The City of Shadows (2 page)

Meanwhile a purple and crimson thread of prelates made its way through the thousands of robed priests in front of the altar. For seconds it was so quiet that the birds could be heard singing in the trees; there was the cry of a solitary gull sailing overhead. Cardinal Lauri, the Papal Legate, read the Pope's words to the crowd. ‘Go to Ireland in my name and say to the good people assembled there that the Holy Father loves Ireland and sends to its inhabitants and visitors not the usual apostolic blessing but a very special all-embracing one.' And as the Mass started Vincent simply walked to where he wanted to be, where he had to be. ‘Introibo ad altare deo.' I shall go unto the altar of the Lord. He answered the Cardinal's words with words he had not spoken in many years. ‘Ad Deum qui laetificat iuventutem meam.' To God who giveth joy to my youth. Once he had spoken those words as an altar boy. But slowly, painfully, not even understanding why at first, he had seen all the words he knew by heart come to feel like someone else's. They couldn't belong to him any more, and worse he couldn't belong to them. But today they were his again. He held them close, like childhood friends. He hadn't understood how much he wanted them to be his again.

There were moments in the Mass when he felt the happiness of a childhood that had been ripped away from him by his consciousness of who he was. Was it really impossible to find a way back when he could feel like this? Suddenly he realised that the time had come. The Cardinal had elevated the host that brought Christ's presence into the life of every one of the million men, women and children now on their knees. Three thousand priests moved out into the crowd with the Eucharist. And for the first time that day, there was doubt in Vincent's mind. He had still not seen him. He had looked and looked, hoping, believing. Only now did he feel fear, a growing fear that despite everything the priest was not there, that something had happened, that he was lost in a crowd that was a quarter of the population of Ireland.

But then he saw him, shockingly close, moving forward with the chalice, along the line of kneeling figures towards him, just as the passionate voice of John McCormack soared up from the high altar, where he stood in the red and gold and black velvet tunic of a Papal Count. ‘Panis Angelicus.' Bread of Angels. The bread of angels becomes the bread of man. O miracle of miracles. The priest was too absorbed in what he was doing, too full of the sanctity of the moment, even to see anyone he served the host to; each kneeling form, hands clasped in prayer, each tongue protruding to take the bread of the angels. And it was almost as the priest reached him that Vincent took the note from his pocket. ‘I will wait for you after. I will wait for you. Vincent.' He had written more at first, much more, over and over again, but each time he had thrown the note away. There would be time to say all that. And there would be ways to say it without any words. He was shaking now as the priest stood in front of him. ‘O res mirabilis!' As the host left his lover's hand and rested on his tongue, Vincent pushed the tightly folded note at him. The man stared down. It was a look first of nothing more than broken concentration and surprise, but it was followed by confusion, and then fear.

The kneeling figure looked up at the priest with an expression of almost beatific devotion. The moment lasted only seconds, though for both men it seemed much longer. For Vincent it was as if the million people in the Park were no longer there. For the priest it felt as if a million pairs of eyes were looking into his soul, horrified by what was there. He moved on abruptly to offer the host to the next communicant. Vincent closed his eyes in a prayer of thanks. He had seen neither the confusion nor the fear on his lover's face. He hadn't seen the tightly folded note, screwed instantly into an even tighter ball, fall to the ground to be trodden underfoot, unread. And as the Mass ended and a million people went in peace, Vincent Walsh simply sat and watched them go – the people, the cars, the carriages, the politicians, the priests and the prelates. He watched until the stewards and soldiers and policemen were leaving too. He watched until long after he knew that his faith in that day was not going to be fulfilled, until long after all the hope that he had shared with a million people that day had drained away.

There was darkness in the sky now. The policeman had been eyeing him on and off for over an hour. He walked towards Vincent with a look of distaste.

‘It's time you were away from here.'

‘I was waiting for someone.'

‘I don't see anyone left to wait for. You heard what I said. Off.'

