Fallen (24 page)

A small thrill of recognition went through me.

‘But now, I fancy, I'll strike out on my own.'

‘What will you do?'

He stretched his legs and stood up, went over to the broken window and looked out. His entire attitude changed. He went very still. ‘Fire,' he said.

‘Where?'

He hurried to the door under the front steps. I went after him but he told me to stay where I was while he moved cautiously out towards the road, sheltered by the steps. When he got to the end, he straightened. ‘Come here,' he said. ‘Look.'

Down at the main road, the terrace on the town side of the bridge was on fire. Flames shot out of the window on the gable wall of Clanwilliam House.

‘Is there anyone still in there?' I asked, when I could speak.

‘Not alive.' There was no emotion in his answer.

‘There are people there, watching. Can we go?'

‘There's a guard at the end of the road. They wouldn't let us through. If they did, we wouldn't get back.'

‘But –'

‘Why must you always try to get a closer look at things that are perfectly evident?'

Stung, I backed away from him. I excused myself and went back inside.

Upstairs, I took off my stale blouse, rinsed it and wrung it out. Thinking I might go to bed, I sponged my skirt clean. By the time I'd hung it up to dry over the bath, I already regretted my efforts. I was far too restless for sleep.

In the wardrobe of the room I was sleeping in, I found a summer dress of Dote's, a pale blue lawn that might have been fashionable twenty years ago. It was pleated on the bodice, had a high neck and tiny buttons on the long cuff. A
little on the short side, it was loose at the waist and smelled of mothballs, but it was the best I could find. I tied the crimson and gold sash of this morning's robe around it. Hard to imagine Dote filling a dress like this, she was half the size now.

My hands trembled, but I wasn't cold. It must have been a reaction to the day. When I'd managed a knot of sorts, I went to the window and tried to make out what was happening at the corner.

Hubie came in, holding Paschal. ‘He was hiding under my bed.'

Paschal came to me and buried his face in my shoulder. He bunched the soft fabric of the dress in his fist and crammed it into his mouth. I stroked his back and looked past him, at Hubie. He'd put on a smoking jacket over a clean white shirt.

‘Katie,' he said. ‘Come away from the window.'

‘What'll happen now?' I gestured at the smouldering ruins of the houses by the bridge. The shadowy figures of sentries on the road. Night deepened. As I watched, the last light dwindled and sank into the earth.

‘I'll tell you what I think, but let's have a drink.' He moved back towards the door that was open to the landing. I followed him, as in a dream: down the stairs and around to the back of the house. Paschal breathed into the crook of my neck. Hubie was talking, his voice a thread pulling me along behind him. What we'd seen that afternoon had raised the stakes. They could expect no mercy now. There'd be rage in high command. ‘They'll see us all, every man, woman and child, as potential traitors.'

I stared at the floor. Carpet, stair, floorboard, black-and-white tiles, rug, tile, board, rug. Each step weighted. My ears rang.

‘What you mean is,' I said, when we'd reached the back parlour and the cabinet where the spirits were kept, ‘that the
army won't trust our men now, on the Continent. They'll be undermined.'

‘Most likely.' He was looking at labels on the bottles in the inadequate light from the lamp he'd brought in from the kitchen. ‘There's not much oil left.'

‘Have you a match?'

He passed me a box from his pocket. I took one out and fingered the small round tip before striking it. The matchhead scratched and flared, a neat, blue-and-gold teardrop of flame, strangely pure and clean. I dipped it towards each of the candles on the mantel in turn, making a small forest of light.

My eye was drawn to Paschal's reflection in the mirror. He clambered among the bookshelves behind me, as though he'd a particular volume in mind. He stopped to scratch, caught me looking at him and returned my look, as if he knew all about me. More than he should. His teeth chattered. It sounded like a scolding. I turned around, patted the seat of May's chair. ‘Come down here and be quiet.' He jumped to my shoulder and I settled him on the chair. ‘So, after today, all those other deaths will mean nothing. Liam died for nothing.'

Hubie steadied a bottle of Irish between what was left of his hand and his belt. He pulled off the lid with his left hand and poured generous measures into two glass tumblers.

