A Star Called Henry (38 page)

—Good-night now, mister.

—Good-night, I said.

—You get your rest.

—I will.

—Do.

I made a very quick decision and, like that, I wasn’t frightened any more: I’d ride her. I’d fuck her the once and no harm done. It took the load off my mind and I began to sink into the bed and the sleep that came with it. Just before I fell out of thinking, I realised something: I was wearing my britches, the ones Miss O’Shea had given me on our wedding day. They hadn’t been on me on the night we’d run from the Tans. She’d put them on me some time in the last weeks, she’d undressed and dressed me. The britches were her love letter to me and I was reading it when I fell asleep.

She was on me.

Her hand over my mouth.

She’d come down the steps from her bed.

Her weight on top of me, I couldn’t see a thing.

I’d changed my mind completely: I was going to stop her. I couldn’t put up with this. But my arms were caught under the bedspread and she was digging away at the other end of it.

I bit her thumb. To get it off, and the rest of her big hand. I bit and knew immediately, as sure as the teeth that bit were mine, the thumb I bit didn’t belong to the woman up the steps. I knew that thumb; I knew the blood and loved it.

—Miss O’Shea?

—And who else would it be?

—There’s a yoke up the stairs dying to rape me.

—Don’t I know her? she said.—She’d rape me if she could find a way. Let’s go, so. The Tans are out and about. There are no safe houses any more.

I found my boots and carried them to the door. It was well and truly night now but I was able to follow her over the yard and a gate and through a field that wasn’t too bad on the feet. She had two leather bandoliers, in an X across her chest, and a revolver sat on each hip. Her hair was tucked into a cap, what I thought was a Glengarry. She’d our Thompson sub-machine-gun on her back and trousers tucked into her boots. I recognised them, even in this dark; they’d once belonged to Annie’s dead, dead husband.

We stopped at the far end of the field and I put my boots on. While I was doing that, sitting on the wet grass, she bent down and kissed the top of my head.

—We’re both alive, she said.

—And kicking.

She had the Arseless hidden away in a ditch across more fields. This time she cycled and I sat on the crossbar. We rode through the middle of the night and she, a gorgeous bat folding me in her wings, dodged the holes in the road and knew all the corners where I saw none.

She kissed the back of my neck.

—You’ve been making a name for yourself, I said.

—I’m like you now, Henry, she said.—I’ve many names.

—Our Lady of the Machine Gun.

—That’s my favourite.

—And what about your arm? I asked.

—The best thing that ever happened to me, she said.

—How d’you mean?

—When the first bullet went in I couldn’t believe the pain. I didn’t think it was possible. I still couldn’t believe it when the second one hit me, but it was no worse than the first. And the third one was barely a tickle. I don’t know if it was the same man did the firing or if they were all aiming at my arm but if I met him today I’d thank him.

—Before you shot him.

—Yes, she said.—Now’s not the time for sentimentality. I knew when the third bullet hit me that I could stand up to anything. I’ve nothing to fear. There’s no stopping me now, Henry.

—Is your arm not sore?

—It’s agony, she said.

She braked. She was off the bike and we were lying against a ditch two seconds before headlights ripped the night and a tender roared past, its wheels a few feet from my face. Before it was gone back into the dark, I saw two rows of men, facing each other on either side, rifles across their knees. I couldn’t see uniforms but they didn’t look like Black and Tans. They were gone.

—Wait, she said.

I wasn’t going anywhere.

It was a rumble for a long time before it took a shape - Miss O’Shea slid deeper into the ditch and I followed her example - and an armoured car rolled past. It sent stones and dirt on top of us; we could feel it shredding the ground. And I could feel my wound now, for the first time since Miss O’Shea had come and rescued me. I watched the car continue. It was metal that had no shine, topped by a gun turret that scanned the sides of the road as it followed the tender into the dark.

Its growl was there for a long time after it had gone and the pain was getting worse. It was as if the weight of the passing car had opened up the wound from the entrance hole of the bullet slowly to the exit.

—Who were they? I asked when it seemed safe to whisper.

