A Mad and Wonderful Thing (10 page)

As well as sweets, Aunt Rosie brought laughter. For the two weeks she was home, the house was full of joy. Some people are like that: they find life funny, and life — appreciating the applause — seems to reward them with a gentle passage. ‘My Johnny', she called me. I think she took a shine to me early on; she was always poking and tugging me. Or maybe it was because Granny was fond of me, and she was so fond of Granny, and the affection was just relayed across. I don't know why these things happen — why some people take a shine to some people and not to others, and some get left out altogether. I wouldn't have noticed it then. Stuff like that only registers later on.

Granny Reynolds often took care of me when I was small. We went through all the old stories together long before I went to school, and Aunt Rosie took great store in this. On every visit I had to read for her, and every time it was the same tales she wanted to hear: ‘Tír na nÓg', ‘Cúchulainn and the Táin', ‘The Children of Lir', and ‘Fionn Mac Cumhaill'. I found ‘The Children of Lir' sad, but Aunt Rosie loved it. She had one boy of her own, Donal, and two girls, and she was married to an Englishman — though she often said that she'd appreciate it if we kept that quiet, before she'd throw her head back and let out a big laugh. Donal is three years older than I am, and he got the
Beano
and the
Tiger and Scorcher
comics every week in Liverpool. The following week, when new issues were bought, Aunt Rosie would bundle those two comics and post them to me. From my sixth birthday, the bundle came every week; I thought it was sad that Donal never got to keep his comics, but I didn't protest.

One day, when I was eleven, Aunt Rosie went into hospital and died, and the
Beano
and
Tiger and Scorcher
stopped coming. I thought it was an odd thing that she timed it like that — dying when I was just about to grow out of those comics. I never did get to thank her or Granny for giving me the gift of the habit of reading. With small kindnesses, people can make big differences for others without ever knowing it.

Anyway, I am dreaming of Aunt Rosie and English sweets and the
Beano
and
Tiger and Scorcher
when there is a touch to both arms. I step back from the shelves ready to apologise. It's a bad habit, the pulling of books and reading a little whilst taking a few steps and then squeezing the books back into wrong places. But it isn't library security; they haven't got any, of course, but you can get insecure when surprised. Who it is, is Cora and Aisling.

‘Hi, handsome,' Aisling says. ‘The how-to-handle-a-woman section is over there.'

‘Thanks,' I say. ‘But first I just need to catch up on the hydrodynamics of spherical imploding shock waves and a few other matters.' Sometimes that reading by browsing can be fierce useful.

‘Right,' she says.

I turn to Cora, and she smiles that smile of hers — that smile that lifts the mood and air and light and weight of a whole day.

I smile, too, and reach for her and touch her. ‘All these books,' I say, ‘and the two most beautiful women in the world. All we're short of is a bag of toffee, and it's pure heaven.'

‘A bag of toffee?' Aisling says.

‘A bag of toffee,' I repeat, and I reach out to Aisling, too, and so make us into some class of a daisy chain. ‘Did I tell you yet about Aunt Rosie?'

I get two shaking heads.

‘Well then,' I say, ‘how about we get some books and I take you both to the Imperial for coffee? And then I'll tell you about Aunt Rosie.'

Chips and eggs, and milk

IT IS A BRIGHT MAY EVENING, AND CORA AND I ARE TO MEET AT DUNNES
Stores at seven. It is one month since we first met, and tonight we will go out early to celebrate. I watch for her as I pace around the wide pavement. She arrives smiling.

‘The Imperial for coffee, the Cooking Pot for drink, or the Roma for chips?' I offer.

Cora chooses chips.

In the Roma, a middle-aged Italian woman is busy directing operations. She is short, and her dark head barely shows above a long serving-counter.

‘Does your mammy know you're in there?' I say to her as we pass. She ignores me as she takes an order slip from the serving girl and shouts an instruction into the kitchen.

