On Blueberry Hill

by Sebastian Barry

  For two years no one knew who done it. Then I told Christine. I was like a poisoned rat, the guilt of it was poisoning me, so I told her. She just stared and stared at me, completely unable to understand. She didn’t even say, ‘Why did you do it?’ She didn’t even say that. ‘What about Doreen and Mickey?’ was what she said. ‘What are they, ghosts as well?’ What did she mean? She went straight to the guards, she wasn’t having that. My own wife, and I do not blame her. She was right, dead right. It was Mr Herman Good of Dawson Street defended me, but you know, there was no defence. I had done it, that was it. I done it because PJ killed my son, and I killed his mother because that seemed to me like for like. It took a great effort. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. Something that was precious to him, for something that was precious to me.

  PJ

  I remember sitting in here, with all that going on outside. My cellmate in those days was a Russian lad, Vlad, who was supposed to have killed two men in a fight in Burdock’s chipper, not that he admitted to it. ‘I ham hinnocent,’ he would say. ‘Hinnocent, Patrick, as God is my vitness.’ And, maybe he was, you could never tell, only, his trial had said different. But he was here in those days, occupying Christy’s bed. And I couldn’t have had a better pal. OK, he was a rough man, from the forests outside Moscow, where, he said, the sun bouncing off the snow would burn you and blind you, in the freezing cold of winter, and there were wolves and boars still where he lived, that would take you off a forest path if you let them, and devour you at their leisure. The screw on this landing was a man called McAllister, a big burly man, he was probably a Protestant with a name like that, but that was neither here nor there, and he wasn’t a nice man. Oh, he was anxious for me to have all the latest details of the trial. How the killer had crept in and murdered my mother in her bath, this is what he told me, and as he spoke I could imagine a shadowy man creeping through the rooms of our old house, maybe hearing a little noise in the bathroom, and finding her all convenient in the bath. I couldn’t get my head around all that, though I was a murderer myself. And to think of her, a person of absolute modesty, meeting her end in that fashion. And he would go out then, all delighted with himself, and why he had it in for me quite so badly, I don’t know, only he said he didn’t like queers and homos, I mean, he might have been telling me the same things, you know, but with a kind and considerate voice, since we weren’t allowed newspapers, but no, it was all to terrorise me, and when he was gone again Vlad would come closer to me, and put his hand on my shoulder, and say, ’Not vorry, Patrick, this man is bad cunt.’

  Years later they let Vlad go free. New evidence had come to light, he had been innocent all along. I missed that Russian bear. And one day the cell door opens, it’s McAllister, with another man, I hadn’t an idea who he was, never saw him in my life. ‘Here’s your new cellmate,’ says McAllister. And I suddenly felt gratitude to him for putting someone in with me. In comes the fellow, a skinny streak of a chap about ten years older than myself, a wiry bouncy man, humorous looking, I liked him instantly, he strides in confidently and throws his few things on Vlad’s old bed, and nods to me, and we introduce ourselves, as innocent as you like. ‘Howaya,’ he says. ‘The name’s Christy, Christy Dwyer.’ ‘Hello,’ I says, ‘PJ, PJ Sullivan.’ And we’re standing there like that, we were shaking hands, like the good old lags we were, and he was nodding then, and then his head began nodding a bit faster, like he was thinking, and then into my brain came rushing the thought, like a hare bounding, like a hare running fast, Christy Dwyer, this couldn’t be the man that killed my mother? They’d never put us in together, sure there’d be murder. Christy Dwyer, Christy Dwyer. Well, I supposed it might be a common name enough. And we sorted the room out between us, as you do, and he had a little packet of nude pictures he had brought in from his other cell, wherever it had been, and he asked me was it alright if he put them on the wall beside his bed, he had the bit of blue tack. And I wondered why was he asking me, was it at the back of his mind that I might be a priest? Did he suspect also, if only subconsciously? Did he already know? And I said I didn’t mind at all, not a bit, it would brighten the place up. So he laboriously arranged them on the wall, and he told me their names, like he knew them all, like they were friends of his. But they were just the girls off a newspaper. And he had his little radio, with the Sellotape over it, and he said he liked Ronan Collins, he liked to listen to Ronan Collins, because it calmed his nerves. He said he suffered a bit from his nerves. And then, I don’t know how, suddenly out of blue, he rushes at me. It was like being assaulted by a huge metal spring. ‘Are you the fucker killed my son?’ he said, and gave me a little push, like he wanted to give space to confess, and I drew back then, like a villain in an old western. If we’d had six guns we’d have drawn them, but all we had was our sorrow, and he leaped at my throat, by God I could hear McAllister laughing like a crazy man behind the cell door, with the little bracket open, laughing, peering in, what a great lark, Christy at my throat, I fought back as best I could, this is the man who murdered my mother, and we went at each other, oh hammer and tongs, I tried to beat him with my fists, but I’m a terrible fighter, if there’d been a chair in the cell I could have tried to smash his head with it, just to stop him, he was like a force of nature, then he punched me clear across the room, a little man like that, he had a ferocious punch, I staggered against the crapper, he leaped on top of me and tried to force my head in, ‘I’ll fucking drown you, you cunt!’ he shouted, I managed to heave him off me, I was absolutely terrified now, I knew he was going to kill me if he could, he was going to fight me till he killed me, wear me down and kill me, he was wiry and astonishingly strong. But he didn’t have my weight, and he broke away from me, and leapt to the bunk, trying to tear the ladder from it, so he could beat me to death with it, I supposed, and I rushed across the room at him, like a bloody rhino, and tried to crush him against the metal bed. I heard McAllister then rattling the key, and in he rushed, and to tell you the truth there was a terrible concerned look on his face now, like he knew it had gone too far, and he would get the blame, and he dragged us apart, not laughing now, because he realised we would both be happy to murder each other, there was a fury in us both, myself too now, the whole thing had pressed the fury button in me, a tremendous thing built up like a volcano, we would have been glad to see blood and hear bones breaking, and McAllister was caterwauling now, screaming at us to stop, and in rushed one of the other screws, Bennett I think it was, and he didn’t seem to think it was a good joke either, to put the two of us in the one cell together, without due notice, but suddenly, suddenly I was exhausted, and Christy too, he was so tired he was mewling like a cat, and they got us apart, pushed us down to the floor, like the afternoon wrestlers that used to be on UTV, the rage in us gone now and the superhuman strength that goes with it, and they put the bracelets on us, our hands behind our backs, and seeing we were quiet now, bollixed as Christy might say, McAllister went out and phoned the prison doctor, and he came and injected us, like we were wild animals being caught for the zoo. And sleep came upon me like a lorryload of darkness tipped over my head.

