Peeling Oranges

by James Lawless

  ‘So you were in favour of physical force?’ I hear my voice saying, but is it me, or is it some part, some conditioned part of me giving utterance when really what I want to say is, Why don’t you touch me, Mam? Have I got some disease? Is that what it was all along, in all the years? Is that why? Please say that’s why. Please say there is some reason, some logical explanation.

  ‘In the beginning, before I realised the horror of it all,’ she says.

  ‘You mentioned Cumann na mBan.’

  ‘Hand me the matches.’

  I hand the matches to her.

  ‘Yes, when I was a child,’ she says, lighting another cigarette, ‘I was very impressionable, whether it came from the books or the speech makers, I golloped up everything. I really didn’t know what I was doing. Tomás and Gearóid were so sure in their own heads. I wanted to help in some way. We had witnessed what the Tans had done, coming in the middle of the night, pulling women out of their beds in their nightdresses, cutting their hair to shreds, setting fire to their homes. Muddy didn’t believe in violence of course, so there was a great excitement in the secrecy of what we were doing. And Gearóid, he was so dedicated, but so serious. We used to…’

  She starts to cough.

  ‘You used to what?’ I say impatiently.

  ‘We used to try to lighten him up a bit at the céilithe run by the Conradh. Tomás would be leapin’ about the place, acting the maggot with a wide-hipped girl called Úna, doing the Walls of Limerick, and I myself had no shortage of requests to dance. Gearóid would put a face on him anytime I was with someone else, but no amount of cajoling would get him to move himself. He just stood there, sullen, out of the light, always watching. And going home he used to recite ‘A is the army that covers the ground’. Things like that. You know that’s the last thing I remember him saying in English.’

  I look at my mother. Despite her age and ailments, I can see a young woman trying to escape, trying to jump out through the straitjacket of wrinkles and veins and white hair.

  ‘He was the one in the photo in Muddy’s?’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The one hiding his face?’

  ‘No, no, no. That was some Liberties’ boy long forgotten. What was I saying?’

  ‘What you used to do.’

  ‘What did I do?’ She seems to be awakening from a dream. ‘I’ll have to run back to catch the thought where I left it.’

  ‘He came to you in Rathfarnham,’ I say, persisting.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Gearóid.’

  My mother suddenly pales. ‘Who told you that? Was someone talking to you?’

  ‘No, Mam. I read it in a letter you…’

  ‘You’re reading my letters?’

  ‘Sorry. I …’

  ‘That’s what they taught you in boarding school,’ she says angrily. ‘How to invade someone’s privacy.’

  ‘No, Mam.’

  She extinguishes the cigarette, twisting it around in the shell.

  ‘What did I do? Is that what you asked me?’ She sighs. ‘I sold lilies, remember I told you?’

  ***

  Cumann na mBan was founded in Wynns hotel. My mother mentioned the hotel many times. She mentioned having tea there with Tomás and Gearóid, and then just with Gearóid, when Tomás was killed.

  Tomás and Gearóid went to James Street school together. They excelled at hurling and Gaelic football. Together they joined Óglaigh na hÉireann, the name under which the IRA was launched in nineteen-nineteen. They trained in the Wicklow mountains. Mam or Muddy would have cocoa ready for them when they came home from training on snowy winter evenings.

  ‘They’ll get their end,’ that’s what Muddy used to say. Tomás used to take out the accordion. He played by ear, a natural gift. It used to draw the neighbours into the shop. Those whom the gods love you know…’

  Gearóid gave my mother white heather. I read this in their letters to each other which they wrote of course in Irish.

  ‘You picked it specially for me’ she said.

  ‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘I just found it stuck to my boot. Maybe it will bring you luck.’

  ***

  On the Sunday morning of the twenty first of November 1920, both men went to see the Dublin football team play Tipperary in Croke Park. Muddy made them sandwiches and gave them chocolate from the shop. My mother made them a flask of tea to keep the cold at bay.

  Twelve British intelligence agents had been sent to murder Collins. That morning the Big Fellow had the twelve executed.

