A Star Called Henry (29 page)

—I will, I said.—Don’t worry.

—Off with you, so, she said.—Himself says you’ll be needing a safe bed now and again and you’ll always be welcome here. It’s not a big house but it’s a friendly one. We’re all for the Republic around here.

I hadn’t seen anyone, only herself.

—And it’s always nice to feed a handsome man. Off with you now, she said.—It’s a long ride to Dublin and we’re not getting any younger standing around here flirting.

—Thanks very much, I said.

—For what?

Poisoning me, I said to myself as I went through the rain in search of the Arseless, to a long barn that smelt of old oats and horse leather.

 

 

I caught up with Collins in Phil Shanahan’s.

—Sorry about the eye, though, Henry boy. I’ll let you win the next time.

But he didn’t.

I wasn’t angry now. My wounds always mended quickly. I grew fond of them as they faded and women were always fond of nice scars, and I was very fond of women. The black eye gave me the look of a lost pup. A big girl in a field behind Kinnegad had told me that as she licked it, and women were fond of pups as well. I’d taken my time cycling home from Rusg. I’d climbed off the Arseless several times, at Ballagh, Athlone, to look at the Shannon I’d crossed the first time in my sleep, and Kinnegad.

—We’re nearly there, Henry, said Collins.

He gave me his full face and attention: there was no one else in the room while he talked. He had the startings of a moustache that already added years to him; he was a businessman, a family man on his way home.

—We’ve Dublin organised and the other towns are more or less sorted and soon, soon we’ll have enough of the country ready for action. We have the men and the houses but not enough know-how or weapons. The bang-bangs are coming and you and some other good boys are going to supply the know-how. We’re going to give the British what’s what in the bogs, boy, and in the towns and all over the bloody place. No G.P.O. this time, Henry. To fuck with it. We won’t be trapped this time. You’re going back the way you just came from. First thing, tomorrow. To train the country lads. And to pick out the best ones for ourselves. We want our own boys holding the reins. We’ll have a drink now for tomorrow’s road and then you’ll go home and get some sleep. You’ll need all the energy you can muster, boy. And, by the way, Cathleen in Kinnegad says you’re the best and the slowest ride she’s had in weeks.

T
hree years on a stolen bike. Over mountains, rivers and provinces. But first I said goodbye to Annie.

—Does it make me look like a lost pup, Annie?

She grabbed my ears and stared at my black eye.

—It’s just a shiner, she said.—Don’t listen to anyone who says different. They’re only taking advantage of you. Now.

I watched her bruised knees slip past my eyes.

—Will I sing? she said.

—Yes please, Annie. A slow one.

—The slow ones are sad.

—Fine.

—And they still last three minutes, no matter how slow.

—Fine, I said.—I’m going away, Annie. For a while.

—You were never here, she said.

—I was, I said.

—No, she said.—Not really.

She tapped my head with her knuckles, and then tapped my chest.

—Not really you weren’t.

—I’m here now, Annie.

—You are at that, she said, and her fingers left my ears and I watched her rub her thighs as we began to push and pull and her hands drifted from her thighs to mine and up to my back, to my neck, and back down along the knuckles of my spine and she found the right notes and sang to me.
She lives in a mansion of aching hearts, she’s one of the restless throng.
She hoisted herself against me and did the work as she sang and I stayed as stiff and as still as I could. And it was easy. She was old and young at the same time, Annie. Young thighs, old neck. Young wrists, old hands. Young hair, old teeth. Young eyes - gorgeous, brave things drilling into me - and an old voice made filthy by a life of Dublin air, a thing made of smoke and sex. She blew on one of my nipples - oh Annie - and continued.
Though by the wayside she fell, she may yet mend her ways.
She slammed and sang and we came together that one last time.
Some poor mother is waiting for her
- we fought each other and won -
who has seen better days
- and lost, and lost. We fell apart just in time before we died.

I sat up.

—Are you crying, Annie?

—No, she said.

She was turned to the wall.

—Poor Annie.

—Poor nothing, she said.—There’s nothing poor about me. Except for the lack of spondulix. Worry about yourself.

—I’ve no worries, Annie, I said.—Was that one of the American songs?

—It was, she said.—I want to go there. I could do things there.

She turned to face me.

—I want to own a piano, Henry.

And she turned away again.

—Why don’t you go then?

—Because he wants to die for Ireland.

—He?

—I’m married, remember.

—I thought you were talking about me for a minute.

—I don’t care whether you die or not.

—Ah, you do.

