Beyond Absolution

by Cora Harrison

  ‘Jimmy!’ He screamed the boy’s name again, but this time a mouthful of water choked him and he spluttered. He felt himself sinking. He could do nothing. The water had captured him and there would be no help for him. He felt the weight of his heavy leather boots pull him down. He had never learned to swim and did not know what he should do. He tried to kick, but his legs felt as though weighted with lead. His woollen great coat, his uniform, his shining boots, all of the things that his mother was so proud of would now be the means of killing him.

  The thought of his mother, though, roused him. He roared the name of Jimmy again and thought, through the water that bubbled in his ear canal, that he caught a faint roar of sound from the crowds above. This encouraged him and he tried to kick again.

  But the movement filled his boots with water. His legs pulled him down, down underneath the stinking green slime. He struggled desperately, frantically, flailing his arms, trying to force them upwards as though the river was solid and he could grasp its strings of water weed and pull himself free by hauling on them.

  Once again he sank.

  Three times, he said as he surfaced once more. Someone had told him that once. A man can only sink three times and after that he drowns. Or did he drown on the third sinking? He tilted his chin and tried to breathe, a spout of water gushed from his mouth. His boots were pulling him back down. They felt as though they were filled with lead instead of just water.

  He would give up, he thought. He had a vague feeling of sorrow about his mother left all alone and about little Jimmy whom he had failed to save. He should have sent him home by himself. The boy would have been safer without him. He had done everything wrong. It was easy to let go and to drown there in the river water. He turned his face towards the spire of the Holy Trinity Church, reaching high above the river and breathed a last prayer that his mother would be all right without him, that the God to whom she prayed every day would comfort her and would send friends to her. He sank below the river again, trying to remember the words for a last act of contrition.

  But then he rose again. That would be the third time. But as the thought crossed his mind he saw something bobbing up from the murky waters of the river.

  Suddenly he was invigorated. Suddenly he knew what he should do. How could he not have thought of it? A barrel, he thought, will float.

  There was one not far from him. He could see it now, bobbing drunkenly on the water. It would have struck the overhanging stone parapet as it fell. The Beamish porter would be leaking out, would leave the barrel buoyant. Ideas floated mistily through his head and he prayed, watching the barrel, knowing that only minutes of life were left to him.

  The tide had turned and the drag of the water was drawing the barrel towards him. Frantically he beat his hands on the surface of the river, clawed it to him with splayed fingers and strained every muscle to lift up the heavy lead-filled boots.

  And the frenetic splashing somehow kept him afloat, kept him alive and waiting, his eyes straining towards the rounded shape of the barrel rolling and bobbing in the fetid waters. He was calm now, no longer filled with agonies of remorse for the past or fears for the future; just calm and concentrated, awaiting his chance, awaiting the one opportunity that God had offered to him.

  And the barrel rolled towards him, lurching from side to side like a drunken man. He risked that his left hand would keep him afloat while he clawed at the smooth wood. There was nothing to grab hold of on it. Each of the staves was securely grooved into its companions on either side, the outside laboriously shaved and planed, smooth as glass.

  The croze! The word just jumped into his head, pronounced in his grandfather’s husky voice and his frantic fingers felt for the groove at the top of the barrel. And found it. He dug his nails into it, holding on for his life. The other hand clasped the barrel to his chest.

  Now his two arms were around the barrel, hanging on desperately. Now he just had to hold it and allow the river to take him where it wanted.

  But no; there was no safety in that. The circle of light ahead of him told which way deliverance lay. If he surrendered to the outgoing tide then he would be dragged down under the long length of South Mall until he emerged at Albert’s Quay. By then he would probably be dead – dead from lack of air, dead from inhaling the stinking gasses from the city’s sewers, dead from a blow on the head as the tide tossed his helpless body against the stone sarcophagus which enclosed the water where once Cork’s eighteenth-century ships had sailed.

