The Abstainer

by Ian McGuire

  “They’re following the mayor,” Rice says to Riley. “They plan to shoot him when they get the chance.”

  “The mayor?” Riley says. “How can you shoot the fucken mayor?”

  Doyle stares at Rice, and Rice looks back at him calmly as if nothing much has happened. Doyle reminds himself that he needs those two pistols, that the moment of reckoning might come, but this is not it, not yet.

  “Whosoever knows the plan is in as deep as the man who pulls the trigger,” he says finally. “Remember that. If they hang one of us, they’ll hang us all.”

  “I can keep my counsel right enough,” Rice says, “and so can Jack here. Don’t worry yourself about us. We’re all fighting on the same side. We’re all loyal Irishmen. You do your duty and we’ll do ours.”

  Rice holds out his hand, and Doyle looks at it.

  “We’ll talk about duty after I see those guns,” he says.

  CHAPTER 10

  It is past noon the next day when Rose Flanagan finishes her morning shift at the Spread Eagle Hotel on Hanging Ditch. She pulls on a dark wool bonnet and wraps herself in a shawl against the damp December chills. She left home well before dawn; she is tired now and her head is throbbing, but the thought of going back to Thompson Street, to her mother’s pleading eyes and swollen face, to the caustic mix of shame and sorrow that fills the rooms like smoke since Tommy’s death, makes her want to groan or weep. Her neighbors ignore her now. The children stop their games of tag to stare and catcall as she walks down the street. They have had a window broken, words chalked on the walls. Is it not enough to murder and disfigure a man? she wants to say. Must you hound his grieving family also? Is there no decency or kindness left in the world? They must leave Manchester, of course, there is nothing else for it, but where can they go? She has uncles and cousins scattered about, but the letters she has had back are not encouraging. Everyone knows about Tommy’s crimes, it seems, the news has spread, and even those who have no great love for the Brotherhood don’t wish to be linked to a traitor. If she had realized even for a moment what he was doing, she would have stopped it. She would have taken him by his collar and shaken some sense into his head just as you would with a stubborn child, because really, she knows, that was all her brother ever was—a foolish boy, too taken with himself and his own cleverness to ever believe that anyone would wish him harm.

  She buys a penny bun from the bakery across the road. It is still warm from the ovens, and the smell as she holds it comforts her. She must marry someone, she supposes, that is the only escape, but who will have her now? No one in Angel Meadow or Ancoats for sure. A stranger, then, that is what she has been brought to by Tommy’s greed and foolishness. As she steps out of the shop, she sees the policeman O’Connor. He looks at her, nods, and touches the brim of his bowler hat.

  “James O’Connor,” he says. “You remember me perhaps?”

  She stares back a moment, wondering how to answer, then looks away.

  “I wanted to speak to you,” he says. “I thought it was better not to come to the house.”

  “I’ve nothing to say to the police. You’ve caused us enough trouble. You should see how my mother suffers. If all this is the death of her, I won’t be a bit surprised.”

  “I’m sorry for that,” O’Connor says. “I am.”

  “You could have stopped him,” Rose says. “Any time, but you didn’t want to, I suppose.”

  “He came to me first. He offered to talk.”

  “You could have stopped him any time,” she says again.

  “I told him to be careful, but I had no idea this would happen. No one did.”

  He is speaking in a low voice so as not to be overheard. The people walking past glance at them. A man with a white apron puts a tray of fresh loaves into the bakery window.

  “What do you want from me?” Rose asks.

  “I want to find out anything you know. We’re still looking for the men who did it.”

  “My brother’s been murdered,” she says. “That’s all I know.”

  “There’s a place nearby here,” O’Connor says. “An eating house on Thomas Street. We could talk there without being watched over. I have some questions.”

  Rose can still feel the faint heat of the bun in her hands. There is no good reason to talk to him except that she’s curious. She wants to know all that he knows.

  “How much did you pay him anyway?” she asks.

  “Not very much. Five or ten shillings, once or twice it was a pound, but that was rare.”

  “He must have gambled it all away, then.”

  “I believe that’s right.”

  She feels a moment of strange jealousy at the thought of the two of them together, her brother and this man.

  “I would have come to you sooner except for the priest,” O’Connor says.

  “That priest was no use at all. He was scared half to death.”

  “I might be able to help you a little,” he says. “If I knew what you needed.”

  She looks at him again. He is tall and thin, half-handsome in his way, but there is a slowness and sadness about him too, as if every thought and word requires careful preparation.

  “You can’t help me,” she says. “I should be going now. My mother’s waiting for me at home.”

  There’s a pause. She waits for him to argue or insist, but he doesn’t.

  “I made a mistake,” he says eventually. “When we called on you before, asking after Tommy, I didn’t realize it.”

  “What mistake?”

  “I can’t explain it all here. It’s too involved. Let me get you a cup of tea. It’s a quiet place I’m thinking of, clean, and you don’t need to stay long if you don’t like it.”

  She hesitates a moment longer, then agrees to go with him. Even if they are seen together, she thinks, what difference will it make now?

  They find a table at the back, near the kitchen. When they’re settled, O’Connor tells her about the notebook. She doesn’t understand at first, so he explains it again.

