The Swan Song of Doctor Malloy (5 page)

All the talk of collusion between the governments, their propaganda and callousness, only confirmed Caitlin's feelings that political expediency was becoming the order of the day. She still held her convictions. She still knew why she had got herself involved in the Cause, even though she wanted out now. There would always be others to continue the work, of that she was sure. But Gerard's visit fuelled her resolve to get out of this business as soon as she could. Leave it to some fresh blood to sort out, to get the show back on the right track. They decided to let events take their course. To carry on according to plan and do what they had been trained to do. One last time.

After Gerard's first visit there had been no further contact from Kieran or any of the other cell members. Gerard had told Caitlin and Sammy this would happen; that all concerned had agreed it simplified things if he remained the single point of contact. He phoned almost every other day to check if they needed anything and visited on two or three further occasions. It was he who told them to leave by the train station immediately after the bombing, to go to North London and await the call from the cell commanders.

So this is the now for Caitlin and Sammy. Sitting in a bar in London, with the refrains of a wake wafting along the corridor. Having risked their lives, they're now being accused of complicity: photos of Gerard as evidence of fraternisation with the enemy. That the bombing has been a success, that the Prime Minister is on a life-support machine, is neither here nor there. All the double-double talk spins through Caitlin's mind.

‘You're a coward,' says Liam calmly. ‘You're in too deep, you know too much and your talk of desertion is too dangerous.'

But Caitlin barely makes sense of his words. She doesn't know anymore who is who or what is real. There is a short silence. A lull in proceedings. Caitlin feels as if she is suspended in the air, her head buzzing the way it used to when, as a child, she hung upside down on the swing in the garden. And at the same moment she feels strangely resigned, sensing she will never now be a mother, never have a life of her own. She feels the calm of the convicted. There is nothing more she can say. They have made up their mind about her. She has been betrayed. She tucks her hair behind her ears and stares hard into Liam's eyes. It comes as little surprise to Caitlin Malloy when the big man cuffs her hands, places a heavy sack hood over her head, and tells her to stand up. Something deep inside tells her that this is the last she will ever see of Sammy.

‘I'm so excited,' I say to John down the phone. ‘I haven't touched a drop of booze or sniffed or smoked a drug since the Friary.'

‘Great,' he says, ‘but one day at a time.'

‘I'm into double figures, creeping into weeks. And that's not all, my life's work, my one-use syringe, remember I was telling you?'

‘Yes,' says John. ‘I remember.'

‘Well, it's all taking off. I just need some backers and we can get it into production and get it out there. Things are just going great. My boss has been really good. He told everyone I was at a monastic retreat.'

‘That's excellent,' says John. ‘That's what we mean by anonymity. It's entirely up to you who you tell.'

‘And,' I can't help babbling on excitedly, ‘I'm meeting my daughter in a short while. I'm so happy.'

‘Have you been to any Aftercare Meetings since you came out of treatment?'

‘Not yet, I've been really busy.'

‘Don't be too busy to put your sobriety first. You sound like you're on a pink cloud, but be sure to get to meetings to keep you there.'

‘Yes, I will, I will,' I say, hearing Lottie's key turning in the door. ‘Got to go, John, Lottie's here. Speak to you later.'

‘Take it easy,' says John. ‘Call me and we can link up at a Meeting.'

‘Sure, bye for now.'

Lottie enters the room hesitantly. She smiles uncertainly at me and I move to greet her. As I hug her I feel the tension in her body.

‘Hello, sweetheart,' I say, holding her at arm's length. ‘It's so lovely to see you.'

At sixteen she looks more like a young woman than ever. She wears a soft lilac roll-neck pullover and blue jeans. She lets go of me and drops her black leather jacket onto a chair.

‘How are you, Dad?' she asks nervously.

‘I'm great. The Friary has been really good for me. There'll be no more nonsense. I've finished with all that.'

‘No more drinking?'

‘Juices and mineral water from now on. And tea. I think I'll drown in tea.'

She smiles, her broad easy smile this time, and I laugh.

‘It's a lovely day, shall we go up on the Heath?' I ask.

