We’re getting near the end, no more than a few batches of straw are left to be tied down and the daylight is failing, when I see someone coming up the laneway. Ida Harte.
‘Hello, Ida,’ says Aidan.
She gives him a cursory glance. ‘I’m selling fresh salmon here, straight from the Blackwater,’ she says.
‘Go on, Mata Hari, take yourself away, there’s nobody here wants your wares,’ Sean says.
‘And who are you to speak for the man of this house?’ says Ida, eyeing me up with malevolent glee. ‘It’s Pius I’m here to see.’
I clamber down to her, grab her by the elbow and yank her across the yard. I throw open the door and fling her inside. I shut the door after us and look hatefully at her, standing by my kitchen table where my Maggie made my dinner. She opens her bag. A couple of fish flop out.
‘What do you think you’re doing, coming to my house?’
‘I always come here for poteen.’
I get a couple of large bottles from the dresser. ‘Here’s your fucken poteen,’ I snarl, stepping up close, right in her face, and I stare into her gaping black eyes. They’re mesmerising. I lurch forward. It’s not my fault, it’s beyond my control. I’m not kissing her, I’m trying to swallow her whole. Her mouth grinds remorselessly against my face. Hot breath shoots down her nostrils against me. Her sweaty palms molest my neck and face and hair. Her tongue licks and caresses the inside of my mouth. I’ve known Monto girls to indignantly refuse to do this, saying if I want that sort of thing I can go to France. She moves her hands down from my head to my shoulders to my chest to my waist. In a single, shocking motion she grabs my left hand and plunges it down the front of her skirt. She mauls in closer and I grope the hair and the moistness.
I pull my hand away as if from fire. Ida stands before me, panting. Her cheeks are red, her nostrils flaring, her breasts are almost hanging out of her half-buttoned blouse. The crockery Maggie washed lies dripping by the sink. I watch dumbly as she buttons her blouse and ties up her hair. She snatches up the bottles of poteen from the table and says as she leaves: ‘Remember, all you have to do is leave the lantern on,’ and I can’t help but feel she’s mocking me just a little bit.
I wait a few minutes before I go back outside, where I find Sean holding a lantern as Turlough finishes the last section of the roof, just as the last of the daylight is about to depart. Pius and Charlie are sitting on the cart smoking. ‘You’re all flushed,’ says Charlie, eyeing me shrewdly.
‘She’d turn you to stone with a look, that one,’ says Sean up on the roof, ‘but you’d ride her all the same.’
I’m studying Aidan closely but can see nothing in him to suggest he suspects anything. Thank God Maggie isn’t here. She would know. Women have a sixth sense about these things. I call up to Sean. ‘I’ll play in your match,’ I say.
Even for a Saturday afternoon, Sackville Street is buzzing. A wild-looking old drunk with wiry grey hair and bloodshot eyes presses a handbill into your hand.
SUPPORT THE BELFAST DOCK STRIKE!
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
BUILDING SYNDICALISM IN IRELAND AND BEYOND
KEYNOTE SPEAKER: ALEXANDER BLANE (ex MP)
Outside the Customs House, 3pm
Alexander Blane. You know the name. Now you look closer at the old fellow, you see he isn’t drunk at all, not at this moment anyway. You recognise him, though he looks very different from the photos you’ve seen of the respectable Parnellite who was Armagh’s MP once upon a time. He’s the first person from home you’ve met since you arrived in Dublin. He invites you to a political meeting, so you can talk more.
Alec has a thousand great stories about home. The fortress capital of a pagan empire. The only place in Ireland that Ptolemy put in his Atlas. The place Patrick chose as the new citadel of Christendom in Ireland. He knew your father. ‘Always a great man for contributing to the Party.’
