After the Lockout (6 page)

Maggie answers the door with a grimace of condolence but her expression gives way to horror when she sees the battering you have taken. She rushes you inside the house, scattering her younger brothers and sisters with matriarchal authority, and lies you down on the sofa by the range. It's warm and smells of baking bread. Maggie's father is perched in his usual armchair. God knows what he makes of you; one eye lolling madly is the only sign he's alive at all. Maggie goes out into the scullery and comes back with her father's old leather medical bag, towels and two bowls of water. She puts one bowl on the range and heats it.

‘Look up at the ceiling, we have to keep the wound elevated. If we can't stop the bleeding you'll have to go and see a proper doctor.' She immerses a towel in hot water, wrings it out and sets it against your eyebrow. ‘Help me apply pressure to the wound.'

From your good eye you look at the graceful curve of her neck and want to take a bite out of it. She's wearing a red and brown dress with little lace frills at the edges. She's close enough that you can smell her distinctive smell.

‘I told you to look at the ceiling,' she says. Her father's daughter.

When the bleeding stops she washes the wound with a soft wash-cloth. You grip the sofa tightly and grit your teeth while she pours liquid from the spirit bottle over the cut – ‘Isopropyl. It'll prevent infection,' she says – and uses tweezers to remove what she calls debris. She makes up a dressing with surgical adhesive tape and gauze. ‘But it won't be enough,' she says. ‘The broken skin won't knit together on its own. You need stitches.'

You nod quiescently. You're so tired. You ask if you can sleep in her shed. You are grateful she doesn't ask for an explanation.

‘What will you do tomorrow?' she asks.

‘I'll bury my mother.'

‘Afterwards?'

You're too tired to think. ‘I know if I stay here I'll kill him.'

From his window Stanislaus watched everyone arrive. He had a dusty volume of theology in his lap, lit by a single candle, but it was a mere prop. It took two hundred people to fill the Parochial Hall and from early on, the place was full. The cheering and clapping from the Parochial Hall grew louder and rougher as the night got later, and Stanislaus was relieved as eleven o'clock approached and the guest of honour hadn't appeared. The
moon, full and large in the cloudless sky, shone across all but the darkest corners of the parish, so Stanislaus would have seen him. But eleven o'clock came and went and there was still no sign of things winding up. Eventually Stanislaus rose and readied himself to intervene, but he wobbled and sat back down. He gripped the arms of the chair. His vision swirled before him. He held his face in his hands and felt the cold sweat on his brow. But this was not a stroke and it soon passed. He looked at the bottle. It didn't seem like he'd had all that much to drink. He had gone for years of his life without a drink, it wasn't something he was a slave to, but it was true that he had acquired a taste for brandy in his old age.

Outside in the distance the light of a lantern appeared and as it grew bigger Stanislaus made out three figures atop a buggy, drawing closer. Charlie Quinn's leg stuck out in silhouette. Hulking Turlough Moriarty drove the buggy. Typical. The Moriarty boys were perennial foot-soldiers, from their grandfather, a locally famous Fenian of the sixties, on down. It was no surprise that they would regard Victor Lennon as a great fellow altogether. The third man sat between Charlie and Turlough with the brim of his hat pulled low over his face. It had to be him. He watched Father Daly emerge from the Parochial Hall and speak to the men on the buggy. They spent a moment looking at their watches. Obviously Father Daly was explaining the time, and that the dance was over. The third man got down from the buggy. Father Daly made to go back inside but as he opened the door he was almost knocked aside by Aidan Cavanagh, who dashed round the corner and heaved up his guts on the wall of the Parochial Hall. Stanislaus gripped his stick in his fist and bounded furiously down the stairs. By the time he reached the
Parochial Hall Aidan was gone and only Charlie and Turlough sat on the buggy. They called their greetings but he didn't stop to acknowledge them.

Inside, smoke, sweat, music and colour blasted Stanislaus's senses. Musicians clattered ever faster, all aggression and artless volume, and the wood floor vibrated like the skin of a drum under thudding feet and bodies crashing to and fro. It barely passed as dancing, this hauling and mauling. Overhead was a banner fashioned from an old green tablecloth that read Erin Go Bragh Welcome Home Victor. Stanislaus felt suddenly vertiginous. Standing near the door, tapping his foot and observing passively, was Father Daly. He turned white when he saw Stanislaus.

‘Is this how you supervise an event? I said teetotal,' Stanislaus seethed.

‘I haven't seen anyone taking drink.'

‘Open your eyes, man.' People would always come up with schemes for concealing liquor but a good priest would be wise to them. Stanislaus tutted disgustedly at the curate's failure. ‘It's well past eleven.'

‘Victor has just arrived. I thought another few minutes wouldn't be any harm.'

Stanislaus stalked away. Further discussion would only aggravate him. He moved towards the stage at the top of the hall, and word of his arrival spread perceptibly as he moved through the crowd. The dancers became less frenetic, then stopped altogether. It was like water dousing a flame. As Stanislaus ascended the stage, the musicians stopped playing and held their silent fiddles and banjos and bodhrans guiltily. Standing centre stage, he didn't have to wait long for silence.

‘It's very late. The dance is over. Don't anyone make any noise on your way home,' he said. The crowd looked back dumbly. ‘I said this dance is over. Good night to you all.'

‘Victor is here!' cried a voice from the back of the hall.

Everyone turned. The hall seemed suddenly bigger with two hundred people facing away rather than towards him. Men wrestled past each other, women too, to converge on the doorway, where Victor Lennon now stood. He wore a tattered military uniform, bandolier and big sloped hat. Had he changed his clothes? Shrewd. He was a striking sight in the uniform.

