A Star Called Henry (12 page)

—Who are they when they’re at home?

—They’re our mother and father.

—You’re being cheeky again, aren’t you? I don’t think you’ll be staying here. No, I don’t. You were let in by mistake. This is not the place for you. You must be twelve, she said.

—I’m eight, I said.

—He’s nearly nine, said Victor.

—No, he is not, she said.—No, no. I don’t think you’ll be staying with us.

I didn’t care any more. There was no point. I felt stiff and huge and too old for my desk - maybe she was right about my age - so I stayed put. I decided to say nothing until I was angry. I trusted my anger. And answering her without it had only made me feel stupid.

—Have you heard of Our Lord?

She was talking to Victor.

—What?

—Our Lord. Do you know Jesus?

—I do, yeah, said Victor.—That’s him there, your man hanging over the blackboard.

She grabbed his arm.

—Pagans. The pair of them. It’s Saint Brigid’s you should be in, she hissed.—I knew it!

Saint Brigid’s was the orphanage up on Eccles Street. I knew all about Saint Brigid’s.

I was up out of the desk and I grabbed Daddy’s leg on the way. The desk fell apart and Victor fell with it but she held on to him.

—Give him back! I shouted.

I didn’t wait for an answer. I just lifted the leg and whacked at the nose. She rose and flew and skidded across three desks and landed in a black heap on top of half a dozen screaming boys. She’d left Victor behind.

—Come on, Victor.

We ran to the door. I held his hand. He was coughing again. Miss O’Shea let us past. I turned at the open door and shouted into the room.

—MY NAME IS HENRY SMART!

I nudged Victor.

—MY NAME IS—

He coughed. It came from somewhere dark inside him. I watched the colour drop from his face as he waited for the air to turn and let him breathe.

—VICTOR—

He grabbed more air.

—SMART.

—Remember those names, all of you, I said.

I looked at Miss O’Shea.

—And you remember. That you were the woman who taught Henry Smart how to write his name.

She was blushing and her mouth was wobbling. I wanted to stay. But the nun was back on her feet. She was swaying a bit, but getting her head back. She came at us.

—Let her have it, Victor, I said.

Victor filled the room with his roar.

—FUCK OFFFFF!

And we were gone. Out onto the street and away. We ran until we were safe, just two snot-nosed, homeless kids among thousands. We ran to the other side of town.

Far away from Saint Brigid’s.

I’d had two days of schooling. But it was enough. I knew it was in me. I could learn anything I wanted. I was probably a genius. Victor started crying and I knew why. It was the warmth, the singing, making words, the chalk working across his slate, the woman who’d made him feel wanted. I missed it too, already, but there were no tears. We sat under the wall at Baggot Street Bridge and hid from the world.

We were well out of it. Miss O’Shea had just been a bit of good fortune. A lucky knock on the door. The nun had been the normal one. Mother, she’d wanted to be called. Never. Not even Sister. Fuck her. And religion. I already hated it.
Holy God we praise Thy name
. Fuck Him. And your man on the cross up over the blackboard. Fuck Him too. That was one good thing that came out of all the neglect: we’d no religion. We were free. We were blessed.

—Hey, Victor, I said.—Come here till I tell you. We haven’t had a thing to eat in three days. Are you hungry?

—Yeah.

I got him onto his feet.

—Come on, so. What d’you fancy?

—Bread.

—Fair enough. Is that all?

—Yeah.

—You’re easily pleased. What does V.I.C.T.O.R. spell?

—Victor, said Victor.

—Good man.

We went off looking for a shop with bread in it, with a good wide door for escape and some short-sighted old josser behind the counter. Dublin was full of them.

 

 

And then Victor died.

On the same day as the new king was crowned. I woke up but Victor didn’t. But, actually, he did. He woke me. His coughing. I was awake. Terrified, like I’d never slept. Like I’d just been born; empty. It was so dark. I felt something over me, and lifted my hand. I touched something and I remembered where I was. We were under a tarpaulin, behind the Grand Canal Dock. We’d crawled under it, out of the rain, the night before. Victor coughed again and I remembered the noise that had pulled me from sleep. I’d never heard it as bad. It was a cough that broke bone, an unbelievable hack that would destroy anything in its way.

