-through ears, I was no one’s idea of an active Volunteer. I’d become a bit of a star. I was recognised on the bus and when I went to collect my pension.
—Are you the man on the telly?
—That’s the oul’ fella with the hat and the leg.
Even the junkies stopped to chat.
But now, the man with the beard gripped my arm. The lorry hid us from the crowd. There was shite on its wheels. I knew, because I was pushed up against one.
—They won’t be broadcasting that wee speech, he said.
The anger was in his fingers, not his voice. I knew I’d been stupid.
—You won’t get away with calling the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland a cunt. Three times.
He let go of my arm. But he was capable of killing me. He pointed a finger, like he was joking, scolding a child he loved but wouldn’t hesitate to murder.
—And don’t dare, he said.—Don’t dare say she is one.
I saw him put the pillowcase over my head. That second - he’d do it.
I’d been getting cocky, stupid. But Thatcher gave me energy. I was a few months off eighty, and Thatcher had woken seven hundred years of racial hatred. She kept me wide awake at night. I shovelled spuds into me, thinking of Margaret Thatcher.
—The more men die, said the man with the beard,—the less shocking it will be. The country will stop being outraged and the softies down here will look at the kids fighting on the streets of Belfast and go back to thinking that they’re just wee savages. The strike will fail. These weeks are crucial and you’ve just blown one of them, Henry.
—I thought that’s what you wanted, I said.—You said it yourself. Political ambition and armed struggle are mutually exclusive.
I was pleased as I spoke - as I heard myself. I remembered clearly what he’d told me months before. I remembered thinking that he was saying nothing new, that Ernie O’Malley had argued the same thing, whenever I’d been too slow to see him coming. And another thing: I knew that by arguing now I’d get something out of him, something with juice to bring back to the lads from G Division.
—If the strike fails, I told him,—you’ll be able to put the struggle back on track.
I didn’t believe a word I said.
—It’s too late!
It was a whisper but he shouted. I was back up against the lorry wheel.
He took a breath.
—It cannot end in defeat, he said.—We’re too far in.
He took another. I wondered if he had asthma or something else that grabbed his breath.
—The armed struggle can go on for years, he said.—It already has. We cannot be beaten. But this is different. The weapons in this one are the men themselves, not bullets. We’re not going to get replacements from Libya or the States. They’re men. If they keep dying, people will get bored.
—No.
—Yes. And they’ll turn on us. Why are we letting it happen? Why are we letting them die? Now, it’s Thatcher - she’s to blame. But give it a couple of months, give it the summer, and see what happens. You don’t actually know any of these men, right?
I did
n’t answer. He didn’t want me to.
—I do, he said.—I knew them before they went in, and I was in there myself, with some of them. Four men have died. That’s four good friends of mine. And there are more friends of mine in the queue. I don’t want this but I’m stuck with it, and it is horrible. The thought that we are killing our own. It’s horrible. So, don’t you dare joke when you’re up on that platform representing republicanism, d’you hear me?
He looked at me again; he held me up with his eyes. He patted my shoulder.
—You mind that wee tongue of yours, he said.
The general election was on the way. The man with the beard didn’t want to run any candidates. He didn’t want the infection that would come with success. And he wasn’t alone. There were four men sitting at the table.
—A trap, said the man who usually drove, and all heads nodded.
—But it’s a trap we’ll have to walk right into, said the man with the beard.—The pressure’s on. Bobby won.
—And he died.
—Aye, said the man with the beard.—But he won and Thatcher let him die. She killed him, that’s the way of it. He was dying anyway, with or without the by-election. So it worked. That’s the thinking.
—And now there’s another chance.
—Aye.
—Does it have to be blanket men who run?
—What about Henry here?
No one laughed. They looked at me. And no one said No. But No it emphatically was; the three seconds’ silence nearly took the roof off the place - we were in another farmhouse. I was off the ticket before I could turn down the honour. And that was grand. There was no hurt there, nothing in me screaming.
The man with the beard washed the cups and dishes. He wouldn’t let the others help.
I gave the G-men the candidates’ names two days before Sinn Féin gave them to the press.
We were sitting on the bench, at the pond. I was the man in the middle.
—You’re sure about these?
—Yep. Unless they die in the meantime.
—Is that a stab at humour, Henry?
—Men who don’t eat die, I said.—That’s the tactic.
He looked at me. The men in my life had started to look at me.
—You’re enjoying yourself, Henry, said the Clare man.
I thought about this.
—Yeah, I said.—I am.
—You were dead for fifty years, she said.
—I looked for you.
I nodded at the woman on the bed.
—I told her that too. I looked for years.
—We waited, she said.—It was our lives. Even after she married that O’Kelly man.
She sat up.
—Séamus would still be alive if we hadn’t waited for you, she said.
I looked at her and, Jesus, it was much easier to love my son, the boy who’d always be a boy. She was right. But I had to deny it.
—How do you make that out? I asked.
—We’d have come home sooner, she said.—He would have had a bed, and food. Instead of dirt. And the wind.
She was right. I didn’t try to change that. I didn’t want to. She was my daughter.
She looked at her mother.
—How long has she known about you?
—Years, I said, and regretted it.
I’d have to become a father again. I was being crueller than I’d ever been, even with a gun. But I didn’t know what to say.
—I’m sorry, I said.
She sighed. Her hands were up around her head, grabbing and prodding.
—About ten, I said, shaving two decades off the figure.—We met accidentally.
She looked at me.
—I moved to Ratheen, I told her.
