After the Lockout (5 page)

Pius is still apologising extravagantly as he closes the door on Benedict. You hadn't planned it, it was an unconscious reflex. You look to your big brother Seamus but he turns his eyes to the floor. You look to Anthony, second eldest, your favourite. To Mary. To Sarah. To little Agnes. They all turn their faces away. Perhaps spitting at the bishop was too much, but at least it was unequivocal. The spit will wash away but the act won't. You look at your mother, shrouded in white on a table in the corner, unmoved. The gesture means nothing to her. Pius unbuckles his belt.

‘Da, please
…
'

‘Don't you Da me,' he hisses, pulling the belt from his waist, loop by loop. ‘You do that to a priest? You do that to a
bishop?'
He wraps the belt round his knuckles, doubling the leather. Nausea rises in your nostrils, hot and horrible. The room is dark, with only the hearth's dying embers giving light; Pius's face is half red, half shadow, the margin flickering down the middle. You can smell his hot breath. He never drinks, but there's poteen there, the wildness in his eyes confirms it. The belt lashes across your face. You don't feel anything yet.

‘He comes over here and tells us Ma is going to hell? The bishop can go to hell and so can you,' you cry. Defiance is all that is left to you. His fist connects with your jaw and the pain is such that for the briefest of seconds it feels like you have departed this life. You're crumpled on the floor absorbing the blows as Pius swings and swipes and the belt leather cuts deep into your arms and back and head.

‘I'm going to kill you,' Pius cries, and it sounds like the most absolutely truthful statement he's ever made in his life. You hear women scream and they're all telling him to stop but they're all too spineless to make him. You peek from your foetal position
and, seeing a lull, launch yourself at him. You clatter into his midriff and crash over the table. Tea and wake sandwiches go flying. Back on your feet, you see your mother through eyes bathed in blood and tears. A slice of ham has landed on her cheek. Pius puffs desperately for air, his face is purple. Your mother is dead and this yellow-belly runs away into a bottle just when you need him most.

‘You're nothing but a drunken coward,' you say as you run out the door.

We have the compartment to ourselves. Not many heading north at this time of night. I pull down the blinds and scrape the flecks of bacon and carrot off the lapels of my suit. Charlie's too civilised and conscientious to put his feet up on the empty chairs beside him but I'm not. I pull the trilby hat down over my face and make myself comfortable. It's a rickety old bone shaker but I'm soon nodding off. One minute we're between Clontarf and Sutton and Charlie is saying something about how the Madden footballers have reached the county final; the next he's poking me with his cane and telling me to wake up, we're near Armagh. The train is stopped. I see lights further up the line, but outside it's darkness.

‘This isn't a scheduled stop,' Charlie says.

The train starts moving again, chugging its last mile or two, and I hear compartment doors being slid open up the hallway. I peek out. Two soldiers stand in the hallway a few compartments down smoking cigarettes and pointing their rifles to the ground. A third soldier, tall and slender and wearing an eye-patch, comes
out of the compartment, and they move on to the next one. They'll be in on top of us in a moment.

‘I'm not even home yet and already the harassment starts.'

‘I'm sure they're not looking for you, Victor.'

‘When you've been lifted as many times as I have, Charlie, you know fucken tyranny when you see it.'

‘Don't start now.'

‘I bet you the officer puts on an English accent. Wait till you see.'

‘Victor, please.'

There's no way the train will get to the station before they get to us, snailing along like this. I lie back on the seat and pull the hat down over my face and a moment later, I hear the compartment door slide open.

‘Right, wake up, we need to take a look at your …' the officer begins – he
is
putting on a sort-of English accent – ‘Charlie Quinn! Get up and let me shake your hand,' he cries, sounding fit to burst.

‘I'd like to, Hugh, but' – Charlie makes a tap, tap, tap – ‘I'm not as good on my feet as I used to be.'

‘Oh. Of course, I'm sorry.' Hugh slumps down into a seat and sighs. I'd love to get a look at this fellow, but I stay hidden beneath the hat.

‘How's the eye?'

‘Doesn't bother me at all. I got away very lightly compared to some.'

‘True enough. Poor old Frank Jennings lost half his face. And you heard about Bob Morrow?'

‘No justice, is there?' Hugh rises and stands over me, close enough that I can smell the tobacco off him. I fidget. ‘This fellow with you?'

‘Cousin of mine. Name of John Swift. Why, who are you looking for?'

‘Just keeping our eyes open.'

‘I'll wake him up and check him,' says another voice, a Scottish accent this time.

‘Let him be, Hugh,' Charlie says calmly, ‘he had a lot to drink earlier.'

‘Shut it, you,' the Scottish accent snaps.

‘Stand down, Campbell,' Hugh barks. ‘This man deserves your respect and with God as my witness, he will have it.' The train hits the buffers with a jolt of sufficient violence to wake any man except John Swift. I tense up, waiting to be unmasked. But instead I hear first Campbell, then Hugh, apologise to Charlie. They leave.

‘Jesus Christ, Charlie,' I say when I come out from under my hat.

We disembark the train. Not more than a handful of people are in the station, so there would be nowhere for us to hide, but the soldiers aren't on the platform yet. We move as quickly as we can out of the station and into the refuge of the shadows. The night is still and calm and the full moon lights up the empty street. It's late. In a few hours the mills around here will be thronged. Up ahead, lights flash and an automobile splutters beneath a street light. A military vehicle. Behind us Hugh and his men exit the station. I drag Charlie into the shadow of the arches at the front of the station and we watch the soldiers pass by, no more than a few yards from us. Hugh talks to the driver of the truck, and they climb into the back. The truck retreats into the distance and I breathe again.

