What happened on the cliff that summer was a mystery that became a street legend. Nobody really believed the Breen boys’ report of an attack from nowhere, and the cliff was full of stones anyway, so nothing could be found or proved. Most believed that there had probably been some row or incident among the gang and that the story was a cover-up, though some thought the Breen boys to be too young and their injuries too severe for it all to be a fiction. But nobody cared enough to give it a serious investigation.
Jimmy McCusker survived, though he’d broken his neck in the fall, and when he got out of hospital he joined his father in the daily vigil on the front porch. I got a new bicycle the next Christmas — a blue Raleigh — and when dry weather came I took it for a ride around the block. When I passed the McCuskers I stopped and looked at the boy in the wheelchair as his father shouted abuse at me. But something had changed: the tightening in my back and the sore grip to my middle were gone, and I was no longer afraid of them. I waved to the McCuskers as I rode away.
We moved to a new house later that year, and I never saw Jimmy McCusker or my red bicycle again.
A black flag flying
IT IS THE SECOND WEEK OF MAY, AND IT IS TWO WEEKS SINCE THAT FIRST evening with Cora Flannery. Two weeks. I am nervous. Today I’m to call at her house for the first time. Today I shall meet her mam and dad. I have held out for as long as I can, but Cora says that I am really pushing it, that at two weeks I am being just plain weird. What can I say? There is normal time and there is Cora’s time, and well …
I tie the low gate closed behind me with the shoelace and salute Dad, who stands watching me from the front porch.
‘All right, Son?’ he calls.
‘All right, Dad.’
Next door, in the front garden of an identical house, a small man is bent low at work among some roses and shrubs.
‘She has you on your hands and knees again, Eddie,’ I comment.
He barely looks up. ‘Gobshite.’ It is just a whisper, but I catch it, and too late he tries to run. Too late and too slow. Before he can get going, I have cleared the wall and have him in a firm grip.
Eddie Reynolds is my uncle. He is ex-army and he is a small man. But he is a proud man. He was, in his youth, the featherweight boxing champion of Leinster, and he held that title for five years. Eddie and Hannah are my mam’s brother and sister, and live next door. The three of them do everything together — shopping, socialising, holidays, the whole fruit-basket — and the rest of time they give out about each other. Eddie and Hannah never married and neither one has children. When Eddie retired from the army he took me as his vocation, and many of his afternoons were spent teaching me boxing, arm-to-arm combat, and — removed from the eyes of others — how to handle a gun. Eddie delighted in the telling of tales of army life: the barracks, the rifle-range, the border, the Curragh, the Congo, and the Lebanon. I loved to hear the stories. Back then, Eddie could manage me, but that was ten years ago, when Eddie was fifty and I was nine. This is now. It is no longer a contest.
‘Gobshite, is it?’ In one movement I lift the small man up on my shoulders and spin him around.
‘Johnny,’ Eddie pleads as he tries to fight my hold. ‘Let me down, you fecker.’
But I hold him easy enough.
‘Hannah, Hannah,’ Eddie calls out.
Aunt Hannah appears in the central doorway. She takes no notice of the scene at play on the front lawn. She turns to Dad, who still stands in the open front porch.
‘A beautiful day, Oliver,’ she calls.
‘A beautiful day, Hannah. Thank God. A beautiful day.’ He looks up to pencil-grey clouds that move below a blue-and-white sky. ‘Though we could see a shower yet.’
‘How’s herself?’ Aunt Hannah asks.
‘Right as rain, Hannah,’ Dad says, indicating over his shoulder. In the brief silence of his pausing, a few faint notes of song escape the hallway. ‘She’s right as rain.’
I let Eddie down, and have cleared the wall before he steadies and takes a swipe.
‘Too slow, you old fox,’ I call, pulling the Dunn & Co straight.
I take the bicycle from where it rests against the front wall, check the tyres for hardness, mount, and I am off. I look back as I go. The old soldier waves, acknowledges Dad with a salute, gives his sister a shake of his head, and returns to his gardening low among the roses.
