Two steps before me in the procession, the Countess swings her hips like she knows I’m watching, her arse bobbing like a Halloween apple begging me to take a bite out of it. She and I are the only ones here in the full uniform of the Irish Citizen Army, and we look splendid. Most of our lads make do with a scrawny red sash because they’re too dirt poor to afford a uniform, or because there are men with guns in this town who’d shoot them for wearing one, but we can afford it and we’re safe here, now, in this admiring crowd. Up ahead the Volunteers are singing God Save Ireland said the herooooooes, God Save Ireland said they all, and beside me Bob Sweeney roars out our own version about God doing the same for Big Jim Larkin.

‘There must be quarter of a million here,’ says Bob between choruses. They’re saying the back of the funeral was still at O’Connell Bridge while we were at Glasnevin for the burial, three miles away.

‘Half a million. Or a million. Always revise numbers up. Be sure the peelers will revise them down,’ I say.

He rolls his eyes, but who knows how many people are here? There are flags everywhere. Golden harps on emerald green. Green, white and orange tricolours. Eamonn Carr with our Starry Plough. One stalwart fellow with a banner of deepest red in his clenched fist. All the unions are here. The Gaelic Leaguers. Sinn Féin. The women’s leagues. Jesus, the Boy Scouts. The Dublin Fire Brigade: engines and carriages and blue-coated firemen. The bloody Lord Mayor of Dublin. How many of them had even heard of Tom Ashe eighteen months ago? They all want a piece of his martyr’s bones now. Look at them all, snaking piously along the streets behind the mournful musicians and a hundred fucking priests. I spit.

‘We’re going up to Monto later, all the unmarried boys. You coming?’ says Bob. Eamonn Carr nods enthusiastically.

Pair of jackeens, all bluff and bluster. The Countess glances over her shoulder and catches me looking at her arse again. Her so-called husband away in Bohemia or wherever the hell these past five years while she’s slumming it with the socialists. She must be nearly fifty but I definitely still would. The Monto whores have nothing to teach posh girls, honest to God they don’t. ‘What sort of a socialist colludes in the exploitation of working-class women?’ I say.

‘All right, misery guts, just trying to be friendly.’

I see a flash and I’m blind. ‘Mr Lennon, Edgar Andrews, Irish Times. Does your presence here today indicate the Irish Citizen Army and the labour movement generally supports the prisoners’ campaign for political status?’ asks some beanpole. ‘What do you make of reports from Dublin Castle this afternoon that the Executive is to concede the demands of the Sinn Féin prisoners?’ I’m just trying to get my vision back. I see his starched white shirt, boater hat, bright white rose on a tailored lapel. Another fellow, with him, more throughother-looking, shouldering a portable camera. Smoke rises from the light bulb.

‘You nearly blinded me with that thing, pal.’

But he’s all persistence. ‘What do you make of the force-feeding of the hunger strikers, Mr Lennon?’

‘You’ve got the wrong man.’

He retreats looking sceptical, but we’re at Amiens Street, within staggering distance of the pubs the journos live in, the lazy toadies, so they’re coming like locusts now. There’s a fellow talking to the Countess. Indo, probably – not as well turned-out as the fellow from The Times. No white rose. Another fellow confers with the photographer who almost blinded me. That suit was probably decent in its day. A Freeman’s Journal suit, I’d say.

‘What’s your name, sir?’ asks another fellow in a soft felt hat with a press card in the ribbon. Looks like he slept last night in a pub or a brothel or the street. Or all three. Herald, no question.

‘You can fuck off and tell your boss he can fuck away off too.’

I don’t suppose he’ll pass the message on to Mr William Martin ‘Murder’ Murphy but it feels good to say it.

As we pass Amiens Street station I feel a hand squeeze my shoulder and turn to see Dick Mulcahy, the wiry bastard. An hour ago he was in uniform firing the graveside salute but he’s back in his civvies now.

‘Come with me, there’s a man wants to talk to you.’

Just as perfunctory as that. I haven’t seen him in ten months, since they released us from Fron Goch, and not even a hello. I haven’t missed those dead eyes.

