The Dead Republic (35 page)

I’d had enough soup. I’d had enough of everything. I was tired and still terrified.

The man with the beard had been talking. He was looking at me now. They all were.

—We’re heading into a summer of it, he said.

—Aye.

They’d kill my daughter if they found out. If the men here knew I wasn’t Henry Smart M.P., she’d go into the ditch after me.

—Once or twice a week, said the man with the beard, to me.—We don’t want to tire you out.

I didn’t even know her surname.

They were going to show me off. The ancient activist, the man from the song. I’d make sense of the young men starving themselves, racing to become as old and as noble as me. I’d be their living saint.

And I’d tell it all to the G-men. To keep my sour daughter alive.

—And you’ll say the few words?

—No problem, I said.

I’d been a veteran before, even when I was still a kid. In the first years after 1916, before the war became the War, I was the man who’d been in the G.P.O. As the story grew and the Easter days became glorious, I walked into crowded rooms with Jack Dalton. Gaelic League dances, fundraisers for the men still jailed in England. The hush and buzz. And the eyes.

I wondered what was going to happen this time, when I walked into a packed room or climbed onto the back of a lorry. Who would they see this time? What would they see? Would the young man be there behind the rheumy eyes, or in the oul’ lad’s shoulders? (The eyes were rheumy but I could still see plenty with them.)

—A fedora, I said.

—What?

—I’ll wear a fedora. And I’ll carry a wooden leg.

They’d see the oul’ lad being helped up onto the platform. They’d see the leg - they’d know the secret story - and they’d see the young man stepping fast through the century, right in front of them. Like Oisin falling from his horse into Irish muck and ageing hundreds of years in a couple of seconds. They’d see me bettering Oisin, doing the trick in reverse, young Henry shimmering behind the oul’ lad, walking back into quick republican life.

They looked pleased, settled.

—The wooden leg, aye, said the man with the beard.—But why the fedora?

—I look good in a fedora, I told him.

I was still the sandwich-board man.

 

 

 

The voters of Fermanagh/South Tyrone elected a dying man. Bobby Sands became Bobby Sands M.P.
I am a political prisoner because I am a casualty of a perennial war that is being fought between the oppressed Irish people and an alien, oppressive, unwanted regime that refuses to withdraw from our land.
Bobby’s election would bring about a settlement. Thatcher would never let a British Member of Parliament die on hunger strike.

Thousands of people marched slowly behind his coffin to the republican plot in Milltown cemetery. Thousands more stood at the roadside as we passed. In Belfast this time, not Dublin. 1981 this time, not 1917. Bobby Sands, not Thomas Ashe. There was the tricolour on the coffin, the black beret and leather gloves. The cameras were everywhere, and I stood in front of them. And the surveillance helicopters - I was in among thousands of people but I could hear them clearly, the blades battering away at the silence.

The coffin was taken from the hearse somewhere near the graveyard - I didn’t know Belfast - and out of the crowd three I.R.A. volunteers emerged, just as I’d done at Ashe’s funeral, and fired three volleys. They removed the berets and bowed their heads for a silent minute. Then we moved again. A hand took my elbow; I went where I was brought.

It was a slow march that nearly killed me, the final half-mile. A strong hand held me up, into the graveyard. I was kept at the front, in among hard men in new suits. A man I was told was Gerry Adams - the name was whispered into my ear like a secret - folded the tricolour and handed it to a woman who must have been the mother. There was a little lad there too, the son. Then another man stepped forward. Owen Carron, I heard the whispers - Bobby’s election agent. He was a young man trying not to look young. He spoke and I thought I’d stood there before; I’d already been at this funeral.

—Irishmen and women, he said.—It is hard to describe the sadness and sorrow in our hearts today as we stand at the grave of Volunteer Bobby Sands, cruelly murdered by the British government in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh. Bobby has gone to join the ranks of Ireland’s patriotic dead.

