A Star Called Henry (16 page)

—Cock-a-doodle-doo, said Paddy Swanzy, beside me.

I listened for gunshots or shouting but there was nothing, no loud or hurrying noises from above. I searched the dark for my boots and shook blood into my legs; they’d gone numb in the britches. There was light coming from the big room to the left, and a smell with it.

—Porridge, said Paddy.—That’ll stop the bullets. There’s murder going on over at City Hall. They say. The Devil’s Half-Acre is submerged in blood and liver.

I listened again but could still hear nothing.

—Whose blood? Theirs or ours?

—Most of it’s imported, said Paddy.

He was joking. He knew as well as I did: most of the British soldiers were Irish. Irishmen who’d needed the work. And anyway, we’d nothing against Englishmen either, or Scots or Welshmen. We were fighting a class war. We weren’t in the same battle at all as the rest of the rebels. And they’d find that out soon enough.

I stood up, strapped on my bandolier and joined the queue of men still numb and crooked from the night. The porridge in the air set my stomach yapping. I grabbed a bowl from a card table and held it out to be filled.

—Two and two?

I was looking at two brown boots that had a woman’s toes neatly packed into their points.

—Don’t know. Two and two what?

—Bottles.

—What’s in them?

—Porter.

I looked at her.

—Four.

—I knew it was you, said Miss O’Shea.

—It’s me alright. It always has been.

—You’re still a great one for the answers.

Brown-black eyes and floating slivers of hair that had escaped from a bun behind her head. It had been five years since I’d last seen her, since Mother the Nun had come into the classroom and ended my education. She hadn’t changed a bit; the five years had done no damage. But I’d changed, of course. I was up over her now and, as I stood there, I could remember what I’d been like when I’d knocked on her door, with Victor. I could feel Victor beside me; I could feel his sweat in my hand. Henry, the small, filthy boy who’d been a whopper for his age was now a man, and big for any age. He was tall and broad with the skin and hair born of sound blood and clean living. The sores and crusts had fallen off me. I was a sparkling young man; I fought every day for my cleanliness. My eyes were blue and fascinating whirlpools; they could suck in women while warning them to stay well away, a fighting combination that had them running at me. And I knew exactly what my eyes could do.

And Miss O’Shea hadn’t even got to them yet. She was still feeding on my britches. I stood at ease and let her. She was mesmerised. I looked down at the bun that had been above me the last time I’d seen it. It was a mass of the finest brown hair, endless hair that was dying for fingers to comb it. And, under it, her neck, and my eyes slid down to the start of her Cumann na mBan uniform. And the badge on her breast, the rifle held by the slender curling letters.
C na mB
. She saw me and blushed and I remembered that too.

—You still have your leg, she said.

It was in my holster, my da’s leg, varnished and ready to knock heads for Ireland.

—I do, I said.—I’ll be seeing you.

And I left her there, dangling. I went into a corner and downed my porridge. It was early days. There’d be more porridge and, with a bit of luck, wounds to swab and bandage. We’d be seeing each other again. Miss O’Shea wasn’t going anywhere, and neither was I.

Another day of waiting. Day Two of the Revolution and I was already bored. Staring out at the empty street and the rain. Listening to the far gunfire, waiting for it to come closer. Waiting to be surprised. Wanting it. Badly. Wanting to shoot and wreck and kill and ruin. But Dublin, that part of it outside my window, didn’t really wake up at all. No trams now, four empty tramlines outside, no hawkers, hardly any people, or acknowledgement that we were ready and wanting a fight. Only the odd group or individual coming up to the window. Most were bored and some were angry, kept from their work. They remembered the hunger of the Lockout, and they were blaming us now.

—You’re a shower of irresponsibles.

—Is Mick Malone in there with yis? He has the keys to the print-shop and we can’t get in.

—Nothing but a shower of irresponsibles.

—Tell him we’ll have to break the door down or lose a day’s pay and the foreman says the door’ll come out of his wages if he still has the job when he comes back.

—Where’s Mick Malone? I shouted.

—With de Valera, said Felix Harte.

—He’s over in Boland’s Bakery, I told the young fella outside, under my barricade.

—What’s he doin’ there?

