Jig (7 page)

‘Are all Americans that loud?' she asked.

‘I'm an average screamer,' he told her.

Nurse Canavan reached for a cigarette and lit it, and her face was briefly illuminated by the flare of her Bic. She had a wonderfully straight Irish jaw, a fine generous mouth, and high cheekbones which gave her face a certain delicate strength.

‘So tell me,' she said. ‘You're at Trinity, did you say?'

‘Trinity,' Cairney answered.

‘And you're one of them wealthy Americans that comes over here to study at Daddy's expense, is that it?'

Cairney shook his head. ‘Daddy's money can't buy happiness. Besides, he doesn't support me. I have a small income from teaching undergraduate classes at Trinity. He's never really approved of my studies. He doesn't see the point to them.'

‘I must say he has a case, Patrick Cairney. It seems to me a young man like yourself shouldn't be poking around so much in the past.'

‘And where should I be poking?'

‘You know something? You're disgusting.' She laughed again. She had one of those rich sincere laughs that change the temperature of rooms, like fine resonant music.

‘Seriously now,' she said. ‘Is archaeology a field for a young man?'

‘We study the past to understand the future,' Cairney intoned solemnly.

‘You,' and she nudged him with an elbow. ‘Are you never serious?'

‘I have my moments.'

Rhiannon crushed out her cigarette and lay back. ‘Does it really matter how much a loaf of bread cost in ancient Egypt?'

‘I like to think it helps us understand inflation.'

Cairney peered at the cinder of light that lay against the window, thrown on the glass by a faraway streetlamp. He felt both comfortable and secure with this lovely girl at his side. She offset something of the lonely edge he frequently experienced – a stranger in a strange country. And yet it wasn't alien at all because there was a sense in which he'd been familiar with it all his life, courtesy of his father, who had instilled in him the wonders of Irish culture and history. Harry Cairney, who for most of the year had been an absentee father in Washington, returned each summer to Roscommon to indoctrinate his son in the melancholic songs and stories that were part of the Irish tradition, tales of defeats and victories, old loves, poems about the Old Lammas Fair in Ballycastle and the headlands of Kerry and the braes of Strasala. When other kids were out in hot sandlots tossing baseballs at their fathers, Patrick Cairney would sit with a fishing pole on the bank of a river and listen to his father recite the last words of the patriot Robert Emmet on the eve of his execution. Even now the young man could remember Emmet's speech.
When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done
. Harry Cairney had been less a father than a kind of history instructor whose view of the past was coloured by the romanticism of the Irish exile. All through his childhood the boy had wished for a father like the one other kids had, those young vigorous men who'd throw a baseball at you or take you one-on-one on a basketball court or get down with you in a scrimmage. But Harry, who was fifty years older than his son, had seemed remote even then, removed from Patrick both by years and memories of a faraway island. As if he felt guilty about his absences, Harry forced himself on his son during the summer, but never quite in the way Patrick Cairney wanted. He was too old and too dignified, too
detached
, to get down in a sandlot and dirty his hands. He was too
sophisticated
to go inside a sporting-goods store and discuss the merits of this or that baseball bat. Consequently, when Patrick thought of his father now he felt a curious combination of admiration and pity, the former because Harry had occupied an exalted position in politics and was highly regarded by everyone – and the latter because the world Cairney had tried to foist on his son was an old man's dead reality and therefore pathetic.

Patrick Cairney got out of bed and went into the small kitchen, where he filled a glass with water. He carried it back to the bedroom and slipped under the sheets beside the girl. Once more through the night came the quick whine of a Garda car.

‘You've gone very quiet all of a sudden,' Rhiannon said.

‘
I am Ireland: I am older than the Old Woman of Beare
,' he recited. ‘
Great my glory: I that bore Cuchulain the valiant
.'

‘
Great my shame
,' the girl replied. ‘
My own children that sold their mother
.' She paused a second. ‘Patrick Pearse. Sure, I've known that since I was no higher than a blade of grass. Where did you learn it?'

