by Seamus Deane
‘Stop it here, Constable,’ he commanded when we were passing the door of Barr’s house. He got out, knocked on the door, talked to Mrs Barr when she answered, pointed towards me in the back of the car. She glared past him at me. He went two doors up, to Greene’s house, did the same. Then to the house of two others from the gang, each time pointing towards me, sitting stranded in the back seat. We drove on when he got in, stopped at his house near the cemetery He turned to me.
‘This is your second time in a police car, isn’t that right?’
I nodded. Burke had been in charge the night they had searched the house for the pistol and interrogated us in the barracks.
‘Well, now, weren’t we the easygoing men to let your daddy go the last time? A gun in the house and him with the brother he had? His big brother, Eddie. Did you ever wonder about that, or ask him why? Ever ask yourself why? For some others must have wondered, if you didn’t.’
I said nothing.
‘Now Barr, that big slag, he thinks he knows why. I’ll do you one favour. I’ll tell you this – Barr’s got it wrong. I’d say your daddy has it wrong too. Maybe you should ask your mother, now her daddy’s got sick – none too soon either. Still, there you are. Once an informer, always an informer. That’s what they’ll say. And we’ll see what comes out in the wash, eh? Off you go.’
He pushed me out before him and waved me away. I walked across the Lone Moor towards home. I could see no way out. No one would believe me; or if they could see what had really happened, they’d still be doubtful. Because of Eddie. Wasn’t that what Burke was saying? Yes. But also no. For Barr had got it wrong, he had said. But how could my father be wrong about his own brother and a policeman be right? And what did my mother know that was different? I’d have to run away, I thought. Chicago? The name ran senselessly in my head. My face felt as though it had set into a hard plaster mask, although I was crying inside, hard and dry, but crying.
INFORMER
June 1952
The first time I ran away after that, I got as far as the gangplank of the Belfast-to-Liverpool boat. Then my father and Tom appeared with a plain-clothes policeman and took me home in Tom’s car. I had a shilling and sixpence in my pocket and no raincoat. Liam was embarrassed when he heard that. No raincoat? he echoed, disbelievingly. The second time, I got a lift in a lorry that left me outside the village of Feeney, no more than a dozen miles away, and I had to give up and walk home to more uproar and a stricter regime. After that second attempt, I was no longer allowed to go to the public library and borrow books. Weekdays I went to school, weekends I stayed in, no matter what the weather. My mother never let up.
‘What could have possessed you to go running to those vermin? Have you no self-respect, no pride? And if you’ve none for yourself, have you none for the rest of us? Thank God my father’s too ill to hear about this – the shame alone would finish him. A grandson of his going to the police!’
‘I didn’t go to the police. I threw a stone at them.’
‘Same thing in the circumstances. God alone knows why this sort of thing keeps happening. Is it a curse? What did we do to deserve this?’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘The police, the police! That sort of thing, you helpless gom.’
My father asked me over and over to tell him in detail what Sergeant Burke had said. I didn’t mention anything about Burke’s reference to the earlier interrogation, or why they had let him go, or his mentioning Eddie or Grandfather, or hinting I should ask my mother. Why didn’t I take a few punches from Barr and his gang? My father wanted to know this. It would all have been over now. Didn’t I know what sort of people the police were? Had I no guts, no sense, no savvy, no shame? His face flushed and his reddish hair shivered above his ears when he leaned towards me and my breath touched him.
The police had stopped visiting houses in the street and asking questions. It was all a put-up job. They could not have cared less; they were just making trouble. Or rather, Burke was making trouble. He knew everything, it seemed, and was twisting the knife again in a casual sort of way. I knew that it had to do with my grandfather, who had fallen seriously ill recently and was not expected to live much more than a year. Maybe his approaching death had stirred a memory in Burke. Meanwhile, I was out of it. No one would play football with me. If! watched a game and kicked the ball back from the sideline, the player would lift the ball and wipe it on the grass before going on with the throw-in.
