The Heart Broke In

by James Meek

  Bec thought about this. If they did, her mother might find out what had been going on. She would see her husband and daughter with black and green warpaint smeared on their faces, and be angry with him for leaving her by herself on his last night, and for conspiring with Bec, and angry with her for hunting herons when she was supposed to be sleeping, and for lying. Whereas if her father put the heron away somewhere safe, or just let it go, they could slip back into the house, wash themselves in secret, and never be discovered. And yet she was tremendously curious to find out what Ritchie would do if he found a tall grey bird with a long sharp bill unexpectedly flapping around in his room.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and her father nodded, clamped the net with the struggling bird between his teeth, and began to climb the wall of the house, fitting the toes of his boots and his fingertips between the cracks in the stones. A few minutes later she heard Ritchie scream.

  While the household was distracted she cleaned her face and went to bed and by the time her father came to kiss her goodnight, she was asleep. She didn’t see him alive again. Ritchie told her that very early in the morning, when their father left, he’d taken the heron with him to release in another part of the country.

  A month later, at her father’s funeral, Bec met the blokes. Some of them were handsome, watchful and quiet, like her father, like the heron. They preferred the edges of crowds. Others she didn’t like, crop-haired men bursting with secretiveness, swollen-chested in smart uniforms they obviously hardly ever wore. She understood that these were not the people who were supposed to have killed her father. Angry Irish men were supposed to have. The blokes and the Irish men were on opposite sides. They were enemies. They fought each other over there in that place, in Northern Ireland. That was the fighting place they shared, and the blokes had come out of that place here to Dorset to claim her father for themselves. They thought his death belonged to them, so it belonged to that fighting place across the sea, and Bec didn’t like that. The blokes surrounded her family. Her mother looked beautiful in black, and the blokes were afraid of beauty; it was too strong for them, it made them shy. But Ritchie, who’d cut his hair and become kinder and more gentle since their father’s death, was fascinated by the closeness of the Marines. He seemed to find it easy to talk to them, and they to him, and Bec saw that her brother could easily become a bloke. When the earth first hit the top of the coffin, she felt its hollowness, that it was a wooden box with her father in it, in a way she hadn’t when the Marines had carried it on their shoulders. For a moment the hope rose up in her that sometimes death might not be the last thing that happened, not to everyone. That some people might live for a bit, then die, then live some more. Why not? But she already knew that this couldn’t be.

  By the time she was at university she knew much more about the sort of things her father and the blokes did. In the library her mind would bite most cleanly into her studies when she could bring her dreams to bear on what she read, and her memories would bind to the nubs of learning on the page. When she first studied the life cycle of the parasite that causes malaria, she thought how brave the parasites were, dropped from a mosquito into the vast, hostile, unknown territory of the human body, hiding out in the liver for days, disguising themselves to pass for human and bluffing their way past the phages standing guard on their way to the heart. How dangerous and difficult the parasites’ journey to the heart was, through the heart and into the lungs, paddling upstream, against the flow of blood. If they made it to their target, they would begin their work, and this great, powerful, infinitely complex regime they had infiltrated, this human body, would sicken and perhaps be destroyed. The parasites killed the world around them; but their aim was not to kill. Their aim was only to live, and to multiply.

  42

  A demonic shape tore into the lamplight when Ritchie’s fingertips were stinging from a Joey Santiago riff and he half-fell, half-jumped from his chair. He screamed, clenching his bowels, shielding himself with his guitar, but the beast was everywhere at once, on the ceiling, on the floor, on every wall, with carnivore eyes and a beak like a dagger. Ritchie couldn’t tell where wing ended and shadow began. Just as he began to understand that a giant bird had entered his sanctuary he screamed again and pushed his back against the door, pressing the guitar sound box to his loins. Behind the bird, by the open window, was its devil master, in the shape of a man, with skin mottled black and pink, staring at him.

  Ritchie stopped screaming, squeezed two tears out of his eyes and sank to his haunches. Fear became anger and he raised his guitar by the neck and with a marvellous splintering sound smashed it on the floor: his first.

