A Mad and Wonderful Thing (5 page)

I went to my bedroom and sat on my bed and cried, and Anna came in and held my hand. We heard Dad leave, and we ran to the window when he returned, but all he had with him was the
Democrat
. I figured it must be one that he had gone and bought himself.

When Christmas came around again I asked for a slingshot.

‘Why do you want a slingshot?' Mam and Dad asked.

‘To be like Cúchulainn,' I said. They thought this to be bit of a laugh, and they repeated it to all our relatives and callers.

‘Going to be like Cúchulainn, this boy,' they told everyone.

‘I need a good one,' I said to Mam when she was alone in the kitchen. ‘A strong one, like a kind of sports-shooting one.' And I showed her models I'd found in books that I'd borrowed from the library.

Christmas brought the slingshot, and I had my plan made.

I spent the next six months with stones and marbles. I used footballs and tennis balls as targets, and I practised every day until the target was a golf ball and I could hit it from across the length of the garden. I was ready.

Between our housing estate and the next one were hilly fields. One hill had been part chiselled away at some time, leaving a face of rock exposed. It wasn't very high — perhaps some twenty feet — but to us children it was huge, and we called it the cliff. Anna and I climbed there when there was no one about.

The summer holidays came, and the children from both estates gathered in the common ground of the hilly fields. Jimmy McCusker and his gang held a raised patch near the height of the cliff like a pride of lions might hold some higher mound in the African savannah. The rest of us children, like a grazing herd, kept a distance. That year, McCusker's crew comprised the two Breen boys, and I waited for a day when the three boys were at the cliff height and no other children were near. I had my place in the long grass prepared, where I knew I couldn't be seen. On previous mornings, before anyone got there, I had checked the cover, I had measured the distance, and I had practised the range.

I first took one of the Breen boys. I hit him in the forehead and he fell. The other two had no idea what had just happened, and stood around him open-mouthed. I then took the second Breen boy, catching him in his open mouth, and he went down screaming. I could see McCusker was panicked as he searched out into the field for some solution or reason. He found neither, and I hit his right shoulder and then his right knee as I worked him backwards to the cliff. He was moaning and desperate for cover. But there was none — the long grass was all mine — and when he reached the cliff he looked over it as if unsure whether to jump or scramble down, and so he turned again to face me, and I hit him in his left eye, and he fell back and away.

What happened on the cliff that summer was a mystery that became a street legend. Nobody really believed the Breen boys' report of an attack from nowhere, and the cliff was full of stones anyway, so nothing could be found or proved. Most believed that there had probably been some row or incident among the gang and that the story was a cover-up, though some thought the Breen boys to be too young and their injuries too severe for it all to be a fiction. But nobody cared enough to give it a serious investigation.

Jimmy McCusker survived, though he'd broken his neck in the fall, and when he got out of hospital he joined his father in the daily vigil on the front porch. I got a new bicycle the next Christmas — a blue Raleigh — and when dry weather came I took it for a ride around the block. When I passed the McCuskers I stopped and looked at the boy in the wheelchair as his father shouted abuse at me. But something had changed: the tightening in my back and the sore grip to my middle were gone, and I was no longer afraid of them. I waved to the McCuskers as I rode away.

We moved to a new house later that year, and I never saw Jimmy McCusker or my red bicycle again.

A black flag flying

IT IS THE SECOND WEEK OF MAY, AND IT IS TWO WEEKS SINCE THAT FIRST
evening with Cora Flannery. Two weeks. I am nervous. Today I'm to call at her house for the first time. Today I shall meet her mam and dad. I have held out for as long as I can, but Cora says that I am really pushing it, that at two weeks I am being just plain weird. What can I say? There is normal time and there is Cora's time, and well …

I tie the low gate closed behind me with the shoelace and salute Dad, who stands watching me from the front porch.

‘All right, Son?' he calls.

‘All right, Dad.'

Next door, in the front garden of an identical house, a small man is bent low at work among some roses and shrubs.

‘She has you on your hands and knees again, Eddie,' I comment.

He barely looks up. ‘Gobshite.' It is just a whisper, but I catch it, and too late he tries to run. Too late and too slow. Before he can get going, I have cleared the wall and have him in a firm grip.

