by Shaun Herron
“Will you leave me alone,” she said and tried to pass around Powers.
“Get into the car,” he said.
Then she knew. McManus looked the other way.
“You leave me alone,” she said helplessly.
The women were leaving their doorsteps, grinning, moving down to the curb.
Powers reached for her and she screamed and clawed at his face. His grab for her hands came too late. She got her nails to his face and lashed at his shins with her feet. Callaghan came in behind, his arms around her. He closed his hands over her breasts and squeezed as he dragged her back. Her screams tore the street and her father came roaring from his house, a club in his hand. The women were on him from behind, and he went down on his face. A dozen of them tore at him, dragging on his club, kicking and stamping on him. “Run, run,” he howled to his daughter as he scrambled to his knees and was kicked back to the ground.
But she couldn’t run. The rear door of the car was open and Callaghan and Powers had her halfway in. Kelly took a handful of her hair and hauled on it.
“You won’t have it long, you dirty wee hoore,” he told her and yanked her through the door.
They had her across their knees when Powers got in beside McManus. “Away on,” he snapped, and put his hand to his bleeding face. “The last lamp post at the end of the street.”
She was no longer screaming; only sobbing in terror. The women were running up the street after the car, the father stumbling behind them washed in his own blood, beaten with his own club which had been clawed from his hands.
Everything they needed was neatly packed in a cardboard box in the boot—a gallon can of black paint and a stick to stir it, a pair of barber’s scissors and a nylon clothes line. Powers and Callaghan held her and Kelly tied the girl’s ankles and wrists to the lamp post. “Shift the motor into the clear and keep the engine goin,” Powers told McManus, and he moved the car forward along the street from the gathering crowd of women and children.
A twelve-year-old girl stirred the paint, singing into and under the shrieking, laughing turmoil of bodies and voices:
“Oh! see the fleet-foot hosts of men who speed with faces wan, From farmstead and from fisher’S cot upon the banks of Bann. They come with vengeance in their eyes, too late, too late are they, For Roddy McCorley goes to die on the Bridge of Toome today.”
She might have been busy on some classroom project. She had been reared on songs of this sort, at home and in the church school she went to—her mind was filled with Ireland’s wrongs, for Ireland’s history, her teachers told her, “is a catalogue of wrongs,” none of them Irish. The child felt nothing for the now still and silent girl at the lamp post. Mavis was suffering no wrong; she had been found wanting in loyalty and solidarity; she was engaged to a soldier; Mavis was a hoore, and that was neither Irish nor good.
A large fat woman took handfuls of Mavis’s soft auburn hair in her big fist, slapped the girl’s head back against the lamp post, and snipped the hair off close to the scalp. The girl’s eyes were shut, her hair was tossed in the air; children fought for it as it fell.
When that work was done an angular woman with the face of a bitter man took the can of black paint from the stirring, singing child and upended it above the bound girl’s head. It oozed thickly down her face and head onto her summer shoulders, blackening her pretty blue-and-white dress, draining over and between her white little breasts. Wiping out her self. She was a rag doll, slumped forward and down, her head lolling, her knees bent, without speech. She was nothing.
On the edge of the ring her father fought the furious women to reach his child and was battered again with his own club. They tore at his head, clawed his face, and gathered his flesh under their nails, beat him again to the ground, kicking him in the stomach, the back, the face, the groin, jumping on his feet and ankles, hooting, howling, screaming in deranged triumph. The man lay still.
The circle danced; fat women jigged around the lamp post and the girl, their skirts hauled high, big putty thighs bouncing and jiggling like sows’ bellies. They jeered, sang, chanted, “The soldier’s hoore, the soldier’s hoore the soldier’s hoore,” and their children danced with them, chanting.
The father crawled on his hands and knees through the ring and they kicked him as he passed. He hauled himself to his feet and took his child in his arms to ease the pain in her wrists and ankles. His face was blackened by her painted head and he moaned, “Oh ma wee darlin ma wee darlin ma poor wee darlin . . .” and she could not look at him or speak to him for fear her eyes and her mouth would be filled with the paint.