‘Yes, that would be fun.'

‘Tea at Kenwood?'

‘And kite-flying on Parliament Hill.'

‘Great idea. I'll get it from the loft.'

‘Like the old days, Dad.'

‘Like the new days,' I say, as I head off upstairs to rouse the purple and green kite from its semi-retirement.

The sky is a blue you want to take home in your pocket. Standing on top of Parliament Hill, the city of London is laid out below us like a glorious model. All the familiar landmarks are in clear relief. Saint Paul's Cathedral, Canary Wharf, and glimpses of the river as it cuts the city into north and south. In the distance the Sussex Downs stand out like folds in a blanket. I look at Lottie as she flies the kite. She clings to the handles, every twist and turn reverberating through her young body. She is absorbed in the moment, hypnotised by the sense and feel of it. The kite dances on the currents, swooping and diving, its string cutting a jigsaw through the air. An old man stops on the pathway, shields his eyes with his hand, and watches the kite as it loops and buzzes through the sky.

Later, we sit on a bench and look down at the panorama before us.

‘I wish Grandpa and Grandma were still here. To hear me play, I mean. I used to love it when I was little. Grandpa used to sing those old songs and I played my recorder. I can still remember them.'

‘So can I,' I say, though with different memories.

Lottie goes quiet for a moment. She looks at me to see if I know, opens her mouth, says nothing, turns and then says, ‘It's the anniversary next week, Dad, isn't it?'

‘Yes, you're right, it is. Next Tuesday. It'll be six years.'

‘Can we do something? Something special. To remember.'

‘Of course we can, Lottie. We'll do something special to remember.'

As if I could ever forget.

He wanted to go back to Ireland, he announced one Melbourne Cup Day. To join the cause, to push the British and their Protestant lackeys back across the sea to their miserable little island. It came as a surprise as he'd always hated the bigotry of the Irish at large, their small-mindedness, the appalling weather. So after decades in Melbourne never really joining in but giving it a fair go, my father decided he must return. And where he went my mother went too. First to London, where they stayed a year or so, and then off on the well-trodden path to Holyhead and the ferry across the Irish Sea. When they finally died, after all the false starts, after all the bodged attempts, it was ignominious. Not as my father boasted it would be, cut down by a British bullet as he fought on Irish soil for the Republican cause. Not death in the line of fire.

Their last trip across the Irish Sea took them to Bray, on the coast just south of Dublin. My father, drawn by the early opening hours of the bars in Ireland and the rent outstanding on the tiny flat they'd moved to in Kentish Town, not to mention money due to a nasty loan shark, decided late one night that now was the right time to return to the land of their birthright. The old Cortina was loaded with clothes and a few blankets. Before heading north to Holyhead they made a fire in the garden and burnt any incriminating documents, mainly unpaid bills. The only stop on their moonlight flit was at the all-night Indian shop at the end of the road, to stock up on essentials for the journey: eighty John Player untipped cigarettes, a dozen bottles of Guinness stout and a bottle of Jameson's Irish whiskey. When they arrived in Dun Laoghaire it was ten past seven in the morning and the bars had just opened. After spending the remains of their money on real Irish Guinness in a real Irish bar, they drove on to Bray, where my father's youngest brother lived. The exhausted Cortina spluttered to a stop on the esplanade outside Colm's house. All the banging on the door, all my father's shouts through the letterbox, could not alter the fact that Colm, Theresa and their five freckledfaced, ginger-haired boys were sleeping peacefully in a caravan on their annual holiday in Youghal in County Cork.

‘What's all the commotion?' enquired a woman who had poked her head out of an upstairs window next door.

‘Where's Colm?' shouted my father.

‘They're off on their holidays.'

‘Holy Jesus.'

‘I'd mind you to hold your language,' replied the woman, horrified.

‘Mind your business, missus,' said my father, kicking the door and going back to the car.

He sat in the driver's seat, sucking the last drops from an empty bottle of Guinness as my mother slept comatose on the piles of clothes and blankets over the back seats.