We slip out of the procession, unnoticed in the clamour, and climb the steps into the station, beneath the great clock on the wall showing five bells. Up the platform, Dick exchanges nods with a porter who doesn’t ask for tickets, and another uniformed railwayman turns away and pretends to see nothing as we slip into the first-class carriage. Someone in the distance shouts my name but Dick pushes me aboard the train before I can look around. There’s a man in the hallway with his hand inside his coat. He sees Dick and nods. He opens the door behind him. Leather upholstered seats, silk curtains, deep-pile carpet, mahogany and brass everywhere, every man with his own ashtray. The train starts its click-clacking way. Arthur Fox and Mick Collins and Bat McClatchey look up.

‘First Class? Some revolutionaries you are.’

Mick smiles. ‘We meet wherever we can. There aren’t many safe places to meet these days, Victor.’

Bat McClatchey I’m not surprised at. We’re from the same county, he and I, and I have to say I like him, mainly for that reason, but politically, well: I expect to be fighting against him in the real revolution to come after this one. Big nationalist, big Catholic and every bit as reactionary as all that sounds. But Arthur Fox I am surprised at. Arthur’s one of us. He’s one of the Gardiner Street silk weavers, one of the men who helped organise the Citizen Army. Arthur saw real action in South Africa and he flattened more peelers during the lockout. Thank God for him during the Rising, telling Mike Mallin to retreat to the College of Surgeons away from the turkey-shoot on the Green. Thank God our army had a few actual soldiers as well as bad poets.

‘I saw you got your photograph taken there. That was careless, boy,’ says Mick in that sing-song accent of his.

‘That fellow from the press? He said he was a reporter from The Times.’

‘It just so happens he was telling the truth, but you didn’t know that. The one with the camera was a G-man, down from the Castle. Fuckers stand out like blood in the snow. You shouldn’t be letting anyone take your picture.’

I’ve better things to do than stand here being lectured by some lilting sleveen from West Cork. He’s younger than me for Christ’s sake. I always pegged him for an eejit to be honest. But he cleaned up at cards in Fron Goch. Maybe that was his secret. Six foot plus and you never saw him coming.

‘We need you to go on a trip for a few days. But we need to be sure you’re committed,’ he says.

‘I’m committed to a Marxian republic, not some Fenian gombeen version of what we have already.’

‘Victor, you’ve been letting that mouth of yours run away with you too much lately. You’ve been drawing attention to yourself. It has to stop,’ says Dick Mulcahy.

‘Don’t give me orders, Dick, I’m Citizen Army, not a Volunteer.’

‘I’m Citizen Army and I say that’s no longer a meaningful distinction,’ says Arthur.

‘Arthur, these altar boys want to change the flag and nothing else and you know it.’

‘Jesus, but youse socialists are a barrel of laughs,’ says Mick, with all the usual aggressive collegiality, but Dick Mulcahy grabs me roughly.

‘Damnit, Lennon, if we want freedom we need a revolution and for revolution we need bloody fierce-minded men who don’t care a scrap for death or bloodshed. A real revolution is not a job for children or for saints or scholars.’ He lets go of me. ‘Like I keep saying, in a revolution any man, woman or child who is not with you is against you. Shoot them and damned to them,’ he says to Mick. ‘This fellow is too soft for our purposes.’

‘You’re being too hard on him, Dick,’ says Mick. He’s watching me closely, reading me. I keep looking at Arthur. Yes, it’s him I’m surprised at.

‘Connolly himself said there’s no more Irish Volunteers, no more Irish Citizen Army, only the Irish Republican Army. I’m sick of losing. These lads have a plan that might work,’ Arthur says.

‘Can you be trusted to follow orders?’ says Mick. He knows Bat has already approached me. He knows I’ve already wriggled out of taking the secret oath of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. They only want political revolution, but I’ve been shouting from the rooftops that without social and economic revolution, it’s a waste of time. I don’t suppose they like it. Besides, virtually every IRB man I know is a fucking prick. But I can’t really say that to these lads.

