1972

by Morgan Llywelyn

  Barry’s stunned mind was beginning to work in fits and starts. He recalled hearing his name—My real name!—and then several men—half a dozen, maybe seven, not wearing uniforms—came running toward him. B-Specials? The nausea was growing worse. I fought back. He held on to that small consolation. I fought back! In his mouth there was a taste of blood. “Perhaps you’d best fetch a doctor,” he whispered to the priest.

  “Will you be all right if I leave you alone for a few minutes? My housekeeper’s away for a couple of days, but I’ll lock the door and be back as soon as I can.”

  “Thanks,” Barry murmured as the darkness engulfed him.

  The next time he opened his eyes two men were bending over him. One was the priest; the other was a stubby little man with a nose empurpled by broken veins. “Back with us, are you?” he asked in a curiously lifeless voice. His teeth were bad and his lustreless eyes looked like dirty marbles.

  Barry felt an immediate aversion for him.

  Father Aloysius said, “This man’s a GP. He’s come to help you.”

  “I don’t need help. Just let me rest awhile and I’ll …”

  “You’ll do nothing,” said the doctor, “until we see to your injuries. John—Father Aloysius—tells me you don’t want to go to hospital. Is that right?”

  “Right.”

  “Listen to sense, young man. You may be concussed and you definitely have a couple of broken ribs. The leg’s the worst, that’s a compound fracture. We could set it here, I suppose; John could help me. But you’d be much better off in hospital where—”

  “No hospital,” Barry growled through clenched teeth. “I mean it.” He glared at the doctor.

  “All right,” the man said reluctantly, “but you may regret it. There are fractures both above and below the knee. A shard of bone’s actually pierced your trousers. Looks like they beat you with clubs—or an iron bar. I can’t think how they missed shattering the kneecap. Maybe there was so much blood, they thought they had.”

  Barry made another desperate effort to get up. The two men gently pushed him back down. “None of that now.”

  How do I know this man’s a doctor? I have only the priest’s word for it, but is Father Aloysius really a priest? Wearing a dog collar doesn’t prove anything. I could buy clerical garb myself. Barry’s head was swimming. There was a maddening buzzing in his ears.

  During the ordeal of straightening the bones and setting the leg, he fought with all his strength to remain conscious. At last the doctor stepped back and mopped his forehead. “Now don’t move until that plaster hardens, young man. I believe there’s some ligament damage, but I’m hopeful it will heal itself along with the bone. We’re not out of the woods yet, though. With an injury like yours there’s always a chance of infection. There’s also a possibility that the blood could form a pool in your calf muscle, in which case we’d have no option but to put you in hospital. You could lose your leg.”

  “I love good news,” Barry croaked.

  Damn it all. Damn it all to hell. Damn them all to hell.

  Much of his body was now either bandaged or encased in plaster. His head was swathed in gauze with only his eyes showing.

  “Your own mother wouldn’t know you,” Father Aloysius told him.

  My own mother. God, I can’t let her see me like this. “I can’t stay here, Father. People are expecting me.”

  “And where would that be? Clare?”

  “No.” Whatever you say, say nothing.

  “You’ll not be fit to travel for a while, I’m afraid,” the priest said. “But you’re welcome to stay here as long as needs be.”

  What if he knows the men who attacked me? What if he’s only waiting to turn me over to them? “I don’t want to be any trouble.”

  “Ministering to the sick is part of my work, and anyway May Coogan—she’s my housekeeper—will be back soon. She’s good at nursing. Meanwhile, do you want me to send word to your family?”

  “I don’t have any family.” What a fool I was not to tell someone where I was going.

  “What about the people who’re expecting you?”

  “Just acquaintances. Not important.” Barry closed his eyes. With a sense of relief he heard the two men leave the room.

  Several times during the night Father Aloysius brought a bucket into which Barry pissed a stream of what looked like pure blood. The doctor was there first thing next morning to check on his condition. “How’re you feeling now?”