‘From my father,' Cairney answered. ‘Didn't I mention he was born right here in Dublin? Above a shop at number 29 Patrick Street, to be exact.'

‘And overseas he went to make his fortune,' Rhiannon said.

Cairney nodded. ‘I don't think he ever really left this country.'

The girl pressed her face into Cairney's shoulder, her damp lips against his skin. Something had changed in the room in the space of a few minutes. Somebody had left the door open, and that old Celtic wraith Melancholy had gate-crashed.

‘The funny thing, as Irish as he still is, he's never been back here to visit,' Cairney said. And he envisaged Harry Cairney as he'd last seen him two years ago, some months before the old man had unexpectedly married Celestine Cunningham of Boston in a private ceremony. Cairney had never met the woman but apparently the old man was overjoyed with the match. He'd written a couple of times to say so. When his letters weren't extolling the virtues of Celestine, they were urging Cairney to visit this place or that, as if the son might vicariously undertake a pilgrimage that the father had always meant to make for himself.
Take a walk through St. Anne's Park near the Dollymount Strand and smell the roses or Don't forget to have a jar in the Stag's Head at Dame Court
. In these letters Cairney could still hear the strident voice of the man who had turned all his short boyhood summers, which should have been treasured times, into diatribes against the sheer perfidy of the English and the atrocities they had committed in Ireland.

Cairney said, ‘He wants to keep a memory of Ireland the way it was, not the way it is now. He romanticises things that were never romantic to begin with.'

‘And I see nothing wrong in such a thing,' Rhiannon said. ‘Why shouldn't old men have their illusions?'

Cairney nodded. Why not indeed? he wondered. Memories preserved in amber were inured to change. Harry Cairney's Ireland was the Dear Green Place, the
Sean-Bhean Bhoch
, the Old Woman of Sorrow. His was an Ireland of martyrs, a place of ghosts. It was the doomed Easter Rising of 1916, when Harry Cairney's heroes – Patrick Pearse and Eamon de Valera and James Connolly – had seized the General Post Office on O'Connell Street and Boland's Mills in the south of Dublin and the English had crushed the insurgency with field guns and a gunboat on the River Liffey, consequently creating a new generation of martyrs.

It was an Ireland where Harry Cairney's heroes were executed by the English. John McBride, Pearse himself, James Connolly (wounded, carried by stretcher to the firing squad), Thomas MacDonagh, names that had echoed like bells through Patrick Cairney's formative years. And all the others – the glamorous Countess Markievicz who had stalked the streets of Dublin with a great plumed hat and a revolver, the beautiful Maude Gonne, who had captivated the heart of Yeats, running firearms into Ireland in defiance of the English, bold Rory O'Connor and his men who had dramatically seized the Four Courts Building in Dublin.

An old man's illusions
…

What did they all come down to now, these clichés of glories lost and won? Patrick Cairney wondered. In what did all this romance and glamour and bravery distil itself?

The answer was simple. Squalor in Ulster, where courage had yielded to indiscriminate acts of terrorism and where, behind the walls of Her Majesty's Maze Prison – formerly Long Kesh Prison or, in convict terminology, The Lazy K – so-called political prisoners, members of the militant Provisional IRA, smeared their excrement on the walls of their cells and women did the same with their menstrual blood.

Patrick Cairney wondered if his father ever thought 60 about that, the way courage had become eroded by sheer human indignity. He doubted the older man ever did:
memories preserved in amber
…

He propped himself up on one elbow. He stroked the side of the girl's face.

‘For a student, Patrick Cairney, you've got a pretty fine physique,' Rhiannon said. ‘What is it you do? Lift weights? Pump iron, as they say? Or is it just those old books you plough through are so heavy they build your muscles up?'

‘I dig,' he answered.

‘Dig? With a shovel?'

He nodded. ‘I dig holes in the ground.'

‘Like a navvy.'

‘That's all I am, Nurse. A navvy with a purpose. When a labourer digs, he isn't looking for anything. But when I dig, I'm searching.'

‘And what have you ever found?'

‘I once found a Coca-Cola bottle circa 1930.'

‘What treasure.'
Traysure
was how she pronounced the word.