—Eating all the fig rolls, said Paddy Swanzy.

The Cumann na mBan women were cycling all over the city and coming back with news. The stories were flying, facts and rumours and little bits of extra we made up ourselves to get us through the day. There was full-scale war going on out at Ashbourne; Thomas Ashe and Dick Mulcahy were up to their thighs in Saxon gore and cow shite. Michael Mallin and Countess Markievicz had taken Stephen’s Green; the Countess was training the ducks in the finer points of urban warfare. There were boatloads of guns and machine-guns being run onto the beaches of Kerry, and other huge killing machines, already on their way to us. German boats full of weapons for us; they’d got through the British blockade. The British had been off their guard after the
Aud
was sunk in Queenstown harbour, down in Cork. They thought they’d dealt with the crisis but the
Aud
had been just the first of many, the nose of a long convoy. There were even German troops coming off the boats, squads and squads of them, big twins and triplets; they’d marched through Tralee. They were marching up the Naas Road. And the Irish Brigade with them, homesick Irishmen from the German prisoner-of-war camps, marching towards us. And boats of Irish-Yanks already on the Atlantic, heading our way, with new guns and muscle; Jim Larkin had landed at Sligo with an advance party. The whole country was up, Wexford, the West, Kerry. The Irish regiments were defecting and the Orangemen had marched through Balbriggan the night before, on their way to flush us out; they were going to join up at Ballybough with the cadets from the School of Musketry in Dollymount. But we weren’t worried. De Valera and the Third Battalion were holding back all the armies to the south and Ned Daly and Éamonn Ceannt were doing the same to the west. They’d taken over the South Dublin Union and armed the sick and mad. Dublin’s nuts were holding back the armies of the Empire. And they were doing a good job of it; we didn’t see a hint of a soldier or hear an angry shot all day. Or even a fat rozzer to have a crack at. All we fought was the boredom and abuse.

I kept a tight watch on all the street corners and let Miss O’Shea make up my dreams for me. She was down there waiting for me, with a bowl of stew, slices of thick, warm brownbread or maybe even a couple of chops. She was down there, dreaming of me. As my eyes searched the broken shop windows across the street, I licked Miss O’Shea’s ear. And she felt it, downstairs in the basement, I knew she did, as she drove her wooden spoon and watched the potatoes breaking off the wall of the cauldron. Her ear had never been licked, not even by a pup or a sister. I could feel her skin shivering under my tongue, felt the slight heat of her blush as I crawled up the little creases behind her ear, three little rivers, towards her bun - I was going to free that hair and lie down in it. I knew exactly what I wanted. I was no ordinary boy. I was practised and cool, an out and out pleasure machine, my hands oiled and scented with the stuff that made my rifle sing. I moved another half-inch and her hair melted on my tongue. I pressed myself into the barricade.

—Will you look at those gobshites.

It was Paddy and his timing was perfect; I’d very nearly shoved the barricade out the window. There was an extra leg in my britches, fighting for space and purpose. Baying for a republic.

—What gobshites? I said.

I kept my eyes on the street and my bollix on the sandbag.

—Those gobshites, he said.

I didn’t have to look now; I heard them. Some of the Volunteers had their beads out and were down on their knees, humming the rosary.

—The revolutionaries, said Felix.—Will you look at them?

Plunkett was in there with them. He could hardly stand; he spent most of his time on a mattress. The man was dying, a waste of a bullet, but he had the energy to beat his breast and drive his knees into the tiles.

—The first sorrowful mystery, said Paddy.—How we ever ended up with those gobshites.

Like a come-all-ye, the prayer was taken up by other men and others up and downstairs; some of our lads too, down on their socialist knees. I took my eyes from the street for a few seconds and watched Connolly across the hall, grinding his teeth; I could almost hear them crumbling above the rosary drone. Pearse was in a corner, on a high stool, his head in a notebook; he was mumbling as well. Collins, to be fair to him, looked ready to go in among them and kick them back to earth.