The shotgun blasted like a cannon and some of the dancers were down, screaming, not chanting, bleeding, not drawing blood. They were on their faces in the street, their crying quick like panting, or long-drawn wails, or out-of-pitch foghorns on Belfast Lough. Their fat legs were torn, their fat backsides full of shot.
The discharge almost knocked the girl’s little crippled bird-mother onto her back. She staggered backwards, her steel glasses tossed down to the tip of her nose, the stem dislodged from one ear. She knocked her glasses back onto her nose and the gun’s barrels dipped, too weighty for one thin arm. She grabbed it quickly again with both hands.
Powers and Callaghan and Kelly were standing to one side. They moved together towards the woman.
“I’ll take the gun, missus,” Powers said in his leader voice.
“You dirty cannibal,” she yelled. “Come near me and I’ll kill you.” The idea pressed in her mind and she screamed, “Kill you, kill you, kill you!” She looked around wildly at the frozen women on their feet and the moaning women on their faces and the gun swung with her look, “Filthy, filthy, filthy muck,” she screamed at them and swung the gun back to the three men.
“You, you dirty wee turd,” she shrieked at Kelly, “you tied her. You cut her loose.”
Kelly did it quickly. “Take her home, Sam,” the maimed little kestrel said to her husband.
“Oh mammie, mammie,” he wept and half-carried their child out of the malignant ring.
“Yis kin get up off yer fat bellies and git away from me now,” the little woman said. “All but you, ye filthy dog-dirt,” she said to Kelly.
Moaning and crying and bleeding and wronged the women backed and limped and bled away, and Powers and Callaghan backed with them.
“Stan in the front o’me,” she shrieked at the waiting Kelly. “You’re the one that tied her,” she screamed, and pointed the shotgun at his legs and squeezed the trigger. But it was harder to pull than it had been before. She was frightened now and weakened by the storm, and the dragging with two fingers on the trigger lifted the barrel of the gun from Kelly’s legs. She scattered his guts for yards over the paint-stained street.
The kick of the gun threw her back on her heels and she sat down in the street. Kelly lay about her, his eyes staring at the lamp post. He was eighteen. He had never had a job and had never looked for one. It had never mattered before. There was always British welfare. Now it would never matter. The little woman got up slowly and picked up the shotgun. They watched her limp awkwardly away to her house and her husband and her child.
Powers and Callaghan walked to the car. Somebody could look after what there was of Kelly. He was non-operational now. McManus drove them away.
“That one’s a vicious oul bitch,” Powers said like a man who had been wronged and could see no reason for it.
That night the McGonigals’ house burned down. Mavis was in the Royal Victoria Hospital. Her father and mother had no such refuge. The army took them in. Young soldiers fed and sheltered them.
“Here, m’am, take some of this,” they said, and tried to coax tea or soup or something into her.
The mother and father sat, huddled and staring but not seeing. “Oh ma poor wee darlin,” the man intoned like a litany and his tears were endless. The woman sat stiffly and like a corpse and stared in tearless desolation at nothing or some secret thing.
The police came
for them in the morning, big red-faced men in middle life. One of them coaxed gently, “Come on, missus, don’t be afeard now. Nothin’s gonta harm you. Your wee girl’s gettin better.”
“Do you have to part them, constable?” a young army officer asked him.
“Och, no, sur, nothin of the sort, sur,” he said, “we’re just gonta tuck them away where there’s no harm. Poor oul souls. Och, that poor wee girl. They’re a right parcela fuckin cunts, thon boys.” He looked uneasily at the officer. “If you’ll excuse that class of talk, sur.”
McManus wrote his letter to his sister on his scraps of soiled newsprint in the dark, under the covers. It said:
1. When 2. you 3. get 4. my 5. next 6. letter 7. please 8. do 9. exactly 10. what 11. it 12. says 13. or I’m 14. dead 15. Johnny.
THREE
BOTCHED operations have to be explained. Simple operations that are badly botched have to be explained away.
