Trespasses

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The End of the World is a Cul de Sac

for Stephen, Tom and Anna

CONTENTS

1. 2015
2. THE IRISH FOR NO
3. 1
4. 2
5. 3
6. 4
7. 5
8. 6
9. DÚIL
10. 7
11. 8
12. 9
13. 10
14. 11
15. 12
16. CHIAROSCURO
17. 13
18. 14
19. 15
20. 16
21. 17
22. 18
23. IN CALVARY’S FLOW
24. 19
25. 20
26. 21
27. 22
28. 23
29. 24
30. WHEN I MOVE TO THE SKY
31. 25
32. 26
33. 27
34. 28
35. 29
36. 30
37. 2015
38. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
39. A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

There is a melancholy blast of diesel, a puff of smoke which might be black or white.

So the harbour slips away to perilous seas as things remain unsolved; we listen

To the ex cathedra of the fog-horn, and drink and leave the world unseen –

Ciaran Carson, ‘The Irish for No’

Ah! That first affair, how well one remembers it!

Stanley Kubrick, Barry Lyndon

2015

They follow the guide, a thin, pale girl. She’s wearing a linen sheath dress in moss green, and there’s a fine spiky tattoo wound around her right arm that looks like barbed wire. Cushla moves to the edge of the crowd, away from the French and Italian tourists in expensive raingear; her own age – which stills surprises her. Away from the man on her left, pushing fifty, with steel-grey hair that’s greased back, small glasses and a soft wool jacket.

The guide stands slightly to the side of the next exhibit, a couple of feet from Cushla. This close, she can see the barbed pattern on the girl’s skin. It’s gorse, spiky tendrils of stems and golden flowers. Cushla likes her for it, for choosing the shrub that chokes the hills here, not roses or butterflies or stars.

It’s a piece of sculpture, made of resin, fabric, glass fibre. A white figure on a plinth, chalky, sarcophagal, a shrouded look about the face, features indistinct. The body is oddly sexless, though it is male; there is breadth in the torso, bulk at the chest. From the waist up he looks peaceful, sleeping head resting near the bend of an arm. There is something not right about the pose, though; his limbs are splayed awkwardly, have not been arranged.

The girl begins to speak. This work is from the seventies, she says. The artist was moved to make it when her friend was murdered. While the almost classical composition is a familiar representation of death, the disordered configuration is shocking, hinting at the violence of the moment of the subject’s murder and the chaos of the hours that followed. She gives us her friend as Everyman, yet his rather untidy bearing makes him human.

The others move towards the next piece, a structure like a Tardis fashioned out of six doors taken from Armagh Prison. Cushla hangs back and steps towards the sculpture. The girl with the gorse tattoo was wrong. The artist hasn’t shown Everyman. The detail is intimate, accurate even, almost as if the cast had been moulded over his body. The neat ball of fat at his middle. The slight raise of his right shoulder. A doughiness about the jaw. She looks at his face, afraid she will see fear or pain, but he looks just as he did when he was sleeping.

Someone touches her arm. It’s the man with the small glasses.

Miss Lavery, he says. Do you remember me?

THE IRISH FOR NO

1

Cushla wrapped her handbag in her coat and pushed it into the gap between the beer fridge and the till. Her brother Eamonn was bent over the counter with a stock list. He looked up at her and his eyes narrowed. He inclined his head at the mirror that ran the length of the bar. Cushla leaned in to check her reflection. Father Slattery had marked her with a thick cross an inch wide and two inches long. The rub of her finger raised the piney, resinous scent of whatever blessed unguent the ashes were mixed with and blurred the cruciate shape to a sooty smudge.

Eamonn slapped a wet serviette into her hand. Hurry up, he hissed.

Most of the men who drank in the pub did not get ashes on Ash Wednesday or do the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday or go to Mass on Sunday. It was one thing to drink in a Catholic-owned bar; quite another to have your pint pulled by a woman smeared in papish warpaint. Cushla buffed until the skin on her forehead was pink, the serviette blackened, flittered. She tossed it in the bin.

Eamonn muttered something under his breath. The only word she could make out was eejit.

