​The priest was a tall, thin man with pale blue searching eyes. His shock of straight fair hair perhaps made him appear younger than he actually was. Marsh guessed him to be about fifty years old. In the immaculate black attire, he reminded Marsh of a Russian submarine captain not that he had ever come across such a personage.

 

“Will you have a…” asked Murt.

 

“Buying the clergy drink won’t get you into Heaven,” the priest laughed, “Thanks Murt but I’ll buy me own tonight. The last time I ended up in your company I was gee-eyed driving to Kildysart. He’s bad company,” he declared in a commanding tone as he called for a whiskey.

 

“Very bad company Father,” agreed Beatrice.

 

The priest fixed his eyes on Marsh who was standing up. “Ah, a stranger I see.”

 

“That’s right Father, I was just leaving I’m just passing through.”

 

“Passing through!” the priest laughed. “Sure, you couldn’t pass through here, it’s more or less a dead end. Like some of the people.”

 

Marsh laughed.

 

“I’m joking of course. The people here are the best, the very best and I’ve been around although my church is over Cranny direction, you’ll have to have a short one on me as a visiting guest and having the get up of a pagan about you.”

 

“Thanks, Father I’m willing to be converted. Actually, I’m just from over the way.”

 

“I’m Turlough the priest. And you are?”

 

“Lambert Turlough, Lambert Simnel.”

 

“Oh! So, you’re not a Catholic? Not that I give a fuck but it’s a curious name.”

 

Marsh laughed. “Ah Father, one of the sons of Saint Patrick. A daily communicant, Salu taris hostia and tanto mergo and the seven dolors….”

 

The priest gave Marsh a penetrating stare. “Don’t believe a word of it not even if you told me in the confessional… and while the name sounds familiar, it’s just that I can’t think of a Saint Lambert, you know, Albert maybe but Lambert….!”

 

“Well, you have to go back a bit Father…”

 

“Really?”

 

“Yeh. Back to the 670’s to Maastricht. He was a big strong fella, by all accounts and a good fighter. He was from one of the noble families of Maastricht and was a regular visitor to the Merovingian court of King Childeric the second. He was a protégé of his uncle Theodard who succeeded Remaclus as bishop of Maastricht. When Theodard was murdered around 669 the councillors of Childeric made Lambert bishop of Maastricht.”

 

“They were rough times to be sure,” said one of the older men. “To murder a bishop!”

 

“You know your stuff,” Turlough acknowledged as Marsh took a swig of the whiskey.

 

“Ah it’s just because of the name and then Lambert got himself into hot water when he denounced Pepin the Short for his sonorific liaison with his mistress Alpaida who was the mother of Charles Martel or Charles the Hammer…”

 

“Did you say sodomitic?”

 

“No Father, sonorific…”

 

“Ah good. I remember doing the deeds of Charles Martel and his victory at the battle of Tours which put a halt to the gallop of Abd al-Rahman and his Arab hordes.”

 

“That’s right. Actually, Rahman was slain in the battle but to get back to Pepin well he became the first of the Carolingians to become king and despite having a distinguished ecclesiastical education from the monks of St Denis he had Lambert who had a firm belief in the sanctity of marriage murdered.”

 

“Rough times indeed,” muttered another of the older men.

 

“Yep, reminds me of the chicken song,” said Marsh, “Yeh know,

 

Three cheers, three cheers for homicide,

 

My right side is left an my left side is fried.”

 

The priest gave him a puzzled look and shook his head. “Invaders,” he snapped. “Invasions from Saint Lambert’s time and before that time.”

 

“And after that time,” said one of the older men.

 

“Indeed,” agreed Turlough, “and long after that time. Hordes of them coming to plunder our monasteries and churches and murder our holy men.”

 

“Yuh never said a truer word Father,” chirped Murt as the priest took out a packet of Craven A cigarettes from his jacket pocket. “Here have one of these lung busters,” he laughed as he passed one to Marsh “they’ll get you to heaven all the quicker.”

 

“They pursued their agenda with relentless savagery,” declared Marsh as he blew a smoke ring towards the wooden ceiling.

 

“That they did and after the Recusancy Acts when the Reformation, as they called it, was cranking full on they unleashed organised and unapologetic madness on the people….”

 

“Don’t forget Dun An Oir Father,” advised an older voice.

 

“By God, I won’t and its not far from here, not very far at all where Grey promised quarter but instead massacred 600 including women and children and where after decapitating them had their bodies tossed into the sea….” said the priest in a baleful voice.

 

“A terrible business,” titanic Pat muttered.

 

“To be sure it was an it had the full support of Spencer the great poet who called for a genocide of the people...our people.”

 

“Not to mention the also great Sir Walter Raleigh, sure wasn’t it the very same joker who was having the throats of the women and children slit in the woods after the Desmond rebellion. Actually, Father it was around that period that some historian, can’t think of the name now that mentioned the word Holocaust,” said Marsh.

