Another Kind of Life (10 page)

At the same time, she was filled with rage against her father. How could he do this to them? The shame of it – stealing money when he must already have enough, leaving his family with
nothing, and then – going to jail. She would be ashamed of him for the rest of her life. She would never forgive him. Never, never.

Grandpa Delaney was waiting for them at Amiens Street Station. He looked severe, standing there on the concourse, dressed from head to toe in black. He stood out from the
crowd. Nobody was standing anywhere near him – it was as though people sensed something forbidding about him, and gave him a wide berth. He looked like someone important, looked as though he
might even own the station. His hands rested, one on top of the other, on the ornate handle of his walking stick. His back, as usual, was ramrod straight. Hannah had a brief memory of the only day
he had seemed to unbend. Christmas. Sitting in Papa’s armchair by the fire, warmed by good brandy. He had taken her on his knee and told her about his own Christmases, when he was just a lad.
He had shown her a shooting stick that had once belonged to his father. His eyes bright with merriment, he had revealed its secret to her: the little compartment, concealed just beneath the handle,
big enough for one generous measure of brandy. He had twinkled at her then, tapping the side of his nose and nodding conspiratorially. Their secret. It was the only time Hannah had ever seen him
really smile. His face now wore its all-too-familiar expression – a mixture of impatience and disapproval, and Hannah could feel something inside her sinking.

They walked towards him. Hannah thought they must appear to be a rather sad and bedraggled little group by now. Mama went over and kissed Grandfather’s cheek. She heard her say: ‘You
got my letters then.’

Hannah did not hear his reply. She was too busy trying to recover from her astonishment at Grandfather’s behaviour. He put both arms around his daughter’s shoulders and enfolded her
in a mighty hug. Sophia clung to him. All Hannah could hear was her mother’s voice, choking with sobs, saying over and over again: ‘Oh, Father, what are we to do? What are we to
do?’

He held her for a long time. Eleanor and May stood beside Hannah, looking bewildered. Eleanor’s thumb was resting at her lower lip again, a thin thread of saliva drooling from her open
mouth. Hannah wiped her face with a handkerchief, glancing over at her mother, trying to smile reassuringly at her sisters.

‘It’s all right,’ she whispered to them. ‘Mama’s upset because Papa couldn’t come with us. Don’t worry.’

Sophia composed herself quickly. She turned to her daughters. Hannah thought her smile was watery.

‘Come along, girls, say hello to Grandfather.’

He hugged each of them in turn. Hannah felt his moustaches tickle her face, liked the strong smell of tobacco from his skin. May and Eleanor were timid with him at first – they were a
little confused by this affectionate behaviour on his part. All they could remember was that he slept in his chair when they went to visit, and growled from time to time that children should be
seen and not heard.

Sophia linked her father’s arm and they made their way together out to the waiting carriage. Hannah followed, with May and Eleanor in tow.

It seemed to her that her first lifetime had passed away from her since early that morning. She no longer felt like the schoolgirl whose embroidery class had been interrupted by a visit from
Sister Canice. That could have happened to someone else, for all the resonance it had for her now. It was like shedding a skin that had become too small for her. She felt that she had expanded
since morning, that life had become deeper, wider, far fuller of shades of grey than she could ever have imagined.

She had never thought about the precariousness of things before. Now her life seemed like a fine thread woven along with others into the tapestry called family. It seemed that when one of those
other threads snapped, the whole picture unravelled and life emerged from the wreckage, in all its messiness and confusion.

Hannah had the feeling that things would never be simple again.

M
ARY
WASN’T SURE
what had woken her. Some unaccustomed sound had startled her into wakefulness, and now she was alert,
watchful. The whole house was silent, but something was wrong. She could feel it. The street had been strangely quiet this evening; there had been none of the usual Friday night drinking, no rowdy
return from the pubs on Peter’s Hill. The men had gone home early, quietly, stayed close to their own firesides. The emptiness of the streets had had an eerie quality to it: no groups of
youths hanging around the corners, dragging on a shared cigarette, shouting across to groups of disdainful girls. No children fighting over whose turn it was to hold the skipping rope, or play
ball; not even the North Street dogs had barked.