The regulars were lined along the counter. Jimmy O’Kane, the single egg he bought for his tea bulging in his breast pocket. Minty, the school caretaker, who got through so much Carlsberg Special Brew the pub won an award for having the highest sales in Northern Ireland, even though he was the only customer who drank the stuff. Fidel, in his khaki cap and tinted glasses. By day he measured mint imperials and clove rock in his mother’s sweet shop; by night he was brigadier of the local branch of the Ulster Defence Association. A fitter from the shipyard called Leslie who didn’t speak until he was drunk and one night told Cushla he’d love to bath her. Another man. Middle-aged, with a whiskey in front of him. Dark-eyed, faintly jowly. He was wearing a black suit and a stiff white shirt from which the collar had been detached, clothes that were conspicuous among the overalls and drip-dry fabric. His hair was flat to the ears then wavy at the nape of his neck, as if it had been sweating under a hat. Or a wig.

Cushla climbed on to a stool to turn up the volume on the television. When she climbed down, the man with the whiskey was flicking at the filter of his cigarette with his thumb, as if he had just looked away.

The news started the way it always did, with a montage of short scenes. A riot. A boy of six or seven climbing up the side of a Saracen personnel carrier to poke a stone into one of the slits from which the soldiers pointed their guns. A march on Stormont, thousands moving up the long avenue to the parliament building. They had added a new one. A single parked car on an empty street. It looked like a photograph until the car bulged and exploded into a great ball of smoke and fire and its doors somersaulted away from it, glass from the surrounding buildings falling like hail on to the tarmac. The segment finished where it always did, on an image of Mary Peters holding up her Olympic medal.

She won that three years ago, Eamonn said.

It’s the last thing that happened here we can be proud of, said the man. His voice was deep, almost rough, despite his refined accent.

Right enough, Michael, said Eamonn.

How did Eamonn know his name?

Fidel inclined his head at the newsreader. Barry’s had the beard trimmed, he said, looping his own brush around his thumb and teasing it into a long, tapered point.

The news. A country road; a police Land Rover parked sideways across its white lines, a pair of legs draped in cloth protruding from a bald whitethorn hedge. Men in balaclavas behind a Formica table, woolly faces pressed to a row of microphones, lit sporadically by camera flashes. A pub with no windows, damp smoke wheezing from a crater in the roof.

The last item on the news was a human interest story. Everyone liked this part because it was usually something non-partisan they could comment on. A reporter had been sent into the city centre to ask people what they thought of streaking. It’s ridiculous, said a woman in a knitted hat, sure it’s far too cold. There were sniggers around the bar. A tiny man slick with Brylcreem said he’d do it if somebody paid him enough. The next man barked ‘it’s obscene’ and walked off. Then they stopped a girl with long dark hair and big eyes. She was wearing an Afghan coat, the collar fluffed up around her face. I think it’s fantastic, she said, something different. She seemed stoned.

She has the look of you about her, Cushla, said Minty. Would you be up for a bit of streaking yourself?

Leave my sister alone, you pervert, said Eamonn, smirking. Normally she would have had a reply that would shut them all up, but she was aware of the man with the neat whiskey and tidy nails.

Eamonn told Cushla to do a sweep for empties. She went on to the floor. Three men with crew cuts were at a corner table cluttered with soapy-looking tankards. As she reached for the last, one of them placed it on the carpet. You forgot one, he said, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his neck. She bent to pick it up and he laid his hands on her hips, just above her arse. She eased herself free of him and went back to the bar to the sound of their laughter.

Did you see what that soldier did? Cushla asked Eamonn as she dumped their glasses in the sink.

No. He said it without looking at her and she knew he had.

He frigging groped me.

What do you want me to do about it? he said, only it wasn’t a question. He couldn’t do anything.

They lived in a garrison town, although it had not felt like one until 1969, when the troops were sent in; not that the soldiers ever patrolled the streets there. The Laverys met them across the bar, when they were out of uniform. The first few regiments were all right. Then the Paras arrived. They liked to leave reminders. Cigarettes ground out on the carpet, tiles they had peeled from the wall lying broken on the floor of the gents. The day after Bloody Sunday, a group of them came into the bar. Even Fidel and the boys were uneasy in their company and soon there was just Gina and Cushla and the soldiers; her father was too sick to work. Gina sat on the stool, pushing her glass under the optics, watching them. She managed to ignore them until one took a bite from his beer glass, the others egging him on, and spat splinters and blood into the ashtray. Cushla had watched as if it was a horror film as her mother strode across the floor. What English jail vomited you lot up? Gina said, before phoning the barracks; she had rung to complain so often she knew the commanding officer by name. She told him in her telephone voice to remove his men, that they weren’t welcome any more. The military police took them away, but the sight of squaddies in the pub still made Cushla uneasy. Gina had shown her hand.

