A Mad and Wonderful Thing (32 page)

I walk on and think on his words: blood on the scaffold, oppression, liberty and independence. It is the story of Ireland. But are we any closer to liberty and independence? And what are those anyway? I think about the war, and I know that a change has
come. My old life — whatever that was — is over. I have let it go. There is no regret. There is no joy. Piece by minuscule piece, it has fallen away. Step by step along the walk, it has washed from me; and, like yesterday's rain, it has drained and gone. And, somehow, it doesn't matter at all.

I enter a pub on the promenade, and from a finely dressed barman I order a large coffee with cream. The coffee comes as I take a thick book from a pile that sits on a shelf by the bar. I start into the book, and after a couple of pages I start again, but I cannot make any sense of it. I flick through the book, reading a line here and there, but I can't get to it. I shuffle in my seat. A drum of wind has gathered inside me. I try to get comfortable and read. I try to work the gas free. But I am cramped, and I can't concentrate on the reading. I replace the book on the shelf and, as I stretch, the waste escapes with a loud clatter. The barman looks over and I salute him. What else could I do?

‘A fine village you have here,' I tell him.

‘Young Donnelly, isn't it?' he says. ‘I know your father.'

‘Guilty as charged, Capt'n,' I salute him again.

I walk to Dundalk and go to Saint Joseph's. I light a candle. I have lit a candle in every village and town I have walked through.

There is a trail of burning wax behind us
, Bob says.
Your walk can be seen from the heavens.

‘So how was your walk really, Johnny?' Anna asks me at the kitchen table when we are alone. ‘Did you learn anything with that mad head of yours?'

‘I was working on the brain thing again,' I tell her. ‘The human brain has been this size for hundreds of thousands of years, but it was only about a hundred thousand years ago that we began to rapidly progress away from what we were. Something must have changed then. And after that change we could interpret things, analyse behaviour, and copy. We must have developed some function to learn, to hold on to, and to teach. To be human is to ask questions. Nothing else that exists does that. That's what makes us different. And to retain answers and discoveries, the brain must have developed a copycat function so that creativity could be captured and built on. And so we learned fire, and tool use, and how to build shelter. And we developed language, and this led to a collective learning, and so progress was kind of unstoppable, is unstoppable. But something else came with the copycat and with the collective learning — a sort of by-product — and that is empathy, a sense of belonging. And from that came culture and civilisation, and all the rest of the hullabaloo. But belonging, too, came with a by-product, and that was a new thinking: a thinking that there is an us and a them.'

‘And you didn't drink too much? Did you, Johnny?'

‘No, Anna,' I tell her, and as I rise from the table I reach over and kiss her head. ‘I didn't drink at all.'

‘So,' Anna says, ‘are you going to tell Mam and Dad about this
nature of man
theory of yours?'

‘Actually, Anna, could you do that for me? I'm a bit busy with stuff.'

‘Johnny,' my sister says to me, as she stands and touches my face. ‘You are as mad as the east wind.'

I decide to repeat my college year in Limerick. Until September, I have time to play with. I take Clara to Ennis, and we picnic with Bella and Marcela and Mick at Mullaghmore. I take Éamon to visit Aisling in Dublin. We go on the train — Éamon loves the train. I take Aisling, Clara, and Che to Castlewellan in the Renault 4. We picnic under the twisted oak. I take Mam and Dad for drives to Cooley and Carlingford. I take Che for walks to Soldiers' Point, Ravensdale, and Cúchulainn's Castle. I drink tea and coffee with Anna. I write a letter to Bremen. I don't think about the war.

It is the eighth day of July, and we have a night out in the Cooking Pot. Everybody comes. Congratulations and good wishes are real and warm. Anna and Aisling remain together all evening, and speak in whispers. Eddie and Hannah are there with Mam and Dad, and so, too, are Fionnuala and Gerry Flannery. Big Robbie is camped at the bar with Frank, Peter, and Jack Quigley. Conor has come from London. Éamon has a gift for me. It is a map of Ireland, and on it my walk is traced in gold. I am surprised and don't know what to say, and Éamon Gaughran has his moment. The gathering has travelled to his head like a tumbler of poteen, and all his lights are on. He puts his arm around me and flicks his head.

