That night, before he went to bed, Joey went in to check on his little baby brother, Thomas. He was lying on his back in the cot like a big blancmange and Joey peered at him through the bars and knew instinctively that something was wrong, that a baby’s face should not be purple like that, and he also knew (but how was a mystery) to reach gently into the soft and toothless mouth and tweak the tongue and pull it up and away from the back of the throat and this he did. The whoosh of breath then into that tiny mouth was very loud, very deep. He watched through the bars as his baby brother’s face faded from the colour of plums to the colour of strawberry ice cream and then vanilla ice cream and then he went to bed and slept soundly and dreamed that a kindly thin-faced man with wings held him and flew him over the estate, down into people’s gardens, across their moon-blued roofs. It was a reward, the thin-faced man said. A prize for being good. Transvection, although that was a word which Joey did not know.
Joey forgot that dream the next day, as the business of tracking down the boy who pushed him into the canal and making that boy eat dog poo as punishment occupied his thoughts. The angelic visitation, if that is what it was, simply became one blurred moment of his fever and he quickly forgot the incident as he also quickly forgot the delirious episode itself. Now, he does not recall ever being seriously ill as a boy, and indeed all he knows of his childhood is that he had one and that it was unique, that something happened in it to make it unique. There was no thin-faced gentleman, no life-saving gesture, no ecstatic soaring. But it was unique. It was unlike all others. And he did find the boy; and he did make him eat dogshit. Down on his skinned knees on the park grass, sobbing, vomiting as he lapped.
ALASTAIR
Don’t like this, lar, no way … not really for me this but fuck knows av gorra do it … we’ve all gorra do it sometimes, like … in this werld … y’know … just gorra be done sometimes, man, no two ways about it … just gorra be done …
Now I must be violent.
Cos I mean if I don’t then it’ll friggin happen to me, like … fuckin Darren or Tommy or one of them … cos if I don’t, if I don’t then –
No. Cos they’re not fuckin gunner catch me, are thee? Am not gunner be here. An gunner be where am a gunner be
in that place.
That post office in that village what was it called the name of it what was it
erm
Cilcain.
That’s where am gunner be.
Cilcain.
But am never gunner get there am I not unless I get friggin violent … pure gorra get that dough back, man … an if I avter get fuckin violent to gerrit back then so be fuckin it … just gorra be done …
But not too … erm … not too …
… erm
don’t wanner waste him like or anythin Jeez no … he’s just a friggin kid … just little fuckin babyscals, the two of em … just wanner scare em really … just make em, y’know … what’s the werd … the werd is
Jesus … fuck … sometimes I get so confused … always have been since that time in the Copperas Hill sty when the fuckin bizzies … so many times thee booted me, like … never been the same since … can’t … things I can’t fuckin do like in me ed it goes all cloudy this way …
But yeh – violence. That’s what’s gorra happen now. Some kind of violence, like.
Just to scare them. Just to get that money back.
