After the Lockout (22 page)

‘Who the hell is at the door now?' Stanislaus demanded.

‘Charlie Quinn wants to see you. I told him to come back tomorrow but he seems very determined.'

‘That boy keeps appalling hours. Tell him to come in.'

Maggie is gone from the bed when I wake but she's outside the bedroom door, fussing around and making sure all the Cavanaghs are ready for mass. The clock on the wall shows a quarter to nine and I'm ashamed to have slept so late but thrilled to be where I am. I pull on my trousers and shirt, and
I'm washing my face in a basin of clean water left thoughtfully on the dresser when Maggie comes in. Neither of us knows what to say so we share a nervous giggle, and drying my face quickly, I sweep her into my arms and kiss her. She pushes me away with feigned mortification. ‘What if someone comes in?' she says, but I'm not fooled. I seize her again and plant my lips on her till she's well and truly kissed. Her resistance revives when she realises I'm manoeuvring her towards the bed. ‘No, Victor, I have to go to mass,' she whispers, and I'm about to reply but she silences me with a finger to her lips. ‘Wait till we're all gone to the chapel before you let yourself out. And please don't let anyone see you.'

We kiss again and she straightens herself. She opens the door and she's about to leave when I say: ‘You can't marry Charlie. You have to marry me.'

She closes the door and stands inside with her back to me for a moment. Facing the closed door, I fancy she wears a rueful smile as she whispers, as if to herself: ‘If I could talk to myself when I was ten … Charlie and Victor … What would I say?' She turns to face me. ‘I don't think I'd be in the least bit surprised.' Her expression is that of the officious schoolmistress now, no longer the lover. ‘I won't be a widow in some Dublin tenement.'

‘What are you talking about, widow?'

‘You said marriage. Marriage means a future and a home. I won't be mistress to a man married to a cause.'

‘Och, Maggie, I've asked you to marry me. Are you saying yes or no to me?'

She opens the door. ‘I'm saying yes to you. But only if we stay here. Both of us. You need to let me know if you can say yes to me.'

After she's gone I wait a short while before letting myself out of the house into the empty street. The vacated homes and suspended workplaces are eerie in their silence. All the parish is enclosed behind the granite walls and mahogany doors of the chapel, and the sound of their incantation is at once massive and distant, suggestive of great clamour without drowning the song of the sparrows. The incanting grows louder as I get nearer. No-one has ever before heard of St Margaret of Scotland and it's no Holy Day of Obligation, but Benedict has issued a summons and that's the end of it. Sucking down a lungful of air, gently and quietly I open the church door.

Young men stand solemnly inside the door. Turlough and Sean are among them. They nod as I nudge through. Aidan Cavanagh greets me with eyes that implore me to peace. There's standing room at the top of the centre aisle, staring straight down the spine of the church to the altar. The pews are packed, and on the altar Benedict mumbles the mumbo jumbo. He's facing away from the congregation so I don't know whether he knows of my entrance. Everyone else knows. Whispers ripple through the seated ranks like the thrill a prize-fighter's arrival sends through a crowd previously unsure the fight would go ahead. TP McGahan brazenly takes notes from the back pew between prayers. He'll have to explain his lateness to work on a day that is not holy anywhere outside Benedict's teetering realm, but his Protestant boss and Protestant readers will enjoy a yarn about quarrelling Catholics. Kate McDermott gives me a look that is positively hostile. Charlie turns away after the briefest second, as if he can subject himself to the sight of me no longer. Pius kneels with his forehead on clasped hands, while Maggie kneels in the same posture. I look at her auburn
ringlets, her delicate shoulders, her graceful neck. She turns to look at me, something desperate in her eyes. She mouths something, but I can't make her out. She simplifies: ‘Please. Victor. No.' A few seats over, Ida Harte ogles me with maniacal glee. Father Daly the Sinn Féiner fixes me with a stare. I've met a thousand green-orangeman like him, all with the same prejudices and inconsistencies of thought. Though the dog collar is novel, I will say that.

‘Per evangelica dicta deleantur nostra delicta,' Benedict intones, and the congregation mumbles its part of the call-and-response routine like somnambulant parrots. He puts down the chalice, bows at the tabernacle and walks to the pulpit. I fancy he stalls for a second as he spies me, standing square on and looking straight down the aisle at him. Benedict mounts the stairs of the pulpit slowly, deliberately, and shuffles his papers below the marble lectern, taking time to compose himself. Someone breaks the silence with a hacking cough that seems loud as gunshot. Benedict looks up.

‘Most of you will have read about the terrible events in Russia. Some small number of anarchists claim to have affected a revolution in that vast and benighted nation. Time will reveal whether the lawful and moral authorities will return their country to peace, and we must pray that they shall, for the revolutionists do not believe in Christ.' He pauses and looks down the aisle at me. He speaks well, the old bastard. Clear and commanding. ‘They wish to destroy all forms of religion, these Bolshevists. They are not all Jews, but they would all be Christ-killers. They would give their country over firstly to the kaiser, and then to the devil. Their talk is of equality but their business is the murder of priests.'

The congregation shifts in the pews and Benedict affects another skilful pause. He leans forward and continues. ‘In this country, we remember Blessed Oliver Plunkett. We remember how we were hunted and hanged for our fealty to the one true faith. We remember when our loyalty to the Holy Father was called treason by others. We know that freedom of faith is not a right but a hard-won and easily lost prize. I am old enough to remember the old folk speak of the Mass Rock. I remember old priests telling of their lives as fugitives. These were heroic men, criminalised for their vocation. Those hellish days, in truth, happened only a moment ago. Only our vigilance prevents their return. The faithful in Russia are confronted with that reality this very day.'

