The Death of an Irish Tinker (16 page)

ONEY MAUGHAM IMMEDIATELY took to life in a Traveler camp. After the distant, impersonal, up-market neighborhoods of Reigate and Ballsbridge, where she had passed most of her girlhood years, the warmth of the greeting that her grandparents and she received at the Traveler encampment in Cork seemed magical.

Didn’t everyone revere her father, Mickalou? Wasn’t his music playing on one of the many boom boxes that were constantly blaring there even as her grandparents and she got out of the car? It was as if they were expected.

Immediately they were surrounded by interested, adoring people. “Yehr da, now,” said one woman to Oney, “he was brilliant, he was. The best of our people, going away.”

“And don’t she look the spit and image of him?” said
the
McDonagh, the patriarch of the large Traveling family that had always been close to the Maughams and now proved it.

Her grandfather was given the use of a large, new caravan that had every amenity—toilet, shower, kitchen with microwave, the lot—“For however long you stay, Ned. And please God, may there be no end.”

Tea was laid on, and the entire experience was like a revelation to Oney. She could not imagine any one of their neighbors in Ireland or England ever doing or saying such things. In those places her mother and she had remained at best curiosities, at worst probable Tinkers.

“I can tell from her blather she’s a Knacker,” Oney had once heard the Irish mother of a classmate say about Biddy while they were living in Surrey. “Worse still is her two-color eyes what come from incest.” Oney had not told Biddy about that; for some reason she couldn’t.

Instead she had carried the shame until now, when she decided that since they
were
Knackers, she would accept and be proud of it. At least here she belonged—in a caravan at the side of a road with her grandmother snoring in the bunk next to her. Feeling a contentment that she had never known, Oney slept soundly the night long, even though she knew the door was unlocked.

“It’s a tradition,” her grandmother had said. “Travelers never lock their doors against other Travelers. And we don’t knock coming into another house. We’ve nothing to hide or fear from ourselves,” which also seemed like a marvelous practice to Oney.

In the morning even the pervasive litter of old cars, scrap metal, discarded toys, and just plain rubbish seemed to her like a necessary component of the community. And the continual noise: shouts, curses, music, dogs barking, people arriving and departing, and the whoosh of cars speeding down the motorway.

And over a “nice fry cooked out in the open so ye can taste the woodsmoke,” Maggie went on. “Travelin’ people is the best people. The old ones, the ones like McDonagh here, the ones that was reared up in the country and not nigh some city slum. They’re the real Irish people. Good-hearted, open-handed, and they remember always who is who and all the closeness of the past.

“Sure, we were poor.
Are
poor. What’s this”—Maggie cast her hand at the Mercedes, which was now covered with
a tarp to conceal it—“but something that will soon be that?” Her hand moved to a pile of scrap not fifteen feet from the bumper of the expensive automobile.

“It’s got no life. Not what you or Biddy have, or your handsome, brilliant father had which is still alive. List’.” Maggie held a gnarled old hand to her ear, and they could hear a Mickalou tape playing deep within the camp. Maggie was wearing a red and white bandanna around her head that made the thick gold bands in her ears look like hoops.

“That’s joy, music is. And spirit and divilment. Both your parents had loads o’ that. And you too, which is nothin’ to be ashamed of. Not at all. No. Just be careful when you let it out—for yourself and for me, since I love you.”

Which was when five girls, all around Oney’s age, approached the caravan. “How yiz?”

“How’s yehrselves?” said Maggie, tilting her head back to assess them, dressed as they were in various conditions of outrageous.

The one who had spoken was a probable blonde with a green Mohawk haircut and rhinestone acne up the side of one nostril. A black spandex-like bandolier had flattened her breasts against her chest in a way that looked painful. Otherwise she was wearing a dungaree miniskirt and hobnail boots.

Most of the others had visible tattoos on their hands and arms, and many had the same one on their ankles—of a red spider, fangs showing, in the center of a pink and blue web.

Another one had what looked like a silver bone through her nose.

“We’re wonderin’ if yehr young one there would like to come out with us.”

All for it, Oney smiled, put down her plate, and began to stand. She had never met people like this, although she had secretly wanted to. And after all, they were hers now, and she theirs.

“Out where, if ye don’t mind my askin’?”

