Carn (25 page)

Under cover of darkness the Dolan plaque was broken in two. It lay forlorn in the square, the name Dolan smeared with tar. Over a period of two days there was a constant stream of visitors to
the Lacey home where everything Benny Dolan had ever said or done was re-evaluated at length. Una Lacey, heavily sedated, stared dead-eyed at the relatives and friends of her father who lowered
their eyes and weakly shook her hand. Over cups of tea, football matches long since past were relived, the night the cup had come home to Carn and not a man woman or child had slept a wink, Pat
Lacey carried on a victory parade through the streets with the silver trophy held aloft. Coach trips to away matches came alive in the kitchen, then faded away again to a distant time, as if they
belonged solely now with the body of Pat Lacey. The members of the Anti-Divorce League had a special wreath made and delivered to the house. The body was taken from the mortuary and brought to the
church where Pat Lacey lay beneath the stained glass Sacred Heart with his arms crossed in the padded box, his pinched face fixed with a faint smile, beside him, in an unopened coffin, the body of
Josie Keenan.

The double funeral wound its way through the streets. The Pride of Carn Marching Band played behind the hearse as the cortege wound its way towards the cemetery on the hill above the town.

James Cooney, Father Kelly and the National Secretary of the Anti-Divorce League walked silently behind the band. The curtains were discreetly drawn in all the houses. The shops and business
premises were shuttered and barred.

The requiem twisted its way through the tiny streets and alleyways of the town, fanning out across the snowcapped fields of the hinterland. The town became an empty shell as they drifted in
silence towards the cemetery. The Secretary of the Anti-Divorce League stood by the open grave and struggled with the wind and a flapping piece of notepaper. His words opened out solemnly above the
supplicant, despondent heads of the mourners. The country, he said, was under attack from forces that were all the more formidable because they were in many cases, unseen. Great changes had taken
place in Carn and in many other small towns throughout the country, almost without us realising it. Once upon a time, in communities such as this one, there was such a thing as the common good. The
personal interests of the individual were secondary in the past to what was perceived to be the good of the community as a whole. But now, all that has changed. People are only interested in what
society has to offer them. They are not concerned with what they might be able to do for their neighbour, what they might be able to offer the community. We have become a selfish, irresponsible,
materialistic society. We are no longer a caring people. The decay has already set in in many areas of life in this country. Already we are seeing the signs of internal collapse that have so
visibly affected other countries—broken homes, crime, greed. But there are people in this country, he went on, who had pledged themselves to the continuation of the values our society once
held dear. People who believe that these values are worth fighting for, no matter how unfashionable it may seem. Pat Lacey, my dear friends, was such a man. He was not a man who subscribed to the
notion of the
ME
society. He was a man whose selflessness and dedication knew no bounds. He always had time for everyone. He gave his time unthinkingly to many of the
organisations in this town, in particular to the football club, Carn Rovers, which he built up almost single-handedly from nothing. He was a man I myself met on many occasions in connection with
our work and I never failed to be deeply impressed by his honesty and sincerity. What a pity his life had to be so tragically cut short by a murderer’s bullet. But Pat Lacey would not be the
sort of man to bow down before these callous, self-appointed, so-called patriots. He would say to us—let us stand up to them—let us decide what kind of a just society we want—one
that does not lust after power and material possessions, that cherishes its children and the family unit above all else—this is the kind of society he wanted . . . and the kind of society,
dear friends, that he died for.

The speaker crossed himself and bowed his head. Una Lacey broke down and had to be carried from the graveside. “That bitch’s husband killed my father,” she screamed helplessly.
Sadie stood by the cemetery gate and clutched her daughter’s hand tightly to prevent her dropping in a faint. Then the priest began to speak. His voice drifted on the wind down into the
streets of the town where Pat Lacey had spent his entire life. A stray dog nosed in the tumbled bins behind the Railway Hotel. The windows of the Turnpike Inn had been blacked out and above the
door a sign read
CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
.

The jeweller’s clock stood suspended at three. The broken pump skitted its umbrella of water across the cracked paving slabs. The priest’s words seemed to carry for miles. “I
remember the first trophy that Carn Rovers brought home. We lit a fire in the square. There were children dancing. Musicians from the town played jigs and reels. The silver band here played for us
all in the square. The captain made his speech. It was Pat Lacey’s big night. The first time Carn Rovers had brought a trophy home in thirty years. And there were many nights like that
afterwards. There were many nights like that afterwards for one reason and one reason only—the hard work and dedication of Patrick Lacey. There are not many men like him. There have not been
many in the past and there will not be many in the future. It was because of him, and men like him, that this town became great. It was because of him that Carn became the queen of the county. And
perhaps it will, if his memory is to mean anything to us, one day become great once more.”

The priest lowered his head and paused for a moment in silence. Then he said, “May he rest in peace.”

The rosary began and the deadening chant filled the cemetery. As Josie Keenan’s coffin was lowered into the clay, a woman looked up from her prayerbook and whispered, “Do you see
that man over there? That’s Vincent Culligan. He’s a big building contractor in England now.”

