After the Wake (7 page)

‘I was sixteen when I was sentenced.’

‘In this paper you were writing it says …’

‘Listen Hymie, never mind my writing. How about your reading? What was the book you read to your sister with the dirt in it?’

‘There was no dirt whatsoever in it, though you are all so pig ignorant. It was
The Rambler
by Doctor Samuel Johnson, A Londoner’s Visit to the Country, if you want to know.

So it was too, when I looked it up a few nights
after, in the National Library.

‘Have another drink, Brendan Behan,’ said María. She always called me by my two names, so as to be polite, but at the same time not making too free with me.

‘I will, ma’am, thank you,’ said I, ‘I’d sooner the Vartry water than the soda water, if it’s all equal to you.’

‘For me, María, um, ah, whiskey solo,’ said Hymie, holding out his tumbler.

‘You’ve had your ’nough for the moment,’ said María.

‘Ah, María, your poor ould Tee Ah Och Aye me.’ (That’s how it sounded).

She handed me a drink.

‘May the giving hand never falter,’ said I.

You’re welcome this night, Brendan Behan. Take what you like out of that. Any other night, I supposed, the water out of the tap would be good enough for me. But like that again, that was not true either. Fair play is bonny play, and one thing about María or anyone belonging to her, they were never mean with drink.

Hymie put forward his glass again and she refilled it, and her own, with resignation.

‘
Salud
and
sláinte
,’ said María.

‘
Sláinte
’gus
saol
agaibh,
’
*
said I.

‘
Salud,
sláinte,
muchas
pesetas
,’ said Hymie adding something about my castinettas.

‘That’ll do you now,’ said María, ‘mind yourself. An old man like you, should be ashamed of yourself. On your knees you should be thinking of the next
world.’

‘I thought that was supposed to be a great place,’ said Hymie.

‘It depends which part of it you go to,’ said María.

‘Be Jasus, and the Pope mustn’t think much of his chances of going to the good part, for there’s no great hurry on him going there. Any time he’s sick there’s about fifty medicos from every part of the world in attendance on him, whether it’s his arse or his elbow.’

‘Now, Uncle,’ said María, severely.

‘What was that he said in Spanish about castinettas?’ I asked her.

‘Don’t have me tell you,’ said she, ‘it was shocking anyway.’

‘Well,’ said Hymie, ‘what would shock that fellow would turn thousands grey. I only said …’

‘Never you mind what you only said,’ said María. ‘Tomorrow morning when you wake up, craw-sick, you’ll be down on your knees, praying for the wrath of God to be averted from a sinful old man. I know,’ she added, ‘because I’ve heard you in your room.’

‘Seeing as you listen to my prayers, it’s a wonder you wouldn’t be listening outside the retrate* as well, when I’d be relieving myself of a morning.’

Hymie’s humour had changed. He was really annoyed.

‘Look,’ said I, ‘here’s the girl herself.’ Deirdre was coming down the stairs. ‘Fresh and well she’s looking after her trip.’

‘So well she might,’ muttered Hymie. María left us, to bring Deirdre over to someone to introduce them.

‘Hymie,’ said I, ‘Deirdre is very fond of you.’

‘Nobody’s fond of you when you are old,’ said he, ‘the only reason the other bitch has me here is
because she can call me Uncle, and it makes her think she’s still young.’

When her introductions to the new guest were complete, Deirdre came over to us. Her black hair gleaming, brushed back the way she always wore it, her oval face and brown eyes shining, innocent and understanding. The Madonna.

I was not thinking of her recent adventure, and certainly I was not thinking in sarcasm.

If she couldn’t resist a fellow, it was because she was too kind.

‘Feel better, now dear,’ is a cant phrase, but in Deirdre’s case, it was an exact description of her maternal attitude. Not exactly, because she had her own enjoyment too, and I know she had that as part of and as much as the head stroking and consoling.

As natural and as pure as spring water, and I’d have done a lot for her, and did. Wasn’t I after organising what even to me, a bad Catholic, was a most grievous sin?

