Herself Alone in Orange Rain Page 8

  Weeks blur by; Daideo becomes a living corpse. One morning his wasted legs buckle as he’s shaving. I hear the clatter above the sizzing of rashers, drop the spatula and run. He’s crumpled on the floor, red arced over the white tiles, spray from a cut done as he fell. When I lift him he’s hollow like a bird, his heart thrumming fast. I sit him on the toilet and stem the bleeding with a towel that, later, I rinse and re-rinse, crying as watery red streams of my grandfather’s life trickle down the plughole. The bacon is burnt; neither of us eats that morning.

  I think about getting help, but who from? Aiden’s on the run; things are bad in the north since the strike started again. When he calls I lie, say things are fine, because I don’t want him worrying about my problems when his are so much bigger. I rule out our neighbours, the busybody Brennans or kill-you-with-kindness Kellys. I won’t have anyone from college interfering. I even think about Mum and Dad, Susan and John. But this isn’t their problem. Maybe Frank? But it’s me, not Daideo, who wants handholding.

  We battle on, him for death; me for life. I cook and sit over him until he eats. I’m late for college and have to stay back, catching up. When I get home Daideo is asleep, his eyes closed in a papier-mâché skull.

  I break.

  ‘Fuck sake, eat it.’ I snatch the plate of mince, mash and peas and hold it under his nose.

  He pushes it away. ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘I know what you’re doing. Stop it.’

  He crosses his arms.

  ‘Daideo, this is crazy, please.’ Tears prick my eyes. ‘You’re killing yourself.’

  ‘Haven’t I that right at my age?’ He swipes the plate from my hand. It frisbees across the kitchen and shatters over the cooker. On legs all sharp white bone and shivering skin, he hauls himself up and totters from the room.

  I fling my own plate at the sink. Then cry over the mess.

  That night I sneak into his bedroom while he’s sleeping. The air is hot, thick and dry. He stirs, mutters oaths; I glimpse his bloodless shrunken gums, watch his mottled hand feebly striking long-dead enemies. On the bedside table his yellowed false teeth bob in a glass. A rozzer smashed out his real ones during the War of Independence. He told me that, and how he shot dead the RIC man a week later. To some that makes him a hero, to others a murderer. But I’ve seen him use two cadaverous hands to get his teacup to his lips and lean on his stick, knotted knuckles flexing, to go from kitchen to living room. To me he’s just a frail old man, the grandfather I love, am slowly losing. I slip out.

  I want to understand him. In the living room I sit with my sketchpad. If he’s the original, I’m a print taken from it but I’m too cowardly to see the image of myself in him. The page stays blank.

  Next morning I have toast and cereal, tea. I pour him a cup as he enters the kitchen, holding onto the doorframe, the fridge, the cupboards, on his way to the table.

  ‘Do you need a hand tidying up?’ he asks gruffly, nodding to the food-crusted cooker.

  ‘No.’ I light a cigarette.

  He stretches for the cup I’ve put beyond easy reach. I don’t help. Fingers splayed, he grabs the cup, nearly toppling it.

  ‘I’m the last, so I am.’ He sighs.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘My school pals, St Enda’s, class of ’16. Did the lad show you Hal’s grave?’

  ‘Yes. What happened to the others?’

  He rubs the loose skin of his brow; I expect it to tear and bleed but it’s already dead leather.

  ‘Charlie,’ he sighs, ‘your… Susan’s uncle, he was killed during the Rising, sixteen he was. Patrick too. And another wee lad; Jesus, I don’t remember his name but he was our company piper. Freddie.’ He shakes his head. ‘Freddie was a Freestater, after the Treaty. We never spoke again. I heard he died from heart trouble in the fifties. And Cathleen.’ He smiles now. ‘Sure, she was too good for me. That,’ he points to the locket around my neck, ‘was hers. She returned it to me the day she came to tell me she was marrying someone else. Sick of waiting for me to finish fighting, so she was. They went abroad, America. She’s dead now.’

  I squeeze the locket in my fist.

  ‘Why did you fight?’

