1999 (17 page)

“I understood him, I just can't take it in.” Barry struggled to keep his emotions under tight control. “Some people flinch their way through life, Séamus, but Ursula strides through hers. I can't imagine her any other way.”

“Oh Christ. Oh Christ.” McCoy stared at the floor.
They didn't care who she was or what she was, they just ruined her life.
“The fuckin' Orange bastards,” he said in a guttural monotone that did not sound like him at all. “Ye fuckin' planters' shit, may you and all your breed roast in hell.”

What the hell can I do for her now?

What the hell can
I
do?

McCoy did not notice when Barry left him to return to the ward. He had forgotten about Barry, the boardinghouse, everything else. The only job he had left was becoming clear. He was being steadied and aimed like a rifle to carry out his sole objective. His sacred duty.

When Barry sat down by his mother's bed Ursula asked anxiously, “What's wrong?”

When did she start sounding anxious?
He hated lying to her, but this was one time when he must. “Nothing's wrong,” he said calmly. Taking a book of poetry out of his pocket, he began reading aloud. His eyes and lips coordinated the endeavour; his mind was somewhere else. More than an hour passed before he realised McCoy had not returned. It was unthinkable that he would leave without telling Ursula good-bye. “I'll be back in a minute,” Barry said.

McCoy was not in the corridor; not at the nurses' station; not in the lobby nor the coffee shop.

Not in the hospital.

When Barry went outside there was no sign of the Austin Healey anywhere. He returned to the lobby and rang the boardinghouse. “Is Séamus there, Barbara?”

“He came in a little while ago and got that old pack of his, then he went out again.”

“Did he take my car?”

“No, it's still parked outside.”

Barry's next phone call was to the Bleeding Horse. “Is Séamus anywhere around?” he asked the bartender.

“Not a whisker of him, Barry. Why, did he go missing?”

“I don't know yet. Who else is in there? The Professor?”

“Only Patsy, propping up the bar. But he's always here, you'd think he had no home to go to.”

“If Séamus does come in tell him I'm looking for him, will you?”

 

On the twenty-eighth of May Merlyn Rees announced, “There is now no statutory basis for the Northern Ireland Executive.” Brian Faulkner resigned as chief executive. The UWC had won. The Sunningdale Agreement was brought down; power sharing in Northern Ireland was consigned to the scrap heap of history.

 

Barry read selected items from the newspapers to Ursula. One reporter had described the Ulster Workers Council as “A plucky little band of Ulstermen who have brought London to its knees.”

“Plucky little band indeed!” Barry said sarcastically. “All they had in their arsenal was the British army, the RUC, a half-dozen power stations, an airport, a ferry terminal, and four-fifths of the civil service. Not to mention the BBC, which was happy to broadcast any information the loyalists fed them—power blackouts, surgery cancellations, petrol shortages—anything that would keep people in a state of anxiety. Like his ancient namesake, this Merlyn's waved a magic wand. And made democracy disappear.”

“What does Séamus have to say about it?” Ursula's voice was querulous. “Why doesn't he come to see me anymore?”

“I'm keeping him too busy these days,” Barry replied. With practice it was getting easier to lie to his mother. “We had a lot of projects planned for this spring and summer and we have to take advantage of the good weather while it lasts.”

Though he would continue the search for several days, he knew it was futile.

Séamus McCoy had gone up the road.

In June six members of the IRA serving time in English prisons were on hunger strike, protesting the appalling conditions in which they were being kept. Two young women who had been convicted of bombing the Old Bailey, Marion, and Dolours Price, attracted the most media attention. But some of the men were nearer death. When Michael Gaughan died on the third of June in Parkhurst Prison the IRA responded immediately.

A bomb exploded on the seventeenth in Westminster Hall, injuring eleven people. However, another story was still in the headlines: the IRA kidnapping of Lord and Lady Donoughmore.

The wealthy British peer owned an eighteenth-century mansion, Knocklofty House, in County Kildare. On the day following Gaughan's death a rogue IRA unit had been driving around the Irish countryside, guided by a copy of
The Stately Homes of Ireland,
looking for someone prominent to kidnap to force the British to end the stalemate over the remaining hunger strikers. When the elderly Lord and Lady Donoughmore returned home in full evening dress from a night out, they were violently seized and carried away.

The initial violence did not last. While they were being held in a safe house, Lord Donoughmore later related in his diary, the leader of the gang, a Belfast man called Eddie Gallagher, personally cooked a traditional Irish fry-up for his hostages with the best eggs they had ever tasted.