Later, I recited the lament I’d written with Jack Dalton in the Gravediggers pub in Glasnevin after we’d buried Ashe.
Let me carry your cross for Ireland, Lord. For Ireland is weak with tears
. Men and women listened, as if the words were brand new. I saw tears, and held back my own. I looked out through the smoke, at my audience, at the crying, big-eyed women, and I wondered if any of them would want to know me like they used to in the old days.

—We took the crusts off for you, said a woman, another voice into my ear that day, as she put the plate of sandwiches in front of me.

 

 

 

The bus was waiting for me at the gate of the nursing home, two hundred yards from the bus stop. It had no conductor, and the driver was wearing sunglasses and - I was guessing - a bulletproof jacket. The lower deck was empty, until I sat down. Then the G-men came loudly down the stairs, and smiled. The Clare man took the seat in front of me, and Campion pushed in beside me.

—Shove over there, he said.

—Henry Smart, said the Clare man.—The star of stage and screen. How are you?

—Grand.

—And how’s the missis?

I stared at him.

—The same.

Exactly the same. She hadn’t moved or blinked in months. She was alive because I was told she was alive. I couldn’t feel a pulse now, and I hadn’t been able to see her chest take in a breath. But I knew she was alive. It was on -
in
- her face, the old look, up on the bike, on her way to kill for Ireland. Her colour was a shade deeper, a happy anger. And the eye, still open. She was looking at me - I knew it. She knew what I was up to.

They kept her nails and hair cut - the gorgeous nurse had told me. She’d given me a lock of hair, in a small plastic pill bottle. I stared into the bottle. I pulled out the grey hair - horse hair.

—Is this yours? I’d asked her.

—Go way out of that, she’d said.—It’s Missis Smart’s.

—Miss O’Shea’s.

—Missis O’Kelly’s.

She loved the names, the stories they were telling her. She’d even made romance out of the way I’d been pulled from the home by the I.R.A. driver months before; she’d forgotten the violence, the threat.

—It must have been urgent, she’d said, weeks later.—Was it?

She’d seen me on the television - fedora, black armband, leg held high, for as long as I could hold it. (They’d let me hold an Armalite, at the back of one of the republican clubs. The weight of the thing; I couldn’t get it near my shoulder. A hand took it gently from my hands. No one said anything.) We sat side by side and watched my wife.

—The same, I said now, to the Clare man.

—Ah well, he said.—We’ve been watching you on the telly, Henry.

—Yeah.

—What have you got for us?

—The bossmen don’t like it.

It wasn’t the first time they’d met me since they’d come to my house - I’d sat on a bench beside the pond, in the park near my house; I slept, and woke, they were sitting beside me. But it was the first time I’d be giving them something big. I’d been holding onto it for months.

—Don’t like what?

—The hunger strike.

—Why not?

—They’re afraid of it, I said.

—Are you reporting here, or theorising?

—It’s what they told me.

—We’re talking Army Council here, are we?

—That’s right.

—What are they afraid of?

—That it’ll get out of control.

—How so?

—The impetus didn’t come from them, I told him.—Adams and the Army Council.

I was pleased with myself. But I wasn’t sure why.

—There was a groundswell, I said.

—That’s the cliché, alright, said the Clare man.—You’re telling us nothing new.

—They’ve had to jump in and take over, I said.—But they didn’t want Sands running in that by-election. Or the other men.

—What other men?

And I told them.

There was a general election on the way in the Republic and there’d be hunger strike candidates, men dying on polling day. It would be well known soon; I was giving nothing real away.

—Who told you this?

I gave them the name.

—You spoke to him?

—Yeah.

—He told you this?

—You’ve been watching the telly, I said.—You’ve seen me with him.

—He talks to no one. He’s famous for it.

—He talks to me.

—He talks to you, said Campion.

—Yeah.

—And tell us this, said the Clare man.—Why would he do that?

—I was in the G.P.O., I told him.—I freed this fuckin’ country.

I’d reminded them: they were on the bus with history.

—And he thinks I’m harmless, I said.