Eddie Reynolds is my uncle. He is ex-army and he is a small man. But he is a proud man. He was, in his youth, the featherweight boxing champion of Leinster, and he held that title for five years. Eddie and Hannah are my mam's brother and sister, and live next door. The three of them do everything together — shopping, socialising, holidays, the whole fruit-basket — and the rest of time they give out about each other. Eddie and Hannah never married and neither one has children. When Eddie retired from the army he took me as his vocation, and many of his afternoons were spent teaching me boxing, arm-to-arm combat, and — removed from the eyes of others — how to handle a gun. Eddie delighted in the telling of tales of army life: the barracks, the rifle-range, the border, the Curragh, the Congo, and the Lebanon. I loved to hear the stories. Back then, Eddie could manage me, but that was ten years ago, when Eddie was fifty and I was nine. This is now. It is no longer a contest.

‘Gobshite, is it?' In one movement I lift the small man up on my shoulders and spin him around.

‘Johnny,' Eddie pleads as he tries to fight my hold. ‘Let me down, you fecker.'

But I hold him easy enough.

‘Hannah, Hannah,' Eddie calls out.

Aunt Hannah appears in the central doorway. She takes no notice of the scene at play on the front lawn. She turns to Dad, who still stands in the open front porch.

‘A beautiful day, Oliver,' she calls.

‘A beautiful day, Hannah. Thank God. A beautiful day.' He looks up to pencil-grey clouds that move below a blue-and-white sky. ‘Though we could see a shower yet.'

‘How's herself?' Aunt Hannah asks.

‘Right as rain, Hannah,' Dad says, indicating over his shoulder. In the brief silence of his pausing, a few faint notes of song escape the hallway. ‘She's right as rain.'

I let Eddie down, and have cleared the wall before he steadies and takes a swipe.

‘Too slow, you old fox,' I call, pulling the Dunn & Co straight.

I take the bicycle from where it rests against the front wall, check the tyres for hardness, mount, and I am off. I look back as I go. The old soldier waves, acknowledges Dad with a salute, gives his sister a shake of his head, and returns to his gardening low among the roses.

I cycle out of the small estate and turn west onto the Ramparts Road. I pass the grounds of the lawn tennis club where on summer mornings Anna and I would climb the wall for a game before the caretaker arrived and threw us out. I turn north through Distillery Lane and then west again through Jocelyn Street, passing the office of a local newspaper below the first-floor snooker rooms of the Catholic Young Man's Society where Éamon and I played every week while the rest of the class took to the cold and windy sports-field. At the junction with Chapel Street I pass the Home Bakery where Mam queues on a Saturday morning for two French loaves and an almond ring, and every so often a chocolate or pineapple cake. I pass Saint Patrick's Cathedral and continue west through Crowe Street passing the town hall. I continue along the side wall of the county-court house and enter the Market Square. It was here I sat with Cora just two weeks ago. And it was here in this square where I first took notice of politics, first made conclusions on the story of Ireland, and first decided my role. That was 1981, and I was ten years old.

Bobby Sands, an IRA prisoner in a British jail in Northern Ireland, died after sixty-six days of a hunger strike. He was twenty-seven years old. Nine other men would follow him that summer on a demand for identity, a demand to be recognised as political prisoners. The streets and the television stations were full of it. The newspapers Dad brought home were full of it. Mam and Dad's talk at the kitchen table and neighbours' talk over fences was full of it. The walls, hoardings, and bridges around town were full of it. The list of the prisoners' five demands was everywhere, with
SMASH H-BLOCK
below them as a sign-off.