While the couple waited to know their fate—listening to news on the radio and working crossword puzzles—six hundred people met at a rally in the nearby town of Clonmel to demand their release.

On the seventh of June the Price sisters went off their hunger strike in Brixton Jail as a result of negotiations with the British; negotiations that had nothing to do with the kidnapping of the Donoughmores, who were not nearly as prominent in British society as Gallagher's gang had believed. In an early example of the so-called Stockholm Syndrome, the Donoughmores had grown genuinely fond of their captors. They felt only gratitude when on Saturday they were driven to Dublin and released unharmed at the Parkgate entrance of the Phoenix Park.

The negotiations that did not concern them had taken place in Northern Ireland between senior British officials and members of the republican leadership, including Seán MacStiofáin and Dáithí Ó Conaill of the Dublin IRA, Séamus Twomey the Belfast commandant, Martin McGuinness from Derry, and Sinn Féin's Gerry Adams, who had been released from Long Kesh to take part.

On the twenty-second of June the IRA announced a ceasefire. Further talks were to go ahead in London on the seventh of July.

The loyalists promptly stepped up their assassination campaign against Catholics in the north.

 

At the end of the month Ursula's plaster mummy case was removed. Her wizened, shrunken body horrified her. “Don't let my son see me like this,” she pleaded. Using chocolates Barbara had given her, she bribed a nurse to purchase two voluminous flannel nightgowns that would cover her from neck to toe.

 

In July Gerry Adams went to London with the IRA contingent meeting British representatives to discuss “a way forward” in the north. The talks disintegrated into a show of temper on both sides. The republicans felt the British had no intention of ameliorating their position, and would always side with the unionists to the detriment of northern nationalists.

All bets were off. The republicans flew home.

 

Éamonn MacThomáis completed his prison sentence that month and resumed his duties as editor of
An Phoblacht
.

In the British House of Commons Merlyn Rees announced vague plans to phase out internment gradually. Amorphous promises for the unspecified future were not enough, however. The IRA responded by setting off bombs in Birmingham, Manchester, and the Tower of London. The bomb in the Tower killed one person and injured a number of others.

 

Acting “as a matter of conscience,”
¹
Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave voted against his own government's bill proposing the regulation of contraception. On July sixteenth the bill was defeated by seventy-five votes to sixty-one.

Portlaoise Prison in County Laois was a prime example of the Irish government's attitude toward the IRA. The
taoiseach
's father, William Cosgrave, had been a leader of the victorious Free State side in the Civil War. His son Liam's motto was, “We did it before and we'll do it again.”
²
Under his administration Portlaoise had become infamous for denying basic privileges to republican prisoners, fights, beatings, and torture beyond the usual rough treatment accorded prisoners by their guards.

On the eighteenth of August 1974, nineteen republicans blasted their way out of Portlaoise. A member of the republican “escape committee” had noticed a breach in security near the laundry house, a small door that opened onto the street outside. The republicans then set themselves to making imitation guards' uniforms that fooled the real guards long enough to allow them to plant a small bomb to blow open the door and make good their escape.

 

“Spinal injuries are tricky, we simply don't know enough about them,” Ursula's doctor told Barry. “We've done all we can for your mother in hospital. With assistance she's able to sit up for brief periods, and her bladder and bowels are functioning satisfactorily. Because she insists her pain has reached a tolerable level we've reduced her medication. I hesitate to recommend sending her to a convalescent facility, however. I doubt if a woman of her spirit would thrive in that environment. Will you be able to care for her at home?”

“The farm?”

“Oh no, she needs to be close to a major hospital where a doctor can examine her at least every few months. I meant your home here in Dublin.”

Barry did not anticipate a pleasant conversation with Barbara that afternoon. To his surprise she met him at the front door. Before he could speak she said, “This letter just came in the post. It's addressed to me, so I opened it. But it doesn't make any sense.” She handed Barry a small, grubby envelope, containing a single cigarette paper folded in half.

Written in pencil on the small scrap was, “17. Been lifted. In the Kesh.”

There was no signature.

“I thought it must be for you,” Barbara said, “because of the 17. But what does lifted mean? And what's the Kesh?”

“Séamus has been caught and sent to Long Kesh. It's a prison in Northern Ireland.”

“Prison! Oh, Barry, that sweet man—and he is a sweet man, I didn't realise it until now.” Her eyes began to glitter with tears. “What a terrible year, first your mother and now Séamus. It's like God is angry with us.”