—Victor?

I couldn’t see him, although I knew that he was right against me, where he always was when we slept. I could feel him. I touched him, waited for another cough.

—Victor. Stop. Sit up.

I tried to wake him, to get him sitting. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t get a proper grip. I found his cheeks and rubbed them. All I wanted was to hear another cough. I still couldn’t see him. I searched for the edge of the covering, to give him air. To see him. I rolled along under the low tarpaulin and kept rolling until I was out from under it. I stood up and lifted it and peered back in.

I could see him now. I let morning light in by lifting the tarpaulin roof with my back. I knew he was dead, even as I rushed back in. His mouth was open, and his eyes, staring into the darkness. There was a mark, where a line of watery blood had run from his mouth past his ear. I rubbed it away with my sleeve. There was nothing in his eyes now, just what I thought was the memory of his last agony and terror - the last cough and the utter darkness on top of him. I’d been right beside him. He was white and glazed. His mouth was stretched, the cracked, bursting lips were losing colour as I looked. He was changing there under me, hardening, gone. I thumped his chest, and got nothing back. He was dead. I thumped again. I felt his face. He was warm. I put my cheek to his mouth, waited to feel a breath, hoped, any tiny tickle. There was nothing. I pressed my cheek to his mouth, tried to go deeper for signs of my brother’s life. I pushed; I tried to climb into him. I felt wetness on my cheek. My own tears. Victor was dead.

I held his hand. I waited for his fingers to curl around mine. To prove me wrong. I dragged him out from under the tarpaulin, hauled him across to a cinder path. I was a shadow across him. I got out of the way of the sun’s early rays. I still hoped. The heat would loosen him, send a shiver of life through him. His fingers would stretch, curl and squeeze mine. He’d sit up and grin. And cough.

The sun made a wet skin of the frost on the path and weeds but it did nothing to Victor. His neck was crooked, as if he’d been hanged.

I left him there.

He was dead. I wouldn’t let myself be fooled into thinking anything softer. I wasn’t going to see him up there with the other stars, with the first Henry - burning gas, a celestial fart - and all his brothers and sisters, twinkling up there in a happier place. He was dead. I wasn’t even going to look at the sky.

The city was quiet. None of the morning charging and madness that usually had us on our feet and ready before we’d time to remember where exactly we were. Us. We. I’d no more use for those words.

I walked.

There were some people out. I could hear a car off somewhere and a man shouting at a dog or child. I passed a woman who was waiting for a shop to open. She wanted to be the first, to have the shopkeeper to herself for a minute, to plead with him to extend her credit. I could tell by the way she hid in her shawl and by the aggression in her eyes as she looked out at me. I went on. I put my hands in the holes which had once been pockets. Could she tell that I’d just walked away from my dead brother? I took my hands back out.

The flags were out and flapping and there was brand new bunting hanging over Grafton Street. I remembered now: the new king was being crowned, over in London. It was a holiday. That was why the day hadn’t taken off yet. We were going to walk out to Kingstown, to work the crowds around the bandstand on the east pier; that had been the plan - Victor’s idea; he loved the boats and the music.

I walked all over the city. Away from the main streets and bridges there were no flags, no banners. George V’s coronation. And Dublin didn’t care. And my brother was dead on a cinder path behind the Grand Canal Dock and nobody cared about that either. Another dead child. We’d found dozens of them on our travels, me and Victor. There wasn’t even a reward for them.