So, I didn’t take a few punches. Now what would it take? I asked my father that.
‘A bit of sense. And a bit of courage.’
That angered me. ‘Courage? To get battered? That’s just stupidity.’
‘And what do you think this is? Eh? What’s this? Everybody has to suffer just because you couldn’t face it.’
He was right but he was wrong too. One night he said it again. I was listening to a wireless report on the Korean War and looking at the map of Korea in the newspaper, running my fingers across the thirty-ninth parallel and imagining the Americans retreating down the peninsula before the North Koreans and the Chinese. Somebody had insulted him that day on my account. Why hadn’t I taken a few punches? Why did I have to bring the police back into our lives? Was once not enough? First, the gun. Now this. Was there something amiss with me? No, I told him, there’s something amiss with the family. The police were on top of us long before I was born. If he wanted to blame someone, let him blame Eddie, not me.
He hit me so fast, I saw nothing. My shoulder felt hot and broken.
I got up, hating him, although I could feel the tears coming as the pain increased through the numbness.
I saw that Liam had closed his eyes and that my mother had stopped cutting the loaf of bread on the deal table. The knife lay there, with crumbs still sticking to its saw-edge. The half-cut slice leaned out sadly from the squat loaf She had her back to us, and I saw the sigh run the length of her spine, down from the shoulders. Her apron string stretched. My father looked at me, his face suddenly sad as well as angry. He was sorry he had hit me; but he wanted to hit me again. He stood up from his chair and said very quietly to my mother, touching her shoulder as though he were picking a loose hair from her dress:
‘I’m going to clip some of those roses. They’re in bad need of it.’
He went out to the garden. The latch clicked as he closed the door behind him. She turned round, her eyes shining and pale with anger.
‘Bed,’ she said, ‘bed, right now.’
‘But I’ve had no dinner.’
‘Bed, this instant!’
I fled upstairs.
ROSES
July 1952
There was a pickaxe in the shed, a great bow of iron on an oiled shaft. I brought it out and drove it as hard as I could into the soil near a rose bush. The bush trembled, and a few petals fell. I drove it in again in a full arc, and this time felt the point strike at roots. A third time, and the roots yielded more, and the bush shook in the sun’s glare. I turned the pickaxe round in my hands and used the blunter end. This time, the root gave way, and I had to prise the pickaxe out by shifting it back and forth in the soil. Then I went on, round both sides of the bush, until it sagged sideways, and the petals were shining crimson all over the path and glinting weakly in the disturbed earth.
I hunched down for a moment to watch a sleeve of greenfly tighten on a rose stem. I counted the black spots on the leaves, fingering the shiny stubs of the thorns that sharpened to so fine a point that only a prick of blood on my finger told me exactly where the sharpness ended. The heat was like a nausea. I pulled away a diseased leaf, and rose petals came out into the air with the tug. I shook the rose bush, and more petals fluttered down. I crushed some in my hand and sniffed the satiny scraps of colour, but they had no aroma. Yet, growing, they gave off this powerful odour that felt to me like dread, a hot radar signal.
I was soaked in sweat. There were ten more rose bushes in a staggered line down to the gate, and five more at the sun-t
rap at the side of the shed. I would never have the strength to uproot them all. I went back to the shed and dragged out two bags of cement, threw them on the ground and punctured them with the pickaxe in one powdery stroke. It was easy to tear the paper back, get a spade and shovel the white powder over each bush, beating them as flat as I could with the back of the spadehead, sending petals and cement dust whirling in spirals with each blow. It was only when I saw the cement bags lying flat and torn on the path that I stopped to survey what I had done. The heat had lessened by now My father would be home in little more than an hour. In a panic, I grabbed the bags and folded them, thrust them back in the shed, took out the yard brush and began to sweep the petals and dry powder into the rose beds, thinking I would have the path clean at least. But as the nausea and dread died in me and I saw the broken roses hanging down in the choking dust, I gave up and stood there in a trance, hearing the front door open and my mother’s voice and the children babbling and running. They all came right out to the yard, shouting for me, my mother right behind them, smiling. Then they all went still; I blinked at them through the dust that was making my eyes smart. They kept appearing over and over again as in a series of snapshots, all of them posed at different angles. My mother’s hand was at her heart. I walked straight to her and past her. She put out her hand and clutched my bare arm.