  “That was the mistake I told you about,” he says.

  “So without the notebook our Tommy might still be alive?”

  “Most likely. Yes.”

  She looks down at the table, then up at the gas mantle glowing on the wall above O’Connor’s head.

  “They would have found him out some other way. He should have stayed clear of the police, kept his mouth shut, but he had a mind of his own. He was clever, our Tommy, but not clever enough.”

  The tea arrives with a plate of oatcakes and a jug of milk. O’Connor lifts the lid of the pot and stirs it.

  “We can catch the men who killed him, we just need some help. Can you tell me what people are saying?”

  She laughs.

  “I’m about the last person to know. They won’t serve me in the shops. I’ve been spat at twice in the street. No one gives me the time of day since they found out Tommy was a spy.”

  O’Connor nods. He isn’t surprised. Half the point of killing an informer is to scare the life out of the ones who are left behind.

  “Before he disappeared, did Tommy say anything about Stephen Doyle? Anything at all?”

  She shakes her head.

  “I knew Tommy was in the Brotherhood, but that was all. He never talked about it and I never asked.”

  “Why did he join?”

  “For the fun of it, I suppose. And because it made him feel important. Why did Tommy do anything?”

  “He was still young.”

  “Just twenty-two in June,” she says. “How old are you, Constable O’Connor?”

  “I’ll be thirty-five next time around.”

  “And hardly a gray hair that I can see.”

  “Only one or two.”

  She looks more tired than she did before, he thinks, bruised and wor
n down by it all, but her manner hasn’t changed even though her brother is dead now. She’s still bright in her way, and pretty, with those green eyes and the smile.

  “What kind of a place is this?” Rose says, looking around.

  “Temperance.”

  “You’re an abstainer? For how long?”

  “Not so long. I’m new to it.”

  She takes a bite of the oatcake. She has small teeth, pale lips. There is a dark crumb at the corner of her mouth that she pushes away with her finger.

  “How will you manage now that Tommy’s gone? Do you make enough working at the hotel to pay the rent?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Not nearly enough, but we can’t stay here anyway. No one will talk to me now. Even my friends are scared. I’ve lived here all my life and it’s like I’m a stranger. My mother still doesn’t understand what’s going on. She sits there in the parlor every day expecting people to call to say how sorry they are for her loss. I tell her they’re not coming, but she won’t believe me.”

  “There are other places you could go to,” O’Connor says. “Liverpool, Glasgow, Birmingham. Make new friends, start afresh.”

  She frowns.

  “We’ve done nothing wrong, yet we’re being punished. How can that be fair?”

  Fair, O’Connor thinks. Is that what she expects?

  * * *

  —

  He remembers his childhood in Armagh—the cabin by the stony conacre and the pig they fattened each winter to pay for the summer oatmeal. He was only twelve when his father killed a man in an argument about land and was found guilty of manslaughter and transported. Then, the year after, their mother died of the sweating fever and O’Connor and his sister, Norah, went to Dublin to live with their aunt Ellen in the two rooms of her dilapidated tenement off Meath Street.

  Norah grieved their losses, but O’Connor was glad to be away. Despite the filth and the stench of it, he preferred the city life. He went to school for two years, where he learned grammar and history and a smattering of Latin and Greek, then became apprentice to a tailor, James O’Reilly. When he was seventeen, he had an idea to join the fusiliers. He visited their barracks at Arbor Hill to volunteer, but they wouldn’t take him. They didn’t say why, but making his way home afterward, he wondered if they had found out about his father’s crime, if there was a thick ledger on a shelf somewhere with the name of Paul O’Connor written down and a black mark inked beside it. Just the thought made him bitter and furious. The next day in the tailor’s, he argued with a customer and was given a stern warning, then, a week later, when he did it again, he was told he must leave.

  After that, he found work as a drayman for O’Connell’s brewery. One day, walking back to his aunt’s flat in the cold dark, still wearing his hobnail boots and canvas apron, he met his old schoolmaster Felix Nugent, a Kerry man who had once told him he had a good mind and might even consider going to Maynooth to train for the priesthood. They stood together for a long time, talking. Before they said goodbye, Nugent told him he was too bright to be wasting his life as a laborer and should find something better to do. He said he had a brother-in-law who was an inspector in the Dublin police and, if O’Connor agreed, he would write him a letter. When O’Connor explained what had happened with the fusiliers, Nugent shook his head and said he doubted there could be any such book in existence, but, even if there were, his brother-in-law was a fair-minded fellow who would never seek to hold one man responsible for the errors of another.

  * * *

  —

  “It isn’t fair,” he says to Rose. “Of course not. But if we could only find Stephen Doyle, we could end it all now.”

  “You won’t find a man like that until he wants to be found.”

  “Is that what people are saying?”

  “I don’t know what people are saying. I told you that already.”

  O’Connor nods and drinks his tea.

  “Even if you caught this Doyle and hanged him, that wouldn’t be the end of it,” Rose tells him. “There’d be someone else after that.”

  “That’s what they want you to believe, but it’s not true. We can beat them, I promise you.”