  ‘Rock and roll,’ said Ritchie’s father. ‘You make too much noise. Now your mother’s going to come. I wanted to talk to you.’ He looked over to where the terrified heron was hiding in the corner, went to it and broke its neck. He tucked the dead bird under his arm and stepped onto the window ledge.

  ‘Tell Bec I let the heron go,’ he said. ‘Look after the women. We’ll talk when I get back.’ And he dropped out of sight.

  On the plane to Dublin twenty-five years later the death of the heron came to Ritchie, as he had enriched it over the years, half-knowingly. There were two things he knew that Bec didn’t know whose secrecy pleased him. One was that his school had cost twice as much as Bec’s. The other was that his father had killed the heron. Nothing he’d seen his father do and nothing he’d heard him say had impressed him like the calmness and lightness with which his father had wrung the bird’s neck at exactly the moment when its continued survival became an embarrassment. It seemed to Ritchie that you could read thousands of books and never get such a lesson in that kind of beautiful rightness, the manliness and dignity of a moment when generosity turns perfectly to ruthlessness. At that moment, the act justifies itself; but a moment too early and it is cruelty, a moment too late and it is weakness.

  In the arrivals hall of Dublin airport Ritchie dialled the number he’d been given and met a red-faced man who looked old for the gel in his short, spiked hair. Mike worked with Colum O’Donabháin at the community centre. He led Ritchie to a car with the first blush of rust on its wheel arches.

  ‘Not got your camera?’ Mike said as they got in. The car smelled of dogs.

  ‘I explained in my letters,’ said Ritchie. ‘I thought the first time it would be better to keep it one on one.’

  ‘When you see the documentaries, that’s the big moment, isn’t it? When they meet for the first time.’ Mike offered Ritchie a cigarette and lit up. ‘This is a hard day for you, Mr Shepherd.’ He opened the window and blew smoke out into the damp air. ‘Listen to me talking. What the fuck do I know about making films, now? I love the documentaries, though.’

  Ritchie had left it till a fortnight before he was due to meet O’Donabháin to consider the professional help he’d need to make his first film. By the time he realised that six years’ experience making studio-based entertainment TV for a national network was thin preparation for going out into the world and capturing a story, it was too late. He’d had time to lunch a couple of directors, thinking he might take one of them along, but hadn’t trusted them. They’d been too eager. They asked what there was in the way of Shepherd family videos. They’d wanted to make the film their own.

  ‘Are we going?’ he said. O’Donabháin’s friend had put the keys in the ignition but not switched on the engine. He sat back smoking. The windows were steaming up. Was he a terrorist too? thought Ritchie. Is he still?

  ‘I’ve known Colum O’Donabháin twenty years,’ said Mike. ‘I don’t know you. You’ve got to look after yourself, and I’ve got to watch out for him. So I have to ask. It’s not revenge you’re after, is it?’

  ‘No,’ said Ritchie. ‘I explained it in my letters.’

  ‘Not wanting to humiliate him, or put him on trial again?’

  ‘No.’

  Mike started the car and drove off. ‘North Dublin. It’s handy for the airport,’ he said and laughed. ‘The
probation fellows, they think he’s a success story.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Working in the community centre, looking after his mum, writing the old poems. They think he’s a success, the bloody fools.’

  ‘He’s not rehabilitated?’

  ‘Oh, he’s habilitated all right. He’s habilitated all to hell. Did you read any of the poems?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Ritchie. He’d taken a look, but they hadn’t made sense to him. There’d been nothing in there about killing people, as far as he could tell; plenty about mothers and the seashore.

  ‘Here,’ said Mike. He opened the glove compartment, took out a thin book and gave it to Ritchie, who recognised the manila cover, the woodprint of a gull and the title, Surrender. The book had a bus ticket sticking out of it. Ritchie opened it at the marked place and saw a poem called ‘The Clapper’.

  ‘Colum said to make sure you read that one before you met him,’ said Mike.