First tho av gorra get some kip … pure fuckin knackered me, like … no lie … get back to me nan’s an avver smoke an a birruver kip … maybe gerra birra scran as well … pick up a bagger chips or summin … or somethin … yeh, somethin …
Lights comin on. Moon comin out. When I was a kid me nan bought me oner them things, them things that dangle above yer cot like, that hang from the ceiling … forgotten what they’re called … a model of the sky, like, all the stars an the moon … I used to always be tryna catch that moon … it had a face drawn on it … a smiley face … like a smiley god or somethin it was hangin there above me an I was always reachin up for that smiley moon … that model moon … I thought it was God … burrit was just a
that modellin agency, oh aye yeh … they’ll all be leavin there at this time, all them sexy berds like, that’s the way I’ll go home … back to me nan’s, like … see them all comin out at this time them dead sexy women … see them … on Duke Street, like … that modellin place … opposite thee Anglican … looks nice at night-time all lit up, thee Anglican does … aye but them models … thee all come out at this timer night … there’s
there’s one … friggin arse on her, lar … just perfect like … God in them tight kex … there’s
there’s
im
there’s oner them fuckers
can’t believe it man little fuckin thievin gobshite sittin there on that bench
bastard he made these marks on me face an I need that money I need that fuckin
now I must be VIOLENT
FREDDY
Oh yeh fuckin buy you, gerl. Fuckin buy you now oh aye you’ll fuckin cream when yeh see the brewsters I’ve got stashed, oh aye you an a thousand friggin others includin that Madeleine O’Shea, oh yeh yer all gunner cream when yiz see what Freddy lad’s got stashed away can buy yiz fuckin anythin can buy you
Look at me I’m wearin Diesel
Wearin fuckin Diesel I am oh aye
yer all gunner
all gunner
fuck it’s im
It’s im
ARGH GERROFF ME GERROFF ME I WANT ME MAM I’VE DONE FUCK ALL GERROFF ME LAD AL GET ME BRUDDER FUCK OFF FUCK OFF GERROFF I’VE
MAM MAM MAM MAM MAAAAAMM
HELP ME SOMEONE HELP ME
DARREN’S VICTIMS: NUMBER 23 (COUNTING ALASTAIR AS ONE)
All I wanted to do was watch the fuckin film. No fuckin need for that, man, no fuckin need … all’s I wanted to do was toot a little rock an watch me favourite friggin movie like, an now look now look I
—Mmmm. It’s too deep for glue. Sometimes we can simply glue these clean cuts together but not if they’re as deep as this. Has to be suture, I’m afraid.
Me mouth works. Tries to: —Wiw … wiw urr ve …
—Don’t talk, you’ll make it worse. It’s very deep.
His fingers are in my cheek. Jesus Christ I can feel his fingers going through my face my face through my fuckin face shouldn’t be able to do that his fingers in me my face my face what’s HAPPENED TO MY FUCKING FACE
Some blackness as this I’m falling falling into. Painkillers, wharrever they’ve jacked me up with kicking in strong. I can hear another voice, two other voices. Two doctors. I hear the words ‘plastic surgery’.
Plastic surgery on my face. My face needs plastic surgery.
Oh Christ that bastard. Totally fuckin uncalled for. This is my life now changed for ever nothing will ever be the fuckin same again ever ever ever EVER
That talk we all had last night about The Matrix when we were all stoned on that oil an Michelle she said that them brothers who made the film had taken the blue pill and are in the know an thee made that film to warn us all it’s more of a documentary than just a movie an we all went wow an we an we an an an an an
an fuck that how pathetic it was, me
Me, how fuckin pathetic I am goin on about The Matrix my fault this is all my fault I must be shite for him to wanner do this to me for him to hate me so fuckin much I must be shite this is all my fault this wound this pain no life ever the same again
all my fuckin fault
my face needs plastic surgery it is that bad
That’s how bad my face is cut up is damaged thee need to reconstruct it
The Matrix oh aye we live in The Matrix reality is
This is reality
This is fucking reality
Me, lying on my side an I can feel one half of my face slipping over thee other half an I can taste my own tears as they trickle through the hole in my cheek into my mouth mixing with the gushing blood an that should never be allowed to h
appen cos
cos
In reality my face is whole
In reality it should not be
PLASTIC FUCKING SURGERY WHAT SCARS WHAT SCARRING PAIN BLOOD AND MY FUCKING LIFE WRECKED THIS IS REALITY THIS IS REALITY THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS FUCKING
FERDIA MAGUIRE AND FAMILY (WHAT’S LEFT OF IT): 1849
The fog bank is a whitewashed wall a mere stone’s throw from the shore rising sheer from the grey sea like something more solid than fog. Little waves emanate from it to lap the sand and shrieking gulls drift through the milky vapour like wraiths or souls unmoored, recently released but if that is the case then the entire sky would be black with them and the sound of their screeching would burst ears. Ferdia stands and waits for those little waves to swell, to tell of an approaching boat somewhere in that fog and bound for the shingle shore on which he stands.
