The Whore-Mother (6 page)

“Look, Johnny,” Baillie said to his silence. “Look at me.” The old man got up, ran to the far end of his room, and held out his palms defensively. “
Shoot
me, Johnny. Go on,
shoot
me—that's what it's all about now.
Killin
, boy.
Kill
me!”

Christ!
There'ye are, are you, Baillie? Yes, by God, there he was. He was disgusting. A cowardly old playactor too. The man wasn't real. McManus picked up his rolled parchment in its little cylinder and got up.

“Christ!”
he said, and made for the door.

“You're not the kind, Johnny. You're not the kind ...”
the old man shouted pathetically.

He slammed the door on the treacherous old fool ... he wasn't
real
....

“They'll eat you, Johnny, head and all,” the old man shouted through the door. “They're the kind....”

“The kind” were coming upstairs. They were not last night's lot. A woman led two men in. She was carrying a tray and on it two dishes of porridge, two spoons, and a miniature jug of milk. She was about thirty, black-haired, square-bodied, and big-bosomed with her bulky breasts tied down against her rib cage as if they were testimonies to crushed lust.

“There y'are,” she said. “Did y'sleep well?” She set the dishes on their laps, put the spoons in them, poured a thimbleful of milk into each dish, and said, “There's yer breakfast. Ate up now.”

Then the three of them leaned against the wall, their hands behind their rumps, and watched.

“I can't get at it, missus,” the boy said with innocence. “My hands is tied.”

“What did ye tell the sojers, McCartin?” the woman said.

“I niver told them no thin, missus. Honest to God. They just give me fags. M'da was a sojer....”

“What'd they give you the fags for?”

“T'smoke,” he said without guile.

“What did ye tell the sojers, ye dirty wee boy?”

“Nothin, missus. It's the God's honest truth, missus. I niver done it.”

“What did ye tell the sojers, McCartin?”

She opened the boy's trousers and fumbled for his penis.

“Oh, please, missus.” Shame and terror mingled.

She took it out. “I could cut it off ye,” she said.

“Missus....”

“Gimme a knife.” One of them handed her a knife. She laid it against his small organ. “What did ye tell the sojers, McCartin?”

McCartin was crying. “Nothin, nothin, nothin,” he whimpered, “Before God and the Holy Virgin, nothin, missus....”

“Give him a spoonfula porridge,” she said to the man beside her and handed him the knife.

The man took a spoonful of porridge and shot it into the boy's face. It hit him between the eyes and stuck, a little heap of surplus sliding down on either side of and over his flattened nose. He bent his head and some of the porridge plopped off his face into his lap.

“What did ye tell the sojers, McCartin?” the woman said again in her toneless voice.

“I niver told them nothin, missus. Please, missus, I told them nothin.”

She stood beside him curling some strands of his long hair in her fingers. “Yer hair's durty,” she said, and jerked it out by the roots.

The child squealed helplessly, “Oh, Jasus, missus. Please, missus.” He didn't know how to appeal to her or plead his innocence.

She took a heavy handful of his hair, secured her grip, and jerked it viciously. McCartin yelled but the hair did not come away. She jammed one foot against his chair, swung her thick body, and hauled the second time. The hair came out. The wide bald patch on the boy's head seeped blood. She threw the hair on the floor. Its tiny white roots blinked under the naked light in the ceiling. Backhanded she struck the boy across his wounded face. He fell sideways and boy and chair lay helplessly imprisoning one another on their sides. He was crying desperately. She kicked him in the chest with the sensible shoes on her broad feet.

“If ye want any porridge, McManus, y'ony have t'ask fer it” she said, and they took the bulb from its socket, left and locked the door.

“They're gonta kill us,” McCartin whimpered from the floor.

“Yes,” McManus said.

“What for?” It was a desperate little cry.

“It would take me all day to tell you.”

“I was afeared she was gonta cut my thing off,” he said. “Thons a terrible woman.” Then he said pathetically, “I'm starvin.”

