A Star Called Henry

  I said nothing more on the subject of Gandon. I had to think and watch. There were two versions of the man, Granny Nash’s and Jack’s. I walked past Dolly Oblong’s at night and dawn and early evening but there were no Alfie Gandons at all to be seen.

  Then Thomas Ashe died.

  T A veteran of 1916 - he and Dick Mulcahy had ambushed and beaten a gang of the rozzers in Ashbourne, our only victory that week - he’d been arrested for talking rebellion in a public place. He refused to recognise the court and was marched off to Mountjoy. There were already forty other DORA men in Mountjoy so, with Ashe in the lead, they went on hunger strike. They’d been tried by special court, so they wanted special status. Ashe was pulled out of his cell and force-fed. He was strapped to a chair and an eighteen-inch rubber tube was shoved down his throat; two eggs were beaten in a pint of milk and pushed down to his gut in twenty strokes of the stomach pump. Nausea, vomiting, internal bleeding. By the end of the day he was dead.

  The funeral was huge. Let me carry your Cross for Ireland, Lord. For Ireland is weak with tears. The Volunteers took over the city. Wearing banned uniforms, carrying banned hurleys, we marshalled the crowd and walked behind the coffin with thousands of mourners from all over the country, de Valera in the lead in his new uniform and the Countess leading what was left of the Citizen Army. And, for just a second, shame burnt holes in my cheeks: I was in the wrong uniform. But I was busy. For the aged man of the clouded brow, and the child of tender years. I pushed through the crowd at the graveside. I passed my hurley to a weeping woman and took a Smith and Wesson from under her coat. There were two other men beside me now. Brigade Commander Dick McKee gave us our orders - three crisp shouts, like black birds in the silence - and we fired three volleys into the Glasnevin trees. Then Collins, every step a decision, walked in front of us and turned to the heaviest section of the crowd. His first words were Irish. I didn’t understand him. Anseo - Here - and Tar istigh - Come in, the pair of you - learnt from Miss O’Shea, were as much as I knew of Irish and I’d spent every second of the march to the graveyard searching for her. Then Collins moved over to English.

  —Nothing additional remains to be said. That volley which we have just heard is the only speech which it is proper to make above the grave of a dead Fenian.

  That was all. He moved away and went off to mourn in privacy; Ashe had been one of his closest friends. There was work to be done. Jack and I wrote The Last Poem of Thomas Ashe in the back snug of the Gravediggers.

  —What rhymes with years?

  —Tears, I said.

  —Oh, good man, said Jack.—Loads of them in a good lament.

  By the end of the day Volunteers in mufti were selling sheets of our poem on the streets - Let me carry your Cross for Ireland, Lord. My cares in this world are few - and there were thousands more of the things going down and across the country to the markets and church gates - Let me carry your Cross for Ireland, Lord. For the cause of Róisín Dhú.

  —You didn’t know that Jesus was an Irishman, sure you didn’t, Henry? He’s one of us.

  —Like our landlord.

  —Exactly.

  He defined propaganda for me.

  —Getting your boot in first, man. And propaganda is the shine on your boot.

  The funeral was filmed and the film developed in a window-blackened car on its way back into town; it was ready for viewing in the cinemas that night - another of Collins’s strokes.

  The suits were the work of a genius.

  We were back in Collins’s office, weeks after the funeral. He stood and twirled, to show off his new suit.

  —What d’ye thinks, lads? he said.—The best of bull’s wool.

  —Very nice, I said.

  There were two small, neat piles of cash side by side on the edge of his desk.

  —Get your own, he said, pointing at the money.

  —Why? I said.—I’m a docker.

  —Not all the time you’re not, boy. You’re a rebel and there’ll be a price on your head. And I’ve a friend in the Castle who tells me that you can evade arrest much more successfully if you’re dressed like a company director. So buy a fuckin’ suit and no more lip out of you.

  So we went over the road to Clery’s and I bought a grey suit like the ones I’d seen the Yanks wearing in the pictures and it became my real uniform.

