I poured myself a generous finger of my brother-in-law’s whiskey, then grinned at the health warning printed on the label. “When did they start putting this shit on bottles?”
“About the same time the telephones stopped working.” She gave me the flicker of a smile, a hint of the old Maureen. “You’ve been away too long, Paul. You even sound like a foreigner.”
“I’m back now.”
“To Boston?”
“The Cape. When were you last there?”
“It must be all of four years. His excellency doesn’t approve of my going down there. He takes his Parish friends down if the girl’s not there, but not me.” She drew on the cigarette. I had given Maureen the keys to the Cape house so she could have an escape hatch, but I had never intended Patrick to take the place for his own amusement.
“What does he do there?”
She shrugged. “They play at being men, you know? They lose money at cards, drink beer, and shoot duck in the fall.”
“He won’t be doing it any longer,” I said, “I’m moving back in. Have you seen Johnny Riordan lately?”
She shook her head. “Not for three years. The last time he came here Patrick picked a fight with him. It didn’t come to blows, but they fair shouted the tar out of each other, and Johnny hasn’t visited with us since.”
“What was the row about?”
She sighed. “The usual, you know?” She explained anyway. “Patrick had just got back from Ireland, so he was sounding off about the Brits. How they were worse than the Nazis, and Johnny wouldn’t take him seriously.”
“Patrick went to Ireland!” I could not hide my astonishment.
“The Friends of Free Ireland arranged the trip. They had one week in Dublin and one week in Belfast. Father Shea went from Holy Redeemer, and Michael Herlihy travelled, of course, and some young fellow from the Congressman’s office went with them. Patrick was full of himself when he got back. He was ready to fight England single-handed! I wish to hell he would sometimes. So now he’s on the committee. A big man, he is, and busy! He’s planning wars against England when he isn’t drinking whiskey or losing money on the horses.” She lit another cigarette from the stub of the first. “Are you really moving back home?”
“Yes.”
“And with a sack of troubles.” She was silent for a few seconds and the smoke of her new cigarette rose in a smooth column that suddenly tumbled into chaos a few inches above her hair. “Is it a woman?”
I shook my head. “I lost my last girlfriend. She reckoned I’d never make her rich so she went off with a Frenchman.”
“Good for her. What happened to that girl you were sweet on in Ireland?”
“She died.”
“Poor thing.” Her right hand sketched the sign of the cross. “Be careful, Paul.”
“I always am.”
She grimaced. “Is it drugs again?”
“I’m long out of that.”
“I’m glad, Paul. That was a cruel business. So what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll buy a fishing boat? Run after the tuna? I hear the Japanese buyers wait at the Cape wharves to buy fresh tuna. Cash on the nail, ten or even fifteen bucks a pound and no questions asked. I could make a good living with a tuna boat.”
“Sure you could, sure.” Maureen knew all about dreams that never came true. She was probably the expert.
I picked up my bag and went to the door. “You say Patrick’s at the Parish?”
“All day. I wish he’d stay there all night, too.” She got to her feet, walked to me, and put her arms round me. She said nothing, but I sensed she was crying inside, but whether at her wasted life or whether for relief at my homecoming I could not tell.
I drew back slightly and very gently touched the raw, yellow edged bruise beside her right eye. “Did Patrick do that?”
“No, it was Mother Teresa who hit me. Who the hell do you think did it?”
I kissed her. “Look after yourself,” I said, then I looked up and saw that Terence had come to the kitchen door from where he was staring aghast at us. I guess he had never seen anyone show affection to his mother and he was consequently in culture shock. I gave him the finger. “She’s my sister, punk.”
“Where are my trainers, Mom?”
“I’ll look for them, honey.” She pulled away from me.
“And you said you’d get me some soda, right? And these chips are stale.”
I let the door bang shut and walked fast away.
