The Whore-Mother

by Shaun Herron

  THE WHORE-MOTHER

  SHAUN

  HERRON

  THE WHORE-MOTHER

  M Evans

  Lanham • New York • Boulder • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

  M. Evans

  An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

  http://www.rlpgtrade.com

  10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom

  Distributed by National Book Network

  Copyright © 1973 Shaun Herron

  First Rowman & Littlefield paperback edition 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

  ISBN 13: 978-1-59077-344-4 (pbk: alk. paper)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Shaun and Siobhan

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  THE WHORE-MOTHER

  ONE

  Mc MANUS folded the white margin of the Irish News along the line of the type, made sure it was straight, pressed the fold to a sharp edge with the nail of his thumb, and laid the page on the table.

  He sat down to look at it. He was in fact looking at his hand which rested on the spread page.

  Callaghan was watching him from the other end of the table. He had a mug of sweet tea cupped in his hands. “What’re you playin at now?” he asked McManus.

  “I want to see if I can tear it all the way up along the line of the fold,” McManus said, and under cover of the talk raised his hand an inch off the table and spread the fingers. The hand was not trembling. He licked his lips.

  “What’s wrong w’your hand?” Callaghan said.

  McManus turned it over slowly and examined it. “Where?” he asked stupidly and looked at Callaghan, turning the hand again. “What’s wrong with it?” He felt in his head the comfort of a small triumph.

  “You were lookin at it,” Callaghan said irritably.

  “Was I?” He didn’t seem to understand. “No. I was looking at the fold. I’ll try it.”

  He opened the fold and began to tear along it slowly, half an inch at a time.

  Powers and Kelly, their feet on the old iron kitchen range, turned their heads to watch.

  “Did you learn that sorta thing at the university?” Callaghan said.

  Powers said, “Shut your gub.”

  McManus tore carefully and patiently at the thin page. Sounds came in from the street—a child’s voice, a woman calling, traffic passing on the Falls Road at the end of the street. Four men watched intently as the white margin separated from the printed page with a little sound like a hamster shredding its bed. The lengthening tail of paper drooped over the edge of the table and wagged with the gentle movement of McManus’s fingers.

  Callaghan lifted his mug of tea to his mouth and slurped it. “You can’t do it,” he said.

  Powers said, “Shut your gub.”

  McManus tore the last half inch. “I can’t?” he said, and made a face like a grin at Callaghan. It took all his will to make the face and he was sure it looked false. He leaned back in his kitchen chair and tore a strip off the margin, about an inch and a half long. He went on tearing the ribbon of paper in equal lengths, with the mindless tranquility of a man killing time.

  “What’re you doin now?” Callaghan asked him.

  “Tearing paper,” McManus said.

  Powers looked curiously at McManus for a long moment, then turned back to the fire.

  Kelly snickered and glanced knowingly at Powers. “Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer,” he said.

  McManus performed an odd little operation as he tore. Every other strip of paper was slipped into the crotch of the little finger of his left hand; the rest stayed in the thin stack forming between the thumb and forefinger of the same hand.

  Callaghan watched the operation with hostile intensity. “What’re you gonta do w’it when you get it all tore?”

  “Bum it.”

  “Christ.”

  When his little enterprise was finished McManus closed his fist and put his hand into his pocket. The exercise relaxed him. He dropped the papers in the crotch of his little finger into the bottom of his trouser pocket, and folded the rest into his palm.

  “You said y’were gonta burn it,” Callaghan said in an aggrieved voice.

  “When I’m ready,” McManus said. “You should never hurry a therapeutic exercise.”

  “La-de-da,” Callaghan said, and noisily drained his tea mug.

  “What’s a thera . . . thera . . . what sorta exercise, McManus? What for?” Powers asked, looking into the fire in the range.

  “Therapy. Healing. It soothes the nerves.” He knew he shouldn’t have said it. That was the sort of thing that enraged them. He’d done it many times too often.

  “You’re sick?”

  “No.”

  “You’re afeareda the wee girl?”

  “I’m not afraid. I’m nervous.”

  “What for?”

  “I came here to fight soldiers, not little girls.” He should keep his mouth shut. He wanted to. On this one, he couldn’t.

  “She’s not a wee girl. She’s a soldier-fuckin wee hoore.”

  No more, McManus told himself: Shut your stupid mouth. His accent and his vocabulary roughed their nerves and their patience. His attitudes inflamed them. “I know,” he said, “I’ve never done it before, that’s all.” He had his envelope stamped and addressed in the foot of his sock. Now he had the paper for his letter in the bottom of his trouser pocket. All he had to do was write it and get it posted. The thought almost started him trembling. He could get it in the knees if they caught him. He collected himself, stood up, stretched, and tossed the papers in his palm into the fire. They were damp from the sweat on his hand. One scrap stuck. He gripped himself, picked it off his wet palm, and shook it from his fingers into the open range.