  That afternoon the Tans, in retaliation, opened fire on the crowds in Croke Park. Tomás was shot dead. Gearóid escaped.

  Gearóid wouldn’t talk about it except to say that he was pouring tea, and the flask was hit first, and when he saw the shards flying, he knew it meant a second chance.

  My mother said that Muddy was stoical one minute – she was very stoical in the presence of Collins – and despairing at other times. At night she wailed like the banshee. Neighbours rallied round her.

  Muddy wept not only for her son, but also for her husband, killed four years earlier. My grandfather – a follower of Jim Larkin – had been the treasurer of the plumbers’ trade union. In 1916 the plumbers went on strike, and during Easter week my granddad set out to pay the men sustenance money. Muddy had asked him to stay at home because of the insurrection. But he felt duty-bound, as some of the men’s families were economically destitute.

  Snipers were very active in Camden Street. Casualties were heavy.

  ***

  ‘You remember Camden Street, Mam?’ I say.

  She is sitting breathing calmly, looking out the window at the garden, at the fading daffodils and the cathedral-like spires of the yew tree, perhaps inducing in her a longing for the Liberties.

  ‘Camden Street?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The shopping was always good there. Plenty of small shops with personal service, not like these big supermarkets springing up all over the place now. I can never find anything I want in them; everyone’s too busy to help me.’ She ponders. ‘You said Camden Street?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I remember the blood flowing into it from Camden Row.’

  ‘Blood?’

  ‘From the slaughterhouse. The screams of the animals. An animal can sense death, did you know that?’

  ‘No, Mam.’

  ‘It can have a foreboding.’

  ‘I mean Camden Street in 1916, Mam.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Granddad, Mam.’

  ‘Granddad?’

  ‘Your father. He went out in 1916 to pay the men, remember?’

  ‘Wait now,’ she says starting, ‘I remember. I do remember that as clear as if it were yesterday. I was worried about Daddy. I was only twelve, but I stole out of the flat, unknown to Muddy. I tried to follow him. I would’ve followed Daddy anywhere, he was such a selfless man, always helping others. I followed him but I lost him in the darkening streets. I saw two volunteers who had been captured and placed kneeling in the middle of the street, and then they were shot in cold blood by an English officer. There was not a cat or a dog left alive. An officer of the Volunteers had his brains blown into the street. I don’t know should I be telling you this. I can tell you now, can’t I?’

  ‘Of course, Mam.’

  ‘I thought it wasn’t right that a man should be parted from himself like that. I don’t know where I found the courage or bravado at twelve. I suppose at that age you believe bullets can’t strike you. Anyway, I ran into the street and scooped the officer’s brains back into his cap.’

  ‘You did that for a stranger?’

  ‘With my bare hands. You don’t mind me telling you?’

  ‘No, it’s just…’

  ‘I remember it had a funny feel to it like holding a bird with the life throbbing in your hands. Let him be buried whole, I said to myself. I suppose I believed you had to be complete to come back in the next life, or something like that.’<
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  She pauses and looks, but it is not at me she is looking, or the wall or the window or the door. She’s looking at some faraway thought floating in a wide expanse, and she’s trying to lasso it with her mind, to moor it in.

  ‘And remember when I said there is a time when life takes on a meaning?’

  ‘I do, Mam,’ I say, thinking of the irony of her questioning my memory.

  ‘Well then,’ she says, ‘that’s when it happened for me.’

  It was thought that it was a revolutionary’s bullet that struck my grandfather down – a ricochet. But my mother said that Muddy always insisted that he was felled, like McDonagh and Connolly, by the forces of the Crown. Such names were selected not by Muddy but by her daughter. She had used these names before, deliberately avoiding the name of Pearse. She never mentioned Pearse since the day I came home from school and tried to recite his poem, The Mother, to her. I had just learned it off by heart. I felt proud. I wanted her to hear me, to hear my voice, to praise my memory, just as much as I wanted her to hear the poem for its own sake. I got beyond the title and part of the fist line: ‘I do not grudge them: Lord...’ when she dismissed me and the poem for being too sentimental. She would hear no more of it.

