A Very Irish Christmas Read online

  “I’m sorry.”

  Skeffington sat down in the armchair. He turned to speak to Crilly.

  “Well?”

  “Easy. No bother,” said Crilly. “That’s where I met our friend here.” Cal tried to remember the name of the man who wrote the book. When Skeffington spoke to Cal his voice sounded deeply hurt.

  “Cahal, why didn’t you let us know where you were?”

  “I told you before. I want out.”

  “Sometimes there’s a price to pay.”

  “Yeah, I was just telling him,” said Crilly, “about what we did to your friend last night.”

  “Sometimes,” said Skeffington to Crilly, “you are extremely stupid.”

  “I was just trying to put him in the mood for listening to you. And it was your stupid idea to use the humane killer on him. Cal says they’ll be able to trace it.”

  “Highly unlikely. Have you not realized yet that Cahal is no longer on our side? He should be told nothing. Cahal has had a change of heart, isn’t that so?”

  “I don’t think I’ve changed all that much. I see things differently now.”

  “That’s what’s called becoming a traitor to the cause. The next step is to become an informer.” Skeffington still had his overcoat and scarf on and held his left leather glove in his gloved right hand. He lay back in the chair, sighing. “I really thought better of you, Cahal. In its fight for Irish freedom this kind of thing has dogged the Republican Movement all through the centuries. Our own Lundys have thrown it away—nameless rats from Ireland’s sad past.”

  “I have not informed on anybody,” said Cal. “I just felt bad about what I was doing. It was against my conscience. Was it you guys who planted the mine out on the Toome road?”

  “No. That must have been the lads from Ballyronan. Why?”

  “They killed a cow.”

  “That kind of sarcasm helps no one, Cahal. Mistakes are inevitable.”

  “You mean it would have been all right if it had been a person?”

  “Did you ever hear of Archbishop Romero? He talked about the ‘legitimate right of insurrectional violence.’ Oppressed peoples have the right to throw off the yoke in whatever way they see fit—and that’s from an eminent doctor of the Church. If somebody is standing on your neck you have the right to break his leg.”

  “With a captive bolt?”

  “Yes. If it will be a lesson to others. There are no rules, Cahal. Just eventual winners. I myself prefer the God of the Old Testament: ‘You who strike all my foes on the mouth, you who break the teeth of the wicked.’”

  Mrs. Crilly came smiling in again with her wobbling tin tray.

  “It’s bitter outside. Would you not turn on the other bar of that fire?” She set the tray on the table and asked Skeffington about his father, listening to what was said with concern.

  “Och well, he’ll be warm in the hospital tonight. The central heating in those places would boil you. I think it’s why the half of them die. That couldn’t be good for you. When I was in for my hysterectomy—I’ve had the whole works removed, y’know—the sweat was breaking on me the whole time. The doctor said it might just be the change of life but I thought it was the central heating.”

  “Thanks, Ma,” said Crilly, holding the door open for her. When she had gone Cal lifted his cup and blew on his tea. There was an awkward silence. Cal looked at the clock. The library would be closed by now. He remembered the noise of the fire in his own house, the thunderous roaring of the flames. He thought of Marcella the next day tramping on the broken glass and the wet charred floor, looking at the remains of her library, the stink of destruction in her nose. The only books in Crilly’s house were a set of four bound Reader’s Digests—green spines with gold lettering—held upright by a plaster dog at each end. In the middle. Remember in the middle of March—a month of the year.

  “Well, Cahal?”

  “What’s this price you’re talking of?”

  “We want to know where you are staying—so’s we can get in touch with you if we need you.”

  “So the price of getting out is staying in?”

  “More or less.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “Cahal, look. I have been extremely lenient with you up until now. This is not a game we’re playing. What you have done is called desertion. You know the penalties for that in any other army in wartime.”

  Crilly stood up and walked behind Cal. Cal watched him out of the corner of his eye. He held tightly on to his parcel.

  “But look. I keep telling you I never joined. I helped out once or twice …”

  There was a long silence. Skeffington separated the fingers of his limp glove. Crilly looked through the curtains and made a slurping noise as he drank his tea. Cal heard the characteristic sound of a Land Rover engine outside and was aware of Crilly stiffening. A door slammed and Crilly hissed.

