‘Is.’
He tries to barge past, but she’s got long arms and she is fast on her feet. ‘You’re a little liar, Vincent Connolly.’
‘Am not.’
‘Are. How would you know if the dress rehearsal went well? How would you know dress rehearsal finished early, when you missed the dress rehearsal?’ She adds spitefully, ‘It’s a shame, really. Miss Taggart says you make a lovely little dancer.’
He feels the familiar burn of humiliation and outrage at the intrusion. She’s no right to talk to his class teacher like he’s just a little kid. He sees the gleam of triumph in her eyes and hates her for it.
Cathy is fourteen and attends the convent school on Mount Pleasant; she’ll be at the big parade, too. But while she gets to keep her dignity, playing the recorder, Vincent is expected to make a tit of himself, prancing about in an animal mask. In an animal mask in front of the Queen.
‘Get lost, Cathy.’
Cathy pulls a sad face. ‘Now Miss Taggart says you won’t be able to be in the pageant.’
‘You can have my mask, if you like,’ he says. ‘Be an improvement.’ Silly moo doesn’t know she’s just made his day. He makes a break for his room, and she gives way; it doesn’t occur to him that she let him pass. He’s thinking he’ll buy that Chopper bike with the money in the bag, take his mum shopping, buy her a whole new outfit. He’ll get his dad a carton of ciggies – the good ones in the gold packs. As for Cathy, she can whistle. No – he thinks, shoving open his bedroom door – I‘ll get her a paper bag – a big one to fit over her big fat ugly head. No, a tarantula – no, two tarantulas – no, a whole nest of tarantulas. Six of them – a dozen – big enough to eat a bird in one gulp; evil creatures with bone-crushing jaws and fat bodies and great goggly eyes on stalks. He’ll make a cosy den for them under her pillow and stay awake until she comes up to bed – a whole hour later than him, by the way, cos Cathy’s a big girl–
He loses the thread of his fantasy. His bed has been carefully remade, the blankets tucked in. The dirty linen he’d used to camouflage the bag is folded neatly at the foot of the bed. And the bag has gone. He feels its absence like a hole in the centre of him.
Horrified, he whirls to face the door, but Cathy has slipped quietly away. Her bedroom door is shut. He boots it open.
Cathy is sitting cross-legged on her bed, the bag in front of her.
‘You bloody–’
‘Thief?’ she says, in that pert way that drives him crackers. ‘Takes one to know one, doesn’t it, Vincent?’
‘You give it back!’
She puts a finger to her lips and cocks her head. The front door slams. It’s Dad. She whispers, ‘Anybody home?’
Their father’s voice booms out, a second after, like an echo in reverse: ‘Anybody home?’
Her eyes sparkle with malicious good humour. ‘What would Dad say if he knew you’d been thieving?’
Vincent clenches his fists, tears of impotent rage pricking his eyes. He considers rushing her, but Dad would hear and come to investigate.
‘Give me it. It’s mine.’
‘Now, Vincent, we both know that’s not true.’ She plucks at the zip and he wants to fling himself at her, to claw it from her grasp.
She shouts, ‘Is that you, Dad?’ putting on her girly voice just for him.
Their father’s footsteps clump up the stairs. ‘How’s my girl?’ he says.
‘Just getting changed.’ She raises her eyebrows, and reluctantly, Vincent back-heels the door shut.
Their father passes her door and they hear a heavy sigh as he slumps onto the bed to take off his shoes.
Cathy is smiling as she unzips the bag, and Vincent wants to kill her.
First, she looks blank, then puzzled, then worried.
‘You can turn off the big act,’ he whispers furiously.
Only she doesn’t look like she’s acting. And when she finally turns her face to him, her expression is one of sick horror.
‘Oh, Vincent,’ she whispers.
His stomach flips. The anticipated wealth – the bundles of cash, the glittering treasures of his imagination – all crumble to dust.
Carefully, reverently, she lifts a bible and a set of rosary beads out of the bag. The beads are dark, solid wood; a serious rosary, a man’s rosary. She holds it up so the silver crucifix swings, and he stares at it, almost hypnotised.
