by Donal Ryan
We captured that boy as he walked alone, drawing beside him in a van with a wide sliding door, grabbing him from behind and around his throat and half throttling him and punching him in the stomach and face to subdue him and we pressing down with the weight of our bodies on his legs and arms so that we could bind him hand and foot and pointing our weapons into his smeared streaked face and dragging him across gorse and bog and scrub and stone to the beam we had planted deep in the earth of that lonesome hillside and we shackled him to it and rounded him with rope and he screaming all the while through his gag, and pissing himself, and shitting himself, and his tears sopping through his blindfold, and all our violence not the product of our bravery but of our panic and our fear and our mad desire to be finished and done with what we knew by then was our folly. We stood back thirty paces. That was what we had agreed. It seemed too far, it seemed too near. It was for a finish twenty-seven, I’d say.
The boy screamed before we fired, long before, all the ways up in the van, and stayed screaming after we fired because we missed his head and heart with our first volley. The rounds pierced his shoulder and left arm and one went right the ways through the very edge of his neck. Terrible shooting, shameful. The second volley tore his blindfold from his eyes and the top of the post we had him tied to exploded into splinters and one of his eyes was replaced with a dark and gory hole. And still he screamed and his entrails were exposed. And John P fell forward from the line in a strange crouching tumble and Martin Guiney roared something and I stepped out over John P’s prone body though I wanted badly to kick him upright or to stamp on him and scream at him to get up to fuck and do this thing himself and I walked forward and forward and took aim at the centre of the boy’s forehead though my hand was violently shaking and my aim was somehow true and that for a finish quietened him. Thanks be to God, I heard one of the Brien Cutters say behind me. I’m not sure to this day which one. I hardly spoke again beyond a line or two about the weather all down the years after to either of them, nor to Martin or Pat, my noble friends, my brothers in blood.
There are moments in days when I feel a swelling of something like pride, unbidden, unwelcome in my breast. Then I check myself. That I gave the command to aim and fire, that I alone stepped forward from the line, suspecting from the kick and heat from my weapon that my rounds were live and deadly, and despatched the boy when things fell to such bloody chaos, and despatched with him any sliver of a chance I might have had of solace in the stony future, is no reason to allow myself to ascribe any virtue to my actions. My blood was hot but I murdered him fair coldly. He was shackled and bound and helpless, beaten and soiled and begging. He was the son of a mother and a father and the child of a family and they’re wondering about him yet.
I feel the closeness now of my end. I fell asleep in this chair the other evening and I woke of a sudden and the flickering television was gone and that whole end wall of the day room was bathed in light and all my blank-faced comrades were gone, replaced with a rank of winged creatures, at once transparent and solid, real and unreal, and at the centre of this apparition was a staircase of shimmering gold, and I wanted to raise myself and walk to it and put my foot on the first riser and look up to see could I know from the bottom what lay waiting at the top, but I found myself unable to move. I feel the breath on my forehead of an admonishing god. Or a finger-wagging saint at least, with plenipotentiary discretion. I’ll be stopped for sure at the summit of those stairs, if I ever have the strength to climb them, and told Go back, you must wait, you must atone, and I’ll state my case that I’ve atoned enough, each day since our summary execution of that wild boy. I haven’t had a moment’s ease since, not even in my hard-got sleep.
We swaddled him in canvas and we buried him fine and deep and we swept and fixed the earth above his grave and scattered twigs and leaves across it so that it would appear undisturbed and we said no prayer over it only stood for a moment in a half-circle with our eyes cast down and filed back down that hillside to the van and once again into the cold arms of the waiting years.