“We’re goin’ into Youghal to a meetin’ and then shoppin’, and dancin’.”

“Dancin’ where?” Maggie’s hand came out and eased Oney back onto her chair.

“In a pub near Cork City. It’s safe. Loads of kids go there.”

“And this meetin’ now. Who you meetin’, if it’s not too much to ask?”

“NA,” said another one.

“And who’s NA when he’s at home?”

“Narcotics Anonymous,” the Mohawk one said. “We go there every day.”

Maggie’s head went back, and she blinked, remembering. NA and AA and the Catholic Pioneers, who also swore off drink and drugs and were maybe the only reason her Biddy was still alive. All the meetings she had attended, all the support she had received. For Maggie, NA was golden, a miracle, and this girl could not have mentioned a better meeting, harrowing sight that she was.

“Go,” said Maggie, pushing Oney up. “And have fun,” which was what she needed to keep her mind off her mother. “Do you have any money?”

“Will I need any?”

Maggie had second thoughts, considering how naive and protected Oney had always been. Sure, compared with the others, she looked like a babe in the woods with her long, wavy hair, fresh complexion, and thin limbs. Yet she was fully a woman with good breasts and hips.

“You take this, and if you see somethin’ you like, buy it, but don’t tell your grandfather where it come from.”

Maggie gave her an even hundred pounds, thinking she’d see some of the togs the others were wearing, which would help her blend in. And should. Her with a Traveler pedigree better than most.

“Don’t be showin’ how much you have,” she whispered in Oney’s ear as they kissed. “But if ye glam something
you like, buy it for yourself. You should look the way you want.”

Twelve hours later Ruth Bresnahan was still tailing the clutch of Traveler girls who had forayed into Youghal in an ancient and battered Bedford van that was easy to follow. The tailpipe gave off clouds of black, sooty, and foul No. 2 diesel smoke that had been banned by the EU.

It was the least of their illegality. The tags on the car actually belonged to another vehicle that had long since been scrapped, Bresnahan had learned after radioing in the number. Also, the tax stamp was missing. Alone the violation was enough for the vehicle to be seized, had it belonged to somebody else.

But Bresnahan could imagine some
shadog
at a road check simply waving the wreck on, loaded as it was with its freight of Tinker young ones, whose raucous chorus of explanation and/or complaint could make several hours of a guard’s life unbearable. The assumption being, of course, that Travelers were incapable of obeying the law and didn’t know any better.

From the vantage of her “plain brown wrapper”—as the squad’s beige unmarked Toyotas were sometimes called—she had watched the girls visit the basement meeting room of a church where an NA placard had been hung in a window. Outside, a motley collection of mainly young and proletarian-chic people were smoking cigarettes and chatting. There was the odd older person—a dowdy housewife, an aging hippie, or an artist or a dated rocker with his long hair tied back in a ponytail. He had climbed out of a new Jag, and Ruth wondered what
his
story was.

An hour later and the meeting over, Bresnahan followed the girls back out onto the highway. They drove west through Midleton to a mall on the outskirts of Cork City, where they cruised the shops in an intimidating punker clutch, helping Oney Maugham select jeans, tank tops, and a few pieces of necessary jewelry—spiky earrings and a dog
collar to match. But in the way that they established themselves—at doors, at windows—it was plain that they had been given the task of protecting the lass.

After that Oney was conveyed to a hair salon. Bresnahan nearly intervened, thinking that the girl’s rainbow black, wavy tresses would be cropped. Instead she came out with her hair frazzled—tweaked into long, thin, curled spikes as though transformed by electroshock—that were arrayed to make her look much older and dangerous and not a little bit sexy. The earrings and dog collar only added to the impression. And given the tank top that all but exposed her shapely breasts and thin waist, Oney Maugham was without a doubt the most attractive one among them.

A pub—of all places, for recovering addicts—came next. But the large car park out back was filled with cars, and hearing music, Ruth assumed that the young Traveler women militant were there for dancing. Deciding to change into appropriate vestments that would make her appear a bit different and like part of the crowd herself, Ruth moved to the back seat. After all, she was only thirty and young-looking, if she did say so herself, and she would have a better view of Oney Maugham from the bar.