She reaches into the carry-all again, and brings out a small package, wrapped in brown paper. Three words are printed in neat block capitals on the front of it: ‘FOR FATHER O’BRIEN’.
They stare at it for a long moment.
‘Vinnie, you robbed a priest.’
‘He isn’t,’ Vincent whispers, his voice hoarse. He feels sweat break out on his forehead.
Wordlessly, she holds up the rosary, the Jersusalem Bible.
‘He can’t be – he was wearing normal clothes.’
‘Shh!’ She looks past him to the bedroom door, and he realises he had been shouting. They hold their breath, listening for their father. There’s no sound, and after a moment she whispers: ‘He might be on his holidays.’
‘He was wearing a leather jacket, Cath.’
She looks into his face, absorbing the information, but her eyes stray again to the parcel, as if pulled by a magnet. ‘So, maybe it’s his brother, or a friend. It doesn’t matter Vinnie: that parcel is addressed to Father O’Brien. There’s no getting away from it – you robbed a priest.’ She bites her lip. ‘And that’s a mortal sin.’
Cathy is in the Legion of Mary, and she’s been on two retreats with the sisters of Notre Dame. She always got an A in Religious Education – so if Cathy says it’s a mortal sin, he knows for sure that the Devil is already stoking the fires of hell, chucking on extra coals, ready to roast him.
‘I’ll go to confession, I’ll do penance – I’ll do a novena,’ he gabbles, trying to think of something that will appease. ‘I’ll do the Nine First Fridays–’
The shocked look on his sister’s face makes him stop. But the Nine First Fridays are the most powerful prayer he knows: a special devotion to the Sacred Heart, getting up at six o’clock on the first Friday each month for nine solid months to attend early mass and receive the Holy Eucharist – surely that will wipe his sin away?
‘Vincent,’ she says, gently, ‘There’s no penance for a mortal sin – and you can’t receive Holy Communion with a big black stain on your soul: it would be like inviting Jesus into your home with the devil sitting by the fire in your favourite armchair.’
When he was little, Vincent’s mum and dad both had to work, and Cathy would take care of him after school, in the holidays – even weekends, if Mum got the chance of overtime. Between the ages of five and eight, Cathy had been his minder, his teacher, his best mate, the maker-up of games and adventures. But he’d got bigger, and by his ninth birthday he wanted his independence. He became rebellious, and she was offended and hurt and that made her superior and sarcastic. Now, feeling the Devil squatting deep inside him, chiselling away at his soot-blackened soul, he feels small again, frightened and lost, and he wishes she would take charge.
‘What’m I gonna do, Cath?’
She stares at the neat brown package as if it’s radioactive.
‘Vinnie…’ She frowns, distracted, like she’s doing a difficult sum in her head. ‘There’s only one way to get let off a mortal sin.’ She turns her eyes on him, and they are so filled with fear that Vincent is seized by a terrible dread.
‘What d’you mean, “it’s gone"?’
The man in the leather jacket is standing in a phonebox, opposite the clock tower of the university’s Victoria Building. The quarter chimes have sounded and the clock’s gilt hands read six thirty-two; he should be in position by now. He closes his eyes. ‘Gone, vanished. Stolen.’
‘You lost it.’ His unit commander’s voice is hard, nasal, contemptuous.
‘I thought it would be safe in the car.’
‘Oh, well, that’s all right then – anyone can
make a mistake.’
‘It was well hidden.’
‘Not that well, eh?’
The man fixes his gaze on the gleaming face of the clock, willing the hands to move, but the silence seems to last an eternity.
‘When?’
‘Sometime between six last night and five this morning.’
‘Twelve hours you left it?’
‘Wouldn’t it draw attention if I checked the damn thing every five minutes?’
‘Watch your tone.’
The man grips the phone receiver hard. The sun has been up since four-thirty and the temperature in the glass box must be eighty degrees, but he daren’t ease the door open for air.
‘Is it set to go?’
‘It’s on a twenty-four-hour timer, like you said. It’ll trigger automatically at three this afternoon.’ He takes a breath to speak again, but the voice on the line interrupts:
‘Shut up – I’m thinking.’
