Twisted Agendas

by Damian McNicholl

  “I don’t need your permission.”

  “A loyal son would be thankful his father’s got a viable business that can offer him a future. I had to start from scratch because your grandfather had nothing but thirty acres of heather to… ”

  “I’ve heard all this before, Dad.”

  He looked at Danny fiercely. “I asked you what Susan said about this.”

  “I’m going to London.”

  “If you do, it’ll not be for a couple of months. It’ll be for good because I won’t take you back. I’m not paying for you to go on some fool’s errand.”

  “I’ve got my own money.”

  “Get the hell out of my sight.” His father jerked brutally back on the recliner. “Why can’t you be like my other trainee? Aye, that lad knows who puts the butter on his bread.” His father’s lips puckered and relaxed as he stared at the television. “That new car’s going to him first thing on Monday morning if you haven’t come to your senses. As well as the raise I was going to give you.”

  Parrot Talk

  His stomach felt as if a swarm of migrating monarch butterflies were inside, their huge wings beating against its delicate lining. He needed to see Susan alone right now. They’d been sitting with her mother drinking tea in the living room for ten minutes, having first discussed the likely value of a crystal bowl that arrived from a relative of Susan’s who’d just learned of the engagement, and now were on the list of guests to be invited from his side of the family. The wedding was over three months away, yet Susan and her mother’s lives had begun to revolve around the planning. Danny rose and walked over to the window, planted his hands on the mahogany sill and watched a ragged vector of wild geese slicing across the thin blue sky.

  “Would your mother be upset if we didn’t invite Rita?” Susan’s mother asked, her pen poised above the list of names.

  His mother and Rita had been friends for years. She was the sister his mother never had. Even her second marriage to a wealthy English dentist and her subsequent removal to Guildford three years ago had not diminished their friendship.

  “Mum would mind.” He gripped the edge of the sill and pressed down so hard with his thumbs the nails flashed white round their tips. “Susan, do you fancy a ride somewhere?”

  “We have to cull this list,” Susan’s mother said, and she sighed just like his fiancée did when she felt put upon. “It’s already over two hundred guests. I feel it’s best to keep it to family, and by family I mean only down as far as second cousins.”

  “That’s reasonable,” Susan said. “Though we’ll have to keep my boss in, Mother. He’s sure to give me a decent present.”

  Three years Danny’s senior, Susan was an accountant, but having failed to secure work with a large accountancy firm in Belfast due to the mediocrity of her degree, had had to settle for a position with a solo-practitioner in a nearby town.

  “Let’s drive to the seaside, Susan.”

  She came over to the window and gazed out at the landscape of forested hills in the far distance. “It’s a bit breezy?”

  “You can be silly, Susan,” her mother said. “Danny wants you to himself. Off you go. I’ll rim the list and run it by you later.”

  Traffic was light and it took Danny just twenty-five minutes to reach the coast. The sun streamed from between gaps in the clouds, the powdery sand was cold to the touch. Pungent clusters of seaweed, pieces of smooth beach glass and fragments of shells littered the water’s edge. A man and young girl sat reading on a checkered rug. Further up the strand, behind a large chunk of silver driftwood, two youths and a collie played with a frisbee. Susan gripped her hand around his forearm and they walked in silence for a minute, Danny observing a man fishing from the seawall, she staring ahead.

  “I wanted to see you alone because there’s something I need to tell you,” he said.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “This whole marriage thing’s happening a bit fast for me.”

  She unlinked her arm but didn’t speak. Her eyes darted from his to a flock of wheeling gulls moving toward the crest of a nearby bluff where the crushed-stone blue coloured walls and white cross of a convent stood sentinel. A shifting breeze pushed the heavy air into Danny’s face as he swept his gaze from her to where the sea and sky merged slate on steel.

  “What are saying Danny?”

  “Remember I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I wasn’t all that happy about my job?”

  “Oh, not this again.” She laughed. “Everything’s going great for us.”

  “We’re very young. Don’t you think we’re rushing this a bit?”

  “We’re ready.”

  He was silent for a moment. “I’m leaving work for a while.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” She stopped walking and turned to him. “You’re being groomed to take over.”

  “My brother’s still in business school.”

  “I wasn’t going to mention this,” she said, and then paused till she caught his eye. “Your father and I chatted after we got engaged.”

  “You did?”

  “He’s got great plans for the business and they include you at the highest levels. That’s why you can’t leave.” She squeezed his arm. “You need to be around to make sure the big opportunities come your way. The early bird gets the worm every time. Your brother’s got three years of school yet.”

  Danny stiffened. “I’ve decided to go to London.”

  “A holiday? Now?” Her amber eyes reminded him of a lemur’s. “There’s so many things we need to do for the wedding and… ”

  “We have to postpone the wedding.”

  An explosive silence arose, that was punctuated by the reverberating barks of the excited collie as it tried to anticipate the instant when its owner would send the frisbee arcing through the air.

  “Postponement’s not possible,” she said finally. “Daddy’s already paid for the reception. The honeymoon package is non-refundable.”

