War Children (3 page)

I don’t know what Mattie thought she was doing. She must have known the entrances to the court would be blocked. There was never a way out for her, and the place was crawling with British.

An Auxie caught Mattie’s shoulder. She smashed his hand away with the pistol and he cursed. Mattie danced off again. She reached the Empty Steps and she danced up them to the top. Then she just stood there, breathing hard. She looked up and out around the broken-backed roofs of the court, peered at all the faces turned towards her as
though looking for someone in particular.

No-one said a word; people just backed away and watched this mad girl. The British too had quietened, knowing they had her now, a big circle of khaki and black surrounding the ragged creature on the Empty Steps – my best friend, none of them taking their eyes off her, none of them taking their eyes off the death in her hands.

‘Antonio!’ Mattie shouted, really loud.

She did. I heard her.

I can hear her still.

She should never have raised the gun. All the rest she might have got away with. If she’d got a beating itself, sure, it wouldn’t have been the first she’d had. They mightn’t have believed she knew nothing, but they wouldn’t have tortured a child. Maybe they would if they’d been let, I don’t know; but surely they wouldn’t have been let torture a young girl.

But she did raise the gun, and she pointed it at a soldier, and she squeezed the trigger.

There was a very loud click as the hammer fell. No bang, just a very loud click sounding in the total silence. Maybe it was a misfire. Maybe the pistol was empty. But it didn’t fire.

The British guns did. Three, four, maybe half a dozen of them. All I heard was a ragged volley, swollen by the echoes from the crowded houses in that mean square, and Mattie Foley was raised up off the Empty Steps with the force of the bullets. It seemed to happen very slowly. The Dancer
Foley’s feet did a last little flurry in the air, and her skinny body wriggled with the force of bullets. She spun around completely. Then she fell in a little bundle of nothing and tumbled down to lie in the dirt at the foot of the steps.

I felt like I’d been shot myself. It didn’t hurt, but it was like a big lump of lead had been slammed into my chest and stayed stuck there. I felt like I was sinking into the ground with the weight of it. The women started keening and the men started cursing and the children started crying. They all started running away, as if they expected the soldiers and Auxies to mow them all down now. Stranger things had happened. I just stood there looking at Mattie. The British closed in around her, and all I could see was the odd flash of rags through gaps between their boots. Someone who was crying and saying broken words grabbed me and hustled me off. I fought them, fought to stay where I could see my friend. But the person was too strong. When we got around the corner of the high wall I looked to see who it was. It was my Ma.

Our house wasn’t broken up too bad. Mattie had made her run with the gun before the Tans got properly started on it. Ma sat me down at the kitchen table, but I started shivering so hard in my whole body that my knees bounced off the bottom of the table. I think I had some kind of a fit. I know that I fell on the ground and I was shaking and then I was gone. When I woke up I was lying in the bed with an overcoat over me and Ma was bathing my forehead with
cold water from the bucket. She was crying without making any noise.

‘The poor child,’ she kept saying. ‘The poor, poor child.’

I suppose she was talking about Mattie. Maybe she was talking about me. She tried to get me talking but I hadn’t the heart to say anything. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. After a long time she left me alone in the room with the curtains pulled and I lay in the dark and I stared at
nothing
. I didn’t actually cry at all. I just stared. I don’t know what I thought about – nothing, I think, if you can think about nothing. Little rose-covered cottages and sofas
covered
with
Waffenfabrik
and sausage sandwiches, maybe. Antonio Neckar with his headaches and his squinty eyes.

My Da came in to me that night when he got home.

‘Nancy,’ he said, ‘would you not come out and talk to us?’

He put a hand on my shoulder and I held it. He worked on the docks, my Da. He was a big strong man but I never heard him say a cross word to one of us kids unless he had to. One time a man blamed my brother Ray for breaking his window. He blamed Ray because Ray was outside when the man came out to see who’d done it. Ray swore he hadn’t but the man wanted to take it out on somebody. He was boxing Ray’s head when Da came up and asked Ray if he’d broken the window. Again Ray said he hadn’t. The man called Ray a liar, and still tried to hit him. Da hit the man a
single box that left him stretched out on the street with his jaw broke.