‘In the name of all that’s sacred…’ she began, the tears rolling down her cheeks, ‘what have you done? What has possessed you to do such a thing?’
‘Ask Father. He’ll know’ I replied.
I felt such fury then, I could have done it all over again and only the sight of the shocked faces of my younger brothers and sisters stopped me going down the path and picking up the spade or the pickaxe and beating the roses even flatter. It occurred to me at the same moment that Eilis wasn’t there. Could she have been upstairs watching, too frightened to come down, while all this was going on? And Liam would run his hands through his red hair and roll his eyes and then throw his arms wide in helplessness. And my father, I thought, through my mother’s wailing and sobbing, which was relentless now, he could go fuck himself. I clumped angrily up the stairs, stripped naked, got into bed and lay there waiting. After a few minutes, a vibration started up in me, and my head twitched in a sort of dry grief. Then it stopped, and I lay there watching the shadows on the ceiling lengthen, waiting for my father.
That autumn, I would start secondary school and was enchanted by the notion that I would be reading new languages – especially Latin and French. I was trying to read a prose translation of The Aeneid, but the strange English and the confusion of names left me stranded. I had left my Virgil, I realised, lying open on the table. I closed my eyes and tried to remember some of the names: Turnus. Nisus and Euryalus, Aeneas himself, Turnus, Anchises. The same names repeated themselves. I could remember no more. I opened my eyes and my father was looking at me from the door.
He said nothing. He looked. He moved inside the room and closed the door. The skin on my belly crawled, and my thighs were slick. I didn’t want to look at him, but his eyes held mine and, as he moved again, my head followed him.
‘So I know, do I?’
I nodded.
‘Tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, and every other day that comes, you’ll know.’
He walked out of the room, slamming the door behind him. I lay there all night. The others slept downstairs. The house was perfectly still. I couldn’t hear voices. I wanted desperately to go to the bathroom but couldn’t go down the stairs. Hot and twisted with discomfort, I somehow fell asleep.
When I woke, I had to pull on trousers and bolt to the bathroom, through the kitchen and scullery. It was already mid-morning. To my astonishment, my father was there with my uncles, my mother’s brothers. They stopped talking as I fled through the kitchen and remained silent until I had returned and gone up the stairs again. My mother was nowhere to be seen; I guessed she had gone over to see Katie, who lived only two streets away, to seek advice and comfort. I didn’t know what to do, so I got back into bed and listened to the murmur of voices. There was a noise of men moving, a shout, and steps went down the backyard path. The gate was opened. I got up and looked out on the ruined garden and saw men carrying in bags of cement from a lorry parked at the back gate. My father and uncles went out with them, and there was much heaving and clanking before they came in again, swing-walking a cement-mixer from one side to the other. Then they brought in sand and heaped it in a cone beside the cement-mixer and buckets. All day long, as my father and Tom mixed cement, Dan and John spread it, while the other workmen uprooted and cleared the rose bushes ahead of them, raking the ground level as they went and throwing the dead bushes into the back of the lorry By three in the afternoon, they were finished. The yard glistened grey all down one side and on the other side of the shed that I could not see from the window. They cased the wet cement in planks, cleaned up and left. I think that was the first time my father ever missed a day’s work.
Again, I slept alone that night. No food was offered, and I didn’t ask for any. Next day, the newly cemented section had whitened. I saw Liam removing the planks that had cased it. At that point, I dressed and went downstairs. My mother turned away when I came into the kitchen and went out to the scullery. Liam came in, shook his head at me and put his finger to his lips. So I got myself some bread and butter and tea and made to go out. My mother came in from the scullery.