  They were the work of a genius. Not the cut of them - mine left me with red, merciless trenches under my shoulders - but the idea of them, the use of other people’s snobbery and stupidity for our gain, that was class. Collins was full of plans and skits that dropped us there with admiration, obvious notions that no one ever worded but him. He slept in the beds of men who’d just been arrested - the rozzers would never search the same house twice in a night, especially when they’d found their man the first time. The safest bed in town, he said. He was a plastic man. Everyone knew him but no one could describe him. His hair was brown, fair and black. He was broad but not particularly tall; he was the tallest man in the room. He grew a moustache and the years grew with it; he filled out, became middle-aged. He shaved it and became a lad again, much too young to be Michael Collins. He smiled at the rozzers when he met them at the roadblocks; he helped them in every detail; he joined them. He never hid in a coat, behind a collar.

  —Michael Collins, he said once in answer to a young, fresh rozzer’s enquiry.

  I was with him.

  He laughed. We laughed. They laughed.

  —I’m just having you on, he said.

  In a cap and muffler or less impressive in the overcoat, he’d have got the butt of a rifle in the chops. Not Mick, though. He was a company director, a man about town, a class above them and one of their own.

  —Michael Collins, I said to the same question.

  They laughed again. They let me away with it because I was with Michael Collins.

  —Keep it up, lads, said Collins as we passed through the block.—You’ll soon catch the bastard. And you can give him a root in the hole from me.

  —Good-night, sir.

  The British ruled the country through the police. They had their own spies and other spies and touts and stool pigeons; the country was covered in a close mesh of whispers, all sliding back to Dublin along voice-made wires, to G Division headquarters in the Castle. The man beside you on the tram, the barman washing the glasses, your brother helping you with the mowing - spies. The woman you were fucking, the man she was marrying, all of them, all whispering back to Dublin Castle, into big ears, big books, onto dusty shelves. All of them paid and looked after from G Division, the political crime unit of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Anyone suspected of disloyalty to the Crown, treachery alive or dormant, was put in a big black book and a large S, like a brand, was scratched beside the name - marked for life, and watched. At the ports and railway stations, in the picture houses and churches, from hedges and roofs. ‘S’ for what? Sedition, suspect, special? I never knew. With the S beside your name you were never lonely. Half the men at Volunteer meetings were spies, deliberate or accidental, married to spies or the real McCoy themselves.

  So Collins invented the circle. An I.R.B. member knew nine other men, no more - his circle. I knew more than nine but never at the same time. The dead and arrested were quickly replaced. I knew faces, winks, nods but not names. The worst torture, flames, even phosphorite, couldn’t have produced more than ten names, including my own. The ignorance made us braver. And we knew who the spies were and we whispered our own messages into their ears, dropped home-made hints, filled them with shite.

  The police ruled the country.

  —And that’s why we’re going to kill them, said Jack.—Assassinate every bloody one of them.

  I was on for it; I came from a line of cop killers. I’d been chased by them; I’d dived into underground rivers to get away from them. They were never people, the rozzers. And they were stupid too; seven hundred years of easy rule had made them lazy. Collins’s own cousin, Nancy O’Brien, had a job in the Castle; he
r duties included filing the secret-coded messages of the Under-Secretary, Sir James MacMahon. Another cousin, Pearce Beaslai’s, a woman called Lily Merin, worked behind the walls as a typist. A couple of times a week she got the tram from work to the top of Clonliffe Road. She walked to a house and entered. The house was unfurnished, except for a desk, a chair and a typewriter. She typed verbatim what she’d typed throughout the day, and left. And I gathered the pages and brought them to Collins or Jack. On other evenings she walked Grafton Street and Dame Street and, by flick of a finger or tap of her heel, she identified intelligence officers and other familiar faces to men like me, men she didn’t know who were right beside her. We were getting ready. Gathering names, faces, addresses.

  —They’re the cement, said Jack.—The peelers. We get them and it all falls apart.

  But not yet.