‘When you call my son a liar,’ he said to the man, ‘then you call me a liar. I may not have much but I have my word. Don’t try and take it away from me.’

Afterwards I found out that Ray really had broken the window, but he was ashamed to tell Da because he’d have been disappointed. Years later, when Da was dying, Ray, a grown man then, confessed that thing to him. Da laughed.

‘Sure, I knew you were after doing it,’ he said to Ray. ‘But that fellow was only a bully. And I never liked bullies.’

When I held my Da’s hand that night, the time Mattie Foley got shot, that’s when I started to cry. I cried and I cried and I shook the same way I’d been shaking at the kitchen table. Da held me tight till the sobbing went down, then he brought me out and sat me down and Ma gave me a cup of sweet tea. Jim and Ray were sitting by the fire. No-one said anything. We were sitting like that for a while when there was a knock on the door. My Da opened it and two men were standing there. They were strangers.

‘Well?’ Da said.

‘We’re asking around about a friend of ours,’ one of the men said. He spoke with a country accent.

Da looked at them for a long while.

‘Come in,’ he said then, and they came in past him. They were young men in caps, with long dark coats. They looked serious and shifty at the same time. I was too numb
to take them in, really, but I could sense the others tensing. Da closed the door and came over to the table. He sat down and looked up at the men without asking them to sit.

‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.

‘We had a friend staying with Mrs Nolan,’ the man with the country accent said. ‘He had a bit of a problem.’

‘Someone informed on him,’ the other man said impatiently. He was a Dub.

Da looked from one to the other.

‘Well, it was no-one in this house,’ he said. He sounded tired. ‘We minds our own business, and we don’t like peelers.’

‘We believe,’ the first man said, ‘there was money involved.’

Da looked like he was going to spit, but Ma would have taken the head off him if he’d done it in the house.

‘Blood money, so,’ he said. ‘No good ever came of blood money.’

There was a clatter on the back door, and I jumped. I must have made some noise too because Ma came over and held me. Da was on his feet facing the door with his fists clenched. Each of the strangers stuck a hand in a pocket of his topcoat.

The back door was always on the latch. It opened now and Chancer Foley came in. His face was white.

‘Mick,’ my Da said. ‘I’m sorry for your trouble.’

Chancer Foley held up a silencing hand. He looked past my father at the two strangers.

‘Youse are looking for the man that put your friend on the spot,’ he said.

There was something odd about him that I couldn’t place. Then I realised he wasn’t drunk. Here was Chancer Foley sober – a sight Mattie had said she’d never seen.

The two young men looked at Chancer. They took their empty hands out of their pockets.

‘What do you know about it?’ the second one asked. He was thin-faced, intense.

Chancer Foley started crying. It was an ugly sight, without even drink to excuse it.

‘I’m the man,’ he said. ‘I’m who you’re looking for.’

I felt something like a lump of ice moving up and down my spine.

‘I had a daughter,’ Chancer said, ‘and one time my daughter told me I’d do anything for drink-money. I’d sell human life for it, she said, and I’d pay for it in hell.’

His whole face was moving as he spoke, big spasms moving across it. His eyes were mad.

‘Well, I done it!’ he said. ‘I sold human life for it. And she was right – I’m paying. But it’s not enough.’

He looked over at my Da.

‘She was a mad young one,’ he said. ‘Mad as a hatter. You could neither talk sense into her nor beat it into her. But she was only a young one, when all is said and done.
There was no harm in her.’

There was a drip on the end of Chancer’s nose. He wiped it with his coat-sleeve.

‘Them boyos the other day,’ he said to the two men. ‘The Auxies. They were looking for a man. They said they’d pay good money for word of strangers. And money is money.’

‘Blood money,’ my father said.

‘Blood money, aye. I never knew what that meant.’ Chancer held up two shaking hands, the dirty palms washed clean in places by the sweat and maybe tears on them.

‘When I looks at these hands now,’ he said, ‘I sees them full of me own daughter’s blood. It was on the street
outside
today, her blood. A big lock of it. Me wife had to go out and scrub it up when she came back from work. I found her still at it when I came home. She had the blood washed up this long time, there wasn’t a sign of it on the stones. But she was still scrubbing. She’d scrub the very stones out of the ground on that spot if she could.’

