—Don’t get me wrong, he said.—I’ve used one, and I’ll use it again, I’m sure. I hand each new man a leather of his own when he comes in to see me in September. But I always tell them to keep it on the desks. Visible, you know?
I nodded.
—A warning to the boys, he said.—But only to use it when it’s absolutely necessary. And there’s the problem. Because, Henry?
—What?
—What’s necessary?
I didn’t answer.
—Good man, he said.—There was a time there when I wondered if maybe I’d failed to make my point. Because there was a hell of a lot of slapping going on. It was like applause some afternoons, all the way down to the bottom of the corridor there.
He let go of my arm.
—I spoke to them, he said.
He was tall. I made sure I was too. We were tall together, looking back along the silent corridor. There was a bulb down there needed changing.
—I spoke to them, he said again.—They’re nice lads, I like them all. And top-class teachers. There isn’t a real dud in my staffroom. They agreed with every word I said.
He smiled.
—And it worked, he said.—For a little while. I’ve been in worse places. And so have you.
I said nothing.
—But gradually it came back, he said.—Usually in the afternoons. The last hour before the bell. One started, and they all had to join in.
He stopped. He looked at me.
—And then it all stopped.
—That’s great, I said.
—But why?
I looked down the corridor, half hoping some teacher would take a swipe at a child and save me.
—Because it’s unusual, he said.—It’s nearly the end of the school year. It gets wild around this time.
It was graveyard quiet down there.
—And Tom McCauley’s scholarship lads, he said.—They don’t really appreciate how important that Primary Cert is to them. How their whole futures depend on it. It has to be beaten into them. Usually.
He held my arm again, gently.
—What’s going on, Henry? he said.—Any theories?
—No.
—None at all?
—You said one of the teachers started and they’d all join in. With the leathers.
—Yes.
—Well, maybe that’s what after happening this time, in reverse.
—One of them stopped using the strap.
—And the others joined in.
He let go of my arm.
—But why?
—Don’t know.
—You have eyes and ears, Henry.
—So do you, Mister Strickland.
—Yes, he said.—I do.
—Your daughter, I said.
We were eating the dinner. It was stew, but with better meat than I’d found in any stew before.
She looked - she stared.
—Yes? she said.
—Is she here? I asked.—In Dublin.
—No, she said.
—Grand.
The spuds were great too. I could forget the awkwardness I’d just dragged into the kitchen.
—I don’t know where she is, she said.
—Oh, I said.—Right.
—What about your daughter?
—America.
—And your son?
—The same.
—It’s far away.
—It is.
I ate, and she did too.
—This is great, by the way, I told her.
—Thank you.
—Lovely, I said.
I looked at her. I waited.
—Did you ever eat griddle cakes?
—No.
—Really? I said.—Never?
—No, she said.—Not where I grew up. They wouldn’t have been the thing.
—Grand.
—We’d gone past griddle cakes, she said.—That would have been the thinking.
—Fine.
—Why do you ask?
—I was just wondering.
—I could find a recipe.
—It’s up to yourself.
We ate.
The priest was sweating. It was another hot day out there.
—Father, I said.
—Henry.
I didn’t know why he was there. He was my employer but it was his housekeeper who handed over my pay at his back door every Friday night.
—I was passing, he said.
—Grand.
—How are you?
—Fine.
He was trying to see past me, into the gloom behind. My home was like a cave. It had been built when men were smaller and the builders even meaner. Each cottage got a window at the front and a much smaller one at the back. There were three small rooms behind me. The jacks was out the back. The water pump was on the street, right behind the priest.
But I liked it. The word home had begun to mean something. I didn’t own the place - the Corporation did. But it was mine.
—I hear great things, he said.—I had a chat yesterday with Mister Strickland.
—I’m glad he’s happy, I said.
—He’s happy, alright. He’s more than happy.
He clapped his hands.
—And that, now, makes me happy.
I’d been seen. Sneaking out of Missis O’Kelly’s, with the bike on my back. Someone had told him, some insomniac gawking out at the dark, or the dawn - it had been bright enough when I’d left the previous Sunday. The priest was letting me know. He was threatening me.
—Will you have a cup of tea, Father?
I didn’t move to let him past. I was letting him know there was no one hiding behind me.
—Ah no, he said.
I didn’t have any tea. I never drank it.
—I was just passing, he said.
—Grand.
—And you’re happy?
—I am.
—With the job, he said.
—That’s right.
—Because, he said,—there are people who’ll be very happy to hear that. Cheerio now.
I wondered who these people were but I was happy enough to see him go, back up the hill. I wasn’t so sure now that he’d been threatening me. But what he’d just said had sounded like a much bigger threat.
He didn’t look back. He slowed down; he was struggling on the slope. But he kept going. He looked in the open door of the cop shop. (It had been the R.I.C. barracks in the fighting days, but not one that I’d ever set fire to.) He kept going, past the barber’s, up on to the Main Road.
