After the Lockout Read online

  Darran McCann

  After the Lockout

  Dedication

  For my parents, whose love, support and example made

  possible the writing of this book, and so much else.

  Epigraph

  … I inclined

  To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin

  Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.

  He said: I made the Iliad from such

  A local row. Gods make their own importance.

  – Patrick Kavanagh, from ‘Epic’

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  One

  Two steps before me in the procession, the Countess swings…

  Two

  Stanislaus sorted through the great ring of keys to the…

  Three

  Stanislaus stood in the deserted street and looked up at…

  Four

  By the time the light fails on Thursday, no more…

  Five

  When we get to the house Pius is suspicious. Bat…

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  Two steps before me in the procession, the Countess swings her hips like she knows I’m watching, her arse bobbing like a Halloween apple begging me to take a bite out of it. She and I are the only ones here in the full uniform of the Irish Citizen Army, and we look splendid. Most of our lads make do with a scrawny red sash because they’re too dirt poor to afford a uniform, or because there are men with guns in this town who’d shoot them for wearing one, but we can afford it and we’re safe here, now, in this admiring crowd. Up ahead the Volunteers are singing God Save Ireland said the herooooooes, God Save Ireland said they all, and beside me Bob Sweeney roars out our own version about God doing the same for Big Jim Larkin.

  ‘There must be quarter of a million here,’ says Bob between choruses. They’re saying the back of the funeral was still at O’Connell Bridge while we were at Glasnevin for the burial, three miles away.

  ‘Half a million. Or a million. Always revise numbers up. Be sure the peelers will revise them down,’ I say.

  He rolls his eyes, but who knows how many people are here? There are flags everywhere. Golden harps on emerald green. Green, white and orange tricolours. Eamonn Carr with our Starry Plough. One stalwart fellow with a banner of deepest red in his clenched fist. All the unions are here. The Gaelic Leaguers. Sinn Féin. The women’s leagues. Jesus, the Boy Scouts. The Dublin Fire Brigade: engines and carriages and blue-coated firemen. The bloody Lord Mayor of Dublin. How many of them had even heard of Tom Ashe eighteen months ago? They all want a piece of his martyr’s bones now. Look at them all, snaking piously along the streets behind the mournful musicians and a hundred fucking priests. I spit.

  ‘We’re going up to Monto later, all the unmarried boys. You coming?’ says Bob. Eamonn Carr nods enthusiastically.

  Pair of jackeens, all bluff and bluster. The Countess glances over her shoulder and catches me looking at her arse again. Her so-called husband away in Bohemia or wherever the hell these past five years while she’s slumming it with the socialists. She must be nearly fifty but I definitely still would. The Monto whores have nothing to teach posh girls, honest to God they don’t. ‘What sort of a socialist colludes in the exploitation of working-class women?’ I say.

  ‘All right, misery guts, just trying to be friendly.’

  I see a flash and I’m blind. ‘Mr Lennon, Edgar Andrews, Irish Times. Does your presence here today indicate the Irish Citizen Army and the labour movement generally supports the prisoners’ campaign for political status?’ asks some beanpole. ‘What do you make of reports from Dublin Castle this afternoon that the Executive is to concede the demands of the Sinn Féin prisoners?’ I’m just trying to get my vision back. I see his starched white shirt, boater hat, bright white rose on a tailored lapel. Another fellow, with him, more throughother-looking, shouldering a portable camera. Smoke rises from the light bulb.

  ‘You nearly blinded me with that thing, pal.’

  But he’s all persistence. ‘What do you make of the force-feeding of the hunger strikers, Mr Lennon?’

  ‘You’ve got the wrong man.’

  He retreats looking sceptical, but we’re at Amiens Street, within staggering distance of the pubs the journos live in, the lazy toadies, so they’re coming like locusts now. There’s a fellow talking to the Countess. Indo, probably – not as well turned-out as the fellow from The Times. No white rose. Another fellow confers with the photographer who almost blinded me. That suit was probably decent in its day. A Freeman’s Journal suit, I’d say.

  ‘What’s your name, sir?’ asks another fellow in a soft felt hat with a press card in the ribbon. Looks like he slept last night in a pub or a brothel or the street. Or all three. Herald, no question.

