Irregulars (3 page)

4

T
he messenger boy is no longer sobbing, but tears well in his eyes and run down his face when he blinks, his cheeks hot with shame because crying is not what proper soldiers of the Irish Republican Army do.

Nor do they wet themselves in terror, as he had done, in the back of the motor car as they brought him here, the man seated next to him letting out a roar when he felt the piss encroaching onto his side of the bench seat and driving his elbow into the boy’s mouth, cutting the boy’s lip against his teeth.

The messenger boy sniffs back blood and snot and tries to wipe the tears from his face with his shoulder. He cannot use his hands because they are cuffed so tightly behind him that he has lost all feeling in them. His legs are also bound with the belt from his own trousers, and the men have left him on the muddy floor with his back against the damp wall of this derelict cottage, the interior of which holds a cold darkness all its own, colder even, the boy imagines, than outside.

Shivering, unable to warm himself, he swallows back his fear and wonders how long he has been here, in the dark. And he wonders where the other boy has been taken. They had brought him in the car as well, the thief curled up on the floor of the Ford, resting their boots on him, digging their heels into his ribs, his balls, when he whimpered. The messenger wonders whether the other boy had pissed his trousers as well. Would serve him right if he had, the filthy, robbing gouger.

The enemy is everywhere
, he thinks, Free State traitor bastards and street robbers; dippers and tenement scum like the lad with the fish-knife. When the Republic comes—the proper, goodo, decent republic the IRA had fought the Tans and Tommies for and not this half-arsed, cap-tipping Free State model sold to an ignorant people by Collins and Griffith and their mob of Crown stooges—they will clean up the streets right enough. No more dark lanes and mugger boys with knives. The streets are full of them, his mother has always said, and it flashes through his mind to tell his mother what has happened, how the two had tried to rob him. She was always on to him, when he was younger, about minding himself on the streets.

Tears well again in his eyes, and he swallows down the hard lump of sadness and fear in his throat. Another thing no proper soldier of the Republic would do: cry for his mammy when his prick is in the fire. Like his is now.

He sniffs again, and resolves to buck up and act like a soldier. No more tears, for the sake of all that’s right and holy.
I’m fifteen years old
, he thinks.
Not some youngfella in short trousers mitching from school, but a scout, a messenger, a soldier of the IRA, Dublin Brigade, and now, a prisoner of war, no less
. He is momentarily pleased by this realisation.
I am a prisoner of war
, he tells himself, thinking of the letter he will write his mother.
Dear Mother, fear not for my safety. I am currently a prisoner of war ....

And he resolves to say nothing to the men who have brought him here, no matter what they do to him. The message to Mr Murphy in Burton’s Hotel had been delivered, as ordered, mouth to ear, and no evidence of this can be found on his person. So he will keep the head down, the mouth shut, no matter what they try on him. He is certain of this. He will make Commandant O’Hanley proud, he will, straightening his back against the wall and wishing he had a cigarette, though he has only recently begun smoking.

For some time he lets his mind wander in the dark, images of himself in the uniform of a soldier—in his fantasy it is a British Army uniform, as familiarity brings it to his mind first, and the army he fights for does not yet have one—of himself on a gallows, his eyes blindfolded, a rakish cigarette dangling from his lip, a fine, sweet weeping girleen dabbing at her eyes. He smiles to himself.
A prisoner of war, I am.
He only wishes his friend were with him. At least then he would not be alone in the dark. Even that thieving bastard of a robber would be company. Even him.

He wonders again what has become of the other boy, and as if his thoughts have provoked it, the thief boy begins to scream. The scream comes from outside the cottage and is piercing and girlish. One word is intelligible. The word is
No
.

The messenger boy shivers in the cold. The tears overflow his eyes and run down his cheeks, and this time he does nothing to try to staunch them. Different images now parade through his head.

5

J
eremiah Byrne awakes cold and wet with dew. In the grey light of morning he peers out from the high grass in which he had finally, several hours earlier, lain down to sleep. His stomach growls as if to wish him good morning and remind him that he has not eaten in more than a day.

