A Mad and Wonderful Thing (4 page)

It must have been winter, because it was dark and wet and cold. We were on our way home from an afternoon's shopping in Newry. Mam has a thing about shopping in Newry — she says everything up there is great value. As it leaves the town, the road from Newry to Dundalk climbs a big hill. Near the beginning of this hill there is a junction where the main road continues south, and where a smaller road runs east along the coast of Carlingford Lough and then south around the peninsula into Dundalk Bay. The seashore route is a nice drive on a nice day. Dad had a habit of calling out to us kids in the back as we approached this junction, ‘Turn or straight on?' We always shouted ‘Turn', because the longer coastal road offered something of an adventure. Most times, Dad drove straight on anyway, whatever the vote, but once in a while — to keep the magic in the game — he turned.

There was just Anna and I with them in the car that day — I guess the two older boys were at home with Aunt Hannah — and we shouted, ‘Turn, turn, turn.' I don't know why Dad turned. It was too dark to see anything of the drive, but maybe he fancied the spin or was in some sort of a comfortable daydream and needed the extra mileage. Whatever the reason, it was a bad choice.

The road we took runs next to the Newry Canal on a narrow strip between the broadening lough and the dark rise of Cooley Mountains. Four miles from Newry, the road crosses the border into the Republic of Ireland. There is a customs post on the southern side, and sometimes a police or army security-check on the north. Somewhere between Newry and the border, Dad suddenly slowed. I tried to look ahead between the two front seats, but it was difficult to see anything in the dark and the rain. Then I saw the slow arc of a lamp being waved. Mam and Dad's conversation died abruptly, and in the new silence I could hear Dad's breathing as he stopped the car and wound down his side window, his hand slipping once from the handle.

It wasn't the first time we'd been stopped on a trip to Newry, and I sat quietly in the back with Anna as Dad passed his licence out to the soldier and answered questions about who we were and what we were doing there. The soldier told Dad to get out and go to the rear of the car and open the boot. I heard the boot opening and the sound of muffled voices. Then there was silence, and waiting. Then another soldier stooped through Dad's door and pointed a gun at Mam and shouted for us all to get out of the car, and he stood us by the side of the road with his gun still pointing at Mam, and we watched in the cold rain as two other soldiers searched the inside of the car. The first soldier was still questioning Dad at the rear of the car as the search came to some kind of an end, and we cowered in the wet darkness as Dad lifted Mam's scattered shopping from the road and put it back into the car. Dad closed the boot, trying to lock it, but he couldn't get the key into the catch, and the first soldier pushed him towards the driver's door as the second soldier marched the rest of us to the car and shouted for us to ‘Get in and get the fuck out.' Even as a six-year-old boy, I thought this to be an odd instruction.

Dad was fumbling and struggling to get the car going again, and after only a few yards the car stalled. Dad was breathing loudly, shaking the steering wheel with a tightened grip as if he were trying to force the engine by will and panic alone. It was then that the thing happened. Thinking on it later, I know that a soldier must have run from the ditch, but at the time it seemed as if the gun appeared from the dark air. Dad's window was still fully opened, and the first thing we all saw was the big black gun as it caught Dad on the side of his head.
I heard Mam scream, and beside me in the back Anna gripped my left arm and froze. I saw Dad recover from the knock, but as he turned to the window I watched the gun go into his mouth. The only sound in the car was Dad's gulping for air. The next words were very clear, ‘I'm going to kill you.' There was a long silence before the gun disappeared back out the window. Dad didn't move, Mam still stared straight ahead, and Anna was still frozen.

