by Lia Mills
People sometimes asked what it was like, to be in a show. It was impossible to tell. Confusion was the main thing. Confusion and noise. Hard to say what happened first, or next, or when; whether what he saw was real or phantom, smoke or demon. He couldn’t always be sure if it was thunder and lightning come to earth he was dealing with, or war. Only the screams were real – metal, men, beasts – everything jumbled. The earth turned inside out, clumps of it thrown around in a hot sour wind, and he just trying to make a way through it. When it was over, first thing he’d do was breathe. He’d take in one single breath. And, if he got away with that, he’d risk another. Then, when he was sure he was alive, he’d find out who else had come through. When the rolls were finished, he’d take himself off somewhere quiet, first chance he got. He’d go over it all in his mind, try to sort it into something like sense. He’d say goodbye to the lost, and let them go.
Another thing people asked was if the two armies had really played a game of football, that first Christmas. Hubie was on leave, but he’d heard the story. He could well believe it. In some places the lines were so close that at night they could hear each other singing. Sometimes, if they knew the songs, they joined in. Or set their own words to the tune, once they had it. Nights like that, you’d forget to be wary.
I told myself to breathe. I knew what was coming.
They knew there was a big push coming. There’d been heavy shelling for days, and rumours of gas. They’d written their letters, checked their kit, reviewed their orders. A corporal came round with the chronometer. Everything was set for the morning. At midnight Liam went around talking to the men and then went towards the latrine. Hubie was at the fire-step. The moon was just off full, the balloons were silver. Flares went up, trailing green and yellow lights. He heard the shots that got Liam. Jonesy saw it happen. He said Liam stood proud of the whole sorry mess, he just stood there. And they got him, twice. Two shots.
Hubie and Jonesy ran to him. He was still alive, asked had he a ticket home. Hubie said not to get ahead of himself. He held Liam’s hand ’til the stretcher boys came, and that was the last he saw of him, when they carried him away.
We all stared at his gloved hand.
‘Did you keep track of what happened to him?’ Isabel asked.
He flinched. ‘Later that morning, thousands were wiped out by gas. So many that we became the Front. Everything that had stood between us and Fritz was gone. Wiped out. And they came at us. I lost track of everything. So many died.’
He stared past me, fixing on the mirror over my head. ‘There was no let-up. We were so far outnumbered – they’d a field gun for every rifle of ours. They flattened us.’
When the gas came, they were blazing away, the guns roasting hot. Then yellow smoke billowed up around them. Someone, one of the Canadians who’d materialized by some miracle to fight beside them, roared at everyone to piss on whatever cloth came to hand – handkerchiefs or caps – to cover their mouths and noses and breathe through the saturated cloth. It worked, for some. And the gas rolled on, over their trench. Hubie was lucky. Some instinct caught him by the scruff of the neck and dragged him up out of the trench into cleaner air, sucking on urine, and the gas rolled on and left him behind. Hubie and a handful of others. Jonesy wasn’t so lucky. They listened to him froth and hiss and choke. He drowned, right there beside them on dry land, and there wasn’t a damned thing they could do about it. It took twenty minutes. Jonesy tried to speak but retched instead, spilling clots of matter on his chin. Coughing up his own lung. He clawed at his breast pocket and Hubie remembered he’d a locket in there, his wife’s picture on one side, three gap-toothed boys grinning on the other. He took it out and wrapped the chain around Jonesy’s fingers. His hands stopped flailing then. He clutched that oval of silver ’til he was dead.
When the gas dispersed they could see the wounded, lying out in the open. The lucky ones were dead. Some wriggled around, calling for help. One, both legs gone, was trying to get back to the line on stumps. Hubie took the locket out of Jonesy’s cold grasp and went to help the legless man. Later he sent it back to Jonesy’s wife with a letter telling her it had been a comfort to him, when he died. Sparing her the real details. The twenty frantic minutes and the sounds.