When she could bear to raise her head the man gave her a smile. His eyes were kind. He had heard everything and she was ashamed, more for Eamonn than herself, and set about tidying the shelves of bottled beer.

Nice view, an English voice said. She glanced in the mirror. The groper was standing at the counter, a banknote in his hand. Behind her, the beer tap gasped, as Eamonn pulled pints for him.

She’s pretending she can’t hear me, the groper said.

Perhaps because you are humiliating her, said Michael. Cushla felt herself turn. He had swivelled on his stool and was facing the soldier, the whiskey resting on his left palm.

Come on, mate. I’m having a laugh, the soldier said, so shrilly he sounded like a whining child.

Humour is most effective when it’s mutual, Michael said.

The groper leaned forward, paused, then drew his neck back in, as if he’d thought better of it. He picked up the three glasses awkwardly and went back to the table, beer dribbling across the floor. Eamonn was staring implacably at the television, but she knew by the set of his chin he felt emasculated. Fidel and the others too looked as if nothing had happened. Who was this man?

She busied herself, wiping, tidying, trying not to look at him. The door banged. The soldiers’ table was empty, a couple of inches of lager left in the bottom of each glass.

The regulars began to slope home. You should get out of here for an hour, Cushla told Eamonn. See the kids before they go to bed.

I don’t want to leave you on your own.

I’ll be fine now.

OK then. Give me a ring if you’ve a problem, he said, and then he was gone.

Michael lit a cigarette and blew the smoke down his nose. Throw another in there please, he said, sliding his glass at her.

She glanced in the mirror as she was pouring his drink. He was watching her. She was emboldened by having her back to him and didn’t look away.

She put the whiskey on the counter. Cushla, isn’t it? I’m Michael. Would you like one yourself? he said, closing his fingers around the tumbler. The room looked better with him in it. Behind him, the shabby lanterns that were fixed to the walls were casting circles of warm light on the teak tables, and there was a squalid opulence about the jade-green tweed that upholstered the banquettes and stools.

I’m teaching in the morning. Thanks, but, she said.

Where do you teach? he said. It was one of those questions that people asked when they wanted to know what foot you kicked with. What’s your name? What’s your surname? Where did you go to school? Where do you live?

I teach P3s in St Dallan’s.

So the children are seven or eight? That’s a nice age.

It is, she said. I had P1s for the first two years. Spent most of my time bringing them in and out to the toilet.

You brought the children to get ashes this morning, he said.

He must have seen her removing them. Eamonn’s irritation with her. Yeah, she said.

I lived in Dublin in my youth, he told her. It’s wall-to-wall Catholics down there, you know. It was said lightly, but he was looking at her so keenly it was a relief when he took his eyes from hers and drank.

I got ashes this morning myself, said Jimmy O’Kane in a loud whisper.

You made a better job of getting rid of them than I did, said Cushla.

A wee taste of Lifebuoy on a dishcloth, said the old man.

Cushla glanced at Michael. His eyes were creased in amusement.

She made a cup of tea and pulled the stool around to face the television. A drama had come on. Helen Mirren was lying on a settee stroking a white cat, while her husband was confronting Malcolm McDowell about sleeping with her. Cushla didn’t know why she would go next or near McDowell, who was skinny and cruel-looking and wearing a prissy blue jumper, when she was married to Alan Bates, who was thickset and brooding. Helen Mirren got up and walked around the room. She was wearing a white shirtwaister. She looked classy. Cushla had on a pink cheesecloth shirt and jeans with a patch that said ‘Push My Panic Button’ sewn on one of the back pockets.

Jimmy finished his pint, bottom lip working at the rim to catch every drop, and, patting his breast pocket gently, shuffled out the door.