  In the small hours when I woke, groggily, I could just make out Christy in the darkness. They had left us together, after all. The light from the prison yard shone in the little window, and lay in a glistening bar across his face. I looked at him. He was covered in bruises from the fight. There was a little blood on his bald head, whether his or mine I couldn’t know. I looked at his face for a long time, him still sleeping. I suddenly knew something, it was a moment of simple compassion, and in that moment I realised it had been a long time since I had considered another man’s pain. I mean, considered it with the piercing sympathy of an ordinary priest. I was looking at the face of a suffering man. And in that face I saw a shadow of the face I had loved best in the world. And suddenly the worst thing was not that he had murdered my mother, but that I had killed his son. How can I truly describe that moment? I feel it might be important to do so. But
I haven’t got the words for it.

  I didn’t have much time to think about it either, because twenty minutes later I began to feel very strange. It was the blood had gone cold in my brain, if there is blood in a brain, I suppose there must be, and the strangest feeling came over me, like there was poison in my throat, or my throat was being throttled by invisible hands. A horrible dreepy sensation in my chest, extremely unpleasant and alarming. And then I was thinking, well, if this is going to carry me off, good riddance to bad rubbish, and then, thinking better of this maybe, I called out to the sleeping form of Christy. Or I meant to call out, but the sound that came was just a meagre whisper. I whispered and whispered, meagrely. I suddenly knew my life depended on waking this man. But my throat seemed closed, and you can’t get a note from a flute that’s stoppered up. Nevertheless I strained to do so. Then Christy Dwyer seemed to come awake of his own accord. ‘Mercy of good Jesus,’ he said. ‘I thought I was dead.’ Then I push on with my whispers. ‘What are you saying there, bud?’ he said, like we were men meeting at a bus stop. ‘I can’t fucking hear you.’ Then he bounced himself closer to me, he had to edge really close, and get his ear right to my mouth. I asked him to shout for McAllister. ‘I will, I will,’ he says, ‘no bother.’ Which is just how Christy is, helpful by nature. Despite everything. ‘No panic,’ he says, ‘that’s the main thing.’ Then he caterwauls for McAllister or Bennett, some bloody screw to come running. As it was late in the evening, it was a lad called Doyle was on, one of the decenter screws, to be fair, and Christy said I was pegging out, as he called it, and someone better get me to the doc. So Doyle goes out and fetches another night man from the tier below, and they bring in an ancient wheelchair that they must keep somewhere, and I’m heaved up into it, still with the blasted bracelets on, and then I’m being wheeled out. And then it was down to the yards by the old service stairs, Doyle and the other lad helping me down, the wheelchair going bang bang bang, you’d think there might be a lift in Mountjoy, except it was built in the eighteen-hundreds, and Christy’s voice in the distance now, shouting ‘Can’t you take these fucking handcuffs off me before you go?’

