A Star Called Henry (19 page)

He went back to the window and, while bullets zipped past him, buried themselves in the window and hopped off the granite sill, he shot Nelson.

—Got him in the other eye, the hoor. Now, lads. Back to work.

We crawled to our hole in the wall, away from windows and snipers.

—A bit of peace and quiet.

And we burrowed again. Became a machine again. Through the wall, we had a hole we could climb through. We looked in first, carefully, expecting to find hard, killing faces staring back at us.

We saw mirrors, velvet, bottles.

—It’s the Coliseum, said Felix.—The theatre. I know it. It’s the bar.

—Last orders, gentlemen, said Paddy.

I had my arse through the hole when I heard a voice behind me.

—Commandant Connolly wants Private Smart.

It was O’Toole, the honest Boy Scout.

—Buy yourselves a drink, lads, I shouted into the bar, and I threw some of the change from my pocket in after them.

—Thanks a million, big fella, said Paddy.

I pushed past O’Toole, jangling what was left of my change.

Four men had gone out next door to the Metropole. As the first shell hit the roof of the hotel, they brought back a brass bed on good, true castors, so Connolly could continue to run the show. I took one bed knob, his bodyguard, Harry Walpole, grabbed the other and, together, we shoved the bed all over the post office. Beside Connolly as he moved, his adjutant, Winnie Carney, took down his thoughts and orders and shouted at people to get out of the way. She ran back to her typewriter, in a corner behind one of the counters; the rat-tat of her typing sent men diving for the ground.
Courage, boys, we are winning, and in the hour of our victory let us not forget the splendid women who have everywhere stood by us and cheered us on.
He was mad, I think, in the last hours. The burning building was dripping all around us. His face was yellow and drenched. He must have been in agony. I could see where bone had come through the skin above the ankle; the bandages and brace couldn’t hide the bloody points. And he’d been shot in the left arm.

I pushed him away from the huddled officers.

—Over to Clarke now, son, he said.

I could just hear him above the gunfire and other explosions. We heard, then felt stone toppling above us. A shell had hit the balustrade, the first direct hit. I kept pushing as more shells shaved us and hit the Metropole and Eason’s beyond it. There was an eighteen-pounder at the Parnell Monument, pointed straight at us and, behind it, a pair of howitzers, testing the range, playing with us.

—They have us in their sights, he said.

—They took their time.

—True.

Another shell hit the roof. I waited for the toppling to continue down on top of us, horrible seconds, and still the bullets bit at the walls around our heads. Men, on ladders being nibbled by the bullets, knocked holes through the plaster and floorboards, to get the hoses up to the roof.

—We’ll never be forgotten, Henry, said Connolly as I rolled the bed up onto Clarke’s foot.

Outside, the people inside the military cordon were beginning to starve. There was no one to bake bread or milk a cow. Even the pubs were shut. The bullets were constant. Anything moving was shot; anyone at a window was a sniper. Our last outposts were alone and falling. There were now twelve thousand soldiers in the city, and another four thousand on the way, and a huge pit had been dug in Arbour Hill for the rebel dead, with a hill of quicklime beside it: there’d be no republican funerals.

The shells were dropping on us now in a steady, reliable stream. The machine-guns never stopped. And dinner was served.

—I won’t eat that.

I watched a Volunteer turn his back on the tin plate offered to him by one of the Cumann na mBan women, crouching under the bullets in a nurse’s uniform.

—Why not? she said.

—I won’t eat meat on a Friday.

It was Friday. What had happened to Thursday?

—I’ll have it, I told her.

I stood up straight in the main hall and ate the Volunteer’s dinner, the best bit of chicken I’d ever tasted. I felt the hot draught of passing bullets, a slice of shrapnel flew into one of my spuds and fizzled, but I ate it all up, every last mouthful. They watched me, waited for God’s bullet to send me down to hell. But, as two of the gawking Volunteers were hit by machine-gun spray and fell screaming onto the wet tiles, I lifted my head up, brought the empty plate up to my face and licked it clean. Then I handed it back to the woman.

