War Children (6 page)

Later she didn't know how long she'd run for. It might have been five minutes or an hour. She fled through the empty land, falling and getting back up, running and
scrabbling
and pushing herself on. Sometimes she went on her
hands and knees. She couldn't have stopped if she'd wanted to; and she didn't want to stop. She wasn't a child now; in her blank terror she was hardly even human: she was an animal fleeing its death. She could not have fled more
desperately
if there'd been a devil behind her, snapping at her ankles, keen to tear out her heart and her soul. In the end she stopped when she fell for the twentieth time, and this time couldn't get up any more. She lay gasping in great shuddering breaths, pain like a hatchet ripping through her ribs and lungs and chest with every breath she took. Then she passed out.

When she woke up she lay looking at the sky, wondering where and who and what she was. It came back to her like a slap in the face, the memories of screams and shots, the burning tenders and the charred hump of the Auxie driver slumped over the steering wheel in the burned-out cab. She lay shivering in her whole body for a time. Then she caught hold of herself and made herself sit up. She was in a field on a green hill, just inside an open wooden gate. She knew at once where she was, recognising it from a fairy rath by the hedge as one of Caffertys' outlying fields. She was at least three miles from Mulligan's Drop, nowhere near home.

She drew her knees up and buried her face in her skirt. The skirt was ripped and tattered from thorns and hedges she'd burst through, not noticing. Her arms and legs were bleeding from a hundred little cuts. She clasped the torn
arms around the bruised knees and huddled there, shaking. She felt very small in the big world around her. After a long time she made herself stand. She looked around. She saw no-one. The world was silent again except for the birds and the bees and, somewhere, the distant sound of a single motor. She was back in the still, country world that she'd been in before the ambush – her own world. It was hard to believe the assault had happened at all. But she was still shivering, and still bleeding, and she knew that the ambush had happened, all right. It was this world now, this world she had known all her life, that seemed almost a dream.

She'd get nowhere, she knew, standing here like this. She had to go somewhere, to find people. She remembered the cold eyes of the Auxies as they'd focused on her, and the one standing in the waters of the Rasheen who'd actually shot at her. She'd glimpsed something in those cold eyes more terrible than anything else she'd seen in that place, more frightening than the bodies and the burning. She'd seen death there: her death. Auxies were always wild after an ambush – who wouldn't be? They went mad for revenge, and they often burned houses near an ambush site – burned houses, and beat or killed people they thought must have known about the attack or even people who couldn't have known about it. And they'd thought Statia was involved. They'd meant to kill her – she'd seen it in those awful eyes. They might still shoot her if they found her. They might shoot her dead.

She could go to Caffertys', she supposed. But the Auxies might be there already, drunk with vengeful madness. Another cold pang stabbed Statia's gut at the thought. The day was declining now, the sun lower in the sky. There was a first faint breath of coolness in the air. From where the sun stood, Statia guessed she'd been unconscious for maybe two hours. That would have been plenty of time for the Auxies to reach Caffertys' roadside home. But then, with a rush of relief, she realised that was impossible: the great hole blown in the Rasheen bridge would make it
impassable
for the tenders, and the Auxies would have gone nowhere on foot – they might have walked straight into another ambush. Any detour they made, on the other hand, would have taken them well out of the area: the bridge at the Drop was the only one over the Rasheen for miles. And the Auxies were in no state to go looking for revenge anyway. If they'd gone anywhere then they'd have gone back to their barracks, to have their wounded tended. They'd drink, and they'd rage, and when darkness fell they'd darken their faces and they'd pick up their guns and they'd get in other tenders … and then they'd go burning. And it wasn't dark yet. No, the Auxies had certainly just gone back the way they came, as quickly as they could.

For one small minute she nearly relaxed, but then, as another thought struck her, the coldness in Statia's
stomach
came again. It wasn't a stab of cold this time, but a slow, spreading thing like a wave, and it spread till it chilled
her whole body. Because if the Auxies drove back the way they had come, then the first house they'd see on their way back to the barracks, not two miles from Mulligan's Drop, up its long lane on the hill, standing out against the skyline like a landmark, was her own. And even though the sun still shone, and the covering darkness they preferred had not come, they might, in their fury, be tempted.