There was no respite. They were straight into another show, and then another. They were gassed again a month later, and Colonel Loveband died and that was effectively the end of the Second Dublins. A proud battalion was diluted when the dregs of one unit were combined with the survivors of another, and then new drafts added, Kitchener’s Mob, half trained. Months of stalemate and no ground gained in a barren landscape like a nightmare with no ending. The war would drag on ’til there was no one left to fire the rusted empty guns on the last survivor, who would have long forgotten what silence was, what it sounded like.
The sky outside darkened. I got up to help Dote pass around more tea. I was stiff from sitting on the floor so long, not moving. Isabel leaned forward, her eyes fixed on Hubie, her arms folded around her knees. She shook her head at the cup and saucer I offered, kept looking at him. A light rain drummed against the window.
A deep rumbling roar from outside was followed by another that cracked the world open. My cup rattled on its saucer. Someone moaned in the hall. I looked out, and there was Nan, sitting on the bottom stair, in the gloom, with her shawl up over her head and a weird sound coming from her throat. ‘Nan! What are you doing there?’
Her pallor was remarkable. ‘The childer are gone asleep.’
‘Don’t be out there on your own.’ I hesitated. This was not my house. But Dote was at my elbow, saying, ‘For heaven’s sake, come in and join us, Nan.’
Nan looked up the stairs. ‘That last one might have woken them.’
‘I’ll go and see.’ I ran up to the bedroom Dote had assigned to me and the girls. There they were, top to tail under the eiderdown, their hair strewn around them, fast asleep.
When I came back down, Nan was sitting, stiff and straight, on a hard-backed chair that she offered to me.
‘No, stay there – I was on the floor before.’
Dote patted a cushion on the coal box, beside her chair. On her other side, May had taken her glasses off to polish them with her cuff. Her face had a blind cast to it without them. Beads of perspiration were visible on her forehead. The sound of distant shooting was more insistent. ‘Be a pet and close the curtains, Katie?’
I did as she asked and went to sit on the coal box, sideways on to the window. The drawn curtains gave the light an orange tinge.
Nan had a queer look on her face. She hunched over her knees, with her big feet planted on the floor. ‘Do youse mind, it’ll be Bealtaine five days from now?’
‘The start of summer,’ said Dote.
Mouth-of-fire. The orangey light in the room played havoc with my mind. It touched Hubie’s face with amber. One of his ankles lay across the other. I found myself wondering what his legs might look like – would they be amber too? I looked down at my hands, spread my fingers. There were traces of dirt under my nails; they could do with a scrubbing.
‘One of the four corners of the year,’ May said.
‘What do you mean?’ Isabel asked.
‘The hinges of the world swing open. All manner of strange things creep through.’ May pulled her cardigan tight around her narrow shoulders and shivered. ‘When souls cross over, either way.’
‘It’d give you the collywobbles,’ Nan said, knotting her hands.
‘The entire flaming door was ajar, in Flanders,’ Hubie said. ‘Banging on its hinges, all year long. At night we’d see the Red Cross lanterns, as they gathered up their wounded. One morning we watched them carry out a stretcher, draped in a cloth. We held our fire and watched them busy themselves with men we thought were hurt.’ A bitter laugh. ‘All that time, they were setting up a gun. We lost three men to it that morning.’
‘No!’ Isabel said.
‘You’ve no notion.’ He glared, as though we were to blame. �
�You think old rules still apply. I’ve heard it said out there’ – he swung his cup towards the window, then to his mouth, swallowed – ‘ “No war’s ever been fought in the streets of a European city.” ’ He put on a false accent to say it. His face was flushed. ‘Those men out there think they’re safe, surrounded by people like you, and buildings. I’ve seen whole villages wiped off the face of the earth, pulverized. Churches and farms destroyed. Why should you be immune, here?’
‘People think if they say it often enough, it will be true,’ Dote said, careful.
He tugged the black leather glove from his damaged hand and slotted a cigarette between the clawed, livid finger that remained and his thumb. With his other hand he took out a lighter and flipped the wheel, lit the cigarette. He stared at me all the while, as though daring me to look away. He sucked in a deep breath, stabbed the glowing cigarette-tip in my direction. ‘This’ll give you an idea … There was a private, not a young man, lost his head one morning. He keened like a woman, for no reason. Slack mouth, drooling, tears streaming down his face. I’d never seen it before.’