He waits in obedient silence.
‘Whoever took it must’ve dumped it, otherwise you’d be locked up in a police cell by now.’
‘That’s what I–’
‘I’m speaking, here.’
He clamps his mouth shut so fast he bites his tongue.
‘Even so, you’d better not go back to the hotel. Leave the car, catch a bus to Manchester. I’ll have someone pick you up.’
‘I have a weapon. I could still complete my mission.’
‘And how close d’you think you’d get?’
‘I could mingle with the crowd. They won’t even see me.’
A snort of derision. ‘You’ve a whiff of the zealot about you, lad. They’ll sniff you out in a heartbeat, so they will – be all over you like flies on shit.’ The man listened to the metallic harshness of the voice, his eyes closed. ‘This’s what you get when you send a dalta to do a soldier’s job.’
That stings – he’s no raw recruit. ‘Haven’t I proved myself a dozen times?’
‘Not this time, son – and this is the one that counts.’
‘It’s a setback – I’ll make up for it.’
‘You will. But not in Liverpool; not today.’
‘Look, I checked it out – the approach roads are closed, but there’s a bridge–’
‘What d’you think you’ll hit with a thirty-eight calibre service revolver from a bloody bridge?’
He wants to say he’s been practising – that he can hit a can from thirty yards, but that would sound childish – a tin can isn’t a moving target, and it takes more than a steady hand to look another human being in the face and fire a bullet into them. So he says nothing.
‘No,’ his superior says. ‘No. They’d catch you. And make no mistake – they would shoot you like a dog.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Only fools want to be martyrs, son. And even if you don’t care, I do. I care that we’ve spent money on equipment and you let a scouse scallywag walk away with it. I care that security will be stepped up for every official visit after today – even if you walk away right now. Because there’s the small matter of a package that will turn up at three p.m.’ He sighed angrily. ‘We’ll just have to pray to God the thieving bastard left it somewhere useful, like the city centre.’
He books his ticket for one o’clock and walks down to the docks to clear his head. They are still adding the finishing touches to the stands when he stops by the tunnel approach on his way back to the coach station. He joins a group of kids gawping through the wire mesh at the chippies hammering the final nails in the platform. He can see the plaque above the tunnel, draped in blue cloth. This is where the Queen will make her speech. A team of men are sweeping the road leading to the tunnel entrance and a dozen more are raking smooth the bare soil of the verges.
Attendance is by invitation only, but a man dressed in overalls and looking like he has a job to do might pass unchallenged and find a good spot under the stands. Only what would be the point? Without the device, it would be hopeless: even if he did manage to remain undiscovered, he would have to abandon his hiding place, walk out in front of thousands of people, place himself close enough to aim his pistol and fire.
Police are already clustered in threes and fours along the newly metalled road; there will be sharpshooters along the route – and true enough, they would shoot him like a dog.
Father O’Brien hadn’t been anyone important. He didn’t have the ear of the bishop and he wasn’t destined for Rome; he hadn’t a scholarly brain nor a Jesuit’s mind to play the kind of politics it would take to elevate him above parish priest.
But he was a good man. He came from the fertile chalklands of Wexford, around Bantry Bay, where they spoke in softer tones, and faces were more given to smile. He liked a drink, and would stand you a pint if he fell into conversation with you at the Crown Bar, but he wouldn’t hesitate to tell a man when he’d had enough, and he’d tipped more than one out onto the street before he’d drunk his fill. The man’s father and the priest had come to blows over that; he’d taken to drinking after he lost his job on the shipyard. Father O’Brien had kicked his da out of that bar every night for a fortnight, until on the last day, his da got murderous mad. He swung wildly at Father O’Brien, out on the street, but the priest ducked and dodged, light on his feet, deflecting and blocking, until at last, dizzy and exhausted, his da had sunk to the pavement and wept.
‘Ten thousand men work at the Belfast shipyard, Father,’ he’d said, his words sloshing out of his mouth. ‘And just four hundred Catholics among them. You’ve a good education: can you tell me what makes a Protestant better at lugging sacks of grain than a Catholic? Is there some calculation that adds up the worth of a man and subtracts a measure of humanity because he was born a Catholic?’