I looked out. The shadow of the G.P.O. had stretched right across to the other side of the street, up the walls of the Imperial, to the barricades at the windows and our men behind them. Higher up, on the roof, the Starry Plough was still in the sun’s white gaze. The last of the day’s heat was in the sweat at the corners of my eyes, and the blackness now in front of me - I couldn’t trust what I was seeing. There was nothing out there but I couldn’t be certain of it. There were shadows moving but they were nothing. Around corners, over the river, down on the quays the city was moving; it was the usual racket and whine but it could have been the Army coming at us. There was a spark behind a window that could have been a rifle barrel. There was a sharp, lonely crack that might have been a Vickers gun accepting its magazine. All was quiet but maybe appalling. And, behind me, my colleagues and comrades, my fellow revolutionaries, were on their knees - and they’d been on them and off them all day - with their eyes clamped shut, their heads bowed and their cowering backs to the barricades. What sort of a country were we going to create? If we were attacked now, we were fucked. I didn’t want to die in a monastery. I’d made up my mind to jump.

But I thought I saw something - the hint of fire behind glass across the street, beyond the Abbey Street corner. I was looking at it, waiting for it to become something definite, when the fireworks started. Real fireworks - whizz-bangs and cartwheels - tame, crackling, happy holiday sounds and then the whiff of powder, like a burning box of matches just beyond my nose. The sparks and whizzes were coming from way down the street, near the river, so they lit up the edge of my vision - I couldn’t see causes, anyone running or lighting fuses - until the bangs came from above our heads. Rockets zipped into what was now the night and exploded, and dropped their colours and I watched them melt and disappear and waited for the next explosion.

Most of the men ran to their stations but some of the rosary boys seemed to think that the Chinese crackers were a sign that their prayers were being spurned. They started shouting the responses; their foreheads were virtually on the ground, rubbing the flags to a new smoothness.

—Up off your knees!

—There’s a war on, lads!

They jumped or were kicked upright; they clung to their beads like their mammies’ fingers. Collins was in there with his boots swinging.

—Get rid of the beads and pick up your rifles!

And the firework sparks fell and died over Sackville Street. The streetlights were smashed and it was darker than ever before out there. Except for the odd flame and rush of a rocket, there was nothing to see. Were they finally coming at us, crawling in under the rockets and whizzers, taking us out with bangers instead of shells and bullets? Were the roman candles the measure of their contempt? They were already celebrating the easy certainty of victory. Crawling closer and closer, in fancy dress and drunk. They were going to push us over.

But I knew what was actually happening just after the fires started and lit the street and started to consume it. The flames lit the figures and they became people - boys and men, women, girls and strange shapes stooped under piles of furniture and clothes.

I heard the shock in the Volunteer voices.

—They’re looting over there, sir!

The kids had broken into Lawrence’s toy and sports bazaar, and had released all the fireworks. Now that it was night and safe and the rozzers had hidden themselves away, the citizens of Dublin were lifting everything they could get their hands on. And, once again, I felt that I was on the wrong side of the barricade. I leaned out and watched the show.

A small army of street arabs struggled past with a rocking horse held over their heads. They turned at North Earl Street and climbed over the barricade; they struggled up, dragging the horse, and the horse’s head disappeared as they slid down the other side. They were followed by another gang hauling a piano, with a young fella on top of it; he glowed in the dark, covered in iodine to kill his ringworm. Another kid, dressed in the threads of a golfer five times his size, dashed by with his back parallel to the street, held down by the weight of a full golf bag. An oul’ lad, already drunk from the promise of the unopened jars of whiskey he was lugging, staggered up towards Cavendish Row, his neck kept cosy by a feather boa that trailed for yards behind him. And there were ordinary sights too, people getting away with all the things they could carry. Dipping in and out of the shop displays, over my broken glass, and deeper into the departments and vaults behind them. Climbing into the gift horse’s mouth. Voting with their feet and backs; welcoming the new Republic. Prams and hand-carts full of fur coats and stoles, bloomers and stockings. And the sucking and gasping going by; I knew that the kids had liberated Lemon’s sweet shop.

The fireworks were gone or made lifeless by the real fires that had joined to destroy the far side of the street. I heard the approaching bells of the fire brigade and my heart let go of a whoop as Tyler’s in front of me ignited and joined the blaze. Almost immediately, my nose welcomed the bracing tang of burning leather.