A Star Called Henry
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Description
Roddy Doyle’s acclaimed novel about an intrepid Irishman’s years of reckless heroism and adventure – “An extraordinarily entertaining epic.” (The Washington Post)
Born at the beginning of the twentieth century, Henry Smart lives through the evolution of modern Ireland, and in this extraordinary novel he brilliantly tells his story. From his own birth and childhood on the streets of Dublin to his role as soldier (and lover) in the Irish Rebellion, Henry recounts his early years of reckless heroism and adventure. At once an epic, a love story, and a portrait of Irish history, A Star Called Henry is a grand picaresque novel brimming with both poignant moments and comic ones, and told in a voice that is both quintessentially Irish and inimitably Roddy Doyle’s.Roddy Doyle is an internationally bestselling writer. His first three novels—The Commitments, The Snapper, and the 1991 Booker Prize finalist The Van—are known as The Barrytown Trilogy. He is also the author of the novels Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993 Booker Prize winner), The Woman Who Walked into Doors, and A Star Called Henry, and a non-fiction book about his parents, Rory & Ita. Doyle has also written for the stage and the screen: the plays Brownbread, War, Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner, and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors; the film adaptations of The Commitments (as co-writer), The Snapper, and The Van; When Brendan Met Trudy (an original screenplay); the four-part television series Family for the BBC; and the television play Hell for Leather. Roddy Doyle has also written the children’s books The Giggler Treatment, Rover Saves Christmas, and The Meanwhile Adventures and contributed to a variety of publications including The New Yorker magazine and several anthologies. He lives in Dublin.
INTRODUCTION
Born in the slums, raised on the streets, caught up in the fight for a free Ireland at the age of fourteen, Henry Smart is, indisputably, a survivor. A Star Called Henry describes the first twenty years of Henry’s adventure-filled life in early twentieth-century Ireland. Using a compelling first-person fictional narrative, Booker Prize-winning author Roddy Doyle lets Henry tell his own story, revealing this young man’s heroism, as well as the tumultuous era in which he lived.
Henry stood out from the moment he was born. “I glowed guaranteed life,” he boasts. In Ireland’s tuberculosis-ridden slums in the early 1900s, healthy babies were rare. But beyond this gift, there is little in Henry’s life to call miraculous. His father works as bouncer and a hit man at a local brothel. He has a wooden leg, which he uses as a weapon as well as a prosthesis. Henry’s mother is already old at age twenty, beaten down by poverty and by the deaths of so many of her children. Henry’s name is the same as one of these dead babies, and neither parent can bring themselves to use it. “I was Henry but they never called me that,” Henry explains. “She wouldn’t; he couldn’t . . . . So they called me nothing.”
Denied the use of his name as well as any material or maternal comforts, Henry ends up, by age three, spending most of his time on the streets, accompanied by his beloved younger brother, Victor. Life is marginally better here than in their home, until the day that the “rozzers” (police) nearly catch him after he heckles the King of England. Henry’s father spots his sons running away and leads them to an escape route he knows well—the rushing underground rivers of the Dublin sewers. After this, Henry never sees his father again, though the sewers prove useful to him many times in the future. Henry’s father leaves him another gift—his spare wooden leg. The leg will become his constant companion, aiding him in the service of war, romance, and disguise, long after he leaves home.
On the streets Henry learns to stay alive by taking advantage of whatever situation presents itself: he sells rats to rich men for betting races, he herds cattle for drovers, he learns to pick pockets. As the seeds of rebellion take hold in the city, Henry eagerly offers his services. He is paid to pour tar on cows owned by absentee landlords and sells week-old newspapers to Dubliners hungry for news of uprisings.
Henry’s life is soon dominated by Irish politics. The early 1900s was a period of tumult for Ireland. The nationalist movement was gaining momentum backed by the guerilla warfare tactics of the newly-former I.R.A. Henry’s strength, toughness, and street smarts are a useful resource to the Irish rebel leaders, including the renowned real-life rebel, Michael Collins. Collins, Padraig Pearse, and James Connelly use Henry to train young fighters and to blow up buildings. Eventually, Henry becomes an assassin for the republic, wielding the wooden leg as a murder weapon.
Though exhilarated by the excitement of his work and the cause, Henry is too smart to ignore the hypocrisies of the revolutionaries and his own tenuous role in the activities. “I was shaping the fate of my country, . . . but, actually, I was excluded from everything. . . . the men of the slums and hovels . . . were nameless and expendable . . . We followed orders and murdered.”
As the turmoil of the era surges around Henry, he continually searches for camaraderie, love, family, and identity in the midst of the chaos. He gravitates towards female warmth, from his own mother’s sad affection, to the women who can’t resist his handsome physique, to his affair with the love of his life, the schoolteacher-turned-rebel Miss O’Shea.
Will Henry find some peace in his hard-edged existence? A Star Called Henry gives some hints, but this novel is really only the beginning of the Henry Smart story. Roddy Doyle plans to make Henry’s tale a trilogy. Since this young man is such a survivor, his life promises to be a long one, bursting with adventures enough to fill at least two more novels.
