The Whore-Mother (8 page)

Where would McManus go while he was waiting for his sister to act on his instructions?

What the fuckin hell did it matter where he went or was? Clune sometimes lost patience with his comrades. None of them was of his level of intelligence. He often wondered how they would succeed at anything if he wasn't there. Your man's goin to Muckamore, isn't he? They'd wait for him there, and if there was any change the watchers would know it and report and the treacherous bastard couldn't get far.

The bottle was three-quarters down. They had everything clear. McManus was dependin on his sister. He didn't know they knew that. They had the eyes. That's one thing Powers did right. There wasn't much they missed. It was McManus who was runnin blind—and frightened. Set the watch. Send the letter. Wait and search at the same time. Get done with him. Wee boys and women and girls could do it, all but the killin. Meanwhile, there was a war on and it had to be got on with.

McManus knew where he was going. He sat where he could see through the platform of the bus and watched the traffic coming behind. If they'd drummed up a car there'd be more than one man in it and they'd be watching the bus as other drivers and passengers never did. But the cars he could see from his perch on the back seat had only the drivers in them.

A frightening thought occurred to him—that they might somehow have gone ahead of him, and were waiting where he intended to leave the bus, at Castle Junction. He jumped from the platform between stops and walked and ran and trotted all the way to the Salvation Army hostel.

For half an hour he watched the street from a doorway opposite and saw nothing that suggested the hostel had ever entered their minds. It was Protestant. It was strange. Only the poor had knowledge of or dealings with the Salvation Army. They would give a lot of thought to where he would go. They would take his background into account. The Salvation Army was not part of it. They would surely conclude that he would hide among his old Protestant friends in some middle-class district. He bolted nonetheless for the front door of the Sally Ann and was confused that the woman at the desk was young and pretty with the sort of tranquility in her face he expected only in the faces of good nuns.

He was twenty-two, running for his life from men he had joined in a spasm of ardor and anger and had learned to despise and had not betrayed, and she smiled as if there was nothing odd or desperate or dangerous about him and as if there were no plasters on his battered face.

She said, “Hullo. It's nice to see you. Can I be of any help?”

He didn't know what to call her. Sister? It was better not to call her anything. Suddenly, for no reason that he could account for and at the instant didn't try to, he was aware that he was supposed to be dead now and out of the way, and was alive. He was staring hard at the woman.

“Is there something wrong? Can I help you?”

“Could I have a room here?” he said. “Miss.”

He saw the way her head seemed to dip and her face came forward a little, then lifted up towards him as she smiled and said, “A bed?” It was a shy sort of movement and also a kindly modification of his expectations.

“Anything,” he said. “I....” It isn't easy for young middle-class Ulstermen to do what North Americans of the same sort do with the ease and acceptance of Egyptian bazaar hagglers or Billingsgate fishwives. “I ... have hardly any money.” It was difficult to say.

“Neither have I,” she said. “Maybe we're both lucky.”

“Yes,” he said, and watched her open a big book. “Would you sign the register?” She turned it round to him and held out a pen.

He took it, scrambling in his head for a name. Tommy Davison was the first one that came and he stopped it. It seemed to block the exits from his mind. He leaned down over the book, turning the pen in his fingers, roving, over books, records, athletes ... records? Somebody sent him once a recording of the Bethlehem Bach Choir, conductor, Ivor Jones. He wrote Ivor Jones. He had an American cousin who said he knew him. “Ivor Jones,” he said, and turned the book back to her and laid down the pen.

She read it and put a number after his name and said with a rising inflection, “You've been in an accident.” She was looking at his hands, not at his face, but she was thinking of his face, he was sure, not of the cuts and bruises the chair-leg made on his hands. He said nothing. “Come. I'll show you.” He followed her upstairs.

It was a large dormitory, with twenty-four narrow iron-framed beds. “That's yours in the far left-hand corner. Number one. Is that all right?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“The place fills up,” she said, and gave him a key and turned to leave him. “That's for your locker. It's under the bed.”