There it was again: shouting, running feet, the sound of glass breaking. Cecilia stirred in the bed.

‘What’s goin’ on?’ she asked, struggling out of sleep.

Mary was kneeling at the window, pulling the corner of the curtain back a little.

‘I don’t know, but it’s somethin’ bad – I heard glass breakin’ a minute ago.’

She peered out into the dimly lit street. At first she could see nothing out of the ordinary. No doors opened, no lights blazed from the waiting eyes of the houses that lined each side. It was
all much too quiet. Suddenly, there was a roar from the top of Peter’s Hill, from where it adjoined the Shankill Road. Cecilia scrambled over to her sister’s side, putting one arm
around her shoulder, as much for her own comfort as Mary’s. She started to tremble.

‘Oh my Jesus – look at yon crowd!’

Mary felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. Gooseflesh roughened her arms; her throat went dry. She thought she had never seen so many men massed together before. The roar of their voices
increased as they marched as one body down the narrow street, their boots sinister on cobblestones, their arms swinging. They had a swagger made of rage and drink.

‘Yis ’uns will get bate! No fuckin’ Home Rule here!’

‘And no Pope, neither!’

Their bodies seemed to swell, to fill the whole street from side to side, crowding and crushing from pavement to pavement, their shadows looming upwards from gutter to street lamp. It was
impossible to distinguish the men from the distorted shadows they threw, from the sticks and clubs they waved in the air, hurling them upwards from time to time and catching them again to the
incessant drumbeat of stamping feet.

Their voices were ugly and discordant. Old insults were hurled at the same time as sticks and stones laid waste to almost every window on the opposite side of the street. Mary pulled
Cecilia’s head down below the level of the window sill.

‘Keep low, for God’s sake!’

Just as she spoke, there was the crash of glass as the McNiffs’ front window shattered into tiny pieces and fell, in graceful, starry slow motion, to the ground below. The mob cheered and
whooped, now kicking doorways and launching lumps of paving-stones through the doors and windows on both sides of the street.

The noise became intolerable.

‘What are they saying?’ Cecilia was clutching at her sister’s arm, her eyes wide with terror.

‘Sssh!’ Mary warned her, keeping her eye on the street, trying to comfort Cecilia as best she could, patting her hand distractedly at the same time.

‘Long live the Queen!’

Mary could see the shadowed faces of the mob uplifted into the greenish pools of gaslight. They were all shouting, all of them, each vying with the other for the worst insult, the most savage
bite of triumph.

‘We’ll win, so we will! A British parliament for a British people!’

Their caps were pushed back from their foreheads: no need for subterfuge here. They don’t care, Mary realized; they don’t care who sees them, who recognizes them. They can do their
worst and there’s no one to stop them.

‘We’ll teach yis, fenian bastards! Ye’ll not win!’

The shouts grew louder, the men working up their own anger, faces chiselled by drink and hatred. And yet the crowd never missed the beat of its own march. It made steady, menacing progress, like
some sort of terrifying heartbeat, until the entire street was filled.

‘Taigs out – we’ll have no fuckin’ Pope here!’

Still the houses sat tight. Not one broke ranks: no door, no window showed any sign of life.

Suddenly, as abruptly as it had begun, the noise of the mob ceased. As though at some secret signal, the marching stopped. The men stood still and silent, their sticks now by their sides,
smacking from time to time off an impatient trouser-leg. All that could be heard was the shuffling of feet, the chink of nails on stone.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, but we’re for it,’ whispered Mary.

The silence was immense.

Suddenly, Cecilia nudged her sister.

‘Look yonder,’ she said, nodding her head to the right.

Some of the street lights had been broken in the fray, but those close to Peter’s Hill were still lit. In the misty, greeny-yellowish light cast by a cluster of three or four lamps at the
corner, Mary could make out a large group of RIC men.

‘Them bastards is just standin’ there!’ Cecilia hissed, crouching down again.

‘Aye – not a baton drawn between them.’

Cecilia craned her neck again, moving the hem of the curtain very gently. She began to count silently.

‘There’s at least forty of them – what are they doin’?’

‘Nothin’,’ replied Mary, grimly. ‘And I’ll wager that’s what they’ve been doin’ all night – nothin’.’