The train is slowing, I’m guessing we’re approaching Harcourt Street. Mick peeks out under the bottom of the drawn blind, and seems suddenly impatient. ‘You were at the GPO and Fron Goch, fair enough, but that isn’t enough any more. Go to Phil Shanahan’s and wait, there’ll be someone to meet you there later. Go straight there now, no detours.’

‘I’ll need to go home and change out of the uniform.’

Bat pulls down a suitcase from the overhead compartment. It’s my suitcase. He tells me he stopped by my room earlier and picked up some things. ‘Sorry about your door.’

‘You’ll be at Shanahan’s,’ says Dick, wearing a look that makes clear it’s not a question. For now, it’s easier just to agree with them. I nod.

‘Good man,’ says Mick.

Dick Mulcahy shows me out onto the marbled platform of Harcourt Street station. I’m on the plush, loyalist south-side now. Not such a smart place to be wearing this damn uniform. I straighten my sloped green hat, keep an eye out for peelers, and make for the nearest public toilets to get changed. Back in the civvies, I’m stepping out of the jacks when I hear someone shout my name. I turn and I see a face from another lifetime.

Charlie Quinn.

He’s older. Skinnier. His hair used to be an auburn thatch but it’s thinner and greyer now. He’s still handsome in a country sort of way. He sports a Kitchener moustache and he’s walking with a hell of a limp. He lurches forward and throws his arms around me. ‘I’ve been in Dublin for days looking for you,’ he says. ‘I knew you’d be at the funeral.’

He feels slight and bony. Charlie comes from shopkeepers, he should be pink and fat and boyish like his da, but he looks older than a docker of his age, and dockers age the quickest. ‘Was that you shouting my name back in Amiens Street?’

‘I followed you onto the train. I didn’t think you’d heard me.’

‘I wasn’t sure I did.’

He smells of ointment but beneath that there’s something else, something like you’d smell in a butcher’s specialising in offal on the turn. It’s like the smell of Connolly in those last hours at our little Alamo on Moore Street, when there was nothing left to do but ensure the surrender was worded properly before the ceiling came in around us. Two days after a ricochet ripped into his ankle. Two full days of agony and morphine, and he was laughing and crying at the same time, like only someone hopped-up to the eyeballs can. Charlie is holding a thin wooden cane against his left leg; he lifts the cane and gives it a little tap against his left shin. The sound of wood on wood. He smiles bravely.

‘The doctors tell me I should wear this prosthetic all the time, but to tell you the truth, I hardly ever do. It chafes something terrible. Could have been worse. At least I kept the knee.’

‘What happened?’ I say, but I see his greatcoat and the little patches of wool darker than the rest, where regimental insignia have been stripped off.

‘Shell fell right on top of us. I was lucky, really.’

‘King and fucken country, Charlie? How could you be so stupid?’

He waits till I exhale, so he knows I’m finished. Not the best way to start a conversation with an old friend, I confess. ‘I’ve come to bring you home,’ he says. ‘It’s your da, Victor, he needs you.’ Charlie lifts his hand in a drinking gesture. ‘Worst I ever seen.’

‘My da isn’t the sort of man would be taking advice from me,’ I say. It’s the most unexpected thing, and I’m trying not to show it, but I feel like I’ve been waiting a long time for this invitation.

‘Och, Victor, don’t be like that. Everything is forgot about now.’

‘I haven’t forgot nothing.’

Stanislaus let himself in the front door and found Mrs Geraghty waiting in the hall, clutching a telegram in her fist. ‘Jeremiah just delivered it. It’s from Dublin, Father,’ she said, half breathless.

‘Thank you, Mrs Geraghty,’ he said, and started up to his study, leaving her disappointed at the bottom of the stairs. He stopped halfway up. ‘I’m sorry to keep repeating myself, but the correct form of address for a bishop is Your Grace.’

‘I thought that was only for proper bishops?’

‘An auxiliary bishop is a proper bishop.’