 

“Indeed, an appropriate word Lambert,” applauded Father Turlough. “And dear people, despite all this terror our forefathers held onto their faith. So overwhelming was their commitment to the holy sacrifice of the Mass and of our Virgin Lady that in 1577 Lord Justice Drury reported that in Waterford the people had infinite Masses in their churches every morning without any fear and he saw them ‘resort out of their churches by heaps’ and Marmaduke Middleton, the Elizabethan bishop of Waterford and Lismore wrote in 1580 that there was Masses in every corner, that they had Rome runners and friars among them, that they were wearing their beads and praying to them in public and setting up statues in their street doors and worshipping them ….”

 

“Our house is full of statues, Blessed Martin, Our Lady, some without heads….”

 

“Yes, yes. Your mother’s house is a credit to the village,” said the priest in an irritant tone to Eddie, “but Marmaduke continued on complaining that the people were praying for the dead, ringing bells and dressing their graves at diverse times of the year with flowerpots and wax candles.”

 

“The best wax candles are to be found in the side altar which is dedicated to our Lady of Perpetual Succour in the church of Saint Francis Xavier in Gardiner Street,” explained Marsh.

 

“Really!”

 

“Isn’t that amazing, did you get your information from the nuns?” laughed Beatrice.

 

The priest shook his head. “That’s very bold of you Beatrice but how is it that I’m not surprised.”

 

“Ah yes, but no. You see. I experimented with microcrystalline wax, renaissance wax, green casting wax, scopa modelling wax, white beeswax and various forms of paraffin wax but I can tell you now nothing could compare to the Gardiner Street wax.”

 

“Astonishing! The Jesuits again, and what would this wax be used for Lambert?” asked the priest.

 

“For sticking the heads back on the Child of Prague statues,” explained Marsh to grunts of approval from the customers.

 

“Sure, when did anyone ever see a Child of Prague statue around here with a head?” asked Clancy.

 

“That’s right,” agreed Tom, “sure wouldn’t you think that they were all made in a factory run by these Saudi fundamentalist head choppers.”

 

“I tell you now, you could hop one of these waxed Child of Prague laddoes off the floor an the head would stay on,” Marsh reassured all.

 

“I must remember that,” the priest replied without enthusiasm. “But to get back it was reported,” he continued in a rising voice, “when the Book of Common Prayer was introduced to church services in 1560 the faithful boycotted them and whenever they were forced to attend services against their will many people disrupted them and treated the service as if they were at a Rolling Stones concert and showed their defiance by talking so loudly that the minister’s voice was drowned out because they detested this forced religion. Not that some of my sermons are treated with any more dignity,” he laughed.

 

“Isn’t he a holy terror!” said Beatrice.

 

“And remember,” continued the priest, “the Irish stood by their faith when the Scotch and Welsh gave in and swallowed the soup…”

 

“There’s some historians who would dispute that…” Marsh cut in.

 

“Dispute!?”

 

“Well contradict. Because the Scottish Reformation was largely homegrown. You know followers of Calvin and Knox. It was Presbyterian and hostile to England. In fact, Knox had been a galley slave and escaped to become a leading evangelist and while Wales remained Catholic early on and led by the Tudors there wasn’t really any attempt to force the religion on them. It just became mixed in as large numbers of people of English origin who came to the mining villages became absorbed into the Welsh identity.”

 

“I could accept that,” said the priest, “as I’m not well up on Welsh history…”

 

“I got a bit of it recently from this Welsh nationalist chap Cayo-Evens,” explained Marsh, “but the main point to take into consideration is that there was never an attempt at a Plantation of the original population in Wales like here. I mean it’s a bit hard to convert people to a new faith when those promoting it are murdering and stealing the land of those they are trying to convert and have been doing it for a couple of hundred years.”

 

“That’s it,” acknowledged Turlough, “centuries of the pitch cap and the gallows right up to the Stonebreaker’s Yard in Kilmainham in 1916.”

 

“And after Father…. though there’s a lot of poppy suckers and shoneens in the history wings of academia and in the church that want us to forget the afters, they want us to deny our history and who we are,” said one of the older men at the counter.

 

“Not only to deny who we are but worse, they want us to apologise for who we are and to do our best to be somebody else,” laughed Murt.

 

“Yes, preferably somebody with a stiff upper lip,” suggested Marsh as he called two whiskeys, one for himself and one for Turlough.

 

“I can’t deny that,” agreed the priest, “because although it saddens me the church, my church, has a history of bending the knee to the counter-revolutionaries of history, it has nearly always cowed down to the establishment and has been running with that agenda for years, and people forget that the Irish election of 1918 was an all Ireland election in which the people by a large majority democratically voted Ireland out of the British Empire. The whole of Ireland that is. And when the British imposed their solution on the Collins crowd the church, my church, who were getting very alarmed that the War of Independence was shifting in what we now call, a left-wing direction, immediately jumped in to frighten and influence the populace for the Free State.”

