A Star Called Henry (25 page)

She climbed down from where I’d ridden her, up on to my shoulders. In the last seconds, before I came - she’d got there a good minute before me - her fingers couldn’t reach my back. They lost touch with my shoulders and she’d been singing
a cappella.
Her head was close to the ceiling.

—Who’s been feeding you meat?

—No one, Annie, I said.

—You’re up to something, anyway, she said.—Aren’t you, mister?

—No, Annie, I said.

—Go ’way, yeh pup. The last time you rode me like that you were crying for all your dead friends. You’re a soldier boy again. All ready to die for the dear little shamrock. Remember that letter you said you’d write to me before they shot you?

—I do, I said.—But don’t worry. There’s no reason for me to be writing last letters.

—Just don’t forget it. Because you’re up to something. Back on the floor, she held on to my arm; she didn’t trust her legs yet. She took a good deep breath and shook her head.

—What about another song? she said.—It’s early yet.

—Sorry, Annie. I’m a busy man.

—I knew it, she said.—Dying for Ireland.

—I’m dying for no one, I told her.—Have you heard
The Bold Henry Smart
yet?

—I’m listening to him, she said.—Unless it’s a song you’re talking about.

—Keep an ear out for it, I said.—I’d love you to play it the next time.

—I only take my songs off the gramophone these days, said Annie.

—Maybe that’s where you’ll hear it, I said.

—Maybe, she said.—But I’m only listening to the ones from America. I’ve had enough of the Irish ones.

—Maybe the Yanks’ll be singing it yet.

And I was gone.

Jack and I spent hours of the night in the lanes and back alleys of the north side, looking for sniping positions and escape routes. We’d been trapped in the G.P.O. and the few other outposts the year before. It wasn’t going to happen again. We were going to control the city.

—We won’t be caught this time, man. They’ll be the ones coming out with their hands up.

We mapped the city, planned our victory. And we ended up the nights in pubs, houses that were friendly to us, with other men who had seen action in Easter Week or had just missed it, men who had experience and, in the snugs or safe corners, we drank and laughed to the future. We were young and having a ball. The older men, the ones who were going to knock us into shape, they were still in the prison camps in England. Or they were dead: the ghosts of Easter Week followed us everywhere and we had to drink hard and quickly to be able to ignore them, and I had extra ghosts of my own to ignore. We were having our holidays before the real work started; we knew we’d deserve them. Those of us who had already killed, the old-young men of Easter Week, knew what all the nightly meetings and open furtiveness were leading us to. We were toasting our own deaths.
To give up my gun they’ll need tear me apart.
And every night when we were walking home Jack Dalton sang sedition.
The heart of a Fenian had the bold Henry Smart.

Sometimes, just to keep the G-men fit, we met up in the social hall of the American Rifles on North Frederick Street and, our noise disguised by the dancing classes that shook the building most nights of the week, we practised our drill.

—Are you out for the dancing, Sergeant?

With mop and broom handles on their shoulders and even shovels we took home from the docks, we put the youngsters through their paces.
Proud sight, left right, steady boys and step together.
We had them going at each other with wooden bayonets, up to their thighs in imaginary gore, all the evening while the dancing ladies and gents below hid us behind their wall of sound and the blood dripped onto their heads. The G-men must have noticed the parade of grazed knuckles and broken fingers that walked past them at the end of every evening.

—A waste of time, said Jack.—But it’s good for morale.

He was right. The only useful tool for bayonet practice was a bayonet. The only way to teach a man how to kill with a gun was to give him a gun and someone to kill. So we started collecting money every week, threepences and six-pences, all marked into the Quartermaster’s green book, which I minded, the money and the book, until we got round to electing a quartermaster. And we started buying guns. Dublin was a garrison town; there were more barracks than houses. The Great War still had more than a year left to run. The city was crawling with Tommies and Irish-born squaddies, and lots of them were broke and desperate enough to sell their rifles to us. Officers, even Unionist officers, came looking for us once word got round that ready cash could be had from the Shinners in exchange for working weapons. We gave four quid each for Lee-Enfields. We upped it to a fiver when a colonel in the Munster Rifles threw in his Official Army Military Manual with the gun, as well as a box of bullets and a map of Dublin Castle. We carried the manual around inside the covers of a book,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, one of the few that Granny Nash hadn’t wanted.

