Pearl (20 page)

Diabolical:
the word the farmer in Mayo had used about the plastic covering the hay. But Pearl did not believe in the devil; she kept trying to understand. What could they have had in mind, the planters of the bomb: the Real IRA, as they called themselves, the ones against the peace process, the ones feeling betrayed?

She tried to understand the politics. One reporter suggested that Omagh was chosen precisely because it was a Sinn Féin success story. Sinn Féin, she’d come to learn, was the political wing of the IRA, as distinguished from the military. The injustice of the old jerrymandered districts had been corrected in Omagh: it was a 60 percent Nationalist town with a Sinn Féin–dominated town council. She tried to understand: the Real IRA thought the regular IRA, represented by Gerry Adams, and especially Sinn Féin, was the enemy for having supported the peace agreement. She could understand that. But then what happened to their minds? What could they possibly have been thinking? Who could they be punishing or warning by the death of twenty-nine Protestants and Catholics, mostly women and children, rich and poor?

When Pearl learned that one of the movers behind the bombing was Bobby Sands’s sister Bernadette, she understood that the sister thought she was doing something to mark her brother’s death. It was entirely comprehensible, the desire to mark a death. But then other marks would have to be made for other deaths, more and more marks till the surface of the world was pocked with them: marks made for the dead.

She couldn’t know what was in their minds; in hers—she cannot banish them, or won’t—were the First Communion picture of Sean, the photo of James with his dog, the wedding pictures of Philomena, a policeman’s description of an old woman, water streaming over her corpse, a corpse that was only a torso: “I thought it was a dressmaker’s dummy at first.” The flashing wires, the roof tiles floating along with parts of brains, hands, feet. What could it mean about a person that he or she could imagine such a thing to be in the service of the good?

Her inability to understand, her relentless replaying in her own mind of the images, the faces, made Pearl feel she had lost her grip on the world. She called her mother, and Maria said, Oh, darling, how awful, tell me about it, tell me everything, do you want to come home? But Pearl could tell that in America, the meaning of Omagh was dilute. Her mother was of no help, and Finbar’s response appalled her: “It fucks our side but good; it makes us look completely in the wrong.”

She only wanted to sit with Breeda, the two of them going over and over the details with each other, saying over and over, “I just don’t understand.”

And then, in early September, Mick came back, his summer season over, a great triumph theatrically. “People are wrong,” he said, “to think summer theater has to be brain candy. They loved
Marat/Sade
. They loved
Waiting for Lefty
. We really raised some consciousness.”

Which, he thought, needed to be done about Omagh. He blamed not the bombers but the police; they were given warnings. The warnings were misleading, Pearl tells him, another part of the nightmare: the bombers told the media the bomb would be in front of the courthouse, and it wasn’t. The police led the people away from the courthouse, unwittingly to the center of the bomb’s radius.

“You believe that shit?” he said. “It’s just part of the history of the failure to listen on the part of the Brits and the Unionists. I don’t believe a goddamn word. I believe they were given plenty of warning, but they decided not to respond to it because this would blacken the revolution’s name.”

Finbar agreed with Mick; all his friends agreed with him. She couldn’t bear to be in the same room with any of them. She spent time with Breeda or alone in the flat that she had rented, months before, with Jessica, who e-mailed her from Colorado, where she was hiking with her boyfriend, saying that she was feeling great, all better now, the Rockies were awesome, she never wanted to leave Colorado.

Why didn’t Pearl go home then? The semester at Wesleyan had already started; she’d signed up for her courses at Trinity. But it was more than that. She felt she and Breeda needed to work on understanding things together, quietly, slowly; they needed to talk about things, say the same things over and over, try to figure out what had happened. It was not her land, but she couldn’t go back to America, where Omagh was just another name of horror, worth, perhaps, thirty seconds for two days on the seven o’clock news. She must stay in Ireland; she must try to understand.