  ‘If Connolly or Collins had foreseen Ireland developing into a…don’t you know? what’s the word…?

  ‘Materialist?’

  I know the word. She had used it many times before.

  ‘…into a materialist culture, would they have given their lives for us? The trouble with noble people is that they presume nobility in others.’

  She looks across at me. Her upper lip is quivering. ‘Ireland is a desert,’ she says.

  ***

  I try to picture my grandfather crossing Camden Street during the Easter Rising. He is wearing a long coat and hat and carrying his trade union bag. My grandfather is a civilian, but he also responds to a call of duty. He has a heavy flu. Muddy thinks it might be consumption.

  Bullets whiz over my grandfather’s head as they are meant to do in any good action picture. Bullets are noises sensed in the ears. They are not missiles that pierce the heart.

  And cities are built for commerce. They don’t like being pulled apart by belligerents, no matter how ideological they may be. The moods of cities change from day to day as citizens seek the means to survive. And when crevices appear in city walls, citizens scavenge and hide, peeping out at the strange breed who try to blow up their world. They throw stones. There are plenty of stones in cities. The War Widows throw stones into a darkness. It is an action, not so much of hostility, as of incomprehension.

  Citizens hear the volleys from Kilmainham Gaol. The volleys waken something in their brains. They are losing rare eagles. The volleys are impoverishing their world. Fourteen executions; two per day. Who are the murderers with the rifles? Each shot acts as an alarm clock ringing in the national consciousness. And one shot from a high window in Camden Street brings my granddad down.

  ***

  Michael Collins, who had visited Muddy to offer condolence on the death of her husband, came again when Tomás was gunned down.

  ‘Poets sing their sadness,’ my mother said. ‘Their misery evaporates into air. But where does the sadness of non-poets go?’

  Uncle Tomás was given an IRA military funeral. The volleys that were fired, according to my mother, went through her heart. And as for Muddy, if it weren’t for Gearóid who held her, she would’ve jumped into the grave alongside her son.’

  All that is tangible to me of my uncle Tomás is his revolver, which now rests among a diplomat’s books. It acts as a link between generations, between the living and the dead.

  ***

  Another day my mother is in good form. It is a warm day. The sun is shining. Her neurasthenia (newly-diagnosed) is under control. Apparently she developed this nervous condition without knowing what it was, after her ‘horrendous experience’ in Rathfarnham. I, of course, was her ‘horrendous experience’, although she pretended that it was the burglary.

  I imagine the callers to her house when she was alone: the insurance man with his beard and shiny boots knocking at the front door, or the IRA man emerging out of the folds of night going through the lighted doorway towards her. I think of my mother, a recluse in the suburbs, a laughing girl in the Liberties.

  I write in my diary: ‘Environment is an architect of the spirit.’

  ***

  There is some talk on the news about an increase in the number of homeless people. It acts as a jumplead for her memory. She speaks of the absurdity of a State who paid a widow with a large family an allowance of seven shillings and sixpence per week when her weekly rent was ten shillings. She witnessed the evictions. There was nothing she could do. It was the law. She speaks as if it had happened yesterday.

  ‘We tried to help them in the tenements. But some things are best forgotten.’

  ‘I want to know, Mam.’

  ‘A lot of them in their leafy suburbs have forgotten.’

  ‘They’re not all bad, Mam. We moved.’

  ‘Not all bad?’ She ignores the second part of my statement. She doesn’t see herself as a suburbanite. She doesn’t think she has moved at all. ‘There are many people of principle – self principle, ha! Two pence halfpenny looking down on two pence. Society was more egalitarian then. People were closer, don’t you know?’

  I think of Mam using words like ‘egalitarian’. It was part of the socialist jargon of the time which had crept into everyday speech.

