The Whore-Mother

by Shaun Herron

“If ye want any porridge, McManus, y’ony have t’ask fer it” she said, and they took the bulb from its socket, left and locked the door.

  “They’re gonta kill us,” McCartin whimpered from the floor.

  “Yes,” McManus said.

  “What for?” It was a desperate little cry.

  “It would take me all day to tell you.”

  “I was afeared she was gonta cut my thing off,” he said. “Thons a terrible woman.” Then he said pathetically, “I’m starvin.”

  They starved for two more days, in two more houses and with eight more men. The boy’s head was covered with bald patches from some of which the scalp also had been torn. The next day they were taken back to the Markets. McManus had been beaten every day. McCartin’s face was pulp. The child no longer cried. He seemed to McManus to have stolen away into a voluntary coma. Sometimes he started in his semiconscious stupor and mumbled something. Twice McManus heard, “Ma ... Ma ... mammy,” and just before they were moved for the last time, “I wisht I was dead.” So did McManus.

  Back in the Markets the regimen was eased. But when they arrived and were taken upstairs the faces of cold and lurking hysteria were even more explicit. Three men came upstairs behind them. It was a slow climb. McManus had to shoulder the boy to the top. The men behind watched his struggle in satisfied silence.

  They were met on the landing by a small lean youth who in his middle-class mind McManus would formerly have called a corner-bay—a hanger-about at street corners. In the face the hysteria was hot, and silently screeching. He let McCartin pass, stood aside a little for McManus and said, “Stop where y’are.”

  “That’ll do, Shamus,” one of the men on the stairs said stiffly.

  “It was my brother’s face you kicked in, y’traitor cunt,” the small man said. It came out like air escaping from a tire.

  McManus was standing sideways to him, weak and light-headedly alert. He knew from the man’s stance what he was going to do, and when he swung at his belly, McManus shifted slightly and the knuckles grazed his stomach but the uncontrolled savagery of the swing took the man with it. He teetered on the top step, and dangled.

  McManus was past restraint. He kicked the suspended and slowly moving stomach and the man went out, spread, and fell on the stairs on his back. McManus jumped, both feet high and together, and landed on the extended belly below him. With his hands tied behind his back he could do nothing to save himself and went crashing forward onto the two men immediately below. The man behind them took the burden of bodies and crashed backwards. They were heaped at the bottom of the stairs, McManus on top.

  Yet there was no more violence. They unscrambled, lifted the man from the stairs, and over his screams one of them said to McManus, “You broke his fuckin back.”

  “I hope so.” He went up to the bedroom alone while they attended to their comrade who was taken away. Then the men brought food and untied them. When McManus had eaten, a man they had not seen before cleansed their cut faces and bathed their bleeding wrists. The man who did this was well dressed, he had pale long hands and knew what he was doing. He had to feed McCartin. He went away when he had finished with them. He didn’t speak all the time he was with them. But he didn’t at any time betray shock or offense at their condition. The other three men treated him with deference.

  The day that followed was a healing day. Their food was good. McCartin escaped into almost constant sleep. McManus announced that he had diarrhea and was allowed to go to the water closet when he said he needed to.

  He had a soft lead pencil. What he needed was paper and he couldn’t ask for it. Toilet paper was his only alternative and there was none in the water closet. There was a box nailed to the wall with cut-up squares of the Irish News in it. On this, during frequent visits to the water closet, he printed his letter to his sister, got it into its stamped envelope, and stowed it in his sock.

  His passivity was gone. He had made up his mind to run or die—maybe both. If he was going to die, he told himself, the initiative would be his, not theirs. Forgiveness, he decided, was a Christian but not an Irish virtue. With festering magnanimity he presented a modestly friendly front to his guards. They kept their silence and their distance.

  He wasted his time. On the third day back in the Markets, when his strength had increased and McCartin ceased to be a battered zombie and was once again a terrified child, Powers and Callaghan appeared.

  “You’re movin,” Powers said, full of command, and took him back to the Falls.

