The Whore-Mother (2 page)

He drove slowly, Powers beside him. There was plenty of time. These mean Belfast streets depressed him. They had been his home for nine months, though when he let the word home into his mind the idea that this place could in any sense have become his home repelled him. It had become his prison. The Antrim Road was his home, among Belfast's Protestant middle classes. The first thing he learned when he came here to the Falls—a young Ulster Catholic trying, as Conor Cruise O'Brien had put it, forever romantically to recreate the heroic past—was that he was an Ulster middle-class Catholic who was as distant from Ulster working-class Catholics as were the Ulster middle-class Protestants. The first undermining blow to his illusions of Irish Catholic comradeship was in his distaste for the coarseness and vulgarity of his comrades. They were urbanized peasants, without the earthy originality of the peasant, or the concrete poetry of his vocabulary. The second thing he learned was what he called “their single-minded mindlessness.” The third was their righteous savagery. Christ, it was different from the heroic legends! He'd thought a lot about that in the past nine months—Finn McCuill and the Fianna, the ancient army of heroes; Cuchullian, the whole bloody lot that he learned at his father's knee. Purity, gallantry, invincibility—that was their image. But when he told his father he was joining the Provisional IRA and entering into the long succession, “Please, no, no, Johnny darlin,” the old man said, “sure that hero stuff's all just a lot of oul talk.” And the stuff he learned in school—Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, Daniel O'Connell, Patrick Pearse, Michael Collins that was “a lot of oul talk” too when he went to see Bull Baillie, the master who taught it to him. “They're not your kind, Johnny.” Maybe not, but they all filled his head with the stuff and it took the reality to get it out. Powers was the reality. Sudden rage boiled up in him. His foot was hard on the pedal. He slammed on the brakes and flung his passengers about in the car.

“What the bloody hell's wrong w'you?” Powers yelled at him.

“I'm sorry. I was thinking.” He wanted to hit Powers. Not just to hit him. He wanted to smash the big arrogant face.

“Thinkin, for Christ's sake! You were puttin your foot down. That's what a driver does when he's angry. What's up?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothin my fuckin arse. I'm thinkin we'll have to take a look at you, McManus. Away on.”

That was the first time any of them had given a direct indication that they had doubts about him. If they wanted to take a look at him they believed there was something to look at. He drove very carefully, his mind shut down. But his hands sweated freely and to keep his grip on the wheel he had to wipe them dry on his trousers. He knew Powers watched him do it. It made him sweat even more, wipe oftener, and feel his arms empty of substance.

He wove slowly out onto the Springfield Road and up towards the housing estate where the girl lived. He had never seen her. Her name was Mavis. The thought of her name almost brought a weak hysterical giggle to his throat—Mavis McGonigal. Holy God, what a stupid, vulgar, and ridiculous name. He set his lips and his teeth and forced his mind to its work.

“In at the next right turn,” Powers said, and he pulled in to the curb. “She'll come from behind us,” Powers said.

A boy of about nine years left his post at the curb and came to Powers' window. “She's gettin off the bus,” he said, and walked away, waiting across the street, not to miss the sport.

“Get out, Danny,” Powers said to Callaghan. He said to McManus, “When she walks past you, drive beside her.”

“I've never set eyes on her.”

“Kelly knows her.” Powers got out and walked up the street with Callaghan.

“I wisht I did know her,” Kelly said from behind. “I'd like to bite her nice wigglin arse.”

McManus watched his rear-view mirror.

“She'd make a right good fuck,” Kelly said. Then, resentfully, “Just think of that fuckin soldier fuckin her.” He thought about that. “Jever fuck a Protestant, McManus?”

McManus could see a gaggle of girls coming up the street. One came alone, some distance behind them.

“Did'y hear me, McManus?”

“Yes.”

“Well, did you?”

“Mind your work.”

Kelly twisted and looked back through the rear window. “That's the bitch behind.”

Powers and Callaghan were walking back now, towards the car. The chattering girls passed them. The solitary girl drew level. McManus moved the car with her. She was pretty and shapely and her bottom swiveled.