There’s a weighing scales in the tiny cubicle of a bathroom in my room and I step up onto it every morning before my ablutions so I can chart in my mind the disintegration of myself, my falling away to nothing, quarter-pound by quarter-pound, a bag of sucky sweets a day. I’m not afraid to die and leave this place of sinners and sinned-against, guilty and innocent, and they all enmeshed and melded so no one is without stain, where only the faces of infant children are cast unsullied on the world, their only sin being done long ago by imaginary people in the pages of a book written by ancient men. I’m not even afraid or sad to leave my dear John P alone here because he’ll know next to nothing of my passing and what sense he might have of an empty place beside him where once I sat will fade from him like a ghost in sunlight.
No good came of it. That’s the miserable honest truth of it. John P’s daughter never emerged from her silence, only pulled it more and more tightly around herself until it suffocated her, and her body was never got from the roiling sea. Her neatly folded note had only one word on it: Sorry. Her car was parked tidily in a corner of the car-park across the road from the climbing walk to the cliffs. It had a ticket on the dashboard to show she had paid as much for parking as the machine would allow her. The first three hours of her eternity were covered.
I know something of the bite and sting of the despair that led John P’s daughter along that rising path at Moher. The notion overtook me shortly after it was all done that, having taken a life, I had in some way forfeited my own. I would breathe, but each breath would increase the debt I owed the universe. I felt myself undeserving of my happy, healthy children, brimming with goodness and love, and I think now looking back I in some way set about sabotaging things; it seems for all the world now as though I dismantled myself as surely as did that lovely girl. She flung and dashed herself to pieces in a few short moments; I did the same over long years, in a way as quietly violent. My son and daughter drag themselves in here to look at me the odd evening and it’s as though they hate me: they huff and sigh and roll their eyes and pretend it’s their restless children they’re vexed with, and not me, not the memory of my tensed-up silent stewardship of the best part of their teenage years.
I fell into wickedness. I’d lose my reason over the tiniest of things: a murmur during the news; a clack and scrape of cutlery on a plate; a room not tightened to my liking. When they took to going out to discos I terrorized them. I harped and roared, and ridiculed my daughter’s frocks and tops and my son’s scraggy hair and torn trousers, and drove them everywhere even though they asked could they go on the bus with their pals and I’d sit outside and wait and bore holes in the walls of those places with my stares and I’d look in from the vestibule and their pals would see me and point and snigger and a time or two I marched in and enforced a distance between my daughter and a lad who looked as though he might be throwing shapes. My wife couldn’t understand it at first. What in the name of God has got into you? But soon my crossness became the way of things and she wrung her hands and shook her head and lived with it for thirty years.
John P cast himself into silence as surely as his bruised and wingless angel cast herself into the sea. It was as though he took the mantle of it from her. His wife withered and died and it seemed as though her fading and passing made no odds to him. And I felt only gratitude for his wordlessness: there was safety in it, and a measure of comfort. It was no bother at all to me to call to him after. Isn’t that strange, the ways of things, the ways of human minds? Once all our impecunious bargains had been done, I was free from my previous fear and unease and able again to cross my friend’s threshold and sit and chat of weather and sport and news and local intrigues and watch him watching out the window for something, something, I don’t know what. All old talk. Listening and nodding and watching. All of naught, to naught, for naught, year upon year of moments, of time slowly marked, of silence filled with empty words.
I often saw the outli
ne of the boy after in the shapes of things living and dead, his head bowed, his body still tied fast, leaning forward from the filthy beam. In the gloaming especially, when spectres are born of shadows, in a tree in need of coppicing, say, or in a windblown fence, or in among a huddle of bulrushes. Some days in the mirror, looking at my monstrously normal face, I’d see reflected in the black parts of my eyes that ghostly post and its weight of torn flesh and shattered bones. And always those times a scream would rise in me and my blood would run to ice and my heart would spasm and pound.
I thought often of deserts in those wintry days, of walking into emptiness until my legs would carry me no further, of lying flat beneath a flaying sun, the flesh being cleansed from my bones, and they in turn being bleached white and dried to powder. That would be the death and disposal of my choosing, if I were able to grant myself the privilege of choice.
But here I am existing still.