  “That was a lotta work for fuck all,” Callaghan said.

  Powers said, “Shut your gub.”

  They sat in silence and immobility for five minutes and the ten-shilling alarm clock above the range ticked away the minutes with a tinny and irregular sound. McManus thought about writing his letter. It had to be done in bed, he decided, in the dark; he would read for a while, mark passages in a book to justify the pencil, put out the light, put one word on each piece of paper, and number each piece from its front edge. A letter written on scraps of newsprint would impress his sister with its desperate urgency.

  But how could he get the stamped envelope from his sock to his pajama pocket? Callaghan was in the other single bed in his room, always watching, always listening, like a suspicious dog. Maybe that’s what he was? Maybe they suspected his state of mind even more than he feared? If they did, he’d get it in the knees. Or the head. He closed his eyes tight and forced his mind back to the mechanics of the business. He’d keep his socks on so that he could get the letter into the envelope. “My f
eet are cold, Callaghan,” he’d say. Callaghan slept in his shirt and underwear and socks. He’d see nothing strange about it. Go to the bog, he thought, and put the paper in your sock. That was it, do the whole thing in the bog. They couldn’t come into the bog with him; he’d put everything in his sock, flush the bog, and come out looking casual. If he could.

  It had to be done tonight. He had to know he was getting out. He couldn’t know that till he started reaching out. His sister would do what he asked. England, for the love of God; he had to get to England. He’d be safer there, there’d be a place to hide there. His mind began to wander in that meadow: Irishmen and the poor dirty bloody English; Irishmen working in England or on the dole on English taxpayers’ money; Irishmen hiding in England from other Irishmen; Englishmen hiding Irishmen from other Irishmen in England . . . a little shudder chilled him.

  “Somethin botherin you, McManus?” It was Powers, strong Powers, single-minded Powers, Powers the leader; Powers the future martyr with his name on some martyr’s monument and the television cameras showing it off to a grateful nation and an amazed and admiring world. . . . That was what Powers wanted—to die for Ireland and to be talked about forever. He wanted a ballad of his own.

  “Just the girl. I’ll get over it,” McManus said.

  “The university makes them soft,” Callaghan explained with a malicious little smile.

  “One of these days. . . .” McManus cut it off.

  “Shut your gub and no morea that,” Powers said strongly, like a master of men, and there was no more of that.

  The alarm clock said half-past four. The girl worked in the city hall and would leave it at five o’clock. She would turn the corner from the bus stop into her street in Springfield at five-twenty or five-twenty-five. The bus could be a little late, but the girl’s habits didn’t change; home at the same time every day. She had her tea and if she was seeing her soldier that night she went out; if he was on duty she stayed at home. The man wasn’t even much of a soldier—some sort of clerk. She was Irish, she was Catholic; he was English and that was political treachery and racial pollution. Her soldier was turning Catholic but that meant nothing. He was an English soldier. He was the enemy, she was a quisling, she had been warned, she had nobody to blame but herself. Examples had to be made, discipline had to be maintained, solidarity assured—and fear was part of the order of nature.

  “Away on,” Powers said, and led them out of the house into the street. Callaghan stood aside to make sure McManus went out before him. Like a watchdog, McManus thought, and his stomach sank. He wanted to run, full of fearful imaginings. He knew how far he would get. But they couldn’t know what was in his mind? He had kept his nerve, given nothing away; he was sure he had given nothing away . . . the awful thought clouded his vision that maybe they weren’t going to get the girl. Maybe he was the one? His brains scrambled. He stumbled.

  “For the love of God, get a holt on yourself, McManus,” Powers said contemptuously.

  So much was done for the love of God.

  TWO

  THEY walked, two by two and almost heel to toe, in a defensive little square down the street away from the Falls Road into the warrens beyond. The car would be where it was supposed to be, the plates changed, keys in its ignition.

  There were keys for every car that was made. Pick the car, locked or unlocked—these days people were locking them and a lot of good it did them—open it, drive it away, change the plates, leave it at a predetermined place deep in the district, and the men it was assigned to would come and get it when the time came. Plates were as easy to come by as keys and cars were alike: you only stole the look-alikes. It was the plates the police and the army looked for; who can tell one four-cylinder Vauxhall or Ford or Austin or whatnot from another? And who needed one for more than an hour or two? They went for their car with a fine sense of security. Very likely, they’d have dumped it or blown it up before the owner knew he’d lost it.

  McManus scarcely saw the stringy street of flat-faced little houses, their brown blackened by generations of Belfast’s industrial dirt. He knew people spoke to them as they passed, children greeted them, though not with the spontaneous exuberence of an earlier time, men saluted them with obedient deference, but these people were vague in the corners of his eyes. He stared ahead, clinging to the appearance of composure, and stopped when Powers stopped. He shook his head free of the gauze that clogged it. He had to drive. He always had to drive.

