The Whore-Mother (5 page)

McManus was bent half-over the boy. He spun and straightened his right leg as he hooked into the man's guts, low down. The face came down and forward, uttering a long weird sound, and McManus was set. He hooked left and right to the sides of the face, crouched and uppercut the nose as it swung back onto his knuckles. He felt the nose fold. The body whipped up, bent backwards, and fell, its head at the feet of the two men standing on the landing. They pulled the body away and came back to the door. They did not try to come into the room but their eyes had blazing in them the peculiar light of a high Irish dementia that is never quite concealed by its own thin surface. One of them yelled, “Liam!” and the sound broke, shrill, against the roof of his mouth.

“What?” from downstairs.

“Up here.”

“Did one of youse fall off the landin?”

“Up here!”

McManus thought of the chairs, but his fighting room was too confined. He could do more damage with his feet and fists. He moved closer to the door and waited. Three of them would take a while to get through the narrow doorway.

Liam appeared on the landing. He looked at the man on the floor, his nose flattened against his face. “Christ, aye,” he said. “I see what y'mean.” He looked in at McManus. “Aye,” he said, and charged.

McManus met him with a jab and a straight right that sent him back to the landing, his mouth mashed and bleeding. He tried to say something but his mouth wasn't working properly. He pulled out the tail of his shirt and dragged it up to his mouth. The lower buttons of the shirt flew off and tinkled on the landing. He touched the shirttail to his mouth, looked at the blood, held up three fingers at the other two, nodded, and charged again.

He had to come first, the other two behind his shoulders. He came low, going lower as he came, and McManus kicked. The lifting right foot with the left leg extended behind it from the toe would have put a rugby ball into orbit. McManus felt the impact through his foot and leg. He felt the face collapse and saw the body fall away, spun sideways into the path of the man to the left. The one to the right came on, going low, and there wasn't time to recover and kick again. He tried to ram the charging head down onto his rising knee, but the face merely dug against his thigh and the man's arms were around his waist, rushing him back against the boarded window. The other one lifted a chair, smashed it against the floor, and came at him with one of the jagged legs.

McManus was pounding at the base of the neck of the man who held him against the boards, but his head was tucked tight against McManus's side and the blows were ineffective. The man's arms slid down over his rump and fastened tight around his legs. McManus threw up his hands to protect his head from the swinging chair-leg and the wood smashed his hands away and rose again and fell, raking his neck and again, on the rise of his shoulder. His left arm dropped. He yelled in pain and rage and the man holding his legs keeled over. McManus keeled with him and the man with the chair-leg got him on the chin. He wasn't out, but he was going. He was on the ground and they were kicking. He rolled in a ball, his arms around his face and head, and took the chair-leg and the boots on his shoulders and thighs and rump and backside. And on his hands and wrists. Slowly and painfully he slipped away. The last thing he heard was the lunatic whimpering and guttural whinnying of the men who were kicking the consciousness out of him, and the screaming of the beaten boy, who was being trampled like a lumped-up rug.

M
c MANUS
was tied to his chair when he drifted painfully back. After an uncertain while, in the light from under the door, he dimly saw the boy tied to another chair.

“Y're there are'y, mister?” the boy said. His hair was long. His pale face shone ghostily through it; its cuts and bruises were like shadows. “They give youse an awful batterin, mister,” he said plaintively.

It was old news and poor comfort. Every bone and muscle in McManus's body ached from the battering; there was half-dried blood on his face and neck; the fingers of his hacked hands stuck together behind the back of his chair and the cords sawed at his wrists. In his unconscious state his wrists had taken the weight of his slumping body.

Resolutely he tried to escape out of the pain into a hard look at his follies. Why is it only in Ireland, he wondered, that a man looks straight at you and asks you if you're there? Because we are confronted by so many welcome illusions? Because we lie first to ourselves and then to everybody else? Has lying become so deeply a part of the texture of our being that we can no longer believe ourselves? “Y're there, are'y, mister?” Peering into your face.