  ‘You can fuck off and tell your boss he can fuck away off too.’

  I don’t suppose he’ll pass the message on to Mr William Martin ‘Murder’ Murphy but it feels good to say it.

  As we pass Amiens Street station I feel a hand squeeze my shoulder and turn to see Dick Mulcahy, the wiry bastard. An hour ago he was in uniform firing the graveside salute but he’s back in his civvies now.

  ‘Come with me, there’s a man wants to talk to you.’

  Just as perfunctory as that. I haven’t seen him in ten months, since they released us from Fron Goch, and not even a hello. I haven’t missed those dead eyes.

  We slip out of the procession, unnoticed in the clamour, and climb the steps into the station, beneath the great clock on the wall showing five bells. Up the platform, Dick exchanges nods with a porter who doesn’t ask for tickets, and another uniformed railwayman turns away and pretends to see nothing as we slip into the first-class carriage. Someone in the distance shouts my name but Dick pushes me aboard the train before I can look around. There’s a man in the hallway with his hand inside his coat. He sees Dick and nods. He opens the door behind him. Leather upholstered seats, silk curtains, deep-pile carpet, mahogany and brass everywhere, every man with his own ashtray. The train starts its click-clacking way. Arthur Fox and Mick Collins and Bat McClatchey look up.

  ‘First Class? Some revolutionaries you are.’

  Mick smiles. ‘We meet wherever we can. There aren’t many safe places to meet these days, Victor.’

  Bat McClatchey I’m not surprised at. We’re from the same county, he and I, and I have to say I like him, mainly for that reason, but politically, well: I expect to be fighting against him in the real revolution to come after this one. Big nationalist, big Catholic and every bit as reactionary as all that sounds. But Arthur Fox I am surprised at. Arthur’s one of us. He’s one of the Gardiner Street silk weavers, one of the men who helped organise the Citizen Army. Arthur saw real action in South Africa and he flattened more peelers during the lockout. Thank God for him during the Rising, telling Mike Mallin to retreat to the College of Surgeons away from the turkey-shoot on the Green. Thank God our army had a few actual soldiers as well as bad poets.

  ‘I saw you got your photograph taken there. That was careless, boy,’ says Mick in that sing-song accent of his.

  ‘That fellow from the press? He said he was a reporter from The Times.’

  ‘It just so happens he was telling the truth, but you didn’t know that. The one with the camera was a G-man, down from the Castle. Fuckers stand out like blood in the snow. You shouldn’t be letting anyone take your picture.’

  I’ve better things to do than stand here being lectured by some lilting sleveen from West Cork. He’s younger than me for Christ’s sake. I always pegged him for an eej
it to be honest. But he cleaned up at cards in Fron Goch. Maybe that was his secret. Six foot plus and you never saw him coming.

  ‘We need you to go on a trip for a few days. But we need to be sure you’re committed,’ he says.

  ‘I’m committed to a Marxian republic, not some Fenian gombeen version of what we have already.’

  ‘Victor, you’ve been letting that mouth of yours run away with you too much lately. You’ve been drawing attention to yourself. It has to stop,’ says Dick Mulcahy.

  ‘Don’t give me orders, Dick, I’m Citizen Army, not a Volunteer.’

  ‘I’m Citizen Army and I say that’s no longer a meaningful distinction,’ says Arthur.

  ‘Arthur, these altar boys want to change the flag and nothing else and you know it.’

  ‘Jesus, but youse socialists are a barrel of laughs,’ says Mick, with all the usual aggressive collegiality, but Dick Mulcahy grabs me roughly.

  ‘Damnit, Lennon, if we want freedom we need a revolution and for revolution we need bloody fierce-minded men who don’t care a scrap for death or bloodshed. A real revolution is not a job for children or for saints or scholars.’ He lets go of me. ‘Like I keep saying, in a revolution any man, woman or child who is not with you is against you. Shoot them and damned to them,’ he says to Mick. ‘This fellow is too soft for our purposes.’

  ‘You’re being too hard on him, Dick,’ says Mick. He’s watching me closely, reading me. I keep looking at Arthur. Yes, it’s him I’m surprised at.

