A Star Called Henry (21 page)

—There there, she said.—That’s right.

She cried too. I could feel her tears on my face; they were warmer than mine.

—Poor little Henry. Poor poor poor poor, poor little Henry.

And she felt the other little Henry pressing against her.

—Feeling better?

—Yes, thank you, Annie.

In the merry month of May.
Her fingers were on my back again -
from my home I started
- lifting and dropping -
left the girls of Tuam
- brushing and pinching the rhythm -
nearly broken-hearted
- as she whispered right up to my ear.
Saluted father dear, kissed me darlin’ mother.
I was wide awake now; I’d never slept.
Drank a pint of beer my grief and tears to smother.
I was on top of Annie now, ready for the chorus, dying for it, bringing her to it, and through to the rest and black sleep that would follow.
On the rocky road to Dubellin, one two three four five.

—Four more exee-cutions!

Heuston, Mallin, Con Colbert, Éamonn Ceannt. Annie was out foraging. I pushed away the sacks she used for curtains and looked down from her window at the top of the house. The trams were running again; I could hear them climbing past the bottom of the street, on Summerhill. The kids were in the school yard at the other end. My old school. I wondered was Miss O’Shea out there, looking after them, or was she in jail? Or hidden, or dead? I put my tongue to the window and licked her little rivers. But all I tasted was grey air and dirt on the glass that became black as my breath steamed the window. It was just the same old place out there. The same old buying and robbing, stray dogs and children, bare feet and sores, matchstick legs and rickets. Flaking brick and rotten wood, running filth, and dying coughs from open windows. But there was a young chap down there at the corner. I leaned out to hear him. He was selling something.

—Last of the rebel pictures! Last of the exee-cuted rebels!

And there was a small queue, made of the same people who’d thrown stones and shit at me a week before. And now they were buying prints of Pearse and Clarke and Plunkett that they could never afford. And Annie brought me home the stories. Gunshots at dawn. The slaughter on North King Street. Sheehy-Skeffington’s murder. The last words and letters of the dead men.
My darling wife, pulse of my heart, this is the end of all things earthly.
Locks of beloved hair, buttons from jackets and shirts.
I kiss this paper that goes to you . . . I and my fellow signatories believe we have struck the first successful blow for Freedom.
A wedding at night in a prison chapel lit by a single candle.
My darling little boy, remember me kindly . . . Ireland has shown she is a Nation . . . Slán leat. Do not fret.

And I ventured out in a pair of dead man’s trousers, with a dead man’s wife on my arm.

—He wasn’t very big, was he, Annie?

The wind was whipping away at my ankles.

—He was big enough, said Annie.

Every woman we met, every black shawl, had me itching to run; they’d all seen me hanging from the post office window, kissing Annie, on Easter Monday. Annie felt it in me, the way I held back. She squeezed my arm.

—You’ve nothing to worry about, she said.

—Are they on our side now?

—I’m not on your side, darling, and you’re perfectly safe with me. They’d like to tan your arse but they’ll never hand you over to that shower of murderers. And I’ll tell you another thing.

—What?

—They’re wondering what sort of a love letter you’d write to me if you were going to be executed.

—A great one, I said.—Anyway, they could find out if they informed on me.

—God almighty, said Annie.—You’re all the same. You can fire your bang-bangs and march till your arses meet the ground, but you’ll never understand romance.

We crossed Gloucester Diamond.

—They’ll never turn you in, she said.—And what’s more, they’ll make their husbands join the rebels if they ever come back from the war.

—Even though they don’t believe in it?

—That’s right, said Annie.

We crossed Tyrone Street and on. It was early morning but there was no room for the sun in Faithful Place. The bullies were already on the steps of the kip houses; the city was full of soldiers, far from home, angry and victorious. I’d spent hours and nights down here, with Victor, waiting for our father to come back. I’d felt all the boots and eyes; we’d crouched in every shadow. It was the only place I knew that could frighten me.

Annie stopped us outside Dolly Oblong’s.