  Barry’s head was pounding and his entire body hurt more than he would have thought possible. “I’m wonderful entirely,” he said. “How long until my leg heals?”

  “If nothing goes wrong? The bones will take twelve weeks to mend if you’re lucky and there are no complications. It may be a year before you can walk normally, though—if you ever do. I believe I mentioned the possibility of ligament damage, and there’s bound to be some muscle atrophy.”

  For another day and night it was impossible to concentrate on anything but fighting the pain. The doctor left tablets for him, but Barry was unwilling to take anything which might further dull his mind. Something’s gone terribly wrong. Someone identified me. He would think about it when his brain was clearer. In the meantime he dare not make himself any more vulnerable than he already was.

  At least one worry was lessened when Father Aloysius’s housekeeper returned from visiting her mother in Cookstown. A thin woman with lank hair but brilliant blue eyes, May Coogan assured Barry that the priest was exactly who he said he was. “I’ve kept house for himself since he was assigned to this parish, and you won’t find a man with a better heart anywhere. You’re not the first stray he’s taken in off the street, you know. What happened to you? Were you robbed?”

  “I had a wallet in my coat pocket and a black hold-all with two cameras in it. Did Father Aloysius find them?”

  She shook her head. “He said he looked for a wallet with your name in, but there was none on you. I’ll ask him about the bag, but he never mentioned it to me.”

  Barry had been stripped not only of his cameras but of anything identifying him as Finbar Lewis.

  They called me Barry Halloran.

  It might have been Special Branch; it might have been the RUC. Either way, they had known who he was. The only answer was an informer. In Belfast he was Finbar Lewis, but one of the safe houses where he stayed had demanded verification of his true identity. His description could have spread through the Six Counties as quickly as a telephone call. And I made it easy for them by being careless.

  As his convalescence continued, so did the sleepless nights. Nights when he kept the pain at bay through sheer willpower. Father Aloysius always seemed to know, and often came in to sit by his bed. The two would talk for hours, with Barry concentrating ferociously on every word to avoid thinking about his body.

  He revealed something of himself during those long predawn conversations, though he was careful never to give too much away. He admitted to being “an Irish republican” without ever once saying he was a Volunteer. He talked more about his time at Trinity and his interest in photography.

  “You’ll be taking photographs again one of these days,” Father Aloysius assured him. “You don’t need two good legs to use a camera.”

  “No, but it would help. I have to be able to get to the subjects.”

  “Of course you do; I wasn’t thinking. I’ll say a prayer every day for your total recovery, my son.”

  Barry was grateful to the priest. He even liked him. But although he called him “Father” he could not accept him as someone holy. Ursula Halloran’s opinion of priests had insinuated itself into her son’s subconscious like a worm into an apple.

  Still, he would be sorry to say good-bye. The shabby little house, the kindly priest, the solicitous housekeeper who learned to make tea as strong as he liked it—even the floral pattern of the wallpaper in his room—had become familiar and comforting.

  Chapter Twenty

  THE young man sat stiffly uprigh
t on his seat. Occasionally the jolting of the train made him wince. His left leg in its plaster cast protruded far into the aisle. Every time someone edged past the obstacle he offered a low-voiced apology. After the train crossed the border into the Republic he unwrapped the bandages from his head. Without them he felt strangely naked, but more like himself again.

  The money to buy his train ticket had been loaned to him by the doctor with the dead voice and lustreless eyes. His name, Barry had learned, was Terence Roche. He and Father Aloysius had been schoolboys together in the Bogside. In spite of his repellent appearance Terry Roche was kind and caring. And I’m a damned poor judge of character, Barry told himself reproachfully.

  Roche had visited Barry several times a day. When he learned that his patient had lost his money, he said, “Don’t worry about paying me. You have enough on your plate.”