He was talking fast, running through the words. ‘I tried to shut his mouth for him with a slap to the cheek. Told the colour sergeant to put him in the funk hole, keep an eye on him. He crammed himself into it, face first. Like a child trying to hide in its mother’s skirts. As if he wanted the earth to open up and take him.’ He glared at us, defiant. Daring us to judge him.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘Not long after, a shell fell in on top of him and killed him.’ He stood up, paced the length of the room, then back again. Across and back. Across and back. Across and – ‘What no one ever says is that one man’s decision sets off a whole train of events that ends in the ruination of another. Someone fires the first shot. Someone decides where troops will go. Every little thing you do out there has consequences. One man’s whim can be the end of another; a step this way or that can save or kill you. That was one of my own men, and I’m the one who did for him.’
Dote cleared her throat. ‘He was a liability. You weren’t to blame.’
‘Poor soul.’ Isabel was pale. ‘It’s barbaric.’
Hubie’s contempt appeared to settle on her. I was glad it wasn’t me. ‘Don’t ask, if you don’t want to know. It’s easy to have an opinion from a distance. I’d have liked that luxury, myself.’ He leaned down and stubbed out his cigarette, chasing the sparks across the bowl of the ashtray and extinguishing each one. The china rattled. He went back to his pacing, hand clasping wrist at his back, shoulders square and lonely.
‘You’d want to have seen the rats.’ There was a gleam in his eye – he was enjoying making us uncomfortable. He said he told his men not to kill them because they’d stink up the trench and squelch underfoot, in a way that’d sicken the strongest of stomachs. After he was injured, while he was lying on the ground outside the medical post, waiting for his turn, a rat ran past his head, near enough that he felt its feet disturb his hair. The rat had a human finger in its mouth. ‘I wondered was it mine.’
There was a queer silence. Dote and Nan began to clear the dishes. I looked out of the window. ‘There’s a car stopping.’
Isabel stood and looked out. ‘It’s Stephenson. You should come back with me. All of you.’
‘There are too many of us,’ I said.
‘You’d be welcome. There’s a command post in the park, soldiers everywhere. And sentries. It might be the safest place in Dublin.’
‘There wouldn’t be room for us all in the car.’
‘Stephenson could come back. If the troops are on their way –’
‘What do you think, May?’ Dote asked.
‘Go if you want. I’m staying.’
‘I’ll stay with you.’ Hubie walked over to the window.
‘I will too,’ Dote said.
‘Katie?’
Before I could answer, Hubie spoke. ‘There’s no particular vantage point here, for either side. The end houses might be at risk, but I’d say we’re safe enough.’
‘But the children –’
‘Should go,’ he said. ‘It’s liable to get – loud.’
‘Or, as you said, the gunmen might surrender. In which case, all’s well.’ I’d a whole string of reasons for not wanting to go to Isabel’s. Percy Place was closer to Eva, for one. Besides, I had to admit that a stubborn flame of curiosity had lit on the floor of my mind, about what might happen here – I was no better than Eugene and those others who sat at the hotel window to watch, when it came to it. And I wanted to know what else Hubie Wilson might have to say, given time. I had questions I’d like to ask him, when no one else was around to hear.
I told them I wanted to be near Eva. May said of course I should stay in Percy Place. Nan and the girls could go to Herbert Park with Isabel, they wouldn’t need me. Isabel looked put out, but she didn’t complain. She only said again that everyone was welcome, any time.
The front door stood open. The pavement smelled of fresh rain. Trees glistened over the replenished water of the canal, which threw up circles and darts of diminishing rain. Isabel’s father’s car waited at the kerb. Stephenson stood beside it, talking to Hubie about the car. A De Dion-Bouton, but made in Belfast by an outfit called Chambers, had Hubie heard of them? There was a waiting list. The Judge had had to wait two years for it, but it was worth every minute of the wait, it was a beauty.