‘He still might –'

Vincent stopped. The world he had forgotten about since the early hours of that morning, looking down at the shimmering, moonlit waters of the Liffey, the world he really lived in, the world in which he was a permanent and unwanted stranger, was there in front of him again. Even those words, ‘He still might –', said in the way he'd said them, were enough. This guard he had never seen before already knew him. The expression of contempt and disgust was palpable, already like a punch, like the real punches that had so often come with that look in the past. It wouldn't be the first time they had come from the police officers of the Garda Síochána.

‘If you want the shite kicked out of you, there's a few of us would be happy enough. Are you up for that?'

Almost anything Vincent said would provoke a beating. He knew the look too well. There was a group of gardaí, smoking close by. They were watching him too. It was the same look. He got up and turned away, without another word. He walked back through the Park, back to the river, back along the Quays. Everywhere there were people. They still filled the streets, more and more of them as he got closer to the city centre, where the parades and processions had continued all afternoon. The whole place was full of people celebrating this day that had been like no other. But for Vincent Walsh it was a day like every day again; like every day had been for years.

*

He walked into Carolan's Bar. He nodded in response to the greetings, but there was nothing behind the smile he forced out of himself. He stepped in behind the bar. For a moment Billy Donnelly said nothing. Then he picked up a bottle of Bushmills and half-filled a tumbler. He thrust it into Vincent's hand. Billy didn't need an explanation. Hadn't he known the outcome?

‘What else did you expect? I told you.'

‘You're a fecking clairvoyant, Billy.'

Vincent put the glass to his lips. He didn't want it but he drank it.

‘Jesus wept, Vinnie. If I'd a pound for every man here was fucked by a priest and never saw him again, I'd be the richest man in Ireland!'

‘You don't know anything about him.'

‘I've met his sort in every jacks in Dublin. We all have.'

‘You're a gobshite.'

‘I am and I wouldn't know an angel if he was up my arse. It's why I'll never get to heaven. Go on, forget about working tonight. Get off and see some of your pals. Or take the bottle upstairs and shout at the moon.'

‘I'll be better doing something, even listening to a bollocks all night.'

Billy grinned. He reached for the Bushmills again and refilled the tumbler. Vincent drank it down in one. He'd the taste for it now. He turned back to the bar and grabbed one of the empty glasses thrusting towards him.

‘Another pint if that's the sweet nothing's all over with now!'

‘In the glass or will I pump it straight into your great, gaping gob?'

‘If that's what's on offer I'll have the pint afterwards so.'

Vincent laughed with everyone else. The cramped bar at Carolan's smelt of stale beer and sweat and cheap aftershave. Once in a blue moon Billy Donnelly decided the place had to be cleaned properly, and for the next week it smelt so strongly of Jeyes Fluid that when the smell of the stale beer, sweat and aftershave returned, it was like the breath of spring. Vincent looked around at the noisy crowd of regulars; the screeching queens with rouged cheeks; the swaggering boys always giggling too much; the big men with moustaches and muscles and paunches; the tweed-jacketed pipe smokers who jumped every time the door opened and kept their wedding rings in their pockets. It wasn't a place you could really say you belonged, but it was safe. It shut out a world where belonging was out of the question. The Guards knew what Carolan's was and most of the time they left it alone. But there was a price for that. They paid a visit now and again, just to drink Billy's whiskey and to remind him and his customers they were there on sufferance. And if the Guards wanted information, they got it. A sign behind the bar read: ‘Don't say anything, Billy's a fucking unpaid informer'.

That night Vincent Walsh laughed a lot and kept on laughing. He kept on drinking and drank too much, and Billy Donnelly was happy to let him. There were a lot of bad things that could happen to a homosexual man. Falling in love came high on the list. The kind of love that didn't go away the next time you had sex was the worst. You had to train yourself not to care if you wanted to survive. And behind the laughter Billy could see that Vincent believed in something no one in Carolan's Bar had any right to believe in. Love was still burning in his eyes. It would be a long time before he let it go. Billy knew. He had been to the same place. Twenty years ago a doctor had pumped his stomach and saved his life. There were days when if he'd met that eejit of a doctor again he'd have beaten the bastard senseless.