  ‘It was too important not to.’

  ‘And is it still?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘So if you were young now you’d be fighting?’

  ‘That’d be my choice to make.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘I would.’

  ‘It’s why you sent me away, isn’t it?’ I know the answer is yes but I need him to say it.

  ‘You’re too much like me for your own good and mine,’ he mutters. ‘Sure, I was after you understanding why sometimes you need to fight. I knew Susan and John’d teach you that. But I was never after you doing it, not here. Not like I had to.’

  ‘But if I decide to…’

  He clutches my hand. His fingers are brittle, frost-burnt branches. ‘I’ve no right telling you how to live, just as my father didn’t telling me, but I’ll not lie to you: I don’t want a life for you such as I had. I hoped the past would end with me.’

  ‘How’s that possible when there are still Brits in the north, when you suffered so much for nothing? You haven’t seen what it’s like up there now.’

  ‘I don’t need to. Jesus, I’ve seen it all before. It needs tearing down, ripping up, painting over.’

  I try to pull my hand free but his fingers bite down on mine.

  ‘Caoilainn, I’m tired,’ he sighs. ‘Christ, I’m eighty-one, it’s enough. My fight’s over.’

  ‘What about me?’

  His grip slackens. ‘You’ll do what you want, just like I did but I’ll ask you to have the decency to wait ’til I’m buried.’

  Inside he’s already dead, has been for days, weeks, maybe years. Realising that numbs my fear and ramps up my panic.

  ‘Where are my parents buried?’

  His eyes dart away from mine. ‘Monaghan.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That’s where we were living at the time.’

  ‘Why not Milltown, or Glasnevin, the Republican plots?’

  ‘It wasn’t right.’

  ‘But if they died fighting…’

  He bangs his cup down. Steaming tea splashes onto his hand. He doesn’t notice. I jump up to fetch a cloth, ice; he stops me with a scowl. I sink down, cowering from his rage and pain.

  ‘They should never have died the way they did. It wasn’t fair. I didn’t want it marked; tricolours, berets, graveside gunshots. They deserved peace.’ His eyes fill with tears. ‘We all deserve peace, Caoilainn.’

  ‘Aye, we do.’ My words smoulder.

  Daideo rubs his watery eyes, squeezes my hand again, cools my anger with his grief. ‘Just think on it before you’re doing anything. Le do thoil. Do what your heart tells you is right.’

  ‘I will.’

  He nods. Smiles. ‘Aye, that’s wise advice given me by a wise woman. Yous would’ve got on.’ He lets go of my hand. ‘Now get yourself to college. I’ll see you after.’

  I stand at my easel, squinting at the Belfast triptych. I’ve been working on it since term started. It’s to be my assessed piece but I can’t get the city’s hostility into it. I’ve painted, over-painted, scraped back, darkened; it always turns out anaemic. From across the room Mr Walsh, who’s on his rounds, checking and encouraging, catches my eye. He pushes his glasses up his nose, heads over.

  ‘How’re you getting on?’

  I scowl and smear more black into the clouds.

  ‘If you’re not happy with it there’s time for you to start something else,’ he says.

  ‘No.’

  The word booms around the studio. Several students look up. Colleen smirks and leans over to Clare. They giggle.

  ‘Come into my office, let’s have a chat,’ Mr Walsh suggests.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I’m worried. You’ve not been yourself this term.’

  He’s thinking about the bruise on my
cheek, still visible after the Christmas holiday, and the ‘chat’ he tried to have with me then. He’s thinking he’s young and cool enough for hearing confidences but old and wise enough for giving advice. I’m thinking he should mind his own fucking business.

  ‘How would you know?’

  ‘I can see it in your work.’

  I pick up the Nescafe jar filled with mucky turps and splash the grey liquid over my canvas. The scene bleeds into itself. ‘What do you see now?’ I kick the easel. It clatters to the floor. I walk.

  In the car park I stop to light a cigarette. The wind is wild and my lighter keeps blowing out.

