After the Lockout (2 page)

‘I thought that was only for proper bishops?'

‘An auxiliary bishop is a proper bishop.'

In his study Stanislaus set the little post-office envelope on his desk beside the newspaper he hadn't yet read and sat down. He picked up the telegram, sliced it open, then set it down again. Unready. He looked around the bulging bookshelves that lined three walls of the room. They made the place claustrophobic. He turned the chair around, as he always did, to the window, which commanded a view straight down the middle of Madden village. The chapel, the graveyard, National School, Parochial Hall, post office and Poor Ground; all the comings and goings were under his gaze. He could almost see into the terraced homes of his parishioners. The women were indoors, the men were in the fields, the children were at school. Red flags fluttered from homes and telegraph posts, and bunting crisscrossed the street, but aside from that, things were mostly right with Madden. He looked again at the telegram. Whatever it contained, it was bound to vex him. He picked up the newspaper instead.

ULYANOV ‘LENIN' DECLARES RUSSIA ‘WORKERS' STATE'

He threw it down again. Once, this had been his favourite time of day. Morning mass finished, pastoral visits done, he'd have an hour to look out the window and read the paper. The symmetry of keeping one eye on his parish and the other on the events of
the world pleased him. But since the war, there had been nothing but bad news, and it was all Russia these days. There was no pleasure left in his ritual. He was no monarchist and did not miss the tsar – a king who couldn't feed his people didn't deserve to be a king – but these Bolshevists … Ulyanov had said the events last Easter gave an example to be followed and it seemed Dublin last year had its sequel in Petrograd this year.

The clock chimed four. Father Daly, the curate, came in the door like an unbroken colt and said Mrs Geraghty had told him of the telegram. Stanislaus nodded and the curate picked it up, his fringe flopping over his forehead as he opened it. He set it back on the desk, text facing up. Stanislaus couldn't help but see it now.

VL arrive 10 o'clock train STOP
Need transport from station CQ STOP

‘So he's coming then,' said Father Daly. ‘Do you think he'll be able to get his father back on the straight and narrow?'

‘We must hope so.'

They had given up any hope that Pius Lennon might sort himself out. Stanislaus called often but the door was never answered. Pius's life seemed to revolve entirely around poteen; a lamentable state for a man formerly so substantial. He had taken to wandering the parish at all hours of day and night, flaming drunk, with a bottle in one hand and a loaded shotgun in the other. Not long ago he wandered up the street while the school-children were on their break, scattering them in terror. The postman Jeremiah McGrath said he remembered when Pius Lennon first came to the parish to marry his Deirdre, before he became
the respected pillar that Stanislaus knew. Jeremiah said people were right to be terrified of Pius.

‘His method is different but I fear Pius is going the same way as his wife,' said Stanislaus.

Pius owned several hundred acres in the east of the parish and Madden's economy had long depended on the Lennon land. Pius had started his drinking after his Deirdre's death. They said Deirdre had been the belle of the county in her day, but when Stanislaus knew her, that had been hard to credit. He'd had no choice in refusing her a funeral or burial. Church teaching was clear and unequivocal. The drinking accelerated as each of Pius's children left, one by one, till they were all gone. Now he lived reclusively, letting his land go to ruin, and no longer offered work to anyone. So Stanislaus had compiled a list of the Lennon children and all the places to which they had emigrated, and wrote to the Cardinal's office for church contacts in each place. The reply came quickly. It seemed he still drew some water in Armagh. He wrote to parishes and dioceses around the world and, over several months, the replies came. Stanislaus was flattered that some of his colleagues in far-flung places had heard of him and were familiar with his work. They were keen to assist. He got addresses for all but one of the fifteen Lennon children. Of the fourteen, he knew the Sarah girl was only thirty miles away at the Monastery of St Catherine of Siena, but he would not interfere with her vocation. The fifteenth name he circled in red ink. He had no address for that one. It would be a last resort even if he did have one. He sent out thirteen letters.

Six, seven, eight months passed. Jeremiah McGrath assured him nothing was wrong with the long-distance mail, even with the war, and slowly Stanislaus came to accept that there would be no replies. The name circled in red ink rebuked him. The Victor fellow had left Madden boasting of Brooklyn or Botany Bay, but everyone knew he was in Dublin since his name had appeared in the margins of the press during the industrial unrest. He had been a minor figure, not a Larkin or a Countess Markievicz, and Stanislaus had denounced Larkin's union from the pulpit, as per the Cardinal's policy, but he knew the parishioners had a sneaking regard for ‘their' Victor. When their Victor joined the insane adventure of Easter week, sneaking regard flowered into strident pride. No-one from Madden had ever been famous before.

Victor's best friend Charlie Quinn had volunteered to go to Dublin to find him. Stanislaus asked Charlie whether he thought Victor would agree to come home. Charlie said he didn't know.
What he was willing to predict, though, was that Victor would still be every bit as angry as he was the day he left Madden. Stanislaus was discomfited to think of the rage-filled boy coming back into his life a full-grown man. He pushed the newspaper across the desk under Father Daly's nose and pointed to the Ulyanov headline.