Shelagh is a shape close to him, a dim figure asquat on the sand-and-stone beach and attended by three smaller shapes like familiars. She has been weeping for days, it seems, weeks. One of the smaller shapes bends double and coughs and retches. Aoife again. Any more of this and she’ll be spewing up her own lights.
—That Aoife once more? Ferdia’s voice is gulped by the fog, as is Shelagh’s affirmative murmur. —She still bringing up the blood?
More murmuring, more retching. This could be the loss of child number 3 in as many weeks but what is a man to do with a child so hungry and wasted that its lights and liver can be discerned as dark patches beneath the stretched skin like the transparency of a sprat? Feed it more grass the likes of which only bring on the dysentery? Or visit the Hollow of the Blood again where the vein of a calf can be slit open and famished mouths can be pressed slurping to that awful spigot? Chances must be taken. Death must be defied glutted as it is here, now with cairn-topped mass graves carbuncling the fields, uncountable new ones every day.
The retching stops. Aoife cries loud.
—She well?
—She’s not. She’s ill and will die and her soul is claimed like yours and mine and all. They’re only childer, Ferdia Maguire, and damned them you have.
—Ach, would ye ever shut that hole? Ferdia spits then reflects that to swallow that mucus may have provided some nourishment. —Sure and don’t we need money? You know of a man alive who’ll take us off this island without a coin, do you?
Shelagh shakes her head and reaches and gathers her children to her, three where there was recently five, three where there will soon be two. —Not alive, no. All charity in this place is sunk in the earth. Those who live and breathe belong to Lucifer and there is nowhere to go from here. We exchange one Hell for another and nothing more there is to it.
Ferdia sucks on a shell. For the salt, for the salt. The pain in his stomach is vile and howling and there is a wailing in his head too as there has been for months since this began, since the dark cloud passed over the country and infected the people with an evil just as the prátaí were infected with the blight. But then the occupiers were of an evil anyway with the evictions and the burnings and the potatoes on the other hand hid their rot beneath their unblemished skins and they came up from the ground as they always do tumbling like pebbles and only revealed their black hearts when cleft. All goodness gnawed at, eaten away. Tiny cankered animalcule and the apocalypse they can sow. A mere blink of time to scrape people down to the bone, to suck muscle and flesh into the horrible hollow air which alone can sustain no life.
—One Hell we exchange for another and no way out of it there isn’t, Shelagh mutters again and then sinks her head into her bundle of children and begins to mutter a prayer in the old tongue. Soft sibilants and rolling plosives beneath and akin to the small crash of the waves.
And truly it has been a Hell, a deathscape designed by demons in finery. After the crops failed and the grain was removed to feed others away over a sea and the clergymen called wrath down on the heads of those who sought to seize the corn and Trevelyan withdrew whatever meagre aid there was all Mhaigh Eo it seemed walked the storm from Doo Lough to Louisburgh. All Mhaigh Eo, with the rain and the lightning and the never-ending hunger taking children and the old and the cairn-crowned graves appearing along the trail in bog and sudden pasture and running roadside and in uneven lea where the great forests once stood now tree-stripped to make the navy of a malign alien race to ferry away that very commodity which could lend respite to this vast ravage. And then in Louisburgh these marchers drenched and dripping and semi-naked skeletal were poked and inspected by the Poor Law Guardians who instead of declaring them official paupers and allotting them three pounds of meal per family unit instructed them all to be at Delphi Lodge, the private fishing lodge of the Marquis of Sligo and ten miles distant at 0700 hours. Without stint the rain fell and under a tree denuded of leaves the youngest Maguire died and rage would have grown then had not pain and exhaustion swamped it although some among the wanderers there were who spoke of redress and revenge yet such words in the mouths of such scarecrows wet and emaciate provoked only sobs from hollow stomachs. And then the march to Delphi Lodge which exposure took more of the very young and very old, some left sitting upright at roadsides like milestones calibrating the distance to Hades and when this legion battered, bedraggled arrived they found the Guardians at breakfast and would not be disturbed. And so a wait followed. A long wait. And unwilling to be interrupted at table the Guardians sent the ragged horde on their way home. Home to a barren farm and empty shell of a house from which soon they were to be dragged for non-payment of rent.