And he tells you about class struggle. How it’s the only alternative to the oppression of the workers. What they call class warfare is actually working class self-defence. The warfare by the rich against the poor is ceaseless. The rich have a great advantage: their hatred and vengefulness towards the poor is bottomless. The wickedness of the rich is staggering, and the poor are staggered by it. The established order is not satisfied with the world and its riches. Their vanity requires a narrative that ennobles their base, selfish, heartless, gutless, gluttonous existence. They have armies of statesmen and journalists and artists and teachers and rhetoricians and yes, preachers, to provide it. Priests are part of the power structure, with which the working class has nothing in common. Their hands are soft, their stomachs round and their minds filled with the doctrines, not of Christ but of the established order. Remember what they did to Christ. If the preachers preached the message of Christ, they too would be crucified.
You’re sitting in his crumbling tenement room on Burgh Quay, as you have many times before, wondering how Alexander Blane, who has dined with Prime Ministers, has fallen so low. It’s simple. He stood against Cardinal Logue. Over Parnell. Now, like you, he is living in exile.
THREE
Stanislaus stood in the deserted street and looked up at the red bunting. When they’d first festooned the street, he’d supposed it would be for a few days, but it had been several weeks now. At least, he thought, the day of the confounded football match had finally come, so all this foolishness would be over soon. The Cardinal took a firm line that Gaelic games were awash with nefarious characters and dangerous, extremist politics, and Stanislaus believed he was right. Others disagreed, even openly. William Croke and John MacHale, God rest them. Archbishops, unimpeachable churchmen, red-clawed nationalists and perhaps the only churchmen in the country who could oppose the boss and get away with it. They had given the GAA the legitimacy it needed to sweep across the country. Boisterous crowds would return later in the afternoon with news of victory or defeat, but for now the parish was deserted except for a few women with children to mind. It was a big occasion for many, but since Stanislaus’s disapproval of Gaelic games was well known, people tended not to talk to him about it. It was a poor priest who knew nothing of his parishioners’ passions, so it was no harm that in Father Daly, Stanislaus had a Crokeite for a curate. Especially since Victor Lennon had shown a worrying ability to insinuate himself into it.
It was absurd that he could be challenged by a spoiled rich boy like Victor Lennon on the question of the poor. Stanislaus hadn’t been born to wealth. He was born, he believed he remembered being told as a child, just as the great Pentecostal storm tore the roof off the shack he was born in. The Night of the Big Wind. The old folk always said the end would come at Pentecost, so Stanislaus entered the world to people who thought it was ending around them. Oídhche na Gaoithe Móire they called it in the old language, the language that spoke of an ignorant and hungry past, of people who wore a thin film of Christianity over hearts still essentially pagan. Whatever primitive name she had given him he had long forgotten, just as he had forgotten all but a few phrases and grammatical constructions of the old language. Stanislaus came later, after her. He felt no sorrow for the loss of that past. He felt no nostalgia for standing outside the locked gates of the grain stores. He did not miss hunger. Absurd that he could be challenged on the poor by Victor Lennon. Absurd also, that he should be challenged politically. Stanislaus thought back, as he sometimes did, to his time as a curate in Mayo. He still sometimes saw the captain, tall and doggedly proud of bearing but unable to mask a frightened, hunted look.
‘When I walk into a shop or an inn I can get no service. The postman will not come to my door. The servants have quit my house. No-one will conduct business with me. I salute people on the road but they look past me as though I am a ghost.’ Cut-glass accent, whiskers twitching. ‘Apparently there aren’t any laws against this sort of thing.’
‘My parishioners have asked me to enter into negotiations with you regarding their rents.’
The captain shifts in h
is chair. ‘So you’re one of those priests, are you? I know some other landlords have allowed themselves to be held hostage, but I will not. I have legal contracts. I have the law on my side.’
‘Last winter in this parish alone your men evicted fifty-nine families and burned their houses to the ground. They brutalised men, women and children. This winter we face possible famine in this area. During the Great Famine, your father refused to waive the rents. You know what happened in this area as a result.’
‘My father is not the issue!’ He pauses. Catches his breath. Exhales coolly. ‘Perhaps there is something, some project perhaps, that I could assist your church with? Something that needs funding. I’m always happy to help friends. If you would speak for me in a sermon …’
‘The plain fact, sir, is that Michael Davitt is in this county every other week, and he gives better sermons than I do. My parishioners want land reform and the Church wants it too. The people have a right to withdraw from you, sir, and withdrawn they have.’
