by Roddy Doyle
For the last six months they’d been using myself and Dinny, the holy relics, parading us up and down the country, at candle-lit vigils and election rallies. And, now, finally, we were face to face. Maybe by accident. But maybe deliberately - we were always watched; no one in the republican movement was trusted.
They separated us now, the fat and skinny lads who were holding us up, and they brought us back, and did it again, and brought us back. Ooh-Ah - Up the ’R.A.! Then we were side by side, like the chariots in Ben Hur. Two old men on the shoulders of the Republic’s sweating future, doing a lap of the square. We were neck and neck most of the way, our legs bashed and rasped. Ooh-Ah - Up the ’R.A.! Wood collided with bone. Did sparks fly when the dead met? I saw them that night.
And I won. I was waiting for him when the lads got tired and dropped us to the ground. I watched the face, the uncertainty that his blindness couldn’t hide, as he was held in midair, and lowered.
We were being watched. Eyes, and eyes. And other eyes. And ears.
I put out my hand.
—Good to see you, Dinny, I said.
He was genuinely blind. He wasn’t Ford, who hadn’t needed his eyes to see. Archer couldn’t see a thing. He couldn’t see my hand. A younger hand, much younger - a grandson’s? - took Dinny’s and brought it to mine. The younger hand let go, and Archer now felt mine. He felt me grab it slowly.
I leaned closer to the face, and the big ear - the streetlight shone right through it.
—Will I tell them now, Dinny? I said.—Will I tell them all about Mary Street?
I got away from the ear, to watch the face. Nothing changed there, but the grip did. He was suddenly the man doing the holding. My grip became his, and he was leaning across to me as the pain climbed up my arm and ate into my shoulder. I felt his breath. I smelt it - he’d had an egg for his tea, and some chips.
—You won’t, he said.
His other hand found my head and pulled it even closer to his mouth.
—You were never anything but a renegade, he said.—We’ll say nothing.
I might have broken his fingers but they were still all set to break mine.
—We’ll call a halt when I count to three, he said.
His face hadn’t budged. Mine hadn’t either - old nerves were slow in registering the pain.
—One, two. Three.
We both let go, and the night was full of clapping hands and whoops. The young hand that had guided Dinny’s hand to mine now took his arm and stirred him away. It belonged to a girl, not a boy, and she looked back at me and smiled. I wanted to be Dinny.
The man with the beard was beside me.
—That was extraordinary, he said.
I nodded.
—Great to see Denis again, hey.
—Ah, yeah, I said.
I’d survived. I was still the last of the rebels. But so was Dinny.
—Denis Archer once changed his mind?
—Yeah.
—For the one and only time in his life, said the Clare man.—Jesus.
He looked at Campion.
—You know what we have here, don’t you? he said.
—A brand new historical fact, said Campion.
—If it’s true.
—It’s true, I told them.—He was on the pro-Treaty side. He’d have shot me if I hadn’t been quicker than him.
—Pro-Treaty, said the Clare man.—But before there was a Treaty. But, fair enough now, let’s not quibble.
—We could bring them down with this, said Campion.
—The whole shooting gallery, the Clare man agreed.—We could go home to our beds.
They looked delighted, giddy, kids with a frog in a jar.
We were on the bus again, the only passengers. The Clare man looked at me.
—We could end it now with what you’ve told us, Henry. You’re a fraud. And now Archer’s a fraud as well. The republican religion is built on two whoppers.
Campion patted my back.
—But Dinny was an M.P., I reminded them.
—But he changed his mind, said the Clare man.—He’s tainted. Think of all those gobshites who adore him. Literally fuckin’ adore him. O’Brádaigh. O’Connaill, with his fuckin’ trenchcoat. The priesty fellas. They’d be devastated if they ever found out. Archer changed his mind. Imagine. Changing your mind. It’s the mortal sin. It’s worse than compromising, sure.
He laughed.
—A few words with our colleagues in the Garda press office. Or, better yet, a chat with an eminent historian who’d write something erudite for the Irish Times. ‘Archer Changed His Mind.’ Or, ‘Archer Shot Opponents of the Treaty.’ We’d have Adams and wee Danny running for the dictionary, looking for a new definition of ‘legitimacy’. And where would that leave you, Henry?