‘Well,
a
mhic
,’ she looked at me, ‘How’s Brendan?’

‘Couldn’t be better,’ said I, ‘if I was any better, I couldn’t stick it. You’re looking smashing, Deirdre, after your trip.’

She gave a class of a look more humourous than a wink, and said, ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

‘You took the words out of me mouth,’ said Hymie, who still had the spite, over María’s remarks to him.

‘You could offer Deirdre a more civil welcome than that,’ said I.

‘Oh,’ said Deirdre, ‘my Uncle Hymie welcomed me already. He was out at the airport with Ciarán and Mammy fighting,’ she turned to Hymie, who grunted.
‘I’ll get a drink for the three of us. Malt, Brendan; and you, Uncle? We have to ask the guests before the family. Malt? Right. And I’ll have a Cork Gin and tonic, and it looks like water, crystal clear, so as the people won’t know what I’m drinking.’

We watched her at the sideboard. She poured a good measure of gin for herself.

‘For a girl of nineteen,’ said I, ‘she’s not a bad hand at filling them.’

‘She’s not, then, God bless her,’ said Uncle Hymie.

‘She never was though,’ said I, ‘she takes it as she takes everything, as something that is there to be enjoyed. I saw her when she was seventeen drink as much as any of us, cook us a breakfast of rashers and eggs and then ask us all to go swimming, and we lying half-dead trying to swallow a curer.’

‘It’s the likes of you has her the way she is,’ said Hymie, ‘her and Ciarán,’ he added, begrudgingly.

‘Oh, I shouldn’t have said that,’ said I, ‘about her drinking as much as any of us; I forgot that you’re her grand-uncle,’

I forgot, said I, in my own mind, that you are a dying old bollocks, and that I’m only pleasing you, by drawing attention to your relationship to this lovely girl – lovely, in the way that bright eyes and softness and breasts and humour and good opening legs made her. You, said I to Hymie, are as much a relation of hers as what the man in the moon, whoever in Jasus’s name he is, is. Fucked up and dried up long since you are.

She came back anyway with the drinks, and Hymie forgot his bad humour, talking and drinking again. And I forgot mine. Couldn’t I afford to? Poor old wretch. We all live to be as old as we can.

Lifting my tumbler I said to Deirdre,
‘Céad
mí
le
fáilte
–
a hundred thousand welcomes to you, and you home.’

‘
Go
raibh
mile
maith
agat,
a
Bhreandáin,
’* said she, ‘it’s great to be home. Oh, there’s Mairéad.’ She took a running dive from Hymie and me, and went over to Mairéad Callan who was coming in the hall.

There was a confusion of female embracing and clinching and, ‘Oh, Deirdre, you look marvellous,’ and more clinching and kissing, and ‘Oh, Mairéad, it’s lovely to see you,’ and ‘Oh, Deirdre, the trip did you good,’ and ‘Let me touch you.’

‘My Deirdre, and how you’ve grown,’ I muttered, watching this touching scene.

‘What’s that you said?’ said Hymie.

‘How about a rozziner?’ said I.

‘Musha then, it wouldn’t kill us,’ said Hymie.

I brought over a whiskey bottle and filled our two tumblers.

‘Hombre,’ said Hymie.

‘The skin off your knackers,’ said I.

Deirdre and Mairéad broke from their clinch.

‘Well, Brendan,’ said Mairéad, with heaving bosom, ‘and how are you?’

‘Only look at me,’ said I.

‘Good evening, Mr. Bolívar,’ said she, paying her respects to Hymie.

‘Ciarán is doing barman,’ said Deirdre, ‘he’ll be over in a minute.’

‘It’s not him I came to see at all,’ said Mairéad, with tempered judgement, ‘but yourself, Deirdre.’

‘Oh, is that the way with you,’ said I, ‘are you long going together?’

‘I can see Ciarán any time,’ said Mairéad.

Ciarán joined us then and from that out the five of us were together.

María was well on, and after a while got out the fiddle and a fellow from their part of the country came out with an accordion and we danced and had a great
céilí*.