‘This is the kind of man we're talking about. A bolshevist, you know,' he snapped.

‘He can't be that bad if he was with Connolly, God rest him,' said Father Daly.

‘Connolly was a communist.'

‘Only in life. No-one will remember that whole communist thing in the long run.'

Stanislaus got up from his desk. He had no intention of debating with a guileless liberal not five minutes out of the seminary. ‘I'm going for a walk,' he said. He went downstairs, opened the door and pulled on his coat as he strode out the gate into the street. He grimaced at the red bunting and flags as he passed under them. Otherwise good parishioners openly disobeying his injunction – and the Cardinal's – against Gaelic games. They'll all be thrilled when they hear of their Victor Lennon's return, he thought. He whispered a prayer for the peace of the parish.

It's your stick. You found it. It's the best stick you've ever seen: three feet long, thick but pliable enough to bend double without cracking. Your brothers are jealous of it. Charlie's jealous of it. Even Maggie's jealous of it, and she's a girl. You use it to hunt, to fish and a hundred other things. It's yours, and the bastard thinks he can just
take it. Phelim Cullen. You know the name. Everyone does. He's three years older than you, looks like he's nearly six foot, fifteen and out of school with the cigarette to prove it. He tells you to go away, stop pestering him. You are far from home, five or six miles at least, in his parish to watch the Madden footballers take another hammering. It's his parish and he says he's keeping your stick. He's laughing but he's threatening to lose his good humour any second. But it's your stick and he can't have it, no matter what.

‘You rotten thieving bastard.'

His expression darkens and he swings the stick at you with a terrifying whoosh. Last warning. Christ but he's a vicious bastard. Charlie and Maggie are looking at you with pleading, terrified eyes.

‘If you don't hand over the stick I won't be responsible for what happens to you.'

The crowd gathered around winces as his open palm cracks loudly against your cheek. A slap in the face. Wouldn't even dignify you with a closed fist.

Well, you'll dignify him with one.

He doesn't see it coming. Not in a million years did he think you'd do it. He's stunned, and he's not the only one. Your fist opens his nose like a knife through a feed sack. You swing again and again and the blows land again and again, till he drops your stick and flees like a beaten dog. You pick up your stick, gingerly, since your knuckles are bruised and bloodied. But it's not your blood.

Charlie and Maggie look at you differently now. It's like they're scared. You're a little scared yourself.

Charlie follows me onto the Number 14 tram. My old route. Once upon a time I knew every tram driver in Dublin but I don't recognise this young, ignorant-looking fellow with the shirt collar too small on him. He yanks the handbrake too sharply and rings the bells like he's Quasimodo. Everything about him screams non-union. A bastard scab. We sit down among the well-heeled, law-abiding south-siders and trundle past Carson's house, the Stephen's Green and the College of Surgeons, still pocked and scorched by bullet and fire. Ladies in expensive fabrics promenade prettily beneath the awnings of Grafton Street. They're carrying parasols. In Ireland. In November. Businessmen, bankers, professionals in starched collars walk stiffly around College Green, Trinity College, Westmoreland Street. Little boys and girls strut after their parents in collars and jackets and short pants, and there's a fat Metropolitan peeler on every corner watching protectively over the oppressing class. We cross the Liffey to the north side, where the oppressed live. The Kapp and Peterson building stands on the corner of Bachelor's Walk and the street they call Sackville and we call O'Connell, unscathed and alone like a cigar stump in an ashtray. Further up, the shell of the General Post Office stands at the centre of a square half-mile of rubble. I look at Charlie. At where his leg used to be. I shake my head. ‘What possessed you? Home Rule? Rights of Small Nations?'

‘Can't say it was. Can't say I even understand what any of that stuff means.'

‘Little Catholic Belgium then, being raped by the Protestant Hun?'

‘I didn't give a damn about Belgium nor about the Hun either. I just wanted to see what this Great War was like. I wanted to get a gun, see a bit of the world, and feel like a grown man.'

The bastard scab announces the Nelson Pillar and we hop off, electric cables crackling overhead. We reach Montgomery Street. Canvas awnings promising Meats, Drugs, Tobacco or News shade the broad pavements of Monto and gentlemen in fine suits walk quickly with their heads down, hoping not to be seen. A gang of malnourished, barefooted gurriers, none more than ten or eleven, idle by the corner and eye us suspiciously. There's an army of gurriers in this city, I see them all the time, trying to huckster a living either side of the tram line. Some beg, some pick pockets, some shine shoes or hawk early editions of
The Herald
. These lads are typical: bony and dirt-caked with narrow, cynical slits for eyes and cigarettes clamped between black teeth. ‘Have you a penny to give these lads?' I say, and Charlie stops to rummage in his tunic. I take a couple of pence from my pocket.

‘Ah, keep your money, mister. You're Citizen Army, aren't ye?' says one of the gurriers. I nod. ‘We'll not take an'ting off you, but we'll take it off your man.' He points to Charlie, ‘John fucken Bull, wha?'