The Star of the Sea (8 page)

The night before last he had glanced towards the mainsail summit and seen his dead father staring down from the crows’ nest. Later on the forecastle, a small fierce bird, an eagle-beaked assassin with bright blue wings, when there couldn’t be a landing bird so far out to sea. And yesterday evening, close to dusk, through the cast-iron gates that fenced off the First-Class passengers, Mulvey had seen another ghost. The dark-eyed figure of a girl he had once wronged, walking hand in hand with a weeping child.

Looking at the vision, Mulvey had realised something strange. Had a banquet been set out on golden dishes before him at that moment, he would not have been able to eat a single morsel. Rather he would have heaved with disgust.

He would have to be careful now. This was how hunger worked its spell. It wasn’t when you felt hungry that you were in the greatest danger. It was when you stopped. That was when you died.

Mary’s Violet Eyes Make John Sit Up
.

It had started on the second morning out of Cobh. Just before dawn Mulvey had been standing near the upperdeck ladders, gazing up at the dying stars. He was thinking about a Scotsman he had known in his childhood, an engineer called Nimmo who worked for the government. Nimmo had been sent to Connemara back in ’22 when crop failure struck the western seaboard. Mulvey and his brother
were among the local boys who were still healthy enough to be given relief work, hefting rubble for the new road from Clifden to Galway. The Scotsman had been an unselfish overseer, spending time with the boys, sharing in the hauling and breaking, sometimes explaining aspects of science or engineering. He had amused them by explaining in terms of Newton’s Second Law why a river might never be made to flow uphill. They didn’t actually need that fact explained but to watch him explaining it was better than working. ‘And thou shalt not attempt to divide by zero. That, my men, is the eleventh commandment.’ He had taught Pius Mulvey a nonsense phrase by which to remember the positions of the planets in relation to the sun: Mary’s Violet Eyes Make John Sit Up.

Mulvey had been running the sentence over in his mind as he stared up at the brightening eastern sky. The words gave him comfort. He liked their rhythm. When suddenly he thought he had seen a whale. Off the starboard bow, perhaps a mile and a half in the distance – a hulking, blue-grey finback bull, such as he had once seen in a bestiary in a London bookshop window. The tail had appeared first, slapping the waves. A moment had passed. Mulvey was astonished. Then its obscene bulk had slid up from head to fin: impossibly long, impossibly black, a gush of frothing water spilling from its jaws – so sleek and vast as to be unnatural; something horrible and awesome from the depths of a nightmare.

The plunge was like a mountain collapsing into the sea.

Unable to move, he had stood still and watched, appalled at the immensity of what he had seen. Uncertain, in fact, that he
had
seen it. For nobody else had seen anything at all. None of the passengers. None of the crew. If they had, they said not a syllable about it. And surely they would have. They couldn’t have remained silent. The creature was half the length of the ship.

He had kept watch for an hour – maybe more – wondering if finally he was losing his mind. He had seen it happen to the starving before. Had seen it happen to his poor, mad brother. While he watched the towering waves came a memory of the last night he would ever spend in Connemara. He could not ignore it. It broke against his mind, like the guilt of an old man for the crimes of his youth.

How he had beseeched, but they wouldn’t be persuaded. ‘We’ll have men on the quay in New York. We’ll have men on the ship.
If that English scum ever walks down that gangplank, you’re a deadman and buried. Don’t think we’re lying. And you’ll get the traitor’s death you deserve, you devil’s bastard. You’ll watch your own heart getting cut out and burnt.’

Stone-hard brothers with bog-oak fists. He had pleaded to be spared this patriotic task. Whoever had denounced him must have made a mistake. He wasn’t a murderer. He had never killed anyone. That, said their captain, was a matter of opinion.

‘I’m leaving my land. Is that not enough?’

It’s well for you that has land to leave
.

‘The man has children,’ Mulvey said.

What about us? Do we not have children?

‘Anything else. But I’ll not do this.’

That was when the beating had started again.

He remembered their eyes; so frightened and convinced. The black-stained sackcloth of the hooded masks they wore. The slashed-out holes where their lips appeared. They were wielding the tools of their livelihood, but as weapons – scythes, hoes, loys, billhooks. Now they had no livelihood left. Centuries stolen in one stunning moment. Their fathers’ labours; their sons’ inheritances. At the stroke of a pen, they were gone.

Black soil. Green fields. The green of the banner draped across the table, splattered with ribbons of Mulvey’s blood. The glint of the weapon they had made him take, the fisherman’s knife pressed to his quaking chest while they raged at him about freedom and land and thievery. The words
SHEFFIELD STEEL
etched into the blade. He could feel it now, in the pocket of his greatcoat, nestling next to his lacerated thigh. He remembered the things they said they would do with that knife if he didn’t stop whingeing about murder being too heavy a burden to put on him. When they held him down and started to cut him, Mulvey had screamed to be allowed to kill.

A man he had never met, let alone spoken to. A landlord and an Englishman; therefore an enemy of the people. A landlord without land; an Englishman born in Ireland – but there was little enough point in seeking definitions. For his class, his genealogy, the crimes of his fathers, for the pedigree bloodline into which he had been born. For the church he attended and the prayers he uttered. As
much for his name as anything else – a single word he’d had no part in choosing.