Powers stood stiffly before the kitchen table in the house in Andersonstown and cast a cold eye on the three men who sat stiffly behind it. Their voices lapped about his ears; one part of his mind listened for sudden questions; the rest of it swam in a pool of obscenities that were the only words he could find to fit his judgment of his judges.
McCann glowered up into Powers’ muscle-tight face and said, “It was a plain wee job. Four trained men and the Springfield Women’s Revenge Committee had to tar and feather one wee hoore five feet to the top of her skull and six-stone weight. Christ, one of youse coulda done it handcuffed. The wee girl’s oul man was let get her away and her wee limpin oul mother shot the arses off half the committee and spread Kelly’s guts all over the street. There’ll be an accountin. . . .”
Powers stared straight back at him and thought, “. . . bigmouthed arse-hole. When was the last time you handled a gun? What are you, anyway, stickin out your poor wee chest. . . .”
There were blocks of silence in the small kitchen. They isolated words and thoughts in sharp metallic channels, enlarging them in the mind, barbing them in the air that was sour with malice and suspicion and jealousy.
McCandless was on the right behind the table. “It’s a pity, Powers, a great pity,” he said in his high-toned way. “Whatever we do, however simple, even a small act of social discipline like this, has to be done properly. The Official IRA would like to see us back in their yard. You gave them a chance to laugh at us. An act of discipline botched by you and defeated by an old crippled woman. If the Catholic community laughs at us, let alone the Officials . . . where are we, I ask you, where are we? Done!”
Powers settled his stony face in McCandless’s direction and thought, “. . . you’re past it too, y’girnin oul woman . . .” but all that could be seen in his expression was the disciplined submission of a good soldier.
Clune spoke of propaganda losses, of the wee cripple who defied the power and authority of the Provisional IRA and made it a comic spectacle in the English papers. “They’ll read about this in America too. Are you tryin to stop the money comin?”
Powers heard it out. He had no choice. The rules of evidence had no meaning here. There was no right to be heard. “Internment without charge or trial” was a good propaganda line in the London Times or the New York Times and in the French and West German and Swedish papers when it was made against the British, but it was a public bludgeon for the enemy; it had no relevance to these courts. They were “different.” They had right on their side; they were Irish; they were the courts of the wronged and the blameless; there was neither time, nor inclination, nor reason to apply the rules of evidence here. So Powers waited for the word.
“Well?” Clune gave him the word.
“Fair enough,” Powers said. “There’s no word of a lie in what you’re sayin.” He remembered the time an innkeeper from the West Country told him the greatest asset Ireland ever had was “the Irish smile that disarmed the world and made enemies think they were safe.” The three of them sittin there like the Holy bloody Trinity were ignorant has-beens but the innkeeper from the West had a word for them too: “Sure, tellin a bloody lie to an eejit is a sort of kindness.” “I’m the one that’s to blame,” he said. “That’s why I feel bad about makin a third bad report on McManus. I’m not sayin he’s to blame about the girl. It’s worse than that or I wouldn’t be bringin it up again.”
“Well, bring it up.” That was Clune with the wee thin face and the hot eyes. He was born in the Markets and wanted no la-de-da’s from universities and places like that in their ranks. Soft bellies and softer heads, he said.
Powers gave Clune his steady look and focused on his social envy. “He gets worse,” he said. “When we blew up the Carleton Restaurant” (seven dead and forty-five mutilated) “he said it was planned by a stupid fool,” (Clune planned it) “and done by a stupid savage” (Clune’s brother carried it out).
He gave McCann his steady look. McCann’s most recent planning exploit was the Chester Hotel (four dead, six blinded, four without arms, two with legs lost, and twenty more in the hospital). “He was screamin about that. He came here to fight soldiers, not commercial travelers and wee office girls,” he said. “He said it was thought up by a cowardly barbarian.”
“The girl, Powers. Get to the girl,” McCandless said. Let’s stick to the point at issue, McCandless always, always said, like some fuckin professor.
“Yes, sir.” Powers got to the girl. “McManus was drivin,” he said. “When we got her to the lamp post I told him to keep his eye on the street in the direction of the girl’s house. He didn’t. He went and sat in the car.”