  The man with the good suit and the long pale hands came to see him twice in the next two days. He drew pus from cuts on his face, stitched some wounds, put medicinal tape on the ones that needed it, and came and went in silence.

  “You’re a doctor,” McManus said to him. Perhaps the man did not hear him.

  At nine on the second night, Powers said, “Bed. We’re workin the morrow. Up at six.”

  The time was now. McManus didn’t care what it was, or what they were going to make him do, so long as it got him outside. However slender the chance, he was going to take it. He slept. They had something in store for him. He was to be a patsy of some kind. It didn’t matter. One good crack at it in the open air was the most he could expect. He had to be ready for it. He slept soundly, resigned and ready. His composure surprised and pleased him.

  In the morning, Powers issued gray step-in overalls and gray peaked caps. On the breast pocket of the overalls a red circle had been embroidered and in the circle, a large M. The badges on the caps were the same. They were the uniforms of the vanmen from Marsh’s biscuit and cake factory on the Springfield Road.

  At eight they walked to the Falls Road and up it to three houses set back behind small railed gardens in the middle of a block of shops. Powers and McManus walked together, Callaghan behind. The third of these houses was the home of Dr. Brendan McDermott. His car was parked in the street. The keys were in the ignition. Callaghan got into the back seat. Powers held open the front passenger door for McManus and said, “Slide over and drive.”

  The doctor watched from behind his curtains as his car was stolen. Then he went back to bed. “I’ll report it at ten,” he said to his wife, “that’ll give them enough time.”

  “Want some coffee?” she said, and went to get it. The doctor propped his pillows and opened his paperback. Surgery at ten. Plenty of time. After coffee he might have the wife; last night he’d been too tired, but this morning he felt like it in an indifferent sort of way.

  If she’d let him. If she did, she’d lie there suffering like a stone nun. The thought put him off her; he’d go elsewhere for it this afternoon; the car and his wife were put out of his mind.

  McManus drove where he was told to drive; slowly, against the traffic going into the city.

  “Up the Springfield,” Powers said.

  Then he said, “Turn and park beyond Marsh’s factory.” It was a quarter to nine when they settled to watch the factory gates.

  “What is it this time, Powers?” McManus asked.

  “We’re makin a delivery.”

  “Where?”

  “Off the Loughside Motorway. To the worker’s canteen kitchen. The chemicals factory.”

  “When’s it timed for?”

  “Half-ten.”

  “That’s close. Who delivers it?”

  “You and me.”

  “What’s Callaghan doing?”

  “He’ll bring this car for the switch when we leave.”

  A delivery van pulled out of the factory gates at exactly nine o’clock. “Than’s Wee Jimmy,” Callaghan said.

  “Get in behind him and just follow him,” Powers said.

  McManus tucked it behind the delivery van. It led them down the Springfield Road, around a bend that hid them from the factory, then turned left off the road and headed through the housing estates back the way it had come. It picked up speed, left the outskirts of the city, and took a lane towards, then a bumpy track across the lower slopes of the Black Mountain. They
stopped in a dip that hid them from the houses in the lower distance and the road far to their right.

  The driver of the van got out and came grinning back to the car. His puck-face was creased by the lines of the irrepressible witling. He leaned on the door and spoke as a familiar to Powers. It was easy for him to lean on the door. His head at full stretch didn’t reach the top of the window frame. He was indeed, Wee Jimmy.

  “Pat,” he said. His grin was engagingly harmless.

  “Jimmy,” Powers said. It might have been a casual meeting on a highway.

  “Who’s yer man?” Jimmy said, and nodded at McManus.

  “McManus.”

  “You drivin?”

  McManus said, “Yes.”