—That’s where I’ll be going when the war’s over. If I’m not too old by then.

—Why, Annie?

—There’ll be no place else for me. There’ll be no more allowances once it’s over and won. Or lost. Whatever way it ends up. The Germans won’t pay us and you republicans won’t be handing out money to the widows of His Majesty’s forces, sure yis won’t?

—We did already. Remember?

—
You
did, Henry. But they’ll never let you do it again.

—I’ll be with you, Annie.

—I don’t want you to start lying on me, Henry, she said.

—I’m not—

—Shut up.

We were moving again, out of Faithful Place, past the corn- and sawmills. Their mixed dusts whirred all around us.

—I don’t know much, Henry, said Annie.—But I do know this: the times never get better for the likes of us.

She pulled my arm.

—Still and all, she said.—There’s a short while as well when they get no worse.

We strolled on down to Amiens Street, around piles of rubble, to Beresford Place. I looked at the Hall from behind one of the pillars of the broken Loop Line. There were soldiers and rozzers on the other side. I didn’t know what they were doing over there. It was just a shell now; there was no one in there and no one coming back.

I heard feet. Lots of them. Marching.

Annie nudged me before I could start looking for ghosts.

—Here’s all your butties now, she said.

And here they were. Marching over Butt Bridge. Several hundred Volunteers and Citizen Army men, familiar faces, not ghosts either although still masked by powder and dirt, and fiercely thin. They were marching between lines of armed troops and other soldiers on bikes, led by a nervous officer on top of a white horse. They turned right, under the bridge, and I was right beside them. I winked at Charlie Murtagh. He saw me and grinned and stopped himself. He leaned and nudged the man beside him, Seán Knowles. Still alive, still alive. And Collins was in there too, in among the Volunteers, half a head over them, out for a stroll.

The crowd that had been following them sensed that their time was nearly up; the men were about to be loaded onto a boat, so the shawlies and scuts ran to catch up and surround them. The parade came out from under the bridge, past the Custom House, towards the North Wall and the waiting cattle boat. There were supporters there too, and people newly converted by the executions, and fighting broke out in the crowd. I let go of Annie and went after them. I picked up a good stone as I ran. The soldiers ducked to avoid stones meant for rebels. I ran ahead of Collins, turned and skimmed the stone on the air. It whacked him neatly and dropped off his shoulder. He grabbed his ear and glared at - and saw me and stopped. Men marched right into his back.

—Will you feed the cat till I get home? he yelled.

He was pushed towards the gangway.

I nodded, and he went on. I dropped back, in case there were government eyes in the crowd. More stones hit him but he didn’t acknowledge them. I watched him walk up into the boat. Annie was gone when I got back to the railway bridge.

On Friday morning, the 12th of May, James Connolly, a dying man in brand-new pyjamas, was brought from the hospital in Dublin Castle to the Stonebreakers’ Yard in Kilmainham Gaol. He was tied to a chair and shot. MacDiarmada had been shot minutes before him, the last two bodies thrown into the pit.

Annie tied her legs around me. She grabbed my hair, to pull me away from the window and the newsboy’s roars. She dragged me back to her side of the bed, dragged, and let go when she realised that I wasn’t resisting. Her legs stayed around me.

—Did you know him? she said.

—No, I said.—Not really. He was dying anyway.

—Poor Henry, she said.

She rubbed the backs of my legs.

—There’ll be no stopping you now, said Annie.—The country’ll be needing new heroes now that the English are after shooting all the old ones. They’ll need new men to shoot and love.

She tightened her leg-hold on me.

—You’ll write that letter to me, won’t you?

—I’ll do it now if you want, I said.

—No, you won’t, she said.—You’ll be too busy.

She lifted herself and climbed onto my chest.

—Now, she said.—Lie back and think of Ireland.

T
hree years on a stolen bike. Through wind, rain and bullets. Henry Smart struck strange, hard blows for Ireland and disappeared.

I did nothing at first, after the last of the executions. I stayed with Annie. I even got work. Annie went out foraging and came back with bread under her shawl and a job for me. Down on the docks.

