Peeling Oranges (12 page)

‘She wore a veil when she was older. I remember seeing her with her face covered at Whitefriar Street sodality. Beauty doesn’t need age to fade.’ She is wandering off. ‘Beauty is lost when love is lost.’

I try to bring her back. ‘Her husband was in Jacob’s in 1916?’

‘Whose husband?’

‘Maud Gonne’s.’

‘That’s right. Coming home from a wedding he was when he heard the commotion, so he just rolled up his sleeves and joined in. Could you credit that?’

She looks directly at me. ‘And do you know why the men in Jacobs gave themselves up? It was “to save the crowded district of the Liberties from indiscriminate firing by the English”. They were their exact words.’

She coughs. ‘My throat is going dry. Are there oranges?’

‘I’ll peel one for you, Mam.’

She lights a cigarette and holds it in the corner of her mouth like some of the Hollywood starlets of the forties, only removing it to suck the orange, or when she wants to tap the ash into her Spanish shell ashtray.

‘You should try to cut down, Mam.’

‘If I gave them up now, I’d die for the want of them.’

She is wheezing, almost panting now as she speaks, each of her breaths frantically supplanting the one that went before.

‘There’s always a time… (pause, breath)…for doing things.’

‘How do you mean, Mam?’

‘A time,’ she snaps impatiently. ‘Don’t you know? Did they teach you anything in that boarding school? Everyone has a time when their life takes on a meaning.’

She coughs, sucks a section of orange and looks at me. That strange quizzical look of non-recognition once more. Who are
you
sitting opposite me? Where did I get
you
from? They are the questions written on her face. Questions she would never voice.

‘Tomás said it was King George’s visit that did it for him, but I was too young then; mind you, not that I was ever as extreme as Tomás. No, it was five years later for me. To latch on to such a belief is something very strong. It’s a sort of religion, I suppose. But I think it is more instinctive. For me it was like the very first realisation that you had a body, and that there were some parts to it which you had no control over, don’t you know?’

She looks intently at me. ‘You are mature now, Derek, you understand. I can talk to you now.’

‘Yes, I understand, Mam,’ I say quickly. I am excited for her to continue. I never found my mother so revelatory. I understand her now. I had been too young previously. That’s what it was. She was afraid I wouldn’t be able to take the truth.

‘I was cleaning in Tomás’ room. I found the revolver in the hollow book. It was so heavy I had to lift it with my two hands. It was real shiny, covered in a
chamois
. For the first time I understood the power a gun confers on the hand that holds it. What good was Muddy’s pacifism? I asked myself. What country ever got its freedom without violence?’

Her wheezing gets louder.

‘Easy, Mam,’ I say. ‘Take your time. Take another piece of orange.’

She sucks the orange. ‘I’m all right now,’ she says. ‘But the thought that this power lurked secretly in our little shop. It opened up so many possibilities in my mind, the feeling that with this... this wonderful piece of technology you could get what you wanted in life, don’t you know? Words just seemed…’ she thinks for a moment… ‘impotent.’

She looks across at me as if to weigh the impact of what she is saying. ‘You know what that means?’

‘Yes, Mam.’

‘It means weak. It means not being able to produce anything. It means worthless. You know what I’m saying?’

‘I know, Mam.’ I feel a tension, an uncomfortable feeling in the presence of my own mother.

‘But the gun can have other… ramifications.’

‘How do you mean, Mam?’

She looks at me, up and down, and across, and through me.

‘You poor boy,’ she says, ‘you poor, poor boy,’ and she opens her arms as if she is going to embrace me and then, as if catching herself on, closes them again and says, ‘Ah, but I was young then. Young and innocent.’

‘So you were in favour of physical force?’ I hear my voice saying, but is it me, or is it some part, some conditioned part of me giving utterance when really what I want to say is,
Why don’t you touch me, Mam? Have I got some disease? Is that what it was all along, in all the years? Is that why? Please say that’s why. Please say there is some reason, some logical explanation.