She was running again before she knew it, with enough wit to close the gate after her this time, but still half-mad. It was at least five miles to home, even going across country. She would have known, if she'd stopped to think, that she couldn't run all that way. But you don't stop to think at such times. Something older than thinking takes over: older, and slyer. Statia now was a hunted fox, hiding in a landscape she knew like the back of her hand. She didn't travel blindly, but moved with a stealth and a speed she could never ordinarily have managed, dodging all but the smallest lanes, taking short-cuts through places too small and too tangled for a fully-grown person to negotiate. She moved fitfully, stopping whenever she heard or imagined a suspicious noise, darting across open spaces, making use of any scrap of cover she could find. And all the time part of her didn't want to be doing this at all. Part of her wanted just to turn and go away, because she was afraid of what she might find.

In her distraught and exhausted condition, it's hard to say whether she'd have made it all the way home. But as it
happened, she didn't need to go the full five miles. She smelled the burning from a long way off, and when she raised up her eyes she saw the thickening column of smoke climbing into the darkening sky. She stopped and stared, knowing what was burning; then, slowly and determinedly now, she began to walk towards the fires.

‘I’m blue in the face talking to him,’ my mother said. ‘It does no good at all. That child is just wilful.’

‘Of course he is,’ my father said. ‘Every child is wilful. It’s part of being young.’

It was me they were discussing, or rather my many
failings
. My mother, as usual, was giving out about me, while my father tried to defend me without actually contradicting her. My father was an easygoing man, a man who valued peace above all else; and in our house that meant making a lot of compromises, because my mother was a woman who had very set opinions on a great number of things. I was in the hall, listening, though I don’t know why I bothered: these conversations always went the same way. My mother would go on about how I was Letting Her Down (‘though it’s yourself you’re letting down, if you only knew it,’ she’d tell me. ‘You’ll realise that one day, when it’s too late to repair your good name.’). My father, while indulging her as best he could, would try to defend me from her worst accusations.

‘I won’t have him answering back like that,’ my mother said. ‘It’s disgraceful.’

‘Oh it is,’ said my father. ‘Totally disgraceful. Still, he owned up straight away. And he does stick by his pals – I like that in a fellow.’

‘That depends,’ said my mother icily, ‘who a fellow’s
pals
are.’

She made the word ‘pals’ sound like something dirty – as in my case, to my mother, it was. This was what lay at the root of the trouble between us. What my mother
disapproved
of so strongly wasn’t so much the things that I did, it was the people that I did them with. When Phil Murphy, the police sergeant, had brought me home earlier that day and told her I’d been playing with a gang that kicked a
football
through a window, my mother hadn’t even asked him who the other boys were. She hadn’t needed to: she’d known.

‘A football?’ she said to Phil Murphy. ‘A bundle of rags wrapped around a stone, you mean. That lot wouldn’t have a football unless they robbed one somewhere.’

Phil Murphy nodded his great red head in agreement.

‘And if they did rob one itself,’ he said, ‘it wouldn’t be the first time. It’s terrible to see such a respectable young boy ruining himself in such company.’

That was the real root of the problem – respectability. We lived in a market town in the midlands, where my father owned and ran the local newspaper. That wasn’t as grand as
it might sound – there were only a few people working on the paper, and my father did most of the writing and even some of the printing. Still, it was
the newspaper
, and that meant we were a highly respectable family by the standards of that most respectable town. Being respectable, to my mother, was terribly important. As a
respectable
boy, I should have mixed with other respectable boys – boys like Eddie Gregg, the pale, lisping doctor’s son, or the insufferably smug Byrnes of the Shannon Vale Hotel, or any one of a dozen tedious merchants’ or publicans’ sons. But I was drawn to boys who
weren’t
respectable – who were, in fact, anything
but
respectable. And that was something my mother could neither stand nor understand.

But ‘respectable’, to me, was another word for boring, and what I liked in a friend were things I never found in the boys she’d have liked me to mix with. I liked boys who were funny, and daring, and lively, and loyal; I liked friends who had a bit of go in them. I found none of these virtues in the boys that my mother favoured. As for the friends that I did have, I was drawn to them mainly because they seemed to me to have all of these qualities in abundance. But as well as that they seemed to have far more interesting lives than I did – in fact, I was downright jealous of their lives. They had freedom, and they had big families that squabbled and fought and made up their quarrels and laughed and cried together in their cramped, lively homes. I, on the other hand, was an only child. Our home was anything but lively.
We never laughed out loud together as a family, or even had a proper row. Those, my mother thought, were uncouth things to do. We were far too respectable for such common behaviour. In our house you could go for hours without hearing any sound beyond the clock ticking, or my mother complaining about the latest maid. In my friends’ houses, where I was accepted without question, I felt I could share a little bit in a bigger sort of life, a common life that, without really knowing it, I suppose I longed to be a part of.