  Hang on, he told himself. Hang on to the barrel. And this is what he did. Trying feebly, from time to time, to kick his heavy legs, he hung onto the barrel, now edging his fingers under the iron rim of the lid and finding the spot where the spigot would be inserted.

  Now he dared to look up; to make out the figures looming ghost-like through the fog, standing precariously on the edge of the broken roads. The word ‘peeler’ was being shouted from mouth to mouth.

  And then a figure, gleaming white in the glow from the lanterns, launched itself over the edge, arms together, well over his head, hands joined, fingers pointed, it dived down and landed so close to Patrick that a great splash made the barrel rock and his nails broke from their precarious grasp on it. For a moment he panicked and then he realized that he had been seen. His hair was seized in a painful grasp and he was held still for a moment, gulping and spluttering.

  ‘Come on, old fellow. Keep your chin up. Let’s be having you. Don’t struggle whatever you do. Let’s get your arms into the noose.’

  ‘Mr Beamish!’ gasped Patrick.

  ‘I should get a medal for this.’ Robert Beamish seemed at his ease in the water, kicking efficiently, his bare feet gleaming white through the green water and one hand stirring the surface while the other pulled taut the rope under Patrick’s arms.

  ‘That’s it, lads,’ he shouted. ‘Pull away now like good fellows. And someone run for a doctor from the Mercy Hospital.’

  ‘A peeler on the end of a rope,’ shouted someone and there was a shout of laughter. Patrick did not grudge the joke or the amusement. Already the rope under his arms was taking his weight, was holding his mouth and nose well above the surface of the water.

  ‘On the count of three,’ yelled another voice. And then: ‘One, two, three …’

  The last word was roared and suddenly the rope tightened almost unbearably making Patrick think that he would be split in half. He rose from the water slowly. There was a heart-stopping moment when he just seemed to dangle there, a dead weight of body, saturated wool clothing and leather boots, filled to the knees with water.

  It was at that moment that he remembered the broken edge of stone and realized the danger that he was in. He was a dead weight and the slow haul of the rope against the sharp edges of the stone would fray the strands and cause them to split and part.

  ‘On the count of three,’ came the voice again. And then the numbers: ‘One, two, three …’

  But on the third numeral, Patrick felt the energy flow back into his arms and legs. He could not swim, but every Barrack Street boy could ‘wax a gazza’, that particular rite of passage in Cork City when, with bare knees and clutching hands, a seven-, eight-, or nine-year-old managed for the first time to climb from the pavement up the slippery pole of the gas lamp. And then proceeded to do it again, and again and again and again, queuing up behind friends and enemies, through the long days of the summer holidays and the fog-filled evenings until some butcher took pity on them and gave them an empty cow’s bladder to play football with.

  The muscles were still there. Patrick took a firmer grip on the rope, lifted his knees with a huge effort, clamped them around the thickly corded tarry surface – from a moored ship, he thought, and proceeded to make a slow progress up the rope. There was a great cheer. People shouted excited commands to him and from the corner of his eye he could see that Joe was standing on the quayside. He began to exert every muscle.

  Now the tug-a-war team’s task was easier. He was no longer a dead
weight but was actively helping. The peering faces came nearer; there were shouts of ‘keep back’ and then another cheer.

  Perhaps they have found Jimmy, he thought and his heart was filled with thankfulness, but then he heard them say something about the doctor. He switched his mind back into survival mode and went on monotonously placing hand over hand and inching, little by little, up the rope with the sodden cloth of his trousers forming a good barrier between the rope and his legs.

  ‘And one more pull. On the count of three – a one … and a two … and a three.’

  The last word was almost completely drowned in a great burst of cheering. His head had reached the surface of the road. Hands reached out and grabbed him under the arms and then he was sprawled on the road while someone turned him over and started to pump vigorously at his back.