Most of the guests were students at the National University and friends of the Bolívars from the rich plains of the Midlands and had every look of solid comfort about them.

They had two ways of looking at me. They liked me, because I had served a sentence of three years for possessing explosives, but they didn’t like the fact that I was a Dublin jackeen*. They applauded vociferously when I sang nationalist songs about the 1916 Rising, but when I sang songs about the 1913 General Strike, they were only polite.

Hymie had it both ways, and every way. He sang songs about the Land War, and with these students the memory of shooting English landlords was a worthy thing to be well remembered, but to go on strike against an Irish capitalist was not the same thing.

I did not blame them for that. Many of them were the sons of gombeen-men, credit shopkeepers and moneylenders getting the profits of a whole district each containing maybe a thousand families, and some of their ancestors, at any rate, had suffered a lot under the landlords.

and the lament for Lord Waterford, a big landowner:

‘Me life on you, Hymie!’ they shouted, ‘your blood is worth bottling!’ Well, just at the moment it might be, for his old face was pink as a baby’s from passion and drink.

So we all got well oiled, and Ciarán, as I knew he would, began remembering when we were kids in the Fianna, and Frank Ryan and Eamonn McGrotty, our leaders, went out with the International Brigade, leaving us who were fourteen years of age with the
women and children, and a humiliating place for tough chisellers* like us. We were left collecting tinned milk and packets of cocoa and bags of flour for the Foodship and were only consoled by street fights, stone-throwing, and one fatal (for them) shooting encounter with the Duffy gang.

So, Ciarán starts crying about all the poor kids, some of them only a couple of years older than ourselves that were killed at University City, Albacete, Brunette, Guadalajara, and Ciarán is there crying like the rain over them.

But I know that it’s not the dead Fianna boys he is thinking of mostly, but it’s his father he is crying for, blood being thicker than politics.

‘Go on, Brendan,’ he roars, ‘give us another one.’

So, encouraged like that again, I start off with songs from the Spanish War-time, about Duffy, and his crusaders for France, and some of the fellows at the party did not like them, on account of being of the big farming class that the Blue Shirts* came out of, but they had to put up with it.

‘Sure, with money lent by Vickers,

We can buy blue shirts and knickers,

Let the Barcelona Bolshies, take a warning,

Though his feet are full of bunions,

Still he knows his Spanish onions,

And we’re off to Salamanca in the morning.’

The bit about his feet was a reference to the fact that O’Duffy was Chief of the Free State police for ten years.

‘No Pasarán!’ shouted Ciarán, but his friends and relations were not overpleased. They clapped politely, though one of them, in an accent like a bullock said, ‘You could let the dead rest all the same.’

‘Arra, fuck him,’ said I, coarsely.

‘Go on, Brendan,’ shouted Ciarán, urging me on to further excesses, and leading the song himself this time:

‘Adelante pueblo, Bandera Roja

Bandera Roja, triunfará …

Viva la República y la Libertad!’

‘No Pasarán!’ shouted María absently, and then recollecting her domestic grievance, ‘Ah, can’t you give us an Irish song, Brendan Behan.’

So we all got friendly and soft
súgach*
drunk, and everyone friendly with everyone else, which is the happiest thing we have in this world, although not always easy or certain to come by, till we sang the last coherent melody, we who had not passed out beyond all hope of recognition:

Then most of the guests departed, and there was the noise of cars starting and shouts of who wants a lift here, and you move over there and take Noreen on your knees and no carrying on under the rugs please, keep your hands easy, I can’t get her started and you’re awful, get out and push, and then silence, and there was only a few of us left.

I found myself, as often I found myself before, in an armchair with Deirdre on my lap and her arms
tangled round me, and in an adjoining armchair like the other half of a family group were Ciarán and Mairéad in a similar position. Mariéad was lighter than Deirdre. This I did not know from experience, because Mairéad was strict and impatient. Though frail and fair, she could repulse a pass from another fellow as effectively as she could a warning or advice about her affair with Ciarán.