  ‘Try mine; it’s windproof.’ Mr Walsh offers me his Zippo. The wind has flicked up the collar of his corduroy jacket. With his John Lennon glasses, pudding-bowl haircut and paint-stained fingers he’s some leftover beatnik Beatle. ‘Am I not allowed to be worried about you?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ I turn to go.

  ‘Caoilainn.’

  I stop.

  ‘I know it must be hard for you, trying to settle in, make friends. If you ever need to talk I’m…’

  I head for St. Stephen’s Green.

  When I get to the park I find a bench near the pond and sit hunched into my anorak, watching the ducks waddle and squabble. Memories of Daideo, Aiden and me bob on the ruffled water. It feels like this is where I started, because it’s the furthest back I can reach. Now I’m here again as though I never left. But I did, and coming back isn’t the same as going back. Too much has changed.

  I stay in the park all afternoon, wondering what the hell I’m doing: will do.

  When I finally get home the house is empty. Daideo is in his chair. He’s been dead a while, the doctor says.

  Belfast—7th May, 1981

  Republicans Bury Their Hero

  100,000 Line the Route of Sands’ Funeral

  The funeral of Republican hunger striker, Bobby Sands, MP, was held today in West Belfast. An estimated 100,000 mourners lined the route of the cortege from the Sands’ family home on the Twinbrook Estate to Milltown cemetery where he was interred in the Republican plot. Following a sixty-six day fast, Sands, 27, lapsed into a coma on 3rd May and died in the early hours on the morning of the fifth.

  Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams addressed mourners and comforted members of the Sands’ family, including Sands’ sister, Marcella.

  In a statement issued after Sands’ death Margaret Thatcher said, ‘Mr Sands was a convicted criminal. He chose to take his own life. It was a choice his organisation did not give to many of their victims.’

  Three other Republicans remain on hunger strike and there is speculation that more will join if agreement over political status is not reached.

  Sands leaves behind an eight year old son, Gerard.

  The crowd paces behind the piper. Women sob; men hide tears. Children trail along, dazed by the throng making its painful journey to Milltown. It’s my second funeral here in a week.

  For Daideo there was only a handful of us: Aiden, Frank, Aiden’s ma, Nora, and younger brother, Danny; the Felons’ club secretary, Patsy, and half a dozen anonymous men who muttered things like, ‘He was a grand ould fella,’ and, ‘Fought with Pearse, so he did.’ Our Dublin neighbours made the journey, the Brennans to gawp, the Kellys to fuss. They left once the priest finished the curt oration that was all Daideo had permitted. As they picked their way between the graves Patsy cocked his head to Aiden.

  ‘Come on, lad, and we can get to the club for a drink.’

  Aiden checked over both shoulders, produced a handgun, aimed for the soggy clouds, fired three times and dropped the gun into his mum’s handbag. Frank took my elbow.

  ‘It’s grand you were with him at the end. Sure, ’tis the best I could’ve done, getting you back here.’

  He stared into Daideo’s grave. Two tears dropped from his chin. He shook his head and set off after Patsy, who was making for the Felons where drinks were free in tribute to the passing of the old guard.

  I was still in Belfast, staying with Aiden’s parents because I couldn’t face the empty Dublin house, when Bobby Sands died two days after my nineteenth birthday.

  Sands’ death is an official tragedy, verso to Daideo’s recto in the book of Republican martyrdom.

  I stand with Nora and Frank, Danny beside me, head up, jaw clenched. He’s begging Aiden to get him into the ’Ra now. He’s fourteen, the age Daideo was when he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

  Aiden’s in the colour party, alongside the tricolour-draped coffin, wearing his Army gear, a warrior in a balaclava knitted by someone’s granny.

  We mass around the grave. The guns appear, modern-looking rifles.

  Frank says, ‘They’ve brought out the Armalites for the wee lad. That’s grand.’

  I watch Aiden, third from the left, as he raises the weapon and sights along the barrel in formation with the lads beside him. Shots rip the sky.

  Nora takes my arm. ‘Are you alright, love?’

  I watch them put Sands in the ground before nudging through weeping mourners until I reach Daideo’s grave. I sit on the mound of loose earth, facing away from the thinning crowd, facing up to myself.