 

Marsh nodded. “That’s correct. A lot of people believe the propaganda spread later on that it was the Dev side that was hugging up to the bishops.”

 

“Yes,” agreed Turlough, “and I can put that to bed for in Cork Cathedral the Administrator a Michael O’Sullivan was reported as describing Republicans as ‘human vermin to be crushed out of existence by all decent people’ while Canon Tracy of Kilmuray, Cork, declared that ‘Republicans would burn in the hottest part of hell. Archdeacon Langan of Moate referred to the destruction of railway engines at Streamstown. ‘The property destroyed,’ he declared, ‘belonged to religious institutions that had their money invested in railway shares, and the destruction of the carriages ‘cried to Heaven for vengeance.’

 

“Conn Murphy,” continued Turlough, “a committed Catholic who had experienced some of the rigours of Free State militancy, wrote to each of the bishops, sternly admonishing them for the effects of their intervention in national affairs. ‘Your public espousal of the Free State cause,’ he wrote to Bishop O’Dea of Galway, ‘has enabled its Government to illegally and unjustly seize and imprison tens of thousands of Irish Catholic boys and men and hundreds of Irish Catholic women, to torture habitually defenceless prisoners...to murder them...You are very directly and specifically responsible for these injustices (through) your failure to utter a single word of protest or disapproval of murders, tortures (and) raids.’”

 

“That was powerful stuff,” acknowledged Long John.

 

“A man called Luzio who had been a Professor of Canon Law at Maynooth and was now Papal Envoy to Ireland was gratified when the Irish Times published an article suggesting that while he ‘a foreign and impartial person’ was in Ireland, there was a good opportunity to conduct peace talks. As a result of this article, Luzio received ‘hundreds and hundreds of letters and telegrams from individuals and public bodies proposing that he play a facilitatory role in re-establishing peace in Ireland. This, he discovered, was a futile task. The Free State wishes to put an end to the conflict ‘through annihilation of the enemy on the battlefield. The most ardent champion of this course was ‘one of the ministers, O’Higgins, a young man of about 30, arrogant and fanatical.’ In addition to the Free State government, Luzio identified two other opponents of peacemaking efforts, the British authorities, which had supported the Free State and ‘aided it with monies and munitions,’ and the bishops of Ireland.’

 

“In 1926 the Jesuit-guided An Rioghacht, The League of the Kingship of Christ became the first of a number of Catholic social study circles to emerge over the next ten years. Broadly speaking, they aimed to recover the idea of Christendom destroyed by the three great historic evils, the reformation, the French Revolution, and communism. Their membership varied from dozens to hundreds. From January 1928 anti-communist articles, dealing generally with ideology appeared in the Jesuit Journal Studies, which was based in UCD, an institution with a perceived pro-Cumann na nGaedheal ethos. And wasting no time at all Cardinal Logue, speaking in Armagh Cathedral on January 1st, 1922, said ‘The Treaty seems to give everything substantial which was necessary for the welfare and progress of the country. The only alternative to ratification of the Treaty was that the country would be thrown back into a state even more drastically oppressive than that through which they passed. He, therefore, asked them to join with the many holy souls in Ireland who were praying for the peace and welfare of Ireland that it might please Almighty God to save them from such a misfortune as the rejection of this Treaty, which held forth the only hope for the peace, tranquillity and welfare of Ireland.’”

 

“Have a whisky on the house for that speech Father,” shouted Mac.

 

“And givus that again Father from the pulpit next Sunday,” Bridie shouted.

 

“If I did that I’d be out of a job. I’ve opted to work from the inside.”

 

“These were the same forces who later trotted out the agenda that says there was no authorisation by the First Dail for the War of Independence, that the Irish Republican Army was just some hatching of irregular gunmen and loose cannons who wanted to shoot peelers when they were on their way to a meeting to discuss the shooting of peelers…,” said Tom.

 

“And you’d know since you were there,” said Murt.

 

“I was there in my teens when these volunteers were formed in 1913 as a defence force to ensure the implementation of Home Rule and I was there when Lloyd George issued his conscription threat at the time of the German plot in 1918 and it was in response to that that the General Headquarters Staff of the Volunteers was established in March in 1918 by the Volunteer Executive…”

 

“You saw it all,” said Marsh.