  “It’s the fuckin’ cops.”

  Skeffington jumped to his feet.

  “Out the back.”

  They moved quickly into the hall. The bell rang and almost before it had ceased the door was hammered by a fist. They saw a peaked cap at the bubbled oval of glass. In the back room Crilly’s mother and father were sitting watching television in blue darkness and Skeffington told them not to answer the door for a while. The three of them slipped out of the back door into the small snowy garden. Cal was in the middle as they went crunching down the path. Suddenly a voice shouted “Halt!” and Cal glimpsed a peaked R.U.C. cap rise above the hedge at the bottom of the garden. Skeffington stopped dead. Cal took one step to the side. Between the toolshed and the coal house there was a gap of about a foot. Crilly tried to follow him but a voice screamed again, “Halt or I fire.” Crilly stood still. Cal heard his own clothes scrape and brush between the walls. His paper bag crackled so he quickly pulled the doll out and dropped the paper onto the ground. He held his breath and stepped up on a wire which separated him from the next door garden. It twanged with his weight. He crept behind some bushes, terrified he would be seen against the whiteness of the snow, then through the hedge on hands and knees to the next garden. He heard angry voices from Crilly’s. The houses were in terraces of four and there was a way onto the street from this garden. Doubled over. Cal made it away from the backs and stood at the front gate looking into the street. Others had come to their doors and were standing watching the Land Rover. Somebody shouted an obscenity at the policeman sitting at the wheel and a snowball bounced hollowly off its roof. The snowball was followed by stones. Cal walked away from the street as casually as he could onto the main road, carrying the Raggedy Ann like a baby against his shoulder.

  On the corner next to the post office there was a telephone box and Cal went into it and set the doll on the shelf. It slumped forward, staring at its knees. The number of the Confidential Phone was framed on the wall but somebody had rubbed either mud or shit over it to obscure it. He made it out and dialled. He told the voice at the other end that there was a fire bomb in the library and that it was in a book called Middlemarch by somebody called Eliot. No, he didn’t know whether it was the only one. He put the phone down as if it was a black garden slug and left the box. Skeffington was right. He had turned informer.

  It took him over an hour to walk home beneath a sky that was clear of cloud and thick with stars. Twice he saw shooting stars score the sky momentarily. It was freezing cold, and to keep himself warm he walked quickly and rhythmically in the black scar at the centre of the road which had been cleared of snow. There were few cars and at this time of night none stopped to give him a lift. He wondered if either Crilly or Skeffington would crack and give them Cal’s name. How long did they question you? Did they kick the living daylights out of you, as he’d heard? Or did they just break you by keeping you awake and persistence? He’d heard of one trick they’d used, of blindfolding the guy and putting him in a helicopter, but taking him up only about two feet, then chucking him out. Or ball squeezing – hurting you in ways that didn’t
show afterwards. He felt sure that Skeffington would never break. Crilly on the other hand was not too bright and anybody could tie him in knots.

  When he turned the bend in the road his first reaction was to look towards the farmhouse and, seeing a light on downstairs, he broke into a run. He rang the bell and heard Marcella ask, “Who is it?”

  “It’s Cal.”

  The door opened. She was in her nightdress and dressing gown and when he passed her in the doorway she smelt clean and washed.

  “Where were you? I went down to the cottage and you weren’t there.”

  “I was in town. I thought you’d be in the library,” he said. “I had to walk it home.” The doll was beneath the crook of his arm and he offered it to her for Lucy, apologizing for the lack of wrapping. She thanked him extravagantly and they stood awkwardly facing each other. He unzipped his anorak and stood with his back to the fire. She smiled and after a moment’s hesitation slid her arms around him inside his anorak and laid her head against his shirt front and thumping heart.

  “I feel the cold off you,” she said.