  Christy

  Triple bypass, Mercer’s Hospital, armed guard on the ward door, so they tell me, for fuck’s sake. In those days PJ was still a young fella, really. I drank a bottle of whiskey every day for ten years, never took a feather out of me. Soft, these lads, from the wrong side of Monkstown.

  So what happens next, McAllister, who was supposed to be just the cunt in this story, goes all Mother Teresa on me. Thinks he done me wrong and what’s more thinks he done PJ wrong but worser. Wants to make it good. Seemingly he goes over to PJ the few times bringing him fucking grapes and Lucozade. PJ, being a confused sort of bollocks, is worried about me and sends me a message that he bears no grudge. Then McAllister, in this bid to become the fucking Gandhi of Mountjoy, wants to know what I think of that. I says PJ can fuck off with himself and his worry and I don’t care if he dies. But I must of said it a shade nicely or something because back comes the message that he’s glad I’m OK and when he’s all healed he wants to come back to the cell. You put him anywhere near me, I says to McAllister, and I’ll gut him with a spoon. Well, says McAllister, I’m glad you can let bygones be bygones. Eh, what, I says, what the what? I’m looking at him. You couldn’t make it up.

  So after a couple of months, they bring him back in to me. Well I had nearly forgotten he existed, you know the way you sort of do, forget everything, in here, including yourself. Ah yes but the real reason for McAllister’s Holy-Joe toing-and-froing in my opinion was McAllister was terrified this whole thing would get out, go beyond our floor, it would come out, in the papers even, what he done, putting us two together for the pure divilment of it, and he was close to retirement, wasn’t he, just a few years, and he didn’t want to be getting the sack, and losing his pension, so he sorta plots to have PJ brought back. That’s my best guess anyhow, call me cynical if you like, and anyhow one day, the door opens, and the fucker’s back, still in the wheelchair, looking somewhat better for his holiday. ‘How are ya, ya poor cunt?’ I says, you know the way you would. But he was very tired from the transfer, and all he could do was climb into the lower bed, sure I was happy enough to swap, took down Samantha and Co, and transferred myself and themselves to the upper regions. And McAllister was in fussing, and the doc too, he must have been in the same stew of worry, the bad-hearted bastard, sticking that needle in us, I hardly think he had the go-ahead for that. Although, alright, when you’re feeling poorly, he does come, promptly enough. But one word from me, or one word from PJ, just then, well, fuck, they were both for the fucking high jump, no doubt about it. So we were suddenly in a state of, I don’t know, not exactly the upper hand, hardly, like, we weren’t in the driving seat, no sir, but we had a little bit on those fuckers, and that’s very useful in here, that’s better than fucking money.

  I mean, influence, but not with the real people. I mean, screws are nearly like prisoners, in a funny sort of way. The real people, the real fucking people, are the fuckers sit on the parole board. And then the fucking minister of the day, peering at your crime on some bit of paper put under his nose, like it was a bit of dog dirt on his dinner plate. I don’t know, every seven years they have a little think about you. Will we, won’t we, let this fucker free? In my case, won’t, with knobs on.

  PJ

  I was as sick as a dog for months. Then slowly slowly I was getting better, I could feel the body picking up, but I hadn’t the slightest bit of energy. Suddenly, when I was put back into my cell, it was all down to Christy to keep me going, which is ridiculous, when you think about it. I mean, even natural justice would say, he was hardly the man for the job. But he didn’t seem to think so. Now, he is a very strange man. He has the most extraordinary anger in him. Sometimes he berates me – for instance, for my ignorance of football. But we never played football at school, we weren’t allowed. But he worships Liverpool, he has worshipped them all his life. One time he was trying to find out the outcome of a match, he calling out the window to a mate of his on Tier Four, it was a Derby match, between Liverpool and Everton, and I asked him where Everton was. ‘You’re a stupid cunt,’ he said, with sudden and absolute viciousness. ‘Have you never heard of Goodison Park?’ ‘I was just asking where it was, Christy, you don’t have to lose your rag.’ ‘It’s in fucking Liverpool, you stupid fucking cunt.’ ‘Christy, Christy, just take it easy.’ Then I said nothing for a bit, and I said, maybe in truth to tease him, ‘Liverpool is in Liverpool, and Everton is in Liverpool, so why are they enemies?’ I said, ‘What’s wrong with you, what’s fucking wrong with you?’ he cries, like a man in pain. ‘I don’t want to be locked up with a fucker doesn’t know fuck, doesn’t know where anything is, doesn’t know Everton are the devil’s spawn …’ This he roared out. Then he turns to the window, in full flower of rage. ‘And you won’t even tell me the fucking score!’ And he was steaming now, boiling with rage, and outrage, and disgust.