I shrugged.
—The last man standing, he said.
Campion patted my back again.
—But a quiet word from one of our inside men, ‘Smart wasn’t in the First Dáil, check it out.’ And that leaves them with no one. No rock left on which to build their church. They’d whack you, Henry.
—No, they wouldn’t.
—Why would you think that? Of all people?
—Bad press, I said.
I was wide awake, enjoying myself. I’d just spent two hours with my daughter.
—Killing an old man, I said.—They wouldn’t do it.
—You’re naïve, Henry. After all these years.
I shrugged - I tried to.
—No, I said.
—Sure, they wouldn’t give it a second thought, man. They shoot housewives, they kneecap children. They don’t care about bad press. They’d shoot the journalist.
—I couldn’t give a shite, I said.
—If they whacked you?
—No, I said.
And then, there, I meant it. They could shoot me, or do me in with a mallet. I’d lived a life. I was full and happy enough.
—They’d hurt you, said the Clare man.
He meant he’d hurt me. The old man in the jar.
I shrugged.
—They’d be able to get at you, Henry, said my pal Campion.
I shrugged again. And I knew I’d overdone it.
The Clare man looked at me like he was delivering a promise.
—A pillow over your wife’s face while they made you watch, he said.—That would hurt, I’d say.
—Take it easy, said Campion.
—Or your daughter, said the Clare man.
His face was right in front of mine, so close I couldn’t see him. —They’d blow her brains out right in front of your eyes, he said.
He took a smoke from his pack. I had to wait till he lit it.
—Just as we get to know each other again, he said.
He was quoting my daughter, saying exactly what she’d said to me an hour before, as we sat beside Miss O’Shea. The room in the home was bugged and I was a clown.
—And they’d rape her first.
—They wouldn’t, I said - I managed to say.
—Wouldn’t they now?
—They wouldn’t do that.
—You’re right, he said.—Faith and family, isn’t that it? They’d strap her to a fertiliser bomb but they’d never touch her where they shouldn’t touch her. Because that would be a sin. But killing her clean, because she’s the blood of your bad blood. They’d talk their way around that one.
He smiled.
—So, Henry, he said.—You can’t die on us just yet. We’re depending on you. And so is someone else.
He patted my cheek - he slapped.
—Okay?
—Easy, said Campion.
I nodded.
—Good man, said the Clare man.—But d’you know what? We still don’t know the answer to the question we really need the answer to. Why you? Why have they canonised you? When they already had Archer. They go and bloody manufacture you. They had to make you up. Why?
I had an answer.
—The hunger strikes and the e
lections, I said.—It’s too much for one man.
—That’s possible, he said.—But it’s not enough. It’s not the answer.
He patted my shoulder.
—I want the answer. Or we’ll just have to give up on it and move on. Are you with me?
—Yeah.
—I want the answer, Henry. I’ll even tell you what I think.
He waited until I looked straight at him.
—There’s more than one man changed his mind in this, he said.—That’s my theory.
She’d talked for hours.
No one came in to check on her mother. There’d have been no point. She was as stubborn as she’d always been, and solid now as well. She looked like she’d been carved from lovely wood. She was dead but she’d outlive us.
I sat and listened, and I began to like my daughter.
She lived in Chicago, she told me.
—Where?
—Oak Park.
—You went back.
—Well, yes, she said.
She’d lived there, with her mother, when I’d found them - when her mother had found me.
—In the same house? I asked.—Missis What-was-her-name’s?
—Missis Lowe, she said.—No. Not there.
—She’d be dead now.
—Long dead.
—Go on.
She was married to a man who was fifteen years younger than her. Your mother’s daughter, I nearly said - but didn’t. She told me this in the American way, a sigh, a complaint that was actually a boast. At the age of sixty, or somewhere near, she was trying to provoke her father. She liked to think of herself as an artist - she was an artist - but she also sold real estate. Fabrics were her thing. Her life was very ordered, she told me. Her life was her loom and her dogs.