‘He's some lunatic,' he calls out. ‘Johnny D is some lunatic altogether.'

A day that started out easy

IT IS THE MORNING AFTER THE NIGHT IN THE COOKING POT. I TAKE A
slow walk to town, pass by the side of the courthouse, and walk through the Market Square. Every time I pass here, I think of Cora.

I visit the redbrick house near the town centre, and I sit in the small front room.

‘I'm sorry about Delores, Chief. She is a great woman.'

‘The very best, John,' Ignatius Delaney says. ‘We are fifty years married next month; it's hard to believe so much time can pass so easily. But she is fading now from her own person. The memory started to slip — small stuff at first — but now she seems to be disappearing day by day, like someone has pulled a plug on her very self, and the drain cannot be halted, and what's left is just collapsing away to a nothingness. It's an odd sort of departure, unnatural. It can be savage on all concerned. But for the day-care centre and her sister's help, I don't know how I'd manage. Her mother went the same. Of her own crowd, you know, we never thought she would go first. Hope can make a blinkered fool of us all.'

‘The human brain is a peculiar and delicate thing,' I tell him, but I don't tell him more. I don't tell him about the hundred billion cells, about the copycat function, about who is controlling whom, about us and them. Instead, I tell him about Aisling. I tell him about the baby.

‘That's great news, John. No man ever wore a cravat as beautiful as his own child's arm around his neck.'

I nod to acknowledge the poetry.

‘You stay down the country,' Delaney continues. ‘Stay well away from this place, do you hear me? You're well away from it. You have done your bit, God knows. It's them against us still, but it won't last much longer — there isn't the will. A ceasefire is coming.'

There is something of the hunt in the Chief's words, something coy, something of the measured cast of the angler's line. I know him too well to be hooked with such bait, and I know he is guarding as much as he is probing.

‘You'll retire from the struggle yourself, Chief?'

‘I'll still do my bit. It's the old devotee for the long war. An army is in need of all its foot soldiers.'

I remember the time he gave me that small speech about foot soldiers. I look to the old man.

‘I wonder about what we do. It doesn't make a bit of difference.'

‘We fly the flag, John. We hold the line. If it wasn't for what we do, they would have trampled over what's left of Ireland long ago. They would have destroyed our beautiful country. But there will be no ovation from the masses. Don't be expecting gratitude; don't be hanging about for the applause. People in the Republic have forgotten the value of freedom. They don't care about the cost. They don't want to know — they are embarrassed by the whole thing. We chose a different view, you and I. We chose to look at what they have done: obliterated our language and culture, stolen our lands, scattered our sons and daughters to the four winds, starved the rest of us, made us outlaws on our own ground. They disregard the native man as nothing but annoying flotsam in the tide of their own greed. Sometimes the native man needs to fight. That's what we did. We chose to fight. God alone will judge us.'

‘I think you're right, Chief. But that isn't true just of the English — it is true of all humanity. We Irish are well capable of bringing shit down on ourselves.'

‘Yes, but that would be an Irish problem in an Irish land. We have a right to make our own mess.'

‘Do you remember all that stuff about original sin, Chief? That man was born a sinner, that being born a sinner is the nature of man? I don't believe that. I believe that man is born with three innate capacities: the love of homeland, the love of woman, and the proclivity to make war. These are our fundamentals. We are born with the tools for infinite joy. We are born with the tools to destroy us. This is the nature of man.'

‘We cannot punish ourselves for what we are,' Delaney says.

‘True. But who can be blamed? God? We are the product of evolution. We are who we are by natural selection. Aggression is elemental to survival. It is built into us. We are born ready for war.'