  He drove slowly, Powers beside him. There was plenty of time. These mean Belfast streets depressed him. They had been his home for nine months, though when he let the word home into his mind the idea that this place could in any sense have become his home repelled him. It had become his prison. The Antrim Road was his home, among Belfast’s Protestant middle classes. The first thing he learned when he came here to the Falls—a young Ulster Catholic trying, as Conor Cruise O’Brien had put it, forever romantically to recreate the heroic past—was that he was an Ulster middle-class Catholic who was as distant from Ulster working-class Catholics as were the Ulster middle-class Protestants. The first undermining blow to his illusions of Irish Catholic comradeship was in his distaste for the coarseness and vulgarity of his comrades. They were urbanized peasants, without the earthy originality of the peasant, or the concrete poetry of his vocabulary. The second thing he learned was what he called “their single-minded mindlessness.” The third was their righteous savagery. Christ, it was different from the heroic legends! He’d thought a lot about that in the past nine months—Finn McCuill and the Fianna, the ancient army of heroes; Cuchullian, the whole bloody lot that he learned at his father’s knee. Purity, gallantry, invincibility—that was their image. But when he told his father he was joining the Provisional IRA and entering into the long succession, “Please, no, no, Johnny darlin,” the old man said, “sure that hero stuff’s all just a lot of oul talk.” And the stuff he learned in school—Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, Daniel O’Connell, Patrick Pearse, Michael Collins that was “a lot of oul talk” too when he went to see Bull Baillie, the master who taught it to him. “They’re not your kind, Johnny.” Maybe not, but they all filled his head with the stuff and it took the reality to get it out. Powers was the reality. Sudden rage boiled up in him. His foot was hard on the pedal. He slammed on the brakes and flung his passengers about in the car.

  “What the bloody hell’s wrong w’you?” Powers yelled at him.

  “I’m sorry. I was thinking.” He wanted to hit Powers. Not just to hit him. He wanted to smash the big arrogant face.

  “Thinkin, for Christ’s sake! You were puttin your foot down. That’s what a driver does when he’s angry. What’s up?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothin my fuckin arse. I’m thinkin we’ll have to take a look at you, McManus. Away on.”

  That was the first time any of them had given a direct indication that they had doubts about him. If they wanted to take a look at him they believed there was something to look at. He drove very carefully, his mind shut down. But his hands sweated freely and to keep his grip on the wheel he had to wipe them dry on his trousers. He knew Powers watched him do it. It made him sweat even more, wipe oftener, and feel his arms empty of substance.

  He wove slowly out onto the Springfield Road and up towards the housing estate where the girl lived. He had never seen her. Her name was Mavis. The thought of her name almost brought a weak hysterical giggle to his throat—Mavis McGonigal. Holy God, what a stupid, vulgar, and ridiculous name. He set his lips and his teeth and forced his mind to its work.

  “In at the next right turn,” Powers said, and he pulled in to the curb. “She’ll come from behind us,” Powers said.

  A boy of about nine years left his post at the curb and came to Powers’ window. “She’s gettin off the bus,” he said, and walked away, waiting across the street, not to miss the sport.

  “Get out, Danny,” Powers said to Callaghan. He said to McManus, “When she walks past you, drive beside her.”


  “I’ve never set eyes on her.”

  “Kelly knows her.” Powers got out and walked up the street with Callaghan.

  “I wisht I did know her,” Kelly said from behind. “I’d like to bite her nice wigglin arse.”

  McManus watched his rear-view mirror.

  “She’d make a right good fuck,” Kelly said. Then, resentfully, “Just think of that fuckin soldier fuckin her.” He thought about that. “Jever fuck a Protestant, McManus?”

  McManus could see a gaggle of girls coming up the street. One came alone, some distance behind them.

  “Did’y hear me, McManus?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, did you?”

  “Mind your work.”

  Kelly twisted and looked back through the rear window. “That’s the bitch behind.”

  Powers and Callaghan were walking back now, towards the car. The chattering girls passed them. The solitary girl drew level. McManus moved the car with her. She was pretty and shapely and her bottom swiveled.

  “She’s askin for it,” Kelly said, “look at her wigglin her arse.”

  Her hair was long and auburn, soft and well cared for. McManus wanted to shout to her to run for it. But where would she run? Almost every woman on the street would try to stop her. They were at their doors now, watching and waiting and smiling. Nobody had spoken to the girl for weeks, except to say “hoore” as they passed her. The children had chalked “hoore” on the walls of her parents’ house, and their mothers had painted it back when the girl’s father washed it off, and their fathers and brothers had beaten him when he tried to burn off the paint with a blowlamp. And the McGonigals had nowhere else to go. So they lived with silence or abuse and went a long way from the district to buy their food, where nobody knew them and could not therefore refuse to sell to them.

  Powers and Callaghan blocked her way. She tried to walk around them and Callaghan moved to stop her. “Just a minute, you,” he said.