A Mad and Wonderful Thing (14 page)

‘Over there are two tribes, two peoples. One tribe are the children of neglect. They are locked in the attic and left to a neighbour's care. It is an act of abandonment. But for the other tribe it is even worse. The other people are the orphans of history. They are nobody's children.'

‘That's a very sad account of things, Johnny-boy.'

‘It's a very sad place,' I continue, ‘so the current status must be broken, whatever the cost. What exists there is not real. One way or another, the foreign rulers must leave. And from the ruins Ireland can be rebuilt. Once freed from the unnatural, balance will be found. It's the way of the world.'

‘But, Johnny, the British have rights, too, don't they?'

‘Yes, sure. A right to be British? Yes. A right to live in Ireland? Yes. A right to live in Britain? Yes. But a right to live in Ireland and claim it to be Britain? No. That is no answer. They might as well claim the Earth to be flat. The children of tomorrow can never wear it. It cannot be worn. But we never learn. The history of Ireland is like our music — it circles and repeats.'

‘I don't understand that. What do you mean?'

‘Ireland is perpetually plagued by division. Plagued by sons and daughters who would suffer rather than raise a hand or thought to revolution. There are yet those who still question the fight that won our independence, and measure all actions against an ideal state that never existed. There are yet those who would return us to another's empire. Those, Cora, are the people of eternal compromise. Those are the people whose words have never carried anything but the death rattle of Ireland. But that is the Irish way; we are cursed to have two views on everything. This is our history, this is who we are, and this is our destiny.'

‘But …' she pauses, and I watch her as she searches through what I have just said.

‘We are a divided people, Cora. There can never be an agreed Irish view on what is right and what is wrong.'

‘But Ireland is a great country,' she says, as she looks out across the mountain. ‘Beauty, Johnny, and magic, too.'

‘Maybe. But not free, Cora. Not yet.'

She watches me. ‘Sometimes when you speak of Ireland, there is something about you I don't recognise.'

‘Good or bad?'

‘I don't know, Johnny.'

I offer her nothing but a wordless shrug.

‘You wouldn't get involved, Johnny, would you?' she asks. ‘What about those terrible bombs? You wouldn't do a bad thing, would you?'

‘No, Cora,' I answer. ‘I wouldn't do a bad thing.'

‘Those bombs.' She reaches to me and rests her hand on my arm. ‘Those bombs kill people, ordinary people — men like Daddy and Éamon, girls like Aisling and me, children like Cormac and Clara. They kill them as they wait on a parade or do their shopping. Children, mothers, fathers. You wouldn't allow that, Johnny. Would you?'

‘No, Cora. I wouldn't allow that.'

‘I know the cause is right,' she says. ‘But then, at the same time, it's not right.'

‘That's the thing about war, Cora. It's never right until it knocks on your door.'

‘What does that mean, Johnny?'

‘Well, it's never right until they arrive at your door and take your father away in an armoured car. It's never right until your brother or sister or husband or wife goes out in the morning and doesn't come back. War is never right, until it calls to your door. And then what do you do?'

I look to her as she lifts her head, and she looks out into the air as she forces the argument through her own sensibility. ‘Anyhow,' I say to her. ‘I thought you wanted us to build an army and throw the invaders out?'

‘That was just talk, Johnny. I want to go to college. I want to teach Irish. I want to get married, to have children. I want to picnic on Cúchulainn's Castle and talk about Tír na nÓg. I don't want war. I don't want those bombs.'

‘Yes, you are right, Cora. A bomb in a marketplace serves no cause but spite. But those soldiers must leave — this still remains a war. And it has called to our door, whether we want it or not.'

‘Oh, Johnny, aren't there already too many dead?'

‘The first one was too many,' I say. I walk away downhill as if I might get away from my own words, and, spreading my arms wide, the Dunn & Co catching the breeze lifting off the lough, I call out, ‘
They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think they have provided against everything. But the fools, the fools, the fools! — they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace
.'

She follows and takes my arm. ‘Couldn't there be talking, to find peace?'

‘Politics? A world of fantasy and fraud. It's the gathering-ground of the conceited.'

‘Isn't politics how things get done, Johnny?'

‘No, Cora. Politics is mostly nonsense. If you had a recording of everything any politician ever said in the history of the whole world, and you deleted all but one-thousandth of the whole, what you would be left with wouldn't make any less sense. Politics is a great lie, an endless cycle of hope and disappointment. Politics is compromise.'

‘Sounds like life to me, Johnny-boy. Isn't compromise good enough?'

‘No, it's not good enough. Nothing great was ever achieved by compromise.'

‘What about friendship? Isn't friendship compromise?'

‘No. Friendship is not compromise.'

‘So what is it then, Donnelly?'

‘What's what?'

‘Friendship.'

‘Friendship is understanding.'

‘What about love? Isn't love compromise?'

‘No, Cora. Love with compromise isn't love.'

‘Then what is it?'

‘With compromise, it's just an arrangement — a set of needs and wants.'

She is uncertain. She looks to me. Her face is full of questions.

‘Love is commitment,' I say, trying to tease the thing out through my own thoughts. ‘That's why a man can only love one woman. That's why a woman can only love one man. No matter what. Everything else is just passion, or intimacy, or lust, or fun, or need, or want, or whatever. But commitment is to one and to one only — otherwise it's not commitment; otherwise it's not love.'

‘Yes, I agree.' She stalls, and moves the discussion as if still trying to get a fix on the direction our words have taken us. ‘What about de Valera? Michael Collins? They went to politics.'

‘Two great men. But de Valera lost the plot in the end. And Collins, maybe he was the best of them all, but …well, he did leave them abandoned up there.'

‘What else could he do?'

‘Politics, Cora. He compromised.'

‘Do you sometimes think of Éamon?' she asks.

‘de Valera or Gaughran?' I ask. I know she wants to break from the uncomfortable ground we have stumbled onto.

‘Gaughran.'

‘Sure I think of Éamon.'

‘I just sometimes think he's a bit of a lost soul.'

‘He is that,' I say, happy to ride along with the change of direction. ‘But he's not so bad with it; it kind of suits him. We can all lose our way sometimes.'

‘
Níl saoi gan locht
,' she says. ‘There's no wise man without fault. Not even you, Donnelly.' And she laughs as she lifts her head and tosses her golden hair into the air.

‘I love you,' I tell her as I watch her.

‘Is that a fact now? Are you sure?'

‘Yes. Very sure. Only you, Flannery.'

She looks to me. Her face is now serious. ‘Do you really love me, Johnny?'

I am surprised by the suddenness and the strange place from where the question comes. ‘Of course I love you, Cora,' I answer, holding her and noticing a fracture in her confidence — knowing I have said too much, knowing I have frightened her.

‘You wouldn't leave me, Johnny, would you?'

‘No force could take me from you.'

‘We will get married, won't we?'

‘Yes, Cora, we sure will. On Cúchulainn's Castle.'

‘Yes, on Cúchulainn's Castle, and we'll make our babies there.'

‘We'll make our babies there, Cora Flannery, and we will be together forever.'

On the grassy trail high above the lough, we hold each other hard in the jubilation of our promise: togetherness forged in the power of our embrace, and relief, commitment, and happiness released into the sweet fragrance of the mountain gorse.

We walk on with lighter feet, and halfway down the mountain we stop and sit, both of us determined to slow the day and prolong the mood. I take the Dunn & Co and spread it on the grass. I push Cora down on her back as soon as she sits, and move across her, kissing her cheek, her nose, her forehead, her eyebrows, her chin, her throat. ‘You are beautiful, Cora Flannery,' I whisper to her.

‘Am I still a mad and wonderful thing?' she teases.

‘Still unbelievably wonderful,' I tell her. ‘And, yes, totally mad.'

‘I love you,' she says, opening her body beneath me. ‘How many children will we have?'

‘Eh, maybe four?' I say, thinking this not a time for talking but for other things.

‘Four? Are you mad?' It was a foolish hope. She insists on ploughing this new turf.

‘Why? How many then?' I have to play along.

‘Eight.'

‘Eight? Are you mad?' I give up.

‘Eight. Four boys and four girls. A boy and a girl for each of the provinces of Ireland.'

‘You really are some lunatic, Cora Flannery.' I push her down again and draw myself across her. ‘Now, if I can keep you quiet for just a moment?' I pull her jacket from her and lift the woollen pullover up and over her head, pulling it high to release her slender arms. She settles again beneath me, her face content and easy, her bright green eyes beckoning, encouraging, her golden hair scattered on the ground, her fragile neck exposed, that arc of perfection which runs from jaw to neck to shoulder, her white body beneath me against the green of the mountain, her innocent bra, white with a tiny pink rose in the middle of the two gentle drumlins, her blue jeans buttoned to her slender hips, the lip of the blue jeans loose against the taut white body, a row of silver buttons, inviting, and two red boots stretched out on the mountain. I kiss her jaw, her neck, her throat. I kiss her shoulder and down across her small breasts. I kiss the little pink rose, and down from the pink rose I kiss her, undoing slowly, one by one, the silver buttons of her blue jeans. Lower I move, and kiss her as her body arches towards me and her breathing changes. I open the fold of the fork of the blue jeans and kiss her abdomen, and move lower, a thin ridge atop soft white material, a little pink rose in the middle. I push the jeans across her hips as I kiss the pink rose.

There is movement in the nearby gorse. Something is there. We rise in a bolt, Cora quickly reaching back into the woollen pullover. I spring to the rear of the bush, and a dark shadow bursts free, a low shape running away, moving quickly across the mountain and diving into some heavy scrub. But before it disappears it turns, and I see the eyes and the grinning face.

‘Jesus, what was that?'

‘A fox.'

‘A black fox, Johnny?'

‘A black fox.'

‘I've never heard of a black fox,' Cora says, recovered now from the fright. ‘I'm not sure that black foxes exist, Donnelly.'

‘Well, they do now, lover girl,' I joke. But I am uneasy. Something about this is very wrong. And that grinning face?

We dress and continue the walk down the mountain. Cora is oblivious to my anxiety.

‘Isn't love the most wonderful thing?' she says.

‘Yes, and all love is friendship,' I say. ‘The ancient Irish believed friendship to be an act of recognition, an eternal belonging. So when people meet and a sudden great union is formed, the old Irish believed that this is not the creation of something new, but a subconscious recognition of something old — a finding of something pre-existing. And they were right. They called that kind of friendship an
Anam Cara
.'

‘That's us exactly, isn't it, Johnny? We are each other's
Anam Cara
.'

‘Yes, Cora. That's us exactly.'

‘We won't hide things from each other, will we, Johnny? We will always be honest.'

‘Yes, we will be honest,' I say. But as the words leave me, a heavy air enters, and I am slowed as I carry that new weight down the mountain.

It is evening, and the light is fading when we reach Carlingford. We watch as a funeral procession gathers in the village churchyard. A long black hearse and an attendant black limousine are parked before the church. Six men remove the casket from the hearse and carry it shoulder-high up the stone steps and into the dark church. Two men in dark suits walk before them. The gathering files in behind.