The Dead Republic (38 page)

I sat and listened, and I began to like my daughter.

She lived in Chicago, she told me.

—Where?

—Oak Park.

—You went back.

—Well, yes, she said.

She’d lived there, with her mother, when I’d found them - when her mother had found me.

—In the same house? I asked.—Missis What-was-her-name’s?

—Missis Lowe, she said.—No. Not there.

—She’d be dead now.

—Long dead.

—Go on.

She was married to a man who was fifteen years younger than her. Your mother’s daughter, I nearly said - but didn’t. She told me this in the American way, a sigh, a complaint that was actually a boast. At the age of sixty, or somewhere near, she was trying to provoke her father. She liked to think of herself as an artist - she
was
an artist - but she also sold real estate. Fabrics were her thing. Her life was very ordered, she told me. Her life was her loom and her dogs.

I looked to see if her mother was listening. She wasn’t.

The dogs had names. And she gave them to me. Taft, Max, Holly. Not Connolly, Pearse and Collins. Taft, Max, Holly and Satchmo.

—Satchmo?

—Yes.

—Is he black? I asked.

—Please, she said.
Pull-ease
.

She stared at me, the mouth dramatically agape. It was hard to watch. The wizened girl, the ghost of my child, was in there.

—That just does not happen, she said.

Why then? I wanted to ask her. Why had she done it? To bring her back to the first time she’d lived in Oak Park - when her father had packed a carpet bag and left, to follow Louis Armstrong?

I didn’t ask.

She didn’t look at me while she spoke. She addressed the window, and her mother’s feet. But she glanced at me now and again, and saw the oul’ lad sitting straight, trying to hide the fact that his back was at him. Trying to hide the fact that he was bored, but happy to be bored.

I went out to the corridor while she’d gone to the jacks, and I saw the G-men’s bus outside, parked across the entrance, blocking it, the engine humming, grey exhaust sliding out the back.

She came back and carried on. She was a woman whose life began in her twenty-fifth year. She didn’t just deny or bypass her childhood and wandering, or the weight that had come with her name. She’d erased them. They just weren’t there. She’d managed what I’d failed to do when I’d gone to America; she’d invented herself, new-born and ready, with no history or anything dragging her back. It must have taken her years, and she must have been mad.

Her fabrics and her doggies.

I heard the bus being revved outside. I heard the rain beginning to pat the window.

She was American. She spoke about her dogs and she knew she was fascinating. Her world was
the
world.

—What’s your husband called?

—Benjamin, she said.

—Is he with you?

—No.

—Looking after the dogs?

—Yes, he is. He adores those dogs.

—Grand.

She rarely left Oak Park, she said. She very rarely had to. Her day was the block and a half from office to home. The dogs went with her, and to the houses and apartments she sold, all of which were in or near Oak Park. The clients loved to see the dogs in the empty homes; they heard their future happiness in the clatter of those paws on the polished floorboards. The doggies sold the houses.

I grinned - I felt the pull of old, forgotten muscles. She sounded like me, the young man back then, with the shoulders and the sandwich-boards. Selling the new world, with my back to the old one.

She worked, she came home.

—Do you have any children? I asked.

—No, she said.—I do not.

She said nothing for a while. And I said nothing. I wasn’t a grandfather. The rain was thumping now.

—When I saw you on TV, she said,—it was the stance, I guess. You stood that way at the boxcar doors. Watching the world. As if you owned it.

I said nothing - I kept the mouth shut tight.

—It’s funny, she said.—I had to see it on the TV before I’d accept it. But there you were. And the word popped open in my head.
Father.

—I didn’t die.

—Yes, you did, she said.

She shook her head, like she was trying to disperse those words, break them up before they formed.

—No, she said.—I know.

She spoke so softly, I saw the words more than heard them.

—At least, I
knew
. You were alive.

She still didn’t look at me.

—But you didn’t come back.

I wanted to explain, justify. But I knew it would be wrong. Fifty years too late, I was thinking like a father.

