The Wake (And What Jeremiah Did Next) (11 page)

Her face was even paler now and she looked as if she was raring to go the second he took a breath which he didn’t look as if he was going to do. “You know why you saw none? Cause the Israelis wouldn’t have one about the place. Like who was it, what do you call him, Brookeborough, the last prime minister in this place before O’Neill, that’s what Brookeborough said about us. I wouldn’t have one about the place.”

“It’s not the same kind of thing!” These words from the dyke. Funny voice, squeaky wee voice, like a boy’s voice breaking, not what you’d have expected to look at her. Big ugly Adam’s apple on her, up and down as she spoke. Could be a man trapped in a woman’s body. I’ve heard of that, genitals tucked away inside.

Pearse turned his head sharply to take her in. “Aw aye it is, dear, it’s exactly the same kind of thing. It’s the same as the Brits did here with their penal laws and their plantations. I’d say from the look of the two of you you’re out marching for Catholic rights. Am I right? Am I?”

The last two words were so loud some heads turned.

“Take it easy Pearse,” I said laying my hand on his arm. “Keep your voice down.”

He pulled his arm violently away. “What the fuck are you talking about? What the fuck has it got to do with you?”

“I happen to know one of them and there’s no call for you —”

“We’re not out for Catholic rights. We’re not sectarian. How dare you!”

This was Aisling. There was a haze around her. Maybe it was my eyes that did it but there was a haze around her. The thought of her touch settled on my heart. We lay together embraced laughing the morning after the night I took her to casualty, the morning she rang the school pretending to be Mammy.

“Crowd of crooked landgrabbers, racist government, and yous can’t even see. Typical City Hotel socialists sipping your vodka and whites. Take your hand away from me Jerry boy. You can go and fuck the two of them if that’s what you want. As long as you know they can’t see past their noses.”

I hadn’t realized I was holding his arm again. He stood up and my hand fell away. “Best of luck citizens,” he said picking up his glass and emptying what was in it down his throat. He knocked against me as he went to go and then he was away, weaving between the tables.

“I’m sorry about that,” I said.

“Is he a friend of yours?” said squareface.

“Well he works with me. He’d given up the drink but he’s obviously back on it again.”

“Obviously,” said squareface needlessly, implying by her tone that I was some kind of accessory.

“He’s a good fella when he’s sober but he was way out of order there. I’m sorry he insulted you.”

“Why should you be sorry?” Aisling pointed out. “It wasn’t your fault.” Paused. “Why don’t you sit here.”

Mutely I did just that, lifting my chair over and putting it down beside Aisling and away from her companion. Mutely because I was trembling and didn’t trust myself to speak. The dyke didn’t look too pleased.

“When did you hear about Audrey?” Aisling said hoarsely.

I swallowed, coughed and swallowed again. “Just tonight there. Vinny told me when I came in. What an awful thing to happen.”

“She was taking a group of children up for some activities in Saint Thomas’s school in the Whiterock when a wall started to collapse. She pushed them out of the way and those two seconds were what …”

She tailed off and put her hand to her forehead. When she was ready to speak again she said: “She was the most generous person I ever met. Oh sorry, this is Frances, this is Jeremiah.” Frances with an e or Francis with an i? Our eyes met, gooseberries eyeballing each other.

“What will you have to drink?” I asked. “Aisling? Frances?”

Aisling waved a hand over her glass shaking her head and her friend seeing this did the same.

“We were actually thinking of going,” Aisling said. “We just came in for the one.” She started to get up. Her black leather skirt rose from behind the table, tight, pleated, hugging her. Frances stood and so did I. Body all aglow now I said: “I was just about to go myself. Sure I’ll walk up with yous.”

+++++

Everything quiet on the William Street front. Somebody was singing round a corner somewhere as we negotiated the scattered bricks and stones. Yellow Submarine. He could sing whoever he was. Better than the Beatle that sang it anyway, the drummer was it? Ringo Starr. Others joined in each time he came back to the chorus but they weren’t so good.

“You wouldn’t think there was a revolution going on,” said Aisling. Her shoulder kept touching mine as I walked between the two of them.