  ‘Connolly himself said there’s no more Irish Volunteers, no more Irish Citizen Army, only the Irish Republican Army. I’m sick of losing. These lads have a plan that might work,’ Arthur says.

  ‘Can you be trusted to follow orders?’ says Mick. He knows Bat has already approached me. He knows I’ve already wriggled out of taking the secret oath of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. They only want political revolution, but I’ve been shouting from the rooftops that without social and economic revolution, it’s a waste of time. I don’t suppose they like it. Besides, virtually every IRB man I know is a fucking prick. But I can’t really say that to these lads.

  The train is slowing, I’m guessing we’re approaching Harcourt Street. Mick peeks out under the bottom of the drawn blind, and seems suddenly impatient. ‘You were at the GPO and Fron Goch, fair enough, but that isn’t enough any more. Go to Phil Shanahan’s and wait, there’ll be someone to meet you there later. Go straight there now, no detours.’

  ‘I’ll need to go home and change out of the uniform.’

  Bat pulls down a suitcase from the overhead compartment. It’s my suitcase. He tells me he stopped by my room earlier and picked up some things. ‘Sorry about your door.’

  ‘You’ll be at Shanahan’s,’ says Dick, wearing a look that makes clear it’s not a question. For now, it’s easier just to agree with them. I nod.

  ‘Good man,’ says Mick.

  Dick Mulcahy shows me out onto the marbled platform of Harcourt Street station. I’m on the plush, loyalist south-side now. Not such a smart place to be wearing this damn uniform. I straighten my sloped green hat, keep an eye out for peelers, and make for the nearest public toilets to get changed. Back in the civvies, I’m stepping out of the jacks when I hear someone shout my name. I turn and I see a face from another lifetime.

  Charlie Quinn.

  He’s older. Skinnier. His hair used to be an auburn thatch but it’s thinner and greyer now. He’s still handsome in a country sort of way. He sports a Kitchener moustache and he’s walking with a hell of a limp. He lurches forward and throws his arms around me. ‘I’ve been in Dublin for days looking for you,’ he says. ‘I knew you’d be at the funeral.’

  He feels slight and bony. Charlie comes from shopkeepers, he should be pink and fat and boyish like his da, but he looks older than a docker of his age, and dockers age the quickest. ‘Was that you shouting my name back in Amiens Street?’

  ‘I followed you onto the train. I didn’t think you’d heard me.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure I did.’

  He smells of ointment but beneath that there’s something else, something like you’d smell in a butcher’s specialising in offal on the turn. It’s like the smell of Connolly in those last hours at our little Alamo on Moore Street, when there was nothing left to do but ensure the surrender was worded properly before the ceiling came in around us. Two days after a ricochet ripped into his ankle. Two full days of agony and morphine, and he was laughing and crying at the same time, like only someone hopped-up to the eyeballs can. Charlie is holding a thin wooden cane against his left leg; he lifts the cane and gives it a little tap against his left shin. The sound of wood on wood. He smiles bravely.

  ‘The doctors tell me I should wear this prosthetic all the time, but to tell you the truth, I hardly ever do. It chafes something terrible. Could have been worse. At least I kept the knee.’

  ‘What happened?’ I say, but I see his greatcoat and the little patches of wool darker than the rest, where regimental insignia have been stripped off.

  ‘Shell fell right on top of us. I was lucky, really.’

  ‘King and fucken country, Charlie? How could you be so stupid?’

  He waits till I exhale, so he knows I’m finished. Not the best way to start a conversation with an old friend, I confess. ‘I’ve come to bring you home,’ he says. ‘It’s your da, Victor, he needs you.’ Charlie lifts his hand in a drinking gesture. ‘Worst I ever seen.’

  ‘My da isn’t the sort of man would be taking advice from me,’ I say. It’s the most unexpected thing, and I’m trying not to show it, but I feel like I’ve been waiting a long time for this invitation.

  ‘Och, Victor, don’t be like that. Everything is forgot about now.’

  ‘I haven’t forgot nothing.’

  Stanislaus let himself in the front door and found Mrs Geraghty waiting in the hall, clutching a telegram in her fist. ‘Jeremiah just delivered it. It’s from Dublin, Father,’ she said, half breathless.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Geraghty,’ he said, and started up to his study, leaving her disappointed at the bottom of the stairs. He stopped halfway up. ‘I’m sorry to keep repeating myself, but the correct form of address for a bishop is Your Grace.’