It's quiet now. I see a horse and buggy idling outside a large red-brick house at the top of the street, and as we move
cautiously in that direction I pull the hat down across my face and try to make out the features of the man sitting on the trap. When we get close, the faceless horseman says: ‘Is it him?'

Alarmed, I look to Charlie. He nods. ‘You got my telegram.'

The horseman claps his hands together and cries gleefully: ‘Welcome home, Victor. Erin go fucken bragh!'

‘Ssssshhh! Keep it down, will you? The Baptist minister lives in there,' says Charlie, pointing to the red-bricked house. Curtains twitch in the upstairs window. The horseman giggles and tells me to throw my suitcase on board. I hesitate. He's late thirties, tall and strong-looking, with the floury face of a man too fond of the drink. He's familiar. A Madden man presumably. Damned if I can place him. Charlie senses my confusion.

‘I sent a telegram ahead asking for Turlough to come and pick us up,' he says.

Of course. Turlough Moriarty. I was in school with his younger brother Sean. Big, strong fellow too, Sean was, if a bit soft in the head. Turlough was the smarter of the two, relatively speaking. All dead-on people, the Moriartys. I climb onto the buggy and thank Turlough for coming. He gives the horse a light lick of the whip and we're on our way. We go up over Banbrook hill past the pubs at the Shambles, up English Street with its proud, polished shop fronts, the gleaming terraces of Market Square and Thomas Street, the huckster shops of Ogle Street and onto poor Irish Street. Not a sinner to be seen. We cut through the slums of Culdee and pass the long sail-less windmill of Windmill Hill, and soon reach Droim Gabhla at the edge of the town. I tell the lads about something a great, wise and knowledgeable man once told me: how the official name for this little hamlet is not Drumgola, as would have been the logical
Anglicisation, but Umgola, because some careless clerk somewhere made a balls of it and left out the ‘Dr'. This little Irish townland has a name straight out of deepest, darkest Africa because of the tin-eared ignorance of the foreigners who took it upon themselves to rename our country. We share a bitter laugh. I look back to the little town, the tiny city of Armagh, lit by a moon bright as a cool blue sun. ‘Crazy place to build a town, the whole place is hills,' I say.

‘Built on seven hills,' Turlough sings, beginning the chorus to the old Armagh song.

‘Like a little Rome.'

After a few miles we turn left and the lights of Madden village glow softly, down below us in a hollow. The horse snorts tiredly. Somewhere in the distance is a fast, throbbing hum, faint but growing louder, like it's coming from under the ground. Madden looms. I make out the chapel spire first. Then the Parochial Hall. A handsome if not beautiful façade of plain rose window above double doors. At the top of the town, the Parochial House, proud and immoveable as a Papal Bull. The three Church buildings all sit on slightly higher ground than the rest of the village, which is why they're the only buildings in Madden that have never flooded. The National School is the only other building in town worth a damn, and it too is controlled, if not owned, by the dog-collars. Same story in every town in Ireland. But I see in the gaslight that flags, yes,
red flags
, are draped from every window, and bunting stretches across the street. Everything red, red is the colour. My God, Charlie said I was a hero, but the place looks like Paris in '48! The subterranean throbbing is identifiable now. It's a drum. There's fiddles and accordions too, coming from the Parochial Hall. We move towards the music.

‘They're holding a dance in your honour,' Charlie says.

‘People's awful proud of you, Victor,' says Turlough. We stop outside the Parochial Hall, its grey façade is broken by splashes of frenetic colour behind the steamed-up windows. The noise is cacophonous. ‘Come on, we're very late.'

A young priest with a mop of blond hair emerges from the Hall. He nods and hails me with a toothy smile. ‘You must be Victor?' I nod. He takes his watch from his pocket and fidgets with it in a way that reminds me of Alfie Byrne, then looks distractedly up the street towards the Parochial House. ‘Thank goodness you're here, we're supposed to finish up at eleven and it's past that now.'

‘Gone half past, I make it,' I say, glancing at my watch. The others look at theirs, then back at me confusedly.

Of course, they're all twenty-five minutes behind me, I keep forgetting. They didn't bother to tell us in Fron Goch about the so-called Daylight Saving Hours. Apparently we're in line with Greenwich now. After being released I walked around for weeks not knowing about it.

‘I seem to be ahead of everyone. My watch still gives Dublin Mean Time,' I say.

When we get the Republic we'll fix the clocks, and no more of this Greenwich nonsense. How supine are people who allow the government to overrule the clock – the
clock
? It's frustrating, though, that everyone else's watch is slow. Being right is cold comfort when the whole world is wrong. ‘I'll be in directly,' I tell the priest.

He nods and turns but as he opens the door he is almost knocked over by a boy of maybe seventeen, who staggers out and around the side of the building. Out of sight, he retches violently.
The priest shakes his head and goes inside. I take my suitcase around to the other side of the building, looking for a shadow so I can change back into my uniform. When I'm changed, I spit on my hands and pat down my hair. A shave would be good, a bit of soap could do wonders, but perching the sloped hat on my head, I suppose I probably look all right.

‘Come on, you're gorgeous,' Charlie calls, and I step into the light just as a tall figure all in black strides past Charlie and Turlough, ignoring them as they call out their salutes. He walks with an impressive sprightliness, gripping his cane like Phil Shanahan grips a hurl, and throws open the door of the Parochial Hall without breaking his stride. The old bastard looks like he hasn't aged a day.