The tall grey-haired man in the tweed suit stared ahead of him, expressionless and oblivious of her comments. James Cooney stood by the cemetery gate with his BMW parked at a discreet distance
where it would neither appear ostentatious nor go unnoticed by the mourners. Beside him the politican shifted from foot to foot and rubbed his gloved hands together. A handful of earth tumbled on
both coffins and the Pride of Carn Marching Band began to move back towards the town where a number of the old and infirm who had been unable to make the journey to the cemetery stood white-faced
on crutches and geriatric walkers in the shadows of hallways and upstairs windows. The requiem seemed to cling to the town for days after, its echoes hanging vaguely in the air, like a thin fog
that would not dissipate.

Maisie Lynch led a torchlit procession through the streets at midnight, reading out her Poem for Peace in the square. It was attended by hundreds of people from the neighbouring counties and
widely reported in the national newspapers.

There were bitter scenes at the court where Benny Dolan was sentenced to life imprisonment. Sadie was attacked by a number of women when she appeared in the doorway. Her hair
was pulled and her face scratched. She was showered with spittle as a policeman helped her into a patrol car. When the workers saw Benny’s photograph in the morning newspaper, they carefully
inspected every detail of his face and said to each other, “Look at those eyes. They’re the eyes of a killer. I never liked him. There was always something odd about him.”

He was never spoken of again while the factory remained open.

In the months that followed, when the people of the town encountered Sadie in the street, waiting with her children for the coach that would take them to the maximum security prison where she
would spend an hour with her husband under the cold eye of the warder, they either hurried brusquely past her or made a reluctant, half-heard remark about the weather or the lengthening of the
evenings.

In Abbeyville Gardens she rarely received any visitors and any conversations she had through chance, unavoidable meetings with neighbours were confined to stiff, good-mannered exchanges at which
their time in the large, anonymous housing estate had made them adept. The construction of a new conservatory or the recent repeat of an American miniseries were consistent safeguards against tense
silences that might result from chance meetings with awkward neighbours such as Sadie Dolan. For the people in Abbeyville Gardens, having only come to Carn in recent years and with their roots in
other places, the deaths of Pat Lacey and Josie Keenan affected their lives in the same way as would reports on the evening television news of natural disasters and horrific train crashes in
distant, irrelevant countries. When their names were mentioned, only the merest flicker of recognition passed across their faces.

Sadie to them was nothing more or less than anyone else. She did not invade their privacy and they did not invade hers. She was the woman with the two children in number thirty-four.

Sadie gave all her time to her children now and whenever the black moods came down around her, she fought them back bitterly, no matter what it took out of her. She did it for Benny and for
them. She wrote weekly to her husband to keep up her strength.

Father Kelly called a number of times and told her to put her trust in God. He told her that He never closed a door but He opened a window. Sadie smiled distantly and stared out the window at
the neat rows of saplings and the array of pedal cars and toys scattered in the driveways as the priest repeated, “The Good Lord works in mysterious ways.”

James Cooney sold his house and moved to Spain. A German with two Doberman Pinscher guard dogs was occasionally to be seen in the grounds of his mansion. The factory went to
rack and ruin, excrement and empty beer bottles scattered about the once-thriving killing floor. Every bulb on the turret neon sign had been broken. The Sapphire Ballroom lay derelict and unsold,
the paint peeling from the precious stone which hung precariously above the doorway where crudely-painted letters had been scrawled in the night:
Judas Cooney
—
Where are you
now?

The car traffic across the border ceased completely. Alec Hamilton sold up and moved away. In Pete’s Pizza Parlour, Sergio folded napkins blankly, the jukebox unlit in the corner. The
Turnpike Inn was purchased by two local brothers who turned it into a delicatessen, then a hairdresser’s, then a turf accountants, then closed it down altogether. A minibus now left twice a
week for the ferry terminals and airports of the major cities, picking up en route the latest batch of school leavers who waited with their sports bags and suitcases in every town along the
way.

In the Railway Hotel, the few remaining youths and unemployed men played darts and scratched lottery tickets morosely. On the video screen above them, the crazed adolescent in the asbestos suit
dragged the body of a screaming young girl into a freezer as the soundtrack blared. An old man sat transfixed beneath the screen, his terrified, perplexed eyes locked helplessly into every movement
of the deranged youth. Two men in the corner argued bitterly about the actual date of the closure of the railway.

“It was 1959,” said Francie Mohan without looking away from the freezer where the adolescent was sharpening up a butcher’s knife to desembowel the girl.

“What did I tell you?” said the man. “1959. Those were the days—what do you say Francie? The days before they closed the railway.”

“Aye,” replied Francie, “there was no stopping us then.”

“The night they closed the railway—that was the night the clock stopped in the town of Carn. Oh I could tell you stories about this town . . .” The man stared into the well of
his drink and faded off into a dreamy haze.

The girl on the screen screamed as a jet of blood splashed across the visor of the madman’s asbestos suit. He raised the butcher’s knife and brought it down in a sweeping arc with a
maniacal laugh.