I cycle out of the small estate and turn west onto the Ramparts Road. I pass the grounds of the lawn tennis club where on summer mornings Anna and I would climb the wall for a game before the caretaker arrived and threw us out. I turn north through Distillery Lane and then west again through Jocelyn Street, passing the office of a local newspaper below the first-floor snooker rooms of the Catholic Young Man’s Society where Éamon and I played every week while the rest of the class took to the cold and windy sports-field. At the junction with Chapel Street I pass the Home Bakery where Mam queues on a Saturday morning for two French loaves and an almond ring, and every so often a chocolate or pineapple cake. I pass Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and continue west through Crowe Street passing the town hall. I continue along the side wall of the county-court house and enter the Market Square. It was here I sat with Cora just two weeks ago. And it was here in this square where I first took notice of politics, first made conclusions on the story of Ireland, and first decided my role. That was 1981, and I was ten years old.
Bobby Sands, an IRA prisoner in a British jail in Northern Ireland, died after sixty-six days of a hunger strike. He was twenty-seven years old. Nine other men would follow him that summer on a demand for identity, a demand to be recognised as political prisoners. The streets and the television stations were full of it. The newspapers Dad brought home were full of it. Mam and Dad’s talk at the kitchen table and neighbours’ talk over fences was full of it. The walls, hoardings, and bridges around town were full of it. The list of the prisoners’ five demands was everywhere, with SMASH H-BLOCK below them as a sign-off.
At the time I wondered why a people with so little, against an enemy with so much, would put all this effort into a battle for clothes and visits — a battle that could never affect the war. I asked Dad what was going on. ‘Politics,’ he said. ‘It is all a game of politics.’ A protest base was established in the Market Square throughout the Bobby Sands hunger strike, and every day on the way from school I walked through it just to try to catch some of the fever. I didn’t. I just couldn’t figure the thing out. The black flags appeared on the day he died; they hung from every lamppost. That day, a skinny teenage girl in tight jeans and sporting a short haircut asked me to sign a petition. ‘Why?’ I asked, and the question seemed to throw her. It didn’t make sense. My ten-year-old head couldn’t figure it out. Bobby Sands had contested a Westminster seat during his hunger strike, and he had won — graffiti on an old wall near the school read, THE RIGHT HON BOBBY SANDS MP. I looked at the wall every day. The Right Hon Bobby Sands MP. Why, I thought, are we celebrating participation in the very thing that has persecuted us all this time? But celebration it was, BOBBY SANDS MP was everywhere.
There were riots in the north when he died. We watched it all on television: women blowing whistles and banging dustbin lids on the pavements, youths attacking armoured cars, police lines behind riot shields, and petrol bombs flying in the night. The funeral was like a state affair — a long cortege of tens of thousands, a colour party, and shots into the air. And everyone had something to say about it.
A week later, after fifty-nine days on hunger strike, Francis Hughes died. He was twenty-five. So the whole thing was repeated. And then another hunger striker died, and then another, and then another. It seemed to go on forever. In the Republic, though everyone was gripped by it, and concerned, we were yet distanced, kind of detached, as though it were remote and happening in another country altogether. We sat as spectators in our living rooms as bin lids rattled in the mo
rnings, stones were launched in the afternoons, and petrol bombs flew at night. We watched the long funeral processions, the stiff-stepped coffin-carrying, and the colour parties shooting bullets up into a sky that never harmed Ireland. And here in Dundalk the black flags hung in the Market Square. Ten men were dead by the time it finished. I asked Dad why it had stopped. ‘Politics,’ he said. ‘It is all a game of politics.’ I didn’t know it then — I know it now — but Dad was right. It was only ever politics, and we lost.
And we Irish are too used to losing. We are too fond of celebrating moral defeats; too fond of celebrating small victories that don’t matter and are not victories at all; too fond of suffering; too fond of martyrs; too fond of the damned word struggle; and too fond of reverting to playing politics with the British, who have a long history of never doing us any good. The only thing that matters in this war is removing the enemy from Ireland. And to this end the hunger strikes changed nothing. They were an attempt at persuasion. But why bother? The only battle worth fighting is a battle that can help win the war. This was the lesson I learned in 1981.