I walked all day. The city filled. People came out and strolled. It was a warm day, with a nice breeze that made the flags snap. What had killed Victor? Consumption, probably; I didn’t know - I was only nine. It was the cough. I knew that now. It had got darker and deeper; it had brought blood with it in the last months. But we’d never said anything about it. It was just a cough. In the dead of night, when we walked alone through the streets, when the horses were stabled and the hawkers were at home, that was what we heard - the city coughing. That was all we heard at four in the morning, before the seagulls got up on the air and started their squawking, bullying the city into waking up. Dead, dead silence except for the thousands coughing, a steady, terrible beat coming from the rooms above us and the basement areas, children and adults being choked to death by poverty. They were too late; we could hear the pain in the noise, we could feel life desperately clinging. It was how night-time was measured in the slums, in blood coughs and death rattles. And Victor had been coughing along with them and I had refused to hear it. I was only nine. There was only me and Victor. We were all that mattered. He would never leave my side. His cough had been different. Just a cough. It was what you did when you breathed Dublin air. When you slept on the ground. When you didn’t have shoes. (Just a few years later, when I smashed the window in the G.P.O. and started shooting, it was at shoes that I was aiming, in the window display across the street in Tyler’s.) You coughed when you ate bad food or none. When you’d never worn a coat. When everyone else around you coughed. When you’d no mother to fix you and no father to run for the doctor. And no doctor who’d come, anyway. When you’d nothing except your big brother. Who was only nine. And scared.

The city killed Victor. And, today, the King was being crowned. In another city. In London. Did they cough till they died in London? Did kings and queens cough up blood? Did their children die under tarpaulins? I imagined myself on a street in London, and Victor was trotting beside me, chatting away and keeping the eye on everything. But someone knocked against me and I was back in Dublin and alone.

There was something happening. A crowd had gathered and others were running to join it. I was on College Green, beside the statue of King Billy. Some in the crowd cheered and I could see the shape of a fight push its way to the edge. I went over, out of the shadow of the Bank, and burrowed my way to the front.

Two men and a woman, their backs to the railings of Trinity College, watched by a tight crowd of maybe a hundred men and some women, riddled with creeping, quiet urchins like myself. The woman was holding a burning torch; the flames were black and raging, climbing over each other. The men held up a Union Jack.

—It’s a disgrace, said someone.

—On today of all days.

—It’s an absolute disgrace.

One red-faced man came out of the crowd with a walking stick raised but other men grabbed him and pulled him back in. And now the woman touched the flag with the torch. The flames caught the cloth and devoured it. Some of the crowd cheered, some booed, and by the time the two men dropped the flag there was very little of it left. The woman stood still and unimpressed. I heard police whistles but the woman didn’t budge. Others ran; still others cheered.

—You’re in right trouble now, yeh Fenian bastards.

The men and woman didn’t move as the rozzers filled the street and scattered the crowd. I stayed and watched. The wind picked up tiny flakes of charred cloth and scattered them over us. I grabbed a piece and expected to be burnt. But I felt no pain. I wondered had I missed it and I opened my fist. It was there. My fragment was red; a tiny island of red left in the middle of a burnt-black triangle.

The rozzers had arrived but there wasn’t much left for them.

—It’s the fuckin’ Countess again, said one of them.

—God, she’s a terrible woman. And Griffith, the hoor.

The rozzers surrounded the two men and the woman they’d called the Countess and led them away. They held her arms and pushed her forward but she said nothing and didn’t look back. And they were all gone. It was over. I was alone again.

I wanted my mother’s lap. Just for a little while. I wanted to feel her shawl against my neck. For a while, an hour or two - a minute. But she was gone, and all the children too. She wasn’t on the step and she wasn’t in the basement. There was no one down there, and nothing at all left. They’d been evicted again. I hoped; still in the city, still alive. I sat on the step for a while. For hours, perhaps; I didn’t know. I ignored the night above me; I never looked at it. Then I stood up and went looking for my mother.

I
held my left arm across my eyes and smashed the window. I heard the glass breaking into smaller pieces on the pavement outside. Glass was breaking all around me and more glass from the two floors above was falling past the window, glass crashing onto glass. I hacked away at the remaining shards with the butt of my rifle. There was nothing outside, beyond the broken windows and the pillars, except the street and the usual noises that came with it - whining trams, the yells of children, shoe nails on cobbles and pavement, the women at the Pillar Stall shouting the prices and varieties of their flowers. Only the shock and curses of people dodging the falling glass outside stamped significance on the morning.