Afterward, Pearl blamed herself for what happened to Stevie, for not paying attention to him in the way he needed, in the way she and Breeda always did. The country of Ireland would have gone on exactly as it had if they hadn’t been paying attention to it, but the boy, if they’d paid attention to him, would still be alive. This is what she tells herself. Because blame is a solid platform we can stand on, a still place in the whirlwind. It tells us: this happened because of that; it could have been avoided. Whereas the unbearable possibility is that nothing can be avoided, the wind bloweth where it listeth and becomes a whirlwind that takes everything up: indiscriminate, violent, incapable of turning or slowing down because of any human word.

So Pearl blames herself for Stevie’s spending more time with his father and being susceptible to his puerile ideas, for wanting to regain the attention his mother had always given him, and Pearl had started giving him, by doing something that he thought would make him a man.

At last you will hear the story of Stevie. The story of his death.

I suppose it began like this. One day, Mick and the boys had had too many beers. They were very downcast in the aftermath of the bombing; they felt their side had been discredited. It would be difficult for the Real IRA to recover.

Mick was talking about his theories of theater. The resistance to the Real IRA was a solid wall that had to be blasted through; some explosive gesture was needed to balance the effect of the Omagh explosion. Then he started talking about the explosive power of laughter, how laughter could break up tragedy, blast a hole in it so you could walk through to something else: to revolutionary transformation. How could they get people to see that the dead of Omagh were the victims of the police and not the revolutionaries?

They’d had a lot to drink. None of them were heavy drinkers; the boys were young and Mick was always concerned about his fitness: proud of his flat stomach, his ability to run like any of the boys and better than most. But that day they kept on drinking, and that was when the idea came to them: they’d do guerrilla theater.

Mick brought up a precedent from the history of the Troubles. Around 1910, a group of women factory workers in Belfast had been forbidden to laugh or sing at their jobs. In response, they created something called the “Laughing Protest”; they kept laughing and laughing, forcing themselves to laugh until they drove the overseers round the bend and the absurdity of the ban on laughing was made public. He told them about seeing Jerry Rubin dressed up as Uncle Sam and as Paul Revere, to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. “That’s people’s theater,” Mick said, thumping the table so hard the empty beer cans fell to the floor.

Then he came up with the idea. They would do something to change the focus from the Real IRA to the police, show that the deaths should be laid at their door.

They went out, a pack of them, Mick and five of the boys, to a sex shop that was open late. They bought (charged to Mick’s platinum Visa) a set of ten assorted dildoes. They tied them together with a ribbon they’d bought on the way and attached to the bouquet of dildoes a note:
A bunch of cocks as a tribute to the Gardai cockups of Omagh who are responsible for the deaths of twenty-nine.

How did it fall to Stevie to deliver the package to the Gardai station? The six of them, sitting around the table, had been delighting themselves with the details of the plan. “One of us has to leave the package and get out in a hurry,” Mick said. And Stevie, who’d also been drinking more than he’d ever drunk in his life, said, “I’ll do it.”

“It’s brilliant,” Mick said, proud of his son for the first time, slapping him on the back to show he was one of the boys: the bravest boy, the most heroic. “Because of Stevie’s age, if he gets caught they’ll be easy with him.”

“Brilliant,” everybody said, opening another can of beer and handing it to Stevie, toasting one another and him for their act, which would explode the wall of misunderstanding and resistance and make way for a new world.

.  .  .  

They phoned the Gardai station, saying there was to be a bomb planted sometime that night. Stevie set off; he was meant to leave the package and run away but he was paralyzed. He set the package down and moved only a few feet from it. Immediately, he was seized by Gardai. Specially trained dogs approached. The package was determined not to be a bomb and was opened in secret.

Breeda and Pearl went to the station together. They made a case for Stevie’s innocence; in his confusion, Stevie became even more inarticulate. The police were kind; they didn’t tell Breeda what was in the package, and she was too upset to press them. Pearl went along with the line she took.

The police told reporters that the package was the confused work of a feebleminded boy who responded to the Omagh bombing by making a package of sex toys. The newspapers noted that Stevie was the nephew of Reg Donegan, and the headline of the small story read
THE BLOOD RUNS THIN
.

The explanation of what was really in the box was left to Mick and the boys, and the explosion that occurred was not caused by laughter breaking through the wall of Irish resistance to revolutionary necessity. No one laughed at the package. It was seen as an annoyance, a pathetic act by a near-idiot. The explosion happened in Pearl’s mind. She lost her temper.