They starved for two more days, in two more houses and with eight more men. The boy's head was covered with bald patches from some of which the scalp also had been torn. The next day they were taken back to the Markets. McManus had been beaten every day. McCartin's face was pulp. The child no longer cried. He seemed to McManus to have stolen away into a voluntary coma. Sometimes he started in his semiconscious stupor and mumbled something. Twice McManus heard, “Ma ... Ma ... mammy,” and just before they were moved for the last time, “I wisht I was dead.” So did McManus.

Back in the Markets the regimen was eased. But when they arrived and were taken upstairs the faces of cold and lurking hysteria were even more explicit. Three men came upstairs behind them. It was a slow climb. McManus had to shoulder the boy to the top. The men behind watched his struggle in satisfied silence.

They were met on the landing by a small lean youth who in his middle-class mind McManus would formerly have called a corner-bay—a hanger-about at street corners. In the face the hysteria was hot, and silently screeching. He let McCartin pass, stood aside a little for McManus and said, “Stop where y'are.”

“That'll do, Shamus,” one of the men on the stairs said stiffly.

“It was my brother's face you kicked in, y'traitor cunt,” the small man said. It came out like air escaping from a tire.

McManus was standing sideways to him, weak and light-headedly alert. He knew from the man's stance what he was going to do, and when he swung at his belly, McManus shifted slightly and the knuckles grazed his stomach but the uncontrolled savagery of the swing took the man with it. He teetered on the top step, and dangled.

McManus was past restraint. He kicked the suspended and slowly moving stomach and the man went out, spread, and fell on the stairs on his back. McManus jumped, both feet high and together, and landed on the extended belly below him. With his hands tied behind his back he could do nothing to save himself and went crashing forward onto the two men immediately below. The man behind them took the burden of bodies and crashed backwards. They were heaped at the bottom of the stairs, McManus on top.

Yet there was no more violence. They unscrambled, lifted the man from the stairs, and over his screams one of them said to McManus, “You broke his fuckin back.”

“I hope so.” He went up to the bedroom alone while they attended to their comrade who was taken away. Then the men brought food and untied them. When McManus had eaten, a man they had not seen before cleansed their cut faces and bathed their bleeding wrists. The man who did this was well dressed, he had pale long hands and knew what he was doing. He had to feed McCartin. He went away when he had finished with them. He didn't speak all the time he was with them. But he didn't at any time betray shock or offense at their condition. The other three men treated him with deference.

The day that followed was a healing day. Their food was good. McCartin escaped into almost constant sleep. McManus announced that he had diarrhea and was allowed to go to the water closet when he said he needed to.

He had a soft lead pencil. What he needed was paper and he couldn't ask for it. Toilet paper was his only alternative and there was none in the water closet. There was a box nailed to the wall with cut-up squares of the
Irish News
in it. On this, during frequent visits to the water closet, he printed his letter to his sister, got it into its stamped envelope, and stowed it in his sock.

His passivity was gone. He had made up his mind to run or die—maybe both. If he was going to die, he told himself, the initiative would be his, not theirs. Forgiveness, he decided, was a Christian but not an Irish virtue. With festering magnanimity he presented a modestly friendly front to his guards. They kept their silence and their distance.

He wasted his time. On the third day back in the Markets, when his strength had increased and McCartin ceased to be a battered zombie and was once again a terrified child, Powers and Callaghan appeared.

“You're movin,” Powers said, full of command, and took him back to the Falls.

The man with the good suit and the long pale hands came to see him twice in the next two days. He drew pus from cuts on his face, stitched some wounds, put medicinal tape on the ones that needed it, and came and went in silence.

“You're a doctor,” McManus said to him. Perhaps the man did not hear him.

At nine on the second night, Powers said, “Bed. We're workin the morrow. Up at six.”

The time was now. McManus didn't care what it was, or what they were going to make him do, so long as it got him outside. However slender the chance, he was going to take it. He slept. They had something in store for him. He was to be a patsy of some kind. It didn't matter. One good crack at it in the open air was the most he could expect. He had to be ready for it. He slept soundly, resigned and ready. His composure surprised and pleased him.