‘I was proud to be a soldier,' he said. ‘Proud of our regiment, of the BEF. It'll be a fiasco now, once Kitchener's Mob are let loose, in conditions a professional soldier would have trouble with. Poor sods. It's not their fault.'

I stiffened. ‘Kitchener's Mob – do you mean men like Liam, with not enough training?'

‘Liam was quick to learn.' He put the lid back on the bottle, meticulous in tightening it with his left hand, holding it steady with his forearm. He put the bottle back in its place
but didn't pick up the glasses straight away. ‘We were at the Marne, you know. That was a battle worth fighting. We stopped the Germans' march on Paris. That was the last clear victory we had, and it's more than a year and a half ago.' He offered me a glass.

I took it. ‘They'll never give us our own parliament now. We were about to get it, when the war started.'

‘I disagree. They never meant to give it. All Irishmen are Mick, to them.'

‘Liam thought, if we all fell in to fight beside them, they'd see how trustworthy we were. That we could be allies.'

I looked into the glass he'd given me and set it on the mantel. I didn't want it. I'd never liked the taste. Hadn't touched it since the night we heard that Liam was dead. The night I went looking for Con Buckley. My cheeks were hot. I was glad Hubie didn't look at me. All the little tongues of flame from the lamp and the candles caused the air to shimmer, darken, turn to gold, then black again.

‘I've had enough of fighting to other people's purpose.' He crossed to the armchair and sat. ‘A cause is one thing. Men enlisted to fight this war for their own reasons, but by the time they'd put on a uniform, khaki or grey or blue, they'd surrendered their right to pursue them. Their will bent to the purposes of idiot generals. Incompetent colonels. And whose purpose did those commanders serve? The King? The Kaiser? Parliament? I will never again raise a gun against another man at the whim of some MP from Yorkshire or Leeds or London – or Dublin, come to that. Never.' He brought his voice under control. ‘Did I kill men because the bloody Kaiser wanted it? Whose will directed me?' He glared at me.

‘I don't know.'

‘I won't do it. Those men out there, the rebels – who authorized any one of them to bring about a single death today? What had any of those boys who were slaughtered on
the bridge to do with this benighted country? Nothing. Did they ask to come here? No.'

The candles wavered. Their flames swayed across wells of shadow. The mirror blazed, a sheet of white gold. ‘I may well kill a man, again. But, if I do, my reasons will be my own. I'll know what they are.' He said this with the force of someone taking a solemn vow, the embodiment of determination. His two fists were knotted, so tight you couldn't see that one was damaged.

I was spellbound. When I'd wanted to go to college, it was at least in part because Liam was going and, if I was completely honest, in part because my mother didn't want me to. Even working for Dote had been a lucky accident. How unconscious I had been of luck, and how very lucky I had been. I'd never consciously chosen a single thing. I'd left all that to Liam, waited to see what life would chance to offer me.

Paschal had fallen asleep in May's chair, curled up on a red velvet cushion. One callused hand covered his eyes. His breath whistled lightly through the black flare of his nose. The sound of his breathing slowed everything down. My mind emptied. The day, and all its angers, ebbed away. The room was calm again, the candle flames were separate tongues, demure and steady.

‘Where did you go, this morning?'

‘Down by the river.' His tone was lighter. ‘Near Merchant's Arch. There was a crowd on the quays looking over. The bombardment lasted hours. They pumped lead into those buildings 'til there couldn't be so much as a rat left alive in them. A fellow beside me said the men were probably long gone; they'd likely knocked holes in the walls and got out that way, into the next building.'

‘D'you think he's right?'

‘They'd enough time to do it. I can't imagine what kept the army away for so long. The rebels could have knocked holes
in all the buildings around, made them into one long escape tunnel the length of the street. And if Joe Soap has arrived at that conclusion, you can be sure the army have as well. They'll pulverize it.'

‘The building?'

‘The street.'

Sackville Street. An extension of my own street. The heart of my city.

Strange sounds outside brought us up to the front parlour. Hubie looked out through the chink in the shutters, craned to see better, edged them open a little further for a better look. ‘They're setting up a field gun,' he said.