  There were weddings and by-elections. Diarmuid Lynch, Sinn Féin’s Director of Food, had commandeered another herd of England-bound pigs and slaughtered them for Irish commerce and consumption. But he’d been caught with the blood on his mitts and, because he was a returned Yank and a citizen of the U.S., he’d been sentenced to deportation. He wanted to get married in Dundalk Gaol, so his fiancée could have a Yankee passport and get herself deported with him. But the men in charge were having none of it. They’d already seen one jail wedding, Plunkett’s in 1916, turned into a republican legend. But Lynch got married anyway. The fiancée smuggled a priest in - under her coat, in her handbag? I never knew - and a couple of witnesses as well, and herself and himself were hitched in Lynch’s cell.

  Collins made sure that the new bride - a looker, by the way; I could see why Lynch had been keen on bringing her into exile with him - Collins made sure that she accompanied her husband and the screws on the train to Dublin and deportation. A huge crowd, Henry Smart among them, met the happy couple and their minders at Amiens Street Station and followed them on foot, up along the river, to the Bridewell. Collins and I, in our Sunday suits, hopped up the steps and in the front door of the station. No one stopped us; several big rozzers got out of our way. Collins, looking like a lawyer or the Castle official in charge of deporting Shinners, strolled straight up to Lynch. I stood at his back, my Widowmaker warm against my chest. He gave Lynch names, American contacts, men to keep Lynch in the fight. Then he shook hands with both Mister and Missis.

  —The best of men and women, he said.

  And we walked out, myself at the rear, back into the safety of the crowd on Chancery Street. Another lad in a brown suit walked up with a bike. Collins took it from him, mounted without bending a knee and cycled away.

  They were our horses, the bikes. I’d been robbing and selling them since before I’d learnt how to ride one but I’d never had much use for them, other than as currency. Disappearing around a corner was always easier on foot, and Dublin was a city of sharp corners.

  —Men on bicycles, said Collins.—That’s what I need. Good men on bicycles.

  —I don’t have one, I told him.

  —I’m only after buying you the suit, he said.—So you can manage the fuckin’ rothar yourself.

  So I found one left against the railings of Trinity College, a grand big Protestant bike, and I took it. The saddle fit me like a cuddle and I cycled up Dame Street. I passed the motor cars and hung off the backs of trucks. I kept going, past Guinness’s and Kingsbridge, and didn’t stop until I got to Granard, without a rest except when I fell off the bike. It was the first time I’d been further than Lucan and, over the next three years, the thin green dome on top of the Spa Hotel became my own lighthouse, the sign that I was heading home or, like now, far from home and further with every shove on the pedal.

  Three years on a stolen bike. Through wind, rain and bullets. Me and the Arseless Horse. No lamp in front of me for fear that the fine fat men of the R.I.C., and later the Black and Tans, would be hiding behind a wall or a hedge waiting with guns for rebels on bicycles. I cycled into black darkness, across and up and down the whole of Ireland. The bottomless whirr of the bike chain swallowed up the next three years.

  And on that first trip to Granard, with letters from Collins stitched into the lining of my coat and duplicates hidden in the tubing right under the saddle, with the Widowmaker tidily holstered to my back, a blade stitched into my cap and my da’s leg in its holster under the coat, I met fresh air for the first time in my life and it nearly killed me. There was nothing in it, just the air itself and I was suddenly starving; stars and pebbles swam in front of my eyes. Air straight off the Atlantic, brand new and fierce. The sting and the big-ness of it, the way it filled my head - I couldn’t cope. Anything I’d ever inhaled before had always come at me through the Dublin soup or, on the wintry days when it blew from the north-east, it came over the smokestacks of northern England and Scotland. Now, the Arseless cut through the fresh stuff and I hung on and drowsed. While my legs did the work the rest of me slept.

  There were no corners out there in the country, no names or measurable street lengths. I had sixty-odd miles to travel but I’d no idea what that meant in effort. I rode between the hedges, and later the hedges trapped the night and disappeared. I kept going through the black. There was nowhere to stop, nowhere to see. I looked ahead for light to aim at but, unless a cloud got shoved aside or a small town’s light gathered above its roofs, there was nothing. I’d travelled through blackness before but I missed the help of river water, the solidity and closeness of the cave walls. The rivers out here were overland but hidden. I could hear them in the dark, running beside me, laughing. I could feel their draughts on my ankles. And the whip of bending branches. There were animals out there that should never have been in Ireland, their paws and teeth tearing at my tyres. I could hear it all but I couldn’t see a thing.