Nephthys and the Lark
SHE COULDN’T SLEEP past dawn for the sound of wind. It seemed always to funnel down this road, pressed to wild gusts between the rows of houses. She imagined the roof being lifted by the eaves or a felled oak smashing through the rafters. But there was no oak near them, no trees at all, only clematis bushes and half-hearted hedges and puny garden willows. They could hardly claim treehood, drippy things. Her husband always said he loved the howl of a storm and the rain battering off the window glass. It made him feel cosy, he said, to be in out of it, in a warm bed. And there was a contentment to his snores, for sure, as though the raging weather really did lull him deeper into peacefulness. She considered hanging a foot out the side of the bed and, when it was cold enough, pressing it against his lower back where his pyjama top always rode up, but she wasn’t sure she was still dextrous enough to pull it off. And she wasn’t sure she was wicked enough to wake him that way.
A familiar chirruping filled the spaces between gusts. February the skylark’s song always started. She’d been hearing him all week and she’d seen him skimming low across the green, landing on the edge of the rockery at its centre as she drove from the estate the morning before. She knew him by his raised plume, his rocker’s coif, like it was gelled to standing. The cut of a young fella going to a disco. The sound of him, and the thought of his little hairdo, and the idea of the cold-foot trick, and the roar her husband would let out of him, and the laugh that would be in his feck off combined to a warmth in her stomach, a childish thrill of pleasures. The wind eased with the brightening of the sky, and she lay still, happy almost, for the hour before the alarm, waiting for the grunting and scratching of her husband’s rising, his sighs and hums, the bellows and squeals of teenagers, the clomps and rattles of a waking house.
She told her three children they were having porridge. The youngest wanted to know why she’d bought Coco Pops if they weren’t allowed to eat them. They were snuck into my trolley, she told him, and it won’t be let happen again. You can have porridge with honey in it or you can go to school hungry. She leant and kissed the top of his sulky head and he winced and rubbed his hand along his crown. Ugh, Mamm-y. Her eldest boy had a hurley on his lap and he and his father were inspecting a crack along its bas, their foreheads almost touching. Her daughter was wearing makeup on her eyes and a skim of lipstick; her skirt was too far above her knees but she was wearing thick tights and it didn’t seem worth the row. Her daughter had her iPhone in one hand and a slice of toast in the other and she was scrolling slowly with her thumb and chewing rhythmically, her eyes fixed to the little screen, the light of it reflected in them. The rain was gone and the wind had lost heart. A rainbow rose from behind the distant hills and arched across a sky of baby blue.
Her husband took the hurley and left it leaning against the back door, the way he’d remember to bring it as he passed out to his car. Jimmy Ryan will hoop that no bother, he told the boy. You can probably collect it on the way back from college. I’ll text you and let you know. Sound, Dad. Her husband always had a redness in his cheeks in the mornings, and his thick hair clumped boyishly. He always showered and dressed after his breakfast, because he said he didn’t like to go to work with a smell of food off him. He always took off his pyjamas and put on shorts and a T-shirt before he came downstairs, though, and a pair of flip-flops. He only ever got cross these mornings over those flip-flops. Where the fuck are my flip-flops? Pounding up- and downstairs, in and out of rooms. And the girl would roll her eyes and the boys would giggle and skit and she’d tell him to mind his language and they were in whatever corner he’d kicked them into the day before and she had more to be doing than minding his blessed flip-flops. A fifty-year-old man that can’t mind one pair of flip-flops. I’m forty-nine. Not for long more, she’d say teasing, but she’d smile her best smile at him, because she knew it bothered him, the thought of turning fifty.
He was a buildings manager at a commercial complex. He worried non-stop. About cracks in plaster, moss in gutters, overloaded circuits, rising damp, descending wires. He found it hard to delegate. He had people under him but you wouldn’t think it. You’d think he alone was holding up every building inside in that blessed complex, like Atlas holding up the world. She worried about him, the redness in his handsome face, the deepening creases at the sides of his eyes, the shots of blood in the whites of them; it couldn’t be good for a man his age. Fretting about bricks and mortar. Those buildings would be standing a long time after him. At least he always slept well. Sleep is important. Her own eyes felt a bit gritty. The hours she’d lost to the moaning wind.