The hall was always called ‘the Parish’, though in fact it was not the parish hall at all, but belonged to one of Boston’s many fraternal orders who were happy for their big brick building to serve as a church hall, a social club, and as a meeting place where the local Irish community could vent its joys, sorrows and political indignations. During the hunger strikes, when the IRA men were dying inside Long Kesh, the Parish had been the scene of passionate gatherings, just as it had in the mid ’70s when Boston’s bussing crisis had turned the city into a battleground and the men of the neighbourhood had sworn that not a single black child would ever cross their local school’s threshold. That battle had long been lost, but the older struggle went on, evidenced by two enthusiastic slogans which were hugely painted in green letters on the Parish’s side wall. ‘Brits Out of Ireland’ and ‘Support the Provos!’ the slogans read and were supported on either flank by gaudily painted arrangements of Irish tricolours, harps, and assault rifles.
The other enthusiasm of the Parish was sport, which meant basketball, and specifically the Celtics. The Parish was where men came to watch the Celts on a giant TV projection screen, and when the Celts were playing even the politics of old Ireland took second place.
Yet, that Sunday, when I pushed through the Parish door, there was no basketball on the big screen. Instead the crowd was watching a news channel. The land war in the Gulf had at last begun, and Saddam Hussein’s mother of battles was being joined on the sands of western Iraq. “We’re kicking ass!” a man I had never seen before greeted me ebulliently. “We are kicking ass, you bet! Kicking ass!”
I pushed through to the bar. The place was crowded and noisy, filled with smoke and the smell of beer. I glanced round, saw no sign of Patrick, so instead cocked a finger towards Charlie Monaghan behind the bar. Charlie stopped what he had been doing, stared at me, looked away, struck his head, looked back, grinned, then abandoned his customers to march down the bar with an outstretched hand. “Oh, Mother of God, but is it yourself, Paulie?” He reached across the bar to embrace me. “I thought it was a ghost, so I did! Paulie! It is you, is it not?”
“It is. How are you?”
“I’m just grand! Just grand! No complaints, now. Have you been hearing the news? We’ve been kicking ten kinds of shit out of the shitheads. And I’m not talking about Iraq, I’m talking about the basketball, so how will you celebrate it?”
“Give me a Guinness.”
“It’s on the house, Paulie.” He let his assistants take care of the other customers while he gave me the vital news that Larry Bird had recovered from the operation on his heel and was running, as Charlie Monaghan put it, like a buck deer in the springtime. “He’s playing like a hero! Like a hero! And last year they were saying he’d never step on the parquet again, not with his foot and being thirty-three and all, but now the other teams are having to double-guard him. Can you imagine that, Paulie? Double-teaming Larry Bird! It’s just like old times, Paulie!” Charlie had grown up in Letterkenny, County Donegal, yet to hear him talk about the Celts was to think he had lived his whole life in the shadow of Boston Garden. “I tell you, Paulie,” he went on, “but we’re going to be world champions this year, no trouble at all!”
I managed to check the ebullient flow long enough to ask where I would find Patrick.
“Patrick Ewing? He’s playing for the Knicks these days, but surely you knew that, Paulie?”
“Not that Patrick. I mean my brother-in-law.”
“Oh, Padraig?
That’s what he calls himself these days. Patrick’s not good enough for him. It’s Padraig or nothing, so it is.” Charlie laughed, and no wonder, for using the Gaelic form of his name was an extreme affectation for a man like my brother-in-law who could barely speak his own language, let alone the Erse tongue. “He’s in the snug,” Charlie went on, “but he’s busy, so he is.” The snug was a back room of the Parish, much given to private business.
“Busy doing what, for Christ’s sake?”
Charlie scraped the head off the Guinness with a knife, topped up the glass, then slid it across the bar. Then, with a conspiratorial wink, he touched the side of his nose with the frothy blade. “He’s got Tommy the Turd in there.”
“The Congressman?” I sounded astonished.
“Aye! The cretin who wanted to give Saddam Hussein a whole year to get his army ready. Too dumb to succeed but too rich to fail.” A columnist in the Boston Globe had delivered that scathing verdict on Tommy the Turd and it had stuck like a hook in a cod’s gill, but the congressman’s scatological nickname had inadvertently been invented by Charlie himself who, with his lovely southern Irish accent, turned every soft ‘th’ sound into a hard ‘t’. Thus ‘thus’ became ‘tus’, ‘three’ became ‘tree’, and House Representative Thomas O’Shaughnessy the Third had forever been transmuted into Tommy t’ Turd.
