The Abstainer

by Ian McGuire

  “It’s you again,” she says.

  “I need to talk to you about that money.”

  The other maid is small and dark, with a wide face and thick eyebrows. She could be Italian, he thinks, or Greek.

  “This is Gabriella,” Rose says, “the only friend I have left now.”

  O’Connor touches his hat.

  Rose smiles as if she has just made a joke. Her face seems thinner than before, more drawn, but her eyes are still bright and lively.

  “Can we go somewhere to sit down?” he says. “It’s too cold to talk out here.”

  “Not that awful temperance place again.”

  “Somewhere else, then. Anywhere. You choose it.”

  She leads him to a small tearoom off Market Street. It’s steamy and crowded inside, and there is a smell of fried onions and burned toast. They wait a minute while a waiter wipes off a table, then they sit down. O’Connor pauses before speaking. He can tell by the expression on Rose’s face, eager and hopeful, that she is expecting the news to be good. He feels like a fool for making promises he cannot keep. He wishes there were some easy way to explain himself, to let her understand what has happened, but he knows there isn’t.

  “I talked to Superintendent Maybury today,” he tells her. “I told him all about the problems, but he says he can’t give you any money. He says the detective office isn’t responsible for what happened with Tommy.”

  She looks confused at first. Then, when she realizes what it means, she looks angry.

  “I’m sorry,” O’Connor says. “I thought there was a chance, but it turns out I was wrong.”

  “Seems you’ve been wrong about a few things lately.”

  “I’ve made some mistakes,” he answers. “That’s the truth of it.”

  “Our Tommy was only killed because he talked to you, and we’re suffering for it now. Does your superintendent not think that we deserve some help?”

  “I told him all that. I explained everything, but he wouldn’t listen. I’m sorry.”

  “Can you not talk to him again? We’re not asking for much.”

  “If I thought I could change his mind, I’d try, but he’s a hard-headed fellow. Stubborn as a brick wall. He won’t budge however much I push him.”

  Rose frowns and purses her lips. There are spots of red now high up on her pale cheeks. O’Connor knows he has failed her. He remembers Maybury’s disdain and feels a throb of anger at the position she’s in and the part he’s played in putting her there.

  “They don’t listen to me,” he explains. “They never have listened. They brought me over here from Ireland to give them advice, but they take no notice of what I say. They do just as they please.”

  “You should go back home to Dublin if you don’t like it here,” she tells him curtly. “If the English won’t listen to you, why do you stay?”

  He rubs his right hand across his lips, then pours some milk into his empty teacup.

  “My wife died last year so I’ve nothing to go back for now.”

  Rose glares at him for a moment, then sighs and shakes her head. When she speaks again the hardness is gone from her voice and they are back to where they were before. Quick to anger, he thinks, quick to forget. That’s how she is.

  “Your wife must have been young.”

  “Twenty-eight,” he says. “We were married six years.”

  “And no children?”

  “We lost a boy at nine months old from pleurisy, and after that Catherine couldn’t manage it again. I don’t know why. I wonder now if she was ill before we knew it, and that was the cause.”

  “That’s a terrible thing. I’m sorry for you.”

  “After she died, I started drinking whiskey. It was very bad for a while. I should have lost my job because of it, but they took pity and sent me over here instead. So I can’t go back there even if I want to. They wouldn’t have me.”

  She gives him back a soft sympathetic look, as if his pain is her pain too, and he feels in response a flash of strange, absurd elation.

  “We’re both of us trapped here, then,” she says.

  “Yes,” he says. “I suppose we are.”

  * * *

  —

  O’Connor pours out the tea and lifts the china cup to his lips. He was a constable living in the police barracks on Kevin Street when he first learned that his father was dead—killed in a barroom fight in a small town just south of Sydney. The letter, written by a local magistrate, explained that Paul O’Connor, originally from County Armagh, had been released on a ticket of leave and had traveled from Melbourne with the probable intention of purchasing land. The man who had killed him, who was in prison now and would likely be hanged, was also an Irishman by the name of Dominick Lanigan, and it was believed that the two of them had previously been close friends but had fallen out over money. The magistrate explained that some small items, which might be of sentimental value, had been discovered in his father’s lodging house after his death, and he asked O’Connor to write back confirming his claim to them as his father’s heir. His sister, Norah, was married by then and living on a farm near Quebec. O’Connor wrote the same day to tell her the news, and also wrote back to the magistrate, thanking him for his trouble and asking that any property belonging to his father be sold and the proceeds given to a suitable charity to save the trouble and expense of shipping them back to Ireland.