All my friends, do you see, came from the rundown part of the town called Irishtown, where the poor people lived. Irishtown, so far as my mother was concerned, was a sort of moral leper colony. She wouldn’t even hire a servant from there, she said. Between their dirt and their thieving, you wouldn’t know what to sack them for.

‘Irishtown’ always struck me as a funny name: we were all Irish in the town, after all – even the respectable folk. I asked my father about the name one time and he said he supposed there was an Irishtown or Irish Street in every town in Ireland. They were leftover names from the old times, he said, when the Irish weren’t let live in the town proper. This only raised fresh questions in my mind. Who had lived in the town then, I wanted to know, and what
had
become of them? And why hadn’t the Irish been let live in the town proper? This was Ireland, after all: this was their country.

But my father only made a certain face and waved me away.

I suspected, from the face my father made when I asked about it, that the story of Irishtown had something to do with politics. My father had a particular disgusted look that he always got on his face when that subject came up. He had to cover political events in the paper, but that didn’t mean he liked doing it. Our country, he often said, had had too much politics: too much politics and too much
fighting
. For some people it amounted to the same thing. Only a couple of years before there’d been an insurrection in Dublin, when a handful of lunatics had tried to seize the city and declare the country independent – without so much as a by your leave (my mother said) to the people whose ‘freedom’ they said they were fighting for. The army had mopped them up in a week, but a lot of people had been killed and – worse – a lot of property damaged. The upstart rebels had shamed the name of Ireland, my mother said. It was bad enough, she said, having the big war going on in France, draining the life’s blood of Europe; at least – until 1916 – we’d been spared the horror of warfare on our doorstep. But some people wouldn’t be satisfied till they had their own homes burning around them, and their neighbours’ too – especially their neighbours’. Some people were just spiteful like that, she said. It was pure envy.

Most of the other respectable people of the town shared my mother’s view of these things, though I’d noticed that a
lot of the Irishtown folk admired the 1916 rebels. Some of them hung pictures of the rebels’ executed leaders in their houses, cheap prints torn from penny papers and tacked up on the plastered clay walls. I’d asked my father about that, but he’d just said that the poor could afford to favour
revolutions
– they’d less to lose. And he’d warned me, for the hundredth time, never to let my mother know that I
actually
went inside my friends’ houses in Irishtown, because she’d worry about dirt and consumption and lice.

‘You know your mother,’ he said. ‘She gets worried when she has nothing to worry about.’

And she worried endlessly about my friends. They were guilty of the greatest crime she knew: being poor. And that annoyed me. My Irishtown friends were honest, by their own lights, and by anyone’s standards they were
adventurous
. They were also reliable – true blue, as we said then. They were my pals, so I stuck with them, to my mother’s despair.

‘It’s you he gets that off,’ I heard her say in a moment of anger to my father once. ‘You that would talk to any dog in the street.’

Needless to say, we had no dog ourselves: my mother said they were dirty brutes, and would destroy the house. All of my Irishtown friends had dogs, of course, and their dogs had the freedom of their houses and ate the same food as the family – what there was of it. These dogs were mostly mongrel terriers, each with more character, on average,
than most of my mother’s human friends put together. We’d often bring them, in packs, to hunt rabbits – the dogs, I mean – in the fields around the town, or rats in the cramped backyards of Irishtown that backed onto the river. It was great sport, but it was more than sport to my friends: the rabbits were a welcome addition to their households’ larders, while every dead rat was a cause for celebration in those infested shanties. Many’s the baby in Irishtown whose toes would have been nibbled by rats if it hadn’t been for those terriers. Irishtowners loathed rats; they loathed them even more than they loathed policemen. I don’t know that the rats had any particular feelings about the Irishtowners; in the case of the police, though, the loathing was mutual.

