*
Pat Millane has been on my mind all night. I was drifting in and out of sleep under the mosquito net and in my half-sleep he would be there, chatting and smiling, with his Galway English and his Aran Irish. Uncanny and unsettling, but welcome, I didn’t scorn to dream of him. Old comrades have odd afterlives in their living comrades’ hearts. He was an ordinary sort of a fella, and yet, extraordinary too, and when that Messerschmitt blew up him and his comrades, and melded them into the blessed aether like a dozen starry angels, it erased a person that was an adornment to the species of man.
His army coffin contained mostly sandbags.
*
Furlough again, happily, because brother Tom had just been elected mayor of Sligo.
Myself and Tom went out for a drink. It was deeply pleasing somehow to see him in his ‘heyday’. Tom has an easy-going soul, it is not difficult to love a man like that, and when he is also your brother, you can feel a lot of pride in the fact. We went to a little cramped bar we wouldn’t usually frequent, just for the privacy of it. It was lovely to order the whiskies and just sit there on the stools, looking at the dirty Guinness bottles on the dusty shelves that passed for a tempting display. And the last valiant light of a late summer’s evening outside – though the light itself was barred, you might think, from entering the dark, unwashed cave, where old Mr Ferriter stood stooped by his cash register.
‘I was talking to Jonno Lynch the other day,’ said Tom.
‘That’s the bowsie put the death sentence on Eneas.’
‘Well, yeh,’ said Tom. ‘True enough. But he’s a town councillor now, you know.’
‘What, in your outfit?’ I said.
‘He’s a very good organiser.’
‘I’ll say,’ I said.
‘Anyway,’ said Tom, ‘he comes over to me, Jonno does, and he leans in, and he says: “We’re hoping for a German win.” That’s all he says, and he winks then. A German win – like the thing was a bloody soccer match. Then he says, “I suppose you’d be in two minds about the war now considering.” “What do you mean?” I said, “if you’re referring to Jack, we’re all hoping he comes back safely, I am sure.” “No,” says Jonno, “I didn’t mean Jack, I meant Eneas. I hear he’s in the British army.” “Well, sure,” I said, “half the blessed world is in the British army. Eneas is just trying to do his bit, I am sure.” “He did his fucking bit for Britain already,” says Jonno. Jonno has an odd way of saying a savage thing humorously, so it takes the insult out of it. This was becoming an uncomfortable talk for me, and I was trying to find a way to get past him. “The RIC were cunts, Tom, cunts,” he says, with that queer vehemence of his. I could see him regretting the swear word a little. “But we’ve nothing against Jack,” says he, as if to mollify things, “sure everyone likes Jack.” “How do you mean?” I said. “There’s no harm in Jack,” he says, like it was one of the sayings in the Bible. And I said, interested enough, you know, because I’d been wondering what sort of stance a fella like Jonno Lynch might take towards you, being in the army and all, “Sure,” I said, “Jack’s only in it to keep his wife in dresses.” “Oh sure, we know that,” says Jonno. And off he went then.’
‘He’s a bowsie,’ I said again.
‘He was very brave in the civil war,’ said Tom, with an unexpected reverence.
Despite trying to keep ourselves out of the way nevertheless a few of Tom’s cronies wandered in. Maybe he had told them to come in later, I didn’t know. Only one of them I knew, McCarthy the champion road-bowler, whose father had been a commandant in the Tan war. He had a head on him like the top of a boggy hill, complete with little streams of sweat.
They talked passionately enough, full of jokes, joshing as always, but the thing I noticed was that they never referred to the war the whole night. I listened to the familiar talk, of land, and marts, and deals, and local scandals – but never the war. Of course they wouldn’t have heard too much about it, the radio said nothing, the newspapers were blank. They had an idea about it no better than a child’s. It was curious to be among them, Tom laughing with them, with the new salt on his talk of personal triumph. The doings of Sligo were paramount, and if ten thousand men had been fastened to the Russian earth by frost and blood, it meant nothing. The war was a word. I had come back from a word and was soon going back to it.
Jack Kirwan had brought Mai to Roscommon to convalesce with him and his new wife. She was back in Harbour House, Maggie restored to her side, and she was in excellent spirits. She was laughing and joking with me in a way that I had almost forgotten. Suddenly she was very supportive about the war.
‘It’s good that one of us is able to do something,’ she said.
She cooked her famous shepherd’s pie for us and the kitchen was spanking clean. It was a great comfort to be with her. She was still a little weak from the pleurisy, but the colour had come back into her face, and although she was drinking gin, she seemed to be going easy at it. I had been intending to present my plan to her for a visit to a drying-out hospital, but I thought she had had enough of hospitals for the moment, and anyway, everything seemed to be going well, and the Saturday morning I was there, she sailed out onto the town with Maggie, and they bought themselves new dresses. She got a Russian coat for Maggie, so she looked like a little general.