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t more egalitarian on paper, but it was in the context of neighbourly acts. A body on the street was never ignored. The old biddy with the shawl and the jug of porter sitting up the lane was part of our community too. People were not afraid to laugh or cry. They wore their hearts on their sleeves. Not like now.’

  Where did my mother wear her heart when it came to me? I wish I could have been that body on the street or that old biddy with the shawl or anyone, so that I could have felt her care for me.

  ‘You visited the tenements?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ She sighs. I can hear her wheezing again. ‘All the children went about barefooted. The twopencehalfpennies were the ones who had the shoes. They had large families with the blessings of the Church. But I’ll tell you this, whatever about the church, I know it has its faults, but if you don’t believe in God, you won’t believe in man, either.’

  ‘What about love, Mam?’ I have that uncanny feeling that I was here before. Where was your heart? I want to say. I never saw your heart anywhere, Mam, least of all on your sleeve. Things that I haven’t the heart to say.

  ‘It’s the same thing: love and religion. Where would we be without them?’

  ‘But…’

  Before I can say anymore, she drowns me out with a fit of coughing that I swear is put on.

  ***

  I pour her tea from the earthenware teapot, the one she likes.

  ’Did you scald it?’

  ‘I did, Mam.’

  She sips the tea. ‘It’s weak.’

  ‘Will I let it draw some more?’

  ‘It’ll do. Put the cosy over it.’ She pulls her tartan rug around her (her own cosy). ‘I remember the ex-soldiers with empty sleeves. Where could they wear their hearts?’ She laughs. ‘Or with trouser legs pinned up, on crutches on street corners singing or playing the mouth organ because they had no money and nothing else to do.’ She pauses. ‘It was gas when you think of it,’ she says.

  ‘What was, Mam?’

  ‘The soldiers, when they were home, teaching the rebels military techniques to be used against the army they were fighting for.’

  She lights another cigarette. ‘The consumption,’ she says. ‘The horses with the plumes passing with the hearses. And the children – children must play if they are to be children.’

  ‘And if they don’t play?’ I say, challenging her. ‘What happens to them?’

  She looks at me. ‘I’m getting tired now, Derek.’

  I hav
e unnerved her. I know by her dismissive tone I have struck a chord. ‘Tell me about the children. What did they do?’

  She coughs and wheezes and rubs her legs, but she sees no sympathy in my eyes.

  ‘They played football in the yard. A bundle of rags tied up with string. And old folks spoke of the Devil Era and asked what that Spanish twister was up to.’

  She sighs. ‘Now Derek, let me go to bed.’

  Part III

  Playing Parts

  Spain & Ireland 1966 - 1973

  I am clinging desperately to a chrome bar on a crowded bus with my ticket vicegripped between my teeth, unable to remove the trickles of sweat that roll down into my eyes. The driver drives recklessly. The bus sways around sharp bends. There are gasps from some of the passengers.

  I alight into the searing heat of a small town called Cuadro on the Costa Brava. A man is walking parallel to me on the opposite side of the road carrying a suitcase. He keeps appearing and disappearing in a swirl of sand and grit, whipped up by a wind. He looks early twenties, broad with brown brylcreemed hair and long sideburns – Elvis style. He nods across to me. His eyes light up when he realises we are both heading for the youth hostel. It’s as if he has found a long lost comrade. ‘Wilhelm,’ he says, striking the deep concavity of his chest. ‘Wilhel…’ I try to say the word. ‘Willy,’ he says striking again. ‘Willy,’ I say, and he smiles. He points to the muscles in his arms and insists on carrying my suitcase.

  Later on the beach, I feel the first twinges of sunburn as Willy makes signs in the sand saying, ‘brmm brmm’ which I presume means he is a mechanic. He goes to a wicker hut and buys martinis and huge slabs of Spanish chocolate which he shares with me.

  Two other Germans arrive at the hostel in a shining Daimler. Many of the hostellers, including myself (not Willy, who strangely stands sullenly aloof), gather enviously around the car, admiring its chrome and leather upholstery and rosewood fascia. They speak in a fluent American-English. When they see Willy, they look scornfully at him.