“She's askin for it,” Kelly said, “look at her wigglin her arse.”

Her hair was long and auburn, soft and well cared for. McManus wanted to shout to her to run for it. But where would she run? Almost every woman on the street would try to stop her. They were at their doors now, watching and waiting and smiling. Nobody had spoken to the girl for weeks, except to say “hoore” as they passed her. The children had chalked “hoore” on the walls of her parents' house, and their mothers had painted it back when the girl's father washed it off, and their fathers and brothers had beaten him when he tried to burn off the paint with a blowlamp. And the McGonigals had nowhere else to go. So they lived with silence or abuse and went a long way from the district to buy their food, where nobody knew them and could not therefore refuse to sell to them.

Powers and Callaghan blocked her way. She tried to walk around them and Callaghan moved to stop her. “Just a minute, you,” he said.

“Will you leave me alone,” she said and tried to pass around Powers.

“Get into the car,” he said.

Then she knew. McManus looked the other way.

“You leave me alone,” she said helplessly.

The women were leaving their doorsteps, grinning, moving down to the curb.

Powers reached for her and she screamed and clawed at his face. His grab for her hands came too late. She got her nails to his face and lashed at his shins with her feet. Callaghan came in behind, his arms around her. He closed his hands over her breasts and squeezed as he dragged her back. Her screams tore the street and her father came roaring from his house, a club in his hand. The women were on him from behind, and he went down on his face. A dozen of them tore at him, dragging on his club, kicking and stamping on him. “Run, run,” he howled to his daughter as he scrambled to his knees and was kicked back to the ground.

But she couldn't run. The rear door of the car was open and Callaghan and Powers had her halfway in. Kelly took a handful of her hair and hauled on it.

“You won't have it long, you dirty wee hoore,” he told her and yanked her through the door.

They had her across their knees when Powers got in beside McManus. “Away on,” he snapped, and put his hand to his bleeding face. “The last lamp post at the end of the street.”

She was no longer screaming; only sobbing in terror. The women were running up the street after the car, the father stumbling behind them washed in his own blood, beaten with his own club which had been clawed from his hands.

Everything they needed was neatly packed in a cardboard box in the boot—a gallon can of black paint and a stick to stir it, a pair of barber's scissors and a nylon clothes line. Powers and Callaghan held her and Kelly tied the girl's ankles and wrists to the lamp post. “Shift the motor into the clear and keep the engine goin,” Powers told McManus, and he moved the car forward along the street from the gathering crowd of women and children.

A twelve-year-old girl stirred the paint, singing into and under the shrieking, laughing turmoil of bodies and voices:

“Oh! see the fleet-foot hosts of men who speed with faces wan, From farmstead and from fisher'S cot upon the banks of Bann. They come with vengeance in their eyes, too late, too late are they, For Roddy McCorley goes to die on the Bridge of Toome today.”

She might have been busy on some classroom project. She had been reared on songs of this sort, at home and in the church school she went to—her mind was filled with Ireland's wrongs, for Ireland's history, her teachers told her, “is a catalogue of wrongs,” none of them Irish. The child felt nothing for the now still and silent girl at the lamp post. Mavis was suffering no wrong; she had been found wanting in loyalty and solidarity; she was engaged to a soldier; Mavis was a hoore, and that was neither Irish nor good.

A large fat woman took handfuls of Mavis's soft auburn hair in her big fist, slapped the girl's head back against the lamp post, and snipped the hair off close to the scalp. The girl's eyes were shut, her hair was tossed in the air; children fought for it as it fell.

When that work was done an angular woman with the face of a bitter man took the can of black paint from the stirring, singing child and upended it above the bound girl's head. It oozed thickly down her face and head onto her summer shoulders, blackening her pretty blue-and-white dress, draining over and between her white little breasts. Wiping out her self. She was a rag doll, slumped forward and down, her head lolling, her knees bent, without speech. She was nothing.

