After the Lockout (21 page)

The lights dim and the piano player tinkles his first notes of accompaniment. The whirr of the projector replaces the hubbub of the crowd. Charlie Chaplin appears on the screen, and people in the crowd who've seen one of his pictures before whisper
that's him
to those who haven't. Maggie picks at her raisins. The pianist tries to keep up with the action on the screen as the little tramp with a funny walk spills a bottle of milk on himself while he's holding a baby. The tuppenny-seat people roar, the better-dressed folk smile. The tramp passes a police station and, in a fit of good-living zeal, goes in and volunteers to clean up Easy Street, the nastiest place imaginable. The pianist plays a snatch of something from
HMS Pinafore
and Maggie sits forward in her seat. She's wasting the arms and cushions I've paid a shilling for but I don't mind. When we were children preparing for Confirmation the priest told us how a Catholic child needed the gift of ‘wonder and awe in the presence of God', and the concept had escaped me but as I look at Maggie in the flickering silver light of the screen, watching with eyes round as saucers, I think I get it. Inside twenty minutes the tramp-turned-constable has turned Easy Street into a God-fearing neighbourhood. The monstrous villain becomes a respectable bourgeois who takes the outside of the pavement in deference to his wife, herself transformed from a sluttish harpy, as they walk to church. Chaplin and his good-living girl walk arm-in-arm after them. It's reactionary nonsense, but to me, Maggie is the real show. She giggles girlishly and squeezes my hand as the screen goes black. I nod to Maggie to tell her that means the film is over. Mad
applause explodes. They show two more Chaplin reels before the intermission, Maggie enjoys each one more than the last. She asks if I can explain the contraption in the third film, the moving staircase that goes up and down, and I tell her it's called an escalator.

‘There's a shop in Dublin where they have one. In America they have them in their houses.'

‘Oh, I wouldn't want one of those in my house. They'd be very dangerous. But it was so funny, the way he would fall down the stairs and then the stairs would carry him back up to the top, and he'd try to walk down, but the stairs would be rising up against him, and …'

After the intermission they show a romance with Florence La Badie. I tell Maggie she looks like Florence. She tuts dismissively but she loves it. The film is quite salacious. When Florence's parents get divorced you can spot the Catholics in the audience fidgeting uncomfortably. The audience fidgeting becomes general when Florence ditches her irreproachable fiancé, a doctor type, and takes up with an obvious scoundrel who is later revealed as a free-loving type. Maggie is riveted with revulsion. I'm almost painfully aroused. The audience is mollified when, upon learning of her new suitor's proclivities, Florence brains him with a statuette, and goes back to the doctor type as the film ends.

Afterwards we walk down Russell Street towards the vast, open common of the Mall. They say it's exactly a mile around its perimeter; we walk the ash-canopied cinder path twice, and I take care to allow my lady the inside. We meet an RIC man on his rounds and he tips his helmet. Maggie stifles a giggle. ‘I don't think I'll ever be able to look at a policeman again and not see
Charlie Chaplin,' she says. ‘I can see why you like him. Look at how the rich people are presented in his films. They're all vain and greedy and violent.'

‘What other way is there to present them?'

Maggie chats excitedly and unguardedly about the films and I cherish each step we take, arm-in-arm, in the flickering, gas-lit prettiness. The Mall is ringed with churches and Georgian terraces, courthouse and bank, gaol, museums and war memorials, but once, horses raced here by day and whores whored by night. This was the centrepiece of some long-dead archbishop's resurrection of Armagh, Patrick's gone-to-seed citadel. I ask Maggie if she knows cock-fighting and knuckle-fighting and gambling and carousing and all sorts went on here, once upon a time.

‘If you're going to reform a place, you start in the most rotten part,' she says.

We walk the path bisecting the middle of the Mall and sit down on the bench by the Crimean cannon. She says her favourite bit was when Florence gave the scoundrel his comeuppance with the statuette. My favourite bit was when Charlie boots the policeman up the arse at Ellis Island.

‘I'm not surprised you liked that bit. That big statue of the woman holding the torch; was that the Statue of Liberty?'

‘Did you never see the Statue of Liberty before?'

‘Of course. I mean, I think so. I think maybe I saw an etching. It's beautiful.'

‘You're beautiful.'

She frowns. ‘I've had a lot of fellows knocking on my door,' she says proudly. ‘Yes indeed. Some were quite ardent.'

‘And did you entertain any of them?'

‘It would have been queer if I hadn't entertained any.' Her brow furrows. She looks so melancholy. ‘A couple of them I tried very hard to love.' She pauses. ‘There are fewer interested parties lately,' she says, just as matter-of-fact as that. ‘Twenty-eight and still a virgin. I think men are suspicious of that.' She snatches her hand back and doesn't dare look me in the eye. ‘I have a proposal of marriage. From Charlie. He asked me a few days ago. I told him I'd consider it.'