 

‘I did and I witnessed the people standing by those who didn’t seek approval because they knew that the British refused to recognise the mandate for Sinn Fein in the 1918 election and the subsequent campaign of intimidation and imprisonment of Sinn Fein speakers, the suppression of Sinn Fein, the Gaelic League and the Volunteers in June 1919 and the suppression of the Dail later in the autumn. And who was largely involved in all of this, who were the eyes and ears of British occupation, it was the RIC, I can tell youse and to a lesser extent the DMP though I wasn’t based in Dublin…”

 

“Well, I wasn’t around then but I know that it was the lovely friendly DMP who battened the Dublin workers during the 1913 Lock-out with pitiless enthusiasm when they were used as William Martin Murphy’s private army and I didn’t ever read of any of them objecting to it…”

 

“That’s right Lambert,” agreed Tom. “I did hear that the DMP were a crowd of vicious bastards when it took to attacking workers who looked for an extra sixpence.”

 

“And we’ve all heard the nonsense from certain quarters how the War of Independence was really a religious scrap between Catholics and Protestants,” continued Marsh “when almost to a man the same RIC were Catholic and even some of them were Gaelic speakers.”

 

“Correct and the decision to take them on and commence hostilities was approved by none other than Cathal Brugha, Minister for Defence in the first Dail. And I’m not here to boast about any of it…”

 

“We know you’re not that sort of a man at all Tom,” said Turlough.

 

“Well, whatever. All I’m saying is that it just happened to fall on my time, on my time...” he said slowly.

 

“It can happen to anyone, like, it happens now to people who chase things that don’t exist,” said Beatrice.

 

“And what are they chasing?” the priest asked.

 

“How the bloody hell would I know Father,” she said as she stared at Marsh.

 

“I’ve got to be heading on,” said Marsh, “I’m already dead late.”

 

Once outside he nearly fell over his bike. He took off in first gear with such a jerk that the bike almost left him on the road. He came around a few turns carefully and wobbled down the hill. After, with great difficulty, rounding the bend onto the Kiladysart road he just about managed to steer the bike away from the low stone wall and in an attempt to prevent himself ending headfirst in the river Shannon and to conquer his drunkenness with sheer willpower he took to shouting at the top of his voice at the flying motorcycle “fuck you stay straight, I said, stay fucken straight or I’ll fuck you into the Shannon” as if he was a farmer trying to control an excited bullock. Within a mile and a half, he was back in reasonable control of the machine. He had no intention of being this late. The Stacpoole house would be in darkness by the time he would arrive to reconnoitre the area.

 

He imagined that if Stacpoole was still alive the darkness would call for a change of plan. First thing on arrival he would have to hunt around the outhouses for a ladder. He would put this up to the bedroom windows and check them to see which bedroom Stacpoole was snoring his head off in. Then he would use the ladder to open a window on the far side of the house to enter, where he would don the rubber mask that made him look like a one hundred and thirty-five-year-old man and like Tarquin, he would move towards his design like a ghost. A terrifying-looking ghost.

 

If he encountered a dog in the yard he was confident of not been savaged twice in the one day. He would be ready with his hunting knife and whatever breed it was it could be nothing like as big as the graveyard animal which he had successfully warded off even though he had been the victim of a cowardly attack from behind. He would dispatch it with one slash across its throat. Wasn’t he taught all that in the camps in the early sixties in the Dublin Mountains? Didn’t Liam Sutcliffe show him how to grab an animal from behind and cut its or whatever was in its throat before it could give out a warning bark? He would be fine he reassured himself unless Stacpoole kept a pack of them.

 

Once in Stacpoole’s bedroom he could creep up on him and slit his throat. He wondered about the gurgling; would it be just gurgling or would it be filled with Stacpoole’s roars? He was not sure whether if in slitting someone’s throat that the vocal cords would also be severed. The idea of all that blood spurting about and maybe some of it splashing onto him was not appealing with advances in forensics improving endlessly. And then what had to be taken into consideration was that a person would not instantly lose their wherewithal once someone had cut their throat. Stacpoole was not likely to sit down, he told himself, as if he was watching butterflies in Knocksedan when he was bleeding to death. And he definitely would not be inviting the throat slasher to sip Earl Grey tea and biscuits with him. No sir, it was obvious that if you crept into someone’s bedroom and sliced into his or her throat with a hunting knife that nastiness would follow once the shock was somehow overcome. If it was the victim was most likely to be so enraged that he would jump out of bed and fight as if he was mad for fight, as if his very life depended on it when in fact it did not and whether or not he knew it his very life with all its halcyon and sorrowful memories combined was moments from ending. In fact the harder he fought the quicker his miserable life would end. The last thing Marsh had on his mind after such a hectic day was to be chased around a shabby mansion by some half-mad lunatic who had blood spurting out of his neck all over everything.

 

He raced through an empty Ballynacally and the only noise other than the motorbike engine crackle was his own loud gurgling sounds. He was making these choking, gurgling noises because he was trying to imagine the landlord in his final frantic struggle. A fit of coughing which made him wobble the bike dangerously on the road brought the experiment to an end. He shook his head telling himself that there was nothing appealing about those sounds. Then he got a fit of laughing while he wondered if on flying past the few houses had he sent shivers up people’s spines as they lay awake in their beds and heard what must have seemed like something diabolical pass. The fear instilled by the grotesque sounds, he reckoned, would quell any lustful desires that the pitch darkness of the night might have been encouraging. Ballynacally would be devoid of lovemaking tonight.