A single black flag was erected in a lane near the school during the hunger strike, and was forgotten and left in place when all the others were taken down. For years, I watched that flag as it faded and tore, until one day the wood gave way to rot and it fell to the ground, where the cleaning truck brushed it up and dumped it along with the other unwanted things.
I cycle north from the Market Square through Clanbrassil Street, passing the narrow road where the school is. Are you joining us today, Mister Donnelly? Would you care to share your thoughts with the class, Mister Donnelly? Is there something strange or startling out those windows, Mister Donnelly? Hello, hello, calling Mister Donnelly, come in please? Continue reading from there, Mister Donnelly. Well, Mister Donnelly, don’t wait for the applause. Mister Donnelly … I pass through Church Street to Bridge Street, a dull, narrow street that offers nothing but a last-chance saloon for desperate enterprise, where the few remaining shops sell everything nobody wants. Rough-looking men stand outside bars and watch me with suspicious faces as if the act of riding a bicycle is an indecent phenomenon and is likely to be of some threat. I pass two vagrants walking south with such slowness that it appears they would rather walk for eternity than reach the end of the street. This northern edge is where the town abandons pretence and ambition, settles for fate over fortune, and lies down with a bottle of cheap wine. I pull the zip on my high pullover and change gears. At the muddy river I turn and cycle west on Castletown Road. Some children are playing ball in the yard of the National Girls’ School, and I have to stop to return a ball that has been kicked over the iron railings. I think of Mam. This was her school. Here in this same yard I know she must have sung, skipped, run, fallen, and cried. I try to picture her there, but can’t. The children resume their game with gusto as I cycle west under the railway bridge. I slow as I approach the low-walled gardens of Níth River Terrace, and I stop halfway down the row of houses. The sky above has softened; the darker clouds have wandered off and the day has brightened again. I look to the chip shop where a girl polishes the front glass with a spray-gun and some loose newspaper.
‘Hi,’ I call to her.
‘Hi,’ she replies. She is a good-looking girl. Isn’t the world full of them?
I push the low gate open with the front wheel, and rest my bicycle against the ashen-grey pebbledash of the side wall. I straighten the Dunn & Co, and run my finger and thumb down the length of my scarf, tidying it neatly parallel to the open coat. I walk to the front door, where two small brass numbers — a one and a six — are high over the central panel. I take a deep breath, and knock.
Bob
THE DOOR OPENS.
‘Hello.’ A boy stands in the doorway.
‘Hello, is Cora in?’
There is a brief silence as the boy examines me. ‘So you think you’re Johnny Donnelly?’
‘Eh, yeah. So they tell me.’
‘So you do exist after all. She’s been blabbering on about you for ages. We all thought she just made you up.’
‘Right.’
Unwilling to let me stray from his gaze, the boy throws a shout over his shoulder, ‘Cora, you’re wanted.’
At the rear of the hallway a door opens and a woman hurries to the front, clipping the boy as she passes.
‘Cormac, give over,’ she says. She is an attractive woman. Her red hair is tied behind her, and her eyes are the lightened green of an August meadow. ‘Come in, come in,’ she says. ‘I’m Fionnuala. I’m Cora’s mammy.’
‘Hello, Missus Flannery. It’s very nice to meet you,’ I say, stepping into the narrow hallway. I feel my breath quicken as I move inside the door. Suddenly I am unsure how to stand. I stand straight, I lean forward, I put my hands in my pockets, and I take them out. I settle on a partial forward leaning, and I clasp my hands low in front of me. The boy watches me.
There are footsteps on the staircase. It is Aisling.
‘Hi, handsome.’
‘Hello, Aisling.’
She approaches, kisses me on the cheek, and takes my hand. ‘Listen, Johnny,’ she says, ‘there’s still time to change your mind. Me and you, what do you think? We could be great lovers.’
I add a burning face to my struggling breath and my awkward stance.
