Carn
Authors: Patrick McCabe
To Dympna and Bernard McCabe
Contents
I
The night the railway closed.
That was the night the clock stopped in the town of Carn, half a mile from the Irish border.
For over a hundred years, the black steam engines with their tails of smog had hissed into the depot at the edge of the town.
It was inconceivable that it would ever be any other way.
So when the official from the headquarters of the Great Northern Railway arrived to address the assembled employees, they were somewhat taken aback by his frosty detachment. “Do you
realise?” he said, “that there are as many passengers using this line now as there were a hundred years ago?”
He went on to read them lists of percentages and figures, quoting from various complex documents. They looked at him open-mouthed. Then he removed his spectacles and said, “We are left
with little choice but to close down the branch line in Carn.” He said that they greatly regretted the decision but it had been given very careful thought and it had been decided that there
was no other possible course of action. Then he said goodbye and was gone.
The workers were stunned. They cursed and swore and went from that to reason and desperation and how to cut costs. They stayed in the Railway Hotel bar until the small hours, but the more they
argued and debated the more helpless they felt. They went over his words again and again. And the more they repeated them, the more they realised how serious he was. By the time they emerged into
the light of the morning, it had well and truly sunk in.
By the end of 1959, there would be no railway in the town of Carn.
After that, all talk of the railway began to gradually recede and after a while it was as if it had never existed. The place went to rack and ruin. Within a matter of weeks, the town plummeted
from aristocrat to derelict. Under cover of darkness, rocks were hurled through the windows of the depot. Sleepers were torn up and used to make garden fences, or simply left to rot on waste
ground. Paint peeled off doors. Many of the workers emigrated to England and America, standing with their suitcases on The Diamond, waiting for the bus to take them to the ferry terminals of Dublin
and Belfast. Those who remained loitered at the street corners, dividing their time between the bookmaker’s and the public house. They turned away sourly from each other and looked up and
down the deserted main street. It got to the stage where no one expected anything good to happen ever again. It might happen elsewhere, but it would not happen in Carn. Not as far as they were
concerned.
Above the jeweller’s shop the clock stood still at three o’clock and nobody bothered to fix it—and that was the way it stayed for a long time.
On a warm summer’s evening in 1965, when James Cooney, formerly of The Terrace, Carn, drove his Zephyr down the main street of the town, he could not believe his eyes. He
stared aghast at the dilapidated shopfronts and the cluster of lethargic layabouts at the corner, at the broken pump skitting its umbrella of water all over the cracked paving slabs. He shook his
head and turned the car towards the outskirts where he had just bought a new bungalow. As he lay in bed that night, his mind was whirring with schemes and possibilities.
At fifty years of age, he knew now, he hadn’t even started.
It was not long before the citizens of Carn began to notice the imposing figure of James Cooney. They remembered him as a quiet retiring youth who had worn his brother’s trousers three
sizes too big for him and carted offal from the abattoir in a zinc bucket. They found it hard to reconcile their hazy memories of him with the confident strut of the man who now walked the streets
daily. They assumed he was on holiday.
But it soon became apparent that James Cooney was on no holiday. His wife and children were installed lock stock and barrel in the bungalow. James Cooney had come to stay.
He’s mad, they said.
He’ll rue the day he left America or England or wherever the hell he was to come back here to this kip. Godforsaken hole. Someone suggested that he had been run out of America.
“I’d like to know what has him here all the same,” said another.
It was not long however before news of his intentions reached their ears.
A factory? they said. Then they shook their heads.
It won’t work. Look at the railway.
In the bars, former classmates said of him, “Who does he think he is? I remember Mr Clarke booting him around the classroom. He couldn’t add two and two.” Many of them vowed to
have nothing whatever to do with his projects. They weren’t going to be caught out twice. They would show James Cooney they weren’t born yesterday. They were no fools.
But James didn’t mind. He just shrugged his shoulders and looked elsewhere for assistance. It didn’t take him long to realise that there were many in the neighbouring towns across
the border who would be more than willing to give him all the help they could.