  Daideo thought the Ryans would teach me to fight but all I learnt from them was what it’s like to be powerless. Words on placards, voices chanting, feet marching; no one gets killed, but nothing changes.

  Here it’s fingers on triggers, bombs exploding, feet running. People dying. Things have to change.

  Protests only have supporters and critics; wars have winners and losers.

  I picture Daideo as a young man, standing on a windswept hillside, kitted out as an ancient Gaelic warrior, readying to lead his army into battle. I see the brushstroke clouds, the smooth blending on his windblown cloak, the gleam of his sword’s blade done with a streak of zinc white no.45.

  But it wasn’t like that. I don’t know how it was; the things he told me are just pencil lines, without light and shadow. The only colours I can ever apply are crimson red no.16 and lamp black no.07.

  A hand touches my shoulder. Aiden stands there, unmasked and in civvies.

  He crouches down. ‘Caoilainn, I’m needing to go. Are you OK?’

  He’s leaving again, taking away his patient resilience, his unwavering strength, his gentle love, right when I need them most. We stand.

  ‘Fine. I’m going home tomorrow. Come and see me soon?’

  He frowns. ‘I don’t know what I’ll…’

  ‘Just come and see me, for God sake.’

  ‘Alright.’

  I pull away, start walking.

  ‘Are you not getting a lift back with my folks?’

  ‘No.’

  I wander around inside Milltown, reading headstones, then up through the Falls, passing the graffiti:

  Blessed are those who hunger for justice

  Give them their rights, not their last rites

  Political power stems from the barrel of a gun

  Oppression breeds resistance; Resistance brings freedom

  Ireland unfree shall never be at peace—P H Pearse

  Welcome to West Belfast: Provo Land

  When I arrive at the O’Neills’ Nora is dishing out.

  ‘Jesus, Caoilainn, we’ve been worried,’ she says, setting down her spoon.

  ‘Sorry.’

  I lay the table. The four of us eat in taut silence. His plate still piled with stew, Danny bangs his fork down and runs out. Frank goes after him. Nora gives one big, dry sob.

  ‘How could she let that wee boy die? She’s the iron bitch, so she is!’ Her words sear the air. ‘He was at school with our Connor. A lovely wee lad, he was, so bright.’

  ‘But this’ll be the end of it now, won’t it?’

  Nora sniffs. ‘She’ll not be happy ’til she’s seen them all in their graves.’ She pulls something from her pocket. ‘This came yesterday.’

  She gives me a small hard lump of tightly folded toilet roll: a prison comm. I peel apart the bri
ttle paper. Cramped writing fills the square, words falling off the edges. Reading it hurts my eyes. It’s from Connor. He’s to be in the next wave to join the strike.

  ‘Mother Mary, haven’t we suffered enough?’ She shakes her head. ‘But what else can we do against those bastards? We’ve got to keep going. Sure, every day we manage that we’ve our victory.’

  When I return to Dublin it’s like none of it happened; I didn’t bury Daideo, wasn’t at Sands’ funeral, never read Connor’s comm or felt Nora’s agony. Everything is in place; my rucksack by the door, Daideo’s hat and coat on the hall stand, his ‘Green Dawn’ painting on the wall. The only proof of what I’ve lived through this last fortnight is the cold silence of an empty house.

  Numbness and habit make me scoop up the post and flick through it. There’s a gas bill, a letter from college warning unless I explain my absence I’ll be expelled and a card with a Dublin frank. I open the card.

  It’s from Mr Walsh. He’s found out about Daideo. His phone number is printed with instructions for me to ring him if I need to talk.

  I bin everything but the bill.

  The days are shapeless. I drift through them, mooching around Dublin, clutching my sketchpad. I want to draw Daideo before I forget his face but the eyes are always sightless. I try other subjects instead; the GPO’s columned entrance, the bandstand in St Stephen’s Green, the Roto’s Remembrance Garden, but I can’t bring myself to finish these drawings. They’re all wrong. I give up, devote myself full time to mooching.