  That night, in Dublin, as he made his usual rounds, O’Connor came upon two drunken men fighting each other in an alleyway. Their faces were sheened with sweat and their eyes were loose and bloodshot. When O’Connor called for them to quiet down, they ignored him, and when he tried to step between them, they cursed at him and spat in his face. He paused a moment, then raised his truncheon and hit one of them a fierce blow across the head. The man dropped to his knees, groaning, and O’Connor stepped forward and hit him again. There was no good reason for the second blow except that he was filled with rage and had no better way to show it. The man toppled sideways and lay flat on the flagstones, unconscious and bleeding from the head. O’Connor looked around, then blew his whistle three times. The other man was already gone, and no one else had seen what happened. If he was questioned, he could say that he had been attacked, and no one would know any better. He crouched down and put his fingers to the prone man’s lips to check he was still breathing. After a few moments, he felt air moving in and out against his fingertips, cool then warmer. Blood was still welling up from the scalp wound and the smell of the splayed body was fierce and terrible. O’Connor thought of his father bleeding to death on a barroom floor in New South Wales. He was not angry anymore, and it was hard for him to remember just why he had hit the man in the way he had. He wondered what kind of person he must be to do such a thing.

  * * *

  —

  Rain knocks against the misted windows of the Manchester tearoom. Outside, the people passing by look like blurred shadows of themselves, like souls without bodies, bewildered and drifting. Inside there is laughter and talk, the crackle of frying; waiters dance and shimmy between the tables with plates of sausages and fresh pots of tea.

  “I have a little money of my own put aside, if you need something,” O’Connor says to Rose. “It’s not fifty pounds, it’s less than ten probably, but you’re welcome to it.”

  “I can’t take your money, Mr. O’Connor. I hardly know you.”

  “Call me James,” he says. “Please. Or Jimmy.”

  “Jimmy, then,” she says. “And you should call me Rose.”

  He waits a moment, then nods.

  “The money’s there, if you ever need it. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “My mother thinks I should just find myself a husband and that would solve our problems. She doesn’t know what’s stopping me, but I told her no Irishman in Manchester will have me. Not after Tommy. I’m too much
bother.”

  “I doubt that’s true,” he says.

  “Oh, it’s true, all right. You should see the way they look at me now.”

  Her boldness always takes him by surprise. There are things he could say to her, he knows, but he doubts he has the will or courage to say them.

  “My mother was married at sixteen,” he tells her. “And my grandmother at fifteen. It was different times back then.”

  “Of course it was. I tell her, ‘We’re not living on a farm in Fermanagh anymore, Ma,’ but she doesn’t understand what on earth I’m talking about.”

  Once the tea is finished with, he pays the bill and they step back outside. It is colder than it was and there is rain in the air. He offers to walk back with her to Thompson Street, but she smiles at the idea and says she is in enough trouble with the neighbors already.

  “Will you ever catch that man who killed our Tommy?” she says. “What was the name, again?”

  “Stephen Doyle. I think we will, but I don’t know when.”

  “You’ll get him before he kills anyone else’s brother or son, I hope.”

  “I hope so too.”

  She puts the scarf over her head and smiles at him quickly, and they shake hands and say goodbye. After she is gone, as he is walking back to the Town Hall, he remembers the dream he had and feels his chest tighten.

  CHAPTER 13

  Jack Riley has run a wet comb through his gray-black hair, and his collarless shirt is buttoned all the way up to the neck. He recites, slowly and with a somber priestliness, each line of the Fenian oath, and then has Michael Sullivan repeat it back to him. There is a dog-eared Bible on the table beside them, and Sullivan’s right hand is resting on it as he speaks. When he forgets himself and makes a mistake, they start again at the beginning. They are standing in the shabby living quarters above the alehouse on Rochdale Road. Slattery, Rice, and the others are drinking downstairs, and their raucous voices can be heard occasionally coming up through cracks in the floorboards.

  “So help me God, Amen,” Riley says.

  “So help me God, Amen.”

  Riley holds out his hand and smiles at him. Sullivan shakes it. Only the things you can touch and taste are real, he tells himself, all the rest is just words. They embrace. Riley is bony as all hell and smells like an ashpit.

  “And now for a fucken drink or two,” he says.

  The oath taking is supposed to be a great secret, so when they go downstairs there is no cheering or backslapping from the others, even though everyone there knows full well what they have been up to. Riley pulls Sullivan a pint and tells him he has just done a fine thing for himself and for his country. Slattery comes across and shakes him by the hand.

  “I always knew this lad was a good un,” Riley tells him. “From the moment he put that copper down on his arse right over there. Christ almighty, but you should have seen it.”

  Sullivan drinks half the pint down in one long gulp and feels the better for it. He looks about the room at the other men. When he thinks what they would do to him if they knew the truth, it makes him nervy. He’s taking an awful big chance, he knows that, but it’s too late to back out now. He must find his way through it somehow. Riley is still talking. He is saying how the Brotherhood has taken some blows lately, but it can’t ever be killed because the love of freedom is a sacred thing, and no matter how powerful the British are, their lies will never be a match for our truth. Slattery is nodding.

  “We’ll beat them fuckers in the end,” he says.

  “Sure we will,” Riley says.

  Sullivan finishes off his pint and puts the empty glass back down on the bar.

  “Are all the fellows in here now a part of it too?” he says.

  “Every one,” Riley says, “and a better gang of men you couldn’t wish for. Here, follow me.”