He walked up the long floor between the beds thinking, “Clean. Who else comes here? Derelicts? Drunk sailors who miss their ships?” When a woman's voice said, “Mr. Jones,” he walked on. Then she was at his elbow. “Mr. Jones?” That was him. He couldn't hide his surprise. “Are you hungry?” she said.

He hadn't had time to think about that sort of thing. Now that he took time, she watched him asking himself, and said, “I could get you something.” She really was pretty, and restful like a good nun.

“Yes,” he said, “I am hungry. If it wouldn't be any bother....”

“No bother at all. Put your things in your locker under your.... Oh, did you leave them somewhere?”

Hadn't she noticed before that he came empty-handed? “Miss?” he said awkwardly.

“Yes?”

“All I have is twenty-five pence.”

She took a little change purse from her pocket and looked in it. “We have fifty pence between us,” she said. “Come on down to the office.”

He hadn't noticed the little chapel when he came to the dormitory. Going back, he looked right into it. Impulse took him in. He crossed himself, kneeled behind a chair, and offered thanks for deliverance, crossed himself again and came out to the corridor. She was waiting.

“Eat, now?”

“Thank you, miss.”

“We'll go into the office.”

It was a little glass room beside the front desk. She told him to sit down. He watched the entrance hall with growing uneasiness. If any of them came in here, searching, he was trapped in this glass house. The only way in or out of it was the door into the hall and onto their guns. They could do it here. They would do it here.

She unwrapped a brown-paper package of sandwiches and did not appear to watch him. He watched the front door, his imagination flying high. “I keep these to nibble on,” she said, and gave him one. Ham. He wasn't hungry now. Coming here was a mistake. Into a trap. He ought to have kept going. Phoned his sister from a call box. No. Now that he'd run for it, they'd have somebody watching her. Yes, and God Almighty, he hadn't thought of that. They'd watch every move his parents and his sister made and when they brought the car to the Limestone, Powers would know it. They would come after him with tireless malice. Wasn't the last murder arising out of the Civil War committed in 1969—almost fifty years after? Was it a son avenging a father he'd never seen? They were like that, down the generations.

“Eat,” she said, looking the other way.

He bit the sandwich. It was tasteless. He chewed at it and swallowed and choked.

“If I can be of any help,” she said, looking directly into his face. “Sometimes there's something....”

He bit again on the sandwich. It took time and prevented talk. It was as much of a trap up in that dormitory as it was in this glass box.

She said, “I'm not prying. You're a Catholic, aren't you?”

“Why would you say that?”

“Protestants don't cross themselves in chapel.”

“Am I not allowed in?”

“Religion is no qualification here. Only need.”

He chewed dully on the sandwich, watching the hall.

“I was in South Africa when the blacks rioted in Port Elizabeth and ate the two nuns,” she said.

He looked at her, puzzled. Why did she say a strange thing like that? She looked a lot younger than she was. So did the good nuns. He could see, now. She was a lot older. He remembered reading about the two nuns the blacks ate. He remembered it because his political science professor had pointed out that the two nuns were among the best friends of the Africans who ate them. “Either the blacks were pagans who believed they could digest the nuns' virtue—or it's unwise to make friends of the blacks,” the professor said. He remembered it also because Catholic martyrs weren't eaten anymore, their priest had pointed out: killed, jailed, hanged, tortured, crucified in one place or another, but not eaten. What am I supposed to say to her? he wondered.

“I remember the next day sitting waiting for them to come for us. We were their good friends. So were the nuns. We became former friends. They ate their former friends.”

He didn't expect talk like that from the Sally Anns. They thumped tambourines, blew trombones and trumpets, and sang on street corners. He didn't know what to say. He didn't care at the moment whom the blacks ate in Port Elizabeth.

“I felt the way you look,” she said quietly.

“What? I beg your pardon?”

“I'm not prying,” she said.