—I had an Uncle Tom, she said.—I won’t to waste my time reading about another one.

—What was there between Alfie Gandon and my father, Granny?

—Everything.

—What does that mean?

—Everything.

I could smell women again. And I could look up at the stars again and grin.

—Oh Henry Henry HenREEE!

I shouted at the black sky.

—Are you looking!?

—Oh mother! Who are you talking to?

—Relax, relax. Just my brother.

—Where where?

—He’s dead.

—I want to go home now.

—No, you don’t. Lean back against the wall there and I’ll tell you how we charged the G.P.O.

Me and Jack just had to look in the door of a
céilí
or concert, a fund raiser for the dependants of the dead and jailed of Easter Week, and the women of the Gaelic League and Cumann na mBan were queuing up for their own three minutes of immortality - longer, maybe, if they went with Jack, but Piano Annie had trained me well. I loved women again. All of them. And I wasn’t looking for a new mother or a shoulder to cry on or hair to bawl into, a dinner, a bed for the night, someone to listen to me. I was just doing what came natural: I was fucking women who wanted to fuck me. I was a living, breathing hero - and the best-looking man in the room, owner of the eyes that brought tears to the fannies of every woman who ever as much as glanced at them. I scored at every
céilí
, sometimes two and three times before the night was over and we all had to stand for
The Soldier’s Song
, and I never once had to dance. And I never paid in; I was my own dependant. I often didn’t make it through the door. I’d go up and they’d be waiting for me. They shared me. I wasn’t interested in conquest. But I didn’t have to be. I ended up riding the unconquerable, the unimaginable.

I felt the floor hop under me - there were three hundred women and men next door doing The Walls of Limerick - as I pushed in from behind. She leaned her hands against the toilet door, keeping intruders out and helping me in. The choice of venue was mine, the position hers. This was something I did four and five times a week. I remember them all, every woman, but this one stands out: I was riding the arse off the mother of one of 1916’s executed heroes. I won’t name names. Her son’s portrait was wobbling on the opposite side of the wall as the dancers cantered past him and his grieving mammy backed into me. But I won’t name names. Her husband was taking the money at the door.

And another girl, another cold night, rummaged in her coat pocket after we’d gone for a walk and found a lane off Gardiner Place and a wall that would act as a bed.

—Will you do a favour for me, Mister Smart?

—Henry.

—I couldn’t—

—Henry, I said.

—Ah, I can’t.

—Ah, go on.

—Henry, so. Will you do me a favour?

—Sure, I said.—What?

She took her hand from her pocket.

—Will you bless my beads for me?

And I did.

I met them all and I never got tired. I loved arriving at the steaming door of a
céilí
in full flight and waiting there; I’d close my eyes for the surprise of age, size, skin. But always, always, before closing my eyes, I looked first for Miss O’Shea. But she was never there. And when I opened them again, she still wasn’t there.

We paraded with banned hurleys, we saluted in public. We nailed a flag and greased the pole and watched the rozzers climbing and sliding. We learnt our tricks from the Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin films we watched all afternoon in the La Scala when the stevedore gave us the day off. We got in for nothing. The staff were sympathisers and came to all the
céilís
when they weren’t working. We ambushed pigs on their way to Britain. Our own butchers slaughtered them in a yard beside Binns’ Bridge and we delivered them to Donnelly’s bacon factory in the Coombe - Irish pigs, Irish labour, Irish stomachs - in a procession across the city, dozens of carcasses on four drays, our men with Lee-Enfields guarding both sides of the bridge as we crossed the Liffey. And now, as we rattled through the narrow streets of the Coombe, the people who’d spat on us not long before applauded.

