The Lost Soldier's Song, page 19
‘You’ve forgotten one thing. If I were Toss Gillespie, I wouldn’t be here.’
‘I like your style. The simple sheep farmer who reads poetry in the evenings. Lieutenant Disley says that your knowledge of sheep farming comes entirely from one book, Far from the Something Crowd. Far from the Maddening Crowd, I think he called it. We know your background, Mr Gillespie. A university man who said goodbye to history books to join the real rebels. Forgive me for finding it amusing. It was your intellectual vanity that let you down.’
Owney was right about Disley being a fox. He’d sprinkled his conversation with literary sprat to catch what he saw as an academic mackerel. Declan knew that he was now Toss Gillespie and that he must face whatever fate lay in store for a Shinner with a thousand pounds on his head.
‘You’ll be pleased to hear that Lieutenant Disley described you as the most civilised Shinner we’ve ever had here. In fact he was surprised that you were a Shinner at all. He gave me strict orders not to send you down. Down to Corporal Cropper, that is. Then blow me down, he undid the lot. “I give you carte blanche,” he said, “to devise an alternative form of rustication.” ’
As he laughed, the front of his trousers heaved like living jelly. He went to the door and spoke sharply to the guards. ‘Take him to the Treacle Room and wait there till I join you.’
‘I’d like to know what happened to my cell-mate,’ Declan said. ‘He was taken away yesterday morning and I haven’t seen him since.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘He never said.’
‘If you find out who he is, I’ll look him up in the records. It’s unlikely that he’s vanished without trace – unless, of course, he’s managed to escape. Come to think of it, there was an attempted escape last night. I must look into it. Quite possibly, he may be one of those who failed to make it.’ He half-smiled at Declan with lips drawn thinly over his teeth. It was impossible to figure out what was on his mind.
The guards marched Declan downstairs to a small windowless room in the basement where a single candle burned on a wall bracket. He looked round and sniffed. The air smelt strongly of urine. The walls were bare except for a black-and-white picture showing two women being burnt at the stake. Then, as his eyes became accustomed to the yellowy light, he noticed a wire cage against the skirting. Inside was a rat with a scrawny body and hairless tail going round and round with its nose down.
‘He must know it’s dinnertime,’ one of the soldiers joked.
‘Rather yours than mine.’ The other pulled a face.
Bruff entered with a bustling air and told them both to wait outside for further orders. ‘You see that rat,’ he said to Declan. ‘It hasn’t eaten for two days.’ He took the candle from its sconce and allowed the hot wax to drip down through the wire into the cage. The rat sniffed the wax as it congealed. Then it began eating it with ravenous abandon.
‘I think you’ll agree it’s peckish,’ Bruff smiled. ‘It will eat anything it can sink its teeth into. If you admit you’re Toss Gillespie, you can forget about the rat. If you continue pretending to be Philip Keegan, you’ll be stripped to the skin and your penis will be painted with treacle. You’ll be tied to the floor with your legs apart and the rat will be released from its cage. For the last time, who are you?’
The sight of the rat chewing the candle wax sent a tremor of horror up his spine. He met Bruff’s eye and rightly or wrongly came to the conclusion that he was bluffing. ‘My name is Philip Keegan,’ he said with an assurance that did not come naturally. Bruff went to the wall and removed the picture, revealing a small window into another room. He looked through the window and turned to Declan. ‘I think this may interest you,’ he said.
Declan looked down into a dimly lit cell. A naked woman was stretched out on the floor with her arms and legs strapped to weights that looked immovable. He could not make out her face because of the gag that covered her mouth and nose but he knew at once that it must be Maureen.
‘She’s in your hands,’ Bruff said. ‘If you don’t own up, the rat will be let loose on her. As you can see, there’s a trap-door in the skirting. When I open it, the rat will escape into the cell.’
He still could not believe that Bruff was being serious and he was convinced that Lieutenant Disley could never be party to such an enormity. Bruff had simply been reading too much schoolboy fiction. This was the kind of torture devised for English heroes by inferior races in the tropics of Empire.
