Peeling Oranges (20 page)

The sighs of mourners evaporate into the smoky air. I hear voices of condolence. My hand is pressed again. Doors are opened and closed. Some of the mourners have finished their mourning and tread unsteadily and squintyeyed into the daylight world outside.

There is just MacSuibhne and me sitting at a table.

‘I’ll call the curate.’ Mac Suibhne stands up to order more stout – for me; all he’s drinking is lemonade. His beard is flushed with grey and cream colours with only a touch of red now. Marked with the stains of age, growing sparse, more difficult to hide secrets now. And I think: this is the former ogre, the star of my childhood nightmare, now bowed, no longer intimidating. He is deliberately delaying at the bar, pretending to be talking to someone but eyeing me furtively.

I imagine the letter, its smell, its yellow, crinkling skin ageing along in unison with the ink like MacSuibhne’s beard. When I open it, however, it is not my mother’s hand I see but black Gaelic typescript on a crisp white surface. The address is just Madrid. The date is New Year’s Eve 1947. I translate spontaneously:

Dear Gearóid,

I am so miserable I can’t stop crying. I told Patrick about the break-in but I could not bring myself to tell him what was done to me. I’m afraid all this will kill him. His heart is weak. I don’t know what to do...

‘There you are,’ says Mac Suibhne returning with the drink, its cream head spilling down the side of the glass. He sits down, drawing his chair close, that nervous twitch in his eye like a bird’s watching for predators.

He’s looking at me, at the froth on my moustache, tears welling in his eyes. ‘It’s so hard to think of her gone.’

I remember my mother’s last street cry for Gearóid. I won’t tell him of course how she called out for him to come and protect her as he had done before for the Woodburns. How many times before?

‘To think, someone said...’ Gearóid is saying, half musing.

‘Said what?’

‘Someone in the embassy said it, that you could have been lost in Europe.’

‘Lost in Europe?’

‘So easily. No one need have known.’

‘Known?’

‘About your being born.’

‘Fuck you, I say.

‘It’s funny, you know,’ he continues calmly, ignoring my imprecation, ‘she was getting on. She saw Foley as her last opportunity to have a child, or so she thought.’

‘How are you so sure she wanted to have a child?’ I’m trying to be awkward.

‘How am I so sure?’ He looks puzzled. ‘Are you a Catholic at all?’

‘You’re a hypocrite,’ I say. ‘You talk about losing me and...’

‘Not me, Derek.’

‘Who then?’

‘I told you, someone in the embassy. That’s all Martha said. She wouldn’t say who exactly.’

‘And politically as well,’ I say (am I snatching at straws?), ‘you’re full of inconsistencies.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You fought against Franco and the Blueshirts on the one hand, and you allied yourself to German fascists on the other.’

‘The Germans were a means towards an end.’

‘Sure.’

‘Look. I know what you’re on about…’ He screws up his eyes and shakes his head as if trying to dislodge a contrary argument from his brain ‘…but we didn’t’t have the luxury of hindsight. ‘Your aunt Peg understood,’ he says, nodding in her direction. ‘She helped.’

‘Peg? ’

‘She’s a brave lady. She had friends in the North, ordinary people. She gave me names.’

‘You’re trying to tell me Peg is a nationalist? You
were
having it off with her.’

‘Listen to me, Derek.’

‘Just shut up, will you? Leave me alone.’

I look across at Peg sipping whiskey in a little nook with old Mrs Chaigneau who has outlived four of her own children, including little Tommy. Peg is rocking to and fro to some inner music of her own. What music? What old flame? Why did Aunt Peg not speak to the woman who broke my flag? Was it through fear or through incomprehension? Perhaps it was simply because she did not understand the meaning of symbols. I remember the Spangles and Woolworth’s and her pursuit of trivia, but all the time was there more than these things?