Cora and I take an empty booth at the far end of the restaurant. As we settle on the bench seats, the waitress arrives with the order pad held and the pencil already moving.

‘What are we having?' she asks, and Cora orders for us both — chips and fried eggs, and two large glasses of milk.

‘We should go down to Dublin for the day, sometime,' Cora says. ‘We can meet up with Aisling.'

‘Yes,' I answer. ‘We'll go down on the train.'

Cora then goes into a long detail of what we will do in Dublin. Trinity College is first on her list, and then the National Gallery and some museums. I vote for cafés and bookshops, but she ignores me and continues her list-making. I don't mind; it's easy to listen to her speak.

The Dundalk accent is an odd thing on the ear. And like many Irish accents, it does have a peculiar attraction, though it would be hard to argue that there's any kind of beauty about it. It has a flat delivery; it's as if the language itself has been taken to a smith's forge and had any unevenness beaten from it, as though elevation or depth were impurities. But though the accent is flat, you can't really call it smooth. Each word is delivered separately — there's none of the stringing together of the north or the south of the island — so that, though they are spoken separately, the words have a levelled sameness about them.

The flat language of the town is an added pounding on the flat language of the county. But there is another voice here, too: the swinging northern accent of Armagh and Down. The county frontier is just a few miles from Dundalk, but the accent borders are much closer. The northern streets of the town are populated with northern voices, and conversations in town can carry one or both accents.

And there is another odd thing: not everyone in town has either accent. Some, by good fortune or accident, have avoided this fate. Most of these are women or girls; few men manage the escape. And like things disabused of some habit or torment, in the light of release they flower tall and bright. Those free from the local inheritance speak with some kind of purity, and every now and again I hear the notes of a harp plucked by the hand of child. This is the voice of Cora Flannery.

‘To us,' I say, raising a toast with my high tumbler of milk.

‘To us,' Cora toasts. ‘Forever.'

I think it's mad the way Cora has slipped so quickly into ‘us' as if we were some kind of preconstruction, prepared and awaiting assembly. I am convinced that Cora has already decided a future for us, that she fully expected our happening, and now that it has happened she has absorbed it as naturally as Ireland absorbs rain. I look to her pale face, and I know that in her beautiful head there are no doubts. But I know what I am. I know that what she sees is not true.

‘What are you thinking about, Johnny-boy?' she asks, a chip held on her fork.

I look again on that face. ‘I am thinking of you, Cora.'

El Cant dels Ocells

IT IS A WET DAY IN JUNE, AND CORA AND I SIT IN THE FLANNERY KITCHEN
and drink tea. Gerry Flannery enters and stands and looks at us in the way he does — half questioning and half laughing.

‘So, has she told you yet how we all first heard of Johnny Donnelly?' he asks.

‘Heard of me?'

‘Yes,' Cora says. ‘I heard of you, then I went to look. It was a story Daddy told us about a friend of his who is a musician, and this friend has a friend in the national orchestra in Dublin — a friend who plays the cello. That was a wonderful thing you did.'

‘My friend still talks about it, Johnny,' Gerry says.

So now I know. ‘Yeah, well …' I say, remembering Bob's last day at the factory.

I'd been at the engineering works for two years when the day came for Bob Hanratty to retire. Bob never enjoyed factory life, and took comfort in the refuge of the oil store and the radio he kept there on a high shelf. One day, as I entered the oil store, Bob signalled for me to be quiet. I watched as he stood still, his head cocked to the radio on the high shelf. A piece of music played through the single round speaker, and when it ended Bob waved me in. ‘Eh, what was that, old-timer?' I asked. ‘That, my friend, was Pau Casals: “El Cant dels Ocells”.' The old man looked at me. ‘ “The Song of the Birds.” Such a beautiful thing. And who is Pau Casals?' Bob tested me.

‘Spanish,' I guessed.

‘Catalan,' Bob corrected me. ‘And a Catalan is Catalan first, and he is Catalan second.' I sat down at the workbench and asked no more about it, but I took note.