We were on the coast road now. It was raining on the other side of Bull Island. It was early May.

The Clare man stood up.

—I’ll get him to slow down, he told Campion.

—Right.

I watched him hold the bars as he went to the front and the driver.

—What are they afraid of? asked Campion.

—Who?

—The lads, he said.—The Army Council.

—There’s fighting going on, I said.—Inside the organisation. It’s the old fight and they’re being stupid about it.

I spoke quietly to Campion as if this was for him only, although I knew the Clare man had left us alone, all pre-arranged, in the hope that I’d spill some better beans.

—Some of them are afraid that if they go too deep into electoral politics there’ll be a change of direction, if they keep winning like they did in Fermanagh. And that the armed struggle will be parked.

It was the first time I’d heard the words out of my own mouth -
armed struggle
.

—Parked, he said - it was a question trying not to sound too like one.

—That’s right, I said.—Parked. So he said.

—He.

—
He.

—Adams or the other fella?

—I’m not sure, I said.

—You’re—

—I’m not sure whether he’s talking for himself or others higher up.

—Oh, he said.—Good man.

There were men who wanted nothing to do with elections, even if the candidates were their comrades, friends, relations on the blanket. And there were others, as far as I could make out, who wanted these elections to be the start of something new. I sometimes knew that I was in the centre of a fight; I was refereeing a boxing match I couldn’t see or properly hear, a bare-knuckle fight with no bell or rules.

The man with the beard had asked me the question, in the bar of the Imperial Hotel in Dundalk. He’d waited till we were alone. He’d given the nod to two skinheads in zip-up jackets, and waited till they were outside in the foyer.

—How did you manage it? he said.

I tried to tell him. And, basically, I told the G-men on the bus the same thing. I shifted the geography from Dublin to the north, but I told them what I’d seen and known - or thought I’d known - in 1920. I changed the tense from past to present and informed on men who were long dead.

—He’s no time for elections, I told Campion, of the man with the beard, in 1981, and of Ernie O’Malley in 1920.—Or parliaments, or giving the people artificial choices.

—We know that, said the Clare man, who’d come back.

He spoke as he sat.

I stared at him again.

—Sorry, he said.—Go on.

The bus stayed on the coast road, instead of going right, for Ratheen and town.

—The hunger strikes scare him, I said.—Because they’re working. They’re queuing up to join. But they’re joining Sinn Féin and the H-Block Committees, not the I.R.A.

—Same thing.

—No.

—Go on.

—It’s a fight, I said.

The bus turned left, onto the Causeway Road, to the island. It had to slow down as it went across the dips, where the new road was already sinking back into the lagoon. The weather was over us now, dark and suddenly wet.

—Will you look at that, said the Clare man.—What a fuckin’ country.

He looked at me.

—Why you?

—I’m their link, I said.

—There are other links, he said.—There’s Denis Archer. He
was
in the First Dáil. And he’s endorsed all the splits for the last fifty years. They’ve always used him before. What’s the story there?

—Don’t know.

—Have you met him yet?

—No, I said.—Not in years.

The last time I’d seen Denis Archer M.P. - Dynamite Dinny - he’d been standing outside Jack Dalton’s office, on the other side of Mary Street, just after Jack had slipped my death sentence across his desk to me. Archer was outside, waiting to execute me. I’d nodded to him; he’d nodded back. And I’d run.

—You know him? said the Clare man.

—I do, yeah.

—He’s their reliable man, he said.—He’s sanctioned everything, given his blessing to everything, as long as it’s violent and pointless. Why do they need you?

—Are you sure he’s alive? I said.—He’d be older than me.

—He’s alive alright, said the Clare man.

—You’re sure?

—We saw him this morning, said Campion.

—We did, said the Clare man.—Coming out of mass. He’s a great man for the mass.

—He’s eighty-seven, said Campion.—And still has all his teeth.

—Did you fuckin’ count them?

—We know his dentist, said the Clare man.—So why you, Henry? Why did they come looking for you?