Torn Water

Drivers stand below the awning above the opened hatch, their breakfast baps and steaming coffee fitted in between bouts of talk. James stands quietly at the back. He often comes here to hover on the outskirts of these men. He envies them their lofty cabs, their autonomy, their careless smiles and the pointed fingers of their speech. He has often dreamed at night of sailing across the tarmac of foreign towns and cities, high above the clamour of normal traffic, his all-seeing headlights blistering the upcoming road.

Two women flit back and forth along the hatch of the caravan, their hands glistening with grease as they stuff gaping bread rolls with sausage and bacon, and thrust them into waiting hands, wiping their fingers hurriedly on their aprons before they claim the money. James edges his way to the hatch and quietly asks for a coffee. The skinnier of the two women, black, heavily dyed hair peeping from beneath the edges of her cap, looks at him for a moment. ‘You're a funny-looking lorry driver …’

He holds his coins out quickly.

‘Shouldn't you be at school?’

‘No.’ He says it quietly, in a flat tone, trying to keep a lid on the exchange.

‘Milk?’

‘No … thanks.’

‘Sugar?’

He nods.

‘How many?’

‘Two.’

He takes his coffee, guides it down from the hatch, bending his head to meet it, and sips before he begins to move off. A main slaps his mug down and asks for a refill of tea. He looks at James, as if he is sizing up livestock in a pen. ‘Whereabouts are you from, son?’

‘Carrickburren.’

‘Carrickburren no less … Do you know a fella by the name of O'Brien lives up that way?’

‘No … Yes.’

‘Keeps the dogs … Francie O'Brien. He's some fucking horse. What's the name?’

‘Mine?’

‘Who the fuck else's? The Pope's? Yes, yours.’

‘James … James La very.’

‘Conn Lavery's son?’

‘Yeah.’

‘He was a good man, your old fella … The fucking best … A true Irishman lived and died.’

James gives his shoulders a shrug. The larger woman in the hatch hands the lorry driver his refill of tea, and as she does so James sidles off to sit on one of the bollards that dot the road. He watches as the man takes his tea and clears his throat with a large hawked spit; he hears the elastic band slap as it hits the tarmac.

‘Good to meet you, son.’

He often gets that. The nodded reverence once men find out who his father was. The grunt of respect.

He spends the afternoon at the disused quarry that lies about a mile from his housing estate, eating his packed lunch only when hunger spikes his stomach. The salmon-paste sandwiches taste damp and slimy, reminding the boy of the lorry driver's spit, arcing heavy and dense, landing with a splat on the black-sponge tarmac. He puts the sandwiches to one side, forcing one last bite down his throat.

He sits cross-legged on a shunt of rock that juts over the deepest part of the pond; birds scythe through the sky. Duckweed covers the surface in mats, interspersed with breaks of water the colour of liquorice. The air seems to hang heavy and doleful over the quarry, dense and thickened like the air in a forgotten room. It reminds him of the silences his mother weaves around the memory of his father. He thinks of the screams she carries in her mouth, cries that rise from her lips like disturbed crows when she drinks.

He can remember his aunt Teezy's arms round him, the smell of soda flour and carbolic soap. He can remember the whispered soothings, her rocking him back and forth on her lap. Beyond in the next room, he remembers seeing his mother's face. Around her people stoop to press her hands; suited men, their cigarettes winking like wizards' eyes in the darkened room, and women standing by her, their faces glowing like lanterns of concern. His mother, a coin head silhouette against the flank of her husband's closed coffin. All this a long time ago when his language rose like bubbles in his throat, and popped formless on the point of his lips.

He remembers the squeal of anguish that came from his mother when two men came to the house that day to pay their respects. They stood before the coffin with a stiff lock to their backs, heads stooped, fists clasped at the base of their spines. He can still see the change in his mother's face as they turned to pay their respects to her. A sound came from her mouth that had raised the hairs on the boy's arms and brought tears to his eyes.