‘In the beginning, before I realised the horror of it all,’ she says.

‘You mentioned
Cumann na mBan.’

‘Hand me the matches.’

I hand the matches to her.

‘Yes, when I was a child,’ she says, lighting another cigarette, ‘I was very impressionable, whether it came from the books or the speech makers, I golloped up everything. I really didn’t know what I was doing. Tomás and Gearóid were so sure in their own heads. I wanted to help in some way. We had witnessed what the Tans had done, coming in the middle of the night, pulling women out of their beds in their nightdresses, cutting their hair to shreds, setting fire to their homes. Muddy didn’t believe in violence of course, so there was a great excitement in the secrecy of what we were doing. And Gearóid, he was so dedicated, but so serious. We used to…’

She starts to cough.

‘You used to what?’ I say impatiently.

‘We used to try to lighten him up a bit at the
céilithe
run by the
Conradh.
Tomás would be leapin’ about the place, acting the maggot with a wide-hipped girl called Úna, doing the
Walls of Limerick,
and I myself had no shortage of requests to dance. Gearóid would put a face on him anytime I was with someone else, but no amount of cajoling would get him to move himself. He just stood there, sullen, out of the light, always watching. And going home he used to recite ‘A is the army that covers the ground’. Things like that. You know that’s the last thing I remember him saying in English.’

I look at my mother. Despite her age and ailments, I can see a young woman trying to escape, trying to jump out through the straitjacket of wrinkles and veins and white hair.

‘He was the one in the photo in Muddy’s?’ I say.

‘What?’

‘The one hiding his face?’

‘No, no, no. That was some Liberties’ boy long forgotten. What was I saying?’

‘What you used to do.’

‘What did I do?’ She seems to be awakening from a dream. ‘I’ll have to run back to catch the thought where I left it.’

‘He came to you in Rathfarnham,’ I say, persisting.

‘Who?’

‘Gearóid.’

My mother suddenly pales. ‘Who told you that? Was someone talking to you?’

‘No, Mam. I read it in a letter you…’

‘You’re reading my letters?’

‘Sorry. I …’

‘That’s what they taught you in boarding school,’ she says angrily. ‘How to invade someone’s privacy.’

‘No, Mam.’

She extinguishes the cigarette, twisting it around in the shell.

‘What did I do? Is that what you asked me?’ She sighs. ‘I sold lilies, remember I told you?’

***

Cumann na mBan
was founded in Wynns hotel. My mother mentioned the hotel many times. She mentioned having tea there with Tomás and Gearóid, and then just with Gearóid, when Tomás was killed.

Tomás and Gearóid went to James Street school together. They excelled at hurling and Gaelic football. Together they joined
Óglaigh na hÉireann,
the name under which the IRA was launched in nineteen-nineteen. They trained in the Wicklow mountains. Mam or Muddy would have cocoa ready for them when they came home from training on snowy winter evenings.

‘They’ll get their end,’ that’s what Muddy used to say. Tomás used to take out the accordion. He played by ear, a natural gift. It used to draw the neighbours into the shop. Those whom the gods love you know…’

Gearóid gave my mother white heather. I read this in their letters to each other which they wrote of course in Irish.

‘You picked it specially for me’ she said.

‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘I just found it stuck to my boot. Maybe it will bring you luck.’

***

On the Sunday morning of the twenty first of November 1920, both men went to see the Dublin football team play Tipperary in Croke Park. Muddy made them sandwiches and gave them chocolate from the shop. My mother made them a flask of tea to keep the cold at bay.

Twelve British intelligence agents had been sent to murder Collins. That morning the Big Fellow had the twelve executed.

That afternoon the Tans, in retaliation, opened fire on the crowds in Croke Park. Tomás was shot dead. Gearóid escaped.