  “Take her to the third door on the loadin ramp. The man ye want is Tommy Davison. All ye do is tell him I’m sick. They’ll give youse a trolley and ye take the case to the kitchen. Then ye come out and drive away. That’s all.” He grinned encouragement. “Tie me up, boys. An make me comfortable, for Jasus sake. I’m gonta be here for bloody hours.” He handed over his delivery book. The possibility of major hardship occurred to him. He glanced up at scattered white clouds moving sedately across the sky. “If it rains, I’ll get my deatha cold.” He winked at McManus. He was a witling all right. This was a great lark. He was here, remote on the Black Mountain. The half-shift at the chemical plant, down in the canteen for the tea break, was far away on the edge of the Lough. Out of sight. Out of mind. No connection between Loughside and Black Mountain. Not in Wee Jimmy’s mind. He could deliver at the Chemicals tomorrow, survey the ruin and the bloodstains and say to the survivors, “Holy Jasus. That’s fuckin awful.”

  “Ireland One Fuckin Nation,” Wee Jimmy said with glee before Powers put the tape over his mouth and propped him up behind a drystone wall.

  “See you the morrow, Jimmy,” Powers said, and patted his head. Jimmy nodded vigorously, his eyes glittering with amusement. “Away on,” Powers said, and shoved McManus towards the van.

  Wee Jimmy sat behind the wheel of his van on two thick hard cushions. McManus shoved them away to prevent his head pushing through the roof.

  “Joy Street,” Powers said, “like shit.”

  When they came out of Joy Street again the packing case, all properly marked like a case of Marsh’s products, was behind them in the van. It was a quarter to ten. Callaghan picked them up in the doctor’s car when they came through Divis Street and McManus watched him follow and watched him peel off for the Shore Road when he took the van into Duncrue Street and onto the Loughside Motorway.

  It was the widest—ten lane—and the shortest—two miles—high-speed motorway in Europe, built on stilts to serve a growing complex of industrial plants located close to the docks. The chemical plant was less than a mile down the motorway, on the left. McManus put his foot down. The skin of his neck was beginning to tingle. It was a quarter past ten when he turned down the ramp into the plant yard and pulled up the van at the loading platform. Then he saw a strange thing in the side mirror: Callaghan, in the doctor’s car, pulling up beyond the yard entrance. Callaghan was supposed to wait a mile beyond this point, on the Shore Road just off the Greencastle Interchange, where the van would be abandoned and the switch made. It was ten-twenty. He swung the van rear-on to the ramp and ran round to open the doors. A niiddle-aged man came forward with a long-tongued trolley.

  “Where’s Wee Jimmy the day?”

  “He’s sick. Are you Tommy Davison?”

  “Aye.”

  “Here’s your delivery note.”

  “What did somebody do to your gub?”

  “You can see.”

  The packing case was on the tongue. It weighed, McManus was sure, more than a hundred pounds and there were likely to be at least a hundred people in the cafeteria and a dozen in the kitchen when the case blew up—in about seven minutes.

  Powers was beside him. “Hurry it up,” he said, and jumped down from the platform.

  McManus took the shafts of the trolley and ran the case through the platform door. He was out of sight of Powers, in a shipping shed. Davison was just behind him. McManus grabbed him and pushed him to the wall.

  “There’s a hundred-pound bomb in that case,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, clear this shed and the canteen before half-ten. Run, man.”

  It was ten-twenty-five. He stood around the frame of the shed door and watched the doctor’s car roaring across the plant yard. Behind him he could hear men shouting, a herd running. He dashed across the platform and jumped down behind Powers as the doctor’s car stopped. When the door opened he rammed Powers through it and climbed in on top of him. The car swung in the yard and went tire-screaming around the plant to the Shore Road. Nobody spoke. Powers was breathing hard, working something out.

  “Tell me, Powers. How was I supposed to get out of there?” McManus said.

  “You’re out, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right.” But that was all and it wasn’t enough. “You weren’t waiting for me, you bastard.”

  They were passing the railway station at the end of York Street when the bomb went off. People stopped in the street, looking into the sky to watch for the smoke that told them where it was this time. When the cloud rose, black and billowing, they moved again, like figures in a movie that has been stopped for a moment, and quickly started. The car turned up Duncairn Gardens, crossed the Antrim Road into Cliftonville, and parked in the front yard of the Royal Academy. They left it there and walked out to the street into a car parked and waiting by the curb. In ten minutes they were back in Joy Street and the car that picked them up was on its way to be dumped.