Hubie was more interested in what De Dion were making now. Aircraft engines and gun parts. They’d devised an anti-aircraft gun, already in use by the French Army, did Stephenson know that? ‘I’ve seen them,’ Hubie said. ‘A field gun mounted on a lorry-bed, firing into the sky. Loud as a train.’
On the canal, a pair of swans glided past in the direction of the humped bridge, their black faces turned towards each other, unperturbed by the fine rain.
‘Are you not worried that the gunmen will commandeer the car?’ I asked Stephenson.
‘No, miss.’ He lifted one edge of his jacket with a finger, showing the grip of a revolver, snug in a leather holster at his side.
There was a commotion on the stairs behind us. Alanna came down first, neat and serene. Behind her, Nan dragged Tishy by the hand, stair by stair. Tishy’s other hand flailed for the banister, trying to hold on. ‘I won’t go without him!’
Dote moved behind Tishy, pressing her forward. ‘We don’t have time for this, Tishy.’
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked her.
‘The monkey’s run away.’
‘But don’t you worry, pet.’ May spoke from the return, above them. ‘We’ll find him. We’ll look after him.’
‘He’ll be safer here than if he’s turned loose in a strange place.’ Hubie’s air of authority seemed to calm Tishy.
‘Let me stay too, then,’ she pleaded. ‘I’ll be good.’
Isabel gathered the child’s fine hair in her hands and lifted it away from her neck. ‘It’s not that, my lamb. There might be trouble. We want you to be safe.’
‘Please.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Come too!’ She grabbed hold of my skirt.
Feeling like a brute, I pulled it free. ‘No, Tishy. I’ll see you tomorrow. It’s for the best.’
Isabel turned for the car. Tishy went with her, feet dragging, shoulders slumped in defeat. Isabel’s arm went around her and pulled her in close to her side. In that moment I saw that she’d meet someone, marry, have children. But the children she would have would not be Liam’s. It was as though she’d tugged a plug loose in my chest. Everything vital inside me drained away, as if Liam died all over again. This time I knew he wasn’t coming back.
The car pulled away. I crossed the road to look at the water, and the swans. When I turned around, Hubie was still standing at the top of the steps. He was watching them too. ‘D’you know, they mate for life,’ he said. Smoke curled from the cigarette he held between his thumb and the shortened little finger of his damaged hand. He’d dispensed with the glove altogether.
‘You were hard on Isabel,’ I said.
‘No. You people are bog-soft.’ He dropped his cigarette and ground it with his heel. ‘I suppose you agree with her?’
‘I think she’s brave. Every time she speaks like that, she goes out under fire in her own way.’
He kicked the butt into the street and started down the steps. I felt a stab of panic, as though I’d never see him again. ‘Where are you going?’
‘The driver said a meeting was called, to organize ways to stop the looting.’ He looked at the face of a watch strapped to his wrist with a leather strap. ‘I’m late, but I might catch the end of it. Do you know where Westmoreland Chambers is?’
‘I’ll show you.’ I ran in to tell Dote I was going, grabbed Liam’s coat off the stand and ran out again, afraid he’d have gone without me. I hurried down the steps after him, shrugging myself into the coat.
He was waiting. He didn’t move out of my way, but stood there, blocking the path, smelling of smoke and something else I couldn’t put my finger on. We were so close, I felt a blast of heat and stepped back, uneasy. It was as though the street and the city beyond it had shrunk to the size of a dressing room, and I couldn’t find the door. ‘What is it?’
‘That coat – do you need one? – it’s too big for you. I’m sure Aunt May would lend you one, if you asked her.’
I shook my hair free from the collar and stalked past him, pulling the coat tight and belting it, pulling on my hat. ‘It’s Liam’s.’
‘It makes you look like a rebel.’
‘Good.’
For the second day running, a crowd had gathered on O’Connell Bridge to watch the dramatics on Sackville Street. A gigantic bonfire raged beyond Abbey Street. Even from the back of the crowd I could see items being flung out of the upper windows of a shop. Ambulances thundered up and down the quays, bells jangling. I didn’t know if it was me or the world that shook.