A Whispered Name (16 page)

Anselm
next checked the month of June. The battalion was evidently in the firing line
because there were lists of casualties and the factual entries were brief. One,
however, caught his eye: ‘Mines detonated at Messines. Extraordinary sight.
German front line completely vanished.’

Anselm
tired suddenly He packed away his papers and leaned his head against the
window, letting the ra-ta-ta-ta, ra-ta-ta-ta soothe him. Without knowing why he
felt he’d stumbled upon something important. The question that framed itself
was not, however, of an investigative character. It was anthropological: what
would it do to a man to handle so much death in spring?

Part Three

Chapter Seventeen

The Family Silver

1

After the trial Seosamh O
Flannagáin (as Joseph understood himself) was taken back to the cellar.
‘Go
hifreann leat,’
he muttered as the bolt went home — ‘To hell with you’.
Joseph thought in Gaelic, he dreamed in Gaelic, his world was Gaelic; but
English was his tongue, now, making him a man distant from himself and from the
land for which he hungered; a land whose worth he hadn’t grasped until he’d
left it far, far behind.

He’d
been condemned, he knew it. If you were convicted, they asked about your
character and if they didn’t call you back after the recess … well … it was
death, that quietest of words. In Gaelic: bás. That was the last you knew of
the affair, until one fine day on parade you were told whether the Big Fella
had ‘commuted’ your sentence to ‘field punishment’ or ‘penal servitude’. Those
strange expressions had never reached the tiny school on Inisdúr. There was no
music to them.

When
all the voices up top had died away the sentry rattled the lock and Corporal
Mackie stuck his head around the door. ‘C’mon, out, you Irish …’ He couldn’t
find the word, so he threw Flanagan his cap (removed before the trial) and,
feeling very silly they marched from the school to the battalion’s billet a
mile or so down the road. They passed the carpenter clouting wood with a mallet
and the abbey where Father Maguire said his prayers.

‘Your
only chance is drink, the chaplain had said in Gaelic, with an oath that would
have shocked Flanagan’s mother. ‘If anything goes wrong, get drunk.’

And
things had gone wrong, badly so. That’s why he’d come back with three bottles
of wine. Lisette had brought them up from the cellar. But one sniff had turned
him against the chaplain’s counsel: instead, he’d poured the stuff all over,
head to foot, and what an awful stink it had raised. The bite in the air had
reminded him of the French fishermen who, from time to time, had called into
the small harbour back home, huge lads from Brittany who wouldn’t touch a drop
of porter. A strange lot they were. They played football barefoot with a
cabbage.

‘If you
get caught, you’ll be tried,’ Father Maguire had said, leaning close in the
trench, the smell of tobacco strong on his breath, ‘and if you’re tried then it’s
death, unless you can give mercy a decent yoke. So get drunk, son.

His
Gaelic was like an islander’s, though he was a mainland clod, from Dingle. He’d
learned the tongue on An Blascaod Mór, among the weavers, before he’d heard the
Voice.

The
chaplain had stalled to ponder his own advice, turning his face to the rain. ‘The
thing is, you’re Irish.’ He’d muttered that to himself in English, as though it
was a problem all of its own, as though it was a dark water that lapped against
Flanagan’s chances.

Corporal
Mackie didn’t speak. They marched in silence past hundreds of faces, pale among
the steaming tents. Occasionally men stared, some with pity, others with
disgust. The sounds of drill —hollering and the thud of feet — came from a
trampled field beside a barricade of hop frames. Mackie stomped right, then
left, then right again, his arms swinging stiff like bits of driftwood, old
spars off the beach. He stopped at a low farmhouse with a courtyard and a few
crazed chickens. As if a bell had been rung Lieutenant Colonel Hammond appeared
from a doorway He led Flanagan away from Mackie towards the corner of the
courtyard, where a dog lay panting.

‘How
are you?’ asked Duggie. Everyone called him that, but behind his back, of
course.

‘Not so
bad, Sir, considering.’

‘Yes,
considering.’