  It had to be now, before they went into the house again. He had to get rid of his Marsh’s overalls. In these, on foot down in the city, he would be caught in minutes. Here, he could be shot in seconds.

  He stopped by the door of the house. “Powers,” he said, “I bloody nearly got trapped in that factory.”

  “You were as slow as an oul woman.”

  “Like bloody hell I was slow. But I’m still shaking and whether you like it or not, I’m going down to Machin’s shop for a packet of cigarettes. If you don’t like it you can shoot me in the back, you black bastard.” It was more than a month since he had been so angrily defiant. It might earn him a few yards’ start.

  He turned and walked back down the street. Mrs. Machin’s huckster’s shop was about fifty feet from the bus route.

  Powers stood watching him. McManus wasn’t supposed to be here at all. He was supposed to be among the dead in the kitchen at the Chemicals. Powers was still working it out as he watched him turn into Mrs. Machin’s. Something wasn’t right: about the timing; about the way McManus came off that loading platform. It should take him, Wee Jimmy told them when they planned it, a long five minutes to get the stuff to the kitchen. It should take him another couple of minutes to get out of the kitchen when the stuff was stacked. He hadn’t been away for more than ... how long? Two, three minutes altogether? He put his hand into his overall blouse, moved a few yards closer, and waited for McManus to come out of Mrs. Machin’s wee shop.

  “Johnny, how are ye?” Mrs. Machin said to McManus and laughed all through her bosomy bulk.

  McManus stripped down the overalls. “A packet of Players, Mrs. Machin,” he said, and hauled the overalls over his shoes.

  “Where’re we gonta do it, Johnny? On the counter?” Perhaps Powers heard her laughter.

  He pulled the letter from his sock. “Mrs. Machin, for the love of Christ, post it for me. Please.” He pushed it across the counter and it fell to the floor behind it.

  She picked it up. “That’s yer fancy wee sister, isn’t it, Johnny?”

  “It is. Please, Mrs. Machin.”

  “Yer down, are ye?”

  “Yes.”

  “They bate ye.”

  “Yes. Please, Mrs. Machin.”

  “You’ve not been informin, have ye, Johnny?”

  “Before God, no.”

&nb
sp; “Away on,” she said, and stuffed the letter between her huge breasts.

  “I’ll have to go running. Powers is outside.”

  “That big cock. God help ye, chile, an give ye strong legs.”

  McManus opened the door and came back to the counter. He was trembling. In seconds he might be very still. He left the little shop in full stride, weaving for the bus route. He heard Powers’ shots and his pounding boots, but he didn’t look round. The road and the corner and the crowds were a few strides away and a handgun was an unreliable weapon. Maybe it was useless (except in the movies) in the hand of a moving gunman trying to hit a moving target. He turned the corner at full belt and hit an old man chest on and went over him, rolling. He rose rolling and galloped into the traffic. Where Powers was he didn’t know till he heard him yelling, “Stop him! Stop him!” Nobody tried. People on the street don’t try to stop big charging young men. How can it be done without getting hurt? A double-decker bus passed him and he jumped for the rail and swung onto the platform. Powers was in the middle of the road, looking after the bus. He turned and ran again, to Mrs. Machin’s little shop.

  FIVE

  MRS. MACHIN was leaving the shop when Powers reached the door.

  He rammed a harsh fist into one of her immense soft breasts and said, “G’on back in, missus.”

  She backed in, her hands against her bosoms, her mouth hanging open.

  “What’d he want?”

  “Players, Mr. Powers.” She wheezed it, hardly able to breathe. Her eyes were wide.

  “What’d he want, you fat bitch?”

  “Players, Mr. Powers.”

  “Where’s his overalls?”

  “Under the counter.”

  “Get them out.”

  She gave them to him. There was nothing in the breast pocket. He threw them back behind the counter.

  “What the hell did you think he was doin when he took them off?”

  “I didn’t think. He went out that fast.”

  “What’d he tell you?”

  “Nothin, Mr. Powers.” Her hands were tight against the cleavage of her breasts.