And Tommy the Turd was now in conference with my brother-in-law? “Good God,” I said. For however dumb Congressman O’Shaughnessy might be, he was still mighty exalted company for Patrick McPhee. Thomas O’Shaughnessy the Third was a thousand-toilet Irish, a Boston aristocrat whose family was one of the richest in Massachusetts. Tommy’s grandfather, Tommy O’Shaughnessy Senior, had been an immigrant from County Mayo who had made his fortune in cement manufacture. Tommy’s father had more than doubled the family’s wealth but, fearing for the company’s profits if his son ever took over the family business, Tom O’Shaughnessy Junior had purchased Thomas the Third a seat in the House of Representatives instead. Rumour had it that the safe Boston constituency had cost the family well over eight million dollars, but at least they had put Tommy the Turd where he could do no direct damage to the cement profits. “So what in the name of God is Tommy doing here?” I asked Charlie.
“Plotting, of course.”
“Plotting what?” The Guinness was far too cold, but that was something I would have to learn to live with now I was home again.
Charlie leaned across the bar and lowered his voice. “You know Seamus Geoghegan?”
“Of course I know Seamus. We’re old friends.”
“Well, you know he’s right here in Boston? And that the Brits are trying to extradite him? They failed at their first try, but now they’re having another go in an appeal court. So we need money to defend him.”
“We being the Friends of Free Ireland?” I guessed, remembering that my brother-in-law was now an official of that group.
“You got it, Paulie. Patrick’s on the committee of the Friends now, so he is. Michael Herlihy really runs it, of course, but Michael needs someone to tally up the cash and keep the membership list in order, and Patrick volunteered after he visited Ireland. Did you hear about that? Jasus, but Patrick came back from Belfast with steam coming out of his ears and there’s nothing he won’t do for Ireland these days.” Charlie chuckled and settled his elbows on the bar ready for the pleasure of telling a good story. “Last September he even hired a bus and drove a whole party of us down to Meadowlands in New Jersey. Two British Army bands were putting on a show in the Brendan Byrne Arena, and Patrick had the bright idea of slashing the tyres of all the cars in the parking lot. When we reached the place he told us it was a blow for a free Ireland, so it was, but the moment a police cruiser came by, Padraig was running faster than loose shit off a hot shovel!” Charlie laughed. “Mind you, if you listen to him tell the tale now you’d think we won half the battle for Ulster that same night.”
“So now he’s touching Congressman O’Shaughnessy for Seamus’s legal aid?”
Charlie nodded, then held up a warning hand as he saw me turning to leave. “But he says he doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
“To hell with that. He’s family, isn’t he? You think he won’t want to welcome me home?” I winked at Charlie, picked up the Guinness and my sea-bag, and went to the snug.
There were five of them in there. Two were strangers, but I knew the other three well enough. There was Patrick himself, Tommy the Turd and, to my surprise, though I should not have been surprised at all, the bright boy of Derry, Seamus Geoghegan himself.
“Who the fuck…” Patrick started to protest when I pushed through the door, then he recognised me and his jaw literally fell open.
I dropped my sea-bag at the door. “Patrick. Congressman,” I greeted them with a nod apiece, then smiled at Seamus. “Hey, you bastard!”
“Paulie!” He stood, grinning, arms spread. “Paulie!” He came round the table and embraced me vigorously.
“Watch my fucking Guinness, you ape!” I protested at his greeting.
“You’re in dead trouble, you know that?” He whispered the urgent words in my ear, then stepped back and raised his voice. “You’re looking grand, so you are! Just grand.”
“And yourself,” I said, then placed what was left of my Guinness on the table. “How are you doing, Patrick? Or is it Padraig now?”
“We’re in executive session here,” he said very pompously.
“Fock away off,” I said in my best Belfast accent. Tommy the Third looked vaguely worried, but that was his usual expression for the Congressman had always gone through life with only one oar in the water. “You remember me, Congressman?” I asked him.