—Thanks very much, I said.—That hit the spot.

—You’re very welcome, she said.

She was trying to control a grin.

—Compliments to the chef, I said.

—She’ll be dizzy, she said.

—Good.

We were trapped and cooking. The lift shaft was on fire, rushing flames to the basement. And, while the Provisional Government pow-wowed around Connolly’s bed, The O’Rahilly sent me up to the roof, to help keep the flames away from the ventilation shaft.

I crawled below the choking smoke with a hose tied around my waist. There were other men there but I couldn’t see them. Shells were falling behind me; I held on every time. I crept. Across the frame that had once held the glass of the dome, onto the safety of slates. In a gap in the smoke I saw a statue, one of the three stone women that topped the post office. Fidelity, I think. I cuddled up behind her skirt. I was right on the edge of the roof. Sackville Street was gone, buried in flame and black smoke. There was a short gap in the smoke, and I saw Clery’s: it had a front but no back, sides or roof; the flames tore out of its centre and steel girders hung black and useless. The Waverly Hotel had collapsed and there was nothing now where the D.B.C. building had been. The rubble was scattered in piles across the street. I unwrapped the hose. If the ventilation shaft wasn’t drenched quickly the G.P.O. would burn from the centre, clean down to the basement, the explosives and ammo and Miss O’Shea. I aimed.

No water. Not a trickle or cough. We’d lost the supply. Bits of stone nicked my skin, chipped from Fidelity by the bullets. I was down on my belly again. I slid through black water that was starting to boil. I couldn’t lift my face. I rolled down over slates that were cracking and melting as my weight flew over them. I stopped on hot concrete and the door was right beside me. It was slammed as I got to it. I butted and thumped it.

And I saw Collins.

—You’re not locking me out, bub, I said.

I pushed past him, down the narrow stairs. The O’Rahilly was there too. They put sand in the gap below the door and wet it with water from a bucket.

—Yis might as well piss on the flames, I shouted, but they didn’t hear me. I didn’t hear myself. The fire was eating every sound. There was a wind scooping up flames and a locked, raging roar from the lift. I heard a slow groaning, building into something huge; the pillars outside were about to give up. I tumbled down the stairs.

The women were being led to a side door, out to Henry Street. Some were scared, but most were angry. And I saw Miss O’Shea. She was being brought along by two other women and shouting back over her shoulder.

—I can fire a gun as well as any man!

One of the women in front had a Red Cross flag and they were all being led by a priest in a stovepipe hat.

—Jesus Christ! They’ll be killed out there!

But no one heard me and the door was cleared and open and the women were out. Miss O’Shea didn’t look back. She didn’t see me. The last thing I saw was the back of her neck, and she was gone. I gripped the banister. It was seconds before I realised that it was burning; I was trying to hear if the shooting outside had stopped.

Most of the men were now in the sorting rooms at the back and in the covered courtyard where glass fell in drops on top of them. I found Paddy and Felix there.

—What’s the plan? I said.

—We’re going to break through their barricade at the top of Moore Street and then go on into Williams and Woods.

The sweet factory. I’d often put my mouth under a pipe and swallowed the waste that poured out of Williams and Woods; it had been my dinner and tea.

—Then we’re going to break through again and head north to the country.

—Just like that?

—Just like that.

We got out from under the dripping glass. In the main hall, on the last table in the G.P.O., was a pile of food. Sugar, tea, hairy bacon, more cake.

—Fill your knapsacks!

I could see the ham curling, roasting in the heat. Pearse was up on the last chair, delivering a speech I couldn’t hear. Kitchener and George V were melting, slithering to the floor. Then The O’Rahilly and Collins were among us and there was action. The whole place was about to cave in.

We were in the first group, about thirty of us.

—Fix bayonets! Connolly shouted, from the bed.

Some of the men cheered.

—Henry, said Connolly.—Get out your father’s leg.

—Yes, sir, I said.

I took my daddy’s leg from its holster and lifted it into the air. The Citizen Army had seen it before, and seen what it could do; it had broken heads and rozzers’ fingers during the Lockout. They cheered and laughed.