  He gives Sullivan another pint, then walks him over to the table where Peter Rice is sitting. Rice points him to a chair and tells him the names of the others. They nod at him and carry on talking. Sullivan goes through the names again in his head in case Jimmy asks him later on—Bryce, Costello, McArdle, Devine. They are talking about a prizefight in Rochdale, and then about a horse for sale, and a man who has been arrested for selling tainted meat. Nothing about Stephen Doyle or the guns, or any scheme. When Peter Rice stands up and goes to the bar, Sullivan turns to the man sitting next to him, Willy Devine.

  “Is there a plan?” he says. “I heard some rumors.”

  Willy Devine cricks his neck, then gazes down morbidly at his half-drunk beer as if its piebald surface might, like tea leaves or the innards of a crow, reveal some deeper truth.

  “We don’t listen to no rumors,” he says.

  “So you haven’t heard any talk about a plan?”

  Devine turns to look at him. He has a dirty-looking beard and gummy eyes. He puts his tobacco-tainted forefinger up to his ale-wettened lips and winks lugubriously.

  “I haven’t heard nothing at all, my darling,” he says, “and neither have you.”

  Rice comes back with a tray of fresh pints and hands one to Sullivan.

  “Yank lad here asking if there’s a secret plan,” Devine says to him.

  Sullivan takes a sip of the beer, then puts it down when he feels his hand begin to wobble.

  Rice looks puzzled.

  “We don’t share the secret plans till later. That’s how it works. You know that, Willy.”

  “Can’t you give him a hint at least, Pete?” Devine says. “He’s dreadful eager to learn. Couldn’t you?”

  Rice sits back down in his chair and looks around the table as if to gauge the opinions of the other men.

  “I maybe could,” he says. He turns to Sullivan: “Which plan do you want to hear about first?”

  “Is there more than one?”

  “Fuck yes,” Devine says. “Do you think we’d only have one plan?”

  “Then I don’t mind which is first,” Sullivan says. He is glad now that he took that chance with Devine. It does no good to be timid or meek, he thinks. People will sense your fear and use it against you.

  “We could start with the most important, then. Which secret plan would be the most important plan, do you think, Willy?”

  “They’re all fucken belters,” he says. “But the one that involves killing that auld bitch the Queen is my favorite.”

  “That’s right,” Rice says. “There’s the plan we made to poison the Queen, with a drop of something nasty in her sherry glass.” He looks at Sullivan. “What do you think of that, lad?”

  “The Queen?” he says.

  “Herself.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “It’s a fine plan, that one,” Devine says.

  “And when will you do it?” Sullivan asks him.

  Rice thinks a moment.

  “Well, we still have to get our hands on the right poison, then we have to take it down to London, so there’ll be some delay. But pretty soon, I’d say.”

  “How can you get in close enough? Won’t she have guards?”

  “It’s the butler,” Rice explains. “The Queen’s own butler is a fellow from Kilkenny named Seamus O’Malone. He changed that, of course, now he goes by Brown.”

  “And he dropped the brogue,” Devine says. “Talks like the fucken Duke of Clarence, now he does.”

  “So it’s just poison you’re using,” Sullivan says. “No guns?”

  “Just poison for this one, but there are other plans for after. Killing the Queen is just for openers.”

  Sullivan looks around the table. The others are nodding in agreement, but he remembers the pistols in the drawer.

  “Are you telling me the truth now?” he says. “Are you being straight?”

  Rice frowns and folds his arms across the bulge of his belly. He takes a long sup of ale and licks th
e remainder from his lips.

  “These are the secret plans. It’s not everyone who gets to know the secret plans.”

  “You’ve been singled out, lad,” Devine says. “You should count yourself lucky.”

  Sullivan nods.

  “I understand that.”

  “Well, I’m glad you do,” Rice says.

  “So if the first plan is the Queen, then what comes next?”

  Rice looks over at Devine as if he needs some reminding.

  “After the Queen, it’s the Prince of Wales,” Devine says. “We plan to take the Prince of Wales prisoner and hold that fancy bugger for a ransom.”

  “That’s right,” Rice says. “And after we’re done with the Prince of Wales, there’s the plan to steal the crown jewels, isn’t there, Willy? Then the plan to burn down Dublin Castle.” He frowns. “Is there another secret plan I’m forgetting about?”

  “How about the plan to get a great big, red hot poker and stick it right up Mr. Gladstone’s arse?” he says. “Did you forget about that one?”

  Devine pauses a second, then cackles and sticks out his tongue, and suddenly they are all laughing. Red shining faces, open mouths, crooked teeth. Gibbering like apes in the zoo. He understands it now.

  “The red hot poker up the arse!” Rice shouts out into the hubbub. “Christ, I knew there was something that slipped my mind!”

  They are shaking their heads and banging on the tabletop as if they have never witnessed such a fine display of wit.

  “You had me there, lads,” Sullivan says when the noise dies down a little. “Jesus Christ, you had me there.”

  It doesn’t matter, he tells himself. They can have their piece of fun, and better they think me a clown than a traitor. Rice slaps him on the back and leans in toward him. His breath smells of raw onion and his face is broad and bristly as a sow’s arse.

  “We always have a joke with the new ones,” he says. “Don’t take it to heart. You finish that beer and I’ll buy you the next.”