‘You don't expect to find such a thing buried in the Egyptian desert,' he said. It was best this way, he thought, best to keep everything at a level of flippancy he could handle. He stared at the darkened window. The silence of the night beyond the window was dense, impenetrable, as if it were the quiet left behind by all the lost causes of the world. He moved his body closer to the girl, holding her. For some reason the last stanza of Patrick Pearse's
Renunciation
went through his mind.

I have turned my face

To this road before me

To the deed that I see

And the death I shall die
.

Cheerful little ditty, he thought.

When he heard the sound of the telephone ringing from the kitchen, he wanted to freeze it out of his brain.

‘It could be important,' the girl said. ‘Why don't you answer it?'

Cairney said nothing. The telephone went on ringing.

‘Good news. You never can tell.'

‘At midnight on a Saturday?' he asked.

After ten, twelve rings, the sound stopped.

Cairney's relief lasted only a moment, because the telephone started up again, and this time it seemed louder than before.

‘Maybe it's a girl friend,' Rhiannon said.

‘I don't have one.'

‘And you expect me to believe that, do you?'

Cairney tossed the bedsheets aside. The room was cold around him. He went inside the kitchen and picked up the telephone and stood there shivering as he listened to the voice on the other end of the line. When he hung up he returned to the bedroom. He sat down on the mattress.

‘Well?' the girl asked.

‘You should never answer a telephone that rings after twelve o'clock.'

Rhiannon crushed out her cigarette. ‘That bad?'

Cairney sighed. He looked slightly flustered. ‘A sickness in the family.'

‘I'm sorry.'

Cairney reached out for the girl's hand, touching it softly. ‘My father,' he said. ‘A mild heart attack.'

5

Dun Laoghaire, Republic of Ireland

It was an old whitewashed house on the outskirts of the resort town of Dun Laoghaire on the south shore of Dublin Bay and in the grey dawn it appeared translucent. The house was surrounded by walls and thick trees. The only means of entrance was through a set of large iron gates, behind which a small gatehouse stood. Usually the gatehouse was occupied by a man who kept a nine-millimetre Brazilian Taurus semi-automatic pistol in his waistband and an FN assault rifle propped against the wall. On this morning, however, the gatehouse was empty and the iron gates were unlocked.

A beige VW came to a halt outside the whitewashed house. As it did so, a man appeared in the doorway. He was called Finn. Although he was in his late fifties, he carried himself in the erect manner of one who has been a soldier in his time. He was imposing – even in the pale dawn one could see the long white hair that fell over his shoulders and the suggestion of strength in his eyes. He came down the steps to greet the driver of the Volkswagen and together both men went inside the house. The driver, the young man known as Jig, noticed the empty gatehouse. It was never occupied whenever he came to this house because Finn required that his visits here take place with the utmost confidentiality. The guard was always sent away at such times. Even within the Association of the Wolfe secrets were stratified. No one person, other than Finn, knew everything that was going on. It was his way of maintaining control.

The sitting room was filled with harps. Finn collected them assiduously. He never played because he was tone deaf, but there were strange little moments when, with all the windows open and the wind coming in off the Irish Sea, he could hear a random music created by nature as the air stirred the strings and made them vibrate. Many of the thirty or so harps were gorgeous gilt creations, inlaid with mother-of-pearl carved with extraordinary care. Sometimes, Finn would reach out and pluck a string, setting up tiny quivering cacophonies as he crossed the room.

Finn sat down. He wore a simple fisherman's sweater and baggy cord pants and sneakers that looked as if they'd been chewed by a neurotic dog. He ran his fingers nervously through his long white hair, and for a moment Jig perceived Finn as a kind of aged hippie, an eccentric guru who'd been to the mountain and come back bearing a message – which, in one sense, was true enough. Today, though, Finn looked gaunt, almost hungry, his huge cheekbones prominent in the lean face.

He pulled a strand of hair from his head and held it up to the light at the window, examining it. ‘My bloody hair is beginning to fall out,' he said. He had an actor's voice. It came booming out of his chest.