‘We were born to this war, you and I,' Delaney tells me. ‘Rolling over and allowing yourself to be beaten is no answer. Many a coward has hid behind the argument for peace.'

‘Yes, Chief, there have been many. Still, though, where has the killing brought us?'

‘John, you are looking for a clear path in a forest where there are no paths at all. We must all cut our own way through. We chose our way, and there are many who will condemn us for that. But inaction is no sure key to the door of serenity. That is not how this world works. History is filled with those who tip-toed quietly to their own slaughter. Didn't you learn that in Hamburg? Abasement must be challenged — it must be fought.'

‘Yes, Chief,' I tell him, ‘that is true.'

‘We have a right to defend our Irish nation.'

‘Nation? What nation?'

The Chief straightens and his face tightens. I reach across and take the old man's hands in my own.

‘Twelve thousand years ago,' I tell him, ‘we didn't exist. The ice had just left, and all that was here were forests and rivers. Elk and deer and hare and wolf had the land to themselves. And then the first settlers came. And who were they? Who are the Irish? Are we Galician? Asturian? Basque? Gascon? Breton? Cornish? Welsh? Manx? Scottish? Or are we the peripheral deposits of Germanic tribes from the plains of Europe? Who are we? We have not spontaneously materialised on this island. We have to have come from somewhere. And then the Norse and the Danes came, and then the Normans and the English. You'd wonder why they'd all go to so much bother to get their hands on a damp place like this. You'd wonder at the attraction.'

Delaney laughs and relaxes again in his chair.

‘You always were of the fecund mind, John. Always a tendency to the discursive analysis.'

‘And who are the Normans,' I go on, ‘but the Norse and the Danes speaking French? And who are English? They, too, are an invention — a Celtic, Roman, Friesian, Saxon, Norse, French invention. Two inventions fighting each other for identity. Beneath our Irish and our English veneer, we are all someone else. And what are we fighting for? We are fighting for an island that was forged from two continents, an island that was buried below seas, that belongs not to any one place on the Earth, that will be lost again below northern ice, that is on its way to nowhere. Nations don't exist, Chief. We come and we go. The whole thing is mad.'

‘We are fighting for our fathers, John. We are doing what they could not.'

‘The making of boundary is eternal,' I keep to my argument. ‘It is made, broke, and remade. But the making belongs only to land and sea.'

I pause and look away. The beat of the wall-clock fills the silence in the small room. We are different men, the Chief and I. War does that; it builds odd alliances. And, like girls, it can wreck your head. I turn again to the old man.

‘War is the worst of man,' I tell him. ‘Yet it is the essence of what we are, the consequence of being human. But, yes, it is war, Chief, and it came to us, that much is true. We chose to fight, and who can judge us?'

‘You are right, John,' Delaney says quietly, almost whispering. ‘Listen to me, John,' he says, leaning across the small table. ‘You build a new life down there. Marry that girl and make a family, and do all the right things. But stay away from here. They will never forgive you for those shootings. If they ever knew it was you, they would come after you. You brought fear itself down on them; with that gun, you changed the war. Thank God your identity will die with me. But take no chances — stay well away, and may God bless you. I'll keep the fire lit, others will take on the battle, and one day we will be a nation once more.'

‘Maybe you're right, Chief. But the people of Ireland today don't care. For them, a united Ireland is as remote as a parallel universe. They know it is possible. They are not sure if it's beneficial. But, mostly, they just don't give a fuck.'

‘Remoteness is a subjective thing, John. It pivots on the personal.'

I lift a framed photo from his desk.

‘That's a new photo, Chief?'

‘Yes, John, a present. She has me warned to keep it near, to keep her face shining out at me so I won't feel so lonely.'

I now recognise the trace of melancholy in the air, that fragrance that has been on the edge of my knowing since I got here, that sweet mix of carnation and vanilla. I know what it is. It is
L'Heure Bleue
.