A Mad and Wonderful Thing (26 page)

‘No, Hannah. I sent him and Anna home. He never had to try too hard for people to love him, this boy. He hadn't to try at all.'

‘He never did get over that girl. Such a thing to happen. Who could have thought we would see so much tragedy? I'm driven demented by the whole thing. I declare to God but we won't be right again after these terrible weeks. God help us all.'

‘Straight out in front of the car, he walked. Straight out, they said.'

‘Will you give over, the two of you?' I call out.

‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,' Hannah exclaims. ‘Are you awake, son? Are you all right? I thought you were out cold.'

‘I was. It's a miracle.'

‘Still a smart alec,' Hannah says. ‘Well, that's good to see.'

‘Where am I? Have I died and gone to hell? Will I have to listen to you two forever?'

I see Mam look to Hannah with raised eyes and then slip out of the room.

‘There's been an accident. You've been run over, Johnny. But you're alive, thank God. Haven't we all had enough tragedy for one lifetime?'

There is no answer I can give to that, so I don't comment. Mam returns with a doctor.

‘Good morning, Mister Donnelly. How are you feeling?'

‘Hello, Doctor. I've no idea how I'm feeling, to be honest. What's the damage?'

The doctor looks to the two visitors.

‘You'd better not ask them to leave,' I tell him. ‘The curiosity would kill them.'

With long and uncommon words, he tells me that I have a broken arm and a broken leg.

‘You are a lucky young man,' he says. ‘You must have nine lives.'

Many lives, actually
, I think, but I say nothing.

‘There is no apparent head trauma,' he continues. ‘You were a bit delirious last night. Because of your history and your condition, we kept you under observation; but just at the point of your greatest anxiety, you had a visitor and you settled after that. The nurses kept a very close eye on you. We moved you here this morning.'

‘A visitor?' I ask.

‘God Almighty,' Hannah says. ‘But I can't handle this at all. He's rushed into ICU, he put the heart out of us all, poor Anna and Mister Delaney and that Flannery girl are beside themselves all night out in the corridor, and he's in there chatting up the nurses. Pretty young things, were they? That'd be just like him, a complete scoundrel. Probably got them running bringing him tea and toast, too, knowing him.'

Anna visits in the afternoon.

‘Well?' she says.

‘Well, yourself.'

‘So what happened? Were you drinking, Johnny? What have I told you?' She sits beside me on the bed and lifts a piece of toast from the bedside tray.

‘What's wrong, Johnny?'

‘Nothing. Just a bit of an accident. I'm fine, really.'

She pauses, and I look away; and in her sympathy, I guess, she lets that enquiry go.

‘And what happened with Mila? She was such a lovely girl.'

‘She slipped from my charm.'

‘Well, this should put an end to your gallop. You have to be more careful, Johnny. And no more drinking sessions. Do you hear me?'

‘Yes, Anna.'

‘I got engaged, Johnny, last month. We were going to tell everyone at Christmas, but then … you know, it didn't seem right. It doesn't seem so important now.'

‘It is important. I'm very happy for you. He is one lucky man. When's the big day?'

‘Not for a couple of years — don't know when exactly. You wouldn't miss it, Johnny, would you, my wedding?'

‘No, Anna,'

‘You better not,' she says leaning into me, holding me, suddenly sobbing. ‘So don't go walking out onto any more bloody roads then.'

Later in the evening, Conor Rafferty visits.

‘You better not have come all this way for me, Rafferty.'

‘I was just passing.'

‘Stick your head out the door there, will you, and see if the tea-lady is about, and ask her to bring us a pot of tea?'

‘Will you feck off, Donnelly,' Conor protests. ‘I will not.'

Nevertheless, the tea-lady is summonsed, and we enjoy tea and toast together.

‘Don't ask,' I warn. ‘It was just a bit of an accident, and let's leave it at that.'

‘I wasn't going to. By the way, Flossie sends her regards.'

‘Well, if you insist on knowing,' I tell him, ‘I was fluttered drunk. And that's the whole truth of it.'

‘I didn't insist on anything,' Conor defends. ‘By the way, I'm driving down to Ennis tomorrow with Anna. We're collecting your things. You will need them at home — you won't be back there for a while, Johnny. I'm sorry.'

‘Thanks, Conor. Always the thoughtful one. Say hello to Bella, and tell her I'm fine and not to worry. Tell her I shall come to see her when I can.'

The tea-lady arrives with the wheelchair that I'd asked her for.

‘If anyone asks, you didn't get it from me,' she says.

‘Right you are,' Conor replies, confused.

Conor helps me out of the bed and into the wheelchair, and we set off around the hospital as I tell him of our mission. We search the corridors and waiting rooms before making a tour of the grounds. We don't find her. We pass the morgue where Peter and I identified Declan as he lay on a steel table beneath a bright robe. I look to the cross on the morgue door.

‘I have an idea,' I tell Conor. ‘Let's go back inside.'

‘What idea?' he asks.

‘Just a mad guess.'

We reach the hospital chapel. Conor pushes the wheelchair through, and he leaves as the heavy door closes behind me. It is a small chapel, five pews each side of a central aisle. She is kneeling in front of the altar.

‘Why was I searching for you?' I say, rolling towards her. ‘Did I not know that you would be in your father's house?

She stands, turns, and steps into the central aisle.

‘Have you come to ask me not to tell?' she says as I near. ‘Not to tell those things you told me?'

‘No, I'm not worried about me. I'm worried about you, that I gave you this thing. I'm sorry.'

‘Isn't it too late to be sorry?'

‘I'm not sorry for what I did. I am sorry for you, that I gave you this burden.'

‘Thing? Burden?'

‘Killings, then. Do you prefer that?'