In his study Stanislaus set the little post-office envelope on his desk beside the newspaper he hadn’t yet read and sat down. He picked up the telegram, sliced it open, then set it down again. Unready. He looked around the bulging bookshelves that lined three walls of the room. They made the place claustrophobic. He turned the chair around, as he always did, to the window, which commanded a view straight down the middle of Madden village. The chapel, the graveyard, National School, Parochial Hall, post office and Poor Ground; all the comings and goings were under his gaze. He could almost see into the terraced homes of his parishioners. The women were indoors, the men were in the fields, the children were at school. Red flags fluttered from homes and telegraph posts, and bunting crisscrossed the street, but aside from that, things were mostly right with Madden. He looked again at the telegram. Whatever it contained, it was bound to vex him. He picked up the newspaper instead.

ULYANOV ‘LENIN’ DECLARES RUSSIA ‘WORKERS’ STATE’

He threw it down again. Once, this had been his favourite time of day. Morning mass finished, pastoral visits done, he’d have an hour to look out the window and read the paper. The symmetry of keeping one eye on his parish and the other on the events of the world pleased him. But since the war, there had been nothing but bad news, and it was all Russia these days. There was no pleasure left in his ritual. He was no monarchist and did not miss the tsar – a king who couldn’t feed his people didn’t deserve to be a king – but these Bolshevists … Ulyanov had said the events last Easter gave an example to be followed and it seemed Dublin last year had its sequel in Petrograd this year.

The clock chimed four. Father Daly, the curate, came in the door like an unbroken colt and said Mrs Geraghty had told him of the telegram. Stanislaus nodded and the curate picked it up, his fringe flopping over his forehead as he opened it. He set it back on the desk, text facing up. Stanislaus couldn’t help but see it now.

VL arrive 10 o’clock train STOP

Need transport from station CQ STOP

‘So he’s coming then,’ said Father Daly. ‘Do you think he’ll be able to get his father back on the straight and narrow?’

‘We must hope so.’

They had given up any hope that Pius Lennon might sort himself out. Stanislaus called often but the door was never answered. Pius’s life seemed to revolve entirely around poteen; a lamentable state for a man formerly so substantial. He had taken to wandering the parish at all hours of day and night, flaming drunk, with a bottle in one hand and a loaded shotgun in the other. Not long ago he wandered up the street while the school-children were on their break, scattering them in terror. The postman Jeremiah McGrath said he remembered when Pius Lennon first came to the parish to marry his Deirdre, before he became the respected pillar that Stanislaus knew. Jeremiah said people were right to be terrified of Pius.

‘His method is different but I fear Pius is going the same way as his wife,’ said Stanislaus.

Pius owned several hundred acres in the east of the parish and Madden’s economy had long depended on the Lennon land. Pius had started his drinking after his Deirdre’s death. They said Deirdre had been the belle of the county in her day, but when Stanislaus knew her, that had been hard to credit. He’d had no choice in refusing her a funeral or burial. Church teaching was clear and unequivocal. The drinking accelerated as each of Pius’s children left, one by one, till they were all gone. Now he lived reclusively, letting his land go to ruin, and no longer offered work to anyone. So Stanislaus had compiled a list of the Lennon children and all the places to which they had emigrated, and wrote to the Cardinal’s office for church contacts in each place. The reply came quickly. It seemed he still drew some water in Armagh. He wrote to parishes and dioceses around the world and, over several months, the replies came. Stanislaus was flattered that some of his colleagues in far-flung places had heard of him and were familiar with his work. They were keen to assist. He got addresses for all but one of the fifteen Lennon children. Of the fourteen, he knew the Sarah girl was only thirty miles away at the Monastery of St Catherine of Siena, but he would not interfere with her vocation. The fifteenth name he circled in red ink. He had no address for that one. It would be a last resort even if he did have one. He sent out thirteen letters.

Dear Mr/Miss Lennon,

I write out of concern for your father, Pius, who I must inform you, has succumbed to the evil of drink. His maintenance of the land and his spiritual and physical wellbeing are of concern to all in the parish, and though we have attempted to divert the self-destructive course on which he is set, it is my pastoral experience that only family can save a man in times of moral despond.

I beg that you return home and care for your father, or failing this, that you ensure another of your siblings can do so.