“Of course,” he said, though he did not use my name, which suggested he did not know me from George Washington. “Might I introduce Robert Stitch?” Tommy went on with his customary politeness. He used courtesy as a defence against cleverness, and it worked, for he had a reputation, especially among women, of being an appealingly well-behaved and well-brought-up boy. “Robert is one of my Congressional aides,” he explained now.
Stitch was pure Boston Brahmin, a young codfish aristocrat, who offered me a curt unfriendly nod. He was reserving further judgment till he knew whether I would be a help or a hindrance to his cause.
“And that’s my lawyer, my solicitor like.” Seamus jerked his head towards a wild-haired, bearded and bespectacled man who stood and held out his hand.
“I’m Chuck Sterndale,” the lawyer said with a smile, “it’s good to meet you, whoever you are.”
“I’m Paul Shanahan,” I said.
“Paulie was with me in Belfast, so he was,” Seamus told the room happily. “The first time I did a runner from Derry and the fockers were all over my backside, Paulie put me up in his flat. We had a grand time, didn’t we, Paulie?”
“We had good crack.” I used the old Belfast expression.
“It was good crack, right enough.”
“You’re Irish, Mr Shanahan?” Stitch asked cautiously.
“By ancestry, but I was born not a mile away from this room, but unlike some I can mention I actually went to Ulster to do my bit for the cause. Of course, I know that slashing tyres in the New Jersey Meadowlands advances the struggle gloriously, but it’s not quite the same as pulling a trigger in Belfast.”
That got to Patrick, as I had meant it to. “What the fuck do you know?” His mouth was half full of potato chips that sprayed out across his beer glass as he bellowed at me. “I was in Belfast three years ago, and I fought when I was there! I did my bit! I got beaten up by the fucking Brits! You want to see the fucking scar?” He jerked up his left sleeve where a barely discernible white scratch showed against his Erin Go Bragh tattoo.
“Oh, that’s terrible!” I mocked him. “What happened, Patrick? Oh no! Don’t tell me you mugged another Salvation Army girl?”
“Fuck you!” He scooped up a handful of chips that he crammed into his mouth as if to show that he had nothing more to
say to me. A cigarette was burning in a full ashtray beside him.
Tommy the Turd raised a pacifying hand. “I can vouch for Mr McPhee’s story. Mr Stitch was with Mr McPhee on that day and he will testify that they suffered a clear case of unprovoked British brutality; clear, unprovoked, and blatant.”
“So what happened, diddums?” I asked Patrick.
Patrick glared at me while he tried to decide whether or not to indulge my curiosity, but immodesty got the better of him. “I had a meeting arranged, right? Me and Mr Stitch were personally invited to meet with some soldiers of the Provisionals. Fellows like Seamus here, the real heroes of Ireland! They wanted a chance to thank us for our support. They’re good fellows, they are, good fellows. So we were told to go to this abandoned house in Ballymurphy, and we went there in broad daylight, broad daylight! Just me and the Congressman’s aide, and you’ll never believe what happened! Never!”
“Clear, unprovoked, blatant brutality,” Tommy the Turd interjected solemnly.
Seamus winked at me while Robert Stitch, who seemed a good deal less proud of the war story than Patrick, stared at the table. “So tell me what happened,” I invited Patrick.
“There must have been a security lapse,” Patrick said, “because we hadn’t been waiting more than five minutes, not five minutes, and the IRA soldiers hadn’t even had time to arrive, when a British patrol came to the house. They knew we were there all right! They shut off the back entrance and attacked through the front. Attacked! Isn’t that the right word, Mr Stitch?”
“They rushed the house,” Stitch said gravely.
“They didn’t ask who we were,” Patrick said indignantly, “they just attacked!”
“Blatant, unprovoked, clear brutality,” Tommy the Turd assured me. Stitch visibly winced.
Patrick shook his head modestly. “We fought back, of course. We were just defending ourselves, nothing more, but I tell you, those Brit bastards won’t forget meeting Padraig Aloysius McPhee of Boston, no sir! But there were too many of them, just too many.”