The Whore-Mother

by Shaun Herron

  Powers reached for the neck of her dress and dragged on it. It held. “What’ve you got in there?”

  “Nothin, Mr. Powers.”

  “ ‘Nothin, Mr. Powers.’ ” He gripped the cloth with both hands and wrenched. It ripped and two great pale breasts and McManus’s letter spilled out. She stood with her breasts naked, her nipples like the rear lights of a car at night, and stared at her guilt on the floor. She was suffocating in fat and fear.

  “Pick it up,” Powers said.

  She picked it up and as she rose, her breasts dangling, he swung and hit them with the hard flat of his hand. “Holy Mary ...” she began desperately, and he hit them again. “You fat oul hoare,” he yelled at her and snatched the letter. “His sister, now. And you were gonta post it for him.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Powers.” Her mind was frozen.

  “You’re sorry. Jasus Christ!” The hysteria screeched in his throat and his thick knuckles beat her breasts, and her arms when she tried to cover them. He hit her again, in the face, and something broke in her. Like a bear on its hind legs, feet apart, arms out and fingers clawing, she howled and charged and in his surprise reached his face. Her nails dug and she drew them down, lifting skin to the line of his jaw, and closed her grip on his jawbone. Then he hooked her and the big woman went down, hanging on for a moment, dragging his head down and his mouth wide open. But her senses faded, her grip loosened, her legs collapsed, and her immense body crumbled. She did not get up.

  He was blind now, insane with rage. He smashed the eggs on her counter, swept her bottled sweeties to the floor and kicked the bottles to bits, tore down the shelving and wrecked the little shop. He pawed like a dog scratching for a bone in the drawers behind the counter and found the white-fluid pen with which she advertised her bargains on her poor shop window. Out in the street he printed on the window,

  INFORMER

  ran inside for the Marsh’s overalls, and had to jump over the inert mass of compassionate blubber on the floor. Then he set out snorting like a frightened horse to find Clune.

  “You opened it,” Clune said gently. “That wasn’t your first mistake. You made a balls of the Mavis McGonigal operation and lost a man to a limpin wee woman with a shotgun that kicked her onto her arse. You let the same oul woman fill the arses of half the women on the estate w’shot. Your job this time was to execute a man we can’t trust and while you were doin it, you were to get as many Protestant Vanguard and Ulster Volunteers as a hundred pounds of gelignite could kill. The fuckin Chemicals is fulla them. All you got was a despatch shed—y’didn’t even make sure the bloody bomb was planted right. And you didn’t execute McManus. He’s out where he can talk, about men and houses and bomb factories, and you couldn’t even hit him on the street. Then you bate the hell outa this Machin woman on your own initiative and branded her without authority as an informer. We make them decisions! She’s shown her big black and blue diddies t’every woman on the street and every time you walk down it, they see what she did t’your face. She’s makin it sound as if she bate the shit outa you and the whole bloody street gave her the money to fix her shop that every week they give t’us for the cause. And then you opened McManus’s letter without authority.” Clune was silent for a moment. The strain of restraint was telling on him. His hands opened and closed. His middle-tone voice was high and tight when he spoke again. “If we had many like you we’d fuckin-well be off the streets in a week!”

  To the three men standing sternly behind Powers, he said, “Take’m down to the Markets and keep’m there till we want to see him—if we want to see him.”

  “Sir,” Powers began.

  “Shut your gub!”

  The prisoner was taken away, stubbornly erect. The court adjourned and its members relaxed their formal and official posture.

  They got a bottle of John Jameson from under the kitchen sink. All three preferred Scotch or Bushmills, but in one another’s company, and certainly on a security matter, it was imperative that they drink John J. It was made in the Republic of Ireland, its purchase offered no support to the economy of the occupied and oppressed North, and there was in any case the importance of symbolic gestures, even when they were made in secret. In public they were important as propaganda, in secret they were a part of a program of autosuggestion.