  He smelt the soft hair of the top of her head and kissed it, held her as if to crush her. He wanted to tell her that he had saved her precious library but knew it would be too complicated. He wanted to be open and honest with her and tell her everything. To explain how the events of his life were never what he wanted, how he seemed unable to influence what was going on around him. He had had a recurring dream of sitting at the wheel of a car driving and at a critical point turning the wheel and nothing happening. For miles the car would career along with the steering wheel, slack, and he would spin it round and round like a ship’s wheel but nothing would happen. Eventually he would hit something—a wall, another vehicle; once he woke roaring in his throat after seeing a child with bright amazed eyes disappearing beneath the front of the car and feeling the bounce of wheels on flesh and bone.

  “Comfort me, Cal,” she said.

  He stepped back and pulled the tie of her dressing gown. He put his hands beneath and round her shoulders. He felt the warm lines of her body through the thin material. He caressed her from neck to knee, feeling no interruption to the smooth passage of his hands. And they made love in an absolute and intense silence.

  “Tomorrow they come back,” she said, “and my life will just become a fragment of theirs again.”

  “Why don’t you leave? Get a flat and I can come and visit you.”

  “Yes, that sounds so easy. I’ve told her that many times. I wish I wasn’t so weak. I wish I could fight with her and insult her. But when it comes to a crisis she always wins. The only way I could do it is not be here when they get back. It’s been a year now, and every time I tell her I’m moving something comes up and she persuades me to stay on. For Lucy’s sake. For Grandad’s sake. After Easter.”

  Cal told her about his own father having to go in to hospital.

  “And at Christmas,” she said. “Cal, you must come here for Christmas dinner. It would be a relief for me to have someone to talk to. And it could seem as if I’m acting out of charity. Will you do that for me?”

  Cal nodded and yet he had the feeling he would never be there. So much so that he crawled naked to where he had flung his anorak on the chair and gave her Christmas presents.

  “Can I open them now?” she said. “I can never wait.”

  She touched between her breasts with the perfume and kissed him. Then in the book she sought and found Grünewald’s picture of Christ crucified and held it up for Cal to see. The weight of the Christ figure bent the cross down like a bow; the hands were cupped to heaven like nailed starfish; the body with its taut rib cage was pulled to the shape of an egg timer by the weight of the lower body; the flesh was diseased with sores from the knotted scourges, the mouth open and gasping for breath. She was sitting on the floor with her back to the couch, her legs open in a yoga position and the book facing him, just below her breasts. Cal looked at the flesh of Christ spotted and torn, bubonic almost, and then behind it at the smoothness of Marcella’s body and it became a permanent picture in his mind.

  They ate supper and went to her bed to make love again and she made Cal promise to leave before morning to avoid the attentions of Lucy when she woke. Marcella lay, her bottom snug in the cup of his thighs and belly and talked. The pauses grew longer until eventually she stopped altogether. Her breathing became deep and regular and her leg jerked in a dream. Cal lay awake beside her, touching her bare back with his cheek. The trust she showed in falling asleep beside him made him feel worse. Could he ever tell her the truth? Perhaps he could write it down. That way he could say what he meant and not get confused. He could write to her and if she replied he could begin to hope. But would she tell the police? A letter of confession would be evidence that would put him away for most of his life. She was what he wanted most and if he couldn’t be near her he might as well be in prison. If he was ever caught—and there was an impending sense that it wouldn’t be long now that Crilly and Skeffington were lifted—he would write to her and try to tell it as it was. He had her now like the Sleeping Beauty of his fantasy. He reached out his hand and touched her moistness but she grumbled in her sleep and jackknifed, closing him out. He kissed the nape of her neck, got up and dressed in the darkness.

  Walking back to the cottage he heard the sounds of a thaw. The black lane showed through the centres of footsteps when the moon raced from one cloud to the next. The air had warmed and melted snow was running down the sides of the lane. Everywhere was the sound of dripping and clinking and gurgling.

  The next morning, Christmas Eve, almost as if he expected it, the police arrived to arrest him and he stood in a dead man’s Y-fronts listening to the charge, grateful that at last someone was going to beat him to within an inch of his life.

  Men and Women

  CLAIRE KEEGAN

  MY FATHER TAKES ME PLACES. He has artificial hips, so he needs me to open gates. To reach our house you must drive up a long lane through a wood, open two sets of gates and close them behind you so the sheep won’t escape to the road. I’m handy. I get out, open the gates, my father free-wheels the Volkswagen through, I close the gates behind him and hop back into the passenger seat. To save petrol he starts the car on the run, gathering speed on the slope before the road, and then we’re off to wherever my father is going on that particular day.