I told her nothing. There was a risk now but I didn’t want to give it up, the bath and the grub and the breath beside me in the bed. But I took different routes home, dog-early on the Sunday mornings. I climbed over her back wall, dragged the bike over with me, and dropped into the soft field - it would soon be a building site - behind her house. Or I climbed into the garden next door, and the next one, the handlebars biting into me, and I came out on the road by a different front gate every time. It looked like I was riding every oul’ one along the road. I didn’t really know why I did it, all the creeping and climbing. The bit of excitement. It did me good and I did it for years.
I spoke to the priest just three times in the next ten years.
—How are you?
—Not too bad, Father.
—I hear great things.
—That’s good.
She never made the griddle cakes.
8
Louis Armstrong came to Dublin, but I stayed away. I saw the photos in the Herald, Pops at the National Stadium. He looked well. He looked like the man he’d been. But I didn’t. He wouldn’t have known me. The bouncers wouldn’t have let me near him.
Kennedy came, and stayed a few days. We need men who can dream of things that never were. His day in Dublin was a day off work, a day to be loud and Irish. I stayed in the house.
Then there was 1966, and the fiftieth anniversary of Easter Week. Another right time to be loud and I
rish - the Golden Jubilee. I was tempted. I looked at the parades of oul’ lads in their cleaned suits and bits of uniforms. I looked carefully at them all. I didn’t know half of them, or a quarter or an eighth of them. With their medals and their slouch hats. I made sure I was in the Manhattan when the news was on, and I sat up close to the brand new television, right on top of the thing. I looked for the faces I’d known. I saw one or two - I could see the young men looking out of the old heads. I recognised two or three, maybe four, out of the hundreds, the thousands who’d claimed their medals and their I.R.A. pensions, and who marched, or tried to, up every street in the country. I watched them march in parts of the country that had never given a flying fuck about the freedom of Ireland and probably still didn’t notice that the postboxes had been painted a different colour. Those medals were mine.
They even met in Ratheen village before mass on Easter Sunday, to march into the church together. I walked through them and heard voices remembering the time Dan Breen had nearly been caught in the safe house on the Main Road, how he’d taken a rake of bullets as he was going over the back wall and still managed to leave three Tans in the back garden, bleeding into the pond. All of them nodding away: they’d all been there, climbing over the wall with Dan. I knew those gardens; I’d been up and over most of the back walls. There wouldn’t have been room for all these chancers. None of them had been in the G.P.O., or anywhere else that had mattered that week, those five days, or the six big years that followed them.
I went into the church and I noticed: my limp was worse than usual. It was worse than it had ever been, even in the days when the absence was new and I’d had to learn to walk. I was dragging my excuse in with me. I was there, I wanted to shout. I was in the G.P.O. I was up on the fuckin’ roof. I got my hole in a room full of stamps!
Missis O’Kelly marched in with them, in her Cumann na mBan uniform and a neat line of her own medals. The only woman in the gang. And her now, I believed: she’d been there - somewhere. It was in her back and eyes. I’d known her fifty years before. I was sure of it, but only now, even after sleeping with her every Saturday night for years. I’d known her voice, years before, when she was young and I was younger, in the G.P.O., and years before that too. I’d known her before she was Missis O’Kelly. I was sure of it now, nearly positive. I knew her people; I knew the mud she’d come from. But I looked at her skirt as she passed. There was no sign of the tear she’d inflicted on the material when she’d climbed onto the bed of stamps. Her hair was grey and too thin now for a decent bun.
It was a hard week to get through. I had a Bush transistor at home, and I heard Éamon de Valera. We cannot adequately honour the men of 1916 if we do not strive to bring about the Ireland of their desire. That was the end of the first day; there were another six to go. But I didn’t turn off the radio. I’d even bought a spare battery, just in case.
I recognised voices, and faces. Seán Lemass, the Taoiseach - ‘The Boss’. He’d been a kid in the G.P.O., a few years older than me. But, unlike me, he’d looked like a kid. I saw him now, all week, looking out from behind his pipe-smoke. De Valera was there too, everywhere, blind and ancient but with no sign of the madness I’d stood beside in Richmond Barracks in 1916 while the photographer, Hanratty, took the snap that became the famous one, the father of the state-to-be, undaunted and straight, a foot taller than his English guards. I was right beside him, smiling for Hanratty, but the useless bollocks only got my elbow. I saw them all week, and a few others, the ones who’d survived. They’d lost the Civil War but they’d ended up winning. The country was theirs and they stood to attention as the flags went up and the old men marched past.
I even saw Ivan Reynolds. I sat up and laughed.
I was in the pub, hugging a slow pint.
He was on a panel, some sort of discussion, looking huge and breathless, being swallowed by his own flesh. But I couldn’t hear him; the sound on the telly was down. He was a minister. Post and Telegraphs, or something like that; Fisheries, Local Government - a step or two from the big jobs. He looked like he’d made the most of his days in power. The television was black and white, but Ivan still managed to look red and shiny. I’d had him down for an early death, back when I’d last seen him, sucking Rémy Martin from the bottle. That was in 1921. But Ivan was far from dead. I looked at him and I wondered if I wanted to meet him again, shake his hand, slag his shine.