  Over their glasses of John J. they drew conclusions from McManus’s instructions in his letter to his sister. He wanted the family car. It was to be left at a specified point on the Limestone Road. It would be found by her in the car park at the Muckamore Abbey Hospital, just outside Antrim town. He wanted the £200 savings his father kept for him. Since Aldergrove Airport was out Antrim way, that was where he was headed. It was the fastest and shortest way out of the country. McManus was for England.

  But he wanted also the old clothes he used when he painted the garage, and his walking boots, and his camping gear with the pup tent. The stuff was to be in the trunk of the car. That didn’t necessarily mean England. It looked more like the hills of Ireland.

  Or youth hostels in Scotland or the English Lakes? Fly from Aldergrove to Prestwick? Then he could go north or south, to the Scottish highlands or the English Lake District. Hostels, with a tent? Well, you couldn’t always get into a hostel and he’d have to sleep in the open. That’s why he wants the tent.

  Clune listened to the talk. What the hell does it matter where he thinks he’s going? He’s going to the Abbey Hospital—that’s the one thing that looks certain.

  So the letter to his sister is printed in pencil on bum-paper; print the address on a new envelope, in pencil, post it, and wait for him at Muckamore Abbey Hospital.

  A watch on his house and his sister? Jasus, yes. Wherever she goes, whomever she sees—she’s got to be under the eyes of watchers till her light goes out at night. Watch the car too, once it gets to the Limestone. Wee boys from the junior IRA would be the best during the day and women at night, with a couple of wee boys or wee girls as runners.

  Where would McManus go while he was waiting for his sister to act on his instructions?

  What the fuckin hell did it matter where he went or was? Clune sometimes lost patience with his comrades. None of them was of his level of intelligence. He often wondered how they would succeed at anything if he wasn’t there. Your man’s goin to Muckamore, isn’t he? They’d wait for him there, and if there was any change the watchers would know it and report and the treacherous bastard couldn’t get far.

  The bottle was three-quarters down. They had everything clear. McManus was dependin on his sister. He didn’t know they knew that. They had the eyes. That’s one thing Powers did right. There wasn’t much they missed. It was McManus who was runnin blind—and frightened. Set the watch. Send the letter. Wait and search at the same time. Get done with him. Wee boys and women and girls could do it, all but the killin. Meanwhile, there was a war on and it had to be got on with.

  McManus knew where he was going. He sat where he could see through the platform of the bus and watched the traffic coming behind. If they’d drummed up a car there’d be more than one man in it and they’d be watching the bus as other drivers and passengers never did. But the cars he could see from his perch on the back seat had only the drivers in them.

  A frightening thought occurred to him—that they might somehow have gone ahead of him, and were waiting where he intended to leave the bus, at Castle Junction. He jumped from the platform between stops and walked and ran and trotted all the way to the Salvation Army hostel.

  For half an hour he watched the street from a doorway opposite and saw nothing that suggested the hostel had ever entered their minds. It was Protestant. It was strange. Only the poor had knowledge of or dealings with the Salvation Army. They would give a lot of thought to where he would go. They would take his background into account. The Salvation Army was not part of it. They would surely conclude that he would hide among his old Protestant friends in some middle-class district. He bolted nonetheless for the front door of the Sally Ann and w
as confused that the woman at the desk was young and pretty with the sort of tranquility in her face he expected only in the faces of good nuns.

  He was twenty-two, running for his life from men he had joined in a spasm of ardor and anger and had learned to despise and had not betrayed, and she smiled as if there was nothing odd or desperate or dangerous about him and as if there were no plasters on his battered face.

  She said, “Hullo. It’s nice to see you. Can I be of any help?”

  He didn’t know what to call her. Sister? It was better not to call her anything. Suddenly, for no reason that he could account for and at the instant didn’t try to, he was aware that he was supposed to be dead now and out of the way, and was alive. He was staring hard at the woman.

  “Is there something wrong? Can I help you?”

  “Could I have a room here?” he said. “Miss.”

