Scoundrel

“I always wanted one. I was sweet on her. Her da said I could ask her out, so he did.”

“But you never did ask her?”

“Never had time, Paulie. I wasn’t like you. I wasn’t one for the girls.” He seemed to be aware that something had been amiss in his life, but he could never have articulated it, nor known how to correct it, and I wondered what demons, born of a mother’s fears and priestly spite, had chased him through the long dark corridors of his lonely nights. “You remember that fellow we shot in Dunmurry?” he asked.

“Of course I do.”

Seamus laughed. “So focking scared. You remember where he hid?”

“In the roof tank, you told me.”

“Like a drowning focking rat.” The boy had been accused of rape. He was twenty-one or -two, and there was no evidence that would have stood up in court, but the community had no doubts of his guilt and so the Provos had stepped in. Seamus had been staying with me and had been asked if he wanted to do the honors, and I had driven him up to the housing estate. It was a Sunday evening in November and there had been a hint of snow in the darkness. The boy’s mother knew why we were there and she begged us to go away, but the father growled at her to hold her peace. The other kids were crying. The boy ran up the stairs. “Watch the focking windows,” Seamus told me, then he had followed the boy into the attic. The panicked kid had taken refuge in the header tank where Seamus shot him. Seamus laughed again. “There must have been blood coming out of their focking taps for days!” He was silent for a few seconds. “Head shot, it was.”

“Do you remember them all?”

“Every one, Paulie. Like they was on films in my head.” He frowned, I thought with pain, then he chuckled again. “Did I ever tell you about Danny Noonan’s big bomb?”

“No.”

“So focking silly.” He was laughing, and I think the laughter was hurting him, but the tale was in his head now and he had to get it out. “It must have been the first or second bomb I ever saw set. In a big focking cardboard box, it was. Danny Noonan built the bomb. He’d just been made the explosives officer in the South Derry brigade and he wanted to make himself known. Wanted everyone in the world to know a new man was on the job like, so he put every scrap of focking explosive he could find into that damned box. I tell you, Paulie, that bomb would have blown the ceiling clean off Africa, it was so big. But Danny wanted it big, see? He wanted something that would make the papers, you know?” He paused to suppress a moan.

“Take your time,” I said stupidly. Time was the one thing that was fast running out for Seamus.

“So Danny decides we’ll take out the BBC transmitter. You know the one? That focking great mast outside Derry? Must be a thousand feet tall if it’s an inch! That would make the papers, Danny said, so we all get in the car and off we go, Big John MacAnally was our driver. Daft as a clock, he was, but he could drive right enough. So off we go and we get in the compound easy enough and there are all these engineers just pissing themselves with fright. There’s Danny, Big John and me, all masked up, two of us with guns, and Big John holding the focking bomb in a focking great cardboard box. So Danny tells Big John to put the bomb by the mast, right underneath it like, but Big John gets all worried. He asks your top engineer man how long it will take them to repair the damage if he sets the focking bomb off under the mast, and your man says it’ll be all of six months. And Big John says, ‘You mean if the bomb goes off I can’t see Kojak this Saturday night?’, and the fella says, ‘Ye’ll not be seeing Kojak for six months of Saturday nights!’” Seamus stopped, and his breath came in horrid rasping gasps for a few seconds. The cigarette fell from his lips, bounced off his thigh, and hissed to extinction in the blood puddling beside him. I thought he was not going to be able to finish the story, but he made a huge effort to take in a breath.

“So Danny’s going berserk, he is. Put the bomb down, he orders, but Big John won’t. He wants to know where he can put it so he can still see Kojak on Saturday night, so the engineer tells him to knock off the sub-station in the laneway. Danny’s screaming at Big John, but Big John tells Danny to shut the fock up because he wants to watch Kojak. In the end we put the focking bomb by the sub-station, down on the laneway like the man said, just to cut off the electricity like, and just so Big John could see his Kojak on Saturday night. Christ, but you should have seen that bang! Jasus, but we scared rooks out of the trees three counties away! There was smoke rising to the moon, so there was. We flattened a hundred yards of hedgerow, but it never made the newspapers. And that was Danny Noonan’s big bomb, just to knock out one focking sub-station in a focking hedge.” He tried to laugh, but was in too much pain. “And Big John got to see his Kojak, so he did.”

“It’s a good tale, Seamus.” That was why he had told it. He came from a race that still told tales and still took pride in the telling.

“So many good tales, Paulie.” He blinked a few times, then looked beseechingly at me. “I’m cold, Paulie.”

I wanted to tell him it would not be long now, but I said nothing. Out beyond the barrier beach the waves seethed and growled like the world’s heartbeat.

“They said they’d give me a medal,” Seamus said after a long silence. “They said there’s a Massachusetts medal of freedom. They said they’ve given it to other IRA men. They said they’d pin it on my chest on the State House steps.”

“Michael Herlihy told you that?”

“Aye, but I had to kill you first. He said you’d betrayed the movement and that he’d give me money if I killed you, but I told him I didn’t want any money. Then he said they’d give me the medal like, and all the newspapers would show it. My mam would have been pleased, Paulie, to see me with a medal. She was always nagging at me to do something in life, know what I mean? And she’d have liked a medal. And the Brits would have been pissed off.” He was quiet for a bit. He had gone very pale. His hands scrabbled and I thought for a second he had come to his moment of dying, then I realized he was trying to reach for his cigarettes. He abandoned the effort. “Give me another ciggie, Paulie.”

I lit one for him, resisting the sudden strong temptation to drag down a lungful of smoke. “There.” I put it between his lips.

He sucked on the smoke, then nodded at Gillespie’s corpse. “I thought that fellow was you.” The mistake clearly worried Seamus. It was a blot on his record. “It was the yellow coat that fooled me.”

“How long were you waiting for me?” I asked.

“Since teatime. Herlihy had Marty Doyle drive me out here.”

“Where’s Marty now?”

“Waiting up by the shops.” Seamus grinned weakly. “He’s driving a focking flower van. Can you believe it? It’s like the time we tried to take a focking hearse to put a bomb outside the Guildhall. Full of flowers, it was, and Malachy O’Brien had the focking hay fever. Can you believe it? He was sneezing so much he couldn’t drive! We had to abandon the focking bomb, so we did!” He laughed weakly. “Those were the days, Paulie.”

“Weren’t they just?”

Seamus drew deep on the cigarette. “You remember the big flats on Rossville Street. And William Street. I’ll never see them again, will I? And what was that pub on the Lecky Road?” He was asking about landmarks in Derry, a city I did not know. “And then we used to drink in that big bar off the Creggan Road. It was so focking cold in there in winter. That landlord was a mean bugger. Short arms and deep pockets, he had, so one night Big John MacAnally said he’d warm the place up and he lit a fire on the floor with focking newspapers. He was a focking mad bugger. They shot him, so they did.”

“The Brits shot him?”

He shook his head. “Our own fellows. Big John was a risk. Mad as a priest without a woman or a whiskey, so he was. Did you ever know Father Brady?”

“No.”

“He told me it would be a bad end.” He breathed hard. “Can you not get me a priest now, Paulie?”

“No, Seamus, I can’t.” Because what had happened this night had to be hidden, buried as Roisin was buried, which meant there could be no priests and no rescue squad and no local police. That was the rule of the secret world and Seamus knew it.

He nodded acceptance of my refusal. “Whose side are you on, Paulie?”

“Yours, Seamus.”

“You’re not a focking Brit, are you?”