Seated across from Aunt Peg are some cousins and unknown or half-known relatives who had emigrated to America many years ago. I can overhear them talking about different parts of the country they have visited. They are expressing disappointment at all the ‘antennae’ that are shooting up over the cottages of Galway. They talk about my mother. According to them, Martha Foley is perceived as a great woman in Irish-American circles. All the work she did in
Cumann na mBan
and her social work in the slums of Dublin, while her husband was trying to get the Irish state recognised in Europe. It must have been very tough on both of them being separated like that, but they did it for Ireland.

Why do I not weep for my mother at her funeral? Because I have been weeping for her all my life. My mother died many times.

Mrs Chaigneau is trying to sing a lament with some old biddies, but being told to hush by the barman.

‘The big bucks,’ says MacSuibhne, ‘they gave money to the demagogues to open up old wounds. They went around telling Protestants not to be friendly to Fenians, or they would take their jobs from them.’

‘Fenians, huh? I have to go.’ I stand up unsteadily.

‘You want to know how things happened. Sit down. Be patient.’

‘I want another drink.’

I know by his look that he disapproves of my drinking any more but he’s afraid to say anything.

‘I’m becoming the typical fucking Paddy, amn’t I?’

He says nothing but waits for me while I beckon the barman and sit down again.

‘Gangs broke up our meetings...’

‘All this is ancient history.’

‘Will you listen? In forty seven we took retaliatory action against a Protestant gang which was terrorising Catholics. They recognised me. “I remember you, McSweeney,” they shouted. It was unnerving, to think that they knew my name. It made war personalised, you understand?’

‘What other kind of war is there?’

He pauses, his head lowering as if in shame. ‘I made a terrible mistake then. I went to hide out in the Foley house – your house – in Rathfarnham. I never thought they would come so far south. They saw your mother. They presumed she was my woman.’

‘Do bhean,’
I say.

‘What?’

‘Wasn’t she your woman, Mr Counihan, Uncle Gus?’ My voice rises with each sobriquet.

‘No, Derek, you must believe me.’

‘Believe you? An IRA gunman.’

Stiffly, he gets up from the table. ‘Read the letter,’ he says, hobbling away. ‘I’ll be back in a while.’

It was late. I had washed my hair and put on a nightdress. I was trimming my hair with a scissors when I heard a knock at the door. I opened it but there was no one there. I was about to close the door when suddenly hands grabbed me and gagged my mouth. I was struck on the head by something, a butt of a gun or something. I was dazed and dragged inside. I heard voices. Northern voices. Two or three or maybe four men with their faces covered towered over me. One of them moved nearer to me. He asked me where “the papist bastard” was. I was still holding the scissors. I made a lunge at one of them. They struck me again, knocking the scissors from my hand, and I was sent reeling across the floor. They asked where my IRA lover was hiding. When I said I didn’t have any IRA lover, they struck at me again. They ransacked the house. They tore every room apart. They found the revolver.

I think of my recurring dream, my nightmare. How do I have it? I know now. I heard my mother screaming it into the night’s darkness. Some secrets cannot be held in; they are too great; they would rend the heart in two:

They held me down and stared into my eyes, pressing the scissors against my throat. Oh Gearóid, I was so far away from everyone. I thought, why did I ever move out of the Liberties? You were right all the time. There would always have been someone there to help me. I heard my heart pounding. I couldn’t scream for fear of being cut. They were holding my legs apart, shaming me. I kicked my legs free. They struck at me again. I only half remember what happened after that. I was semi-conscious, but I know they did it; I don’t know how many of them did it or how many times, but when they had gone and when I had come to my senses, I felt such pain that I knew I had been violated.

***

I am the progeny of a nightmare; a seed born of vengeance; no womb has welcomed me; one, two, three or four men; one two three, one two three; I am the offspring of a collectivity.

‘Sorry for your trouble.’ Jack Ó Súileabháin startles me and shakes my hand. ‘She was a beautiful lady. Real class. Sinéad sends her sympathy. She couldn’t get down.’