‘A loving husband would have no need to hesitate,’ Bruff sneered.
‘If you must feed your rat on human flesh, I’d rather you fed it on mine.’
Bruff went to the door and ordered the soldiers to take the prisoner back to his cell. ‘I haven’t done with you yet,’ he shouted. ‘You’ll keep till tomorrow. I’ll deal with first things first.’
He was already in his cell when the full horror of the situation dawned on him. He kept seeing the rat with its nose down and Maureen strapped helplessly to the floor. He had put his trust in Disley but his knowledge of Disley’s character and background had come from one conversation. And what if Bruff had decided to exceed Disley’s instructions? He realised that he was trying to avert his gaze from something that had to be confronted. The view he had taken was the one most convenient to himself. What if Bruff should tell Maureen that he had refused to come to her rescue? And if he and Maureen ever met again, would she appreciate the psychological acuity that enabled him to place his trust in men like Bruff and Disley? His thoughts chased one another round in circles. There was no respite from the whirling confusion.
The afternoon dragged itself into evening. He listened for sounds in the corridor as he waited for something to happen, and all the time there was only one image in his mind. Towards dusk the cell door opened and Father Delaney entered stoopingly, carrying his hat by the brim. In a way Declan was relieved to see him. He was sick of waiting, sick of uncertainty. Father Delaney would sit and talk evasively without looking in the condemned man’s direction and then he would go away still carrying his hat by the brim.
‘I thought I’d drop in for a minute or two,’ he said with an effortful smile.
‘I’ve been expecting you. If I may say so, you’re rather late.’
‘You mustn’t jump to conclusions. I’ve had a long day. You’re the last on my list.’
‘You’re a messenger of death, Father. No offence.’
‘Death. Eternal life. I’ve come to give you encouragement. I’ve been here for a year. I know how lonely life in a cell can be.’
He was sitting uncomfortably on McColl’s chair and he shifted his position ever so slightly. He had visited too many prisoners for his own peace of mind. He was a decent man who knew his own limitations as a dispenser of spiritual comfort. One day he would hear the confessions of old women again. ‘Father, I forgot to say my morning prayers.’ Routine would be reestablished. Life would go on, at least for some.
‘Do you ever write to your family?’ the priest asked awkwardly.
‘I keep my family out of this.’
‘I’d be happy to take a message or a letter and see that it gets delivered.’
‘I have no message. My father foresaw all this. He’s a far-sighted man.’
‘And your mother? She must be worried on your account.’
‘She puts her faith in prayer. She prays for me every day.’
‘Do you ever pray yourself?’ As he asked the question, he looked into his hat. His cheeks were smoothly sallow and his thin, brown hair was newly trimmed. His hat-band had left a furrow above each ear, and the ends of the hair rose in a little ridge just below the furrow. It seemed to Declan that their conversation was taking place through a pane of glass that could not be shattered.
‘I prayed for clarity of intellect yesterday. That was an exception. I don’t pray every day.’
‘Would you like to make your confession?’ His voice was unnaturally quiet.
‘I have nothing to confess that I haven’t already confessed to Sergeant Bruff. For some strange reason he didn’t believe me.’
‘Is there even one sin you feel sorry for?’
‘Certainly not gluttony. Here every day is a day of fast and abstinence. I’ll end up in heaven in spite of myself.’
‘I’ll read you a verse or two from The Book of Psalms.’
‘You must have read them too many times before.’
‘They were written for the comfort and encouragement of soldiers. “You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day æ A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand æ no evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent. For he will give his angels charge of you to guard you in all your ways.”’
‘There’s nothing I need fear then,’ Declan said.
‘Nothing,’ Father Delaney assured him, rising to go. He took his stole from his pocket and put it round his neck before saying a blessing. Declan bowed his head in acceptance of the blessing, as it seemed to him that it was sincerely meant. The priest raised his hat somewhat tentatively. Then he was gone, holding his hat by the brim.