The youngest lad wouldn’t give her a kiss at the school gate any more. He was nearly out of the car before it was fully stopped. First year in secondary was tricky. She wouldn’t force the issue or embarrass him opposite his pals. But still it stung a little each morning. It pained her, the leaving go of that part of their relationship. The kisses would come back, she knew, when he was older, but they’d be manly, dutiful, perfunctory. The eldest was starting to do that now: he’d kissed her on the cheek last summer before going off on a holiday with his hurling team. She’d heard one of the other lads saying something like Ooh, did you give your mammy a kiss? And he’d said something back like, I did, ya. Will I give yours a kiss as well? And that quietened the smart-arse, and she felt a burning pride in her son, and tears pinpricked the backs of her eyes. He was so like his father. He was already so much a man.
Her daughter had a boyfriend. A lad from town. Sixteen was too young for seriousness, but it was there. It was hard to talk to her. It was hard to think of her being pressured, feeling obliged, giving herself away too early, letting herself be used and cast away, letting her little heart get smashed to smithereens. There was no avoiding that pain, it seemed, no way of protecting her from it. Her daughter’s world seemed compressed sometimes into the screen of that telephone; all of her tides turned at the pull of its gravity, her whole existence seemed wedded to it. She’d told her daughter to bring the boyfriend out home, but she hadn’t yet. She was desperate for a proper look at him, to listen to his voice, to know if he was respectable, or respectful at least.
She stopped on the way back from town at the church. The car-park was low, surfaced in gravel; loughs of water lay along it. Rain often opened holes in the soft ground of it that would lie in wait for car-wheels beneath the treacherous puddles. She tutted and parked on the kerb, at the side of the main road, annoyed. Because the funds were there for the tarmacking, they’d been raised and left as yet unused. She’d helped with the fundraising herself, months ago, pushing alms envelopes through letterboxes, selling books of tickets for raffles and lines for a sponsored fun-run. And her car was just out of tax, and she didn’t want any nosy-parkers scanning her expired disc and thinking things that weren’t true. She nearly drove away again, but she thought of a debt she owed to Saint Anthony from the previous week when the miraculous medal her grandmother had given her had gone missing. She’d promised to light candles, two euros a go, and the number of promised candles had increased from five to te
n before she’d found the medal, sitting dusted with flour in the bowl of the weighing scales. She had the coins in her bag and the debt was being called in, softly but insistently, a whispered voice at the back of her mind.
She should have gone to the gym. She was after missing her spin class two weeks in a row. But the instructor had changed and she wasn’t as happy with the new lad. He was very young-looking and his shout was a bit too screechy. And they’d upped the price to twelve euros for the hour from ten for those that hadn’t paid the lot up front. All the smart ones paid in the one go, or the ones with the biggest arses anyway. They thought that’d surely force them into going every week, the idea of not getting what they’d paid for. She resolved to walk the block before work, once she had the vegetables done and the meat left out for the dinner, and the note of instructions for her husband written out and left stuck to the fridge. She settled her debt and said a few prayers and sat for a while not thinking of anything, her eyes focused on Our Lord in his agony. She was roused from her gentle reverie by a movement from the front pew; an old one making shapes to leave. She left herself before she was sucked into anything, gossip or small-talk, or the feeling of being judged, somehow, or of being made to feel unentitled to the company of Christ.
She peeled potatoes and chopped carrots and parsnips and left them in saucepans of water on the hob, ready. She took a sirloin joint from the fridge and dressed it in a casserole dish with onions and apple slices and covered it and slid it back into the fridge. She wrote on the back of an ESB envelope: