A Mad and Wonderful Thing (22 page)

‘Parks attract the oddballs,' I tell Siobhán. ‘As do churches and libraries. I think what attracts them is the opportunity to sit somewhere.'

‘But I run in the park. And I go to the library. And I even go to Mass on an occasion. Are you calling me an oddball, Donnelly?'

‘Not you, McCourt, no. But you know the type — men who talk to themselves, and women who keep cats.'

‘Women who keep cats?'

‘Yes. Not the woman with a cat or two, or even three — though three is borderline. But the woman with half-a-dozen or more. You know the type: troubled, unbalanced.'

‘That's all right, then. But I can get troubled myself, now and again. And I need a bit of rebalancing, if you know what I mean.'

I laugh. ‘Siobhán, you are …' I look to her face, where her eyes are wide open and her mouth carries that seductive draw of hers. ‘You are some lunatic.'

‘Yes,' she says, rising, ‘but that's what you like about me. Go on, admit it, Donnelly. You have a thing for me, don't you? I know you want me — I see it in your eyes.' And she runs off to chase Clara around the bandstand.

And she's right. That is what I like about her. And, yes, I do think of her. And, yes, I do want her. But that's normal, isn't it? I sit and daydream in the park until I feel her approach again behind me.

‘All right,' I say, raising my two hands. ‘I admit it. There are times when I see you there in Saint Joseph's, when I'd love to bundle you into one of those confession boxes and slide the curtain. Or, even better, stretch you out on the altar and worship that lovely body of yours.' And the thing is said as I am turning to give her my own dirty smile, and it cannot be unsaid or withdrawn, though I try. But it is too late. And the best I can do is to kill the smile, but even that is too late.

There is nothing to say now but the obvious. ‘Ah, hello, Sister Immaculata, it's yourself.'

She gives me a look that the devout reserve for the worst class of sinners, and she bolts away, and I see that within the first stride the rosary beads have been released from concealment as she departs with another intercession to pray for.

Broken skies

DELANEY WANTS A CHAT, SO I AM HOME AGAIN AND ON MY WAY TO THE
house near the town centre. Beneath a broken sky, I take a walk through Dundalk. I pull on a Carroll's No. 1. I realise that these streets are etched into my earliest memories. I remember it was here that I walked with my grandmother. She was a great woman. She was born with all the good things: she was beautiful and warm, her only nature was kindness, and she was full of hope. But martyrdom is a cloaked jester. It pushes as many as it pulls. It allures and it deceives, it wears many forms, and to its charms many fall. Anna McMahon — my grandmother — was one who fell.

She was a pretty girl. Not just pretty, but she had a special quality that some girls have, though in each it can be different — girls can be tricky and slippery. I have a photograph of her as a girl, and she had a touch about her that was beyond Ireland. With her dark hair and her Spanish skin, she carried an allusion of other lands. She was a reader as a young girl. ‘That one always has her head in a book'
,
she told me her father would comment to others, he prouder of her reading than he was of her beauty. She read everything she could find in the town. She read of other worlds, and she dreamed of escape. She wanted love and adventure, but what she got was a baby in her belly and marriage to Charles Reynolds. She was just sixteen years old.

It broke her father's heart that Anna ignored his desperate pleading. He begged her not to take with Reynolds; he warned her that Reynolds offered nothing but a false hope. But Anna was hungry for a journey, and she was too young to see the shallow depth of Reynolds's charm. She let him take charge of her dreams, and Charles Reynolds erased those dreams from her life. He lost his charm, and she lost her hopes, as he took to the drink and she took to survival. She bore him twelve children, and love and adventure became very distant shores. But she refused to let Reynolds rob her of her intelligence, though he set about it as if it were his life's purpose.

What escape Anna managed was confined within the town of Dundalk. She studied the town's story and streetscape, and years later she transferred this to me. When I was young, she took me for walks through the streets of the town as she delivered tender lectures, hard facts of history wrapped in a soft tale — who lived and who had lived, who had done what and who had done what to them, the injustices suffered here, and the battles for Ireland there. She knew every street and building, and she had a story for them all. She never tired of telling the same yarns, and I never tired of listening. In the olden days, she would say, townsfolk spent their days here around market stalls and fairs: ‘There was great comings and goings altogether. But there would have been a lot of horseshit about. I mean real horseshit. Not the kind your grandfather comes out with.'
And we would both laugh at that. She told me that joke a hundred times. I could see it all then, as if I walked that market myself. I can see it all now. But those days, like Granny Reynolds, are gone.

Boggy fields

I AM ALONE WITH MY BOOKS IN STATION ROAD, AND AS I READ I RUN MY
left index finger along the scar by my left eye.

It's all falling apart now
, Bob says.

‘It is not. We remain on target.'

Target? What target? What are you on about?

‘To free Ireland.'

He laughs.
Ireland is free
.

‘Not all of it.'

Depends what you mean by free, then. Is life in Leitrim so much better than in Fermanagh?

‘That's not the point.'

It is the point. It's just not your point. Isn't that the truth?

‘Ireland has a right to its own self-determination. All Ireland.'

Self-determination? Well, you'd know all about that. Ready to kill again, are we? Have you no shame?

‘Shame for what?'

Not for what. For who.

‘Cora didn't understand the necessity of battle. Maybe that comes with having a pure heart.'

Is that a fact? And what about your heart?

‘Fuck off, Bob.'