—They’re new, she said.—Too new to have a name. But they’re worse than the Tans.

They were the Auxiliary Cadets. The Auxies. All former officers and sergeants, they came from the same bitter world as the Black and Tans, but they were paid more, a quid a day, and their uniforms were more complete and army-like, dark blue, coloured up with their war ribbons and topped by Glengarry caps. The one on Miss O’Shea’s head had come clean out of the mess when she’d lobbed a grenade into the back of a tender; it had landed at her feet. They were middle-class thugs, unemployed gentlemen, soldiers of fortune, men out for adventure or looking after the wife and kids at home in London and Dundee. They’d learnt their killing in Belgium and France, the Punjab and Gallipoli. They’d killed Cossacks, Turks and Zulus. These guys knew their stuff.

—Are you alright? she asked.

—I’m grand.

I stood up out of the ditch.

—But I bet my pain’s worse than yours.

—Men, she said.—You always have to win.

—No, listen, I said.—I’m not doing this to best you.

And I fainted.

 

 

We crossed the Midlands many times, a crazy route of ambushes and burnings. We hit the quiet places; we put them on the map. We lived at night and hid inside the day. When we were very lucky, we spent a few hours in a bed or got two days’ worth of dinner off the one plate, or we spent daylight in a bunker under a field, away from the aeroplane that flew low all day or the eyes inside the armoured car turrets. We stayed out of the stone wall country. We cycled east where the hedges grew fat and high, where two rebels in love and their bicycle could sometimes hide.

We lost the Arseless somewhere in Westmeath, at a bridge that crossed the Yellow River. We were under the bridge, padding the arch with gelignite, when the rumble above dislodged the stuff around us. An armoured car had stopped right on top of us. We grabbed hands and slid into the river. She smothered a gasp but I felt at home in the freezing water. Men got out of the car - a hinge squealed, feet hit the road. I held up the Thompson with my free hand and, together, we floated away from the bridge, under some hanging trees, carried by the river without help from hands or feet. Not a lap or splash, the river did it for us. The river and the night. And the sparks from the Auxies’ flare. They found the bike and Miss O’Shea’s empty gun rack. Their torch ran the length of the handlebars and, gradually, they knew what they were looking at. The one with the flare, making up for lost time, sent it up to the sky before he’d got properly out from under the arch. The sparks came back at him and landed on the gelignite that had dropped to the thin bank of earth between the wall and the river. It didn’t blow the bridge but it kept them occupied until we were well away and on dry land, mauling each other in the weeds to get our blood running again. She roared when her bad arm hit my head and I roared when her knee pressed my chest and we both roared when a mouse ran over my back but the Auxies were doing roaring of their own - they set fire to three farmhouses and shot a publican in Crookedwood - and no one important heard us.

We fucked our way across Slieve Gullion, bared our arses and wounds to the sleet that ran up the mountain after us and we never felt the cold. When we sneaked into Oldcastle just before dawn, a Sinn Féiner who owned a safe shop - he was later nailed to a tree after the Tans had been fired at as they drove through the town - told us that we had to go to Templemore.

So off we went.

A big peeler, the District Inspector, had been shot dead in Templemore and the Tans had shown their displeasure by setting fire to the Town Hall and other parts of the town. They commandeered anything they could find in a bottle and drank the lot before they went on to torch three of the nearest creameries. The locals took to the fields and stayed out there until the Tans were all back behind the walls of their barracks and sleeping. Except for the hardy and stupid, the town was deserted when a wee priest-to-be, a seminarian, home on his holidays, being fattened by his mammy for the winter, ran into a shop to buy his
Independent
and kept running when he heard the skid of a tender turning outside on the street, up over the counter, through the door, and he came to a halt in the shopman’s hall when he saw all the statues and the holy pictures bleeding. There was blood on every wall, in every corner, delicate lines of the red stuff running from every saint and son and mother of God.

And that was where we went, after our rest in the councillor’s attic, south to Tipperary, to stoke the miracle, on two new bikes, on the orders of Michael Collins. The councillor offered us his own bike.