  ‘I thought that was only for proper bishops?’

  ‘An auxiliary bishop is a proper bishop.’

  In his study Stanislaus set the little post-office envelope on his desk beside the newspaper he hadn’t yet read and sat down. He picked up the telegram, sliced it open, then set it down again. Unready. He looked around the bulging bookshelves that lined three walls of the room. They made the place claustrophobic. He turned the chair around, as he always did, to the window, which commanded a view straight down the middle of Madden village. The chapel, the graveyard, National School, Parochial Hall, post office and Poor Ground; all the comings and goings were under his gaze. He could almost see into the terraced homes of his parishioners. The women were indoors, the men were in the fields, the children were at school. Red flags fluttered from homes and telegraph posts, and bunting crisscrossed the street, but aside from that, things were mostly right with Madden. He looked again at the telegram. Whatever it contained, it was bound to vex him. He picked up the newspaper instead.

  ULYANOV ‘LENIN’ DECLARES RUSSIA ‘WORKERS’ STATE’

  He threw it down again. Once, this had been his favourite time of day. Morning mass finished, pastoral visits done, he’d have an hour to look out the window and read the paper. The symmetry of keeping one eye on his parish and the other on the events of the world pleased him. But since the war, there had been nothing but bad news, and it was all Russia these days. There was no pleasure left in his ritual. He was no monarchist and did not miss the tsar – a king who couldn’t feed his people didn’t deserve to be a king – but these Bolshevists … Ulyanov had said the events last Easter gave an example to be followed and it seemed Dublin last year had its sequel in Petrograd this year.

  The clock chimed four. Fathe
r Daly, the curate, came in the door like an unbroken colt and said Mrs Geraghty had told him of the telegram. Stanislaus nodded and the curate picked it up, his fringe flopping over his forehead as he opened it. He set it back on the desk, text facing up. Stanislaus couldn’t help but see it now.

  VL arrive 10 o’clock train STOP

  Need transport from station CQ STOP

  ‘So he’s coming then,’ said Father Daly. ‘Do you think he’ll be able to get his father back on the straight and narrow?’

  ‘We must hope so.’

  They had given up any hope that Pius Lennon might sort himself out. Stanislaus called often but the door was never answered. Pius’s life seemed to revolve entirely around poteen; a lamentable state for a man formerly so substantial. He had taken to wandering the parish at all hours of day and night, flaming drunk, with a bottle in one hand and a loaded shotgun in the other. Not long ago he wandered up the street while the school-children were on their break, scattering them in terror. The postman Jeremiah McGrath said he remembered when Pius Lennon first came to the parish to marry his Deirdre, before he became the respected pillar that Stanislaus knew. Jeremiah said people were right to be terrified of Pius.

  ‘His method is different but I fear Pius is going the same way as his wife,’ said Stanislaus.

  Pius owned several hundred acres in the east of the parish and Madden’s economy had long depended on the Lennon land. Pius had started his drinking after his Deirdre’s death. They said Deirdre had been the belle of the county in her day, but when Stanislaus knew her, that had been hard to credit. He’d had no choice in refusing her a funeral or burial. Church teaching was clear and unequivocal. The drinking accelerated as each of Pius’s children left, one by one, till they were all gone. Now he lived reclusively, letting his land go to ruin, and no longer offered work to anyone. So Stanislaus had compiled a list of the Lennon children and all the places to which they had emigrated, and wrote to the Cardinal’s office for church contacts in each place. The reply came quickly. It seemed he still drew some water in Armagh. He wrote to parishes and dioceses around the world and, over several months, the replies came. Stanislaus was flattered that some of his colleagues in far-flung places had heard of him and were familiar with his work. They were keen to assist. He got addresses for all but one of the fifteen Lennon children. Of the fourteen, he knew the Sarah girl was only thirty miles away at the Monastery of St Catherine of Siena, but he would not interfere with her vocation. The fifteenth name he circled in red ink. He had no address for that one. It would be a last resort even if he did have one. He sent out thirteen letters.