Yours in Christ,

Most Rev S. Benedict, Bishop Emeritus

Six, seven, eight months passed. Jeremiah McGrath assured him nothing was wrong with the long-distance mail, even with the war, and slowly Stanislaus came to accept that there would be no replies. The name circled in red ink rebuked him. The Victor fellow had left Madden boasting of Brooklyn or Botany Bay, but everyone knew he was in Dublin since his name had appeared in the margins of the press during the industrial unrest. He had been a minor figure, not a Larkin or a Countess Markievicz, and Stanislaus had denounced Larkin’s union from the pulpit, as per the Cardinal’s policy, but he knew the parishioners had a sneaking regard for ‘their’ Victor. When their Victor joined the insane adventure of Easter week, sneaking regard flowered into strident pride. No-one from Madden had ever been famous before.

Victor’s best friend Charlie Quinn had volunteered to go to Dublin to find him. Stanislaus asked Charlie whether he thought Victor would agree to come home. Charlie said he didn’t know. What he was willing to predict, though, was that Victor would still be every bit as angry as he was the day he left Madden. Stanislaus was discomfited to think of the rage-filled boy coming back into his life a full-grown man. He pushed the newspaper across the desk under Father Daly’s nose and pointed to the Ulyanov headline.

‘This is the kind of man we’re talking about. A bolshevist, you know,’ he snapped.

‘He can’t be that bad if he was with Connolly, God rest him,’ said Father Daly.

‘Connolly was a communist.’

‘Only in life. No-one will remember that whole communist thing in the long run.’

Stanislaus got up from his desk. He had no intention of debating with a guileless liberal not five minutes out of the seminary. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said. He went downstairs, opened the door and pulled on his coat as he strode out the gate into the street. He grimaced at the red bunting and flags as he passed under them. Otherwise good parishioners openly disobeying his injunction – and the Cardinal’s – against Gaelic games. They’ll all be thrilled when they hear of their Victor Lennon’s return, he thought. He whispered a prayer for the peace of the parish.

It’s your stick. You found it. It’s the best stick you’ve ever seen: three feet long, thick but pliable enough to bend double without cracking. Your brothers are jealous of it. Charlie’s jealous of it. Even Maggie’s jealous of it, and she’s a girl. You use it to hunt, to fish and a hundred other things. It’s yours, and the bastard thinks he can just take it. Phelim Cullen. You know the name. Everyone does. He’s three years older than you, looks like he’s nearly six foot, fifteen and out of school with the cigarette to prove it. He tells you to go away, stop pestering him. You are far from home, five or six miles at least, in his parish to watch the Madden footballers take another hammering. It’s his parish and he says he’s keeping your stick. He’s laughing but he’s threatening to lose his good humour any second. But it’s your stick and he can’t have it, no matter what.

‘You rotten thieving bastard.’

His expression darkens and he swings the stick at you with a terrifying whoosh. Last warning. Christ but he’s a vicious bastard. Charlie and Maggie are looking at you with pleading, terrified eyes.

‘If you don’t hand over the stick I won’t be responsible for what happens to you.’

The crowd gathered around winces as his open palm cracks loudly against your cheek. A slap in the face. Wouldn’t even dignify you with a closed fist.

Well, you’ll dignify him with one.

He doesn’t see it coming. Not in a million years did he think you’d do it. He’s stunned, and he’s not the only one. Your fist opens his nose like a knife through a feed sack. You swing again and again and the blows land again and again, till he drops your stick and flees like a beaten dog. You pick up your stick, gingerly, since your knuckles are bruised and bloodied. But it’s not your blood.

Charlie and Maggie look at you differently now. It’s like they’re scared. You’re a little scared yourself.