‘Mammy, quick, get her off him,’ Cora calls, running down the stairs and pushing her sister away. The two girls laugh.
‘Well, it was worth a try,’ Aisling says. ‘Right, I’m off. I’m meeting the girls. See you later, handsome,’ she says, running her hand through my open coat as she leaves.
‘Hey, you,’ I say to Cora.
‘Hey, you, yourself,’ she answers, a blush ripening in her pale face. She leads me to the end of the hall and opens a door. ‘Give me five minutes?’ she asks, and disappears.
I push through the door. It opens to a kitchen. A large, ivory-coloured range stands against the opposite wall, and to the right of the range the back wall has been removed, and through a broad arch is an extended dining and living area. There is a long couch against the far wall of the extension, and sitting on it is Bob, a folded newspaper resting on the lap of his green overalls.
Isn’t this just lovely? he says.
It was when I started my apprenticeship in the engineering works that I met Bob Hanratty. He was alive then. The old man was a caretaker in the machine workshop, and would spend one half of each day lubricating the various machines with his diverse collection of oilcans and grease guns. The other half-day he would empty the scrap bins and sweep the floors. At work breaks, Bob took his newspaper and ate alone at his workbench, preferring the peace and solitude of the oil store to the bustle and raucous banter of the works’ canteen. He intrigued me, and I watched as he pushed his trolley to each machine, one after the other, lubricating the controls and levers, oiling the motors and greasing the machine beds, wiping each handle, point, and nipple, before and after, with a large, red rag that hung from the pocket of his green overalls. It was the old man’s calm, methodical work and his quiet refrain from the coarse taunting of the factory floor that plucked my interest.
For weeks I observed him until, one Monday morning, I walked towards the centre of the workshop as Bob, pushing his trolley, approached the central intersection from the side. Grimes and McArdle were two buffoons who worked the inspection booth opposite the clerk’s office. McArdle was unkempt — a slight frame in a dirty work coat, with a pitted weasel face under oily, brown hair. Grimes was clean, but he was a monster — a huge bulk of a body under a pink head.
‘Did you ever get the ride, Bob?’ Grimes shouted as the old man neared. ‘There’s still time. Is there life in the ould sausage yet? Are you still keeping palm busy?’ he guffawed, leaning forward and signalling the motion with his hand. ‘Hey, Bob, I gave it to her up the junction last night, like this,
’ he roared again, as he turned sideways and held his hands out and demonstrated. ‘Then I went home to the wife,’ he said, laughing loudly, slapping the table, punching McArdle, and turning to include all who could hear him. ‘What about those lovely neighbours of yours, Bob? They’d love a fit man like me.’
I saw the flicker of rage that crossed the old man’s face.
‘Leave that man alone.’ The words flew from my mouth before a consideration to speak was given thought. An abrupt silence tore across the workshop, and uncertainty hung in the hiatus of its tearing. Curiosity gripped the surrounding workers. Suddenly the thing was one big drama. And I was on stage, front and centre.
‘What the fuck is this?’ Grimes turned his pink face towards me. ‘Who the fuck are you? You little cunt.’
Well, that just pissed me off. I knew Grimes could tear me to pieces in a struggle, but so what? To walk away would open the door for this arsehole to humiliate me every time I walked past his booth. I couldn’t let that happen.
‘A cunt,’ I suggested, ‘is the female genitalia. But you obviously don’t know much about that. Are you sure it was a she last night? Did you look?’
There was a loud cheer and clatter, with the workers laughing and slapping hands and mallets on the side of their machines and benches. Men tend to do that — they love making noise and throwing verdicts down from the grandstand. Anyhow, Grimes’s pink face reddened and his eyes filled with fury, and they bore into me with all the dangerous threat of an enraged and wounded bull. But he had no answer.
‘Everything all right there, chaps?’ A head popped out of the clerk’s office window.
‘C’mon, son, that’s enough of that,’ Bob said, leading me away. When we reached the end of the workshop, he turned to me. ‘I don’t approve of that abrasive language and bravado, young man.’
A Mad and Wonderful Thing Page 4