My wages were good so she could afford a few luxuries. There was a lot of hardship in the town because so many had left to work in the munitions factories in England, and more and more things were starting to be scarce, and a lot of little businesses had expired. Almost no one knew anything about the war but the effects were being felt nonetheless. It was as if they were living at the far, far edge of an explosion, so far the light of the blast could not be seen. There was nothing of the destruction, the utter cancellation of human things, cities erased, millions set a-wandering on the roads, that there was in Europe and all over the world. When I thought of the tragedy of Singapore . . . It was a different sort of distress, minor, by the by, and I thought they would all be very surprised, regretful and horrified if Hitler ever made it to Sligo. Even though I suppose I might have been angry at the ignorance of my own home town, it had an opposite effect. There was something poignant about it. With my greater knowledge, I felt responsible for their safety. Somehow or other the mechanism of neutrality was one that also engendered love.
Then it was over to the Mam’s to see Ursula and give her whatever little gift I had for her. She was a child who gave good value for anything she was given, in the form of kisses. She was an affectionate, brave little child, all in all. When I left her this time, I felt just a little less that I was abandoning one of my soldiers in a battle zone. Surely everything was looking up, surely the gods were smiling on us again.
Chapter Twenty-two
I don’t know what got into Tom Quaye and myself today but we spent a crazy hour swapping old army songs, ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’, ‘Tipperary’, ‘Do your Balls Hang Low?’ and half a dozen others. Queer how the First World War songs suited just as well in the Second, different though they were. Tom sings about as fine as Count McCormack, or maybe I only think so now because I have nothing to compare it to in this wilderness, except my own croaking.
*
I was making my way along the poorest of roads near the Ishkuman Pass. It was all geology around me, and not for the first time it occurred to me that the crust of the earth was just a sort of grave for creation. I was driving a Willys jeep, through Pathan territory. It was early ’45 and the war still raged on, but up here all was calm and emptiness. The threat of the Russians coming through the passes to get down into India had long receded. The Japanese were in Burma but the whole continent of India lay between me and that, a nightmare Tom Quaye knows so well. There were forces in the North-West Frontier because even places not under threat had to be manned. I was reading my Bengal Lancer and trying to keep my nose clean. Now I was heading over to one of the more remote mountain passes, because I had heard that a secti
on of road had fallen into a ravine, and I was to go and see and make a decision about what should be done. So there was a day’s driving and as I hadn’t the luxury of a batman or a companion I was intending to put up my tent alone in the darkling hills, and was rather looking forward to it, as long as no one and nothing molested me in my isolation. Many miles back, I had come into a Pathan village, and bought some beautiful mulberry wine. It sat in an earthen pot beside me on the passenger seat, wedged in with books and binoculars and my rifle case. I was glad to take a swig now and then as I roared on through the dry air, creating behind me a great dragon of dust.
For an hour now I had seen not a human soul and I was blithely content with my task, enjoying immensely the painterly desolation of the landscape and the foggy effect of the wine. I was humming to myself the tune of ‘When the Lights Are Low in Cairo’, which I knew so well from Roseanne playing it as one of her special pieces in the dancehall. I was thinking again of her extraordinary beauty, and her present trouble. Father Gaunt had done for her rightly, stitched her up, and blackened her name. Poor Tom. There was no lid on his sorrow about Roseanne. She was out in Strandhill this very moment, I supposed, asleep or awake, in the wild wind or the sunlight, even as I drove through all this other wildness and strangeness of the Hindu Kush. How far away seemed Sligo, and yet, how near, how close, and all the spectres and the living of Sligo, those hearts and souls that once I knew.
Thinking these thoughts, I remember so clearly now coming round a rocky corner, where the mountain overhung the road with a massive shelf of granodiorite, the road cut into the rock deep enough to leave clearance at least for a modest lorry, indeed a type of road I had built myself here and there, leaving my anonymous signature on such rather humble work. I came round the corner and found the reported fault which I had been seeking to verify, the section of the road that had given way. It had quite disappeared, and there was just a long shaley slide into the ravine, a fact I could verify to my complete satisfaction, because I went straight into it in the jeep, the little car suddenly veering left, in a second, a splice of a second, and I had just time to curse the good soldiers who had spotted this thing without leaving so much as a makeshift marker for the unwary, or in my case the half-seas-over, before I began the descent into the lower valley, at first rushing along over the gravel, my only witnesses no doubt the cretaceous corals and calcified bivalves here and there multitudinous in the stones, denizens of some ancient sea-floor, with all the wild force of a roller-coaster car in a fairground, the jeep making a screaming noise quite disproportionate to the event, I was thinking, even as my brain surged with fear and shock, and I slammed my foot hard as I could to the brake, as if that would do any good, and then I was chopping through little bushes and altitude-afflicted miniature trees of some kind, the jeep mindlessly swathing and harvesting, and after three hundred feet of this I was ready for my Maker, because suddenly grew the thought that there might be a proper cliff-drop under this, which I foggily remembered from my careless survey of the land ahead. But before I could work up to a proper terror about this, the jeep lurched sideways, and began to turn over and over instead, tumbling and smashing and the engine roaring and the wheels raging, possibly because in my effort to remain in the vehicle I was now also pressing on the accelerator, and how I remained there so long I could not say, there was no strap or belt to keep me in my place, only the steel and canvas roof, and maybe I was churned about there in the space, I must have been, like a piece of rubbish caught in a whirlpool, and then bang, bang, everything stopped, sickeningly, something much stronger than gravel or bush had been encountered, and whatever it was had won the toss, and stopped us, me and the jeep, what was left of it, brutally, completely, and I am not sure if I was conscious then, but I seem to remember being ejected from the jeep skywards, a curious long moment as I made a violent and improper arc through the dry blue air of the North-West Frontier, maybe then striking the ground shoulder first, because when I came to that’s how I was lying, on a broken shoulder, and not able to move an inch, not only because there was no fuel in my body to effect such a thing, but because the jeep was lying across my lower back and legs with all the insouciance and dead weight of a drunkard. I suppose I must allow that that made two of us. Then I blacked out.