Merridith.

That trinity of syllables had sentenced their bearer to be slaughtered, had marked him down as one of the culpable. The family tree had grown into his gallows. It counted for nothing that he might have done nothing; that was to bring in gratuitous complications. The men beating Mulvey had done nothing either, but that had not spared them when the reckoning came. Their land was gone. They were men without a purpose. Hungry and beaten; finally conquered.

Once they had been harrowers; now they were the harrowed. They still smelt of their land as they smashed him half stupid. Their canvas gloves, their farmer’s boots, still caked with clumps of dead, black soil. Fingers which had tended and planted and coaxed now choking, wrenching, tearing at his face. They had let him escape and then caught him again – as though to say
there will be no escape
. One had a mongrel, another a hunter. The yaps, the howls were the worst things to remember: the hot, wet breaths of the starving hounds, the scrape of their claws and the urgings of the men. A clod of gravelled earth was snatched from a ditch and forced into his choking mouth until he gagged. Stones rained on his body and still the beating did not stop. He felt something of what they themselves must have felt, in every kick, in every gouge and spit and punch. Even through the blood trickling into his eyes, they looked so diminished, so completely afraid. They had been made to look small, and they were, and they knew it. What had happened to his attackers was a kind of rape. ‘You’ll do this, Mulvey, or you’ll never see daylight again. And you’ll be watched on that ship to make sure you do.’ Through broken teeth, he had agreed. He would do it.

The reasons why things are the way they are could be ferociously complicated, Mulvey knew; but in this corner of the empire they worked themselves out into cadences of mathematical inevitability. A man named X would have to die. And a man named Y would have to kill him. You could call it the dictum of the Free Market of murder: the cravings and exigencies of supply and demand. Easily the equation could have set itself the other way around, and for all Mulvey knew, one day it might.

But this time it hadn’t.

This time it wouldn’t.

Christ had spilled his blood to redeem the debts of the guilty, all the inheritors of original sin. No crippled Christ was Pius Mulvey. No innocent martyr awaiting the nails.

Let X equal Merridith and Y equal Mulvey. Impossible to fight the power of mathematical law. A river could never be made to flow uphill.

He felt for the knife. Ice-hard in his pocket.

All night long he would wait for his chance. Perception was clearer in the absence of daylight, in the starlit cold of the decks after dark. People’s habits and movements. Their places for strolling. Shadowy corners. How locks worked. Which doors were chained. Which windows might be left open. Whispered exchanges you were not supposed to hear: like the one between Lady Merridith and the handsome American the other night.

How long more must we keep up this childish deception?

For God’s sake – he’s my husband
.

A man who speaks to you as though you were a servant?

Please stop, Grantley
.

I don’t remember you saying that when you were in my bed
.

What happened was a mistake and mustn’t happen again
.

You know it will
.

I know it can’t
.

Mulvey shuffled on, drawing up his damp collar, clasping his sodden greatcoat around his quaking frame. The moon had turned scarlet; the clouds fiery gold. Small lights were being lit in the windows of the First-Class cabins.

Some way behind the
Star
he saw the sails of a ship that had been following steadily for several days. The sight seemed an intimation of approaching violence, as though Vengeance was riding the second vessel. The knowledge he was being observed hung heavily around him, like a hex bestowed by a ‘spoiled’ priest. That was a curse from which no flight was possible: the anathema of a man who had once known holiness. He wondered which of the passengers was watching him even as he walked. The girls from Fermanagh, who never laughed. Maybe one of the Leenaun brothers. Even the American – a sympathiser perhaps? Plenty of Americans were
sympathisers now. Certainly he was never done skulking around steerage and scribbling like a constable in his little snitch’s notebook. And then there was the possibility that it was only a bluff; that nobody was watching; that Pius Mulvey was alone. But he wasn’t sure. You could never be sure.

A grunted snivel of languor made him turn and stare. Near him, by the half-open door of the galley, a shabby black bitch was nuzzling its vomit. Inside the cookhouse a neat little Chinaman was renting through the carcass of a pig with a hacksaw. Mulvey watched for a time, his tongue soaked with longing. Hunger roared up in him like a hopeless lust.

He walked the ship as though following a chart. Up. Down. Across. Back. Stem. Port. Stern. Starboard.

The churning of the waves. The ropes clanking on the masts. The blind of salt water. The wind ripping at the sails.

And the women talking. Always talking.

The younger ones especially.

I cant let you know how we are suffring unless you were in Starvation and want without freind or fellow to give you a Shilling But on my too bended Neese fresh and fasting I pray to god that you Nor one of yers may [neither] know Nor ever Suffer what we are Suffering At the present

Letter from Irish woman to her son in Rhode Island

T
HE
FIFTH
DAY OF THE
V
OYAGE:
IN WHICH THE
C
APTAIN MAKES NOTE
OF A
DISTURBING EVENT
(WHICH SHALL
HAVE THE MOST SEVERE
R
EPERCUSSIONS
).