It is late February. I am in Crossmaglen, and the gun is set. I am ready. I have given the time and labour to master the elements of my craft — my other craft, sniping, not carpentry. Delaney drilled me through the training, and he drilled me again and again and again. ‘The ability to shoot,' Delaney said, ‘will make you good, but knowhow in the field will make you great. And it will keep you alive. Nous, cunning, and field-craft will win the day over gullible squaddies. You be the fox, John, and those soldiers will be chickens in a henhouse. You just wait your moment, and some stupid bastard will always leave a door open.' And so I learned how to invade the enemy, how to get inside the range, how to find ground and to know that ground, how to survive in that ground and maintain the shot, how to observe everything, how to absorb everything, how to see without being seen, how to mask the attack, how to plan the escape, and how to get away. I learned that how to get in and how to get out are as important as any other thing, and that without this preparation the best shot in the world will not succeed in what I do. And, at all times, I have options on a way out. I have read of German snipers in Normandy who shot from church steeples — and with great effect — on the attacking allies. But those snipers made a fatal mistake: they left only one route out — down the steeple — and when this was eventually choked, the German was dead. The Japanese snipers shooting from trees made the same mistake. I studied their mistakes. I studied everything; I studied long. And, in this pursuit, I was a good student. ‘Don't make second place', the American told me. ‘Second place is a body bag
.
'

I take the shot, and a pink spray bursts into the morning air.

It is lunch time on Saint Patrick's Day. In every village, flags are flying, children are marching, pubs are full of drinking and singing, while I am lying in the mud of Forkhill waiting on the lead of a patrol to move towards the junction of Church Road and Bog Road. Finishing a conversation with a local, he steps into the crosshairs. And I kill him.

It is May, and I am at the long table on Station Road, helping her with her study.

‘You don't love me,' she says, my German girl.

‘I absolutely love you.'

‘Not like her. You don't love me like you love her.'

I hold her in the bed that night as she sleeps on me. I hold her body and I touch her hair and I kiss her head. But how do you love someone more?

In early June, I take her to the airport in the Renault, and she returns home for the holidays.

A bullet to the brain is a dramatic event. The body can go mad. An explosion of electrical signals can blast the limbs into a frenzy — the body flailing, trashing, and leaping — before the eternal silence. I saw a body do that on a shooting with Delaney, and since then I aim only at the torso. It is bigger target, and there is less drama. But today the memory revisits, and I am forced to push it away and clear my thoughts of everything but the present. It is late June and I am in Newtownhamilton. Below me, a British army private looks out over boggy fields. I see his face in the scope, how relaxed he is — he has just shared a comment with a colleague. He doesn't see me. He doesn't know he will never see anything again.

Cause

I AM IN THE DONNELLY FAMILY KITCHEN.

‘Why do they kill? For what cause? For Ireland, is it?' Mam stalls mid-motion, the peel falling into the basin, the bright, naked flesh of the potato glimmering under the running tap. She isn't talking to me. She knows I am there, but her speech is addressed to the radio news-report. ‘Another soldier shot,' she continues, now looking out through the kitchen window. ‘Another boy to go home to his mother dead. Another boy to die in Ireland. And for what? Nothing? What difference will it make?' She shakes her head. ‘Who would shoot a soldier? And why? For us? What good could that possibly do? Who would do such a thing? Who would do that?' She blows a long breath and shakes her head again. She draws the blade across the potato, and another strip of peel drops to the basin as she lets the enquiry fall.

I watch Mam in the way she watches me. I guess that's what mothers do — the watching thing, the wondering. It goes back to my very arrival, Mam's watching. Mam frequently tells of my birth; she says it was too unforgettable.

It was 1971. It was early morning, and she knew she was fading. Her pain had long since breached the walls of impossibility, and as hope fell away she held only to prayer. Exhausted, she asked God to help. And as first light broke the final dark hold of night, I was born. Mam considers the birth a miracle; but, again, that's what mothers do, I guess. Mam considers us all to be blessings from God. There were disappointments: five times she felt the cramping and the blood flow in the early weeks of pregnancy. The babies, when they came, came in two bursts of two. There was just over a year between the first two boys, Peter and Declan. And five years later, Anna. The first three were all summer babies; I was born in the spring. Mam says that there were moments in that long night of delivery when she was sure she was going to die. Yet she still remembers the light of the morning. It was, she says, a beautiful day to be born. And, after me, there were no more babies and no more pregnancies: the doctors took her womb.

Mam tries to keep a devout home; she tries to send her children off into life with at least some religion in us. I try not to break that delusion — what would be the advantage in that? Mam manages a frugal household; the poverty of her childhood has never left her. I know she wished better for us than for her. I know she has tried to ensure that her boys and girl do not surrender hope and childhood for a factory punch-card.

Mam's own mother was softer, more at ease with the world. ‘You can take that gassun anywhere,' Granny used to say of me. ‘An answer for everything and the lure to go with it. It is Orpheus himself we have among us.'
Mam has never quite known what her mother meant by that.

Yet Mam has been curious about me — I guess she never could make me out. Enough times, she has seen the withdrawal to contemplation; she has seen the daydreaming. I hope she thinks they are as harmless as the private ramblings of Dad. It is a blessing for her not to know better. It is a blessing for her not to know who would shoot a soldier.

I get up from the table and leave as Mam pulls a familiar tune from her head, and I am closing the kitchen door as Kathleen Reynolds begins to sing.

Among bramble and weed and moss and stone, I wait and watch the foot patrol approach the village. I am ready. I will wait for the last soldier to cross the gable-end of the low cottage, and there I will kill him. Behind me the falling sun is dropping to green hills, and below me the golden light of evening raises the village as if offered by the gods.

It is July, the month when the lost tribe of the empire decorates itself in the remnants of colony, and parades to the beat of yesterday's drum. Banners of settlement and plantation are unfurled and aired: it must be a painful thing to be lost just a few steps from home. Of course, it isn't home; nobody there wants them either. Their only homeland is the crumbling bridge of the union. And as we attack and break that bridge, these settlers — who barricade themselves from this land and people and culture — wither and rot and ferment and drown in their own poison
.