—I looked out the window every morning, she said.—To see you there, waiting for me to open the door. I kept looking behind me - for years. You have no idea how often I was asked if I was looking for someone. How many people - men! - gave up on me because they couldn’t live with the man who was over my shoulder. And my mother—

She didn’t look at her now, either. She was staring at the window, past it, through the rain.

—I don’t blame her now, she said.—She had to move on. But I would not budge. You were alive and it was simply a matter of time before you came home.

There was nothing for a while. I patted her mother’s arm. I looked at Saoirse - that was her name - and she was looking at me.

—
She
found you, she said.

—I suppose she did.

—That’s good.

—Yeah, I said.

It was feeble - she deserved a lot more.

—We—, I started.

I looked at Miss O’Shea, and held her hand. It did nothing in mine.

—We wasted a terrible lot of time, I said.—We both
knew
. But we were stupid. I was, anyway. She had more to lose, I suppose. Her name and her - I don’t know - her reputation. She should have fuckin’ killed me, to be honest. But, anyway, she was the one who knocked on my door.

—But you did look for her, I said.

—No, I said.—No. I didn’t. Not by then. I went to Roscommon when I came back first, half hoping you’d be there. The three of yis.

She nodded.

—There wasn’t a trace, I said.—The old house was gone. But that’s no excuse. Finding her here, I mean in Ratheen - that was a fluke.

—Did it ever occur to you to go further down the road that time in Roscommon and knock on Uncle Ivan’s door?

—Yes.

—But you didn’t.

—No.

She sighed.

—Well, she said,—I
am
glad you found her.

—But I wasted it.

—Well, that’s why I’m here, she said.—Too much time has been wasted.

—Yeah, I said.—You’re right. This isn’t your home, though. Don’t wreck your life for me.

—Don’t worry about that, she said.

It struck me: she was a nice woman. It made me laugh. She didn’t join in, but she smiled.

—You’re trying to send me back, she said.—Just as we get to know each other again.

—Grand, I said.—Fair enough. That’s good.

She stood first, and I got up and followed her into Ivan’s room. He was on his way out too, and he was going faster than the woman next door. He looked ripe, the colour of a hoor’s curtains. He was rotting already, before he’d finally stopped. The smell was something no old man should have had to endure. But I said nothing. Saoirse loved him. He’d found her alone, a baby, with her dead grandmother, after I’d run from Ireland and her mother was in jail. He’d given her a home while I was in the desert pretending I had a story that needed telling, letting myself be conned, and happy to be conned.

I stayed standing beside her as long as she wanted to stay and hoped to fuck she wouldn’t sit down and expect me to join her. I wanted home and the bed, a night’s sleep.

She stayed a minute - maybe she prayed. Then she walked out. I followed her. She stopped at the front door as she rooted in the big shoulder bag she always had with her. It was some sort of hairy, unorganised wool that looked as if it stopped being a bag when you weren’t looking.

—Did you make it yourself? I asked.

—My bag?

—On the loom.

—Yes, she said.—I did.

—It’s nice.

—Thank you, she said.

She took out some keys.

—Can I offer you a ride anywhere?

She must have hired a car, or she was driving Ivan’s - I didn’t know.

—No, I said.—No, thanks; you’re grand.

She looked disappointed. But she smiled. I could tell now: she was used to smiling.

—Tomorrow? she said.

—Sound, I said.—I’ll be here.

Why didn’t I take the lift? I was walking away again. The bus was waiting for me.