“No.” What am I supposed to say now? he wondered. He was leaving here, by God. But where was he going?

“You're a Catholic, you've been very badly beaten, you haven't a thing, not even a razor, you're very frightened, and you're hiding with no money in what a lot of people think of as a Protestant doss house. Would you like some tea?”

“No. No. No thank you.” Her little catalogue was dinning in his ears.

“So you're not running from Protestants.”

He set eyes on the woman half an hour ago and she had it worked out. If he was that easy to spot he hadn't long to live.

“You're not the first to come here,” she said in her gently persistent way. “Some of them accepted help. Three of them didn't. We read about them—black hoods....”

“Jesus Christ.” He put the half-eaten sandwich on the desk. He thought he was going to throw up what he'd eaten. He could see them and hear them. He could feel their lurking cold hysteria and their righteous savagery.

“You poor boy. If we can help....”

Help. What could these people do? Did they train, carry guns, make careful plans, shoot with ease and without scruple? “What could
you
do?” he said almost too softly to be heard. It wasn't really a question. It was a whisper of desperation, or despair. They'd trained him to use a gun. He would use one if he had to fight for his life. He didn't have one to fight with.

It would be a dog's death.

“How do I know,” she said, “till I know what you need?”

“They might come here,” he said.

“They have come here,” she said. “Slept here, searching.”

“You knew that and didn't turn them in?”

“And have gunfights in the hostel? And have them blow the place up? Then whom could we help?”

“They'll come here,” he said. His stomach was vapor.

“Do you want help?”

“Oh, Jesus, yes, yes, yes.”

“Then come with me.” She pressed a button on the desk and led him away.

He followed her weakly, looking over his shoulder. They climbed the stairs, past the chapel and the dormitory, up a flight of back stairs to a small attic landing, and into a little apartment at the back of the building. “This is our home,” she said, and at the expression on his face, “my husband and I live here. He's a Major....”

“Major....” Yes. They had ranks. Everything scared him now. He had wounded a major in the shoulder, up the Falls. What would she do if she knew that?

It was a very simple place, uncomfortable in the overcrowded fashion of what he called the upper working class. The armchair she pointed him to was hard-packed; its arms and back were not quite in the right places, or at quite the right angles, and the cover on the round table in the middle of the room was sateen with a picture of the Holy City printed on it, and tassels hanging from its edges all the way round.

“All right?” she said, looking shy and smiling.

Was she asking for his approval? He remembered a Scotsman he'd taken through the Stranmillis Museum and who said “Very nice” to everything he saw. “Very nice,” he said, “thank you.”

“You'll take that cup of tea now, won't you?”

“Thank you very much.” He had no idea what to say to this woman. Not: Can you get me a gun? Not: Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Not: I went among wolves like a romantic little boy and now I'm just a terrified big boy.

“You're not like some of them I've seen,” the woman said, putting things on a small lacquered tray.

“Oh?”

“No. You look ... how? Studenty?”

“Oh. Do you think I could have something to eat now? Down there, near the door ... I was too scared....”

“I know that. Ham again?”

“Anything. I'm sorry, Mrs....”

“Beddoes. Now,” she sat down to wait for the kettle, “what do you need?”

“My sister ... the phone....”

“You want to see her?”

“No!
She's at work now. She works in an insurance office in Donegal Square.”

“You'd like to call her there?”

“No. You never can tell who ... no. Would you ... ?”

“You'd have to tell me her name.”

“Oh, yes.” The woman didn't know his name; only that Ivor Jones wasn't his name. He must be very easy to read, disasterously easy, vulnerable. “Her name's Maureen McManus.”

She got the phone book, the name of the insurance company, and the number, and said, “Now?”

“It's very important what you say. You can't mention this place, or my name. But I want her to know who wants her. She's to phone me here. She's not to go home early from the office. Just, you know, go home at the usual time. So I have to give her a time to call me—one time, no other. You see?”