I laugh, but only for a second.

We get into the trap and head for home. It's true that Maggie's most marriageable age is a few years behind her, and it's not good for a woman to have her first-born when she's looking at thirty; the window is closing and she knows it. But Maggie has the beauty, the brains and the breeding to make up for it. We stop outside Madden, looking down the gentle incline into the village. The skeletal frame of the People's Hall, partially robed in tin walls, is vaguely discernible in the dimness. We'll reach the eaves and make a start on the roof tomorrow, and with a bit of luck we'll have the whole thing finished by Friday night. I take Maggie's hand and she lets me hold it for a moment.

‘Will you stay?' she asks.

‘I don't know. I'd like to, but there's a fight I'm supposed to be in.'

She laughs bitterly. ‘Of course, the big socialist!' She takes back her hand. ‘Ask people around here about socialism and if they've heard of it at all, they'll say it means the government is going to take their land off them again.'

‘I have forty or fifty of those people you're talking about working with me, standing up to Benedict,' I say.

‘Only because Father Daly says it's all right.'

I'm nonplussed.

‘Father Daly is a Sinn Féiner,' she says. She can see I didn't know. Usually the dog-collars clamp down hard against any kind of boat-rocking, especially among their own. ‘Everyone thinks you're Sinn Féin too,' she says.

‘Sinn Féin are a bunch of bollixes.'

‘You fought in the Sinn Féin rebellion so you're a Sinn Féiner. There's only one question people care about, and you and Father Daly are on the same side of that question.' She puts her hand to my face, strokes my cheek gently. There's tremendous sadness in her eyes. ‘The girl you knew had to grow up. But my Victor never grew up, did he? He'll never change. Always full of spiels and knows nothing about himself. Purest gombeen, born and raised, and everybody knows it. So why is he playing the socialist?' she says softly.

When she puts it like that, and gives me the look she's giving me, I honest to God don't know what to say.

Hunger is worse in winter. You have burned all the furniture for fuel, and food is scarce. First the strike pay dropped from ten shillings to five, and now it has stopped altogether. The supply ships from England have been fewer. There has always been a population of youngsters living on Dublin's streets but their numbers seem to have multiplied as the lockout has gone on. Packs of dirt-caked gurriers scavenge like jackals around the north side. The Monto
girls aren't on strike. Murphy's four hundred thieves keep coming to Monto for entertainment every night, even as they wreak famine on the working families of the area by day. But some of the Monto girls donate food or money at the Liberty Hall. You have to sneak them in the back door – if your workers or their wives knew where their meal had come from, the food would turn to ash in their mouths. Every now and then, Peggy O'Hara makes you liver and onions, and by God, you're grateful for it.

Connolly arrives from Belfast with a plan to evacuate the children to sympathetic families in Liverpool for the duration. They can eat and live like human beings there, leaving their parents free to win their emancipation. But Cardinal Logue denounces the plan. Better that the children should starve in Catholic Ireland than be corrupted in heathen England, he says. His priests board the ship and seize the children, taking them back to the land that starves them. Their parents, the same people who have struggled like lions against the bosses, let them. The starving armies of Dublin's socialists start drifting back to work soon after. They accept whatever terms they are slapped with, no matter how degrading.

You have failed.

After this, you must never again mistake capitalists and imperialists and clerics for equally human beings. They are heels treading on the face of humanity. You should have remembered your Thucydides: the strong do as they wish, the weak endure what they must. Justice exists only between equals in power, and the strong know it. After the lockout, you know it too. You know what you have to do.

 

By the time the light fails on Thursday, no more than a quarter of the structure of the People's Hall remains to be done. Counting myself, twenty-eight men down tools at the end of the day and the consensus is that only a few hours' work will be needed tomorrow to finish the job. I stand up on the wall of the Poor Ground to address my men.

‘Comrades, it has been another fine day's work. Our great task is almost completed and it will stand for many years to come as a testament to the energy, the productiveness and the solidarity of the Madden proletariat.'

Sean Moriarty patrols the perimeter of the crowd. He slaps John McGrath hard on the back and says: ‘Go on there, Comrade, sing up that song Victor taught you.' John looks uncomfortable and makes no noise until Turlough starts to sing: ‘
Arise you workers from your slumbers
.' I sing up, ‘
Arise you prisoners of want
', and by the end a good few others chime in to make a halfway decent chorus. Afterwards I dismiss them and tell them I'll see them all tomorrow morning at nine, but Aidan Cavanagh says they can't come at nine. They'll all be at mass. It's a Holy Day of Obligation, he says. I bite my tongue. They still feel the
need for their opiate, so I'll let them have it for now. Better to acquiesce in the short term. Their revolutionary consciousness is developing whether they know it or not. They filter away, leaving only Sean and Turlough with me.