He remembers endless nights in dark rooms, his eyes confused between sleeping and waking. Then there were the times when he woke in the middle of the night and felt the presence of someone nearby. He would lie there and listen to the sobs. He knew it was her, his mother, come to stand by his bed and weep hard tears, gin giving her tongue a loosened power, and a longing for the mouth of the one who was gone.

Then there was the time shortly after, when he had stayed with his aunt Teezy in her small house in the centre of town. He had been told that his mother needed some time, that she hadn't been very well, that she needed to be fixed just like a car when the road had got the better of it. He remembers looking up into Teezy's wide face as she told him, and the false smile of courage that his face suddenly wore.

As the sun begins to fade he leaves the quarry, throwing what's left of his sandwiches into the dark water, watching for a moment as they sit on the mat of duckweed, then disappear. As he climbs a barbed-wire fence to rejoin the main road leading to his housing estate, he frightens a pair of birds into scrambled flight. He looks at them as they veer skywards, watching them strain upwards. He thinks then of the lorry driver and his hushed respect for his father's memory.

‘A true Irishman lived and died.’ That was what the lorry driver had said. A true Irishman died only for Ireland, didn't he? Ireland herself would tolerate nothing less.

A Young Patriot's Death for Ireland

I love Ireland, I love her small narrow skies, I love her little shape on the maps, I am about to die for Ireland. I will become immortal, I will live in the songs that old men will sing … Women will cry in wonder at my heroism. My mother will carry my picture and show strangers who I was, and she will cry, I will take my gun and kill. I will destroy. My blood will be a river that other patriots bathe in, finding strength in my heroism.

She knows, my mother knows. This is the way it has always been, Ireland needs our blood to breathe, she needs our bodies to hold on to herself. My gun is old but it will do the job, I will take as many of them as I can. I will enjoy their dark-eyed fear as my bullets rip into their cold hearts.

I take my leave, I tell my mother to look for me inthe night sky for tonight a new star will be there. She is crying. I tell her I am taking the dark journey. I tell her I will be joining my father tonight in Ireland's heaven, where the rivers are green like our fields. Yes, I tell her tonight, I will be with my father in Heaven, two true Irishmen lived and died. She smiles, even though she is crying.

The barracks is quiet. I tell the desk sergeant that my mother's car has been stolen. He doesn't glance at me but looks at his watch as I talk. I wait until a couple of his colleagues join him and then I rip my gun from the shopping-bag I'm carrying. I enjoy the surprise that flits across their faces and the lost expressions in their eyes. I kill two of them before I am shot. Not a bad return. As life leaves my ripped body I see heaven hover before me like an vast alien spaceship. Manning its bridge and beckoning me aboard is my father, another true Irishman lived and died.

2. Sully (#u5466422a-c85d-5157-850c-78efe48e5a9d)

‘Get up … James, up.’

‘What?’

‘Up … Out of it and up.’

He opens his eyes. His mother is standing over him, barking at him. She is hung-over: he can tell by the sideways droop of her head.

‘Come on … Up. We have a visitor.’

‘Who?’

‘Sully.’

‘Shit.’

‘Hey … None of that … Two minutes … And up.’

She leaves the bedroom. He catches her taking a peek at herself in the wall mirror as she exits, running a moistened finger across her eyebrows. She has a thing about her eyebrows, always teasing and pulling at them, coaxing them into arced crescents. It revolts him. She revolts him. Sully revolts him.

Sully was his mother's on-off, come and go boyfriend. He arrived one May evening five years before, announced by the rasp of his van's exhaust as it growled along their estate. James had been in the front field, guillotining the tops of ragweed with his hands and feet, when he heard the vroom of Sully's arrival. He had run to the hedge that bordered the estate and arrived just in time to see Sully get out of the van and run the toe of each shiny shoe on the back of his flared trouser legs before he sauntered up to the front door. James had watched the flush come to his mother's cheek as she had greeted him, the shyness with which she had received the small box of chocolates, then offered her lips to him, closing her eyes in a way that James found devastating.