Maybe it wasn't lying in the ordinary sense? Maybe it was communal suction, when lie and truth and half-truth and the screeching collective emotion swamps the senses and draws you into a pool you don't want to swim in? Maybe the stronger ones stayed on the sidelines, waiting to “deplore” the losers—denounce meant something else and something more and was an impolite word—and make conciliating noises to the winners? In the North, the Catholics were always the losers; born losers. The middle-class Catholics with cold unromantic minds waited it out; but now and then there was an immature one, a less calculating, less stable one who suddenly felt the communal suction and for a while couldn't calculate his own long-term interest.

That's me, McManus thought—Holy God, I can eat my own weight in apes if you put me in a ring with eight-ounce gloves on, and I'm water in the stream when the crowd roars or the songs make my roots tremble.

He remembered walking away from Convocation at the university, his degree clutched in his hand. That walk brought him to this house and this battering, by way of his friend and former history master's study.

When the pleasantries were over he told Bull Baillie, “Now I'm going to the gun. There's nothing more to keep me.” He could hear the old man's approval before his announcement died in his mouth. He needed the old man's approval. Bull Baillie had bred in him a need to walk the hills with Ossian and McMorna and Cuchullain “and walk”—his father said—“in an Irish shroud.” It was Bull who roared his pleasure over the names of the political parties in the South and told his classes, “Listen to the ring of them, boys, Fianna Fail, The Warriors of Destiny. Fine Gael, The Tribe of Gaels! Roots! They have roots! No political party in Ireland that doesn't reach back to the Gael through Tone to Finn and the ancient Fianna will ever get off the ground.
The Labor Party?
Good God!
The Labor Party!
What a name! No color, no roots, no ring, no history—in Ireland, no future!”

They believed him. Didn't he read them things like Willie Fellows' letter to his darling mother before his own countrymen shot him in Mountjoy Prison in 1922 ... ? God, he could put steam into Willie's words ... McManus could hear him ... he could see him in his head, as if through a plate-glass window of the mind, in the class; in his study when he went to see him after Convocation....

“Welcome be the will of God, for Ireland is in His keeping despite foreign monarchs and treaties. Though unworthy of the greatest human honor that can be paid an Irishman or woman, I go to join Tone, Emmet, the Fenians, Tom Clarke, Connolly....” God, that litany. “You must not grieve, Mother Darling....”

And Bull Baillie ... tweed was part of the persona he put on the day he started teaching, and untidy hair that drifted about. He smelled of sweat and tobacco in the winter and McManus had never seen him in anything but tweed. He could see him now in his study, raising his shaggy old head and plucking at a leather button on his waistcoat, his head cocked and his eyes slyly laughing. “Holy God,” he said.

Not, “Good boy. Great. Grand. Lovely.” Just “Holy God.” In an astonished, disbelieving, ironical tone of voice. “You're coddin me, Johnny.”

“I'm not codding you.” He felt hollow already. He had written the scene on his way here. It wasn't working. He was disturbed and disappointed. Frightened, maybe. Bull
had
to approve.

“By Jasus, I need a drink. Will I pour you one?”

“No.”

The master went to a sideboard and poured his own. “Holy Jasus. You're not pullin my leg?”

“No.”

McManus watched it again through the plate-glass window with his eyes closed, his head hanging. It might all have been different if this moment had been different. If Bull had said something else....

He said, “Not you, boy. Not Gentle Johnny McManus.”

McManus could feel the sweat that broke on him then. He had said nothing. He felt rejection, humiliation. Yes, betrayal. This man helped to weave his Irish shroud and all he had to say now was, “Not you—Gentle Johnny McManus.” As if he were some big tame animal in a television series. Gentle Johnny was what they called him when he was on the school boxing team because, they said, he always apologized to a fighter when he knocked him out. They laughed at him then. Bull was laughing at him now.

Bull said, “You wouldn't last a week. You're not the kind.”

McManus sat, wounded and silent.

“You're offended. It's pourin out of your face.”

There was more than that pouring out of his face. He hadn't merely been rejected. He was being dismissed. He wasn't the kind. What kind? Like Willie Fellows? What was he, then? Some bloody sissy?

“You're talking out of a different side of your mouth now, Mr. Baillie. I'll go.”

“Sit there, for Jasus sake. Talk to me, boy.”