On the edge of the ring her father fought the furious women to reach his child and was battered again with his own club. They tore at his head, clawed his face, and gathered his flesh under their nails, beat him again to the ground, kicking him in the stomach, the back, the face, the groin, jumping on his feet and ankles, hooting, howling, screaming in deranged triumph. The man lay still.

The circle danced; fat women jigged around the lamp post and the girl, their skirts hauled high, big putty thighs bouncing and jiggling like sows' bellies. They jeered, sang, chanted, “The soldier's hoore, the soldier's hoore the soldier's hoore,” and their children danced with them, chanting.

The father crawled on his hands and knees through the ring and they kicked him as he passed. He hauled himself to his feet and took his child in his arms to ease the pain in her wrists and ankles. His face was blackened by her painted head and he moaned, “Oh ma wee darlin ma wee darlin ma poor wee darlin . . .” and she could not look at him or speak to him for fear her eyes and her mouth would be filled with the paint.

The shotgun blasted like a cannon and some of the dancers were down, screaming, not chanting, bleeding, not drawing blood. They were on their faces in the street, their crying quick like panting, or long-drawn wails, or out-of-pitch foghorns on Belfast Lough. Their fat legs were torn, their fat backsides full of shot.

The discharge almost knocked the girl's little crippled bird-mother onto her back. She staggered backwards, her steel glasses tossed down to the tip of her nose, the stem dislodged from one ear. She knocked her glasses back onto her nose and the gun's barrels dipped, too weighty for one thin arm. She grabbed it quickly again with both hands.

Powers and Callaghan and Kelly were standing to one side. They moved together towards the woman.

“I'll take the gun, missus,” Powers said in his leader voice.

“You dirty cannibal,” she yelled. “Come near me and I'll kill you.” The idea pressed in her mind and she screamed,
“Kill you, kill you, kill you!”
She looked around wildly at the frozen women on their feet and the moaning women on their faces and the gun swung with her look,
“Filthy, filthy, filthy muck,”
she screamed at them and swung the gun back to the three men.

“You, you dirty wee turd,” she shrieked at Kelly, “you tied her. You cut her loose.”

Kelly did it quickly. “Take her home, Sam,” the maimed little kestrel said to her husband.

“Oh mammie, mammie,” he wept and half-carried their child out of the malignant ring.

“Yis kin get up off yer fat bellies and git away from me now,” the little woman said. “All but you, ye filthy dog-dirt,” she said to Kelly.

Moaning and crying and bleeding and wronged the women backed and limped and bled away, and Powers and Callaghan backed with them.

“Stan in the front o'me,” she shrieked at the waiting Kelly. “You're the one that tied her,” she screamed, and pointed the shotgun at his legs and squeezed the trigger. But it was harder to pull than it had been before. She was frightened now and weakened by the storm, and the dragging with two fingers on the trigger lifted the barrel of the gun from Kelly's legs. She scattered his guts for yards over the paint-stained street.

The kick of the gun threw her back on her heels and she sat down in the street. Kelly lay about her, his eyes staring at the lamp post. He was eighteen. He had never had a job and had never looked for one. It had never mattered before. There was always British welfare. Now it would never matter. The little woman got up slowly and picked up the shotgun. They watched her limp awkwardly away to her house and her husband and her child.

Powers and Callaghan walked to the car. Somebody could look after what there was of Kelly. He was non-operational now. McManus drove them away.

“That one's a vicious oul bitch,” Powers said like a man who had been wronged and could see no reason for it.

That night the McGonigals' house burned down. Mavis was in the Royal Victoria Hospital. Her father and mother had no such refuge. The army took them in. Young soldiers fed and sheltered them.

“Here, m'am, take some of this,” they said, and tried to coax tea or soup or something into her.

The mother and father sat, huddled and staring but not seeing. “Oh ma poor wee darlin,” the man intoned like a litany and his tears were endless. The woman sat stiffly and like a corpse and stared in tearless desolation at nothing or some secret thing.

The police came for them in the morning, big red-faced men in middle life. One of them coaxed gently, “Come on, missus, don't be afeard now. Nothin's gonta harm you. Your wee girl's gettin better.”

“Do you have to part them, constable?” a young army officer asked him.