And tumbrils laden with grain and other crops and livestock too under armed escort traversed the empty land to the docksides where great ships laden with such produce took it elsewhere. From those who would die without it to those who didn’t need it.
So fury did grow, as it must; those who starve amid substance can in their gurgling guts find rage. Can as they consume themselves from within find that they have strength enough still to make a fist or fling a rock which is precisely what Ferdia Maguire did on his way to Westport harbour; providence offered him one of Boycott’s Ulstermen broken-legged at the roadside, having been tossed by his horse, and it was easy to brain the beseeching bastard with a rock and steal the effects from his pockets which comprised but a clay pipe and a pistol with no shot and some money. At the first blow of the rock Shelagh began to bewail the fate of their immortal souls and she continued in this vein without cessation all the way across to Westport sands, through deserted village and past burning barn and fields of wooden stumps and fallow pastures reeking with the dead and patrolled by the black birds who eat such moribund flesh. Wept she did in ditch and under hedgerow as they concealed themselves from government patrol and from weapon-wielding indigents, animate skeletons crazed and with furnace eyes. And when the second child died and his grave was just a scrape in the earth and down into the Hollow of the Blood they went where a man accepted money to open a calf’s vein and in turn they knelt to suck and she stood blood-faced and weeping in that hollow beyond the gaze of Redcoat or Guardian indeed like her they all stood, thick blood clotting on chins and cheeks and most of them weeping and the calf lowing too. And secretive down into Westport harbour with the youngest child carried and vomiting blood not her own not even of her species over her weeping mother’s back and as a family of famine they entered the harbour, a clan of want among the jetties and pilings. Ferdia bought four small fish from a man in a coracle and these were eaten raw and quickly, ungutted and unboned. A man approached and said that for a fee he could carry the entire family safely over to the great port of Liverpool where so many countrymen have fled that they say it outrates even Dublin for sons of Erin and that any man can find paid work on the docks there. Ferdia asked the man the fee. The man asked how much money Ferdia had. Ferdia told him and well then that’s the fee the man said.
So Ferdia and family Maguire wait hungry on the white sand and shingle surrounded by the white fog. Shelagh bawls still into her remaining children held and hudd
led to her but Ferdia, Ferdia … there is an energy alive in him from somewhere. From the gulped blood or the raw fish or even from the shell-salt he is swallowing, there is an energy from somewhere within his weakly beating chest. Maybe from the Boycott Ulsterman rotting now and skull-split at the roadside like so many before him and them undeserving and he most assuredly not. Maybe it is that man’s stolen spiritus now that throbs in Ferdia and distils here on this fog-cloaked empty littoral into rage. A rage in this blood and seed and in whatever other blood and seed they might produce and down further through the bloodline to the many childer he will generate and nurture and to their issue also and for ever on so far that Ferdia cannot see it. Can see only a heaving metropolis somewhere over the sea where those of his blood will possess proud power and never suffer in this way again or want for anything other than perhaps what the blight and breaking of this world can never give.
—Not coming, Shelagh says, a grey shape in grey vapour. —Stranded here we are. All die on this beach we will and –
—Hush it, woman, Ferdia snaps. —I’ll be dead from your screeching if nothing else kills me. Sure isn’t there enough suffering to fight without you making it worse?
She prays again. Buries her head in her children and prays again in Erse and does not see the waves swell nor the small boat drift out of the fog towards them nor hear the slap and drag of oars on water.
Ferdia sees it. Ferdia hears it. And sees also the rope cast out towards him and sees the city over the sea where there is a life to be lived and money to be made and food to be eaten and sees in that city the yet-to-be of his blood and the might in them he will cultivate like he once cultivated potatoes and he will tell them and instruct them to tell their childer too and so on and so on into the next century and beyond that it is not by hoe or spade or rake that a man survives but by a rock. And by his willingness to use it.
Wreckage Page 19