“Don't ‘boy' me.” But he didn't go and he would have liked to cry. He didn't. It would prove something he was fighting not to believe about himself. Wasn't going to believe about himself. His middle-class Catholic friends could wait on the sidelines. He wasn't going to and he wasn't sure why.

And he wasn't coming here to tell Bull Baillie he was going to the gun, and then weakly sneak off to look for a job just because this old man said he wasn't the kind. He had more self-esteem than that, by God.

“You talked plenty in class,” he said.

“All oul talk. Just oul talk. I regret every word of it. The guns weren't out in those days. It was great talk, like reading Gaelic poetry when you had four pints in you. You weren't meant to
do....”
He was going on. Something was dawning on him as he talked. Or had dawned on him in the sound of the demolition by day and by night. He was confronted by it now in the person and intention of one of his old pupils. The unlikeliest one. “What makes you think any wrong we suffered was big enough to justify the killing of women and babies in furniture shops?” His anger was a confusion; it was against McManus and himself and the bombers and the Irish shroud.

“Christ, I'm guilty,” he said miserably, and sat down and forgot his drink.

“You pumped it into us about the raw deal we get in Ulster and now you're telling me we've suffered no wrongs?” McManus said, rebuilding his assurance.

“Oh Christ, boy, don't give me that stupid street-corner rhetoric—of course we suffered wrongs, but put today's nearly six hundred deaths against the fact that some Catholics can't get work in the Civil Service having stood up and said we want to destroy the state. Is it human to kill six hundred people for that? Is there no sense of proportion in us? Does mutilating babies equal gettin prestige jobs in a state we said we'd destroy? Ulster was
not
a Nazi state and there was no excuse for this wanton killin.”

“And no jobs in the shipyards and no houses for Catholics who need them?” McManus said.

“A fact and a lie. All right, the shipyards are a Protestant preserve, but the houses—that's a civil rights lie and the IRA deeply influenced the civil rights movement. There's been no discrimination in housing since 1964—five years before the trouble started, and everybody who wants to know the truth knows it. The truth was established by Coleraine University in an inquiry led by an American and staffed by a group of Catholic scholars. During the sixties, Ulster was puttin up more housin than any other country in Western Europe. We're lyin and we're killin and you believe every bloody lie you're told because people like me got at you in Separate schools and filled you full of patriotic bullshit that gave us a lot of satisfaction and you a lot of illusions. By God, our priests and schoolteachers have a lot to answer for—first off, six hundred dead. We made people like you ready for the IRA not because we wanted you to kill but because we're emotional, self-indulgent bastards who never expect to have to answer for our self-indulgence and never expected you would do anythin but talk.
You
weren't ghetto Catholics. We could pour the stuff out on you without startin a fire. But there's damned little difference between the fools who
got
you ready and the IRA psychopaths who put you to work with a gun or a bomb
when
you're ready.”

Baillie remembered his drink and gulped it down. “Johnny,” he said. “It's none of these things, boy. There's cause for anger and there's need for change. But it's the killin, Johnny. They're
wanton
killers. They
like
killin. And you're not a killer. They won't put up with you, Johnny. They'll kill you.”

That was ridiculous, of course. The silly old fool had never meant a word he said. All his life he'd been a boy among boys, a posturing Irish literary kind of figure—a Dublin poet-figure who talked away his poetry in pubs because it might turn out to be rotten if he wrote it down. McManus had heard about them.

He looked at his old master with bitter resentment. The man wasn't what he let on he was; the man was a coward.... “Why don't you say these things in public?” he said, scoring a point.

“That's easy, Johnny. Who'd hear me? Who'd let me? And best of all, boy—I'm afraid to.”

That was it? He thought of his former middle-class Protestant friends who had quickly found him less than welcome where before the riots and the shooting started, he had been welcome. When the Protestant ghettos erupted in violence, he was still welcome but so was his silence. When the Catholic ghettos rioted, he suddenly was seen to be a Catholic and one with the ghettos, and not to be trusted. Sucked into and pushed into his communal prison, his anger grew and his myths enclosed him. The solution to his frustration grew in his mind. And the man who gave him his mythology laughed at his solution.