Groggy, he searches his memory for the last food he has taken, and in this searching, the frantic action of the previous evening lurches into his conscious mind. He sits up abruptly and scans the field of grass where he has hidden. It is a smaller field than he’d thought when he stumbled upon it in the darkness, bordered by a low hedge and the Howth Road, he thinks, not having known for certain what road it was at the time, but only that it would take him far away from the men and the boys in the lane off the quays.

Jaysusfuck
, he thinks.
Miles I must have run.
And as he thinks this, he looks at his right hand, and sees that it is stained with dried blood. Not his own blood, he remembers. Another fella’s blood.
And thank fuck for that
.

Forced to cut the bastard
, he thinks, when all he’d wanted was a root in the pockets and a pair of boots off the youngfellas they’d followed from the hotel.

Part of Jeremiah knows that he’s in it neck deep now, whether the fella’s dead or not, but another part of him can only hear the growling in his stomach, feel the parch in his throat. Giving the field a final scan and reassuring himself there is no one about, he stands and brushes the dew from his clothing, beating his thighs and stomach with his palms to get the blood flowing.

Blood flowing. He thinks again of the fella in the laneway and decides that he doesn’t mind if he had killed him. He’s hardly eaten in two days and that bastard had come between Jeremiah Byrne and a fine, slap-up nosebag, courtesy of them young lads in the lane.

Time to find Tommo, he thinks, hoping his friend had made it away when the bother kicked off. Find Tommo first, get his side of things straight and make sure his mate keeps his cake-hole shut.

Then head back to the Ma and see if she’d used the two bob he’d given her two days ago—after dipping some gentleman swat’s wallet on Grafton Street—to buy food for his sisters or gargle for herself. But he knows the answer already and sorrow wells up in him as he makes his way through the wet grass towards the road. And this sadness, like it always does, turns to anger as he walks, lest it overwhelm him. He has no choice in this. Anger he can use; sadness is useless.
So what, to fuck,
his anger says,
if I sliced the bastard, when that fella slept on a full belly every night and me and me sisters with nothing but grief to eat. Fuck him, the cunt. I’d stick him again
. If it would mean a hot meal, for himself, for his sisters. For them, he’d stick any bastard who crossed him.

Jeremiah hops a tram at Fairview Park, riding on the open back conductor’s platform, hanging on to a handrail. He makes it three stops before the conductor comes down from the upper deck and ticketless Jeremiah leaps off. He has been making his way home for the better part of an hour now and will cover the last half mile on foot.

The night before seems strangely distant to him as he walks in the rare autumn sunlight, the cobbles and macadam warm and sticky with horse shit and motor oil and Indian summer-softened tar under his bare feet. Everything on Amiens Street—food stalls, fruit stands, shawlies selling holy medals and postcards, newspaper boys with the latest editions for the workers arriving by train from Amiens Street station, beer lorries and cart-horses and tinkers’ scrap wagons—appears unchanged from any other day. Nothing has changed just because he had stabbed a fella. The world rolls on as if nothing has happened. Which means, he decides, that he must not have killed the man, because if he had, surely the world would be different somehow—the colours grander, brighter; the sounds louder and perhaps sweeter to his ear.

Of course, he’s stabbed a fella once before, he has. An auld dosser in a lane who had half shocked the shite out of him, rising from the shadows like a ghost begging for coins, but that fella had lived to doss another day. Jeremiah had only carved up his arm, and that shielded by a heap of rags worn for warmth under a British Army greatcoat. As well as this, he recalls that he has cut youngfellas in fights the odd time, and taken the odd jab and slice himself from other fella’s knives. But he knows that the world will be a different bleedin’ spot alto-fuckin’-gether when auld Jerry gets round to snuffing a fella, and since the world today is just like it was on any other day, he decides he must not have snuffed that fella the night before.

Absently rubbing his palm on his trouser leg as he walks—though he had scrubbed it free of blood with dew-sodden grass at the side of the Howth Road—his stomach growls with hunger, twisting in on itself as he passes bakeries, cake shops, a working man’s café where dockers and porters stand at a wooden counter, shovelling in the bacon and cabbage and washing them down with tea or buttermilk.
Another thing that hasn’t changed
, he thinks, passing a man with a cart selling pig’s trotters—
I’m still hungry
. Same as every day, with the stomach stuck to the ribs and scarce hope of a hot feed. He considers ordering a trotter with gherkins in newspaper and pulling a scarper, going so far as to loiter on the corner next to McCormack’s early house pub to watch the vendor.