‘Something has come up, boss. Something unforeseen. It's the bishop,' says Turlough.

‘At mass tomorrow. He's going to denounce you,' says Sean.

‘He's going to tell everyone you are to be excommunicated,' says Turlough.

‘That everyone should shun you.'

‘That anyone working on the People's Hall will be barred from the chapel.'

‘Turned away from the altar.'

‘Maybe even excommunicated themselves.'

‘That mightn't bother you, but it'll scare the hell out of people around here.'

‘Or put the fear of hell into them.'

‘Nobody wants to be a heretic.'

‘This is serious stuff, Victor.'

‘We could be the only ones left here tomorrow.'

I don't know what to say. I look at the People's Hall and for the first time I'm afraid it might never be completed. This might be as close as I ever get. ‘How do you know about this?' is all I can think to ask.

‘We know everything that goes on in this town,' says Turlough.

I run home, not even stopping for a smoke despite the painful stitch that stabs at my side before I'm past the Parochial House. I want only to be home. Even if we get the hall finished, people might boycott the céilí. What a humiliation that would be for us.

Who am I fooling? The humiliation will be mine. I dash up the road, up the lane, and make it home quicker than I've managed since my school days.

‘Pius! Daddy!' I cry. ‘Daddy, where are you? I need to talk to you.' I open the door of the bedroom. Inside, Pius lies slumped across the bed, his feet dragging on the floor. He hasn't even managed to collapse properly. Poteen is spilled across the floor, an almost empty bottle lies on its side, telling of Pius's afternoon and his broken vow. I check in case he's dead, but of course it's a stupor, so I put him into the bed and sit in the armchair beside him. I sit there for a long time, two or three hours or more in the pitch black. I'm ready to talk to my father now, I wish to God he would wake up. Excommunication. Even the word sounds like a particularly vicious kind of amputation. Benedict is as formidable as the collar he wears, and I've seen men who fought like lions against earthly kings fall to their knees before one of those collars. I wish I could talk to my dad, but I'd settle for just anyone right now. At this hour, there's only one person I can call on, God help me.

I enter the barn as quietly as possible, God forbid anyone should see me, and light the storm lantern, which hangs exactly where she said it would. Light flickers across the dim, opaque barn. I wonder whether I ever truly intended to keep the promise I made to myself not to come here. Maybe it was always inevitable. How long before she'll see? I take the watch from my pocket. Twenty-three minutes past twelve. Almost midnight by the new imperial time that people are too spineless not to acquiesce to. Fat king George gets his extra labour and people just go along with it. If ever a revolution was needed … The barn door opens. Ida comes in and closes it noiselessly behind her. She faces me with a flamboyant flick of her tousled hair. Her eyes
flash in the intermittent light of the storm-lantern. ‘It's you. I knew you'd come,' she says.

I make no reply, no move, no gesture, as she comes closer. She's been asleep, or lying in bed at any rate, and hasn't even stopped to fix herself before coming to me. She opens her shawl. Her breasts heave up and almost out of her under-dress, and she looks down at her body, then up through her lashes to me, as though issuing a challenge; I should get on with taking what surely I have come for. I reach out my left hand to her right, and my right hand to her left, and slowly, gently, I pull them together, closing over the shawl. ‘I'm not here for that.'

She's surprised. She tugs the shawl tightly around her shoulders and steps back. ‘There's no charge, if that's what you're thinking,' she says, and my expression must convey how appalled I am at the suggestion. ‘What do you want, Mr Lennon?' she demands, and I'm surprised to realise she's embarrassed.

‘Benedict is going to denounce me from the pulpit in the morning. He's going to try and have me excommunicated.'

‘I thought you were an atheist anyway?'

‘But excommunication … I have turned away from the church, but it's just that …' I'm struggling, I don't have the words. I don't understand myself.

‘You signed up to be the Prodigal Son, not Lucifer.'

‘He's going to denounce anyone who stands with me.'

‘What are you coming to me for?'

‘I don't know. There was no-one else.' I pause a moment and take her in. She's easy to talk to. There's nothing at stake. ‘Somebody asked me recently why I'm socialist. I couldn't answer her but I can answer you. I watched the bosses starve a hundred thousand families for the best part of a year. And when
we had the bosses beat, it was the priests that finished us. You have never conceived of such cruelty to so many people for so long. God forgive me if I ever make peace with that.'

‘I know exactly what you mean,' she says. ‘Victor, you were at the GPO. The way people talked about you, I thought you'd be eight feet tall. You were a hero. They still want you to be a hero. They haven't definitely decided you're not one yet. If you stand against the bishop now, a lot of people will be torn, for a few days, at any rate.'