  His head dipped and he glanced at the ground just like he always did when cornered in an argument. But then he remembered he could allow this no longer. Pushing away his anxiety he met her stony eyes. “I know this is a shock but these things can be changed.”

  “Have you listened to a word I said? Postponement is not… ”

  “There’s no reason we can’t change the date.”

  “I said, postponing our wedding is not… ”

  “Susan we can change the date.”

  “Why the hell are you talking like a parrot? You’re destroying my life.” She stopped walking and her mouth fell agape. “Oh my God, this isn’t about a postponement.”

  “Both of us rushed into this based on our fathers thinking it’s a great thing for everyone concerned. They’re talking about financial stuff. Not about love and living together for a lifetime. What’s the problem in stepping back to make sure this is right for us?”

  “Are you jilting me?”

  Her accusation had the effect of a slap on the cheek. Their fathers had contracted business together and eight months ago had arranged a first date between Danny and Susan. The affair was a black tie dinner dance organised by Susan’s mother to raise funds for a missionary priest in Lima. That night, Danny found Susan easy to talk to and surprisingly attentive, extinguishing the tiniest lulls in their conversation with questions about his family, his interests, his ambitions. While it was true his father pushed him hard to date her, alluding to her family’s two huge dairy farms and Susan’s status as the sole heiress, it was Danny who’d ultimately formed a relationship with her.

  Like a magpie, Danny had always been drawn to shiny things, and Susan’s hair was very shiny. In the fourth week of their courtship, during what he’d expected to be yet another pleasurable session spent necking and running his fingers through her exquisite mane, she encouraged him to go the whole way. That night, sexual attraction galloped to infatuation. He was still infatuated the following morning and would count the hours remaining until they met up again.
Danny agreed with his father without reservation when he remarked Susan would be an ‘ideal catch’ after cornering him for yet another pep talk before he left to go and see her. During more fantastic sex in Dublin two weeks later, Danny bellowed, ‘I love you’ amid the ecstasy, Susan admitted she felt the same way, and asked what he felt they should do about it.

  His father was ecstatic when Danny informed him he was engaged and immediately set aside a twenty-acre tract of his land for them to obtain a building permit for a house. Almost immediately, Danny began to express the opinion he’d been too hasty but Mr. Connolly countered any reservations with articulate logic as to the soundness of the match. A few months later, when Danny admitted to him that Susan and he were having sex, his father informed him there was now no option but marriage to save the girl’s integrity.

  Danny gripped Susan’s shoulders. “Look at me.”

  She refused.

  “Look at me.”

  Her eyes cut to an imaginary hole in the middle of his forehead.

  “You’re not being dumped. This is something I really need.”

  “How can I believe you?”

  He began stroking the back of her head and said nothing.

  She sighed, took out a tissue and dabbed her eyes. “I’ll resign from my job and come with you. We’ll get a flat.”

  He was conscious now of the strands of her hair rolling and shifting under his fingers like silk. “I have to go alone.”

  She emitted a strangled gasp, pulled away violently from him and began to weep. Two women turned back to stare after they passed by. Danny felt a familiar urge to apologise and placate her. He resisted and laid his hand on her shoulder.

  “Get away from me.” She shrugged him off, her cupped hands plummeting from her face to regard him venomously. “You’ve never wanted this. Take me home this minute.” She strode toward the car park.

  The journey home was silent.

  “Let me out here,” she said when they reached her parent’s driveway.

  “I’ll drop you at the door.”

  “Stop the fucking car.” After climbing out, she held the door and leaned inside. “You’ve humiliated me and my family. You’re not a man. I never want to see you again.”

  She slammed the door shut.

  At the famine house

  Since relocating to study in London, Philomena Patricia Harris insisted everyone call her Piper. She’d loved the name ever since she’d first heard it in the eighth grade when a family from Santa Barbara moved to Long Island and their daughter joined her class. It sounded so much better than Phila, the abbreviation her mother used whenever they chatted, which wasn’t often now. Her father still called her Philomena when he called. He kept forgetting.

  Acceptance of the name change hadn’t been automatic in England, either. Three lecturers and her dissertation supervisor regarded her very strangely at the beginning when she’d insisted they call her Piper. They already knew her legal name from the class register, but ultimately had shrugged it off, attributing her insistence to American vanity and its penchant for reinvention, foibles they were used to because of the large number of Americans pursuing a Masters degree at the London School of Economics.

  The sound of the car horn blaring pulled Piper out of her reverie. Her driver, a young man called Declan, honked the horn again at a black cow ambling lazily down the middle of the narrow road. The beast stopped and looked back at him, then lifted its tail and urinated before moving to the verge.

  “The Glenties sure is pretty,” she said in a renewed effort to make conversation as she stared out at the barren, heather-clad hills. “It’s how I’ve always imagined Ireland.”

  “Americans would like Ireland to stay rugged and poor like this,” said the driver. “Nice place for a visit, but not to live.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean it that way, I know the Irish economy’s doing real good. The Celtic Tiger, right?”

  “That tiger isn’t calling with every Irish family,” he said. “Some people are still dirt poor.”