—Just go up to the stevedore and tell him Piano Annie sent you.

—What’s his name?

—Don’t know. But he has lovely eyes.

I looked for a man with lovely eyes on Custom House Quay and found a fat dwarf standing on a chair and shouting out names over the heads of the dockers who waited at the quay wall.

—Piano Annie sent me.

—Fair enough, said the dwarf.—What’s your name?

—Fergus Nash.

He scratched my new name on the end of his list. We were the same height, with the help of his chair. His eyes didn’t look that lovely to me. They were well hidden behind hair and lids. I wondered what Annie had done to make him show them to her.

—Right, said the stevedore.—O’Malley, he shouted.

The voice was a lot bigger than the rest of him. The ships and boats seemed to creak more as it pushed against them, and it sent the seagulls flapping back out to sea. It lassoed a man walking away from us, down towards George’s Dock. He stopped dead, and turned.

—We won’t be needing you after all, the stevedore shouted.—Go home and have a rest and come back tomorrow. Now, mister, he said to me.—The Inner Dock. Off you go. The good ship
Aristotle
. Ask for Kavanagh and he’ll give you a nice shovel.

I walked past O’Malley. He looked old, ready to lie down, but there was enough of the stuff left in him to spit at the ground I was about to walk on.

—Scab.

I kept going.

—Scab.

I was angry, ready to go after him and lock my jaws to his back but, really, I didn’t blame him. I’d robbed his job. But I’d done it fairly. Every morning for the best part of a year I’d go down to the Custom House and stand with the hundreds of other men, and wait for the stevedore to remember my name. There was no job for life, or even a week. Every day was a fresh start, a terrible wait until the stevedore remembered or forgot you. I saw O’Malley every morning and more often than not, and more and more often during the winter of 1916 and ’17, he went straight back home, wherever that was. He was already an old man at thirty-eight or nine, and me and the other young lads were the ones who were making him old. And one day, in February, a freezing morning that was never going to get any less vicious, there was no O’Malley. That was the end of him. His days as a man were over.

The older men hated the young ones, even when they were their own sons. They saw a new young lad strolling up and perching his arse on a bollard, waiting to be spotted by the stevedore, and they knew that their working days were almost done. The dockers were the toughest men in Dublin, but old ex-dockers were just old, nothing more, old men, like all the other old, broken men crawling around the city. They watched the young lads arriving, shy but big, bursting out of kids’ clothes, raring to burn energy, and they knew it: they were dead. And they hated me more than the other young lads because I could do the work of three of them; I couldn’t help it. They could see it in my shoulders, before I even picked up a shovel; they could see it in my walk and eyes, in the way my cap loved my head. I was the first name off the stevedore’s lips every morning that year. I often wished he’d do the decent thing and ignore me, but he never did.

The
Aristotle
was a crumbling bucket full of coal from Lancashire and I was sent down into its rusting centre with ten other men. All day, on a diet of coal dust and cold tea from a bottle, we filled the tubs that came down to us, dangled over us, blocked out what small light we could grab. I swallowed clouds of dust; I virtually smuggled it off the boat, enough to get any decent fire going. I could taste it, feel it settling in my belly, tumbling towards my lungs. But after four or five hours, I found that I could still talk as I shovelled, small bursts that didn’t leave my mouth hanging open for too long.

—The stevedore, I said.

—What about him?

—How come?

—He’s the stevedore?

—Yeah.

—He shrank, said the man beside me, a chap somewhere in his twenties who still swung his shovel like a show-off.

—Shrank?

—True as God.

—How?

—Don’t know.

We stepped back onto the coal as the full tub was hoisted up out of the boat’s gut. The light lit the dust and the coughing around me intensified; it was easier to breathe in the dark.

—You hear stories, said my new friend.

—Go on.

—Too much of the gee, he said.

—Go on.

—Took all the sap out of him.

I was fourteen, remember: it made sense, although the idea of there ever being too much of anything, especially sex, was out there in the dark, way beyond my experience or imagination.