There's wisdom behind those black-as-coal eyes. I must force people to choose sides. They'll likely fall back in step with the Church after a few days, but those few days and that confusion are there to be used. The iron is hot. If he denounces me from the pulpit, I'll denounce him from the pews. By the time everyone calms down the People's Hall will be built and we will have triumphed, and maybe that'll mean I'm not a false prophet after all. Maybe that's what prophets are: people who keep a fiction going long enough for it to become true. I thank Ida. She opens her shawl once more, but I shake my head.

‘I'm in love with the schoolteacher,' I say.

Maggie comes to the door in her night-dress. ‘Do you know what time it is?'

‘I'm so sorry for destroying everything. It makes me so sad, but it's in me and I can't help it and this time tomorrow I don't know where we'll be so I want to tell you now, before whatever happens tomorrow, that I love you and I don't ever remember not being in love with you and only you.' I pull her into my arms
and our lips come together as though every future kiss hinges on this one. Her lips are so marvellously soft, it's like they've never been kissed before. I open my mouth French-style and she opens hers too, thrusting in her tongue like there's something in my mouth she desperately wants. Suddenly she withdraws her lips and steps back, looking dazed, but she takes my hand and leads me inside. Closing her bedroom door behind us she turns with eyes wide and dilated and throws her arms around my shoulders. I clinch her waist tightly and move her onto the bed. She pulls me down towards her as my hands fumble stupidly, throwing aside her shawl and undoing her petticoat. He skin smells warm and earthy and moist and her nostrils are splayed wide, and she kisses me angrily as I lift up her skirt and try to untie her knickers. Little beads of sweat form on her brow. I look into her eyes for a sign that what I want, she wants too. ‘Let me,' she whispers. She undoes the knot, lifts her hips from the bed and slips her undergarments past her hips, her knees, her ankles, and down to the floor. I undo my belt buckle, unbutton my trousers. She opens her legs and I lower myself into her. It takes a moment but we get there. She's warm and wet, and she holds me tightly. All the time, we peer into each other's eyes. Sometimes she smiles, sometimes she moans gently, I suppose I do too, but mostly we whisper to one another, over and over, the words ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.'

When it's over we hold each other for hours. It's deep in the night when she lifts her head from my chest and looks at me. ‘You still have my heart, Victor. Take care with it this time,' she says. And I'm gripped with the strangest sense that I've done something terrible to her.

It was late and he had to rise early, but Stanislaus wanted to read through his notes once more. He had said the Feast of St Margaret of Scotland was a Holy Day of Obligation and no voices had been raised to suggest it wasn't, so at nine o'clock the next morning the chapel would be full and they'd all be anxious to hear what he had to say. He wasn't sure whether he wanted Victor to be there: it might be best to denounce the ruffian to his face, but his reaction couldn't easily be predicted. Stanislaus hoped the sermon was enough to rescue the flock from the demagoguery of a madman. He considered making it starker but forced himself to put down the pen. The sermon had pleased him earlier, before the brandy had warmed his blood. Best to trust that judgement now.

‘No compromise between the man defending his home and the arsonist,' he read aloud. Overdue fighting words. He had the pulpit, he had the authority of the Holy Church and the righteousness of God on his side, yet he had wasted days paralysed at his window watching Godlessness wrack the parish like disease in the body of a loved one. They had almost finished their shrine; a tumour on the landscape. He sipped from his glass. Mrs Geraghty had given him a look when he'd asked her to pick up some more brandy, he had run out already. What business was it of hers? By any but Old Testament standards he'd had a long life and lived through many battles. He had one more in him, then never more. Tomorrow he would declare his parish for Christ and defy anyone to dispute it, but younger men like Tim Daly, with their softness and liberalism, would have to carry on the fight.

What did Victor Lennon know of famine? Stanislaus had seen famine. And he had seen how the Church had saved the nation
from mental and moral collapse afterwards. What is there but the cloth and the bottle, after holocaust? Even yet the nation had not begun to understand its trauma: how could it, having been cleaved from its language by the rusty blade of ethnocide? Having but a mercurial relationship with the brutish new tongue? Victor Lennon and the likes of him were toying with issues deeper than they knew. They were asking too much of a bewildered amputee of a nation, the surviving sibling of a murdered twin.

Someone was at the front door. Stanislaus looked at the clock but it was a blur in the darkness. He heard Father Daly explain that it was long after a decent hour but soon, footsteps on the creaking staircase were followed by a light, apologetic tap on the study door. Father Daly stuck his head inside. ‘I didn't know if you were still up. It's so dark in here, can I turn up the lamp?' He waited a moment and, hearing no objection, turned up the main lamp, bringing light where there had been a vague glow. ‘Smoky too,' he said.