—No, I don’t, she said.

And I believed her.

—Just remember that letter, she said.

—I will, I said.—Don’t worry.

—I’m not worried.

—Anyway, Annie, I said.—I’ll be back soon.

—No, you won’t.

—I will, Annie.

She shrugged my hand off her hip.

—You won’t.

—I will, I said.—I swear.

But she was right. I never did see Annie again, but I did write her the letter.

 

 

The Great War finally ended but not before the British did us another favour and tried to bring in conscription. The country was packed with able young men unwilling to die for the King and their mothers and lovers unwilling to let them go and by December 1918 and the general election, even though the threat of a forced holiday in France had gone, they all queued up, all men over twenty-one and women over thirty, the young and the poor, and they voted for Sinn Féin. De Valera, Griffith and most of the other leading lights had been arrested again. They’d decided that they were of more use to the cause in jail, so they’d made themselves easily caught. It worked out very nicely. Forty-seven of the candidates were in jail on polling day.
Release the Prisoners, Release Ireland
. Sinn Féin had very quickly become respectable, the party of the parish priests and those middle-class men cute enough to know when the wind was changing. It was the party of money and faith, and thrilling with it because of its links to the buried martyrs; it was outlawed by the British, but cosy. While I was under a wet bush teaching country boys how to stay still and keen until the approaching uniform was an unmissable target, many of my fellow revolutionaries, in their Sinn Féin guises, were adding letters to their names. There was Michael Collins M.P. There was Dinny - Denis on the posters - Archer M.P. There was Alfred Gandon M.P. And there was Jack Dalton M.P.
Give Him Your Vote and He’ll Give You Your Freedom.
Jack was one of the candidates at liberty to campaign, but he spent most of the weeks in the run-up to the election dodging arrest in Dublin. Collins and Jack and other men like Harry Boland and Cathal Brugha who were busy on both the political and military fronts, and who knew that incarceration might get them elected but would leave the Volunteers and I.R.B. lost and nervous and in the sweaty hands of the moderates and johnny-come-latelys, had decided that it was wiser to stay out of jail. Sinn Féin and the Volunteers were controlled by the gunmen; the election was being controlled by men who had no belief in it. Collins made occasional appearances at public meetings around the country -
Come in your thousands
- but, to stay in control of the underground movement most Sinn Féin voters and members still knew nothing about, he and Jack stayed on the run. Collins’s contacts kept him well up to date on raids and cordons and he and the others played hopscotch with the G-men all the way to Election Day and past it.

So Sinn Féin, just a few years before a little gang of cranky nuts and bad poets, swept to victory everywhere except the bitter parts of Ulster and Trinity College, the original home of my bicycle. On the day the votes were counted I was on the same bike heading south from Limerick to Kerry, cycling into a wet gale that blew for me and me only.

There was no Henry Smart M.P. I was four years short of the voting age, I was never a member of Sinn Féin; I wouldn’t have stood for election if I’d been asked, but that was the point, and a point that didn’t drill itself into my head until 1922: I hadn’t been asked. I was bang in the middle of what was going to become big, big history, I was shaping the fate of my country, I was one of Collins’s anointed but, actually, I was excluded from everything. I was on a bike in the rain, all alone on the road. I was never one of the boys. I wasn’t a Christian Brothers boy, I’d been unlucky enough to miss Frongoch, I’d no farm in the family, no college, no priest, no past. Collins slept in the Greville Arms; I never made it up the steps. There was no Henry Smart M.P. There was no Annie’s Dead Husband M.P. And none of the other men of the slums and hovels ever made it on to the list. We were nameless and expendable, every bit as dead as the squaddies in France. We carried guns and messages. We were decoys and patsies. We followed orders and murdered.

But as I cycled into the wind, as I swam across the Deel with the Arseless on my back because there were R.I.C. men standing on the bridge downriver at Mahoonagh, as I got back on the bike and pointed it at a place of stubborn roads and people, I was one self-important little rebel. I had no idea of my tininess and anonymity. I was the Henry Smart of song and legend. I was the inspiration for a generation, a giant on a bicycle, moving from county to county, leaving my mark on the foreheads of the gallant young men, a living example to them all, and a man with a secret mission beneath the one that was whispered into the ears of all the young men of the parish: I was one of the chosen. I was a gunman. I could hear Jack Dalton’s song even in the loudest storms -
He was prince of the city streets, no other lad came near
- I could hear Collins talking only to me -
We’re nearly there, Henry, we’re nearly there.
I had no time for elections or voting, even as a screen to hide the real fight. I was no democrat, no more than Jack Dalton or Brugha or Ernie O’Malley were. The will of the people wasn’t measured in votes. The vote meant choice, but there was no choice. There was only one right way. Some of us knew the way and it was up to us to lead, not to ask permission of a voting majority, but to lead, to really lead, to show, demonstrate, live, die. To inspire, provoke and terrify.