  “You don’t need to promise me anything,” she says. “I don’t care either way.”

  “You’re bitter about what’s happened,” he says. “I would be too.”

  She glares at him suddenly, then shakes her head and starts to weep. O’Connor watches her. He feels the tug of her grief, its dark, unappealable logic like a tide, and braces himself against it. He looks down at his two hands, pale pink and gray against the varnished tabletop, then looks up again. Rose gasps, shudders, wipes her eyes with the edge of her shawl, and sniffs.

  “Look at me,” she says. “Just look at me, will you.”

  It is as if she vanished for a minute, but now she’s back again. He pours more tea into her cup and pushes it toward her.

  “I could get you some money,” he says. “Everyone knows what Tommy did for the police. When I go back to the Town Hall, I’ll talk to them.”

  “If I had fifty pounds, we could get a shop somewhere.”

  “It won’t be so much as that, not nearly, but let me try. See what they have to say.”

  He knows it’s a foolish thing to promise. Maybury will likely laugh at him when he brings it up, but he wants to give her something and what else does he have?

  She wipes her eyes again and drinks the tea. She looks calmer now, almost happy. Some people have that strength in them, he thinks, but he never did. It was Catherine who kept him upright and steady, and when she died it was as though the grief was doubled because he didn’t have her there to help him through.

  They talk more about the money, and he can see that in her head she is already making plans how to spend it.

  “I can only ask them,” he says. “They might say no. I’ll come back to see you when I have any news. I’ll wait for you where I waited today.”

  “Tell them it’ll mean that he didn’t die in vain,” she says. “If we get something from it, even something small.”

  “I’ll tell them that,” he says. “I will.”

  There’s a long pause, then Rose glances up at the clock on the wall and says she must be going now or else her mother will start to fret. O’Connor goes up to the counter to pay, and when he gets back to the table she is already standing, ready to leave. Her green eyes are pink from crying.

  “Your face looks better than before,” she tells him. “Almost back to normal, aren’t you?”

  “Nearly,” he says. “Not quite.”

  As they say goodbye, he feels an urge to touch her, on the elbow perhaps or the angle of the shoulder, a gentle touch, small and comforting, but he doesn’t do it. Instead, he nods quickly and stands aside to let her go past. As she moves by him, he breathes in the hard smells of her work—carbolic soap and white vinegar—and beneath them both, like an almost forgotten memory, the frail must of human skin.

  CHAPTER 11

  Peter Rice’s tannery is on the east bank of the Irk, just up from the Ducie Bridge near the place they call Gibraltar. There is a tripe dresser’s next to it on one side and a sizing works on the other. Michael Sullivan is employed as a yardman. When the fresh cowhides arrive into the beam room, their undersides are bloodied and membranous and the horns and tails are still attached. They must be trimmed and limed before the hair can be sleeked off with the long, dull-edged fleshing knife, and then they must be bated in pigeon manure until they are soft and receptive enough to tan. Out in the tanning yard there are twelve brick-lined pits arranged into three rows of four. The hides are moved from one row to the next until they are dark enough, then they are carried into the shed for drying and finishing. Sullivan’s task is to fill and drain the tanning pits and to grind and shovel the oak bark and manure. He does this for ten hours a day, and, for hi
s labors, he is paid fifteen shillings a week and allowed to sleep on a cot in the damp and reeking cellar.

  The work is exhausting and filthy, and after two weeks of it he is no closer to finding Stephen Doyle than he was the day he walked into Jack Riley’s alehouse. He has listened to the other men talking and he has struck up conversations of his own, but no one has mentioned Doyle’s name even once, and there’s been no sign of him anywhere. He can’t get close enough to Peter Rice to learn anything that way, and if he asks Riley what he should do about the money he owes, the gambling debt, Riley shrugs and tells him to forget about it. It is as if the American has disappeared, or never even existed.

  He is beginning to think that O’Connor’s plan has failed, and he must give up on the hundred pounds and find some other way of filling his coffers, when, one morning, as he wheels the first cartload of ground bark out to the pits, he notices that Neary, who always starts before him, is missing. When he checks with Slattery the foreman, he is told that Rice has sent him off on an errand, and he will be back later in the day. It’s the late afternoon and dusk is falling when Neary reappears. He is carrying a parcel wrapped in brown paper under one arm and smoking a cheap cigar. Sullivan calls out to ask him where he has been, and he says he has been down to Birmingham on the train to do some business for Peter Rice. When Sullivan points to the parcel and asks him what he has brought back, Neary says it’s a secret.

  As they are talking, Peter Rice opens the door of his office and calls him inside. Neary is in the office for fifteen minutes or so, and when he comes out again he is not carrying the parcel. Soon after, when his work is finished for the day and he has washed himself and changed his clothes, Sullivan leaves the tannery, walks across Ducie Bridge, then turns right onto Long Millgate. It is dark and the gas lamps have been lit. He counts each lamp as he passes, and when he gets to the seventh lamp on the right, opposite the butcher’s, he stops and looks about. When he is sure no one is watching him, he takes a piece of chalk from his pocket, bends down as if to tie his bootlace, and marks a white cross and a number on the wall, then stands up and walks back the way he came.