Somewhere in the excitement of ambush and convoy I remembered my time in Liberty Hall. I looked at the sharp, angry cheekbones of the women we passed and the skinny, meatless legs of the children who ran beside us.

—We should give this bacon out to the people, I said to Jack as I steered the cart onto Patrick Street.

—No, Henry, he said.—Not a good idea. We don’t want to interfere with internal trade or anything like that. What we want to do is show everyone that we can run our own country. We have to show the factory owners and the rest of them that these things will go on without the English. And that they’ll go on even better without them.

We turned off Patrick Street, onto Hanover Lane.

—These people know what all this means, he said.

He nodded back at the dead pigs behind us and the other drays following us.

—Jobs, he said—Making bacon and making the money to buy the bacon. That’s what this is all about. Keeping our own money. We get rid of the English and everybody’s happy, man. Everybody. The owners, the workers. Even the pigs because they died for Ireland.

He had everything figured.

—This is just the beginning, Henry. We’re going to take over everything. Commerce, the post, the courts, tax collection. The works, man. We’ll run the country like they’re not even here. And all the time we’ll be persuading them to go.

—And what happens after that?

—After what?

—After they go.

—What do you mean?

But we’d arrived at the front gate of Donnelly’s and I never got an answer. I forgot all about the question.

—Are you going to arrest me, Sergeant?

I marched in front of the G-man with a hurley on my shoulder.

—I’m breaking the law, Sergeant, look.

I stopped right under him. He stood three steps above me, leaning into the door pillar, hoping it would turn to rubber and hide him.

—Under the Defence of the Realm Act, I said.—I’m breaking the law. You have to arrest me.

—That’s what you’d like me to do, said the G-man.

—Of course it is. I’m breaking the law.

—Trying to make fools of us.

—It’s your law, Sergeant. Not ours. So, arrest me.

I was provoking him. And I was breaking the law. Carrying a hurley for mock-military purposes was now illegal, probably more unlawful than walking around with a rifle on my shoulder. We wanted the Castle rozzer to arrest me. We wanted to expose the absurdity of the law, the stupidity and callousness of the regime we were stuck under. We wanted to provoke them into action. Once they started, then we could really start. And once we started, they’d have to try and stop us. They had the uniforms, the numbers, the weaponry. And they’d push the people, and the rest of the world, into the choice: us or them. The war was already won; all we had to do was get them to react.

—I need the leg, Annie.

—Take it, she said.—No one’s stopping you.

—I’ll still call, though, I said.

—Maybe you will, she said.—And maybe you won’t. And maybe you’ll be welcome and maybe you won’t. Remember that letter.

Frongoch and the other jails in England had been emptied of Irish rebels and Dublin was full of restless men, desperate to get back into action, still sweating and giddy after Easter Week. They’d learnt the mistakes and were set to go again. These were the rosary boys come home, the lads whose knees had polished the tiles of the G.P.O. while the incendiary shells and molten dome glass had rained on top of us. They were grim fuckers, most of them, and made even more saintly and self-important by their time in the cells across the water. We could feel their impatience drilling into our necks at meetings in the Gaelic League rooms and they held up the walls at the
céilís
and puddled the floor with their disapproval. Not for them dancing or sandwiches. There was no more riding in the jackses and, the odd time when I went in for a piss, I always remembered to wash my hands.

The fun was over.

I had to give back the green book and the gun money. (Minus my 10 per cent.) One of the saints was now the Quartermaster, a clerk in Hely’s of Dame Street. I had to start handing up money myself every week. Then they wanted money for uniforms.

—No, I said.

The kids who’d been singing about me a few weeks before slumped in disappointment. They’d wanted uniforms even more than the rifles.

—We can’t have an army without uniforms.

The speaker was Dinny Archer, a graduate of Frongoch - he later became known as Dynamite Dinny - and he was looking straight at me.

—True for you, Dinny, said someone behind me.