  But it was just things like that he got mad about. Otherwise, for a man that had killed, he was very easy-going. I mean, we’re talking bed baths here, bed baths. And things like the past, he was very different about. He was very diffident about the past, and what he had done, even what I had done. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had a chance. The first thing was his looking after me. Now, no nurse could have gone to more trouble. I know this sounds ridiculous too. This murderer, this man who had killed the mother of the man who had killed his son, almost mothering that man. Almost fathering. And weak as I was in those days, and I still get dickie days I must confess, something came back to me from the great fog that lay over my memories of Peadar. I say a great fog, because something was happening to those memories, something I didn’t want, they were fading and twisting. I knew I still loved him, I knew I still adored him, and I still didn’t know why I had killed him. I just didn’t have an understanding of it. I still don’t. I used to try and remember things Peadar had said, just or
dinary things, about antiquities, about his feeling for Jesus Christ, which was very strong, about growing up in Monkstown Farm, and the story about his grandfather killed at the gate by who was it? Yes, Con Daly, and he often told me about his own father, and the times they had going about together, I used to be very surprised, because I thought, I don’t know why, but I thought an old-fashioned man like his father wouldn’t accept him, but apparently he did, he really did, and when he was little they used to go into town together, Peadar told me this, and they’d trot along to the Natural History Museum in Merrion Square, because his father loved the exhibits, the Irish Elk that was extinct in Ireland, and the jars of specimens, and Peadar kind of enjoyed them too, and on Fridays Christy’d walk him over Dunedin Field to the dance hall when he was bigger, because a lad like Peadar could be murdered on Dunedin Field, even though he was from that side of Monkstown himself, there was a tree there in the centre of the field where a gay man had been hanged, as a matter of fact, now I think of it, there was a terrible hatred of what they called queers, and they knew Peadar was one of them, and there were lads would have gladly beaten him to a pulp, but his father, yes, Christy Dwyer, the very same, who in everyone’s eyes was a manly sort of man, I suppose the phrase might be, well, they’d never go near Peadar while Christy was with him. Because Peadar loved to dance, Christy would bring him over to the hall, and then smoke fags outside in the June dark, waiting for him. And Peadar told me things like that. And, because I was afraid I’d forget that too, I said it to Christy one night. It was probably as much as two years in, because truth to tell we were both afraid to broach certain subjects, for fear of further mayhem. I said, ‘Christy, I don’t know if I ever told you, but Peadar really really loved you. He thought the world of you, as a matter of fact.’ Christy looks at me, like it was the last thing he had expected me to say, the last thing on earth he had expected to hear, from anyone. He had been telling me about the intricacies of the football pools just moments before. I had surprised him. And he said nothing in reply. But I could see he was affected by it. ‘And I just want to say, and I said it at my trial, I am sorry for what happened. I am sorry for what I did.’ Still he said nothing. I was going to try again, and began to say something else, but he stopped me, ‘It’s alright,’ he said, ‘I fucking know. I fucking know. I know you’re fucking sorry.’ He was quiet again then for a moment. ‘I know it. Because I’m fucking sorry, I am so fucking completely fucking sorry for what I did to your ma.’ Then the cell was vibrating, it’s the only word for it. At the risk of sounding hyper-religious, it did come into my mind that something pretty serious was happening, something I thought that Jesus Christ Himself might know about. He was after all a man who had nothing too. Christy was trembling anyhow, and he was as open as a book, wide open, I might have said anything to him, and there was a question I had been longing to ask him, but never could, because it sounded like an accusation, but it wasn’t an accusation. This matter had haunted me, and sometimes in the dark of the night it used to make me so angry, and it would take a hundred paternosters to feel even half-calm again, and not want that instant, that very instant, to murder Christy in the bunk above. He was standing there, like a target, with the gentleness available only to the wolf. So I thought this was the moment to ask him. ‘Can I just ask you one thing about that, Christy, if you don’t mind?’ I said. I knew I was instantly on dangerous ground, killing ground. ‘What,’ he said. And he didn’t sound exactly friendly. ‘Why did you have to kill her in her bath?’ I said. There was a long, long silence. He wasn’t looking at me now, he was looking at the floor. He swallowed. He swallowed like a boa constrictor, whether to pull something further in, or eject it, I didn’t know. ‘I didn’t,’ he said then, simply, in a quiet voice, as if in all honesty he expected to be believed, it was very impressive, it was the voice of a man praying in private. ‘As God is my witness. I didn’t kill her in her bath. It was in the bedroom. Which is bad enough.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘if that’s true, to tell you the truth that makes an enormous difference to me.’ ‘Well, it is true,’ he said. ‘Not that I couldn’t lie to you, I could. I’d fucking lie to any man if I thought it would get me out of trouble. Who told you it was in the bath?’ ‘McAllister, years ago.’ ‘Well, now, McAllister,’ says Christy, and left it at that, as if he need say nothing further.