Declan turned to the window and thought he saw grains of darkness falling silently as soot in the yard. He was not ready and he knew it. He was too young, too light in being, with no mass of experience to weigh him down. His life was a balloon, flimsy and lightly floating. He wondered if Tom Cronin was still alive. Tom had the gift of being all things to six or seven girls simultaneously. He would cycle fifteen miles to a barn dance and come back with his raincoat over the handlebars at dawn. He could not understand why Declan confined himself to one girl. He said that it was like going to the same river to catch the same trout every day. He did not tell Tom that it was in his nature to concentrate fiercely on one object, to be blind to all but a single pinpoint of light. After Susan had gone, Maureen became that pinpoint, the one brilliant glimmer in a sky of murk. Now he could not think of her without an unsettling sense of guilt.
Imagination was his worst enemy. He tried to expel all images in the hope of obliterating the one image that kept returning. Then he saw Mick Timmony shouting his head off as they prepared to fire. The knack was to wake up strong and empty the mind as you might empty your bladder before going for a morning walk. The firing squad would face an empty shell. Nothing that was essential could be shot. Certain things he would do: walk upright when the time came, walk upright without looking down and without missing a step. He would refuse the blindfold. Again he saw Timmony ranting with a dirty handkerchief knotted over one ear. Even a firing squad had its memories. There was no point in raging. Owney was right. ‘We didn’t like the play, so we put on our own. We got caught in the act, that’s all there’s to it.’
The night was long. If only he could fall asleep, he might wake up warm. Though it was summer, icy fingers explored his stomach. He remembered a cold Good Friday in March and the priest in purple reading from the Passion: St Peter warming himself at a fire lit by soldiers in the courtyard and a maid saying, ‘This man also was with him’. Ever since, he had associated betrayal with cold and yet he could not say whom he had betrayed.
He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, it was already dawn, and he could see the head of a bird outside the window looking in. The bird was sitting on the ledge as if waiting for him to make a move, but he lay on his back in a state of numb paralysis until finally he recognised the striped brown head of a jay. It was light now. He could bear its stare no longer. He sprang off the mattress. The bird rose with a chuckle and somersaulted in front of the window. The shot seemed to come from inside the bird, blowing the wing feathers outwards and upwards as the heavier body fell. From the window he watched the sentry reload. In his frustration he grasped the bars with both hands and pulled and pulled to no avail.
He waited as McColl had waited that morning when they’d both found conversation difficult. The morning wore on and he knew that he must live through yet another day and night. In the afternoon he was taken to the Interrogation Room where Sergeant Bruff was seated behind a desk beaming broadly.
‘Take a seat Mr Osborne. Or should I call you Declan? No, don’t play the innocent. We know about the place you call the Shack. Who was there. Who gave the orders. Soon we may even know where you were born. No, you mustn’t worry. Look at the bright side. You’re a single man again, you don’t have to support a wife called Sheila. Maureen Sheehy is well able to look after herself, I’m sure.’
‘I didn’t say anything and I have no intention of saying anything.’
‘My rat didn’t impress you but it earned its keep, nevertheless. Some people have lurid imaginations. Show them a rat and they lose all sense of proportion. They spill the beans and then put the blame on me. A rat, my dear Osborne, will never attack you unless it’s cornered. But we all have our Achilles’ heel, as Corporal Cropper keeps repeating. Yours is not an overheated imagination but intellectual vanity. You posed as Toss Gillespie just to confuse us, and all the time you were only small fry.’
‘I didn’t pose as anyone. It was you who jumped to conclusions.’
‘Not me, Lieutenant Disley. At least you’ve proved he isn’t infallible, and that gives me a bit of a tickle. You see, he’s classified all Englishmen and he thought he’d classified all Irishmen as well. Mr Osborne, you’ve turned his mathematics arsy-versy. There aren’t two types of Irishmen as he so painstakingly worked out. All Irishmen are Shinners and that about sums it up.’
‘Now that I’m plain Declan Osborne, you’ll be letting me go, I take it.’
‘I don’t think you’re that plain. You’re lucky that Lieutenant Disley took an interest in you. If it was up to me, I’d have you shot.’