  ‘There you’ll do now. Lucky man. Don’t you worry, now! I’ve seen plenty of people hauled up from the river. Soon as they get rid of the water, they do fine.’ A large pair of hands were holding him up. He had been sick three times, had vomited up the river water and was held propped up by someone who was holding a bottle to his lips. It was Robert Beamish who had produced the pocket-sized bottle. Dr Scher was in front of him, his finger on the pulse in the wrist. Patrick choked over the whiskey but it warmed him and he looked around feebly, but there was no sign of little Jimmy. An apprehensive silence had fallen over the crowd. Not even Dr Scher was looking at him and the doctor’s finger on his wrist tensed. Everyone’s eyes were on the river. Something was coming up on the end of the rope. The men pulled, but there was no strain, no counts of three, no shouts of encouragement; they pulled steadily and silently.

  Several constables, Joe with them, had arrived on the scene and they stood around the edge of the hole, shining lanterns down into the broken culvert below. The lights focussed steadily on the rope that was being pulled up – and on the burden that it bore, attached to a hook. Patrick sat up and looked. Could that be the child? There were a pair of child’s wellington boots on the road.

  ‘I had Jimmy, the Reverend Mother’s boy, I had him with me,’ he said to Dr Scher and felt the hand which held his wrist stiffen suddenly and then relax.

  ‘Just an ould shawl,’ shouted someone.

  ‘Knotted up so that it didn’t float,’ said Joe in his ear and Patrick tried vaguely to remember why a shawl might be important.

  ‘Jimmy,’ he said again and Joe was silent.

  ‘No sign of him,’ said Dr Scher. There was a slight catch in his voice.

  ‘Let’s get you back to the barracks and out of those wet clothes,’ said Joe. ‘Can you stand?’

  Patrick tried to get up. He had an agonising pain in his back. There was an odd, metallic taste in his mouth. He put his hand to it, spat and brought it back before his eyes. There was a pinkish-red smear.

  ‘I have a terrible pain here,’ he said, putting his hand on his abdomen. And then with a sudden recollection. ‘A car hit me. I remember now. A car hit me. It knocked me forwards. I fell. I had Jimmy by the hand.’ He tried to remember what had happened next. ‘Perhaps I let go,’ he said and tried to look around. Suddenly he vomited again and this time the colour of it was a dark red.

  ‘Stay still,’ said Dr Scher urgently. ‘Don’t try to move. We’ll get an ambulance.’

  Patrick thankfully gave up the effort. He was beginning to feel faint and quite ill. Everything was hazy and he leaned against Robert Beamish’s shoulder. Joe was already blowing his police whistle urgently. ‘Jimmy …’ Patrick mumbled. And then, with a great effort: ‘Tell Joe …’ But he could say no more. There was a smell of river fog in his nostrils. It made him sick and dizzy. His face felt cold and damp. Joe’s whistle seemed to blend into an ambulance siren. He could do no more for the moment …

  EIGHTEEN

  W.B. Yeats:

  ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  Are full of passionate intensity.’

  Eileen was having fun with Jimmy’s book.

  ‘Take the day over it, you and Jack,’ said the boss. ‘There’s nothing urgent to do. And, who knows, if you get good at it, we might print a few children’s books, teach the younger generation their Gaelic past and stop them turning into little West Britons. You could write them. Would be a piece of cake for you, wouldn’t it? You could write them and Jack could do the illustrations. Keep it all in-house.’

  ‘That should take about five minutes,’ said Jack reading through Jimmy’s story. ‘Only about twenty sentences there. That’s not a book; it’s a leaflet.’

  ‘It can be a twenty-page book,’ said Eileen. ‘One sentence for each page. The child has a problem with reading. We should make it a picture book. You can do the pictures when you’ve printed out the sentences. You’re really good at drawing. Remember those caricatures you did.’

  ‘I’ll need my pay doubled if I’m going to be an artist as well as a compositor,’ grumbled Jack, but he carefully read through the little story again and a meditative slight smile curved his lips as he set up the type. When he had finished he folded the sheet into twenty-four small pages and handed it to Eileen. Some of the sentences were at the bottom of their small section, some were at the top, others in the middle, and twice, the sentence slanted across the middle of the page, sloping down from the left-hand top corner to the right-hand bottom corner. He had even remembered to put a page number on each page.