  Making conversation while his dressings were being changed, Barry had asked Roche which hospital he used. The man replied, “I don’t have privileges in any of them.”

  “Are you not a qualified doctor?”

  “Oh yes, I’m fully qualified, I can show you my certificates. But I’m a Catholic.”

  “There must be some Catholic doctors in the hospitals here.”

  “A few,” Roche conceded. “If they’re willing to kowtow to the authorities and limit their patients to Catholics only.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “You think so? For us it’s normal. My father trained as a telephonist and got himself appointed to Stormont, but when the minister for home affairs learned there was a Catholic on the switchboard, he refused to use the telephone for government business. My father had to be transferred.”1

  In spite of the care he was receiving, as soon as the pain was bearable Barry announced that he was going to leave.

  “I strongly advise against it,” Roche said, “until you’re much farther along in the healing process. You could do irreversible damage to your leg. You have an iron constitution, but that doesn’t mean you can disregard something so serious.”

  Barry was adamant. There was only one place he wanted to be right now, only one person he wanted to see.

  At his insistence the doctor had put a metal fitting on the bottom of his cast to make it a “walking cast”—“This doesn’t mean you can put any weight on that leg, though, so don’t try,”—and equipped Barry with a pair of crutches. His ribs remained tightly bound.

  A fortnight later Barry was on his way back to the Republic. He had no intention of going to the farm. Seeing him in his current condition would give his mother all the ammunition she needed. Tucked away in his bed upstairs, closely watched by Ursula and fussed over by Eileen, he would be trapped.

  Prison would almost be preferable. What did Cathal Goulding say about the Curragh? Oh yes. “Where else could a fellow spend all his time with friends of a like mind?”

  No girls, of course. But if Mam had me under her eye every minute there would be damned little opportunity for girls anyway.

  THE pub in Ballina had not changed appreciably in decades and would not change for decades more. The air was still blue with cigarette smoke. What appeared to be the same six or seven men sat at the bar, discussing the affairs of the world or staring into their drinks. The floor was covered with more or less the same sawdust. The old hammer still hung from its frayed rope. With his back to the bar, the bald-headed man was wiping the discoloured mirror.

  “Séamus McCoy been in here today?”

  “Never heard of him,” the bald man said without turning around.

  “Would he be upstairs, d’ye think?”

  “I told you,” the bartender said truculently as he turned around, “I never …” He paused. Looked hard at the tall, haggard man leaning heavily on crutches, with one leg in a cast almost to the groin. “Is it yourself?”

  Barry gave a rueful smile. “I’m not sure.”

  “Neither am I,” the bartender retorted. “But I can tell you there’s no one upstairs. If you want to wait, he might come in later. Sit over there and I’ll bring your drink down to you. A pint, isn’t it?”

  Barry leaned his crutches against a table and gratefully eased himself onto a chair. When the pint with its creamy head was set on the table in front of him he took out the last coins he had. The bartender refused them: “Your money’s no good here.”

  “Thanks.” Barry left the coins on the table anyway.

  His whole body ached. The effort to hitch a ride from Limerick to Ballina had exhausted what little remained of his strength. He looked longingly at the sawdust-strewn floor, wondering what the bartender would say if he just lay down.

  Then the door opened and Séamus McCoy came in.

  His reaction to Barry’s appearance was the same as the bartender’s.

  Without asking any questions, he put Barry’s arm across his shoulders and half carried the larger man to the room upstairs. Only when the door was closed and bolted behind them did McCoy ask, “What in God’s name happened to you?”

  Barry told him as best he could.

  “And you’ve no idea who attacked you?”

  “Only a hunch. I think it might be Special Branch.”

  “When I learned what you were doing, I confess I was none too happy about it. I told’em as much at GHQ. They were taking a chance letting you go back across the border alone.”

  “They thought it was worth the risk.”

  “I’m not saying it wasn’t. We’ve all risked as much and more. The question is, What to do with you now?”