I was good at it, and getting better all the time.

Sinn Féin had fought the election on the promise that they would abstain from taking their seats at Westminster, so none of the newly elected members, those not in jail, went over to London. Instead, they met in the Mansion House on the 21st of January, 1919 and formed Dáil Éireann, the parliament of the Irish Republic. De Valera, still absent, was elected Taoiseach and President. Collins was Minister for Finance. He wasn’t there either. He was called present but he was actually in England with Harry Boland, also called present, planning de Valera’s breakout from Lincoln Gaol. Griffith became Minister for Home Affairs and Count Plunkett got Foreign Affairs. Brugha got Defence, the Countess got Labour and Mister Gandon got Commercial Affairs and the Sea.

Henry Smart got wet.

I was cycling with scouts in front and behind me; an R.I.C. lorry had been seen in the vicinity and I was a wanted man, although there was no face on the posters that were gummed to the barracks and post office walls and the details and even the name were elusive -
Henry Smart aka Fergus Nash aka Brian O’Linn aka Michael Collins. Is not to be confused with the other Michael Collins. Age: between 21 and 29; 6 feet in height, or taller; dark, long hair sometimes fair; eyes, always blue and striking; is considered handsome by members of the fair sex. Wanted for Murder and Sedition in Ireland. £1,000 Reward.
I was cycling from Drumshanbo down into Roscommon. I had committed a murder; I’d caved in a rozzer’s head with my daddy’s leg on Beresford Place but they weren’t after me for that one or the share of soldiers I’d killed in 1916. As for sedition, it had become my middle name. I was Henry S. Smart. Sedition: words or actions that make people rebel against the authority of the state. That was me. And, as I approached the half-hearted outskirts of Strokestown under cover of the sleet that had kept me company all the way, as I passed the leading scout, a fat boy resting his heaving chest on the handlebars of his sister’s bike, a fat girl who loved me and Ireland and was always dying to prove it, as I took a mental note to reprimand and kick him for waving at me as I cycled past him, as I looked forward to the bed and shelter that were waiting for me in old Missis O’Shea’s house in Rusg and tried not to worry too much about the soup that was part of the bargain, as I did all this nine men in Tipperary shot dead two policemen.

What a day that was. In Dublin, the foundation of the Irish state and in Soloheadbeg the murder of two poor peelers, the first official killings of the War of Independence. Two huge events and I missed both of them. Although my mark was in both places. In Dublin Jack Dalton wore my suit because he’d left his jacket in the fists of two G-men who’d come very close to arresting him on Infirmary Road the night before and, in Soloheadbeg, most of the men who lay in ambush for five days waiting for the cart of gelignite for the quarry and the two peelers who came with it, they had been trained by me. They sat silently and still for five wet January days as I’d taught them to do, Seamus Robinson and Tim Crowe, Paddy O’Dwyer. I’d made them perch on stones in fast, freezing water for hours of the day and night and told them that their ability to lock themselves stiff and snap out of it while the warning twig was still breaking or the enemy bullet was still travelling to the chamber, this line between stillness and speed and their sureness on it was the thing that would keep them alive or kill them and I told them that they would be living on this line for the years that it would take to beat the British or until they died, whichever came first. They lay in ambush for five days, the men I’d trained and the others with them, including the one who lived long enough to write the book and so became the man who fired the first shot for Irish freedom. They waited, although they went to Dan Breen’s mother’s house each night, which was never part of their training and stupid, leaving themselves open to the eyes and tongues of the quarry workers on the road. And on the fifth day the peelers arrived with the cart and they shot them, Constables McDonnell and O’Connell, two local men, one of them a widower with four poor brats, and they took the cart and then nearly killed themselves and half of Tipperary by driving the springless cart loaded with a hundredweight of frozen gelignite over a rough road made of loose stones and holes. And they left the detonators on the quarry road beside the dead peelers. They did it without H.Q’s knowledge or sanction - bored, young, stupid men itching for their big day - but it became the first real action of the war. I knew nothing about it, and heard nothing for weeks; I was cycling down through Roscommon for a big day of my own.