At the time I wondered why a people with so little, against an enemy with so much, would put all this effort into a battle for clothes and visits — a battle that could never affect the war. I asked Dad what was going on. ‘Politics,' he said. ‘It is all a game of politics.' A protest base was established in the Market Square throughout the Bobby Sands hunger strike, and every day on the way from school I walked through it just to try to catch some of the fever. I didn't. I just couldn't figure the thing out. The black flags appeared on the day he died; they hung from every lamppost. That day, a skinny teenage girl in tight jeans and sporting a short haircut asked me to sign a petition. ‘Why?' I asked, and the question seemed to throw her. It didn't make sense. My ten-year-old head couldn't figure it out. Bobby Sands had contested a Westminster seat during his hunger strike, and he had won — graffiti on an old wall near the school read,
THE RIGHT HON BOBBY SANDS MP.
I looked at the wall every day.
The Right Hon Bobby Sands MP
. Why, I thought, are we celebrating participation in the very thing that has persecuted us all this time? But celebration it was,
BOBBY SANDS MP
was everywhere.

There were riots in the north when he died. We watched it all on television: women blowing whistles and banging dustbin lids on the pavements, youths attacking armoured cars, police lines behind riot shields, and petrol bombs flying in the night. The funeral was like a state affair — a long cortege of tens of thousands, a colour party, and shots into the air. And everyone had something to say about it.

A week later, after fifty-nine days on hunger strike, Francis Hughes died. He was twenty-five. So the whole thing was repeated. And then another hunger striker died, and then another, and then another. It seemed to go on forever. In the Republic, though everyone was gripped by it, and concerned, we were yet distanced, kind of detached, as though it were remote and happening in another country altogether. We sat as spectators in our living rooms as bin lids rattled in the mornings, stones were launched in the afternoons, and petrol bombs flew at night. We watched the long funeral processions, the stiff-stepped coffin-carrying, and the colour parties shooting bullets up into a sky that never harmed Ireland. And here in Dundalk the black flags hung in the Market Square. Ten men were dead by the time it finished. I asked Dad why it had stopped. ‘Politics,' he said. ‘It is all a game of politics.' I didn't know it then — I know it now — but Dad was right. It was only ever politics, and we lost.

And we Irish are too used to losing. We are too fond of celebrating moral defeats; too fond of celebrating small victories that don't matter and are not victories at all; too fond of suffering; too fond of martyrs; too fond of the damned word
struggle
; and too fond of reverting to playing politics with the British, who have a long history of never doing us any good. The only thing that matters in this war is removing the enemy from Ireland. And to this end the hunger strikes changed nothing. They were an attempt at persuasion. But why bother? The only battle worth fighting is a battle that can help win the war. This was the lesson I learned in 1981.

A single black flag was erected in a lane near the school during the hunger strike, and was forgotten and left in place when all the others were taken down. For years, I watched that flag as it faded and tore, until one day the wood gave way to rot and it fell to the ground, where the cleaning truck brushed it up and dumped it along with the other unwanted things.

I cycle north from the Market Square through Clanbrassil Street, passing the narrow road where the school is.
Are you joining us today, Mister Donnelly? Would you care to share your thoughts with the class, Mister Donnelly? Is there something strange or startling out those windows, Mister Donnelly? Hello, hello, calling Mister Donnelly, come in please?
Continue reading from there, Mister Donnelly. Well, Mister Donnelly, don't wait for the applause. Mister Donnelly
… I pass through Church Street to Bridge Street, a dull, narrow street that offers nothing but a last-chance saloon for desperate enterprise, where the few remaining shops sell everything nobody wants. Rough-looking men stand outside bars and watch me with suspicious faces as if the act of riding a bicycle is an indecent phenomenon and is likely to be of some threat. I pass two vagrants walking south with such slowness that it appears they would rather walk for eternity than reach the end of the street. This northern edge is where the town abandons pretence and ambition, settles for fate over fortune, and lies down with a bottle of cheap wine. I pull the zip on my high pullover and change gears. At the muddy river I turn and cycle west on Castletown Road. Some children are playing ball in the yard of the National Girls' School, and I have to stop to return a ball that has been kicked over the iron railings. I think of Mam. This was her school. Here in this same yard I know she must have sung, skipped, run, fallen, and cried. I try to picture her there, but can't. The children resume their game with gusto as I cycle west under the railway bridge. I slow as I approach the low-walled gardens of Níth River Terrace, and I stop halfway down the row of houses. The sky above has softened; the darker clouds have wandered off and the day has brightened again. I look to the chip shop where a girl polishes the front glass with a spray-gun and some loose newspaper.