Sergeant Bruff inserted a thumb in his belt. He seemed mighty pleased with himself, and Declan thought it wise to say nothing that might cast a shadow over his simple pleasure in what he saw as a job well done.
‘Tomorrow morning you’ll be taken to a better place,’ Bruff continued. ‘With any luck our paths won’t cross again.’ The ring of treacherous ambiguity in his voice pursued Declan back to his cell. A better place æ a far, far better thing æ a far, far better rest. Again he stayed awake, waiting for the dawn. He could not bring himself to believe that Maureen had broken. If it wasn’t Maureen, it must be someone else. And what if she’d been told by Bruff that he’d put his principles before his love for her? He went back over the time he’d spent in prison, putting events in chronological order as a means of discouraging morbid thoughts.
It seemed to him that he had arrived in his present position by a series of jumps from one box to another, with each succeeding box turning out to be smaller than the one before. The only escape route was out through all the other boxes, and he knew that to live history in reverse was to drain all hope from the soul. Finally, it was morning. Then came breakfast and with it the sanity of routine: the ring of boots in the corridor, doors opening and closing, the gruff voices of the guards. After he’d eaten, he found it possible to sleep. At eleven two soldiers came for him. ‘We’re taking you to C-Wing,’ one of them said. ‘It’s time to cut lucky. And you are lucky, let me tell you. No one’s ever been transferred from this cell before.’
Chapter 12
He found himself sharing a cell with two young men from Kerry. He was glad of the company, even though their conversation was grimly fatalistic at times. He met other prisoners in the exercise yard and he did his best to get to know them. In the evening he tried to piece together the scraps of gossip he’d heard during the day. No one knew anything about Maureen. Ganly and Hurley were in B-Wing, and it was said that McColl and four others had been shot one night while attempting to climb out over the wall. A young man from Carrick Colman told him that the Tans had burnt down the Shack and two other houses in the mountains the previous week. They’d discovered some of the arms hides and had taken four men prisoner. He didn’t comment on the news. He thought it best to wait until he’d heard what Ganly and Hurley had to say.
One morning someone whispered the word ‘truce’ in his ear. He was reluctant to place too much faith in gossip. He had already listened to so much conjecture that politics had come to mean less to him than the chirping of sparrows. Suddenly everyone was talking about a ceasefire, though die-hard Republicans remained suspicious of any negotiations. The only thing that would satisfy their imagination was to see the enemy beaten back ignominiously into the sea. It was a highly emotional time. Songs were sung at night, slogans shouted, and poems and ballads recited. As the weeks passed, the excitement turned to high fever. It was said that a ceasefire was now a certainty. The prison gates would be thrown open, they’d all march out into the arms of cheering crowds in the street, and the British would go home after seven hundred years of ‘highly un-British’ misbehaviour.
One morning in early July he was taken to a room in another wing of the prison where Lieutenant Disley was seated behind a leather-topped desk. He rose as Declan entered and stood by the window until the guards had left the room.
‘I’m leaving tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to have a little memento of your stay here.’ He picked up a green-covered book from the desk and handed it to Declan with a smile. ‘Poems of Today,’ he said. ‘You’ll find the best modern poets are there: Laurence Binyon, Walter de la Mare, Masefield and Rupert Brooke. There’s even an Irish poet called W B Yeats.’
It was a book he’d seen before. He’d borrowed Mangan’s copy and from it had learnt ‘Tewkesbury Road’ by heart. He went to page 84 and found ‘It’s good to be out on the road, and going one knows not where’. It was a strange sensation; it could almost have been Mangan’s copy. He felt embarrassed. Nevertheless, he thanked Disley.
‘Pity it had to end like this,’ Disley said. ‘If that handful of hotheads hadn’t seized the General Post Office in 1916, Ireland would be a peaceable country today. Home Rule was on the books. Everything would have been taken care of in its own good time. It’s always ill-advised to upset the natural rhythm of history. It leads to convulsions, explosions, and huffing and puffing on public platforms. Reasonable men are shouldered aside and the wild men get their hands on the steering wheel.’