“I heard it was like that in Paris,” Frances said. She moved heavy in the black Crombie that covered her shapelessness. There’s money there. Unless of course she got it from some penitent capitalist via the Saint Vincent de Paul. “People would be sitting eating and drinking at tables outside restaurants and round the corner it was all happening.” She really had an unfortunate voice, falsetto nearly, expressionless, awful. The sound of her would have annoyed me even if I hadn’t thought she’d been lying with Aisling. “Margarita was telling me that time she came back. Margarita was there for the whole thing you know.”

I felt a tingle every time her shoulder touched mine. Halos round the lights of the lampposts, frost in the air everywhere, excitement pulling at me. Funny thing about the sky that night, you could still see stars even with all the lights. I was looking up as the dyke was talking, trying to fix my mind on something else, and there was this particular star above the trees in the cathedral grounds that kept winking away. Stellar something they call that. It was on The Sky at Night but I can never take in half of what Patrick Moore is saying because his face distracts me. He’s talking about gases in the atmosphere and stuff and I’m trying to understand but I’m looking at him staring at me with one mad eye and the hair everywhere. Stellar constellation, that was it. To do with turbulence and I don’t know what else. The nearness of what could happen quickened my heart. And above the trees the spire pointed skywards, reminding, sentineled over the city.

“Watch yourself,” said Aisling and gripped my arm. Christ that was a near one. Bloody bricks.

“You could break your ankle here if you’re not careful,” she said and held my arm the rest of the way up to her flat. Above the trees the steeple pierced the blackness pointing skywards. My heart quickened, soaring.

“She was arrested,” explained Frances, “and when the judge asked her name she said Rudi Dutschke, you know the German student leader that was shot, and he says That, miss, is a man’s name. What is your real name please? And she says Janek Litynski and the judge thought she said Janet and so did the clerk of the court and the clerk wrote it down.”

“Jan Litynski that led the Polish revolution there in January?” Aisling was laughing. “They never heard of him?”

“Never heard of him,” said Frances.

Did you ever feel you couldn’t relate to what people were talking about? You could understand what they were saying but you couldn’t relate to it? Well the way they started going on then Aisling and your woman obviously felt they’d some kind of kinship with these ones in Berlin and Paris and Warsaw is it, whatever the capital of Poland is. Not that I cared mind you, I was too busy trying to keep my heart in order. But I remember now it was Pearse went on to me one time about how the situations in these places weren’t like each other at all and weren’t like here either. Difference of night and day, he said, these doctrinarians are making an artificial connection. Why would they do that? I asked him. Because they’re wankers, he said. On the other hand, if you listened to Eamonn McCann you’d start to wonder, although the same guy could probably convince a lecture hall of academics that the nineteen forty phone directory for Dublin was the first draft of James Joyce’s unfinished masterpiece. I heard him one night in the Gweedore Bar coming out with some weird stuff, weird but plausible that is, everything McCann says sounds plausible, about six degrees of separation and this middle eastern philosopher boy called Oz Moses. At least that’s what I thought he was saying and it was only when I said to Pearse What do you reckon about Oz Moses? and he said Osmosis? Yeah, interesting concept, that I caught on it wasn’t a man at all.

Pearse knows a lot, probably he knows too much and that’s what’s wrong with him, too much knowledge being a dangerous thing as I heard a Redemptorist priest saying one time he came to give a retreat in the cathedral. Osmosis is supposed to be, he said, Pearse that is, about picking up information without realizing you’re doing it but there’s a whole lot of hooey talked about it too of course, like you and the world combining and crap like that.

“Would you like to come in awhile?”

We’d got to outside her flat and we were standing there looking at each other and Frances must have felt a bit out of it. We were looking at each other and I couldn’t read her face because it was in shadow but I’d say she could read mine with the light of the lamppost behind her shining right on me. I don’t know what my expression was but whatever it was I would have gone up those stairs on my knees if she’d asked me to.

“May as well,” I said.

The first thing I saw when I closed the door of the flat was Kitty Birch right in my face swinging on the hook. Kitty Birch, instrument of divine torture. Spanking new, Aisling told me laughing the first time she showed it to me. And still framed on the wall outside the bedroom door were me and the Royal Ulster Constabulary with their blurred batons over my head, frozen at ten past four, fifth of October, and me still hanging onto the no waiting sign.