Phil Murphy, the sergeant who’d brought me home after the window-breaking, was the special enemy of
Irishtowners
. It wouldn’t be stretching things at all to say that he hated them, and blamed them for every crime that
happened
in our town. They hated him, too; but more
importantly
to Phil Murphy, they feared him. He liked to boast of how the tough men of Irishtown were more fearful of him than of any other man, and he called himself, when the mood was on him, the King of Irishtown.

‘They may have their pictures of rebels,’ he’d say, ‘and talk all they like of republics. But there’s one king they’ll never get rid of in Irishtown, and that’s Phil Murphy.’

Phil Murphy would quite happily have razed Irishtown to the ground, as I heard him say himself on more than one occasion: razed it to the ground with the people still in it, even the women and children. Since he wasn’t allowed to do that, he was content to be its king – and a true tyrant he was.

There were eight policemen in the barracks in our town, and Phil Murphy was in charge of them. He was a giant of a man, even among all those tall policeman. They were
generally
amiable men, the Royal Irish Constabulary, at least in my experience of them. But Phil Murphy was different. He was a former police boxing champion, and I always sensed an air of violence off him that set him apart from other RIC men. I could feel his eye on me down the length of a whole street, and it was rarely my imagination when I did feel it. He took a special interest in me – for my poor parents’ sake, he said. I need hardly tell you that it wasn’t an interest I welcomed.

My mother would always make tea for Phil Murphy when he called, as he did once a week or so, for a social visit. She’d serve it in the best china at the good table in the
parlour
, and give him a big plate of lardy cake to go with it. Phil Murphy loved my mother’s lardy cake. Crumbs of it would stick to his moustache as he ate, and every now and then he’d lick them off with a flick of his thick red tongue. He was really a huge man, very tall and bulky, with red face and hair and a big, drooping red moustache that hung over his top lip like a fringe. His neck was red too, thick and fat and red. In our parlour he’d carefully take off his cork-lined
helmet and put it daintily down among the tea things on the table. From the collar up then he was red, and from the collar down he was the dark bottle green of his uniform. He and my mother would discuss me over the tea, while I sat sullenly listening and pretending not to. Sometimes I’d glance up slyly, but Phil Murphy’s cool blue eyes would always catch me.

They always talked about me as though I wasn’t there.

‘You’d think he’d have more sense all the same,’ Phil Murphy would say to my mother. ‘Sure, there’s not one of them boyos that hasn’t had kin in trouble – brothers and fathers and, aye, probably grandfathers. And the women are no better. They’re a bad lot up there in Irishtown, ma’am. Criminality runs in their very blood.’

‘I’ve tried everything,’ my mother would confess in despair. ‘Even beating him does no good.’

‘I suppose at their age, now, it’s mostly harmless enough,’ Phil Murphy would say. ‘But it will be very different in a couple of years. What’s play in a child isn’t always so playful in a young man. What’s play for a child can land a young man in the law-courts. And it wouldn’t be a nice thing for his father to have to write about his own son in the court reports in your own paper. And then, of course, you’d wonder even now what some people would be thinking, seeing such a
respectable
child running wild with the dregs of the town.’

He had, I knew, put his finger on the core of my mother’s problem. In the end her worries had nothing to
do with me at all. What really worried her was how my doings might reflect on her, and on her social standing: what would the other ‘decent’ people think of her, letting me loose in the streets with the despised ones? By ‘decent’ people my mother meant the merchant and professional classes of the town – the sort of people she came from. Most of them, like herself, were the descendants of people who’d run the same businesses before them, a little clutch of
families
who’d controlled the town since the last century. Such people viewed the residents of Irishtown with an open
hostility
made up of suspicion, dislike and contempt. In their hearts I suspected they viewed everyone like that, but in the case of Irishtowners they took no trouble to hide it. I knew that these merchants – all pillars of society, pillars of the Church, pillars of the local councils and societies for the improvement of this and that, and notorious, some of them, for their slyness and penny-pinching, their deceit and their greed, some even owning the rundown hovels where my friends were forced to live – viewed my friends and all belonging to them as the scum of the earth. I got angry whenever I thought about that, so I thought of it as little as I could. My loyalty to my friends got me in enough trouble; I dreaded to think how my mother might react if she ever found out what I really felt about the ‘decent’ people whose good opinion she so fretted over.