“He refused to do his job?” McCandless said.
“No, sir. He was against tarrin the wee hoore. He said he wasn’t goin at first. Then he just didn’t do his job. I had my hands full at the lamp post. I couldn’t see through the crowd. It was his job to watch the rear. He just didn’t do it. That’s how the wee woman got in behind us with the shotgun.” He wiped the corners of his mouth with his fingertips. “He’s not with us, sir,” he said to McCandless, and added his solemn judgment. “He’s against us. He’s weak. He’s a danger. One of these days he’s gonta try to run and if he gets away he’s gonta run straight to the army.”
“You know that?” Clune said.
“Yes, sir.” He gave his mouth another wipe and said. “It’s his talk. When the order was made to shoot Protestants in the street to try to make the Orangemen attack the Catholic districts, he said the men assigned to it and the men that ordered it shouldn’t go to Long Kesh—they should go to the gallows, he said. We should turn them in, he said, they’re nothin but common murderers.” That was the right fuckin line. Your father could rape half the women on the street and you could live it down, but if your great-grandfather informed, your great-grandchildren would pass the mark of it to theirs. Nothin set the nerves shiverin and the blood boilin like the fuckin thought of an informer. Questions? Proof? No fuckin questions, no fuckin proof—they took time and chances. Powers gave them all his steady look. “I’m askin now that you take him from me. I can’t trust him. He cost us Kelly. Who’ll he cost us next?”
The silence he got was the silence he wanted. He could feel the judgment in their personal spleen. He could see them translating it into justice.
Clune said through the festering air, “Away on out. We’ll call you.”
Powers smoked a cigarette in the street and worked out the odds, his back against the wall of the house. McManus had been nine months in this army. Powers had been in from the firing of the first shot. His loyalty was clear, his zeal unquestionable. He had four soldiers and a policeman to his credit. He was born in the Falls and had never lived outside the district.
The children playing ball games and hopscotch on the street called to him. “Hullo, Pat,” they said, or “How’re’y, Mr. Powers?” Wasn’t he a hero in the Falls? The women on their doorsteps shouted, “Havin a smoke, Pat?” and, “Cuppa tea, Pat?” Didn’t they thank God the likes of him were here to keep them safe from the Orange?
And didn’t the boys scare the shit outa them anyway? Who wanted it in the knees?
Mary Connors the widow paused on her way down the street and tried to look casual.
“The night, Pat?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Trouble?”
“A wee bit—maybe.”
“I’m fizzin—ready to be corked.”
“If I can, Mary.”
She walked on, under the women’s attentive eyes. Anybody can give the time of day to one of the boys.
Powers didn’t look after her. How the hell can she expect me to come up to her house with a hard cock and do her or me any good when I’m in this sorta trouble, he wondered impatiently, and got his mind back to McManus.
What was McManus with his la-de-da ways and his Antrim Road manners? Sure he was only a student, a middle-class Catholic brought up on the Antrim Road among middle-class Protestants. It had taken him at least three years to decide to offer his services to the IRA. That implied doubt and argued a lack of ardor or conviction. He was argumentative, talked fancy, and questioned the judgment of the leadership. He wasn’t ghetto, he wasn’t workin class, he wasn’t safe. “Them,” said Clune of Ulster’s middle-class Catholics, “they’re just greedy fuckin Protestants that cross themselves.” Powers could depend on Clune in there. McManus finished his degree before he came to offer his services. That proved somethin. Ireland One Nation didn’t matter a damn to him. First, he got himself ready to take a good job when the Border was burned off the Irish map; after that he came to help with the burnin.
When McCandless opened the door and called Powers, his balance sheet was in good order.
But it wasn’t Clune who spoke. McCandless did the talking. “The purpose of the present policy of street assassinations,” he said in what to Powers was his pompous way, “is to make the Loyalists attack the Catholic districts so that we can keep the loyalty of the Catholics and tighten our grip on them. I don’t need to tell you that, Powers.”