‘I will not negotiate.’
‘Then your ostracisation will continue.’
Had Victor Lennon even heard of the land war, or did he understand that very great victory? He doubted it. As he walked up and down the pavement, far from the echoing of his footsteps, Stanislaus fancied he could make out the roar of a crowd. Impossible, of course, the game was being played five miles away, but the sound of a crowd cheering was in his ears, in his head. He wondered how the game was going. He knew little of the rules, but that didn’t stop images forming, images of merest savagery. Victor Lennon and ultra-nationalist nihilists in ominous red colours. Young men slogging through a muddy field. Hard not to think of the Somme. Men doing violence with baying mobs looking on. He thought of the coliseum. No doubt his imaginings were lurid, he had nothing to go on but his prejudices, but he went with them. God forbid Victor Lennon should give people further reason to fancy him a hero. His parishioners admired their patriots, but they loved their footballers.
As he walked back to the Parochial House he looked up at the bunting ruefully. One day he would wean the people off their savage pastimes and all the dangerous extremism that went with them; but he admitted to himself that it would not be this day.
Everyone’s telling me what a fantastic game I played. Pius puts his hand on my shoulder.
‘That second point you got, that was a horse of a score,’ he says, and I think there’s a tear in his eye. There might be one in mine too. I did have a mighty game. There are no Dick Fitzgeralds in Derrynoose, that’s for sure. Plenty of tough fellows but not a footballer among them. As the game wore on everyone around me flagged with fatigue but my fitness stood to me; by the end I was running rings around a bunch of fat farmers. Not bad for a blow-in, people keep saying as they slap me on the back. Half a dozen jokers at least say it. Madden to the backbone, I reply to them all, cut me and I bleed red. There must be three hundred cheering Madden folk gathered in the middle of the field to see the man from the county board present Sean Moriarty with the trophy. I’m hiding among them from Ida Harte, who spent the entire game screaming, absolutely screaming encouragement. It seemed like she ranted all the more loudly, madly, oh God, lustily, when I had the ball. She keeps trying to get close, like she’s trying to hug me or something, but I take a step back from her and shout to Sean to stop hogging the cup, it must be nearly my turn to raise it up.
I spot Maggie though the crowd. She’s slinking away. Soon the crowd will move for home in an armada of bicycles, but Maggie seems to want to get away before the rest. If I move quickly, we can travel the five miles home together, and I won’t have to share her with the rest of them. I sidle away from the crowd as quickly as I can, though it takes a few minutes to negotiate the handshakes and back-slapping and questions, and hop onto the ancient bicycle Charlie has leant me. Maggie’s fast on her feet, she has put a bit of distance behind her already by the time I see her up ahead. She turns as she hears me coming and smiles sardonically in the direction of my mud-spattered knees.
‘Have you not even a wet sponge, or a pair of trousers?’ she says as I pull up alongside her. Red jersey, white knickers, black stockings and studded boots. Wouldn’t have been my first choice of outfit, in fairness.
‘Is that how you greet a victorious gladiator?’
‘More like a Christian with the lions,’ she says, and I’m a bit stung, to be honest. I pat the crossbar and nod for her to sit down. ‘Are you sure you’ll be able to manage it?’ she says, but sits herself down. She wraps her right arm around my shoulder and our faces are inches apart.
‘I think you have an admirer in Ida Harte,’ she says. I almost slide off the road.
‘Was she there? I didn’t see her.’
‘She really does draw attention to herself.’
God knows I don’t want to talk about Ida bloody Harte. Enough of this.
‘Did you think any more about going to the picture house with me?’ Maggie doesn’t answer but her eyes flash like those of a child unwrapping a present on Christmas morning.
