A Mad and Wonderful Thing (29 page)

‘God? God help us all from God. And even if there was a God everyone would be dead before anyone knew anything. In the meantime, like now — when we are still alive — how do we know when to fight? How do we know what is right?'

I don't know, son. I think we are governed by the laws of nature, that we are born with values, just as we are born with arms and legs, that we all know what is right and what is wrong. But history tells another tale.

Through familiar country, I walk north to Newry, and I pitch the tent by the canal — the same canal we drove alongside on the day we were stopped, the day the gun went into Dad's mouth. That night, I think about Ciarán and Demeku, and how bastards like Peadar Neary get to be what they are, and do what they do, because of what I do. But I'm not sure of what I can do to help, so I push it away, trusting an idea will come. On the second morning, I continue north and east through the high, pointy rock of the Mourne Mountains to a forest park in Castlewellan where Mam and Dad used to take us for summer family picnics, and I stop beside a lake and eat lunch under a great, twisted oak. Afterwards, I walk through the trees and around a silver-grey castle, and then, as the rain falls, I decide that I've venture enough for the day and so I make camp. In the morning, I leave known terrain to march north. I walk to Downpatrick, where I stop and pitch the tent, and search for the grave of Saint Patrick; in a small graveyard in a hillside grove overlooking the town, I find a large stone slab inscribed ‘Patrick' among the McCartans, Maxwells, and Olpherts. The next day, I walk on to the port at Strangford, taking a small, blue ferry over the narrow water to Portaferry, and from there I head north up the green peninsula through Portavogie and Donaghadee, staying in bed-and-breakfasts, or pitching the tent if it is dry and clear.

After a week, I arrive in Belfast, where the inner-city residential street pavements and walls and lampposts are decorated in tribal colours. Among the rows of tightly packed terrace houses, murals to the fallen and the fight adorn every end-gable and facade. But the more affluent outer suburbs I walked through were mostly free of such declarations. Tribalism, it seems, belongs predominantly to the poor.

‘Would you look at this mess?' I say.

Love and pride
, Bob says.
They are two blind bastards.

I look to him. ‘I don't approve of that sort of abrasive language, old-timer.'

Yeah, well
, he answers.
We tend not to be so puritanical when we're dead
.

I find a hostel near the city centre, and go to bed early and read a novel I select from a small collection left there by former guests. I leave Belfast before dawn. I walk again through the inner-city areas denoted by ethnic colours, and see how the markings intensify at the tribal edges and fences, in the same way that wild things urinate at the reach of their territory. But the colours and markings here are flags of insecurity; the tribes of Belfast have no solid ground beneath their feet.

The din and grind of a powerful motor approaches — the growing growl loud in the quiet city morning, foreboding, threatening. I keep a steady, easy pace as an armoured-police Land Rover passes and continues away from me, the heavy sound hanging about the street long after the vehicle has gone. They would have taken no notice of me. To them, I am just another curious tourist, one of the many that the city attracts, here to sample the conflict and to bring home photos of murals and barricades and burned-out cars. The police do not see me as their most-wanted. Camouflage, as the Chief so often has told me, does not necessarily mean hiding.

I leave the city and spend the next few days walking to the north-east corner of the island through Carrickfergus, Larne, Carnlough, Cushendall, Cushendun, Ballycastle, and the whiskey village of Bushmills. I take the distillery's last tour of the day, and try a couple of samples before I leave.

‘I understand the attraction of whiskey,' I tell the tour guide, putting an arm around him and holding the sample high. ‘I appreciate the intricacies of the making; I value the joy of the single malt.' I take a sip and pull a sharp face. ‘It's just that I don't like whiskey.'

That night I lodge in the home of a retired British army captain, and in the morning I am offered kedgeree for breakfast. I have never heard of it, but a breakfast of curried rice, smoked haddock, and boiled eggs is too good to pass up. It is as delicious as it is odd.

‘Learn that on service in the Raj, did you?' I say to my host, joking.

He laughs as he pours himself a mug of tea, and then he joins me at the table and gives me his full military history.
If only he knew
, I think as we talk.

My legs are suffering — the joints and tendons are sore and tight, especially in the mornings, and the pain is getting worse day by day. My host notices me hobbling from the breakfast table, and insists on binding each of my knees with wide bandages.

‘It isn't just the impact from the walking, my good man,' he says. ‘Though it is that, too. But it's the new and unusual weight on your back that has distorted your centre of gravity. The body will take some time to adjust. Keep these on for a few days. Carry only what is necessary, drink plenty, and take it easy for the next week or so.'

He gives me a box of col-liver oil tablets as I pack to go. ‘Take a couple of these every day,' he says. ‘They should help. And, yes, I learned that, too, in the Raj.'

‘Thanks, soldier,' I tell him as I leave, and he waves me off.

I think about things as I go. How an enemy soldier is welcoming and kind, and how one of our own is self-serving, racist, and cruel. How Neary banished that girl. How he didn't want his only son married to an African. How he broke his son's heart, and didn't care. How he didn't want the local shame and ridicule. And I think on how I allow him to do it. But what can I do about it?

Two weeks have now passed on the island walk, and I leave Bushmills with a full belly and strapped legs, and stroll the two miles to the Giants Causeway and watch tourists scamper across polygonal slabs of basalt rock. It is raining and cold, and the sea spray stings as I turn west to walk along the top of Ireland through Portrush, Portstuart, Limavady, and on to Derry, where I rest for three days in a hostel reading newspapers and novels, and drinking mugs of hot coffee. The binding and the rest have worked, and my legs are fine, and in the fourth week I walk back into the Republic, into Donegal, camping in Newtown Cunningham before continuing my pilgrimage into the grey town of Letterkenny —where I don't stop — and march north again into the Fanad Peninsula to stop and camp by the water's edge in Ramelton. I sleep long into the day, and the next mid-afternoon I continue north along the long shore of Lough Swilly. I arrive in the village of Rathmullan, and book into a bed-and-breakfast as the sky clears of cloud. After I shower and rest and eat, I walk on the shore as the evening cools and darkens, and a million stars prick through the night.