“God had nothing to do with this,” Barry said grimly. He gathered her into his arms and rested his chin on her head.

Against his chest, she said in a muffled voice, “You didn't want him to go north, why wouldn't he listen to you?”

“Séamus is his own man, Barbara. He did what he thought is right.”

She pulled back to look up at him. “You think seeking revenge is right?”

“Did you never want revenge for your father's death?”

“That's different.”

“It is not different, it's the same emotion.”

“Maybe,” she conceded. “But I didn't do anything about it.”

“Because you had no way to. Séamus did.”

“And look where it got him! What are we going to do, Barry? Can we pay his bail or something?”

“I doubt it. He's probably been interned, which means they can hold him as long as they like without bail or trial.”

“That's ghastly!” She began to sob in earnest.

“That's British law.”

While Barbara was agonising over McCoy Barry told her, “At least there's one bright light in all of this. We're going to have Ursula with us. The doctor said I can bring her home as soon as we can get things ready for her.”

 

Long Kesh, “the long bog,” was the site of a former World War Two air base some eight miles from Belfast. Prisoners were housed in metal-roofed Nissan huts. Clusters of four or five huts were enclosed by a steel mesh fence, forming what was accurately called a Cage. The prison compound contained over twenty Cages that were enclosed within a twelve-foot-high steel mesh fence topped by two double rows of razor wire. The entire area was overlooked by guard towers manned by soldiers equipped with searchlights and orders to shoot to kill.

On the other side of the fence was a no-go zone with British soldiers encamped.

Brian Faulkner had once remarked that the place looked like a German concentration camp; an accurate description.

A number of IRA Volunteers—invariably described as terrorists in the media—were interned in Long Kesh. Following Bloody Sunday the British government had granted the republicans Special Category Status in recognition of the fact that they were fighting for a political cause.

Within Long Kesh there were loyalist paramilitaries as well. They were not called terrorists. Nor did they have Special Category Status.

The full import of Ursula's impending arrival struck Barbara when a van with “Hospital Rentals” on the side pulled up in front of the yellow brick house. She watched with growing dismay as a very large mechanical bed and a commode chair were unloaded.

“Where do you want these, missus?”

“We're going to use one of the downstairs rooms for now. I just hope that bed will fit in there. Come, I'll show you the way.”
I'll have to be a full-time nurse. Plus taking care of Brian, plus running this house…damn you, Séamus McCoy! How could you run off and leave us like this? Don't you ever think of anyone but yourself?

Later that afternoon she was standing at the front door with Brian in her arms—
Let him see how much I have to do already!
—when the Austin Healey pulled up to the kerb. Barry gently lifted his mother out of the car and carried her to the house.

“Didn't you bring a wheelchair?” Barbara asked him.

Ursula said sharply, “I'm not a cripple!”

With Barbara following behind, Barry carried his mother to her room. “Where's Séamus?” she asked him. “Why isn't he here to meet me?”

“I'll explain later, Ursula, let's get you settled first.”

“Tell me now,” she said as he laid her on the bed. “Whatever it is, tell me now. Where is Séamus McCoy?”

“Give me a chance, will you? Barbara, put Brian down for a minute and help me here.”

Ursula caught her son's wrist in one frail hand. “
Now,
” she said.

Barry knew that tone. No further dissembling would be allowed. “Séamus has been arrested,” he said.

Ursula blinked. “For what?”

“I don't know the details yet.”

“When was he arrested?”

“I don't know that either; it happened some time after he left here.”

“Séamus left here? Of his own accord? When?”

Barry was finding the conversation increasingly painful. “After we were told you would never walk again.”

“So you've been lying about him all this time, when you know how I feel about lying!”

Unnoticed by either of them, Barbara carried Brian out of the room. She did not enjoy scenes unless they were of her own making.

“Séamus went back to active service,” Barry told his mother. “I think it was because he wanted revenge for what happened to you.”

The little bit of colour that had returned to Ursula's face vanished.

When Barry came out of his mother's room a few minutes later, Barbara ambushed him. “Why did you order such a big bed? Wouldn't a single one do?”

“She needs to be as comfortable as we can possibly make her. She's used to a full-sized bed on the farm so I want her to have one here.”

“How am I supposed to take care of a bedridden invalid and Brian too? It's crazy, Barry, I can't do it. Séamus is gone and Philpott's no use, he knows nothing about children and he's scared to death of women.”