  The Clapper

  Heavy in my pocket, cold warmed by my hand

  It was with me at the fair

  I had it by me tea and dinnertime

  It had no place to be at night,

  While I was sleeping, there it lay somewhere

  Sleeping well, thanks.

  You couldn’t say it was a handsome thing.

  Sure though, it did belong to me.

  I thought no more of hiding it

  Than throwing it away.

  Twenty Rothmans, that was what

  The woman at the counter shouting

  ‘Mary, mother of God!

  Dear sweet Jesus

  Satan!

  The boy is carrying a clapper!’

  I ran out of McGinty’s News and Tobacco

  The sky was bronze.

  Bell-bronze, from Parnell Road to Ballybough.

  The sky began to ring.

  Since then I’ve known its whereabouts

  No sleep, no sleep, the clapper jings the sky.

  Ritchie closed the book and put it on the dashboard. They’d come off the motorway and were driving through a council estate.

  ‘What did you make of it?’ said Mike.

  ‘I didn’t understand it,’ said Ritchie.

  ‘That’s two of us, then,’ said Mike. ‘He’s proud of that book, mind you, so don’t tell him.’

  They parked outside a whitewashed two-storey council semi. Mike got out. Ritchie couldn’t move. His heart had begun to beat rapidly when the car stopped and he was struck with horror and surprise that he had deliberately put himself in this position. Only now that he was about to meet the man who killed his father did he realise his imagination had always seen it as if it was in a finished film, where O’Donabháin was alone and Ritchie had the camera, the film editor and the audience on his side. In those imagined meetings anything Ritchie didn’t like had been edited out.

  Until this moment his father’s death had seemed like something he, Ritchie, had inherited. Now he saw that it still belonged to his father, that his father shared ownership with O’Donabháin, and that Ritchie couldn’t simply turn up and take possession of it from his father’s executioner. He, Ritchie, was only the son and heir; O’Donabháin had been there.

  Mike leaned down and looked into the car. ‘This is the house,’ he said. ‘You’re expected.’

  Ritchie got out of the car, wondering if Mike could tell he was trembling. A group of teenagers opposite watched him and spoke and laughed among themselves.

  Ritchie followed Mike up the flagstones to the patterned glass door and rang the bell. They heard slippered feet creak up, a blurry shape materialised behind the swirls in the glass, and the door opened. O’Donabháin’s old mother, in a v-necked sweater over her dress, glanced at Mike and Ritchie and stood back against the side of the stairs, gesturing down the hall. She should be begging my forgiveness for giving birth to a monster, Ritchie thought, but he only saw loathing on her face.

  Colum O’Donabháin was standing in the low-ceilinged living room by the flames of a fake coal fire, in front of a blue velour armchair, his hands by his sides. There was a clean glass ashtray on the coffee table and a pile of half a dozen slim paperbacks combed through with coloured Post-it markers. The contrast between the dimness of the room and the brightness of grey daylight through the picture windows behind O’Donabháin made it difficult to see his face.

  Mike introduced them, growing more nervous as he looked from one man to another; they stood still and stared. He finished and waited.

  ‘Will you take a seat, Mr Shepherd,’ said O’Donabháin, waving to a sofa with a tasselled cover facing the fire. Ritchie sat down at the end of the sofa furthest from O’Donabháin. He still had his raincoat on. O’Donabháin lifted a copy of a newspaper Ritchie didn’t recognise, dense with print, from the armchair, dropped it on the floor and sat down.

  ‘Is it all right to leave you two together now?’ said Mike. Ritchie and O’Donabháin looked at him and O’Donabháin nodded. Mike went out, closing the door to the room, the draught excluder scratching over the synthetic fibres of the turquoise pile carpet. The latch clicked shut.

  Ritchie and O’Donabháin sat without speaking for what seemed a long time. Ritchie glanced at O’Donabháin. O’Donabháin was looking into the fire. Ritchie’s eyes had adjusted to the light. O’Donabháin was wearing an old taupe polo shirt, too tight for him, with a red collar.