In the morning, Powers issued gray step-in overalls and gray peaked caps. On the breast pocket of the overalls a red circle had been embroidered and in the circle, a large M. The badges on the caps were the same. They were the uniforms of the vanmen from Marsh's biscuit and cake factory on the Springfield Road.

At eight they walked to the Falls Road and up it to three houses set back behind small railed gardens in the middle of a block of shops. Powers and McManus walked together, Callaghan behind. The third of these houses was the home of Dr. Brendan McDermott. His car was parked in the street. The keys were in the ignition. Callaghan got into the back seat. Powers held open the front passenger door for McManus and said, “Slide over and drive.”

The doctor watched from behind his curtains as his car was stolen. Then he went back to bed. “I'll report it at ten,” he said to his wife, “that'll give them enough time.”

“Want some coffee?” she said, and went to get it. The doctor propped his pillows and opened his paperback. Surgery at ten. Plenty of time. After coffee he might have the wife; last night he'd been too tired, but this morning he felt like it in an indifferent sort of way.

If she'd let him. If she did, she'd lie there suffering like a stone nun. The thought put him off her; he'd go elsewhere for it this afternoon; the car and his wife were put out of his mind.

McManus drove where he was told to drive; slowly, against the traffic going into the city.

“Up the Springfield,” Powers said.

Then he said, “Turn and park beyond Marsh's factory.” It was a quarter to nine when they settled to watch the factory gates.

“What is it this time, Powers?” McManus asked.

“We're makin a delivery.”

“Where?”

“Off the Loughside Motorway. To the worker's canteen kitchen. The chemicals factory.”

“When's it timed for?”

“Half-ten.”

“That's close. Who delivers it?”

“You and me.”

“What's Callaghan doing?”

“He'll bring this car for the switch when we leave.”

A delivery van pulled out of the factory gates at exactly nine o'clock. “Than's Wee Jimmy,” Callaghan said.

“Get in behind him and just follow him,” Powers said.

McManus tucked it behind the delivery van. It led them down the Springfield Road, around a bend that hid them from the factory, then turned left off the road and headed through the housing estates back the way it had come. It picked up speed, left the outskirts of the city, and took a lane towards, then a bumpy track across the lower slopes of the Black Mountain. They stopped in a dip that hid them from the houses in the lower distance and the road far to their right.

The driver of the van got out and came grinning back to the car. His puck-face was creased by the lines of the irrepressible witling. He leaned on the door and spoke as a familiar to Powers. It was easy for him to lean on the door. His head at full stretch didn't reach the top of the window frame. He was indeed, Wee Jimmy.

“Pat,” he said. His grin was engagingly harmless.

“Jimmy,” Powers said. It might have been a casual meeting on a highway.

“Who's yer man?” Jimmy said, and nodded at McManus.

“McManus.”

“You drivin?”

McManus said, “Yes.”

“Take her to the third door on the loadin ramp. The man ye want is Tommy Davison. All ye do is tell him I'm sick. They'll give youse a trolley and ye take the case to the kitchen. Then ye come out and drive away. That's all.” He grinned encouragement. “Tie me up, boys. An make me comfortable, for Jasus sake. I'm gonta be here for bloody hours.” He handed over his delivery book. The possibility of major hardship occurred to him. He glanced up at scattered white clouds moving sedately across the sky. “If it rains, I'll get my deatha cold.” He winked at McManus. He was a witling all right. This was a great lark. He was here, remote on the Black Mountain. The half-shift at the chemical plant, down in the canteen for the tea break, was far away on the edge of the Lough. Out of sight. Out of mind. No connection between Loughside and Black Mountain. Not in Wee Jimmy's mind. He could deliver at the Chemicals tomorrow, survey the ruin and the bloodstains and say to the survivors, “Holy Jasus. That's fuckin awful.”

“Ireland One Fuckin Nation,” Wee Jimmy said with glee before Powers put the tape over his mouth and propped him up behind a drystone wall.

“See you the morrow, Jimmy,” Powers said, and patted his head. Jimmy nodded vigorously, his eyes glittering with amusement. “Away on,” Powers said, and shoved McManus towards the van.