How did I hug a long-lost daughter, lost so long she’d caught up with me? A thin, angry woman whose life I’d destroyed by coming back to life. It was ridiculous. I didn’t love her, and I couldn’t see the girl I’d loved. The room was full of the dead.
We looked at each other. We tried to see something we knew.
Neither of us smiled.
—I saw you on T.V., she said.—There was a report, on N.B.C., I think. On that hunger strike.
—In America?
—Yes, she said.—It’s a big deal. Especially with the Irish.
I wondered who else in the States had seen me. Louis would have been a telly watcher. He’d loved gadgets and new things. He’d have had colour and the works, a remote control. Sitting there, flicking through the channels. (I didn’t know that he’d been dead for ten years.) Or Ford. I saw him in front of a colossal telly, talking to it, giving out and loving it, searching for old John Ford films. (But he was long dead too.) And the women I’d known - did they sit up, those who still could, when they heard the name and saw the fedora?
—You were holding a wooden leg, she said.
—That’s right.
She was looking at my feet.
—Not that one, I told her.—Another one.
She knew the story; her mother would have told her.
—Do you have to do it? she said.
—Yes, I said.—I do.
There were nine candidates, nine big constituencies. The candidates were prisoners, four of them on hunger strike. I was their ancestor, their breathing link to the pure days. I was the rightness of their actions. And they ran me ragged.They dragged me through the wild border counties where, north of the line, the British ruled the air but none of the land, where, south of the line, the locals rode their livestock and smuggled out of principle. I had to stop shaking hands because my own hands and arms were loose in their sockets. I couldn’t hold a soup spoon. I couldn’t put on my own coat. There was rioting every night in Belfast and Derry, and tension you could lean on in the south. Ireland was dead, a failure, a third world country in Western Europe - I heard this every night. And we knew why, and who to blame. People voted for starving men because they hated Thatcher. She’d done this to us, in Cavan/Monaghan, in Sligo/Leitrim, in Dublin North-Central, in Kerry North.
Two of the men were elected, Kieran Doherty and Paddy Agnew.
They carried me on their shoulders, because there were no elected candidates to carry. The heroes were dead or in Long Kesh, so they carried me and Dinny Archer.
I finally met him.
Under a streetlamp. Two old men on the shoulders of the young. Right under the lamp. Someone just arriving would have thought they were going to hang us. We faced each other, under the yellow light. I knew him first.
—Dinny, I said.
He was older than me, and blind.
—Who are you? he said.
—Yeh cunt, I said.—You know who I am.
He was sharp, and fleshless. He must have been well past ninety. There was no blood working under the skin; the mouth was a rip across a yellow skull. He was a better-looking hermit than I was. And he was terrified.
He knew me, alright. And suddenly I knew - now, under the yellow light, it clicked: he was as big a chancer as I was. I knew why he hadn’t exposed me as the fake M.P. and insisted on his own status as the only surviving real one. Because if he got me, then I’d get him. The republican legends would bring each other down.
We stared across at each other, two trigger men who wouldn’t be drawing their guns.
When I’d come down the stairs from Jack Dalton’s office, onto Mary Street, Dinny Archer had been there on the other side of the street, waiting to execute me.
And that was it.
Now, in June 1981, on a damp night in El Paso, County Louth, I laughed into his face. And he, the blind old fucker, knew exactly why.
He’d been on the wrong side.
Jack Dalton had been clearing the way for the new respectability. That was why I’d been destined for the ditch with a bullet in the back of my head. He knew there was a treaty coming, and he knew there’d be the compromises that men like me would never accept. If he’d listened, if he’d wanted to know, I’d have told him that I didn’t give a sh
ite. My war was over, and I only had one man left that I needed to kill: Alfie Gandon. (But Gandon was going to be part of the new respectability too. Gandon was actually their first respectable man.) But Jack hadn’t wanted to know. There’d be the Treaty, and the split. I’d be on the wrong side, so he’d get rid of me a few months early, before it got really busy. Jack would be on the pro-Treaty side; I’d be against it. So my name came at me on a piece of paper and his executioner, Dinny Archer M.P., was downstairs, waiting for me.
Myself and Dinny had been together before. His credentials were impeccable. We’d been together when I shot Detective Sergeant Smith, of G Division. We’d gone into the same hotel room in the Gresham, on the morning of Bloody Sunday, and we’d shot the man we’d gone there to shoot while, in other hotels and bedrooms, other men did the same. The young lads holding us up knew all about that day and our part in it together.
I laughed again.
—Good man, Dinny.
Somehow, after I’d lost touch, after I’d sailed away to a new name, Dinny had changed sides. No one alive knew that he’d once been a hit man for Jack Dalton and the other men who betrayed the Republic. No one except me.
—Been down Mary Street recently, Dinny? I asked him; I shouted across the noise and polished heads.
He didn’t answer.
Commandant Denis Archer. Some time after Mary Street, he’d changed his mind. Dinny had converted to diehardism and, as the other diehards died off, he’d become the last of the breed and the one surviving member of the only legitimate Dáil and, in the eyes of the faithful, the true Republic’s only elected representative. He even claimed to be the man who’d put the last bullet into Jack Dalton. (Although he wasn’t the only man who claimed that one.) In 1938, Dinny and the few other diehard T.D.s had handed over their authority to the I.R.A. Army Council. The I.R.A. became the legal and lawful government. All other parliaments were illegal assemblies, the willing tools of an occupying force. In 1969, when the others were all dead, Dinny endorsed the Provisionals’ break from the Official I.R.A. The Provos became the true government - because Dinny said so.
—The cat got your tongue, Dinny?