  Sometimes it’s the scrap yard, where he’s looking for a spare part, or, scenting a bargain in some classified ad, we wind up in a farmer’s mucky field, pulling cabbage plants or picking seed potatoes in a dusty shed. Sometimes we drive to the forge, where I stare into the water barrel, whose surface reflects patches of the milky skies that drift past, sluggish, until the blacksmith plunges the red-hot metal down and scorches away the clouds. On Saturdays my father goes to the mart and examines sheep in the pens, feeling their backbones, looking into their mouths. If he buys just a few sheep, he doesn’t bother going home for the trailer but puts them in the back of the car, and it is my job to sit between the front seats to keep them there. They shit small pebbles and say baaaah, the Suffolks’ tongues dark as the raw liver we cook on Mondays. I keep them back until we get to whichever house Da stops at for a feed on the way home. Usually it’s Bridie Knox’s, because Bridie kills her own stock and there’s always meat. The hand brake doesn’t work, so when Da parks in her yard I get out and put the stone behind the wheel.

  I am the girl of a thousand uses.

  “Be the holy, missus, what way are ya?”

  “Dan!” Bridie says, like she didn’t hear the splutter of the car.

  Bridie lives in a smoky little house without a husband, but she has sons who drive tractors around the fields. They’re small, deeply unattractive men who patch their Wellingtons. Bridie wears red lipstick and face powder, but her hands are like a man’s hands. I think her head is wrong for her body, the way my dolls look when I swap their heads.

  “Have you aer a bit for the child, missus? She’s hungry at ho
me,” Da says, looking at me like I’m one of those African children we give up sugar for during Lent.

  “Ah now,” says Bridie, smiling at his old joke. “That girl looks fed to me. Sit down there and I’ll put the kettle on.”

  “To tell you the truth, missus, I wouldn’t fall out with a drop of something. I’m after being in at the mart and the price of sheep is a holy scandal.”

  He talks about sheep and cattle and the weather and how this little country of ours is in a woeful state while Bridie sets the table, puts out the Chef sauce and the Colman’s mustard and cuts big, thick slices off a flitch of beef or boiled ham. I sit by the window and keep an eye on the sheep, who stare, bewildered, from the car. Da eats everything in sight while I build a little tower of biscuits and lick the chocolate off and give the rest to the sheepdog under the table.

  When we get home, I find the fire shovel and collect the sheep-droppings from the car and roll barley on the loft.

  “Where did you go?” Mammy asks.

  I tell her all about our travels while we carry buckets of calf-nuts and beet-pulp across the yard. Da sits in under the shorthorn cow and milks her into a bucket. My brother sits in the sitting room beside the fire and pretends he’s studying. He will do the Intercert. next year. My brother is going to be somebody, so he doesn’t open gates or clean up shite or carry buckets. All he does is read and write and draw triangles with special pencils Da buys him for mechanical drawing. He is the brains in the family. He stays in there until he is called to dinner.

  “Go down and tell Seamus his dinner is on the table,” Da says.

  I have to take off my Wellingtons before I go down.

  “Come up and get it, you lazy fucker,” I say.

  “I’ll tell,” he says.

  “You won’t,” I say, and go back up to the kitchen, where I spoon garden peas onto his plate because he won’t eat turnip or cabbage like the rest of us.

  Evenings, I get my schoolbag and do homework on the kitchen table while Ma watches the television we hire for winter. On Tuesdays she makes a big pot of tea before eight o’clock and sits at the range and glues herself to the programme where a man teaches a woman how to drive a car. How to change gears, to let the clutch out and give her the juice. Except for a rough woman up behind the hill who drives a tractor and a Protestant woman in the town, no woman we know drives. During the break her eyes leave the screen and travel with longing to the top shelf of the dresser, where she has hidden the spare key to the Volkswagen in the old cracked teapot. I am not supposed to know this. I sigh and continue tracing the course of the River Shannon through a piece of greaseproof paper.