What is lost when we say
she lost her temper
? Pearl lost her temperateness; she became a body, no longer at body temperature but a boiling thing, a thing on fire. That was what she felt: something inside her had been set aflame, or a flame had touched her somewhere, starting, perhaps, at the soles of her feet, and her blood, her insides, boiled. Whatever its source, the heat of rage took her over. If she could have seen herself, her own aspect might have frightened her. She seemed to swell and grow, her face grew very white, and her eyebrows—which were always noteworthy, being so much darker than her hair—looked exaggerated now against her whitened skin, as if they’d been drawn on with charcoal. She shouted at Stevie. Her mouth was very small but her voice, which he’d always heard as a soft voice, and kindly, was no longer kindly. It was the voice of accusation. It was the voice of rage. He had heard accusation before, heard rage, but he had never expected it in Pearl, with whom he had always felt entirely safe. She looked right at him, and her black eyes were terrible. “How could you have been so stupid, stupid, stupid!” These were the words she said. She said the word
stupid
three times, the word he feared above all others, the word that was to him most terrible. She might have meant it for all of them, but he knew she meant it only for him. And his face lost all its features: went flat, white, like a plate.

Breeda grabbed her son and said she was taking him home. Mick said everyone should cool off; he gave Breeda the keys to “the shack” in Mayo and told her to lie low with Stevie for a while. And then there was the accident.

Stevie was alone, so no one but the driver saw what happened. It was a foggy night. Stevie was standing in the middle of the road. It was not intelligent, to be standing in the middle of the road, but we will never know: was Stevie standing in the middle of the road because he wanted to die? Pearl believes she made him want to die because she had called him stupid. It was what so many people had called him, the thing he feared about himself, the thing she had told him was not true about him: he was gifted, special, of great worth. And then she said it to him just like everybody else.

The driver said he honked his horn but Stevie appeared not to hear. He tried to brake; it was too late. Stevie was dead when the ambulance arrived; it had to come all the way from Castlebar, a twenty-minute drive, but probably it didn’t matter. He was killed right away.

Breeda breaks into Finbar’s apartment, shouting, her face not a face but a mask, twisted, desperate. Her eyes don’t focus. She knocks over furniture, she who’d been afraid to knock too loudly on a door; she turns her uncomposed gaze on them, particularly on Pearl, as Pearl had turned her gaze particularly on Stevie, and says, “His blood is on your hands, the lot of yez, but especially”—she points to Pearl—“on yours!”

The world explodes; the cover is blown off. Pearl sees that all the time underneath this cover—a cover that is fragile, thinner than anyone would have imagined—there is another world, the real world. Exposed now like the rubble of the buildings and the roads of Omagh, the real world: a pit with shouting men, red eyes, open mouths, the twisting faces of the watchers in the paintings of Goya, of van der Goes. And she is one of them. She turned on Stevie. She didn’t turn on Mick or Finbar, who were in the room at the same time. She turned on the weakest, the one who would be most harmed. Automatically, as if she had been bred for it. The will to harm.

Afterward, Pearl was tempted to say, embarrassed at the cliché but unable to let go of it immediately,
I don’t know what came over me.
As if a net had dropped and she had to thrash and strike out for her own escape. Or as if a fiery rash had come over her skin and she had to scratch herself bloody. But no, she knew quite soon after hearing in her own mind the words
I don’t know what came over me
that the cliché was wrong. Nothing came over her. Something came
out of
her, something that had been inside her all along. Was it a snake that traveled from the belly, where it had lain coiled and hidden—since when? Perhaps since birth, uncoiling only now, and traveling like lightning to the brain, biting at the roof of the mouth, the tongue, the jaw’s hinge, till it forced the mouth open and then hit its mark. No, that was not it either. It wasn’t something other than herself, that could be removed, coaxed out, entrapped, struck to the heart, and buried. What had made her say the words was nothing
but
herself, immovable, flesh of her flesh, embedded in the deepest part of her, and you could hack and hack, think you’d got it, but you would never get the whole thing, there would always be more, and it would always be there, always ready to uncoil and strike.