In the end, he moves on towards home. No sense getting lagged or shot.
Shot for a trotter.
Who knows which mob the vendor is paying protection tax to, or which fella idling on the corner has a rod in his pocket and a fierce yearning to use it. Too many lads hauling iron these days, and none of them would shy away from blasting the arse out of a youngfella.

No, no thieving for the moment, he thinks, and as he does, he sees a uniformed DMP man and thanks the god of gougers that the constable crosses the road to speak with a beggar-woman hassling passers-by.

Jeremiah stops, and in the reflection of a chemist’s shop window he watches the policeman menace the beggar until she moves on. Studying his own reflection now, superimposed over the shop’s wares—conventional medicines and ointments, but also herbal balms, tiger powders, curry paste and yearling’s milk potions for superstitious sailors—he begins tucking his hair up under his rough, mushroom-shaped cap, as much of it as he can fit. His hair is the bane of his criminal existence. Even oiled, or unwashed for weeks as it mostly is, it falls out from under his cap in straws of golden light and makes him easy prey for even the blindest of coppers. He turns, instinctively scanning the quays around him. Sensing nothing out of the ordinary, he relaxes and carries on walking.

His hair is of some advantage, he will admit. Girls like it. Not that he is much bothered with them. His sisters are about the only ones he can tolerate. But it isn’t girls he is thinking about—though a girl would do for a turn when the hare was in need of a hole. He is thinking about the other way he has discovered, in the past year, to score the odd bob. His blond hair helps him there and no joke. Fair hair a bonus, in the job of work that was this other way. A far easier way than robbing, he thinks. And, in ways, much harder.

6

O
’Keefe’s mother has told him that his father had been employed by a woman named Dolan. That his father had taken on the work to repay a debt that he would not disclose to wife or son, despite it driving him to wake in terror sweats, shouting, pleading with the darkness.

‘
I didn’t know … she never told me, I couldn’t have known … please …’

‘Told you what, Da?’ O’Keefe had ventured the night before, but his father had responded to his question with the same blank look that O’Keefe had come to recognise, the vagueness in his features that spoke of shadows, voids, in his father’s mind.

‘You’ll see to it, won’t you, son?’ his mother had asked. ‘Your father’s not able. It would shame him, it would, if the woman were to see him like he is …’

‘You know her?’ O’Keefe had asked her in turn. ‘This Dolan woman?’

‘Not at all. Don’t be daft,’ his mother had said, turning away.

Now O’Keefe dresses in his freshly laundered suit of clothes. Civilian clothes marking the civilian he has become. A grey suit, white shirt and starched collar, though O’Keefe notices now that the shirt is not his own and must be his father’s.

Even after five months as a civilian, he catches himself staring at this unfamiliar image in the mirror and, as he knots his tie, thinks back to the day he marched in the RIC’s last parade before its disbandment, his polished black boots slapping the smooth cobbles of the Phoenix Park depot parade-ground. The lowering of the Union Jack and the raising of the Irish tricolour. He remembers the way he folded his bottle-green uniform trousers on the hanger with the coat and the hat, and how he had left them on the bunk there in the depot. Like a second skin, the armour of his past life shed, exchanged for this one suit of grey wool. The suit of everyman. Making him feel somehow less a man in the world now than he was before.

His childhood home behind him, O’Keefe turns onto Clanbrassil Street, slow-hoofs it to Patrick Street and past St Patrick’s Cathedral, Foley’s pub across the way, the public baths on his right, the address of the Dolan woman folded in his pocket. The streets are filled with the clatter and shriek of tram wheels on rails and the clanging of tram bells; the splutter and belch of coal lorries and motor cars; the clopping of cart-horses, movement and light assaulting O’Keefe’s eyes. He starts, goose-pimples peppering his skin as barefooted boys scarper from an alleyway, fleeing some unseen misdemeanour.