I looked to see if her mother was listening. She wasn’t.
The dogs had names. And she gave them to me. Taft, Max, Holly. Not Connolly, Pearse and Collins. Taft, Max, Holly and Satchmo.
—Satchmo?
—Yes.
—Is he black? I asked.
—Please, she said. Pull-ease.
She stared at me, the mouth dramatically agape. It was hard to watch. The wizened girl, the ghost of my child, was in there.
—That just does not happen, she said.
Why then? I wanted to ask her. Why had she done it? To bring her back to the first time she’d lived in Oak Park - when her father had packed a carpet bag and left, to follow Louis Armstrong?
I didn’t ask.
She didn’t look at me while she spoke. She addressed the window, and her mother’s feet. But she glanced at me now and again, and saw the oul’ lad sitting straight, trying to hide the fact that his back was at him. Trying to hide the fact that he was bored, but happy to be bored.
I went out to the corridor while she’d gone to the jacks, and I saw the G-men’s bus outside, parked across the entrance, blocking it, the engine humming, grey exhaust sliding out the back.
She came back and carried on. She was a woman whose life began in her twenty-fifth year. She didn’t just deny or bypass her childhood and wandering, or the weight that had come with her name. She’d erased them. They just weren’t there. She’d managed what I’d failed to do when I’d gone to America; she’d invented herself, new-born and ready, with no history or anything dragging her back. It must have taken her years, and she must have been mad.
Her fabrics and her doggies.
I heard the bus being revved outside. I heard the rain beginning to pat the window.
She was American. She spoke about her dogs and she knew she was fascinating. Her world was the world.
—What’s your husband called?
—Benjamin, she said.
—Is he with you?
—No.
—Looking after the dogs?
—Yes, he is. He adores those dogs.
—Grand.
She rarely left Oak Park, she said. She very rarely had to. Her day was the block and a half from office to home. The dogs went with her, and to the houses and apartments she sold, all of which were in or near Oak Park. The clients loved to see the dogs in the empty homes; they heard their future happiness in the clatter of those paws on the polished floorboards. The doggies sold the houses.
I grinned - I felt the pull of old, forgotten muscles. She sounded like me, the young man back then, with the shoulders and the sandwich-boards. Selling the new world, with my back to the old one.
She worked, she came home.
—Do you have any children? I asked.
—No, she said.—I do not.
She said nothing for a while. And I said nothing. I wasn’t a grandfather. The rain was thumping now.
—When I saw you on TV, she said,—it was the stance, I guess. You stood that way at the boxcar doors. Watching the world. As if you owned it.
I said nothing - I kept the mouth shut tight.
—It’s funny, she said.—I had to see it on the TV before I’d accept it. But there you were. And the word popped open in my head. Father.
—I didn’t die.
—Yes, you did, she said.
She shook her head, like she was trying to disperse those words, break them up before they formed.
—No, she said.—I know.
She spoke so softly, I saw the words more than heard them.
—At least, I knew. You were alive.
She still didn’t look at me.
—But you didn’t come back.
I wanted to explain, justify. But I knew it would be wrong. Fifty years too late, I was thinking like a father.
—I looked out the window every morning, she said.—To see you there, waiting for me to open the door. I kept looking behind me - for years. You have no idea how often I was asked if I was looking for someone. How many people - men! - gave up on me because they couldn’t live with the man who was over my shoulder. And my mother—
She didn’t look at her now, either. She was staring at the window, past it, through the rain.
—I don’t blame her now, she said.—She had to move on. But I would not budge. You were alive and it was simply a matter of time before you came home.
There was nothing for a while. I patted her mother’s arm. I looked at Saoirse - that was her name - and she was looking at me.
—She found you, she said.
—I suppose she did.
—That’s good.
—Yeah, I said.
It was feeble - she deserved a lot more.
—We—, I started.
I looked at Miss O’Shea, and held her hand. It did nothing in mine.
—We wasted a terrible lot of time, I said.—We both knew. But we were stupid. I was, anyway. She had more to lose, I suppose. Her name and her - I don’t know - her reputation. She should have fuckin’ killed me, to be honest. But, anyway, she was the one who knocked on my door.