And when the skeleton of metal girders appeared on the skyline, erected by northmen who crossed the border enthusiastically in their cars every day, the most vehement opponents of James Cooney
began to re-assess their position. As the building went on and the structure took shape, the people began to regret their lack of co-operation. Their sons and daughters became impatient when they
saw the northmen drinking in the public houses. There was nothing they could do but swallow their pride. To cover their tracks they began to praise James Cooney from the heights. They said he had
been the best pupil ever in the primary school. They invented stories of his childhood enterprise and industry. They claimed that his good fortune abroad had come as no surprise to them. Then they
packed off their children to the factory where the neon letters
CARN MEAT PROCESSING PLANT
rose boldly over the meagre rooftops of the town.
The streets filled up with cars. Workers thronged the square and The Diamond at lunch hour. The plant horn hooted every morning as if to say, “Wake up Carn!”
The jeweller’s clock had to be fixed so that the workers could be back in time after lunch. James Cooney called them all by their Christian names and winked intimately at them as he passed
by on the factory floor. He gave them bonuses for extra effort so that by the time the factory had been in operation a mere year the workers were so absorbed in their work the only people left who
cared anything for the railway or even the memory of it were the old people with one foot in the grave.
After he had crossed that hurdle, it was a clear run for James Cooney. He seemed to be everywhere at once. He organised festivals and opened them himself. His photograph stared
almost every week from the front page of the local newspaper. He became president of numerous societies and chairman of the council. All in the space of one year. It seemed that from deep inside
his bungalow on the edge of town he was transmitting atomic energy that was rapidly changing everything for miles around.
Having observed the success of James Cooney, a teenage girl just out of school rented a premises for herself and filled it with clothes she had bought in the city. Above the door she painted a
sign in crazy whorled lettering: “She-Gear for She-Girls!” Then a television shop opened up offering attractive rental rates and in no time at all the humdrum daily conversation had
been invaded and supplanted by the interweaving plots of American soap operas.
A businessman from across the border moved into town and set up a supermarket, the like of which had never been seen before in the county not to mention the town. Vast lettering promised
ridiculous knockdown bargains.
THE FIVE
-
STAR SUPERMARKET
it was called. Its proprietor, a mild-mannered man with a soft northern voice, got to know
all the locals by name and slipped many of them small presents with their first orders. His name was Alec Hamilton and before long, they were speaking of him as if he and all belonging to him had
been living in the town for generations. The supermarket became the most popular shopping centre for miles around.
But not to be outdone, James set his wheels in motion once more. He purchased the run-down parish hall, painted it a garish pink and completely refurbished its interior. He fixed a giant
imitation precious stone above the door. This premises became known as
THE SAPPHIRE BALLROOM
. Where once shy young couples had jigged to the sound of an accordeon band, now
abrasive youths aped dance crazes from England and America. Bikers from northern towns loitered at the back of the hall. The dancers hung about the streets until all hours singing and cheering,
then parped their car horns noisily all the way home.
James Cooney’s appetite was well and truly whetted by the success of his dance hall venture. He purred inwardly when it was said to him, “Just how do you do it?” Other
businessmen felt three inches tall beside him.
It was to put himself out in front once and for all that he decided to build the Turnpike Inn. On his way home from one of his routine visits to the factory he dropped into a hostelry,
ostensibly to have a bottle of stout but in fact to put a proposition to the grey-haired owner with the white apron. When he heard what James had to say, the owner screwed up his face and muttered
to himself saying, “I don’t know Mr Cooney.” But James Cooney’s time in Boston and New York had taught him nothing if not persistence so day after day he haunted the place
until the owner’s spidery signature went on the piece of paper that he produced from his pocket. When the owner went out to tell his wife, James Cooney had a good look at his new acquisition.
The smell from the outside toilet wafted to his nostrils. Slops dripped indolently on to the sticky tiles. “Jee-zus,” he said under his breath.