Gearóid wouldn’t talk about it except to say that he was pouring tea, and the flask was hit first, and when he saw the shards flying, he knew it meant a second chance.

My mother said that Muddy was stoical one minute – she was very stoical in the presence of Collins – and despairing at other times. At night she wailed like the banshee. Neighbours rallied round her.

Muddy wept not only for her son, but also for her husband, killed four years earlier. My grandfather – a follower of Jim Larkin – had been the treasurer of the plumbers’ trade union. In 1916 the plumbers went on strike, and during Easter week my granddad set out to pay the men sustenance money. Muddy had asked him to stay at home because of the insurrection. But he felt duty-bound, as some of the men’s families were economically destitute.

Snipers were very active in Camden Street. Casualties were heavy.

***

‘You remember Camden Street, Mam?’ I say.

She is sitting breathing calmly, looking out the window at the garden, at the fading daffodils and the cathedral-like spires of the yew tree, perhaps inducing in her a longing for the Liberties.

‘Camden Street?’

‘Yes.’

‘The shopping was always good there. Plenty of small shops with personal service, not like these big supermarkets springing up all over the place now. I can never find anything I want in them; everyone’s too busy to help me.’ She ponders. ‘You said Camden Street?’

‘Yes.’

‘I remember the blood flowing into it from Camden Row.’

‘Blood?’

‘From the slaughterhouse. The screams of the animals. An animal can sense death, did you know that?’

‘No, Mam.’

‘It can have a foreboding.’

‘I mean Camden Street in 1916, Mam.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Granddad, Mam.’

‘Granddad?’

‘Your father. He went out in 1916 to pay the men, remember?’

‘Wait now,’ she says starting, ‘I remember. I do remember that as clear as if it were yesterday. I was worried about Daddy. I was only twelve, but I stole out of the flat, unknown to Muddy. I tried to follow him. I would’ve followed Daddy anywhere, he was such a selfless man, always helping others. I followed him but I lost him in the darkening streets. I saw two volunteers who had been captured and placed kneeling in the middle of the street, and then they were shot in cold blood by an English officer. There was not a cat or a dog left alive. An officer of the Volunteers had his brains blown into the street. I don’t know should I be telling you this. I can tell you now, can’t I?’

‘Of course, Mam.’

‘I thought it wasn’t right that a man should be parted from himself like that. I don’t know where I found the courage or bravado at twelve. I suppose at that age you believe bullets can’t strike you. Anyway, I ran into the street and scooped the officer’s brains back into his cap.’

‘You did that for a stranger?’

‘With my bare hands. You don’t mind me telling you?’

‘No, it’s just…’

‘I remember it had a funny feel to it like holding a bird with the life throbbing in your hands. Let him be buried whole, I said to myself. I suppose I believed you had to be complete to come back in the next life, or something like that.’

She pauses and looks, but it is not at me she is looking, or the wall or the window or the door. She’s looking at some faraway thought floating in a wide expanse, and she’s trying to lasso it with her mind, to moor it in.

‘And remember when I said there is a time when life takes on a meaning?’

‘I do, Mam,’ I say, thinking of the irony of her questioning
my
memory.

‘Well then,’ she says, ‘that’s when it happened for me.’

It was thought that it was a revolutionary’s bullet that struck my grandfather down – a ricochet. But my mother said that Muddy always insisted that he was felled, like McDonagh and Connolly, by the forces of the Crown. Such names were selected not by Muddy but by her daughter. She had used these names before, deliberately avoiding the name of Pearse. She never mentioned Pearse since the day I came home from school and tried to recite his poem,
The Mother,
to her. I had just learned it off by heart. I felt proud. I wanted her to hear me, to hear my voice, to praise my memory, just as much as I wanted her to hear the poem for its own sake. I got beyond the title and part of the fist line: ‘I do not grudge them: Lord...’ when she dismissed me and the poem for being too sentimental. She would hear no more of it.