I didn’t.
And I didn’t want a medal. I didn’t want to march or hop.
But I was tempted.
I lay beside her. And I wanted to tell her. I know who you were.
But I didn’t.
Easter Week went away. The Proclamations stayed up, on the school wall and behind the bar of the Manhattan. But most of the flags came down, or frayed and rotted in the wet and the wind.
I looked at Missis O’Kelly, and I wasn’t as sure as I had been. She was just an old woman who missed her husband, once a week. A fine, straight-backed oul’ one. But no more. She’d never been anyone else.
I wasn’t sure.
Once a week, I became her husband. Once a week, she could be my wife. It was grand. And I always liked the time when I was sneaking home. I was getting older, but it got no harder. I kept on climbing walls, and more walls. I’d drop into brand new, grassless gardens. I was nearly sixty-five but I kept on loving the challenge, slouching home, past more and more suburban windows, with the black bike on my back.
Life stayed good in the Republic of Henry. There’d been a sharp increase in the use of corporal punishment in the weeks leading up to Easter Week. Rebel songs and laments had to be learnt, and time was running out. But I let most of it go. I knew it would poison the boys, that they’d always associate A Nation Once Again and Kevin Barry with being skinned alive by some mad culchie teacher with spots across his forehead, bouncing up and down with a tuning fork in a cloud of chalk dust and dandruff. It would make real rebels of them later, as they grew up. So I stayed outside in the weather and gave the football pitch its first cut of the year.
Then it was all over and I advised one or two of the teachers that the time was right for a ceasefire.They looked at me and heeded the advice, and life at the school slipped back to its normality. They didn’t know - though Strickland did, I think - that they were producing a brand new middle class, quick-witted and hungry, who’d grow up soon and make the country theirs. Dublin kids, the sons of parents from the slums. I’d sit back and watch them take over. It would be the pleasure of my real old age.
There were lost days. I’d wake up on the floor. I’d know: I’d been gone, wandering. I’d search my pockets, look out the window at the light. I’d touch my chin and read the stubble. One day gone, or two. On my own floor. Never at the school, or on the street. Or I’d wake on my bed, my clothes still on, jacket off and collar loosened.There’d be food on the table, in the kitchen. Fresh bread, a pint of milk.
Someone - people were looking after me.
I’d look at faces I’d come to know and sometimes like, the ones I saw every day. I saw nothing that said they knew.
I woke up in Missis O’Kelly’s bed. I knew where I was, but it was bright day outside. I hadn’t seen the room in light like this before. I could hear movement from downstairs, and the radio - afternoon music, one of the sponsored programmes. I was dressed, but not for gardening. She’d left the leg alone, and the boot still on it. It was digging into me; it hadn’t been off for days.
—What happened? I asked.
She was in the kitchen, baking. But she wasn’t happy.
—I found you, she said.—Outside. On the road.
—Sorry, I said.—Passed out?
—No, she said.—Just lost.
—I thought it had stopped, I said.
—What is it?
She hadn’t looked at me properly. She was bent down, staring into the oven. She closed it and stood up straight, no grunt or crack. She still didn’t look at me. She was too busy, and furious.
—I don’t
know, I told her.—Amnesia, I suppose.
—Why were you outside my house?
—When was it?
—This morning, she said.—In the garden - the front garden.
—You said the road.
—The garden, she said.—You were in my garden.
—I’m your gardener.
—Not on Tuesdays, she said.—And not dressed for Sunday.
She was right. I was wearing the good suit and the alligators. I rubbed my chin. I’d shaved that morning.
—Sorry, I said.
—You were standing in the garden, looking in my window.
—I don’t remember that.
—You’re too old to be Romeo, she said.—And I’m much too old to be anyone’s Juliet.
She was looking at me now.
—I won’t have it.
She was angry, furious that the neighbours might think that she was rubbing against the hired help, and furious too with herself.
—I’ll stay away, I said.
I meant it; I didn’t give a shite. Fuck her and her snobbery. What the fuck had she fought for, when she’d worn the uniform? I wasn’t going to ask.
—You can get someone else to look after the garden, I said.
Ratheen was full of old men.
—I can, she said.
—What’re you baking? I asked.
But she didn’t answer.
—I’ll see you on Saturday afternoon, she said.
—Grand.
I went out the back door.
I couldn’t move. The air was dirt and screams. I was still on the street. But the street was gone. I knew who I was. Where I was.
Another bang, another bomb, from further off. People near me screamed and ran. I couldn’t see them. I could smell fire in the air. I was under bricks, and looser stone. Big dust still landed on me.
—There’s one over here.
I heard the voice, but I couldn’t see the man.
—Over here! Jesus, his leg!
I tried to tell him. He was forty years too late if he wanted to save it. But I couldn’t talk - there was no real air.