1999 (27 page)

The boarders carried the wounded man into the house. At Barbara's direction they laid him beside Ursula on the bed—“So we can look after them both at once.”

The boarders were bank clerks and shoe salesmen and minor civil servants; too young to have lived through the revolutionary years when a man had to know how to deal with gunshot wounds. They lived in a narrowing world. Unlike their ancestors, not one of them could build his own house or plough a field to feed his family.

Leaving the nursing to the woman, they gathered in the hall outside.

McCoy's eyes were open but unfocused. His neck and collar were soaked with blood. Barbara bent over him. “Séamus. Séamus? Can you hear me?” When he did not reply she straightened up and shouted, “Warren, is that damned doctor coming?”

The little man hurried into the room, wringing his hands. “I rang and left a message.”

“Well call another doctor, you halfwit. I don't care who, just get someone here right away. And call an ambulance too.”

“That will cost a…”

“I don't care if we have to remortgage the house!” Barbara exploded. “Just do it or I'll break your scrawny neck with my own two hands!”

Philpott fled back to the telephone.

Little Brian shouted from the head of the stairs, “Mammy, Mammy, the baby's crying!”

“I can hear her,” Barbara said through clenched teeth.

“Mammy, do you want me to pick her up?”

“God forbid. Just leave her, will you? And get back to bed yourself!” Barbara's voice shrilled upwards. Below the surface lay the jagged edges of panic, like the shards of glass in the shattered windowpane.

Surrendering to panic was an attractive prospect.
But if I do,
she thought,
who'll take care of me?

No one.

Damn Barry.

Barbara rolled up her sleeves and got to work.

By the time the doctor arrived, two minutes ahead of an ambulance, she had sponged enough blood off of her patients to get a look at their injuries. McCoy's wound was the more serious. He had been shot near the base of the neck. Barbara temporarily stanched the flow of blood with a pad of Ursula's clean handkerchiefs fastened down with adhesive tape. McCoy was conscious but in obvious pain. When he tried to speak the blood welled up again, so she ordered him to be quiet.

Ursula's chest and arms had been lacerated by the glass but no arteries were damaged. Barbara dare not attempt to remove the splinters of glass herself, or give her mother-in-law anything to ease her discomfort.
The mystery is, how did she get across the room to the window?

That was a question for later. As soon as Barbara was able to turn her patients over to the professionals she ran upstairs to calm her children, leaving Philpott and the boarders to fend for themselves.

 

Barry returned to Dublin in a good mood. By manipulating light and shadow he had taken a number of dramatic pictures of Brandon Creek, which was in itself unremarkable. He was packing up to come home when he was approached by a representative from one of the big American news magazines. After a pub lunch in the nearest village—and talking about Irish history and adventurers and Christopher Columbus until late into the night—Barry had a contract in his pocket. He was to cover Severin's triumphant return to Ireland; he might even go to America to photograph the
Brendan
being prepared for its journey home aboard a cargo ship.

He parked Apollo at the kerb and walked, whistling, to his front door.

 

“You sure know how to make a fella feel welcome,” McCoy said. He was tucked up in bed in his old room with his neck and one shoulder swathed in bandages. “Take off the door knocker and if that doesn't stop him, shoot him.”

Barry grinned. “Frankly, I thought Ursula was a better shot than that.” The doctor had assured him McCoy would make a full recovery. The bullet had nicked his clavicle and exited beside his shoulder blade. Although he would be sore for a while, he could be up in a day or two.

“Why were you trying to get into my mother's bedroom?” Barry asked—still smiling. “Has criminalisation gone to your head?”

“It wasn't like that, Seventeen. I was on my way to the back door when I saw a light coming from one of the windows at the side of the house. I looked in and there was Ursula. I was so damned glad to see her I tried to raise the window to say hello.”

“There's usually a lamp on in her room at night,” said Barry. “She likes to read for a while before she goes to sleep.”

“Do you know when she can come home from hospital?”

“Not for a while, Séamus. She lost more blood than a frail woman could spare and they've given her a couple of transfusions. Besides, they want to keep her in while they run some tests. The doctors are very curious as to how she got from the bed to the window. They say she couldn't possibly have walked—and she doesn't remember.

“Now answer a question for me. How did you get out of prison?”

“A screw just came to the hut and said to collect my things, I was going home. No explanation. That's the way it is up there, no one tells the prisoner anything. But a pal of mine overheard one of the screws tell another one, ‘That bastard is too old to be dangerous so we're gonna let him go.'”

“As simple as that?”

“Nothing the prison service does makes sense, they're a law unto themselves. But more men are coming into the Kesh all the time, so I guess they were just hard up for room. I'll tell you something for nothing though, Seventeen. I hate like hell being thrown out because I'm too old. That hurts. At least in the Cages I was in the Fourth Battalion, I was still part of the Army.”

“You could have gone back to the Belfast Brigade instead of coming to Dublin.”

“I could have,” McCoy agreed. “But I know when I'm over the hill, I didn't need the damn prison governor to tell me. Say, do you know this is the first time I've ever been shot? That's a turn-up for the books.”

 

Nineteen seventy-seven was the year the United States sent the new Space Shuttle on its maiden flight, perched atop a Boeing 747.

Disco dancing became the newest rage among the young people of Ireland, to the horror of the Catholic Church.

In a major political miscalculation, Liam Cosgrave dissolved the Dáil and called for a general election. A triumphant Jack Lynch swept back into power on the fifth of July.