—Up the Republic! I shouted.

The O’Rahilly was at the front.

—This is it, lads.

He looked back at Connolly.

—Cheerio, he said.

—Now!

The gate was open and we were out. Across Henry Street. In single file. A man fell in front of me. I jumped. His body was riddled with bullets meant for my legs. I landed awkwardly but terror gave me back my stride and now Paddy was in front of me. The men ahead of us threw aside sections of our barricade and we ran through the gap onto Moore Street. And at last I saw the enemy. At the top of the street. At last, the khaki uniforms. We broke into two lines, to the left and the right, and kept running at them and it suddenly seemed very quiet and then the noise was deafening and trapped by the walls of the street, and I heard nothing extra but Paddy fell in front of me and he was dead and his brain and hair were on my jacket and hands and I kept running, and The O’Rahilly had been hit but he kept going, he ran in a zigzag that brought the bullets to him, and Felix fell and I left him behind me, and I was the first, the only man left upright on the street and I could see the bullets, the air was packed with them and, for a fragment of a second, I could think and I jumped at a doorway and hid.

Four or five men were crawling and diving, trying to get out of the hail of bullets. The rest were on the ground; their blood was already like an oilcloth on the street. Paddy’s scalp was on my hand, as if I’d beaten his head with the wooden leg. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t see him properly back there but I could see that Felix was dead as well; the bullets were still going into him but he didn’t know it.

The bullets chipped at the doorway, eating away my hiding place. I abandoned my rifle, put the leg in its holster and slithered out. I hugged the house wall and crept back towards Moore Lane. Every bullet ever made flew up that street, at me, at my feet, at my head. They gouged paths in the wall an inch above me. They fractured, made powder of the pavement right beside me. But I kept going, inch on inch, my face to the wall, inch inch inch, and I could see the corner and I was round it. And up. I ran at a door and it broke in front of me. I fell into the hall and heard screams from upstairs. I got away from the door, in to the parlour window in time to see the second wave of men running onto the lane. And there was Plunkett, held up by two men, trying to hold his sword up, one spur hanging crookedly and alone from one of his boots. He saw me. He stopped and made the two men stop in the sea of bullets, and shouted.

—Come out and fight, you cowardly cur!

And he was gone. Connolly was brought past on a blanket, carried by four kids. I ran to the door, back out to the street. I could see men in the alleys and doorways but there were many more men on the ground. I ran to Cogan’s, the grocer’s on the corner. And through it - the smell of boiling ham - with the other survivors. To a cottage in the yard behind. And there was crying, wailing and a dead girl in the hall, face up on the earth floor, shot in the head - by one of us, there were no other bullets here. Men lay on the ground. I could hear nothing. But I could think. I was catching up. I sat against the cottage wall. Paddy was dead. Felix was dead. I waited to feel something.

 

—Let’s have a look at the animals.

A lit match was pushed into my face.

—You one of the leaders?

I said nothing.

—One of the ringleaders?

I said nothing and stared past the flame into faces I couldn’t see.

—You used dum-dum bullets, you cunt.

I said nothing.

—Didn’t you?

It was Saturday night and we’d surrendered. After hours of moving back and forth with white flags from our last outpost, Hanlon’s fish shop on Moore Street, to the army barricade at the Great Britain Street end. Elizabeth O’Farrell’s steps on the street outside were the first thing I’d heard since the day before, when I’d seen Paddy, Felix and The O’Rahilly falling. She walked past the window towards the barricade with her white flag held steady as the last of the gunfire died and her fading steps were replaced by the groans of our wounded and the tearing cough of a man upstairs with a bullet in his lung. And somebody’s whispered prayer from behind a wall outside.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph assist me in my last agony.
We waited for a shot or a warning cry. The silence hurt my ears; it was forcing me to remember. I heard Elizabeth’s returning steps and, this time, Pearse went with her.

—Shall we go? he said, and he held his sword back so that Elizabeth didn’t have to climb over it. He followed Elizabeth onto the street. We never saw him again.