 

He thought about just creeping in masked and gently, very gently, easing himself up on the bed and then when he was astride the sleeping landlord tapping him on the chest and when he awoke, bursting into a rollicking rendering of the Rocky Road to Dublin. He wondered if when Stacpoole realised that this was no nightmare would he drop dead on the spot from a heart attack. He quickly decided that this was leaving too much to chance but it led him to another plan. A pillow job. If he could sneak into Stacpoole’s bedroom without waking him he could, he guessed, press one of his pillows down upon his pestiferous face and smother the deranged life out of him. This had a number of advantages. A presumed lack of noise was one. The pillow would rule out someone running around the front garden screaming “some fucker has just slit my throat.” There was something else. When he had suffocated the life out of Stacker as he was now referring to him in his mind, what was there to stop him placing Stacker’s head back on top of the pillow, fixing up the tossed bedclothes and closing his eyes because he concluded that the eyes would be bulging and staring into the abyss or whatever it was that one would see when been smothered by a pillow with an eleven and a half stone murderer on top of it. This would, he hoped, make it look as if the man died while he was in the midst of a most blissful sleep. Only he would know the truth. Him and one other person. Dennehy. He would owe it to Dennehy, who he would trust with his life, to tell him that it was himself who had sent Stacpoole to tumble houses in hell.

 

He stopped for a piss just outside Ballyea. A loud bellow from behind the ditch sent a shudder through him. He thought for a split second that it was the graveyard thing hiding in the gloom and here he was with the revolver still in the Honda box compartment. A second bellow relaxed him. Just a lonely cow, he said to himself and then he yelled into the darkness. “And up yours too Pal.”

 

“That was a very educated man,” said Father Turlough after Marsh had left.

 

“Educated or not he’s a complete raving lunatic,” replied Murt.

 

The priest was taken aback. “I thought he was the essence of sensibility. A very well-read man. Quite balanced for a pagan.”

 

“That’s because you were not here when he was telling us all about some kind of witch called Fedelma ban Sidhe and this ancient formula for fartless grass….” said the sceptical Beatrice.

 

The priest laughed. “Fartless grass, what in the name of God is that?”

 

“Maybe it's God who only knows,” Eugene laughed, “But according to Lambert it’s a grass that when the cows eat it they will have fartless farts and the world will be saved from going up in a massive methane explosion, wasn’t that it Eddie”

 

“Something like that and the formula having been lost for a thousand years was rediscovered by some Tipperary fellow called Bates in Trinity College. I’ve heard some stories in me time, but I never heard one to match this fellow’s fancy.”

 

“Would he be one of those green fanatics? I mean there’s all kinds of weirdos and imposters supposedly studying in that college and some people with a responsible moral perspective say that it’s really an experimental centre for the contraceptive pill,” divulged the priest.

 

“I liked him,” announced Bridie, “despite him thinking the landlord Stacpooles were still around an his missing teeth was kinda cute.”

 

“Ah! The Stacpooles. quite an unusual family I believe,” said the priest.

 

“Really?” said Eugene.

 

“Yes, I believe that soon after Catholic emancipation one of them decided to take instruction in the Catholic Church.”

 

“That beats the barney, that does,” declared Long John.

 

“Be the hokey it does,” said the priest as he called for another whiskey. “As far as I know at the time the parish priest who dealt with him was a Father Casey. A man with a reputation for having a lethal right hook,” he laughed.

 

Marsh arrived at Edenvale house to discover that it was now a closed-down sanatorium. When he mentioned Stacpoole to an early morning pedestrian he came upon nearby he was directed to Ballyalla Lake just north of Ennis. The pedestrian told him that there was a Stacpoole estate there a long time ago. He found the estate and in the wan light of the moon, the ruins of Lahinchy House seemed ghost-like.

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Stacpoole Estate

 

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Marsh parked the bike on the moonlight side of the house and removed the revolver. Then he pulled the mask down over his face. He gingerly crossed the yard and keeping close to the dark side wall of a large barn he came to an open door. After listening for some time, he stepped inside. The cobbled stone floor was littered with papers and manuscripts. Even in the near darkness, it was obvious that they had suffered the worse for wear and had been there for a long time. He perused some which seemed to have rows of faded figures written in pencil. “Rent rolls,” he muttered to himself.

 

He crossed the yard to the main house and slowly walked up the five granite steps to the heavy front door. It was slightly ajar and he gently pushed it open and stepped into the large hall. In the dim light, he found the dereliction difficult to comprehend. A crow or something made him duck as it flew past his masked head. “Sweet Jesus,” he muttered to himself, “no wonder his tenants were living in such appalling conditions if this is how he keeps his own house.”