‘I'm sure the bishop won't object to another few reels, since I've just arrived,' Victor called out, crisp and clear, the voice of a man who knew how to project. A musician ran a bow across fiddle strings and waited to see what would happen. Stanislaus and Victor locked eyes on one another over the heads of the people. ‘Sure you wouldn't, Your Grace?' said Victor, jabbing the words mercilessly precisely. The dizziness was returning to Stanislaus. The fiddler scratched the opening notes of some fast reel, and the other musicians joined in. People clapped the rhythm and quickly the floor filled with dancers. It was as though Stanislaus wasn't there. People queued up to shake Victor's hand and shower him with kisses.

‘Are you all right, Your Grace?' whispered Father Daly, climbing onto the stage.

‘For all you care, seminarian,' said Stanislaus, mustering his strength to walk off the stage, beating a path through the people with his stick. Father Daly took hold of his elbow, and though he tried to shrug him off, there was little force in his protest.

‘You don't look well, Your Grace.'

As they passed him in the doorway Victor Lennon nodded, smiled and gulped heartily from a huge bottle. He laughed as he looked at the bishop. Stanislaus wanted to stop him, to insist that the event was teetotal, but his knees buckled beneath him. Had Father Daly not held him up, he'd have crumpled.

‘Are you all right, Father?' said Charlie Quinn, smoking a cigarette with Turlough Moriarty by the door.

‘I'm surprised at you, Charlie Quinn, I'd have expected better,' Stanislaus wheezed as Father Daly helped him into the street. ‘There would've been no problem if you'd ended proceedings when you were supposed to. If you only …' Stanislaus said to Father Daly, but hadn't the breath to finish.

‘You just need rest, Your Grace, you've been overdoing it lately,' said the curate.

‘If you'd made sure it was over by eleven like you were supposed to,' Stanislaus said again as they arrived at the Parochial House, suddenly more weary than angry now that he was inside his own front door. Almost immediately, his eyelids started to droop. ‘Victor Lennon may be the only layman in the parish who knows how to address me correctly. Isn't that funny? Isn't that awful?' he said.

Stanislaus's last thought before he fell asleep that night was the look on Charlie Quinn's face as he'd chastised him. The young man had seemed genuinely distraught.

People are cheering for me and shaking my hand. Benedict looked so strong and unyielding up there on stage, laying down the law, but I knew the people were with me. There's a huge
banner draped from the ceiling, and yes, it's green when it should be red, but it is a tribute to
me
. He looked around the packed hall, five hundred people here at least, and saw sheep in need of a shepherd. I saw comrades in need of example. The young priest with the blond hair has to drag the old bastard off the stage and out the door after the musicians and the dancing start up again. Some ruddy-faced fellow thrusts a bottle into my hand just as Benedict is passing me at the door, and I take a drink, assuming the clear liquid inside is water. Come to think of it, a stupid assumption. It tastes of nothing but pain, and my face screws up as the poteen goes down. The young priest steers Benedict to the door and he's gone before I get my breath back. I feel like I've been punched in the windpipe at the very moment I should be enjoying my victory, Benedict's defeat. He was so very white-looking! So beaten-looking. Like a prize-fighter being helped from the ring after being knocked out. I remember a couple of years ago how the audience in the Volta Picture Palace tore the place apart with excitement after the newsreel showed Jack Johnson getting his comeuppance. As they all line up to talk to me, to shake my hand, to pay tribute, I feel how Jess Willard must have felt after he knocked the big nigger out. Champion of the bloody world.

I know a lot of faces but I'm struggling with names. ‘Stay close to me and drop people's names into conversation in case I forget,' I say quietly into Charlie's ear. ‘Try and not make it too obvious.'

‘Hello, Colm, how are all the McDermotts this evening?' says Charlie to a man of fifty who comes up to me, and a matronly woman beside him.

‘Welcome home, lad, welcome home,' says Colm McDermott, shaking my hand like he's trying to wring something out of it.

I tell him it's great to see him again, and take a punt on the woman beside him. ‘And how are you, Mrs McDermott?'

‘Ah, Victor, I see you didn't lose your manners away in Dublin. But sure you know to call me Kate.' She pushes grey wisps of hair behind her ears, grabs me and kisses me on the lips. ‘God bless you, Victor Lennon, and God bless Ireland.' She's drunk, like most of the men who shake my hand and the women who slobber my cheeks and lips. Charlie keeps me right with the names. The Kellys, the McCabes, the Gambles, the Murphys, the Sweeneys, the O'Kanes, the other Murphys, the Vallelys, the Campbells. The music is loud, the dancing raucous. The place stinks of sweat and smoke and hooch with a thin sliver of Lifebuoy in the mix. Youngsters who should be in bed are still running around. Old-timers are falling asleep in corners. All in tribute to me.

‘Did they do anything like this for you when you came back from France?' I ask Charlie. He makes an effort to smile. Barely perceptibly, he shakes his head. Sean Moriarty, Turlough's brother, comes over and lifts me off my feet in a bear hug. He nearly squeezes the puff out of me. Strong as an ox, he is. They all have questions, crowding around me like I'm a famous tenor or something. What's it like being a national hero? Did they really shoot Connolly, and him strapped to a chair? Who was the best fighter? How do you say that name, Dee Valeera? And what's a Spaniard doing fighting for Ireland anyway? Sean, though, is only interested in the football.