It was while she was scrunched down in the back seat of the Toyota, changing, that the windows were raked by headlamps and a large American-type car pulled in beside her.

Lowering herself deeper into the shadow of the front seats, Ruth realized that she had even failed to lock the doors, feeling—as she often did—that nothing could happen to her since after all, she was a guard. And there she was in only a bra and knickers.

What to do? Nothing, at least for the moment. She’d wait for them to go into the pub or drive away.

Men—she could tell from the voices as the doors opened—stepped out, speaking in the always recognizable pancake accent of Dubliners. Now lying on the floor of the small car, Bresnahan tried to make herself as tiny as she could.

“Remember you, you two-eyed junkie. Yeh fook dis oop, yeh’re dead. Now, what’s her name?”

“Get out of my face, will yeh? I know what I have to do.” The second voice was different, at once country but somewhat refined. But it also sounded tired or resigned or disconsolate in some way. “I’ll do what you want.”

“I asked yeh, what’s her fookin’ name?”

“Ah, fuck off! And get your hands off me!”

Bresnahan heard a sharp crack, like from a slap, and her car rocked as somebody fell against it. And another crack.

“It’s Oney, for Chris’ sake. Oney!”

“Don’t,” a third voice said. “You’ll ruin his looks, and where will we be?”

“I don’t care. Once a junkie fook, always a junkie fook. He browns me off.”

“Well, you leave him to me now. Get back in the car. You’ll want a bit of a rest if we’re to do the job at the camp and get back to Dublin by morning.”

“Knacker scut,” the second man muttered, evidently climbing back into the car. A door clumped shut.

Then in a low, confiding voice the third man, who sounded much older than the other two, said, “You should know this, Sean, since your life depends on it. You’re not doing this for me. No. Who you’re doing it for is bigger than me, much bigger, and if you fail him, you’re dead. You hear me?” There was a pause, then: “I want you to say that you’ve heard me.”

The first man, who was much younger and wearing a white shirt—Bresnahan could see—grunted. All she could see of the other man was a swath of jacket, dress shirt, and stylish tie.

“I realize you don’t feel good about this, nobody does. But we’ve been given orders, and this is who we are, you and me. What we chose, years ago. Maybe it was a wrong decision then, maybe it’s still wrong now, but we’ve no choice but to go through with it. You carry it off no hitches, I’ll take care of you. I promise. That means, out of that
horrid halfway house you’re in and out of the country, if you like. Madeira, the Canaries. You name it.

“Or back to university. You want that, it’s yours. If you want back on the gear even, it’s yours. Your choice. Now, then. Tell me what you have to do.”

The boy sighed. “Get her to come out here with me. Get her into the car.”

“Where we’ll take over. Then what?”

“I walk away, down the road to the next pub. I wait in the bar. When I see you, I come out to the car and take her into the lounge. I order two lemon sodas and sit with her. I make sure she sits upright, doesn’t nod off. If need be, I walk her around. You show up, we leave.”

“Good lad. Remember now, this could make you or break you. I know it’s distasteful, but it’s probably the most important thing you’ve ever done in your life. And like me, you’ve no choice, really, but to do it right. Now, off with you.”

As the boy walked away, Bresnahan got a look at his face, which looked enough like Oney Maugham to be her brother—or Mickalou Maugham’s son—apart from his two-colored eyes. They, of course, were like Oney’s mother. And while somewhat gaunt, the boy—Sean by name—was squarely built with narrow hips and long, thin limbs. And he was handsome in the extreme.

When the man opened the car door to get back in behind the wheel, his passenger said, “At the Traveler camp, when we do them other Knackers, that scut is mine.”

The car door closed.

Reaching between the seats, Ruth Bresnahan slowly pulled her clothes and her purse toward her. The leather bag was heavy, weighted with the 9 mm Glock that she kept in a zippered side pocket. She might still be unclad, but she no longer felt naked.

Oney Maugham could not believe what she was seeing when the boy walked into the bar. It was as if the clock had
been turned back: Her father had been cloned but given her mother’s two-color eyes.

Otherwise the boy looked in size and shape—his face, his hair—like the very same Mickalou Maugham who had peered out at Oney from album covers for all of her sixteen years. Those were the only good images of her father she possessed, all that she remembered of him.