They
fell silent. The dog’s tail flapped on the dirt, its breathing uncommonly loud.

‘I can’t
help you if you won’t help me,’ said Duggie, lighting his pipe.

Flanagan’s
father used to say the same thing, sitting in the exhausted light by the fire.
But his father had been talking of the farm and the fishing, the breaking of
rocks to make the walls, the burning of the kelp to make iodine. And Flanagan
had wanted to escape the harness of life on the island, to taste air without
salt, to walk for miles without sight of the sea.

‘I said
I need your help,’ repeated Duggie, striking another match.

‘I don’t
know what you mean, Sir,’ he lied.

‘Let me
help you. How did you get to Étaples and back again without a pass?’

‘Hah, I’m
sorry Sir, I am.’ He shook his head, as did the dog. ‘I told you before, it
wasn’t me. The police must have stopped some other fella. There’s—’

‘—Flanagans
aplenty in the army’ recited Duggie.

‘Aye,
there is, Sir.’

‘A tot
of rum?’ Duggie asked, playfully reaching for a pocket flask.

‘I won’t,
thank you, Sir.’

‘Thought
not. Drink isn’t your thing, is it?’ The CO sighed and scratched his cheek. ‘You’ll
be kept under close arrest. However —he picked a shred off his tongue and
flicked it away — ‘between the hours of four and six, you’ll polish the weapons
of the regimental band. I’m told there are twenty-six instruments in all. Do them
carefully please. And do bear in mind … there’s no rush.’

Flanagan
had expected to be locked up day and night until the Commander-in-Chief had
decided what to do with him. But the CO had a way of startling you in moments
of crisis by a quiet word or, as now a kind decision. Something to show that
the individual soldier was as important to him as the battalion itself There
was another reason, though, for why Flanagan liked his CO: he served the army
like his father had served the land. Both of them saw further than their own
horizons, both of them would never say so. Yet both of them understood someone
who did, for they looked on to the world from their own regret, from a field
they would not leave.

2

Later that day when the
rest of the battalion was being screamed at while they marched, Corporal Mackie
escorted Flanagan from the cellar to an abandoned house on the roadside between
the abbey and the school. Thin orange bricks framed sections of beige cement
stamped with imprints like a cat’s paws. Mackie unlocked the door and pushed
Flanagan inside.

‘If I
was in charge,’ he whispered, ‘I’d have shot you by now, you worthless bastard.’

The
door banged shut and Flanagan entered the sitting room. Most of the instruments
were stored upon shelves along one wall. On the floor were two big drums and a
tuba on its bell. He sat on a stool and opened a bottle of Goddard’s Silver
Polish. Mindful of Mackie’s bitterness, and the many others who felt the same,
he began to think of Owen Doyle. He, too, had been worthless … from one
angle.

After Flanagan had taken
Major Dunne to the stretcher-bearers, he began the return trip to Joyce and the
boys. Out there, among the craters and rain, he literally crawled upon Doyle.
The heap moaned and hit out, an arm rising from the dirt that smacked Flanagan
straight in the teeth.

‘Calm
down, ye brute,’ he snapped. ‘I’m on your side.’

The
soldier remained crouched, each hand over the back of his head, face down in
the muck, whimpering.

‘Are
you injured, so?’

The
heap wouldn’t speak. It rocked from side to side as if it were a mole trying to
get its nose under the earth. Sitting upright, Flanagan patted its back. He did
that for a long time, as his father had done on the farm, helping a beast push
out a calf. Pat, pat, pat. And all around the rain thumped into the soft land.
Finally the soldier raised his head, his hands kneading the mud. He sat
upright, like Flanagan. They looked at each other, each unseeing, each etched
against the darkness, rain thundering down upon them. This other man had no
gun, no bandolier and no helmet.

‘Where’s
your people?’ Flanagan asked. The figure just rocked from side to side, humming
on a monotone. He wasn’t one of Flanagan’s pack, that was for sure. He was from
another battalion. He’d crossed a boundary He was on the run.