After a long time of lying there, I woke. I saw the sun much lower in the sky and indeed beginning to tip the far upland with redness. I was groggy and without pain. Under my cheek was a black stone, which I assumed was the mashed-up gravel from the black phyllites that stood rather weirdly vertical against the hill. I knew somewhere below must be a river but I couldn’t hear it for the perfect silence, deafening in its own way, only broken by the friendly song of birds whose names I did not know.
It was near to darkness and I knew at that time of the year the nights could be cold. I assumed I was done for. For one thing I still couldn’t move my body, and certainly couldn’t free myself of the jeep’s lumpen weight. Even my arms seemed to be trapped, so that really it was only my head was available for movement, just a few inches either way, and the only remotely comfortable position was on my right cheek, though the gravel was sharp. The truth was I was still quite drunk, and Bacchus my doctor. I knew that that would pass away. While I could have made a stab at naming every atom and speck of dust and rock in the valley, it struck me that I knew almost nothing of the fauna of that district, and inevitably the mind in that position wanders to the possibility of animals under cover of darkness going about their business of scavenging and killing in the quiet hills. I had seen porcupines and pheasants along the way, and I struggled to remember what danger a porcupine might pose to a human. Then my mind turned easily and naturally to the topic of snakes, but I managed to stifle that thought, by putting my trust in the fact that the snake is a private and reclusive creature in general. There was at least no danger of me stepping on anything now.
Fear filled me and then seemed to trickle away. There was a sudden clarity in being helpless. There were no plans to make, no routes to draw up, no water to find, no food to cook. Life was cancelled somehow. The burden of my life with Mai was inexplicably lifted. I was going to die. Would there be grief? I wondered would Maggie make her scoffing noise when she heard, as if something entirely unimportant had taken place. And Mai, and Mai? Even as I gazed about me, awkwardly noting the run of the rocks, and puzzling how there were limestone beds so near to granite, and wondering what slow catastrophes of millennia had produced such an absurdity, I was also inwardly trying to understand the story of my marriage. I gazed inwardly upon the spectacle of it. I looked at it and tried to sort and arrange its sequence of epochs. And a bell started to ring in me, a deep-voiced bell, tolling in me with dreadful but forensic meaning. Mai McNulty, her life erased even as she lived it, a sort of Life-in-Death and Death-in-Life – all your fault, tolled the bell, all your fault. That strange day, just before nightfall.
Are there things we do that rescind our humanity, and bring us a death before the real death?
What broke these thoughts was a sudden pain, so fierce it was like an animal separate from myself. It flared in my lower legs somewhere under the jeep, and began to seep up my body.
I must have passed out. Then I opened my eyes and began slowly to be aware of a puzzling sound. I thought it must be water, from higher up the valley, a deluge coming down after unseen rainfall. I listened and listened and thought I could hear not only the river coming but my own blood inside my skin, and I wondered was that it, was it just my own blood in my ears? For some reason it tormented me, not knowing, I supposed I was now half mad, and everything would be disproportionate now, and witless, and without explanation. Like my life, I was thinking, like my bloody life.
Then down the valley, just within my view, came a hundred goats, each one with a bell around its neck, the bells all together making a sound like a river, and in their company a goatherd, a young boy, with loose white trousers, long shift and round felt hat, and a sort of easy, heedless gait, as unbothered as
the goats by the rough way. He gazed on me a few moments as his charges flooded past, then reached into the herd, and grabbed a nanny goat. Holding her by the front legs, he showed me her belly of teats, and with a gesture of his face and eyes asked me if I wanted to drink. Then he knelt closer to me, and though the goat kicked at my shoulders and head, he got a teat to my mouth, and I sucked on it with boundless gratitude.