  He saw the way her head seemed to dip and her face came forward a little, then lifted up towards him as she smiled and said, “A bed?” It was a shy sort of movement and also a kindly modification of his expectations.

  “Anything,” he said. “I....” It isn’t easy for young middle-class Ulstermen to do what North Americans of the same sort do with the ease and acceptance of Egyptian bazaar hagglers or Billingsgate fishwives. “I ... have hardly any money.” It was difficult to say.

  “Neither have I,” she said. “Maybe we’re both lucky.”

  “Yes,” he said, and watched her open a big book. “Would you sign the register?” She turned it round to him and held out a pen.

  He took it, scrambling in his head for a name. Tommy Davison was the first one that came and he stopped it. It seemed to block the exits from his mind. He leaned down over the book, turning the pen in his fingers, roving, over books, records, athletes ... records? Somebody sent him once a recording of the Bethlehem Bach Choir, conductor, Ivor Jones. He wrote Ivor Jones. He had an American cousin who said he knew him. “Ivor Jones,” he said, and turned the book back to her and laid down the pen.

  She read it and put a number after his name and said with a rising inflection, “You’ve been in an accident.” She was looking at his hands, not at his face, but she was thinking of his face, he was sure, not of the cuts and bruises the chair-leg made on his hands. He said nothing. “Come. I’ll show you.” He followed her upstairs.

  It was a large dormitory, with twenty-four narrow iron-framed beds. “That’s yours in the far left-hand corner. Number one. Is that all right?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “The place fills up,” she said, and gave him a key and turned to leave him. “That’s for your locker. It’s under the bed.”

  He walked up the long floor between the beds thinking, “Clean. Who else comes here? Derelicts? Drunk sailors who miss their ships?” When a woman’s voice said, “Mr. Jones,” he walked on. Then she was at his elbow. “Mr. Jones?” That was him. He couldn’t hide his surprise. “Are you hungry?” she said.

  He hadn’t had time to think about that sort of thing. Now that he took time, she watched him asking himself, and said, “I could get you something.” She really was pretty, and restful like a good nun.

  “Yes,” he said, “I am hungry. If it wouldn’t be any bother....”

  “No bother at all. Put your things in your locker under your.... Oh, did you leave them somewhere?”

  Hadn’t she noticed before that he came empty-handed? “Miss?” he said awkwardly.

  “Yes?”

  “All I have is twenty-five pence.”

  She took a little change purse from her pocket and looked in it. “We have fifty pence between us,” she said. “Come on down to the office.”

  He hadn’t noticed the little chapel when he came to the dormitory. Going back, he looked right into it. Impulse took him in. He crossed himself, kneeled behind a chair, and offered thanks for deliverance, crossed himself again and came out to the corridor. She was waiting.

  “Eat, now?”

  “Thank you, miss.”

  “We’ll go into the office.”

  It was a little glass room beside the front desk. She told him to sit down. He watched the entrance hall with growing uneasiness. If any of them came in here, searching, he was trapped in this glass house. The only way in or out of it was the door into the hall and onto their guns. They could do it here. They would do it here.

  She unwrapped a brown-paper package of sandwiches and did not appear to watch him. He watched the front door, his imagination flying high. “I keep these to nibble on,” she said, and gave him one. Ham. He wasn’t hungry now. Coming here was a mistake. Into a trap. He ought to have kept going. Phoned his sister from a call box. No. Now that he’d run for it, they’d have somebody watching her. Yes, and God Almighty, he hadn’t thought of that. They’d watch every move his parents and his sister made and when they brought the car to the Limestone, Powers would know it. They would come after him with tireless malice. Wasn’t the last murder arising out of the Civil War committed in 1969—almost fifty years after? Was it a son avenging a father he’d never seen? They were like that, down the generations.

  “Eat,” she said, looking the other way.

  He bit the sandwich. It was tasteless. He chewed at it and swallowed and choked.

  “If I can be of any help,” she said, looking directly into his face. “Sometimes there’s something....”