He put his hands down and looked at the men.

‘There’s a stone wall outside here where this whole thing started.’ he said. ‘Your mate saw the Auxies coming the other morning, and he thrun the gun over the wall. I seen him do it. I wants youse to take me out now and put me up against that wall. I’m asking youse to do it. Begging youse. I’d do it me own self only I’ve nothing to do it with.’

The second stranger, the intense one, moved as if to go over to Chancer; but his friend stopped him.

‘It was your daughter that was shot?’ he asked quietly.

Chancer looked at him with mad eyes.

‘Sure, what do you think I’m talking about?’ he said. ‘You stupid culchie!’

The young man looked at him evenly.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘you’ve been punished enough.’

Chancer Foley moved quicker than I’d ever seen him move. He crossed the room and grabbed the man’s coat by the lapels. He was taller and heavier than the countryman, and he glowered down at him.

‘No!’ he said. ‘No, I haven’t.’

The countryman reached up and pulled Chancer’s hands from his coat. He looked up at him coldly.

‘It’s a priest you need,’ he said. ‘And I’m not a priest.’

He nodded to his friend. The two of them bade us goodnight and went out, closing the door after them. Chancer looked around at us. He started to say something to my Da, but something in Da’s eyes stopped him.
Chancer
ran out the back door, leaving it open behind him. A couple of days later his body was fished out of Dublin bay by a dredger. There were no signs of violence.

The court where I grew up is gone now. There’s a block of offices and apartments on the site. Well-dressed young men and women come and go, talking on their mobile phones,
running busily up and down steps that are rarely empty. My mother and father are long gone to their reward. My brother Ray fought in the British army during the Hitler war. He died in Germany in 1945. My brother Jim went to America. I was over there last year for his funeral. I often think of Mattie, and wonder what would have become of her. One time when myself and my husband were home on a holiday we went to the National Museum. They’ve a
special
display there about them times, with guns and uniforms from the Rising and from the Tan war. There’s an Auxie uniform there that set the hairs of my neck standing up when I saw it. But the thing that struck me most was a pistol, a Mauser pistol, there in a glass case. It was the spit and image of the one that Mattie Foley brought into our kitchen that morning. You could even see the same words stamped on the metal:
Waffenfabrik Mauser … Oberndorf A. Neckar
. And for the first time in too many years I thought of Antonio Neckar, with his headaches and his craftsmanship.

There was a couple looking into the case at the same time as me, and when they spoke to each other I recognised the language as German. They even said something about Mausers – maybe surprised to find so many of the guns had come from their own country. And though it wasn’t like me at all, I turned to the couple and asked them about the words stamped on the pistol, and I learned that
Waffenfabrik
wasn’t a thing you’d cover sofas with at all, but that it
just meant ‘weapons factory’. And I learned too that the rest of the inscription meant only a factory site,
Oberndorf-Am
-Neckar
, the Neckar being a river and Oberndorf-
Am-Neckar
being the same sort of a name as, say,
Kingston-on
-Thames, where my sister-in-law used to live. And, of course, it’s not that I’d ever believed that there really was a fellow called Antonio Neckar, because I’d known all along it was only a mad story, but in a foolish kind of a way I found myself standing there not knowing whether to laugh or cry. Because, mad or not, Mattie Foley had called out to Antonio with her last living breath. And as we left the museum I seemed to hear a little girl’s voice echoing in the high rooms, up in the rafters, singing a daft old song:

I think that, in a strange way, and though I hadn’t thought about him for years, Antonio Neckar came alive a bit in my own mind that day. Because those things in the glass cases – the uniforms and the guns – they were only
history
, and history is a name for things that are dead. And Antonio, even though he’d never existed, was still more alive than those things. Because Antonio, with his headaches and his craft, like Mattie Foley with her dirty dancing feet, would never be a dead thing in a museum. The only
museum he’d be in was the museum of this old woman’s heart. And a heart may be old, but so long as it is beating it’s a living thing; and the things that are inside it are not dead. And somewhere in a corner of my own heart, in a place full of dreams, a bit of me will always be sitting on the Empty Steps with Mattie Foley, listening to her mad
stories
, eating sausage sandwiches, maybe, and waiting for Antonio.