Widespread accusations of torture were made against the RUC in Northern Ireland, but summarily dismissed.

On the sixteenth of August it was announced that Elvis Presley, the undisputed king of rock and roll for over twenty years, had died in his home in Memphis, Tennessee.

“The day the music died,” mourned Barbara.

Barry tried to console her. “There will always be music.”

“Nothing as wonderful as Elvis.”

“What about jazz? And opera, you love opera.”

“I used to sing opera, it's not the same thing.”

“You couldn't have done it if you didn't love it.”

“I sang opera because I had the voice for it, that's all. Now I don't have the voice for anything.”

“Of course you do, sweetheart. I love to hear you sing.”

“Fat lot of good that is to me,” she said sullenly.

 

On the tenth of October the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Mairéad Corrigan and Betty Williams for their work with the Peace People. The award was actually that for 1976, for which they had been nominated by West German parliamentarians, but the nominations had arrived after the closing date.

According to a television survey, many Irish Americans believed the bestowing of the Nobel on the pair would mark the dawn of a new day for Northern Ireland.

One U.S. news magazine even proclaimed: “Woman Power Will Win!”

 

The Yanks see this country through the wrong end of the telescope,” Luke told the Usual Suspects.

McCoy said, “Don't let Barbara Halloran hear that, she thinks she's an expert on Ireland.”

“No one's an expert on Ireland,” Brendan interjected. “Least of all the Irish.”

Danny gave an exaggerated sigh. “Here we go again. The Professor's going to be profound.”

“I simply believe the situation is more complicated than most people realise.”

Barry leaned forward with both elbows on the table. “I agree. According to the so-called experts sectarianism is responsible for all the problems in the north, and I don't mean just institutionalised Protestant sectarianism. We're beginning to hear ‘sure there's a pair of them in it.' So, although northern Catholics were almost exclusively on the receiving end of violence until recently, they're as much to blame as the Protestants because now they're fighting back. As for those who aren't churchgoers, if they're nationalists they're labelled as Catholics and if they're unionists they're labelled as Protestants because it's convenient, and they're swept up in the action anyway.

“The British and their apologists portray the conflict as a two-way street with the RUC and the soldiers caught in the middle, heroically trying to keep the peace. Commentators speak of ‘ancient tribalism' and ‘the religious divide,' to make sure people get the message: ‘This is all about taking sides and holding ground and it's a war to the death, so dig in, everybody. Don't give an inch.'”

Barry dropped his voice even lower. Spoke more slowly; made them listen. “In a war someone always wins, even if it's only the arms dealers. Is it possible that the real guilt for what's happening in the north lies neither with one side nor the other, but with forces behind the scenes who're deliberately manipulating a terrible situation for their own gain—just as they manipulated the Treaty that forced partition on Ireland in the first place?”

Brendan sagged in his chair. “If your supposition is true, then politics, which as far as I know is the only alternative to war, is a poisoned chalice. Northern Ireland is a giant chessboard. We're only the pieces; someone else is calling the moves.”

“We need another round,” Danny decided. Shoving back his chair, he headed for the bar.

Séamus McCoy had settled back into life in the yellow brick house, though not exactly as before. His old room was no longer available; boarders had to be shifted around to accommodate him and he was aware of a certain resentment. Philpott had taken over management duties to justify his possession of the mews flat, leaving McCoy to do the maintenance work—for which Barry insisted on paying him far too much.

McCoy spent part of every day talking to Ursula. She loved to hear what he called his “war stories.”

“Back in '69,” he would begin, “or it might be earlier. Or later.”

“Go on, Séamus, tell me!”

“Back in '69 there were riots in Newry as you may recall. They were meant to distract the RUC from Derry, which was taking a hammering. The B-Specials came roaring into Newry in Bedford tenders. That's a kind of armoured yoke, y' see.”

“I know that, go on.”

“The Bedfords were as hot as an oven inside, and the men all smoked cigarettes, which made it worse. Hell on wheels, you might say. They parked in a row on the grassy bank by the canal and everyone piled out to head for the centre of town, where the riot was.

“The word went out. Within a short time people were coming up from as far away as Dundalk. While the B-Specials were busy elsewhere, ordinary men and women overturned the Bedfords and dumped them into the canal.”

Ursula roared with laughter. “You're better for me than a tonic,” she told McCoy.

They never seemed to run out of topics for conversation. The only subject that was forbidden was her state of health.

“I am what I am,” she said, “and that's an end to it.”

But it was not. In secret she still struggled with her body, forcing it to do the impossible.

I did it once, I walked once. How else could I have gotten to the window the night I shot Séamus?

But how did I do it?

The more she tried to remember and send those same messages down the highways and byways of her nerves again, the more miraculous the achievement became in her own mind.

Sometimes at night she turned her face into her pillow and wept.

 

A new craze called Punk Rock arrived in Ireland, highlighted by a group called the Sex Pistols rendering their own unique version of “God Save the Queen.” In the Bleeding Horse Barry remarked, “I like it a lot better than the original.”

He bought the next round and they toasted the Sex Pistols.

 

Patsy's wife—whom the Usual Suspects knew only as a woman of surpassing ugliness—died of a stroke shortly before Christmas. It came as a shock to his friends that he was devastated by the loss.

In a country where most people had nothing, status could be determined by the number of mourners at the funeral. Patsy had notices posted in every obituary section of every newspaper in the capital. “Dearly beloved wife…will be missed forever by her heartbroken husband.”