 

Cautiously he descended his way down a flight of stone stairs and realized he was in the servant’s quarters. What he took at first to be the monotonous ticking of a wall clock turned out to be a dripping tap. Something scurried across the floor at the dark end of the kitchen. The stained sink was half full of plates, some broken, Marsh guessed that whoever was there had left in a hurry. His brow furrowed beneath the mask. A thought occurred to him that made him take the revolver from his trouser belt. What if someone in the pub was a Stacpoole confidant and had gone on ahead and warned the pernicious landlord’s descendents? Maybe some well-armed Stackpooles were waiting for him behind one of the doors.

 

Ever so silently Marsh made his way back up the stairs and to the bedrooms. He found what he believed was the master bedroom because the heavy mahogany door was larger than the other three doors that he could make out along the corridor. He lay down on the dirty wooden floor and inched himself towards the door. As he got close, he saw that it was not fully closed. For perhaps twenty minutes he did not move but listened for any sound that might come from the room. He could not be sure but something so slight as to be almost nothing, almost not little or nothing, almost an afterthought of sound electrified his brain. A little rustle of something perhaps: a little more than a grain of sand tumbling down a sand hill that an ant might disturb or a micro exhalation of breath.

 

His face began to sweat behind the rubber mask as the tension became excruciating. Despite the compulsion to scratch the itching skin only his eyes moved. Then his nose began to tickle, and he knew that within seconds he was going to succumb to the mother and father of a sneeze: a sneeze that could have the velocity to blow the rubber mask to the end of the corridor and alert whoever might be waiting in the room.

 

He was left with no option but to crouch rugby style and bawling like a scalded jackass he threw himself headlong at the door. Surprise was everything. The roaring was for fear and confusion. He was taught that in training camps in the Dublin Mountains and he often thought that it frightened the attackers more than the attacked. But who was he to contradict the likes of guerrilla experts of the calibre of Garland or Malone. The door jerked open and Marsh, the collision with the heavy door sending a searing pain running from his brain to his shoulder and back up again, rolled into the room. He sprang to his feet and seeing that there was nobody standing behind the door he raced to the bed and ripped off the crumpled blankets from the king-size bed with uninhibited fervour.

 

What he saw beneath the dust-ridden blankets shocked him. A few tufts of ragged, white hair appeared to be sprinkled on a crown of pallid skin. Two pale blue, baffled eyes stared up from a hideous face which had the texture and colour of withered leather and Marsh, for a split second, thought he was looking at someone who was wearing his mask. He jumped back and raised the revolver. The figure raised a bony hand and Marsh, for the first time, realized that somewhere in the rags a body was attached to the head.

 

“Leave me alone,” the man appealed in a faltering voice.

 

“I’m not going to touch you if you tell me where the Stacpooles sleep?” promised Marsh who was standing well back from the topsy-turvy bed.

 

“Where who is?” the face asked with a voice that was as dry as a bone.

 

“The Stacpooles,” said Marsh.

 

The figure gave a cackling laugh from a thin mouth and sat up on the bed. Marsh noticed that he had only one leg and watched him carefully as he scrabbled around in the tossed blankets. The man took out a tobacco tin where he had some rolled cigarettes. He put one in his mouth and lit it.

 

“Never heard of him. Only me and sometimes Molloks O’Grady comes here but unlike him I am what you call an entrenched tenant.”

 

“Who is Molloks?”

 

“A homeless guy like meself. Are you looking for a kip?”

 

It dawned on Marsh that the man who he guessed could be in his late sixties was unaware of the revolver he had pointed at him in the moonlit room. He put it into his waistband. “No, are there any other people here?”

 

“None that I’ve seen,” said the man as he began to scratch his one and only leg. He continued scratching for some time and accompanied this operation with a few contented moans. “Would you like a drop of wine?”

 

“No thanks. I only drink beer.”

 

“Ah its just that I have a half bottle of Dry Marsala here that can be used for savoury courses to add nutty flavours in beef, mushrooms, turkey or veal.”

 

“I wouldn’t have known that.”

 

“You learn something every day. You’re not from around here.”

 

“No.”

 

“I thought so with the accent. I’m Mortimer by the way an I’ll tell you now you gave me a terrible fucking fright roaring like that. I thought at first that Molloks was having a nightmare,” he chuckled, more to himself. “Then I thought that someone from the council was after shoving a crowbar up his arse.”

 

“Sorry bout that,” Marsh apologised. “Lambert is my name.”

 

“That’s a grand name. Be a good name for a sheepman with the lamb bit.”

 

“Hmm. I never thought of that.”

 

“Have yuh any money on yeh?”

 

“I have.”