  She could see another famine house tucked in a shallow hollow. Like the previous one, it was also roofless and constructed of the same fieldstone that formed the crumbling walls enclosing the tiny fields. The abandoned dwellings were smaller than storage sheds in the backyards of Long Island homes.

  “Wouldn’t care to live out here, though,” said Piper. “Life must have been very lonely.”

  “You’re right there.”

  Wiry, with a pockmarked face, Declan was about ten years older then she, thirty-four tops, and taciturn. This was the most he’d chatted throughout the two-hour ride. Piper regarded herself a people person, good at making folks feel comfortable, but all he’d uttered were monosyllabic answers to her questions. She wondered if he regarded her as a distraction. Or perhaps he was a chauvinist and resented having to take her to the meeting place.

  In any event she wasn’t going to say anything political and risk antagonising him. She’d networked too hard to commit that act of stupidity, working the telephones for nearly two months as well as enduring a scary interview, before which she’d first been blindfolded, taken to a secret location and then made to sit on an uncomfortable wooden chair looking at a wall with a cheap painting of the Blessed Virgin while two men grilled her. Eventually satisfied she was telling the truth about her objectives, they’d allowed her to turn around.

  “Sorry we had to make you face the wall,” the older, ruddy-cheeked man with a pure white scar above his right eye had said when they’d finished. “We can’t take chances, like.”

  “Since the split, the Provos have gone to seed but the Brits are still hounding us,” said the other volunteer, a slim man with teeth in bad need of flossing. “We had to make sure you’re not Special Branch or a Yank in cahoots wey them.”

  The men were members of the Real IRA and she knew the volunteer was referring to their acrimonious split with the Provisional IRA four years ago at their 1997 General Army convention, the split arising because disaffected volunteers did not want the Provos to lay down their weapons or consent to having their arms dumps inspected and destroyed as demanded by the Belfast Agreement. Though only four-years-old, the Real IRA had already committed significant bombing campaigns and were, Piper was certain, actively seeking recruits and setting up cells in England to ramp up their campaign.

  “No problem,” she said, and gave him an easy smile. “You gotta do what you gotta do.”

  Chills of excitement raced up her spine at the thought she’d passed their test and would soon meet a genuine female IRA volunteer. She thought of her late grandfather, of the times she’d sat on his lap as a young girl listening spellbound as he told stories about his attacks on the British Army and days spent on the run sleeping in barns or the attics of sympathisers’ homes. Though he’d never mentioned women fighters, as a young girl curled up in bed at night in her parents suburban home, Piper wished she’d been born in Ireland. She’d definitely have joined the IRA to fight the British if she had.

  The driver turned into a dirt lane flanked by long brambles that scraped against the sides of the car. Foot-long, silky grass swayed gently in the median. Through gaps in the hedge she glimpsed plump lambs suckling their mothers. After rounding two bends in the lane, the car drew up to another famine cottage. It had a mossy thatched roof, an emerald green Dutch front door and two tiny windows, one with an oil lamp standing on the window sill. A neat stack of peat stood by the side of the gable.

  As Piper clambered out, menacing barks from what sounded like a huge dog started up as the cottage door opened. She retreated quickly inside the car. The driver laughed.

  A lean, very attractive woman in jeans and oversized cardigan came outside, immediately followed by a tan and black Dachshund with a greying muzzle.

  “I’m Maura,” she said, and extended her hand to Piper as she approached. “Karl heard yous pull in before I did.”

  Her handshake was strong, almost masculine.

  “He had me worr
ied for a sec’.”

  “He’s all yap and no bite.” Maura patted the dog’s head. “Isn’t that right my darlin’?”

  Recognising the bond between dog and owner and seizing the moment to establish rapport, Piper stooped and ran her hand along the animal’s broad back. It was greasy to the touch. Despite his layer of fat, she felt the brute stiffen. “He’s a real cutie.”

  “Real fat, too.”

  “You need anything from the shops, Maura?” the driver asked.

  “A carton of milk.” She nodded toward the door when she caught Piper’s eye. “Come in.”

  The dwelling had no electricity or running water, reeked of turf smoke and was sparsely furnished. Informed after they sat at a small dining table that Maura hadn’t wanted to meet her, but had been ordered to do so by the Officer Commanding, Piper tried again to establish rapport by explaining her grandfather had been a gunrunner in the Old IRA before he and her grandmother emigrated to America. Omitting her father had refused in the late eighties to offer temporary shelter to a volunteer who’d been sent to America because the British were closing in on him for the murder of a soldier, she ramped up her Irish credentials by saying he marched every year in the annual Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in New York City and that he and her grandfather had helped raise thousands of dollars for Sinn Fein over the years.

  “What’s your opinion of the IRA?” Maura asked.

  “Ireland must be united and they’re an important part of the solution to reach that goal.”

  “Why the interest in volunteers like me?”

  “Women played an important part in the armed struggle, didn’t they?”

  “Played? Are you suggesting the struggle’s over?”

  “No.”

  “Happy to hear that. It’s not over just because George Mitchell, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern have decided we must disarm.”

  “Government demands during an insurrection are part of what I’m researching for my dissertation.”

  Maura’s eyes became slits. “Why’d you go to England to study if you’re so Irish?”