The strike was lost but they kept me working. Not as relentlessly as during that period in the spring and summer of ’81, when the hunger strikers had become the candidates, before the deaths became harder to count. Much more of that would have killed me - the pinball charge around the country, the soggy bags of chicken and chips at two and three in the morning - no one outside of Dublin knew how to cook a fuckin’ chip. The race against death, trying not to acknowledge the pointlessness, the obscenity of it, especially when the election was over and the victories were followed by nothing. But the men kept dying - Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee, Michael Devine - and I stood on platforms and looked out at smaller crowds. There were the riots every night in Belfast and the other northern towns - more dead boys - and a big riot in Dublin on a hot Saturday afternoon in August. A disaster. The plan was to burn the British Embassy for the second time in ten years. (The last time had been in 1972, a few days after Derry’s Bloody Sunday.) But it ended in a rout, when the rozzers took off their badges and got stuck in with the boots and batons. I was escorted - I was carried - out of Ballsbridge by three big men in bomber jackets who managed to stay standing as their heads and arms were smashed. I tried to tell them that we could go under the street, that the river below could get us away, like it had when my father had rescued myself and Victor from the batons of different rozzers, the fat grandas of the fuckers in the riot gear - that we just had to get over a wall down the lane there across the street, and behind a bush and down a hole; we’d be under Beggar’s Bush in no time. But they didn’t hear or they didn’t understand. Maybe I was only talking to myself. Because they took us the hard way, through the sweating fury of the state. I was covered in the lads’ blood and none of my own when they put me down and into the back of a black van, in Sandymount. I could hear the riot behind us, but we were out of it.

It sickened me. Not the riot - the riot was always coming. The riot was the start of nothing; it was the strike’s last shout. What sickened me was myself, my uselessness. The fact that I could do nothing. Get stuck in, observe, bear witness - I couldn’t even walk away on my own.

—Photograph me, for fuck sake. Look! I’m drenched in blood. An old man! It’s fuckin’ scandalous.

The van kept going.

—There’s plenty of blood today, said a new voice.

It seemed new; I didn’t recognise it. I couldn’t keep up with my minders. There was a core of five or six men and, except for the man with the beard, I couldn’t remember them long enough to describe, either to myself or the G-men. I heard the names - they weren’t kept from me - but never managed to keep them.

—You’re above all that, Henry, said the voice.

I couldn’t see the man at the front of the van. I was in the back, lying across a damp mattress.

—We don’t want you to be seen bleeding, he said.—You’re not flesh and blood.

—I fuckin’ am.

—No. You’re not.

It was over. The families started to intervene; they wouldn’t let their sons and husbands die. Unconscious men were drip-fed back to life. Other men saw it was over and took food before they slipped out of the world.

The lady, the miserable cunt, wasn’t for budging. The Famine Queen herself. Thatcher would have let every man and woman on the island die. But there was that, at least. The hatred. Defeat was always victory, another telling of the old story, to lure the latest young lads into the movement. Defeat was impossible. It was just a horrible kind of victory, the victim’s wheezy triumph.

I gave up, again. I couldn’t face another day. They were hammering on my door the morning after the Ballsbridge riot but I wasn’t getting up to answer. I couldn’t. I slipped below - I was gone. Far away from fact and hunger strikes. Back into the burning heart of Monument Valley.

I knew who I was again one afternoon in November. I didn’t sit up in the bed; I was already doing that. I saw the woman standing at the kitchen table. I saw her through the open bedroom door and I knew who she was, because the knowledge, the name, beat back the thought that it might be Miss O’Shea.

It was Saoirse. She was peeling cooking apples. I knew her, as if I’d been watching her at work for hours. There was a strong beam of sun cutting across the room, lighting two of the table legs. Her head was out of the light but I still knew her. Miss O’Shea was in the nursing home - I knew that. (I didn’t know yet that it was months since I’d seen her.) Saoirse was there in the kitchen, peeling apples. She’d never been in the house before and I didn’t have an apple peeler. But grand. I’d been sick and my daughter was looking after me. I was a lucky man. I was a happy man.

Ivan was dead and buried. The hunger strike was dead and buried. The coalition government that was formed after the June election was about to be buried. I fell asleep, and woke up the same man. I woke and saw a man beside me, sitting on one of the kitchen chairs.

—Benjamin.

—That’s right.

—When did you get here?