A long, steep hill rises ahead of us and I steel myself for the incline. I pump hard on the pedals, up, up, up, gritting my teeth so she won’t see how the hill makes my leg muscles burn, how it makes my lungs expand and contract like bellows in a furnace. Strong, sturdy, tireless as a shire, that’s what I want her to see. I’m not sure if my face will appear purple from the exertion or purest white, since I feel close to fainting. You’d think she would offer to walk up the hill. At least capitalists break your back for tangible reward; women expect you to expire in service to their vanity. I’m relieved to reach the brow of the hill, even more so to see the road stretch ahead in a long, gentle decline. I won’t have to touch the pedals for half a mile. We freewheel, and it’s gentle at first but we gather momentum and soon we’re hurtling. Maggie clings more tightly. We’re dangerously fast now. Maggie’s nose almost touches mine. She doesn’t shriek, she doesn’t cry out in alarm, she doesn’t look afraid. I take my eyes from the road and look at her. The road seems far away. She whispers something, but I can’t make her out as the wind rushes by. Our noses touch. She whispers again, unconvincingly: ‘Slow down.’
‘I have no brakes.’
Our lips almost touch. She clings tightly. I cherish the clinging. Our noses touch again. The long downward slope ends and a little knoll puts the brakes on our momentum. We’re back at a safe speed before we know it and I have to start pedalling again. Maggie loosens her grip and her nose and her lips are far away as ever. She’s looking over my shoulder. ‘The priest is coming. Let me off.’ A motorcar splutters toward us.
‘The Church pays well if the bishop can afford a motorcar,’ I say.
‘It’s Father Daly’s car. His family has money.’ She extricates herself from me and straightens up, as if she hopes it’ll look like she isn’t with me at all. The priest honks his klaxon. ‘There’s someone with him,’ Maggie says, steeliness in her tone now. She looks distressed. ‘Victor, listen to me. I love my job. The things you say, they matter. Please don’t make trouble for me.’
The automobile announces its approach with an ever louder, more dissonant din, and it’s soon upon us. Charlie is sitting beside Father Daly in the pillion seat, looking ashen. ‘When are we going to the pictures together? Monday?’ I demand of Maggie just as the car comes to a stop in front of us. She shakes her head. ‘Tuesday then?’
‘Hello there, you two, you’re making great time,’ says Father Daly. ‘You played very well today, Victor, congratulations.’
‘I’m surprised to see a man of the cloth at a Gaelic match.’
‘There are a lot of different opinions within the Church. Ah, Victor, you’re a desperate man for the controversy.’
‘Maggie, come on and get in the car,’ says Charlie abruptly.
‘There’s a lift here if you want it,’ the priest says to Maggie more emolliently. ‘I’m sorry we can’t offer you a lift as well, Victor, but there really isn’t anywhere to put the bicycle.�
��
‘Thank you very much,’ says Maggie.
The priest gets out and moves his seat so she can climb into the back. I look past him to her, imprisoned in the back seat. I’m sure my misery is palpable, but I don’t care. ‘I’ll see you back in Madden,’ I say, my eyes on Maggie, and she nods as the car starts to pull off. There’s something in the way she nods that fills me with hope, fervent hope. I mouth the word ‘When?’ to her, and pedal hard after the car as it starts off down the road. The shape my hope takes is, I suppose, something like a prayer. I see Maggie’s silhouette in the oval window in the back of the canopy, and, just before the car moves too far ahead, Maggie’s finger traces three letters in the condensation on the window:
WED
The whole team and a good few others – but all men – are in Turlough and Sean’s house passing around our newly won trophy, drinking as deeply as we dare of the poteen it’s filled with. Pius donated plenty of booze and he’s sitting quietly in the corner drinking his portion. It’s getting late and there won’t be a hand’s-turn done tomorrow, but everyone’s happy. Winning a football match hardly seems significant enough to have men shedding tears, but there have been a few tears this evening. You’d think they were the Petersburg proletariat, finally free. Jerry McGrath starts into singing a rebel. I don’t know the song but everyone else seems to. They jibe me for my ignorance. ‘If all the patriots of Ireland are like yourself then our poor country stands in an hour of great need indeed,’ Jerry says. He’s flaming. It’ll be afternoon deliveries tomorrow. In order to prove my credentials I give them a couple of verses of ‘Skibbereen’. I learned it in Fron Goch from some of the West Cork lads. They were always scrupulous about that, I tell Pius. They weren’t from Cork, they were from West Cork.
After the Lockout Page 11