—I could never get up on a bike that wasn’t stolen, I told him.—Thanks for the offer but it’s a matter of principle.

So we fecked two good bikes that were sitting against the kerb outside the R.I.C. barracks. They were solid enough to be peelers’ but, even if they weren’t, if they belonged to a couple of citizens who’d just gone into the cop-shop, we felt grand about taking them because they’d no business going in there at this stage of the national struggle. A nice one each, parked between a couple of armoured cars, both with crossbars.

We cycled the night, south through Fennor and Tevrin, away off the big roads. But the nights were too short for journeys of any length, so we buried the machine-gun in a wood beside Coralstown. We shook the muck off each other’s clothes and continued into the day, husband and wife, on our honeymoon, a cycling tour of the Midlands. I wore my suit and tie, my respectable credentials, and my arsenal under my coat. She put her weapons and ammo in a bag and we became a young middle-class couple from Dublin - and Protestant, to explain away Miss O’Shea’s trousers.

Rochfortbridge, Tyrrellspass.

—Name?

—Michael Collins.

We saw smoke from a burning farmhouse and got back onto the little roads. We spent a night in a barn outside Timahoe and another under a hedge near Templetouhy. We washed, I shaved and we got to the edge of Templemore with the morning crowds.

I took off the collar and tie. I ripped the right leg of my trousers at the thigh and tore around until the leg dropped to my boot. I threw the cloth into the ditch and Miss O’Shea helped me strap my now trouserless leg up with my tie. She tied a good knot that wouldn’t go until I wanted it to. And then, for the first time, I donned my daddy’s wooden leg.

It fit. It hummed.

—He must have been a big man, she said.

—I remember him being huge.

She helped me strap the leather harness onto my own leg. My leg was doubled, bent at the knee, two sets of folded bone, flesh and muscle. Yet the harness fit snugly, no adjustments needed.

—Like a glove.

—You were born to it, she said.

I buttoned up my coat and we were off again, no longer a honeymooning couple, but two out of the thousands of country people converging on Templemore to see the holy things that bled for us. We left the bikes in a field and walked. I leaned on Miss O’Shea; it added authenticity and the leg took getting used to. I missed not having a heel or sole and my real heel was digging a trench in my arse, but the wooden leg didn’t act up. It went where I wanted it to go. It stood up to my weight and stayed put, although I felt frail and wary of the distance between me and the ground, as I went forward on the real one.

—Is it this way to the miracles, mister? said Miss O’Shea.

—’Tis, said a man who was selling bottles from a crate of minerals on the side of the road.—There was a girl cured of her consumption yesterday, they say.

—It’s your turn today, Michael, she said to me.

—A new leg’d be harder than consumption, I said.

—It’s a question of faith, young fellow, said the man.—Not difficulty. Have you faith?

—I have, I said.

—And are you thirsty?

—I am, I said.—But I’ve no money.

—On with you, so, he said.—Good luck to you now and walk past this way again if the statues give you a new leg. Or a new wallet.

—I will, I said.—And I’ll kick those bottles of lemonade up your arse till the fizz comes out of your fuckin’ ears.

—Don’t draw attention to yourself, said Miss O’Shea.

—That’s exactly what I’m here to do, I said.

—But the right kind of attention, she said.—That man will remember more about you now than’s necessary. When he hears about it.

—You’re right, I said.—Sorry. We could always kill him on the way back.

—We could, but it seems a bit harsh.

We got in with the crowds descending on the town, a crawl of farm carts, bicycles, charabancs, motor cars and pilgrims like ourselves on foot. The walking wounded and men and women on stretchers, carried by their children, and children coughing blood, men carrying the damage of war, legless, armless, skinless. The slobbering brainless. And the best of Ireland’s freaks, they were all on the road to town - pin-heads, hunchbacks, dwarfs, a couple of bearded ladies - they were travelling together, in a battered Ford, hanging off it, on the roof or walking along beside it. We got in among them.

—An old soldier got his knee back working.

—I heard that one. And a lady from Thurles got her back straightened.