Charlie follows me onto the Number 14 tram. My old route. Once upon a time I knew every tram driver in Dublin but I don’t recognise this young, ignorant-looking fellow with the shirt collar too small on him. He yanks the handbrake too sharply and rings the bells like he’s Quasimodo. Everything about him screams non-union. A bastard scab. We sit down among the well-heeled, law-abiding south-siders and trundle past Carson’s house, the Stephen’s Green and the College of Surgeons, still pocked and scorched by bullet and fire. Ladies in expensive fabrics promenade prettily beneath the awnings of Grafton Street. They’re carrying parasols. In Ireland. In November. Businessmen, bankers, professionals in starched collars walk stiffly around College Green, Trinity College, Westmoreland Street. Little boys and girls strut after their parents in collars and jackets and short pants, and there’s a fat Metropolitan peeler on every corner watching protectively over the oppressing class. We cross the Liffey to the north side, where the oppressed live. The Kapp and Peterson building stands on the corner of Bachelor’s Walk and the street they call Sackville and we call O’Connell, unscathed and alone like a cigar stump in an ashtray. Further up, the shell of the General Post Office stands at the centre of a square half-mile of rubble. I look at Charlie. At where his leg used to be. I shake my head. ‘What possessed you? Home Rule? Rights of Small Nations?’

‘Can’t say it was. Can’t say I even understand what any of that stuff means.’

‘Little Catholic Belgium then, being raped by the Protestant Hun?’

‘I didn’t give a damn about Belgium nor about the Hun either. I just wanted to see what this Great War was like. I wanted to get a gun, see a bit of the world, and feel like a grown man.’

The bastard scab announces the Nelson Pillar and we hop off, electric cables crackling overhead. We reach Montgomery Street. Canvas awnings promising Meats, Drugs, Tobacco or News shade the broad pavements of Monto and gentlemen in fine suits walk quickly with their heads down, hoping not to be seen. A gang of malnourished, barefooted gurriers, none more than ten or eleven, idle by the corner and eye us suspiciously. There’s an army of gurriers in this city, I see them all the time, trying to huckster a living either side of the tram line. Some beg, some pick pockets, some shine shoes or hawk early editions of The Herald. These lads are typical: bony and dirt-caked with narrow, cynical slits for eyes and cigarettes clamped between black teeth. ‘Have you a penny to give these lads?’ I say, and Charlie stops to rummage in his tunic. I take a couple of pence from my pocket.

‘Ah, keep your money, mister. You’re Citizen Army, aren’t ye?’ says one of the gurriers. I nod. ‘We’ll not take an’ting off you, but we’ll take it off your man.’ He points to Charlie, ‘John fucken Bull, wha?’

Further up the street two women lean out of a ground-floor window of a tenement. One of the women is big and brassy and could be anywhere between thirty and sixty. Her face is painted white, her lips are scarlet and her head is covered by a raven-black wig, stacked high and precarious. The other one is only a young thing. She’s painted and dressed up the same but that only makes the contrast all the more obvious. The usual combination: an old whore for the young lads fresh up from the country with dreams and virginities intact, and a young floozy for the older men. Working girls festoon most of the windows around here.

‘Come on in till I wet yer willy mister,’ jeers the old whore, cupping her hands around her chest. We walk on. The young floozy catcalls after us, are we men at all at all. Peggy O’Hara is leaning out the bottom window of the tenement I live in. Peggy is our tenement’s old whore. Charlie’s appalled that I live here, he can’t hide it.

‘Howya, Victor. Who’s your friend?’ says Peggy, pushing forward her young floozy, a pretty wee thing, perhaps fifteen with big, bewildered brown eyes and cheeks plastered preposterously in rouge. ‘Dolores here’s a real patriot. If he’s a friend of yours, she might do him a discount.’

‘Only a discount, not a free go, for a national hero?’

‘Look around you, Victor. Youse heroes have damn near put us out of business.’

She’s right. This place used to be black with soldiers, all loose change and aggression, looking for a good time in the red-lit windows of the Second City of the Empire. But the soldiers are confined to barracks now. Of course the high-end houses for the rich are still here, and go out the back of any pub on a Friday night, you’ll see the bottom end of the market relieving careless working men of their pay packets; but the servicemen were always Monto’s bread and butter. The Monto girls have cut down more British soldiers with knob rot than all the generations of rebels ever managed with muskets and pikes.

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After the Lockout

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Darran McCannAfter the Lockout

Dedication

Contents

ONE

Darran McCann
After the Lockout