‘Let me see.'

He stood close while I looked. A group of soldiers surrounded what looked like an old-fashioned cannon, mounted on a type of cart, a couple of doors up from here, towards Northumberland Road.

‘That can't be good.' I straightened, and bumped against him. My skin prickled.

‘At least we're on the right side of it,' he said, somewhere near my hair.

The room, when I turned back into it, was darker. I dipped a taper to a candle to catch the flame, cupped my hand around it for shelter and carried it from one unlit wick to the next. The skin of my palm glowed, pink and translucent.

It had been a long, strange day, a day that plunged us into war and brought me closer to Liam and all he'd come to know. And here, across the room, was a man who'd been out there with him. It was like sorcery. Maybe he was a ghost, a messenger, and I should play along. We settled in our chairs again. With our drinks, the remains of Nan's ginger cake and the last two apples sliced on two plates, it was nearly like a normal social encounter. But it felt strange, to be so alone with
him, and the whole night stretching ahead. Watching him eat, I felt the ghosts of his missing fingers, holding him back.

‘Tell me about Liam. Why was he not more careful?'

He said nothing for a while. Then, ‘When we got to him he was alive. There was blood under his hair, but it was his stomach he held.'

I played with the fringes of the antimacassar. ‘A year ago this week.'

‘Yes.'

I was at a window again. Popping sounds came from everywhere, like a fireworks display without light. I checked the sky in the direction of the hospital, where Eva was, and the boy soldier. There was no sign of fire there. ‘It's so dark. How do they know what they're shooting? What's the point of it? Maybe they'll run out of bullets, and in the morning we can all go home again.' I looked over my shoulder at his hunched form.

He sucked in a chestful of smoke, examined the tip of his cigarette, blew across it. It flared. ‘Things happen you've no control over.'

I came back and sat near him. ‘Tell me.'

‘Only a few weeks earlier, we'd to watch their infantry bayonet our wounded. They came at us, and we let loose – I don't know how to describe it, we were possessed. When we got up there and had them surrounded, they dropped their guns.
Mercy, mercy
.' He put on the accent, his face grim.

I was afraid to say anything that might break his trance of remembering, of letting things spill out unfiltered. He shook his head, the way a dog clears water from its coat. ‘Not bloody likely. Not after that.'

‘Liam wrote to me about that,' I said, thinking that, like Hubie, he'd never finished the story. He never said what had happened next.

Yesterday they came at us, the biggest show yet. We started out, but
they poured over from their line and we fell back. You should have seen how we fired to hold them off, more than the fifteen shots a minute, but they kept coming. They came with bayonets ready. Any of ours they found wounded, they finished them. They ripped young Michael Slattery open. His screams were terrible. Rage kept us firing. Our guns overheated. Fat oozed out of them. A captain ran up and down the line pouring oil on the stocks. We overcame them. When they were surrounded, they threw their weapons down and begged for their lives. Kamerad!

I'd nothing but murder in my heart. The silence fell on me as though I were dreaming. All you at home can't begin to imagine the extent of the destruction, the laying waste. The human spirit itself is being slaughtered, here
.

I don't know if it was Hubie that trembled, talking, or me, listening to Liam's words inside his. The whole room was unstable, the walls threatened to tear free from the ceiling, the floorboards wanting to buckle and pitch us out into the horrible night. ‘I read in the papers that their bayonets are terrible. Toothed, like a saw you'd take to a plank. That the worst wounds are inflicted on the way out.'

‘Ours were little better. They're useless now. Hopelessly outdated. But we still have to use them. You've no notion, the savagery. Do you know what they told us in training? If you strike badly, or too deep, and your bayonet gets stuck inside a man? Load a charge, and fire. The recoil will do the rest.'

‘Oh!' I couldn't help the sound that escaped me, or the hand that flew to my mouth too late to catch it. He stared off, blind to me again. He may as well have been alone.

He stubbed out his cigarette, then thought better of it and struggled to light another one. I took a match from the box and struck it, held it steady for him. He cupped the flame with his good hand and drew in the smoke.