The silence went on forever. Then a head appeared at the window and leant in and retreated, and I heard voices and laughter. ‘Pissed his fucking pants, mate,' I heard the soldier call. ‘Pissed his fucking pants.' Dad just sat there, his head dropped and his body slumped and turned away from the window, as other heads gathered at the car and shouted at us, ‘Get going', ‘Drive away now', ‘Move it, Paddy Piss-Pants.' The shouting and the laughing went on and on as Dad remained slumped in his seat. Mam was leaning over to him, her hand cradling his face as his shoulders shook. ‘Oh Oliver, Oh Oliver,' she said, but he didn't respond and he didn't make any move to restart the car. Mam got out into the shouting and laughing, and took Dad out and walked him around the front of the car to her seat before going back to the driver's side and wiping the seat with the cloth that Dad used to clean the windows. Not once did Mam look at the soldiers. Then she sat in the car and drove away into the south.

‘The children,' was all Dad said, and Mam shushed him with a touch, and we travelled home in silence. But I knew that one day I would take a big black gun to those soldiers.

Delaney's cabbages

I CALL TO SEE DELANEY IN THE MIDWEEK FOLLOWING THE SUNDAY MASS.
I rest my bicycle against the redbrick of the front wall and search for him first in the back garden.

‘Hey, Chief,' I hail him. He rises between rows of cabbages, salutes, and moves towards me. The garden is a collection of square enclosures, each enclosure partitioned by a clipped box hedge enveloping straight rows of raised and planted earth. The whole thing is as neat and tidy as a Jehovah's Witness.

‘Is it about a bicycle?' he greets me.

‘How's that garden treating you?' I ask him.

‘Busy time of year. Can't turn your back for a minute.' He looks to me as he removes his garden gloves and places one hand on my shoulder. ‘How's my boy?'

‘Never better, Chief,' I answer. ‘How's Miss California?'

He gives me that look of his, a look halfway between a smile and a sneer. ‘Out shopping with Delores, thank God. I have the place to myself.' He nods towards the house. ‘Let's have tea.'

We move inside to a back kitchen which could have come out of a 1960s
Good Housekeeping
brochure, and probably did.

‘We've had some leakage,' he says, as the kettle boils on the gas stove and he stands at the window looking out over the garden. ‘Nothing for you to worry about.' He turns to face me. ‘I just wanted you to know.'

‘How? Who?'

‘That doesn't matter, John.' He turns again to the window. ‘It's dealt with. But it's nothing new. They tried before. They try now. They will try again. Now and again they get a talker. There are those who can be bought or flattered; it is a flaw in our human nature. But this one doesn't know anything about you — nobody knows about you — so let's just take it as a caution, a warning.'

I am cold as the threat registers. ‘Informers,' I spit the word out.

He doesn't speak as he scalds a white-porcelain teapot with boiling water. He empties the teapot into the sink and spoons in loose tea before filling it from the whistling kettle. He stirs the tea, replaces the lid, and puts the teapot on the table. ‘Now then,' he says. ‘Let's continue to keep it tight, very tight. Just the two of us, and we'll have no loose ends and no loose talk or tout to worry about.'

I nod, and we drink the tea as he talks about cabbages, carrot fly, and fruit netting.

For seven years I have come to Delaney. He has never told me exactly how high he is in the IRA — it doesn't matter to what we do — but I guess he's somewhere near the top. I have helped with some other stuff, too, but he has kept me separate, secret. No one in the movement knows who I am; no one in the movement knows I exist.

It has taken time to get what I need and to know how to use it. I am still learning. ‘I'll help you do what you do,' I had told him early. ‘I'll help you do what you do, if you get me a big black gun.'

‘Leave these matters with me,' he says now as we part, ‘and don't annoy yourself about it.'

But I am annoyed, and as I cycle away I go over each step of our plan, checking every seal and strut. I get home and retie the gate with the old shoelace as Che, our German Shepherd, bounds to greet me, and I wrestle with him on the side path.

Bob stands by the garden shed where I store the bicycle.
Should we be worried?
he asks, as I park the bicycle and latch the shed door.
Have Delaney and Donnelly got a flaw in their great plan to free Ireland?

I ignore him. We should be good — we built the plan slow and well. It is leak-proof and it is failsafe.

That's what they said about the Titanic
, Bob calls, as I play with Che on my way around the side of the house.