‘Upstairs,’ she said pointing. I saw the Virgil sitting on top of the radio, grabbed it and went upstairs. When my father came in at dinner-time, Gerard and Eamon were sent up to tell me I could come down to eat. Everyone was sitting round the table, silent. All the children were ashamed for me. We ate in silence. At the end of the meal, my father got up to remove the plates, as he always did. I made to help him. He put his hand on my shoulder and held me to my chair.
‘You ask me no more questions. Talk to me no more. Just stay out of my way and out of trouble.’
I sank back in my chair. The dishes went clattering into the scullery sink. Everybody seemed to be looking at me but their eyes did not meet mine. I returned upstairs and fell across the bed, still angry, but more horrified, and half-cried, half-cursed myself to sleep. It was getting dark when I woke. Someone had touched me. I opened my eyes a slit, stared at the wallpaper and closed them again as my father bent over me. He kissed my hair. I slowly stiffened, from the toes up. In a moment, I would cough or cry; but the bed rose as his weight lifted, and I rose lightly with it, like a wave lifting. He thought I was still asleep. He whispered to himself something I didn’t catch. The bedroom door closed and the stairs creaked their old familiar music as he went down.
That more or less ended it. The yard remained concreted. When I kicked a football there, I could see it bounce sometimes where the rose petals had fallen and I would briefly see them again, staining the ground. Walking on that concreted patch where the bushes had been was like walking on hot ground below which voices and roses were burning, burning.
BISHOP
August 1952
‘Go now,’ said Liam, weeks later. ‘And tell the Bishop.’
‘How do you get to see a bishop?’ I asked.
‘For God’s sake, go to the door of the parochial house, ring the bell and ask the housekeeper if you could see His Lordship on a private and personal matter of great urgency. Or ask if you could make an appointment to see him, at his convenience.’
‘And what if she says no?’
‘She won’t say no. She’ll likely tell you a time to come back at, after she has wakened the wee slob from his armchair.’
‘Then what?’
‘Then, idiot, the problem is to get yourself in the clear. I’ve been thinking about this. There’s only one sure way. You have to be seen going into that police station with a priest to make your apology and be seen to come out again with him. Then, no matter what happens inside, we’ll start the rumours about Burke.’
‘What rumours?�
��
‘Oh, go and get the priest in first,’ he bawled. ‘Just get him in. Then I’ll tell you.’
Bishop Coulter held out his hand. I went on one knee and kissed the ring on his finger. He lifted his hand away, I got up, he waved me down into a chair. He sat at the end of the table, three empty chairs away. His black coat was well-tailored and sat very well, I thought, against his purple shirt. Shirt? What was its name? I had to concentrate.
‘Now, my child,’ he piped in a light voice that was always surprising, since it emerged from such a biscuit-barrel of a body, ‘what is this private matter you wish to see me about?’
When I had finished telling him, he frowned a little and regarded me steadily and, I thought, suspiciously.
‘You were very much at fault, you know that?’
‘Yes, Your Lordship.’
‘The police have their duties too.’
‘Yes, Your Lordship.’
‘And the sergeant could, you know, have ended your school career, by bringing a charge against you. Yet he did not. That puts you in his debt.’
‘Yes, Your Lordship. I know that.’
‘That area you live in, it does have some most unsavoury characters in it, along with good, decent Catholic people as well.’
I nodded vigorously.
‘What exactly are you here for? What are you asking me to do?’
‘I wondered, Your Lordship, if you might suggest to me the best way to apologise to Sergeant Burke.’
‘Simply go and do so, my child. To the barracks or to his house. Tell him how genuinely sorry you are. I know him. He is a Christian man. He will accept your apology.’
‘But the trouble is, Your Lordship, if I go to see him like that, everyone will think I’m informing again, that I’m going to the police to report names. If I go near him, I make my own situation worse.’