On his last day at work, Bob carried out his duties as normal. At the end of the day, he cleaned his workbench, tidied his trolley and oil-cans, removed and folded his green overalls, and took the radio down from the high shelf. He took a screwdriver and removed the brass plaque from the door. He put the overalls, the radio, and the plaque into a knapsack, and locked the oil store for the last time. He crossed the yard and entered the machine workshop to punch out. All the workers had already left, and the large workshop was silent but for the echo of his own footsteps.

He paused to look around. He had worked there for forty-nine years. I could see he was disappointed no one had waited. He was disappointed I had not waited. But, of course, I had — he just couldn't see me. Bob reached the time-clock, took his card from a rack, and punched out. The heavy clunk of the machine reverberated around the silence. Bob looked up to follow the sound, and only then did he notice the chair and the cello in the middle of the central intersection. Another set of footsteps echoed loudly in the workshop, and a man with long, wavy hair approached from the main external doors. The visitor wore a black formal suit and carried a dark-wooded bow in his right hand. He walked to Bob, and stopped and bowed before taking hold of the cello and sitting in the chair. He acknowledged Bob once more with a single nod. He rested the cello against his left shoulder and then, looking only at the floor some distance in front of him, he began to play. The bow, held in his right hand with four fingers showing, crossed the cello with slow, graceful movements. The fingers of his left hand punched and then nursed the four strings. Music floated through the building; vibrations carried around the machines and workstations, bouncing off the whitewashed walls and the high roof. Bob stood with his raised punch-card in shocked silence. He looked to nowhere as the workshop filled to ‘El Cant dels Ocells'.

‘He'd spent most of his life in that place,' I say to Cora and Gerry, ‘so I called in a favour. He deserved one happy memory.'

‘Well, you certainly achieved that,' Cora says. She leans into me, and I put my arm around her and hold her. ‘ “El Cant dels Ocells” ' she calls the title out into the room. ‘We will have it played at our wedding, won't we, Johnny?'

Wedding? This girl is more crazy than me. I look to Gerry Flannery, but he just stands there, watching me with that look of his, as if Cora's mention of our wedding was normal and only to be expected. I look back to Cora.

‘Yes, Cora,' I tell her. ‘We sure will.'

A box of tricks

I WALK THROUGH EMPTY STREETS. THE TOWN IS DESERTED, AT REST, IN
those few peaceful hours between late night and early morning. It is midsummer, and the advancing light of day begins to diffuse a night that never fully blackened. I take my time; I love the fade of the blue-black to a new day. I consider the girl. From the age of twelve I have decided my own fate. There was no question of what — just a finding of how. And I found it. Discipline, I learned from Delaney; conviction came with me. Each step along the way has been careful, meticulous, determined. This long war has fallen time and again on the rocks of indiscipline, recklessness, and treachery. On these, I will not be caught. And then, into all this, she comes.

The birds are busy at this hour: pigeons, crows, and gulls scavenge for scraps on the roads and pavements, and their hungry cries cut through the quiet. The air is mild. The sky above is showing grey, but it is high enough to offer hope.

I arrive at the engineering works, where all is quiet. The security guard in the small redbrick building by the entrance barely looks up from his novel as I pass through the pedestrian gate. I give a salute which the guard returns with a wave. At least once every month I make an exceptionally early arrival at the works, and at least once every month I stay exceptionally late. Familiarity as a disguise, the Chief has taught me, is as deadly as the greatest camouflage, and as I walk through the entrance and away from the guard I am already thinking of the gun.

I began with a .303. It was an old gun — an old Lee Enfield. It needed a lot of oiling and looking after, but it shot straight. Delaney kept me on that gun for three years. Then, one at a time, he brought me through the Armalite, the Kalashnikov, and the Heckler & Koch. I spent a year on each, and I have taken them all into action. I keep a Glock 17 as well, but it is a different gun for a different kind of action. It was only a year ago when, at last, I got what I was waiting for.