‘What’s
your name, so?’

‘I want
to go home,’ he wailed, answering neither question.

‘And
where might that be?’

The
voice answered, this time aggressive and through bared teeth. ‘I don’t have
one, but it’s Blighty. Not this hole. This cemetery’

Hah,
the fear. It could split the lining of the lungs if you let it loose. The
impulse to avoid death rose from a pit, from somewhere deeper than any thought
or idea.

‘Aye,’
he said. ‘But you’ll likely as not get caught.’

The
hunched figure rocked and hummed under the beating rain. Flanagan could imagine
the running nose, the tears, the juddering lip, and that terrible relaxation in
the limbs, so like exhaustion and helplessness. He’d heard about an execution,
once, when on leave. The poor wretch couldn’t hold his limbs. He’d flopped in
the guardhouse and kept apologising. They’d had to drag him out and strap him
to a chair, and all the while he was saying, ‘I’m sorry, lads.’

‘I can’t
go back,’ whispered the shape. ‘They’ll shoot me.

‘Tell
me your name.

‘Owen
Doyle.’

There
in the rain, soaking up the mud, they talked. In the dreadful, low, unquiet
between explosions. Or rather Doyle did, of home and the cobbled streets of
Bolton in Lancashire. He’d come to London and taken the King’s shilling, and
now he wanted to give it back, without interest. Flanagan’s eyes misted. There
were no cobbled streets on Inisdúr …just tracks across grassland that had
been worn through to the strong rock beneath, a rock that wouldn’t yield. As
Doyle spoke of the cotton mills with their tall, thin chimneys, the tight
terraced houses, and the gas light halos at night time, Flanagan remembered the
fields of seaweed and sand, and the white gable ends of low houses huddled in
the lee. This gathering of flesh and stone he’d left behind. He’d sailed away
leaving a crowd at the slip.

Hardly
listening to Doyle’s moaning, Flanagan made the greatest decision of his life,
though it appeared more as an instinctive reaction than a rational choice. In
truth, the thinking had been completed long ago.

It had
begun with that spate of burials last spring. For three days Flanagan
manhandled his own future. He smelled it on his fingers. It made his trousers
tacky Afterwards, he was told to count the identity tags that had been
collected in a pannier taken from a mule. There were two thousand, three
hundred and fourteen discs of different shapes and sizes, like coins … all
sorts of strange currency crudely stamped with number, name and religion. The
essentials. He’d remembered a winter’s morning on Inisdúr when, as a boy he’d
heard an explosion of wings and seen thousands of birds in flight at once. The
discs became heavy in his hands. On the fourth day and shivering, he told the
new MO that his mind was sick. ‘The faces of the dead hang around me like a
crowd,’ he said. So the doctor checked his tongue and shone a torch in his ears
and snapped, ‘You’re normal.’ Flanagan had been relieved. He’d thought maybe it’d
been too much sun and not enough water. But then, in June, the mines were blown
at Messines. A million tons of TNT, they’d said. The German positions just
disappeared in a great belch of hot wind. Bás. Flanagan had never seen anything
like it, awake or in his dreams. After he saw the crater, he couldn’t speak.
The MO shone a torch in his throat and muttered, as if it were a threat, ‘You’re
normal, just like me.’ But Flanagan knew he wasn’t. That he’d changed. That he
wanted a death with
meaning.

Not
death from a whizz-bang. Not death from a coal-box. Not death from bullets
scything out of nowhere. Not death from suicide, or accident, or a hideous,
screaming brawl with another man-beast. The capricious butchering had almost
driven him mad. Only one sanity remained: if he must, he would
choose
the
manner of his dying. He’d reached the point of serenity where ‘thinking’ was no
longer necessary.

And
then, like a bitter gift, he crawled upon Owen Doyle. At a very deep level,
without being able to fully appreciate the workings of his own decision, or
track the velocity of the insight, Flanagan knew that in finding this unhappy
boy he’d received the opportunity he was looking for: to die in a meaningful way.