  Barry had been asking himself the same question. “I was hoping you could suggest someplace where I can lie low until I’ve healed.”

  “Will you not go home?”

  “That’s the last place I want to be now. I have my own reasons, but there’s also the risk of bringing trouble down on my mother.”

  “Aye.” McCoy gave him a mock-angry scowl. “Apparently you don’t mind bringing trouble to me.”

  Barry smiled; his ribs hurt too much to laugh. “I knew you could handle it.” He felt an almost overwhelming sense of relief. He was back with Séamus McCoy. He was safe.

  MCCOY made the necessary arrangements. Before sundown Barry was ensconced in a house on the Killaloe side of the river, the home of a republican called Reddan. A doctor of the same persuasion had been to see him and pronounced him in good shape for the shape he was in, which was pretty bad. “We’ll have the tape off your ribs as soon as they’ve had a chance to mend, but you’re going to wear a cast for a while. If you were up in Dublin they’d put pins in that leg, but we don’t have the facilities to do that down here. A good rest and plenty of nourishing food will do you a power of good, though. We can trust Mrs. Reddan to take care of you on that score.”

  McCoy promised to tell Éamonn Thomas where Barry was and what had happened to him. “I can get in touch with your mother, too.”

  “Let it be for now; I don’t have to report to her. All I want at the moment is a newspaper to read and a large tin of aspirin.”

  ON the first of August, 1961, the Republic of Ireland applied for membership in the European Economic Community—the EEC.

  On August thirteenth the last gap in the border between East and West was firmly closed: The Berlin Wall was erected.

  In Ireland the partition between north and south remained firmly in place. The level of violence in the north had receded; or perhaps it simply was no longer news. But the conditions which fostered violence remained. “Sectarianism and injustice don’t create peace, and peace is more than an absence of violence,” as Barry remarked to Séamus McCoy.

  THERE was no question of Barry’s returning to university in the autumn. The doctor had taken him to Limerick for X-rays, which revealed that the damage to his leg had been extensive. He would require a protracted convalescence.

  “I’ll be going back to university as soon as possible,” Barry told McCoy. “In the meantime I’ll write to Trinity and explain that I’ve been injured; they don’t n
eed to know how. If I write a letter to my mother, can you arrange for it to be posted from Dublin? I want her to believe everything’s normal.”

  “Think you can fool her?”

  “People who can fool Ursula Halloran are few and far between, but I’m going to give it a damned good try. At least the big horse show at the RDS is over, so she won’t have any reason to go up to Dublin for a while.”

  Barry’s letter was carefully worded. He apologised for not having been home recently, and gave the impression that he was returning to Trinity immediately without actually saying so. He concluded the letter with a request: “Please lodge additional money to my Dublin bank account. I don’t know where it all goes, but the city is twice as expensive as the country.”

  Ned Halloran’s notebooks were still in safekeeping in the Ennis bank.

  AT the September meeting of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association, Ursula Halloran was one of the few who was not delighted by the possibility of Ireland’s joining the EEC. “It would mean so much more money for farmers!” other women enthused. Ursula, however, was sceptical. “If you believe the politicians. But have we not learned the hard way that one cannot believe the politicians?”

  “Oh, you—you’re just a begrudger. You have plenty of money already.”

  “Indeed,” Ursula said dully. “Plenty of money.”

  "HOW did you feel the first time you were arrested, Séamus?”

  “Bloody stupid and that’s a fact. It was my own fault. I’d been to a friend’s wake earlier in the day and I didn’t keep a sharp lookout the way I usually do. The RUC drove right up beside me on the road as I was walking home, and before I knew what happened I heard the cell door slam behind me.”

  “How were you identified?” Barry wanted to know. “Were there constables at the wake?”

  “Not a sinner. The corpse wasn’t even a republican. Or a man, come to that. It was …” McCoy paused, coughed. “A girl I used to know.”