“Sit down there and I’ll get yous something. Let me see. I only have whiskey. Hold on, there’s a bit of Bacardi left. And I think there’s Coke in the fridge. What do you say?” She looked at me first. “A drop of whiskey would be great,” I said. No harm loosening up. Only the one though. Any more and.

“I’ll have a rum and Coke thanks,” Frances said.

Her squeaky voice was really getting to me. Everything about her was off-key, hair sticking up now like a squaddie in shock, face so pale you’d have thought she dipped it in a bag of flour, like gothic or something, shoulders up to her ears, eyes away back in her head, shapeless black jeans to go with the black polo she kept pulling up over her chin. That would be anxiety. Her night’s plans disrupted. I knew from the set of her face she could have seen me far but at the back of it all she was probably settling for three in the bed.

Aisling was stooped getting Coke from the fridge. “I see you still have the photo on the wall,” I said, heart going like mad. The pleated leather skirt had come up a fair bit showing most of the back of her legs as she bent and when she turned she caught me looking and blushed. “If I was a believer,” she said smoothing her skirt, “I’m sure I’d have Saint Antony or somebody like that up there but seeing I’m not …”

“I was talking to a cop the other day,” I told her, “down at Kevin McLaughlin’s. You know, the car dealer down the Buncrana Road.”

“Right?” said Aisling. She handed us the drinks and sat beside the table-lamp which she then lighted. Her face had got thinner, I could see that now, and it wasn’t just the urchin hair that did it. And very pale. Ruby lipstick she had on brought out the paleness.

“Aye, friendly guy and all.”

“Why, does that surprise you?” said Frances. “That he was friendly?” She was challenging me. Looking back on it now it wasn’t surprising. I was a man and a rival to boot and she’d probably made up her mind that I was an outsider of the left-wing loony club. I blinked at her with this perplexed look on my face trying to make her feel foolish. I might as well have been blinking at Lenin’s statue. “I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.

“You sounded as if you had them stereotyped, that’s all.”

“Stereotyped?” Fuck her. I’d rather be doubly incontinent than heaving up against this one. “I don’t know where you got that idea from.”

“That friend of yours down in the hotel. I gathered you were bosom buddies the way you were defending him. Well, birds of a —”

“I wasn’t exactly defending him dear. I was explaining him.”

Her eyes flashed at the dear and Aisling intervened.

“Hey you two, take it easy. What were you saying Jeremiah? God it’s cold, isn’t it? I’m just feeling it now so I am.” She rose quickly and clicked the superser twice and then sat down again. The blue and yellow flame appeared, flickered and steadied. “Sorry, what were you saying?”

“Naw it was just that I changed to a Beetle recently and —”

“Oh I didn’t know you’d changed. What’s it like?”

“Great except when you’re turning a corner it’s like driving a ten ton lorry.”

“I heard that about them. But they’re very dependable aren’t they?”

“I dunno yet. I haven’t had it long enough yet to know.”

“But you were saying anyway.”

“Aye. This fella was asking me how I was managing with it and I told him I’d a problem getting used to the dip switch on the floor. You know the way in other cars you’ve got it up beside the steering. Anyway he started advising me about the dip because he had a Beetle himself and then he said I’m a policeman, maybe you won’t want to be talking to me when you hear that. I was sort of caught unawares and I said Not at all. I was thinking afterwards he could have been one of those guys up there on the wall.”

Aisling laughed. That tinkle again. The waves of heat quivered in the cold air and the faint smell of gas brought back our first time, the night of the fifth.

“Do you see what I was saying there about Margarita and all?” piped up the dyke, effortfully changing the subject. “I don’t care what anybody says, there’s an energy in these things, it’s like a force, why else would all these movements be happening at the one time?”

So much for me and the friendly cop. This was weighty stuff.

“I agree,” said Aisling. “I think it’s going to be unstoppable. It’s like what Marx and Rosa Luxemburg dreamed of. What’s this it was she said? The socialist proletariat are going to be the gravediggers of world capitalism?”

“That’s exactly right,” said Frances, blockhead up and down like a piston. “The socialist proletariat are going to be the gravediggers of world capitalism. Things that are fights for survival at the start turn into revolutions. And they all become connected. They intersect, that’s the thing.”