I’m about to say something to Jack. I don’t know what exactly. I’m looking for some sort of reassurance or affirmation, but MacSuibhne returns, and Jack nods deferentially to him before moving away.

‘You finished the letter? I’m very sorry, Derek, but I thought you had a right to…’

‘Did señora Martínez type this ?’ I ask, feeling it unlikely, but knowing that my mother did not type as all her letters were handwritten.

‘Who?’

‘The embassy typist.’

He hesitates for a moment, wondering perhaps how I knew her, and then says, ‘I typed it. It got a bit ragged with the years you know.’

‘You type?’

‘One finger.’ He laughs. ‘I type a few things for the “movement” from time to time.
Tá fíor-bhrón orm.’

‘I told you…’

He pauses, looks at me, trying to gauge my reaction to the letter. ‘You see how it was.’

‘How it was,’
I mimic. (How was it? Is it real? I have no words).

We sit in silence. MacSuibhne places his arm on my shoulder but I brush it away – I brush away a human touch, something I longed for half my life.

‘I have to tell you something else.’

‘I don’t want to hear any more.’

‘That night. I went on a binge. The gang got to me. When they called me by my name…’

‘You failed to get all of them?’

He pauses. Looks at me as if he’s about to get annoyed.

‘The ringleader,’ he says slowly, ‘he was later arrested by the RUC for planting an incendiary device in a Catholic pub. I’ve information...’

‘What information?’

MacSuibhne looks around, lowers his voice. ‘He’s due for release.’

***

Mourners from another funeral enter the pub. It is their turn to liquefy sorrow. It is our cue to leave.

We walk into the playground of a park across the road from the cemetery. Or rather I walk and MacSuibhne limps along beside me. The wind has abated and the sleet has stopped falling. It is quiet; too late for children as twilight sets in. I’m mouthing, the wind trying to steal away my words: ‘This guy,’ I hear my voice saying, ‘you couldn’t even fucking finish him off. You and your ‘movement’, you couldn’t do that much.’ I’m waving my arms in despair. ‘You had to botch it up, didn’t you?’ ‘No.’ He’s sighing. ‘It wasn’t that simple.’ ‘You’re telling me this guy, this so-called ring leader could be... could be my fucking father...’

‘Listen to me, Derek.’

‘It’s preposterous. I just...’

I don’t know whether to shout in anger or weep in sorrow. I sit down on a chain swing, feeling a weakness in me. He does not speak. I know what he is doing: he’s giving me time to let it all sink in, to let me contemplate the hugeness of what he has revealed, if it is the truth, and why wouldn’t it be? It’s too preposterous to be anything else. He looks around and, satisfied that there is no one watching, sits on another swing beside mine. After a while the swings start to move, to and fro like metronomes filling in a silence.

‘She used to bring you here, you know,’ he says after a while, ‘for the playground.’

‘You saw us?’

‘From the camouflage of leaves.’.

‘That’s when she wasn’t losing me,’ I say sharply.

I grow restless on the swing. I move away. Gearóid limps after me. I sit on the side of a see-saw. I start to bump up and down. ‘This is better,’ I say. ‘More friction, more bumps, more like life, don’t you think? Sit.’ I beckon him to sit on the opposite side.

‘Come on, Derek.’

‘Sit.’

‘We’ll break it,’ he says, sitting down, trying to force a smile.

‘I can shoot you up in the air,’ I say, speaking like a lost child. I bump him hard and he falls off. I laugh. He is slow to get up. Don’t apologise. Say nothing.

‘I’m fine’ he says, as if I’d enquired, and tries to straighten his bad leg with his hands.

He hobbles behind a tree. ‘Peeler passing.’

The anachronism of language as a
garda
walks by. Gearóid has passed his sell-by date.

When he reappears, he wipes a bench with the sleeve of his trench coat and we sit down. ‘I remember sitting in Saint Patrick’s Park long ago,’ he says. ‘It was a winter’s day. It was after an execution.’

‘You mean after a murder.’