It hadn't been such a bad evening in the end. Carolan's was at its loud and irreverent best. The sound of laughter and the caramel-brown anaesthetic had numbed Vincent Walsh's head and put his heart in a box, at least till the morning. They worked hard at laughter in Carolan's. It was the language in which everyone spoke about everything; politics and the price of bread, sex and family squabbles, memories and dreams, religion and the litter in the streets, joy, sorrow, desire, bitterness, hope, resentment, love, hatred, grief; every ordinary pleasure and irritation that life delivered. Outside they spoke another language. And it was someone else's tongue. The last recalcitrants were pushed, cajoled and kicked out into the street. Vincent started to pick up pots. The silence was as sobering as the prospect of washing the stinking glasses and emptying out the filthy ashtrays. Billy bolted the door shut.

‘We'll have the one we came for and let the glasses wash themselves. There won't be a saint in heaven lifting a finger with the day that's in it, so why the fecking hell should we?'

Vincent smiled at the comfortable predictability of the words. Every night of Billy Donnelly's life there was a reason why it was just the wrong time to wash the pots. He had no need of high days and holidays to put off till tomorrow what he was supposed to do today. It was often well into the next afternoon before what passed for clearing up in Carolan's got underway. If you really wanted a clean glass for a morning pint you were better off bringing your own. But as Billy went behind the bar to twist the cap off another bottle of Bushmills, Vincent carried on collecting glasses. Yes, at some point he would go upstairs to the room in the attic and force himself to go to sleep. Not yet. So Billy poured two more glasses, humming the tuneless tune to himself that always indicated no more conversation was required. Then there was a loud hammering on the front door. Billy sighed, walking across the bar with his most forbidding landlord's scowl.

‘Now which old queen thinks we can't get enough of her company?'

He unbolted the door and pulled it open.

‘Didn't I tell you to piss off –'

He stopped. A tall, thin man in his forties stood in the doorway, smiling amiably. He walked in without a word, followed by three others, a little younger. Under their coats and jackets they all wore the blue shirts that marked them out as members of the Army Comrades Association, demobbed Free State soldiers and assorted hangers-on, who thought they'd knocked the bollocks out of Éamon de Valera in the Civil War, only to see him president of Ireland now. The Blueshirts modelled themselves on the Blackshirts and Brownshirts of Mussolini and Hitler, at least as far as shirts were concerned. Their political agenda hadn't got any further than brawling with the IRA in the streets, but in the absence of IRA men to pick a fight with, and with drink taken, a bit of Blueshirt queer bashing wouldn't have been out of the question. Didn't they pride themselves on defending Ireland's Catholic values above everything else? But what struck Billy Donnelly immediately was that these Blueshirts weren't drunk, in fact they were coldly sober.

‘Now, you wouldn't deny us a drink, Billy, not on a night when we should all be throwing our arms around each other with the holiness of it all. And when it's starting to rain out there too.'

Billy didn't know these men, whatever about the familiarity. He glanced back as the last one shut the door and bolted it, smiling. Billy knew that smile; he was a big man who would enjoy what he was going to do.

The older Blueshirt walked across to the bar. He picked up one of the glasses of whiskey Billy had just poured out. He sauntered back towards Vincent. Two of the others went to the bar and started to help themselves to drinks as well. They wouldn't be sober long. The big man stayed put.

‘And you're the bum boy. Vincent, is it?'

Vincent didn't move. He still held a tray of glasses in his hands.

‘You've no business in here.' Billy's voice was firm. But he was puzzled. He didn't know why this was happening. If they'd been drunk it would have been easier. He could handle drunks, even queer-bashing drunks. Nine times out of ten they wanted a drink more than they wanted the pleasure of pulping some queers. The thin-faced Blueshirt turned his attention back to Billy. He moved closer to him, pushing him backwards.

‘Were you at the Mass today, Billy?'

Billy said nothing. The man's easy, conversational tone wouldn't last. He knew that. He knew what was coming when the man stopped talking.