The noisy shuffling of feet had begun again outside. Mary felt a strange sense of relief. Anything was better than the terrifying silence of the last few moments. A great roar came from the back
of the crowd of bodies.

‘Come on out, ye fenian bastards, and take what’s comin’ to ye! Take it like the men ye’re not!’

Still the houses sat tight and silent. A moment’s uncertainty hovered about the men’s heads. Mary kept her head below the level of the window sill and prayed. Suddenly, they were off
on the march again, as abruptly as they’d arrived. This time, they surged back in the direction from which they’d come, back towards the groups of policemen standing on both sides of
Peter’s Hill.

Mary and Cecilia watched as, with what seemed like breathtaking defiance, the men swung their sticks and clubs again, crashing into those windows they had missed in the excitement of their
earlier rhythmic march down the cobbled street.

Their taunts continued; Mary and Cecilia could catch the same old insults, repeated over and over, accompanied by the crashing of paving-stones on doors and windows. The breaking of street
lights went on and on, pools of darkness spilling out over the rough pavement as though released from the exploding stones. Still no baton was drawn. The two women waited, holding their breath,
until the mob reached the policemen.

The men stopped there, congregating all along Peter’s Hill. Each group kept its distance; neither moved towards the invisible boundary which kept them separate, each carefully apart from
the other. The silence was palpable. Cecilia and Mary sat where they were, watching, terrified, waiting for the inevitable. It never came. They remained watchful, gritty-eyed, until five
o’clock when the men finally dispersed, straggling off into the dirty dawn light.

A
FTER
J
OSEPH
LEFT
, May clung to her mother on the platform, too terrified to let her go. She held on
tight to her coat, whimpering, convinced that the noise and black rages of the streets would erupt all around her again if she let go of the familiar. She had just escaped the path of the
terrifying energy that had wanted to snatch and suck at Hannah, at her, and drag them screaming into its very centre. She had had a powerful vision of their carriage being swallowed and spat out
again with its passengers already devoured, missing for ever. She wanted to feel familiar arms around her now, inhale the safe, comforting fragrance of lavender.

‘You’re safe, my love, you’re safe now.’

Sophia rocked her daughter back and forwards, back and forwards as best she could, standing in the middle of the rapidly crowding platform. But the memory of the lurching carriage ride from
school to train station filled May’s senses: her head still reeled with the hoarseness of angry voices, her mind’s eye kept replaying vivid flashes of running bodies, arms flailing in
fury, stone crashing against stone. She had been able to see herself and Hannah as though from above, as they’d huddled together, low on the carriage floor. Now that it was over, she felt the
invisible fist tighten its grip again inside her chest. It squeezed and squeezed so that her breath came wheezing, gasping, and her head grew light and dizzy.

‘I’ve got you, I’ve got you now, you’re safe. Breathe slowly, like Dr Collins showed you.’

Even Mama’s whispered words, over and over, did little to still the rising sea of panic. May tried to slow down, to breathe deeply through her nose, but it wasn’t working. It was
always like this: once the crisis had passed, the waves of suffocation began, washing over and over her until some hand, usually Mama’s, soothed her hot head and made the tide recede. But
there was no comfort to be had here, not now. The hairs on May’s arms and neck still seemed to stand to attention, prickling with the electricity of impending disaster.

‘It’s all right, loves, it’s over, it’s all over.’

May felt her mother’s right arm reach out and draw Hannah closer to her. Hannah put her arm around May, too, and the three of them stood there, trembling. May wiped her eyes over and
over.

‘I thought those men were going to hurt us, Mama.’

Sophia hugged both girls to her.

‘Hush, love, don’t upset yourself any more. You’re here now, you’re safe. We – I had no idea that there was rioting. Let’s just thank God you’re both
unharmed.’

People were now crowding and jostling on the platform. The noise and bustle of the station seemed to have increased tenfold. A red-faced little man in a GNR uniform was now pushing his way
through the crowds in an absurdly cheerful manner, shouting above the excited buzzing that was suddenly everywhere. May wondered if he had any idea what they had just been through. How could anyone
be cheerful if they knew what was happening out on the streets?