I see Clara out on the street. She is cycling on the pavement and concentrating hard. She knows I am there and she wants me to see her. I am afraid to call to her as I know she will lift an arm to wave. So I walk to the gate and lean over.

‘You are going great,' I tell her. ‘A pure natural. We'll have you in the Tour de France yet.'

She stops and looks to me, ‘What's the Tour de France?'

‘It's a race for lunatics,' I tell her. ‘You're made for it.'

‘Funny boy,' she says, and she cycles off, and I watch her go on the red bicycle that I bought her for her birthday.

The red bicycle

I WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD WHEN I GOT MY RED BICYCLE FOR CHRISTMAS.
I had wanted it forever, and I couldn't believe it was actually there on Christmas morning. I couldn't believe it was for me.

I had learned to ride on Anna's small bicycle and then I moved up to Peter's, and when he was off playing football or away at the scouts or something I rode his Raleigh around the front garden. Peter's Raleigh was too big for me — I couldn't reach the pedals if I sat on the saddle — so I rode around the garden standing, with my little body going up and down with the effort, giving the whole adventure a fairground-ride feel to it. It was great stuff, and I always waited until the last minute before returning the bicycle to the shed and pretending all was as normal to Peter when he got home. ‘He's going to catch you one of these days,' Mam would warn. ‘And then you'll be looking for me to save you.' Declan never had a bicycle of his own; I don't think he liked cycling. Isn't that a peculiar thing?

But now I had one of my own — a beautiful red bicycle — and I rode around that garden every day. At the time we lived in a council estate of about a hundred houses. The estate had a rectangular block of houses at one end and an open U-shape of houses at the other, as if the planners couldn't agree on either and so included both. We lived on one of the entry corners of the rectangular block.

The street bully was Jimmy McCusker, and he was fourteen when I got the red bicycle. I think Jimmy was a bit slow or something because he never went to school. Instead he wandered around the street all day looking for trouble. But he never got it from me. I didn't go out there much, and I wouldn't have gone out at all, only I needed to walk to school. Out there were bigger boys and danger, and to me it all seemed rough and threatening. I stayed and played in our garden. Jimmy always had a couple of sidekicks with him — younger boys who would be replaced as they grew up and moved on from him. The McCuskers lived on the back row of houses in the rectangle block, and it was a blessing that I never had reason to be around there. All of my information was gathered second-hand. Sometimes I saw Jimmy about the street as I made my way to or from school, but somehow I managed to avoid him. Dad said that Jimmy was the image of his father and that there must be some class of a delinquent gene running through the McCusker family. Jimmy's father sat in his porch all day smoking cigarettes and abusing passers-by as his son made a nuisance of himself in the street. Dad said that the McCuskers had a fair share of insanity and a monopoly on inanity. It was years later before I knew what that meant.

When summer came, I started to cycle to the shop to get the
Dundalk Democrat
for Dad. The
Democrat
came out at the weekend, and so first thing on a Saturday morning I was up and away. The shop was just past the end of the street, and one morning in August I bought the newspaper, strapped it to the metal carrier, and headed for home. I don't know why I took the rear street through the rectangle block — I'd never done it before — but it was such a beautiful, warm morning and maybe I was daydreaming, or maybe I just wasn't thinking.
Suddenly I had to brake hard not to crash into Jimmy McCusker, who was standing
in the road. Jimmy put one hand on the bicycle and looked down at me. He didn't say a word. My back tightened, I felt my insides shrink, and I was gripped tight and sore around my middle. But Jimmy McCusker didn't touch me. He didn't beat me up. He didn't even push me off. He just took the bicycle from me and wheeled it through his own gate. He even took Dad's newspaper.

‘Didn't you do anything?' Dad asked.

‘No,' I said. ‘I didn't know what to do.'

‘Didn't know what to do?' Dad repeated my words to me, standing above me and shaking his head.

‘I'm sorry,' I told him, but he said nothing.