  —What are you fuckin’ gawkin’ at? I yelled at the clearest of the little stars that had just been freed by the shifting wind as I rooted around in thick ditch water for the bike I’d just cycled into it.

  I was drenched and half-broken but I gave the Arseless a pat and a kick to shake the running filth off. The second my soaking arse hit the soaking saddle the clouds knit together again and took away the stars. I shut my eyes and pedalled into the wind. That was the direction for the next three years, always - straight into the wind. Even when I was cycling east, home to Dublin, even when I was passing under the Spa, my chin on the handlebars, the prevailing winds abandoned me and let the freezing stuff from Siberia push me back. It was a battle all the way.

  I crossed a bridge somewhere early in the second day. I looked down at the river and hoped to Christ it wasn’t the Shannon because, if it was, I’d ridden too far.

  —Where am I?

  —Mullingar.

  —Am I on the right road for Granard?

  —There’s no right road for Granard, sonny.

  —Will I get there if I go this way?

  —You will, God help you.

  I rode into Granard at noon, along the road from Castlepollard, a day and a chunk after robbing the bike. I climbed the last fuck of a hill and sailed into town on its steam, and left onto Main Street. I scooped the sweat and dirt out of my eyes and looked around.

  —Where’s the Greville Arms, pal? I asked a thick-looking kid who was holding up a pole. He had the hair and eyes of an old man but he wore short trousers that bit into his legs.

  —Where it always is, he said.

  He wasn’t being snotty, I could see that. He was nodding down the street. I followed his forehead and there it was, the Greville Arms Hotel, my destination.

  —Thanks.

  —For what? he said.

  —Thanks anyway, I said.

  —For what? he said.

  I thumped some of the dust and harder dirt off myself and the Arseless before I walked the rest of the way to the Greville Arms. Now that I was off the bike the wind had gone away and it was suddenly a very hot day. I wanted to take my coat off but it was the only thing hiding my gun so I put up with its heft and sweat for a
while more.

  Sinn Féin had won five by-elections since 1916: Plunkett’s father in Roscommon, Joe McGuinness in Longford - Joe the Jailbird. Put him in to get him out. He hadn’t wanted to run but Collins had ignored him - de Valera in East Clare, Cosgrave in Kilkenny and Arthur Griffith, another man in jail, in East Cavan. And now there was talk that the sitting M.P. for nearby Leitrim was on the way out, an oul’ lad who’d been old even when Parnell was his boss; the gout was spreading from his feet, nibbling at the outskirts of his brain. Collins wanted to be ready for the by-election that would follow his funeral, and the general election that might come sooner, when the war in Europe ended. I was carrying orders direct from Collins for the men from the Midland and Con-naught constituencies who were meeting in the Greville Arms to discuss strategy, tactics - and gun running, when the democrats among them had gone off to bed.

  I lifted the pedal and parked the Arseless against the bottom step of the hotel and I took the cap off my dripping head for the first time since I’d put it on, a few hours before I’d robbed the bike.

  —Is that sweat I see on your forehead?

  It was Collins, on the top step.

  It made no sense.

  —How—?

  —The train, Henry, he said.—It’s quicker than the rothar but it’s not nearly as good for you. You’re looking well, boy.

  I moved slightly to the right, to get the sun away from my eyes.

  —Why—?

  —You didn’t think I could let these bucks have a meeting all on their ownio, did you?

  —Why me?

  —On the bike, d’you mean?

  —Yeah.

  —It was a bit of a test, Henry, said Collins.—You were fast, boy, I’ll give you that. You didn’t stop on the way, not once. Don’t ask. I know. You even wee-weed off the side of the bike, fair play to you. And most important. Most important, you didn’t mess with the stitches in your coat and you never once took your arse off the saddle to see what was in the envelope under it. I knew you wouldn’t. I knew it all along; you’d come through for me. Will I tell you what was in the envelope now, will I?