He looked out on the cold, slate-grey Irish Sea as it crashed on the pebbly beach. For a moment he was reminded of his childhood and the sunny days out from Dublin when the esplanade was packed with promenaders. Back then, the bandstand, now empty and vandalised, was alive with music on Sunday afternoons. As his wife snored a drunken sleep behind him, he looked over to the cliffs rising from the far end of the beach. Forty years previous, as young lovers, they had walked up over Bray Head, past Sugar Loaf Mountain and on along the coastal path to Greystones. In those days Bray was a thriving seaside town, popular with families and young people from Northern Ireland. The Troubles had put an end to that, and the Bray he now looked out on was a sad and weary town. He put his hand in his pockets and counted the sum total of their collective wealth. Barely enough for a night in a dosshouse; barely the price of a couple of bottles of cheap cider or barley wine.

The result of the inquest and police enquiries were inconclusive and the verdict left open. As far as my daughter Lottie was concerned, and for most people for that matter, they died in a tragic car accident. The police were alerted to a burnt-out car found smouldering on the seafront, not far from the once illustrious Bray Head Hotel where, in times gone by, Joseph Locke sang in the ballroom and the bedrooms were brimming with American tourists digging for their roots. When two charred bodies were found inside the car all sorts of alarm bells rang with the local Garda. Talk of sectarian killings or vendettas between rival Dublin drug gangs over heroin-dealing turf quickly circulated around the small town. But the number plates were still decipherable, and when details came though from the registration documents, foul play was ruled out.

When the police turned up at my door to tell me what had happened I told them I'd been awakened in the night by a call from my father. The earnest young policeman asked me to remember how he was and what he had said. I told them he'd asked me to send him some money, as they were penniless and sleeping in the car for the night. I didn't say he was drunk and I didn't tell the whole story.

What really happened was this. I'd been asleep next to Matilda. Lottie had been sent home from school with a temperature and was in the bed with us that night. So when the phone rang I was in that space between sleep and dozing. I managed to get to it before the others woke and closed the kitchen door behind me with my foot.

‘This is the operator. Will you take a reversed charge call from Mr Patrick Malloy?'

‘Umm,' I hesitated. Through the kitchen window I could see the garden covered in frost and I made a mental note to bring in Lottie's bike left on the lawn.

‘Yes, of course,' I said, ‘put him through.'

There was a delay as the connection was made and then I could hear the sharp drag on a cigarette.

‘Anthony. Is that you, Anthony?'

‘Yes, it's me,' I said, slumping down on a chair, ‘where are you?'

‘It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter where we are. We're here, we're skint, we're finished. I've got enough for another drink and that's it.'

‘Where are you, Dad? Where are you? Tell me where you are and I'll send you some money.'

‘Too late for that. Too late for everything.'

And then the phone went dead.

It never made the papers in Britain, so Lottie was spared the real facts, but it was all over the Irish press. However the fire had started – a dropped cigarette was suggested – it was soon an inferno. The petrol tank had exploded and the doors had been locked. The occupants died quickly.

I travelled over with Caitlin. We asked to see the coroner's photos. He told us we might be shocked and distressed. I looked at Caitlin and we both knew there was nothing left about our family to surprise us. And there they were, two scorched bodies, locked and sealed together in an eternal embrace like a couple in love in Pompeii. They looked peaceful. This was the man who ran away to sea at fifteen, then at twenty joined the army to fight the invading Chinese in Malaya. This was the woman who once wrote plays and poetry and dreamed of being a dancer. This was the couple that queued for opera tickets at the Rotunda and spent nights on the Abbey Theatre steps to see Beckett and Ibsen. This was my father and mother, who as teenagers one sunny Sunday had walked out from Bray to Greystones along the cliff path, the sea swelling to their left, their lives unfurling before them like a freshly mown meadow. Who married and took the ferry across the Irish Sea as soon as the wedding cake was cut. And then, on a whim and the promise of sunshine, bought a ten-pound ticket to the lucky country and the banks of the Yarra.

‘Dad, I've been thinking,' says Lottie. ‘It would be nice if you came to dinner with me and Mum next Tuesday. I think Grandpa and Grandma would want that. So we can all be together.'