  He bit again on the sandwich. It took time and prevented talk. It was as much of a trap up in that dormitory as it was in this glass box.

  She said, “I’m not prying. You’re a Catholic, aren’t you?”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Protestants don’t cross themselves in chapel.”

  “Am I not allowed in?”

  “Religion is no qualification here. Only need.”

  He chewed dully on the sandwich, watching the hall.

  “I was in South Africa when the blacks rioted in Port Elizabeth and ate the two nuns,” she said.

  He looked at her, puzzled. Why did she say a strange thing like that? She looked a lot younger than she was. So did the good nuns. He could see, now. She was a lot older. He remembered reading about the two nuns the blacks ate. He remembered it because his political science professor had pointed out that the two nuns were among the best friends of the Africans who ate them. “Either the blacks were pagans who believed they could digest the nuns’ virtue—or it’s unwise to make friends of the blacks,” the professor said. He remembered it also because Catholic martyrs weren’t eaten anymore, their priest had pointed out: killed, jailed, hanged, tortured, crucified in one place or another, but not eaten. What am I supposed to say to her? he wondered.

  “I remember the next day sitting waiting for them to come for us. We were their good friends. So were the nuns. We became former friends. They ate their former friends.”

  He didn’t expect talk like that from the Sally Anns. They thumped tambourines, blew trombones and trumpets, and sang on street corners. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t care at the moment whom the blacks ate in Port Elizabeth.

  “I felt the way you look,” she said quietly.

  “What? I beg your pardon?”

  “I’m not prying,” she said.

  “No.” What am I supposed to say now? he wondered. He was leaving here, by God. But where was he going?

  “You’re a Catholic, you’ve been very badly beaten, you haven’t a thing, not even a razor, you’re very frightened, and you’re hiding with no money in what a lot of people think of as a Protestant doss house. Would you like some tea?”

  “No. No. No thank you.” Her little catalogue was dinning in his ears.

  “So you’re not running from Protestants.”

  He set eyes on the woman half an hour ago and she had it worked out. If he was that easy to spot he hadn’t long to live.

  “You’re not the first to come here,” she said in her gently persistent way. “Some of them accepted help. Three of them didn’t. We read about them—black hood
s....”

  “Jesus Christ.” He put the half-eaten sandwich on the desk. He thought he was going to throw up what he’d eaten. He could see them and hear them. He could feel their lurking cold hysteria and their righteous savagery.

  “You poor boy. If we can help....”

  Help. What could these people do? Did they train, carry guns, make careful plans, shoot with ease and without scruple? “What could you do?” he said almost too softly to be heard. It wasn’t really a question. It was a whisper of desperation, or despair. They’d trained him to use a gun. He would use one if he had to fight for his life. He didn’t have one to fight with.

  It would be a dog’s death.

  “How do I know,” she said, “till I know what you need?”

  “They might come here,” he said.

  “They have come here,” she said. “Slept here, searching.”

  “You knew that and didn’t turn them in?”

  “And have gunfights in the hostel? And have them blow the place up? Then whom could we help?”

  “They’ll come here,” he said. His stomach was vapor.

  “Do you want help?”

  “Oh, Jesus, yes, yes, yes.”

  “Then come with me.” She pressed a button on the desk and led him away.

  He followed her weakly, looking over his shoulder. They climbed the stairs, past the chapel and the dormitory, up a flight of back stairs to a small attic landing, and into a little apartment at the back of the building. “This is our home,” she said, and at the expression on his face, “my husband and I live here. He’s a Major....”

  “Major....” Yes. They had ranks. Everything scared him now. He had wounded a major in the shoulder, up the Falls. What would she do if she knew that?

  It was a very simple place, uncomfortable in the overcrowded fashion of what he called the upper working class. The armchair she pointed him to was hard-packed; its arms and back were not quite in the right places, or at quite the right angles, and the cover on the round table in the middle of the room was sateen with a picture of the Holy City printed on it, and tassels hanging from its edges all the way round.