‘That's a lot of stuff up there,' I tell Bob. ‘And it looks permanent and static, doesn't it? As if everything has its place in the world. But it is not static. Everything is moving at speeds we humans can't really get a handle on — our heads aren't designed to make a shape out of it. Seeing something is only the beginning of knowledge.'

I leave the strand and walk to a stone pier. I tell Bob that it was from this village that the O'Neills left Ireland during the Flight of the Earls, abandoning Ireland to English rule. I tell him, too, that it was in this village that the English built a great stone battery to protect Ireland from the French — a thinking, I insist, that was beyond madness.

Maybe the French would have been as bad as the English?
Bob suggests.
Who can know?

Maybe he's right. Who can know? Though I doubt it. The stone battery still stands, and we walk around it as I tell him that it was in this village, too, that the English held the great Irish republican Wolfe Tone. That makes three English follies launched against the Irish in this small village which nowadays threatens little more than quiet fishing or a weekend retreat for the undemanding.

What was that you said about seeing something being only the beginning of knowledge?
Bob asks.

In the morning, I leave Rathmullan, walking west through green hills, and in Glenveagh park I spend a sleepy afternoon resting in the open air by a long lake that glistens and sparkles under a sky of scattered woolly-white clouds and patches of blue. I camp beneath a broad pine; and the under the light of a moon that stoops through one of Cora's fleecy clouds, I look across rippling water that stretches away through a valley that some giant has scooped from the mountains, like a sort of impossible inland fjord. That night, I dream of Ciarán and Demeku running, hand in hand, by a blue ocean. And I watch as Ciarán lets her hand go and turns to wave to me. But when he turns again, Demeku is gone, and he is alone in an empty place.

I rise from my camp at Glenveagh and walk west towards the coast, camping again in Gweedore before heading south through Dungloe and Glenties, camping here and there as the good weather holds, before arriving at the port at Killybegs, where I make camp by the sea. The next day, I rest and sit on the harbour wall and watch the work of the port.

My nights, this week, are increasingly laced with dreams of Ciarán and Demeku. I have sent a message to Delaney, and he arrives to sit beside me on the harbour wall. I tell him Ciarán's story.

‘She could be anywhere,' Delaney says.

‘She isn't anywhere,' I say. ‘And she isn't in Africa. Neary is all about control. She is somewhere he can monitor — somewhere he can act if he needs to.'

‘They might not make it together,' Delaney says. ‘It doesn't always work out.'

‘Not our call, Chief. We have to help.'

‘And why should we do that?' he asks.

‘Because I am asking, and I haven't before. And because Neary behaves like he does because we allow him to, because we make it possible. And because if we don't do anything, that boy will go through the rest of his life lost for that girl. He is nineteen, Chief — the same age I was when I lost Cora.'

I let that line settle on the surface for a while before I whip the hook home.

‘And the same age your mother was when she lost your father.'

Delaney leaves, and I sit and watch the fishing boats come and go. He returns in the afternoon.

‘They're in Scotland. And Peadar has them warned not to come back, or to make any further contact.'

I expected this of Neary. I have a plan made, and relay it to Delaney.

‘Put your best man on it,' I tell him.

‘You're my best man.'

‘Your next-best man. And make sure he doesn't report to Neary. Pick someone in England. And give them enough money to make a good start.'

Delaney laughs. ‘Anything else?'

‘No, Chief,' I tell him. ‘That will do for now.'

And Delaney rises and leaves without a goodbye.

I leave Donegal, pushing on south. Some days, I walk fifteen miles; some days, twenty-five; other days, only ten. Another week passes as I walk through Sligo and Mayo to camp at the edge of the ocean on Achill Island. There is something about the Atlantic coast of Ireland that is right, like a sort of jigsaw piece that fits and closes a puzzle I carry around in me. I breathe here like in no other place. It is here I feel the gravity of home ground.

I am on the road to Westport, and in the early morning I am leaving a sleeping village into a land of moss-green, purple, and brown. Birds call though the gentle air. I pass the village school, empty and silent now, but how easy it is to imagine the noise of the schoolyard: the running and chasing, the shouting, the freedom of children's laughter. I look on the hand-drawn posters and paintings that cover the lower half of the windows. Beyond the school and the yard, I notice a handball court. It is a large concrete structure — some thirty feet wide and sixty feet long — with a high wall at the back end, two pitched side walls, and one open end. It's a simple game, handball. As I consider the game, I remember the mornings I used to climb the wall of the tennis club with Anna, when we'd play with the added joy of knowing we shouldn't have been there and were getting away with it. I enter the schoolyard and walk over to the court, where a small, black ball that must have been left behind in the dark of evening lies by a side wall. The pull is too great. I look back to the school and the village. The only movement belongs to crows. I remove my backpack and coat, take a few shots, and decide to give myself a game, Ireland versus England — every first and second shot alternating, country to country, and the first to seven will be the winner. After a while I am really getting into things and calling the score. It is a close game. At five–five I get, perhaps, too excited, and am now calling a commentary on every shot.

‘A tight match here in the Westport Arena,' I call, ‘between the English champion and the young Irish challenger. The crowd are on their feet and cheering every shot. It could go any way.'

It goes to six–six. I am sweating and breathing hard.

‘Hold on to your hats, this thing has gone right down to the wire. Who can hold his nerve now? Who can take glory? Will it be the resolute Englishman or the brilliant young Irishman?'