  O’Donabháin lifted his head and looked straight at Ritchie. ‘How can I help you, Mr Shepherd?’ he said. His voice was firm. He thinks he is a priest, a judge, thought Ritchie. There wasn’t the humility Ritchie had expected O’Donabháin to feel, to pretend to feel. No sadness; no conscience. Ritchie stared at O’Donabháin’s fat hands and thick forearms, bare and fuzzed with curling white hairs, still strong, and remembered his father’s grin when he tantalised Ritchie with the beginning of a story, and Ritchie would shout ‘Tell me, tell me!’, and remembered the coroner’s report, and knew that these were the hands that helped strip his father naked, these were the muscles that pulled the rope tying him to the chair so tight that his father bled from it. That was the hand that made a fist and punched his father two dozen times in the head, broke his jaw, knocked out five of his teeth and fractured his skull when he was bound, naked and helpless. ‘Tell us! Tell us!’ It is the same hand. This is the same man, thought Ritchie. Prison, poetry, age, it didn’t mean anything. It is the same man. Those were the arms that tortured his father and those were the fingers that pressed a pistol to his temple and pulled the trigger and shot him dead.

  Ritchie felt hate for O’Donabháin fill him, inflate him. His hate for O’Donabháin, his desire to see him literally crushed, his bones snapped and his flesh mashed and the remnants fed to pigs, became so strong so suddenly that he could hardly breathe. He stood up and turned his back to the man he had come to Ireland to visit, clenching his fists.

  ‘Are you all right there, Mr Shepherd?’ said O’Donabháin.

  ‘I didn’t think I was going to hate you so much,’ said Ritchie slowly, not turning round.

  ‘I did wonder if you were coming here with a notion to kill me,’ said O’Donabháin. ‘And I thought, “Why not? Let the boy have a go if he wants.”’

  Ritchie turned round, taking deep breaths. Seeing O’Donabháin looking up at him made him feel better. Perhaps O’Donabháin’s eyes had widened a little.

  ‘Of course then you wouldn’t have had me to put in your film,’ said O’Donabháin.

  ‘Would you have resisted?’ said Ritchie.

  ‘If you’d tried to kill me? Oh certainly I would have resisted. I wouldn’t want you to be in the pokey on account of bumping me off.’

  Ritchie sat down, considered, began to speak, hesitated, and went on.

  ‘I expected you to be different,’ he said. ‘How so?’

  ‘You don’t seem punished.’

  ‘Beaten, you mean?’

  ‘I mean what I said. Punished.’

  ‘I’ve never known what that meant, to
be honest. If you mean humiliated, I was punished long before I was put away. The priests and the RUC and Long Kesh took care of that. If you mean “did society take its revenge?” I can’t live in the north any more. I was in prison from the age of twenty-seven to the age of fifty-two. But then there’s people whose idea of heaven’s a little room with a bed and a TV and a pot to piss in.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Ritchie.

  O’Donabháin looked into the fire and waited. ‘You mean remorse,’ he said.

  Ritchie didn’t say anything.

  O’Donabháin looked Ritchie in the eye. ‘I was fighting for a cause. Still believe in the cause. Not so much in the fighting. Your father and I, we were soldiers then.’

  ‘He was a soldier. You were a torturer.’

  ‘Your boys had them too. I was just an amateur.’ He bent his head a little and Ritchie glimpsed something in O’Donabháin that was neither the defiance he’d seen when he met him nor the guilty torment he’d expected. The flood of hatred that had choked him ebbed.

  ‘I was angry with your dad,’ said O’Donabháin, his voice stronger, as if he were angry still. ‘Having to play the fucking hero, just to protect a piece of scum who’d grassed up our cell in Derry and didn’t worry about setting up a couple of RUC for us to take out two weeks later. He was playing both sides against the middle, and we knew that, and so did Captain Shepherd. The ratbag whose name he didn’t give us wasn’t worth it. It was like I was trying to help your father, and he wouldn’t let me. You know sometimes you’re pulling on something and it won’t come loose, and you go mental, and you lay about you and damage everything? It was an operation. I was trying to get the truth out of someone, like pulling a tooth, and it wouldn’t come. I forgot there was a man there for a moment.’