—But you did look for her, I said.
—No, I said.—No. I didn’t. Not by then. I went to Roscommon when I came back first, half hoping you’d be there. The three of yis.
She nodded.
—There wasn’t a trace, I said.—The old house was gone. But that’s no excuse. Finding her here, I mean in Ratheen - that was a fluke.
—Did it ever occur to you to go further down the road that time in Roscommon and knock on Uncle Ivan’s door?
—Yes.
—But you didn’t.
—No.
She sighed.
—Well, she said,—I am glad you found her.
—But I wasted it.
—Well, that’s why I’m here, she said.—Too much time has been wasted.
—Yeah, I said.—You’re right. This isn’t your home, though. Don’t wreck your life for me.
—Don’t worry about that, she said.
It struck me: she was a nice woman. It made me laugh. She didn’t join in, but she smiled.
—You’re trying to send me back, she said.—Just as we get to know each other again.
—Grand, I said.—Fair enough. That’s good.
She stood first, and I got up and followed her into Ivan’s room. He was on his way out too, and he was going faster than the woman next door. He looked ripe, the colour of a hoor’s curtains. He was rotting already, before he’d finally stopped. The smell was something no old man should have had to endure. But I said nothing. Saoirse loved him. He’d found her alone, a baby, with her dead grandmother, after I’d run from Ireland and her mother was in jail. He’d given her a home while I was in the desert pretending I had a story that needed telling, letting myself be conned, and happy to be conned.
I stayed standing beside her as long as she wanted to stay and hoped to fuck she wouldn’t sit down and expect me to join her. I wanted home and the bed, a night’s sleep.
She stayed a minute - maybe she prayed. Then she walked out. I followed her. She stopped at the front door as she rooted in the big shoulder bag she always had with her. It was some sort of hairy, unorganised wool that looked as if it stopped being a bag when you weren’t looking.
—Did you make it yourself? I asked.
—My bag?
—On the loom.
—Yes, she said.—I did.
—It’s nice.
—Thank you, she said.
She took out some keys.
—Can I offer you a ride anywhere?
She must have hired a car, or she was driving Ivan’s - I didn’t know.
—No, I said.—No, thanks; you’re grand.
She looked disappointed. But she smiled. I could tell now: she was used to smiling.
—Tomorrow? she said.
—Sound, I said.—I’ll be here.
Why didn’t I take the lift? I was walking away again. The bus was waiting for me.
11
The strike was lost but they kept me working. Not as relentlessly as during that period in the spring and summer of ’81, when the hunger strikers had become the candidates, before the deaths became harder to count. Much more of that would have killed me - the pinball charge around the country, the soggy bags of chicken and chips at two and three in the morning - no one outside of Dublin knew how to cook a fuckin’ chip. The race against death, trying not to acknowledge the pointlessness, the obscenity of it, especially when the election was over and the victories were followed by nothing. But the men kept dying - Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee, Michael Devine - and I stood on platforms and looked out at smaller crowds. There were the riots every night in Belfast and the other northern towns - more dead boys - and a big riot in Dublin on a hot Saturday afternoon in August. A disaster. The plan was to burn the British Embassy for the second time in ten years. (The last time had been in 1972, a few days after Derry’s Bloody Sunday.) But it ended in a rout, when the rozzers took off their badges and got stuck in with the boots and batons. I was escorted - I was carried - out of Ballsbridge by three big men in bomber jackets who managed to stay standing as their heads and arms were smashed. I tried to tell them that we could go under the street, that the river below could get us away, like it had when my father had rescued myself and Victor from the batons of different rozzers, the fat grandas of the fuckers in the riot gear - that we just had to get over a wall down the lane there across the street, and behind a bush and down a hole; we’d be under Beggar’s Bush in no time. But they didn’t hear or they didn’t understand. Maybe I was only talking to myself. Because they took us the hard way, through the sweating fury of the state. I was covered in the lads’ blood and none of my own when they put me down and into the back of a black van, in Sandymount. I could hear the riot behind us, but we were out of it.