Father O’Brien didn’t have an answer, but he sat with the boy’s father on the kerb, until he’d raged and wept the anger out of him, and then the priest walked him home. He knew this to be the gods-honest truth, for the man had seen it with his own eyes, as a boy of fourteen.
Father O’Brien didn’t preach taking up arms against the oppressor. He wasn’t affiliated to the IRA, nor even Sinn Féin. ‘My only affiliation,’ he would say, ‘is to God Almighty; my only obligation is to my flock.’ Which was how he came to die. Not in a hail of bullets, but in the stupidest, most pointless way imaginable. A macho squaddie – a bad driver trying to impress his oppos – lost control of his vehicle turning a corner. Father O’Brien had been visiting a house in the next street, delivering the last sacraments to an old man dying of the cancer. The armoured vehicle skidded, clipped the opposite kerb, spun one hundred-and-eighty degrees, and smashed into the end of a terrace decorated with a painting of the Irish tricolour. Father O’Brien was pinned against the wall and died instantly.
He had been a gentle man, and a modest one, yet the violence and futility of his death had made a spectacle of him: a thing to point to as evidence of the British Army’s lack of respect; a dread event for old men to sigh and shake their heads over; a lurid tale for children to whisper in the playground, of the priest who was cut in half by an armoured car. Father O’Brien was no longer remembered for the good he’d done in life – only for the notoriety of his death.
The man had meant to deliver a message: that Father O’Brien’s death would not go unpunished, and in failing in his mission he had failed Father O’Brien.
Vincent and Cathy stand in the porch. It’s just shy of seven o’clock, and the sun is shining hot through the top light of the front door. Cathy’s face is pale.
‘You know what you have to do?’
He nods, but he has a lump in his throat as big as a bottle-washer ollie, so he can’t speak.
She straightens his tie and combs her fingers through his hair, staring solemnly down at him. He doesn’t squirm; in truth, he wouldn’t complain if she took him by the hand and walked with him down the street in broad daylight, because he does not want to do this alone.
She seems taller, today. Grown up.
&
nbsp; ‘I’ll tell Mum you had to go early to rehearsals.’
He frowns, wishing he hadn’t skipped rehearsals the day before, thinks that dancing in an animal mask seems small humiliation, compared with what he has to do now.
‘I’ll tell Miss Taggart you’ve got a tummy bug, in case it takes a while, so you’ll have to make yourself scarce for the rest of the day. All right?’
He nods again.
She hands him the small blue carry-all and blinks tears from her eyes.
He hefts the bag and squares his shoulders, setting off down the street like a soldier off to war.
The car is parked outside the hotel, but he waits an hour, and still the man hasn’t come out. Another half hour, and the manager appears on the doorstep.
‘What’re you up to?’ he asks.
‘Is the man here – the one that owns the Morris Minor?’
The manager is broad faced, with small eyes. He jams his hands in his trouser pockets and says, ‘What’s it to you?’
He’s wearing grey flannel trousers and a matching waistcoat to hide his soft belly; Vincent reckons he could easy out-run him, but his great sin burns his soul like acid, so he stills his itchy feet, and composes his face into an approximation of innocence.
‘Got something for him.’
The manager lifts his chin. ‘That it?’ He holds a hand out for the bag. ‘I’ll make sure he gets it.’
Vincent tightens his grip on the carry-all and takes a step back. ‘Is he in?’
‘Went out early,’ the man says. ‘Missed his breakfast.’
‘I’ll wait.’
‘Not here, you won’t – you’re making my guests nervous, loitering outside.’
‘You can’t stop me. It’s a free country.’ He feels a pang of guilt: he promised Cathy he’d mind his manners.
‘We’ll see what the police’ve got to say about that.’ The man narrows his eyes. ‘Anyway, shouldn’t you be in school?’ His small eyes fasten on Vincent’s blazer pocket. He’s forgotten to pin the SFX badge over the real one. He clamps his hand over his pocket and the man comes at him, pitching forwards as he comes down the steps. Vincent turns and flees.
Best Eaten Cold and Other Stories Page 7