 

“I need to get a meal.”

 

“If you know a place open, I’ll bring you there because I want something to eat as well. Would you be able to balance on the back of a Honda with the one leg?”

 

“If you don’t go too fast.”

 

Marsh was surprised to find how agile the man was just using a single crutch. Mortimer directed Marsh towards the town centre to O’Connell Square where the O’Connell monument was. He was shivering when he got off the bike and demanded Marsh’s sheepskin coat.

 

“You have a fucking jacket underneath and you’re only a young fella, I just have this light rag,” he complained as he threw his remains of a coat on the road.

 

“But I’ve a journey to make after this,” Marsh grumbled as he helped Mortimer into the heavy coat.

 

Mortimer led him into a chip shop. He bade Marsh to a Formica table near the back of the restaurant while he ordered from an Italian woman at the counter.

 

“Could I have one chicken en cocotte with parmesan and with melted margarine instead of butter? Oh yeah, arrowroot in the cheese sauce. Also, one spinach gnocchi in tomato cream and throw in a few roasted chestnuts and yeah two teas.”

 

He hopped down and sat opposite Marsh with a smile on his whiskered face. “You’re well up on the grub I see.”

 

“Ah I did a bit of kitchen work one time, but I packed it in.”

 

“The money?”

 

“No. The filth. Wouldn’t go into any other than here. I’ve seen them, spitting on the potato mash, rubbing chicken legs into their sweaty hairy armpits, dipping sirloin stakes into urinals, puking into the soup of the day, shoving trout down the front of their trousers….”

 

Marsh went into convulsions of laughter noticing how dirty Mortimer’s hands were. “What fucken kitchen was that?”

 

“Hell’s kitchen, the one in Limerick prison. One crowd of fuckers trying to poison another.”

 

“What were you locked up for?”

 

“Ah, the usual, drunk an disorderly.”

 

Mortimer told Marsh snippets about his life. He was born in Ennis in 1901. His father had thrown him out of the house after he was expelled from the local Christian Brother school, and he got a job as a helper on a lorry that was part of a hardware store. The rest of the family went to England in drabs except for two sisters who remained in Ennis. They had married and had children, but he kept his distance.

 

“They had an inexhaustible quantity of pompous advice.”

 

He played a small role in the IRA, running messages, during the War of Independence and supporting the Republican side in the Civil War.

 

“The Free State were bad bastards. A lot of the recruits that they let loose down here were unprincipled scumbags from the city of Limerick and Dublin who took no part in the struggle for independence but joined up for the shillings. Indeed, some of the fuckers were former RIC men and even some former Black and Tans.”

 

“I heard that?”

 

The Italian woman came down and placed two plates of smoked cod and chips on the table. “I like your sheepskin coat Mortimer.”

 

“Cost me a fortune Gianna.”

 

Marsh gave Mortimer a surprised look.

 

“You didn’t think they had what I ordered here did you? That’s just a joke with me an her.”

 

“I’m glad,” said Marsh, “because most of my friends will only eat fish if its out of a chipper.”

 

“But to get back,” continued Mortimer as he gave his single leg a scratch under the table “even when the war had ended the Free State had 15,000 republican activists, including meself, in jails. They then called a snap election in August knowing full well that they more or less had the opposition locked up and unable to canvas and despite this and the bishops telling people that republicans had excommunicated themselves from mother church the republicans still won 44 seats to the Staters 63.”

 

“A good show alright in spite of the bishops…”

 

“Don’t be fucking talking. For instance, in Milltown Malbay during the prisoners’ hunger strike Bishop Fogarty stepped down from the altar at the very beginning of mass and ordered all the republicans present to get the fuck out of his church, if you don’t mind, his church, and at that stage, there was 8,000 prisoners on hunger strike. Of course, the press was heavily censored and about three died, not that you’d need to censor the presstitute in this or any western country as they are only mouthpieces for what the yanks or the British tell them to say. But many more hunger strikers died from the effects later. It was a bad failure.”

 

“Were you on it?”

 

“I’d be dead now if I was. There was a women’s one too yuh know.”

 

“I didn’t actually. I’m just thinking, here we are tucking into the nicest fish an chip I’ve had since Ken Nicoletti’s and we’re fucken talking about hunger strikes.”

 

“Yeah, it’s a funny old country. A woman called Annie Hogan, the captain of the Cratloe unit of Cumann na mBan was interned without trial in Kilmainham jail. Now at that time, there were girls as young as fourteen interned. Actually, Hogan was an oulwan of twenty-four,” he grinned, “and really there was little or nothing about any of this on the fucking press.” He rolled a cigarette while Marsh smoked a tipped Benson and Hedges.

 

“Brave women.”