He pauses for a long time and casts his eye around a congregation planted in rapt silence. The thrust for my jugular is coming, I can feel it, but for Maggie's sake I will remain silent.

‘And yet despite all this, people in our midst applaud the Bolshevists. Some people in this country and in this very parish feel quite relaxed about such an attack on the faith. The evidence of this is plain to see in the temple of wood and tin being built in the Poor Ground, just yards from this holy place.'

Unrest washes through the church. There's naked shock in the eyes of men who've worked by my side all week. They only want a bit of a dance on Saturday night to celebrate the footballers. He's telling them that hammering a nail through tin at Madden Poor Ground is like hammering one through flesh and sinew on a bloody cross at Calvary, and I don't think the congregation wants to shoulder it. Unless I miss my guess, Benedict is over-playing his hand.

‘Many of you have helped build that monstrosity with the most honest motives, and have no truck with any wicked Russian creed. My good news to you this morning is that it's not too late to turn away from those who would mislead you. I say to you, in the name of the Lord, I will not stand idly by and watch an agent of evil lead my flock as lambs to damnation. Victor Lennon, you are the corrupter. You are the serpent. You choose to rule in the Poor Ground rather than serve in heaven,' Benedict says, the scorn oozing like slime from the pulpit. He's staring at me, daring me to the struggle. I do not avert my eyes from him, but for Maggie's sake, neither do I speak. ‘Your empire, your
soviet
, is built on the bones of the damned, where no respectable Christian will touch it.'

Johnny Morrissey stands up and cries angrily: ‘The Poor Ground was good enough for my daughter.' Everywhere, heads look up from their study of the floor. The silence is stunned. ‘My Daisy only lived for an hour. How can she be damned?' Johnny says.

‘I have a twin brother in the Poor Ground,' says Jim O'Hagan, full-back from the football team. ‘He died when we were born and but for the grace of God it would've been me. I don't believe I won't meet him some day. I won't believe it.'

And one person after another stands up and shouts about the person they love who's lying in the Poor Ground. The chapel is noisy with the anger of those confronting the bishop and those defending him. Benedict grips the side of the lectern, as if he's afraid he'll be swept away. He has turned white. Maggie's head is buried in her hands.

‘My Daisy is in heaven,' Johnny Morrissey cries.

‘Get out of this church, Victor Lennon. I cast you out, and all those who would stand with you,' Benedict shouts, recovering
sufficiently to muster some ferocity. There seems no point in staying silent now.

‘My mother is in heaven,' I say. ‘Yes, my mother, Deirdre Lennon, stands acquitted anywhere there is justice. And by God there is none in this place. She is damned only by you and your dogma.'

TP McGahan can't write quickly enough. Pius's head is bowed. Maybe he's praying. Maggie is crying. Charlie struggles to his feet. ‘Get out of this parish, Victor, get out and don't come back, you fucken lunatic,' he cries, his oath prompting gasps.

Turlough brushes past me and storms towards Charlie. ‘Sit down and shut your mouth, Quinn, you're not in your regiment now. Victor Lennon has done more for this parish and this country than ten generations of youse leeching gombeen bastards,' he snarls. Charlie shrinks. Turlough would take Charlie out and shoot him like a dog if I ordered it.

‘Out! Out of this chapel, Lennon, Moriarty and all your fellow-travellers. I cast you all out,' Benedict roars, trying to take back control of the situation.

I summon the attention of the congregation. ‘Let me say this to you all: go to any village in Ireland and the priest will have the biggest house while working people struggle to live. Bishop Benedict talks of the Penal Days but he forgets the Famine, when the priests locked their doors and let the people starve. I have seen priests collude to keep Irishmen out of work and out of food. I have seen priests bring starvation to children and claim it as Christ's will. I have seen priests lock people out of their very graves. And the Bishop has locked us out of our Parochial Hall. As always, when the people are in need, the Church locks us out.'

‘The Parochial Hall is Church property,' Benedict replies, but I'm surprised at how weakly the words slither out.

‘It is built by the sweat and muscle of the men of Madden. All the Jesuitical capitalist dogma in the world can't dilute our rights!'

‘It belongs to the Church,' he says again, still more weakly.

‘These people are not the poor, illiterate peasants of the Famine days. These are proletarians and they have built their own People's Hall. The People's Hall is our Mass Rock.' I turn away from Benedict, I am finished with him. I speak to my people. ‘Comrades, our work is not yet finished. Let every able-bodied man, woman and child come with me now to the Poor Ground to complete our great project.'

Maggie is still crying.

Turlough whoops and Sean press-gangs some of the young lads around him towards the door. I stride through the throng and out the door, not stopping till I'm on the other side of the street. Turlough comes first, Sean last, and between them a crowd of fellows emerge blinking into the daylight, shocked and scared and angry but most importantly, there. They remind me of some of the Volunteers who turned out on Easter Monday expecting to do the usual drills and manoeuvres and be home by dinnertime. Sorry, lads, today's the day you do the thing you've talked about doing for so long.

I count the men. Aidan Cavanagh's there. Jerry McGrath. Johnny Morrissey. Jim O'Hagan. Plenty more. Maybe twenty men. That means twenty families, which means a hundred or more people we can rely on. Not bad at all.

Maggie probably hasn't stopped crying yet.

You had to do it, Victor. You just had to, didn't you?