‘Who was the guy?’ an onlooker, a young man in the crowd says, startling me.
‘The guy?’
‘In the coffin.’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, and I wonder what Gearóid would have made of being referred to as the ‘guy’.
‘He was a freedom fighter,’ someone says, an elderly man in a tweed cap and coat. He is the same man who was looking out to sea the time I went swimming with Sinéad. The one who had no respect for the seasons, or maybe I’m imagining it; maybe it’s just that all old men in grey tweed caps and overcoats look the same.
‘He must’ve been high up in the ranks with a turn out like this,’ the young man says.
‘He was the supremo,’ replies the elderly man. ‘Gunned down by a Protestant paramilitary.’
I am invisible. I brush away my footprints behind me as I retreat like those Untouchables in India. All trace of me has gone. I was never here. I was never anywhere.
I don’t hear the funeral oration. I’m too far away. I don’t hear the words but I can recite them verbatim just as I can recite the soldiers’ orders given in Irish. And when I hear the bugle sound and the volley of rifle fire, I know at least the ceremony part is over.
***
Sinéad is staying home for a while. Jack had gone up with some members of the ‘movement’ and brought her home in his own car. There was no trace of the Morris Minor, and I did not dare to enquire any more on that matter.
Since the funeral, Jack is trying to keep her indoors. He fusses over her like the mother she but briefly had, and to his surprise she appears to succumb. She stays in, nursing her eye, spending her time staring dolefully out the sitting room window. What does she see? I wonder, in my visits to her. Is she looking out for me? To see if I’m coming up the road? No, not me. She sees the modern Ireland, suburbia, asphalt and concrete. Or maybe she doesn’t see any of that. Maybe it’s just bombs and bullets she sees, and people crying in anguish.
I visit her most days despite Jack’s coldness towards me. Even though I told him about the shooting I was involved in (compounding what I already had told Sinéad about the manner of Gearóid’s death), and how dangerous it would be for me to return up there, he thinks I have no backbone. And his daughter doesn’t disagree. It’s funny, not a word was mentioned about the trauma of the shooting; and not a word either about Gearóid MacSuibhne, or the funeral, or about his being my father – what it means to me? What the effect of all the years of subterfuge had on me?
Jack keeps on about his daughter, understandably I suppose. He is very upset about her losing an eye. ‘Maimed,’ he says (to me of course, not to Sinéad), ‘maimed for life.’ He looks almost accusingly at me, as if I am the cause of it. ‘Thankfully the other eye is okay,’ I say. But he doesn’t answer me. He just walks away.
Sinéad has been fitted with a glass eye. She is sitting in a chair in the sitting room when I come in. She is holding a mirror and dabbing around her eye with cotton wool. The afternoon sun beams through the window catching the shine in her hair.
‘It’s sore,’ she says in English (Irish obviously being put on hold for a while).
You’re in exalted company now,’ I say.
She sighs. ‘What are you on about, Derek?’
‘Pearse,’ I say. ‘He had eye trouble too.’
‘You’re a cold bastard, you know that?’
‘What do you expect?’
I’m still smarting, despite her trouble, from what she did to me.
‘Oh,’ she shouts, putting her hand to her eye. ‘It’s loose in its socket. It keeps moving around. It’s going to fall out.’
‘It only needs adjusting,’ I say, and I notice the eye weeping, but of course the weeping is not the weeping of emotions (that’s not Sinéad’s scene), but the discharge from living flesh trying to accommodate glass.
‘Jesus, the force of that rubber bullet,’ she says, ‘it knocked me right down; they’re lethal. We’ll have to march against their use.’
‘You’re not marching anywhere for a while,’ I say.
She looks in the mirror. ‘The colour is quite good, Derek, don’t you think? The blue is quite a good match.’
‘It is,’ I say.
She takes out the glass eye.
‘What are you doing?’
‘It’s hurting me,’ she says, and I see the gaping hollow (how could I make little of such a thing?). And I think of the hollowed-out book lying somewhere on a Northern floor, and of Old Testament punishments like the gouging out of eyes, and how Patrick Foley was right when he claimed such things were still with us, but not only in Spain.
‘Those bastards,’ she says. ‘Look at me, Derek. Go on, say it, I’m repulsive.’
She is vulnerable once more just as she was on the radio with Tadhg an dá thaobh. Her defences are down, making her immediately attractive to me.
‘You’re not repulsive,’ I say.
‘You don’t think so?’
‘No,’ I say, and then I kiss her.
***
‘Will you give it up?’ I say to her. We’re sitting on the brown dralon sofa, my arm around her, listening to starlings squabbling at the open window.
‘Give what up? she says, freeing herself from my embrace.
‘All this. The “movement”. Everything.’
She frowns. ‘That’s typical of you, always trying to undermine me.’
‘You know it’s not you I’m…’
‘I’m not a quitter, not like some people.’