‘I prefer none of it,' she says hard, but then immediately softens. ‘Will you tell me something, Johnny? Tell me about the beginning? How did it all start?'

‘I don't think I can do that.'

‘Please, Johnny?'

So I begin with the hunger strikes and the useless sacrifice of it all; how it angered me, and how I was determined to act and to make a difference; how I wrote the essay as asked and handed it to the teacher; how I began the visits to the teacher's house for the private lessons; how the conversations grew, evolved from observations and comment to plans and intent; how there was no great epiphany, no one moment of decision, no beginning; how it was just as it was meant to be — that I was born for the battle, that I was ready-made for the gun.

‘But you were just a boy,' she says. ‘What was it about those soldiers?'

And I tell her about the checkpoint and the standing in the cold rain and Mam's shopping scattered on the road, and I tell her about the big black gun.

‘Tell me about the first killings.'

And I tell her about the .303 and the three long years of learning and then the Armalite, the Kalashnikov, and the Heckler & Koch, and how I spent a year on each and how I took them all into action, with some actions successful, some not. I tell her of the early attacks with Delaney. I tell her of the wet day in Ravensdale, the first one on my own, and then the others. But that, for me, it was all preparation for the big gun.

‘Tell me about the American.'

I tell her about the gun coming, and about the training, and how we went to a remote island because we couldn't use the regular grounds at Ravensdale or Inniskeen.
How, at the end of it, I remained on the island as Delaney stalled the boat halfway to the mainland. How it took a single shot — no loose ends, Delaney insisted. How the American was wrapped in chains and dropped in deep Atlantic waters.

She asks that I light a single candle, and I watch as she kneels on the first carpeted altar step below a high cross.

‘Do you pray for him, the American?' I ask.

‘Yes. I pray for him. I pray for you. I pray for that teacher. Tell me what you did with that gun.'

And so on it goes. I tell her about the Barrett, about what it could do, how all the training had been for it, how I planned to bring fear to the enemy, to change the war; and, one by one, I tell her how I killed in South Armagh. I tell her about Forkhill, Newtownhamilton, Keady, and Crossmaglen. And after each telling, she asks that I light a candle, and I watch as she kneels and prays. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,' she says, ‘for they will be called children of God.'

‘They were not peacemakers,' I tell her. But she ignores me.

‘Tell me about the Englishman.'

I tell her about the waiting in the dark alley, how clearly I heard Cora's words as I stepped out into the side street and walked to the hotel carpark. How there were two people in the car, including that fucker Sloane, I thought. How the driver door opened and the Englishman stepped out. Fuck off, mate, the last thing he ever said. How I walked quickly to the passenger door. Sloane rigid with fright. How it was not Sloane. How it was Declan, my brother.

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,' she says, ‘for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.'

‘There was no spirit in what they were doing,' I tell her. ‘No spirit at all. Only greed and betrayal.
Honra y provecho no caben en un saco
, as the Spanish proverb goes. Honour and money don't belong in the same purse.'

Once more she ignores my protest and asks that I light a candle, and once more I watch as she prays.

‘Tell me about Cora.'

‘Please don't ask me to do that.'

But she insists — and the righteous ground is not mine to defend — so I tell her about the girl with golden hair that fell in soft waves over one side of her pale face. I tell it all. And I tell about how we walked that last day together on the green mountain; how we sang in the pub; how we went home in her daddy's car; how the next time I saw her she was dead.

‘Cora was a special girl,' she says.

‘Blessed are the pure in heart,' I tell her, ‘for they will see God.'

I light a candle for Cora as Aisling Flannery kneels and prays at the altar.

Aisling

THE FOUR MISERABLE WEEKS OF FEBRUARY HAVE PASSED. FEBRUARY IN
Ireland is cold and wet and grey, and the only succour to be found in the month is that it is not January and that the days begin to lengthen. Patches of spring can occur, but they are passing rather than permanent, taunts rather than hints, and without determined attention these small freedoms can go unnoticed. The first ten weeks of the year in Ireland are a challenge to mood and spirit; depression hangs heavy in the cold, damp air. Our national day in the eleventh week is a celebration of survival.

I have healed: my leg and arm are again strong. Well, almost strong — or, as my dad says,
Enough to be getting on with
— and in the eleventh week I pack the Renault 4 with two bags. A half-dozen books rest on a blanket on the rear seat, and Aisling Flannery sits beside me in the front. Eddie and Hannah stand by the garden wall while Mam forces a bundle of sandwiches and a flask of tea through the open car door.

‘You didn't need to do that,' I say, and I salute Dad, who watches from the front porch.

‘Right you are, Son,' he calls. ‘Mind how you go.'

I look to Aisling, who is studying a road map. Aisling's hair is dark, and her skin is infused with honey and sunshine — I don't know how that has come to be, how she can have skin like that. There is so little direct sun in Ireland that we have evolved with a skin mostly free of pigment, so we might capture what little light there is; but Aisling hasn't, and the result is a total blessing. And her eyes? Aisling's eyes are pure poetry, for they are the rustic gold-speckled brown of the fading fern of autumn.

‘You are some lunatic,' I say to her, and her face brightens. I reach over and take her hand.

Conor Rafferty says that the Flannery girls were God's special creation, that He made them with His own hands, that they had a unique purpose, that they came straight down from heaven. But somehow God got distracted, took His eyes off their placing, and they ended up in Dundalk. Maybe he's right. It makes sense to me — I mean, if I was to believe in God and all that stuff. How else could it possibly be? Cora Flannery had golden hair, her eyes were green, and her skin was pale; but there are times when I am with Aisling, and I am off-guard, or my attention is elsewhere, or I lose myself, and just for a moment I forget things and I think that she is Cora. It passes quickly, this kind of moment, but when it passes it leaves damage — it's a fucked-up kind of feeling.