Knock the booze on the head, he thinks. Too much of it altogether since he left the Peelers. He thinks again that he should have joined his barrack mates who signed on with the Palestinian Police after disbandment. The Greater Manchester Police as well was looking for experienced men. Or he could always go up north, to the six counties excluded from the Free State by the Treaty, as many other Peelers had done. Take a job at the very wellspring of the civil war now raging. Like the policing he had done in the Tan War, policing in Ulster—they had changed the name to the Royal
Ulster
Constabulary—would be little more than presiding over pogroms and sectarian bigots with their banners and sashes and such.
No thanks, pal
. Still, though he is wary, he is happy for this job, happy to repay his father’s debt, whatever it may be. If only because nothing good comes of an Irishman with too much time on his hands.

A newspaper boy interrupts his reverie, hawking the dailies.
Read it he-ar!
Free State Army crush Irregulars in Cork. Many dead
, the newsboy shouts, nearly singing.
Lo-ads reported dead
.
Read it he-ar!

O’Keefe continues on up towards Christ Church Cathedral, passing young girls begging for coppers, clutching baby siblings to their scrawny chests or selling matches, some selling themselves. Common as rain in winter—women, girls hawking themselves in the laneways, doorways and cold water flats of the city. More whores than anywhere on earth, so it’s said. Dublin, city of whores and angry men. Which is he? he thinks, and shakes his head at the routes taken by his mind when he lets it run.

He passes fruit and vegetable stalls. Thomas’s bicycle repair shop—push-bikes upturned on the footpath like obstructions in no-man’s land. O’Brien and Sons Butchers next, the coppery scent of blood from the open doorway suffusing the October air, seeping into O’Keefe’s consciousness and turning his mind to memories of battle, but this time he does not let his thoughts wander. Instead he forces them down into the place on the sea-floor of his memory where he keeps them. The murder hole he has named it, and smiles sadly that he should have need of such a place, and wonders would there ever be a time when the smell of a butcher’s shop would not remind him of the war.

In thinking this, O’Keefe considers how memory—experience—is locked into the meat of a body. He has no belief in a soul, or anything so elevated, but he does believe—he has read this recently during one of his long, clock-killing afternoons in the library and agrees with it—that memory becomes embedded in the physical self; that traces of all past action lay dormant in the muscle, in the sinew and tissue and blood of a man like some latent, malarial sickness and return to attack the mind and body in the form of recollection, unbidden, unexpected.
No better than beasts, we are
, he thinks as he continues walking,
as much slave to the senses as any butcher’s dog seeking scraps at the sound of the knife on the strop
.

He hurries his pace for the sanctuary of a passing tram.

Leaving the tram at Amiens Street Station, O’Keefe walks less than three hundred yards before turning onto a quiet lane in the heart of the city. He consults the scrap of paper in his pocket.

He looks around him, taking in the long rows of two- and three-storey redbrick houses that line either side of the street. Autumn sunlight exposes grime that is invisible at night; the worn, crumbling brickwork stained black in places from gas-lamps and barrel fires that light the laneways and alleys and warm the hands of waiting hack drivers on cold nights. Rubbish spilling out of bins onto the cobbles. Dogs picking through the scraps, and cats, wary of the dogs, basking with eyes at half-mast on the sunny stone steps. The street is strangely absent of life, an oasis of silence in the otherwise roiling city. O’Keefe knows its residents exist at odds to the daylight.

Foley Street—formerly Montgomery Street—comes alive at night when it assumes the name most Dubliners know it by:
Monto
.

Also known as
The Kips
, it had once been the largest, most notorious red-light district in the Empire, and the street still thrives, despite the continuing departure of thousands of British Army troops from Ireland.

Memory stirs in his mind, of laughing women, sweet perfume and sour sweat. Of dancing at the edge of his balance. He cannot remember coming here on his binge—he is certain he would have been too drunk to get up to much bother and he’s had none of the tell-tale itch or burning in his piss; his money had been in his wallet in his pocket upon waking in his digs—but he knows why he might have been tempted. Knowledge lodged in the meat of a body. Even turning the corner onto Foley Street he had felt it—a surge of loneliness strong enough to cut through the shame and the fear, a deep, liquid ache low in his chest. A catch in his throat. There are a multitude of reasons, O’Keefe knows, why a man could find himself in Monto, but the desperate need for the company of a woman was the most common. Men with jobs that would never pay enough to afford a wife. Men with no jobs. Soldiers or sailors hundreds, thousands of miles away from home. Monto served these men. And O’Keefe, the ache welling within him, realises he has become one of their number.

He searches the doors for the address.