 

“By all accounts, the conditions on the women’s wing was cat melogin and they went on hunger strike in March of twenty-three for prisoner of war status and for decent conditions. And when those, who were practising Catholics, attended mass they were not allowed to receive communion and were harangued by anti-republican political sermons by the prison chaplain.”

 

“The sleeveen bastard knew what side his bread was buttered on.”

 

Mortimer belched. “Jesus thanks Lambert for that. D’yuh have a few bob on yuh?”

 

“I suppose I owe you for the history lesson. I can give you five bob out of the change as all I have is a ten bob note and I have to get some petrol before I get back but what about the women?”

 

“You’re a gentleman Lambert and I knew the minute I clapped my eyes on you that your mother didn’t rear a jibber,” he laughed, “but the women well, when MacSwiney and Kate O’Callaghan were over twenty days on the strike the authorities decided to move eighty-one of them to the North Dublin Union. This would normally have been welcomed by the women as the conditions in Kilmainham were so fucking dire, but they were concerned about the conditions of the two hunger strikers and they refused to move. The Staters locked up the republican women in their cells and released Kate O’Callaghan in an attempt to end the protest.”

 

“The carrot eh!”

 

“Then the stick because at midnight soldiers, cops and women from Cumann na Saoirse…. that was the Free State version of Cumann na mBan, burst onto the top landing which held the republican women. They went to fucking war on them, some of whom were Irish Citizen Army women dragging them down the stairs to the ground floor and some were fucking thrown down flights of stairs.”

 

“Fuck.”

 

“The women fought back as best they could for five hours being beaten and stripped and eventually seventy bloodied and battered women, including Annie Hogan were imprisoned in the South Dublin Union.”

 

“Is she still alive?”

 

“No, the hunger strike ended and she died some months later in 1924 over the effects of it.”

 

Marsh sipped his tea and ran his tongue around the gap in his front teeth. “You know the way I see it is that the British couldn’t beat the IRA even with the RIC, the Tans an the Auxies combined so they then handed the job over to the Free State and they got on with the job of counter-revolution tying people to mines an all the fucken rest of what the British wouldn’t get away with.”

 

“That’s about it,” agreed Mortimer.

 

“What happened the leg?” inquired Marsh thinking that it might have something to do with the civil war.

 

Mortimer shrugged. “Building site in London fifteen years ago. A steel girder slid off a lorry and caught me. The compo was drank in the Crown.

 

Marsh gave a sympathetic nod, “manies the Irishman swapped that abode for impecunious alley.”

 

“Funny thing I was probably going to get the fucking sack that day if not worse because at ten I’d put a load of laxative stuff in the Elephant O’Shea’s tea. After his third gallop to the shit hut, he had fucking copped a sabotage job and I was known to be the biggest messer on the site.”

 

They both laughed. “And I was an oulfella then.”

 

“I got sacked once meself,” Marsh announced.

 

“On the buildings?”

 

“No, I never worked on them. It was a hospital job. I was a morgue attendant. Used to hose down the bodies and that…”

 

“Jesus!”

 

“Ah yeah. Sometimes I’d hop under a sheet and jump up when a nurse would come in. Scare the shit out of them.”

 

Mortimer gave a hearty laugh.

 

“One day some oulwan came in to identify her son who fell into a bailer or something….”

 

Mortimer was already laughing.

 

“Sure, I wasn’t to know any of this and I did me jumping out from under the sheet trick arms waving and thinking that it was the screamer nurse Dorian who I loved to catch out…Jesus the oulwan went down like a log and they were bouncing all over her chest yelling at one another.”

 

“Christ Lambert I’m not surprised.”

 

“The shop steward was a useless fuck. I think he was riding the matron.”

 

Two fellows probably around seventeen years old entered. They sat across from Marsh and Mortimer and obviously had drink taken. One, a fair-haired man in an expensive-looking leather jacket, said to the other, “Jesus! What’s that smell?”

 

The other wrinkled his nose and appeared to be sniffing the air. “Holy fuck! Dunno I think it might be Old Spice.”

 

“I actually thought at first it might be Young Spice but now I think it is just unadulterated shite.”

 

“You’re right Paul and I think I know where its coming from, no I tell a lie, I know where its fucking coming from.”

 

“God bless your olfactory fons et origo. Where?”

 

“The Sheepman over there who smells like a pig.”

 

Mortimer went to get up. Marsh put a hand on his arm directing him to remain seated. He told Mortimer in a low voice to ignore the provocative comments. “You know and this has got fuck all to do with you, but I was reading once that going back a hundred years ago or more that one of the differences between the Irish and the English was in their attitude to beggars.”

 

“Well, I never heard that and what was the difference?”

 

“Well, the English regarded beggars as a nuisance, an imposition while the Irish had a more holistic approach. Our friends over there appear to have the English mindset so just ignore them, they’re young God bless them, and they have a lot yet to fucken learn about the funny ways of the world, those funny oul ways of the world,” said Marsh.