‘But what life is it?’
‘The only life,’ she says.
‘You could go back to your studies.’
‘What good would that do? That won’t revolutionise anything. I’ve seen it happening with people when they get a bit of money or a qualification; they get sucked into the system and nothing ever changes.’
‘You mean me?’
‘Not just you. But you won’t change anything. Do you think giving lectures will change things?’
Jack pokes his head in the door. ‘Are you all right?’ he says to Sinéad.
‘I’m okay.’
He leaves the room without even glancing in my direction.
‘Jack,’ I shout after him but he doesn’t come back.
‘He’s annoyed with you,’ Sinéad says.
‘I know.’
She starts to cry.
‘Hey,’ I say, putting my arms around her, ‘what’s this?’
‘Why didn’t you go north with him when he asked you?’
‘How could I go north?’
‘He needed you.’
‘And who did I need all my life?’
‘He always spoke highly of you…’ she sniffles, and laughs through glistening tears…‘thought you were a grand lad when your mother told him about your getting the gold medal for history...’
‘She told him that?’
‘Oh I tell you,’ she says brightening, ‘pride is not the word, my Liberties’ boy. Jack said you were marked out.’
‘Marked out?’
‘It was in your genes, he said, and he…’ she pauses.
‘And he what?’
‘I suppose he felt a bit paternal towards you, you know in the absence of…’
‘Fathers?’ I say. ‘I had two. Why should he feel paternal towards someone who had two fathers. A bit of a waste, don’t you think?’
‘Stop it, Derek.’
***
I read in the newspapers that the IRA has a new role in society, or perhaps I should say a supplementary role – that of moral guardian. They’re cleaning up the drug dens of the city, leading vigilante groups wielding hurley sticks or baseball bats. They’re clearing out the prostitutes’ warrens too – the IRA don’t like pimps; they’re anti-vice in every way. They’re injecting terror into the hearts of junkies and pushers and pimps. The gardaídon’t stand in their way. Why should they? It takes some of the pressure off them. They’re merciless especially with the pushers and the pimps who sometimes a
re one and the same. They kneecap them, or the vigilantes beat them real badly. You see them going around the city. It’s like a telltale mark. The pusher or the pimp is the one with the limp.
It’s becoming an international thing, an international brotherhood and sisterhood. Former terrorist groups, former anarchists, even, are becoming the new right, the new moral arbiters. It’s like the world is going too far east.
I tell Sinéad about Luisa. I don’t know why exactly. I have a vague notion why but I’m not clear as yet. I feel I have to confide in someone about her. I have to speak about my meeting Luisa to confirm that the encounter was real – the only tangible element was the cross and chain – and not some dream manufactured from an old musty magazine in a diplomat’s drawer.
‘A prostitute?’ she says.
‘Forced,’ I say. ‘She was forced into it’(just as my mother was forced, I was almost about to add).
Sinéad looks at me suspiciously. ‘And what, may I ask, was the Liberties’ boy doing with a prostitute?’
I relate the story, or part of it at least.
‘Don’t tell me now,’ she says before I have finished, ‘you fell in love with a prostitute with a heart of gold.’
‘It wasn’t love I felt; it was guilt. There was something about her, something vulnerable. I felt bad leaving her. It was like… did you ever feel you were called on?’
‘Called on?’
‘Yeah, maybe something like what your dad was saying about me (for I had been thinking about his words – marked out, but more about my mother’s words and her experience as a young girl in Camden Street). It was the first time I felt it.’
‘The call?’ she says.
‘No, no, not that type of call. All the other times in school and in the different societies, they were sort of artificial, as if they were made up, not real you know. But when I met Luisa I felt something...’
‘What?’ she says.
‘Like I was being called to help in some way to try to right some of the injustices in the world.’
‘And what did you think we were doing?’
‘No, I mean it was something bigger…’
‘Bigger?’
‘I mean something wider, something universal, something beyond nationalism, and it was just spontaneous, the feeling I had; you know what I’m saying?’
‘No, I don’t,’ she snaps.
‘She was abused terribly.’
‘Why are you telling me this, Derek?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You do know.’
I look at a girl with sunlight in her hair and cotton wool in her hand dabbing the cavity where an eye once was, and I ask myself is there always an ulterior motive for telling each other things?
‘Well, maybe I was wondering the way Gearóid had contacts over.’
‘Over?’
‘In Spain. I know it was a long time ago, but I was just wondering if there was any chance you also might know some people.’
‘What if I do? You expect me to ask them to rescue a prostitute. Is that what you want?’
‘Her pimp is the fascist who tried to murder Gearóid.’
‘What?’
‘When he was sprung out of the Spanish jail. Did Gearóid ever tell you?’
‘He’s the one? I mean are you sure?’