  ‘Just you trim these like a good girl while I work on the cover. What’s the name of this book? Yes, I see, UNDERGROUND, hmm, let me think …’

  Eileen hated trimming, but she did not complain. She watched as Jack glued the last two pages together with a piece of cardboard between them. This would be the cover. Working quickly and skilfully, he outlined eleven seated rats scattered down the page, each holding up, etched onto a banner, one of the letters from the word ‘Underground’.

  ‘That’s wonderful; that would teach any child his letters,’ she said enthusiastically as he went over the pencil lines with a lettering pen and black ink. With a deft line here and there, perky or drooping whiskers, different tails or a slight twist of the ear, he managed to give each little rat a personality. ‘You’re a genius,’ she finished.

  The book was finished by noon. Most of the pictures were black ink drawings, but Jack had uncovered some coloured inks in a cupboard so that tongues of orange fire reached to ceiling height in the warehouse pictures and piles of gold and silver nuggets glittered on the page where the treasure was found. And then, last of all, the planks on the rat’s boat were etched in red ink.

  ‘Leave it all to dry while you grab a bit of lunch,’ advised Jack. ‘When you come back you can sew it together and then you can take it over to the convent. Nice for the little fellow to see it before he goes home. Don’t worry. I’ll fix it with Robert.’

  Perhaps I might be a teacher instead of a lawyer or a doctor; it must be a great thrill when you teach a child to read, thought Eileen, as she set off for the convent with the little book carefully wrapped in brown paper and lying inside her handbag. She walked out onto the South Terrace, lost in her usual daydreams of what she would do when Ireland was a republic and education was free to all who wanted it, and took a shortcut through the back streets towards St Mary’s Isle. Normally she would have waited for the evening, but she was impatient to show the little book to the Reverend Mother, and perhaps, have the opportunity to see Jimmy’s face light up when it was read to him.

  But there was no sign of Jimmy in the playground where the children were lined up until the Reverend Mother could see that they were going home with a parent, or a neighbour or at least in a group with one of the older girls in charge. Eileen waited patiently, remembering how her mother used to collect her from school and how she would tell her eve
rything she had learned that day as they walked back together towards Barrack Street. They would sing the songs and recite the poems, make up stories about what they would buy if they had a shilling. Her mother had the gift to make learning such fun for her daughter. What a shame that Maureen had never been able to fulfil her early ambition to be a teaching assistant and then a teacher. Pregnancy must have been a dreadful shock for a fourteen-year-old girl, but Eileen had never felt unwanted. She owed her mother a lot. Once again, she thought of how excited and animated her mother had been on the night when Maurice the lawyer from Mayo, now holed up in Ballinhassig with Eamonn and the others, had visited them and had brought a present of a cake. She resolved to buy a cake for her mother with her Friday pay packet on her way home and then turned her attention to the Reverend Mother who had just handed over the last child and signalled to Sister Bernadette to lock the gate to the school playground. The elderly nun looked very white and her eyes were worried.

  ‘Are you well, Reverend Mother?’ Eileen asked anxiously

  ‘Come into my room, Eileen.’ The question was ignored and nothing more was said until the door was closed and both were seated.

  ‘There’s been an accident, Eileen. There was a landslide in Parliament Street. The road there covers a stream and the blocks of stone slipped. Patrick, Inspector Cashman, was knocked into the river. First of all, they thought that he had fallen, stumbled over the broken tarmac, but now they think that a car hit him hard on the back. He is in hospital with terrible bruising to his back and damage to his liver. He is very ill. The postman told Sister Bernadette all about it. I’m very worried about Patrick.’ The Reverend Mother paused for a moment. ‘And Jimmy, who was with him, has completely disappeared. They’ve dragged the river twice and there was no sign of him, nothing was found except his pair of too large wellington boots which perhaps floated from his legs.’ The Reverend Mother’s voice broke and she got up swiftly from her chair and walked across to the window.