Dead And Buried

Conor had to laugh. He ushered his dad across the doorstep, closed the door behind him and followed his family into the living room.

Mags had already taken up residence on the sofa. Declan lowered himself painfully into the seat beside her; Hazel, at Christine’s insistence, took the armchair, and Martin perched on the chair-arm. Robert sat on Mags’s other side.

‘It’s a lovely place,’ Hazel said politely to Christine.

‘Ought to be, the price they paid,’ Mags sniffed. ‘But you’ve done it nice, I’ll give you that.’ She treated Conor to a half-smile.

Conor glanced at Hazel. She’d only been seeing Martin for a couple of months – but from her trembling hands and anxious eyes Conor could see that life as a prospective Maguire daughter-in-law was already taking its toll on her nerves. He was glad Christine had been made of stern stuff.

‘What’s that?’ asked Martin. He was pointing to a framed black-and-white photograph that hung in an alcove over the television – a kid playing on a street, framed by the overhanging branches of a tree, the houses behind deliberately out of focus.

Conor grinned. ‘D’you have to ask?’

‘Con took that himself, you know,’ Christine put in. ‘He’s got a real eye for a picture.’

Martin leaned closer to the photo – then he laughed. ‘God,’ he said. ‘That’s Coleraine Road! I didn’t recognise it – it looks—’

‘It looks nice,’ Declan chuckled. He slipped off his glasses to blink at the picture. ‘No wonder you didn’t recognise it.’ Then to Conor he said, ‘You’re a real artist, son – you’ve made Coleraine Road look like a place people might live.’

Robert wasn’t laughing. ‘They were good times we had there,’ he said.

Conor shrugged. ‘It’s just a snapshot.’

‘I like it,’ volunteered Hazel hesitantly. She looked at Mags. Everyone looked at Mags, seated like some Roman emperor at a gladiatorial contest, thumb poised to deliver her verdict. But it seemed like she wasn’t listening. She was inspecting her fingernails, holding her left hand in her right. The expectant silence persisted. Conor opened his mouth to say something, anything.

Without looking up Mags said, ‘That pretty picture you have on your wall. On that very road Martin Donaghy went down in ’72 with a British bullet in his back.’ She turned over her hand and her fingertip traced the lines of her palm. ‘Just around the corner is where the Red Hand put a knife in the ribs of young Danny Kennedy. I helped his mother lay him out.’ She still didn’t look up. She only sniffed, and turned over her hand again. ‘That’s the pretty picture you have on your wall,’ she said.

After a moment, Declan reached over and took her hand in his. Conor glanced at Martin, and then at Christine. Her look said: do something.

‘Drinks?’ Conor said, with feeling.

It was Christine who took the opportunity to escape to the kitchen to fix the drinks: bitter for Declan, lager for the lads, wine for Hazel, whiskey for Mags. Conor felt easier when she’d left the room. Poor lass didn’t deserve a family like the Maguires. Did anyone?

While she was busy with bottles and glasses Martin asked, ‘So how’s the wee girl?’

‘God, Mart,’ Conor shook his head. ‘You can’t imagine. She’s grand. She cries like a thing possessed, but she’s beautiful.’ He looked at Mags, saw she was smiling. ‘She’s perfect,’ he said.

‘She’ll be a bonny one,’ Declan said.

‘She is.’

‘I’m happy for you both,’ Martin said. Conor noticed that his brother’s hand was entwined with Hazel’s. Good luck to you, he thought.

Suddenly Mags cleared her throat in a businesslike way. A ripple went round the Maguire men – glances exchanged, postures subtly shifted.

‘You know,’ Mags said, ‘the police have dropped the investigation into Colm’s killing.’

Conor felt a quickening in the pit of his stomach.

‘Disappearance,’ Declan corrected her.

‘Don’t give me that, husband. You know better.’ She shook her head. ‘Four months. Four months is all it’s been! And that’s that. “Dead end.” “Trail’s gone cold.”’ She jabbed a stubby finger at the arm of the couch. ‘Tell me this. Would it’ve been a dead end if it’d been a Prod carried off and shot in the night? Would the trail’ve been allowed go cold if it’d been that bastard Paisley stolen from his wee children, or that fat-faced bastard Hume killed in cold blood at barely fifty years of age?’ She folded her arms. Conor shrugged one shoulder uneasily. ‘Ah, c’mon now, ma,’ he said.

Mags glared up at him.

‘Don’t you dare “ah c’mon now ma” me, son,’ she snapped, and it should’ve been funny – but hell, it wasn’t.

‘She’s right, Con,’ Robert said severely, hunkering forward in his seat. ‘She’s right and there’s no denying it.’

Conor rolled his eyes. ‘Let’s not talk politics today, can we?’

‘This isn’t politics,’ Mags said, as if the last word were in some way distasteful. ‘This is Colm.’

I just don’t think—’

‘No, you don’t. You don’t think, Conor, son.’ Mags was getting into her swing now. ‘All that studying you done, and sometimes I think you’ve learned nothing.’

This was too much. ‘I learned I didn’t want to spend my life fighting a war that never ends.’

‘Well good for you.’ Mags’s narrow lips creased in a bitter smile. ‘Oh, don’t tell me. You’re going to start crying at me over what the boys done in Warrington, aren’t you? You’re all heart, Conor. Go on. Tell me what a wicked thing that was that we did.’

It was the ‘we’ that turned Conor’s stomach. He looked away – he couldn’t look his mother in the face.

Warrington, England. The bomb. Two wee boys dead.

‘That older boy,’ Hazel said, her voice quivering. ‘The one who didn’t, didn’t die right away – they turned off his, his machine today.’

Conor looked at her. You’re tougher than you look, Hazel, girl, he wanted to say. He noticed Martin put a protective hand on her shoulder. Christine, too, took a step closer, towards Hazel. God knew what she thought she was going to do. If it came to taking sides, Conor supposed, it wouldn’t take Chris long to make up her mind.

But it was Conor that Mags had in her sights. Mags just shrugged. Conor made himself meet her eye.

‘The boy was twelve years old,’ he heard himself say.

He saw his da pass a weary hand across his brow. Mags straightened her back and replied, ‘Jackie Duddy, Patrick Doherty, Bernie McGuigan, Hugh Gilmour, Kevin McElhinney, Michael Kelly, John Young, William Nash, Michael McDaid. I could go on.’

It didn’t surprise Conor that Mags could reel off the dead of Bloody Sunday like a kid listing off the Celtic first eleven. After all this was a woman who, when Conor as a boy was refusing to finish his cabbage or his cauliflower, would say, ‘And there’s Bobby Sands starving his poor self to death for you.’

Conor always wanted to say, ‘I never asked him to.’

He was aware of Robert nodding slowly and sententiously at Mags’s side.

‘You don’t care about your own people, Conor,’ Mags said. ‘You’re too busy with…with your cows and your chickens.’

Conor tried to bite back his anger.

‘Cows,’ he muttered, ‘don’t kneecap other cows ’cause they come from the wrong end of the farm.’

‘Only because they haven’t got Armalites,’ he heard Declan murmur under his breath. Martin laughed nervously – but now Mags was on her feet. All five foot one of her.