‘I met him. I went to his house. He lives in Cuadro on the Costa Brava. His name is Javier Jiménez. He tried to…’
‘Tried to what?’
‘Let’s say he made overtures towards me.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘He runs a male vice ring as well.’
Sinéad stops dabbing her eye and looks at me. It’s like one of my mother’s quizzical looks.
‘What do you want?’ Her tone is abrupt, official.
‘I want to free Luisa from him.’
‘Look at me,’ she says. ‘Just look at me.’
‘You owe me,’ I say coldly.
Sinéad sighs like someone overcome by events, someone exhausted.
‘I can’t guarantee anything.’
I tell her that she’s known as La Santa and where she lives. When I say the number 47B she says, ‘The Rathfarnham bus from town.’
‘That’s right,’ I say.
She smiles. ‘The bus for home.’
***
People are sitting in parks and gardens around Rathfarnham like cows in the meadows in the heat of midsummer, listening to the birds chirping in the trees or in the eaves of suburban houses, when I ask Sinéad to marry me. That’s what other people are doing. Sinéad stays indoors in a darkened room (the sun streaming through her sitting room window had begun to irritate her eye, and she was forced to draw the curtains, at least that’s what she said). Why do I ask her to marry me? I suppose I think that by marrying we can compromise (I mean isn’t that what marriage is? Isn’t that what life is?) in some way on our different perceptions of the world. Oh and love, yes, that has to come into the equation too, if I only knew what it was.
But she refuses. ‘You know I can’t,’ she says. ‘But it’s all different now,’ I say (thinking of her missing eye) ‘It’s all different now?’ she says. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘And what do you mean by that?’ ‘I mean…’ ‘Go on, say it,’ she says, and a tear, a real tear this time, begins to show in her good eye. ‘No, I don’t mean that,’ I say. ‘I mean…’ ‘I know what you mean,’ she says. ‘But it’s okay; it’s what anyone would say; it’s what anyone would think but it makes no difference. You know what I’m married to, Derek Foley, for better or worse,’ and the tear extricates itself from her duct and flows freely down one side of her face.
***
Sinéad scans the newspapers every day for news of the North, and after a couple of weeks I see how restless she can become.
‘I’m needed to represent the “firm”, she says one afternoon when I call on her. She is standing at the door of her house with a duffel bag on her shoulder.
‘Sinéad, you can’t go up there, not in your condition.’
‘Watch me,’ she says.
***
For the next few weeks I mope about the house thinking of her. I haven’t the inclination to tackle that old stump in the garden anymore. I just leave it there, let the weeds grow around it. I feel like leaving everything. She’s gone, I keep saying to myself. She has refused me. There is nothing more for me here. I should be lost somewhere in Europe, where my mother always wanted me to be (if the truth were known). I will give in my notice at the university. Ireland is joining the EEC. They’ll be looking for more diplomats to fill their burgeoning posts. I’ll be just following family tradition. And history will be good (it will have a future after all, despite what my mother said). It will look good on my CV.
I watch television, the news and political commentaries on the North (it won’t go away; and the worry is there, no matter what). The British army has entered the Bogside. There is talk of ‘no go’ areas. I imagine her spending her time sitting, waiting in cars in dark lanes, eating from takeaways, suffering with her artificial eye, in constant danger (how can the heart take that, being in a state of permanent alert?). It is no life for a woman, least of all a woman with a handicap; it is no life for anyone. But what is that to me now?
There is an explosion in Mulrooney’s pub in Belfast – it was known that there was an assembly of the IRA on the premises. Among those killed, are the owner of the pub and... I keep waiting to hear her name, Sinéad Ní Shúileabháin, the ‘black patched terrorist’, that’s how the English press refer to her now. She is no longer an anonymity. She has secured her place in the annals of myth. Is that not enough for her – to be a heroine in the eyes of her people and a villain in the eyes of the enemy? What more could anyone ask for? Is that not enough? I keep waiting; any minute now. I keep saying to myself, the next news flash will have her name on it. They don’t have the toll of all the dead yet; they’re still searching the rubble. What do I do? Write in my diary to keep my hands from sha
king:
What can one expect? It has to be this way. It can be no other way. Ideologies, like words to music, fade. There is only the music now; now only the thought. Is that possible? I hear the church bells. But even church bells have their rhetoric.
***
I sit watching the television with my transistor radio blaring on my lap in case I miss out on anything in one medium. They have released more names of the dead. The owner’s two young children and several IRA people are named. No mention of Sinéad, no, not yet. Maybe in the late news…
The phone rings. It says three fifteen a.m. on the wall clock. I had fallen into a doze in the armchair. I pick up the receiver.
There’s a cackle in the line.
‘Sinéad.’
‘Can you hear me?’
‘Just about. Are you all right?’
‘Yes. You saw it on the telly?’
‘I saw it. You’re sure you’re all right?’
‘Yes.’.
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