PRAISE FOR A STAR CALLED HENRY
“Astonishing. . . . Narrated with a splendor, wit, and excitement that lift Doyle’s writing to a new level.” —The New York Times Book Review (front page review)
“Doyle vividly portrays the wild passions of an Irish Everyman . . . [and] the birth of the modern Irish nation.” —Time
“A stellar novel.” —Entertainment Weekly (Editor’s Choice)
“Brilliant . . . ferociously powerful; Doyle captures the desperation of the slums with the intimate authenticity of a poet.” —The Boston Globe (front page review)
“Stunning . . . not only Doyle’s best novel yet; it is a masterpiece, an extraordinarily entertaining epic.” —The Washington Post
ABOUT RODDY DOYLE
Roddy Doyle is the author of six novels. The first three—The Commitments, The Snapper, and 1991 Booker Prize nominee The Van—are available both single and in one volume as The Barrytown Trilogy, published by Penguin. In 1993 Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha won the Booker prize and became an international bestseller. Doyle’s next novel was the acclaimed The Woman Who Walked Into Doors which was also a bestseller and was followed by A Star Called Henry. Doyle has also written for the stage and the screen: the playsBrownbread and War; the film adaptations of The Commitments (as co-writer), The Snapper, and The Van; Stolen Nights (an original screenplay); the four-part television series Family for the BBC; and the television play Hell for Leather. Roddy Doyle is also the author of the children’s book The Giggler Treatment. He lives in Dublin.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Chapter One
My mother looked up at the stars. There were plenty of them up there. She lifted her hand. It swayed as she chose one. Her finger pointed.
—There’s my little Henry up there. Look it.
I looked, her other little Henry sitting beside her on the step. I looked up and hated him. She held me but she looked up at her twinkling boy. Poor me beside her, pale and red-eyed, held together by rashes and sores. A stomach crying to be filled, bare feet aching like an old, old man’s. Me, a shocking substitute for the little Henry who’d been too good for this world, the Henry God had wanted for himself. Poor me.
And poor Mother. She sat on that step and other crumbling steps and watched her other babies joining Henry. Little Gracie, Lil, Victor, another little Victor. The ones I remember. There were others, and early others sent to Limbo; they came and went before they could be named. God took them all. He needed them all up there to light the night. He left her plenty, though. The ugly ones, the noisy ones, the ones He didn’t want — the ones that would never stay fed.
Poor Mother. She wasn’t much more than twenty when she gazed up at little twinkling Henry but she was already old, already decomposing, ruined beyond repair, good for some more babies, then finished.
Poor Mammy. Her own mother was a leathery old witch, but was probably less than forty. She poked me, as if to prove that I was there.
—You’re big, she said.
She was accusing me, weighing me, planning to takesome of me back. Always wrapped in her black shawl, she always smelt of rotten meat and herrings — it was a sweat on her. Always with a book under the shawl, the complete works of Shakespeare or something by Tolstoy. Nash was her name but I don’t know what she called herself before she married her dead husband. She’d no Christian name that I ever heard. Granny Nash was all she ever was. I don’t know where she came from; I don’t remember an accent. Wrapped in her sweating black shawl, she could have crept out of any century. She might have walked from Roscommon or Clare, pushed on by the stench of the blight, walked across the country till she saw the stone-eating smoke that lay over the piled, sagging fever-nests that made our beautiful city, walked in along the river, deeper and deeper, into the filth and shit, the noise and the money. A young country girl, never kissed, never touched, she was scared, she was thrilled. She turned around and back around and saw the four corners of hell. Her heart cried for Leitrim but her tits sang for Dublin. She got down on her back and yelled at the sailors to form a queue. Frenchmen, Danes, Chinamen, the Yanks. I don’t know. A young country girl, a waif, just a child, aching for food. She’d left her family dead in a ditch, their chops green with grass juice, their bellies set to explode in the noonday sun. I don’t know any of this. She might have been Dublin-bred. Or she might have been foreign. A workhouse orphan, a nun gone wrong. Transported from Australia, too ugly and bad for Van Diemen’s Land. I don’t know. She’d become a witch by the time I saw her. Always with her head in a book, looking for spells. She shoved her face forward with ancient certainty, knew every thought behind my eyes. She knew how far evil could drop. She stared at me with her cannibal’s eyes and I had to dash down to the privy. Her eyes slammed the door after me.
And what do I know about poor Mother? Precious little. I know that she was Melody Nash. A beautiful name, promising so much. I know that she was born in Dublin and that she lived on Bolton Street. She worked in Mitchell’s rosary bead factory on Marlborough Street. They made the beads out of cows’ horns. All day, six days a week, sweating, going blind for God and Mitchell. Putting the holes in the beads for Jesus. Hands bleeding, eyes itching. Before she walked into my father.
Melody Nash. I think of the name and I don’t see my mother. Melody melody. She skips, she laughs, her black eyes shine happy. Her blue-black hair dances, her feet lick the cobbles. Her teacher is fond of her, she’s a fast learner. She’s quick at the adding, her letters curl beautifully. She has a great future, she’ll marry a big noise. She’ll have good meat each day and a house with a jacks. Out of the way, here comes melody Melody, out of the way, here comes melody Melody.
What age was she when she learnt the truth, when she found out that her life would have no music? The name was a lie, a spell the witch put on her. She was twelve when she walked into Mitchell’s bead factory and she was sixteen when she walked into my father. Four years in between, squinting, counting, shredding her hands, in a black hole making beads. Melody melody rosary beads. They sang as they worked. Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me. Mitchell wanted them to pray. Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee. Was she gorgeous? Did her white teeth gleam as she lifted her head with the other girls? Beautiful dreamer, queen of my song. The woman on the step had no teeth, nothing gleamed. Like me, she was never a child. There were no children in Dublin. Promises weren’t kept in the slums. She was never beautiful.
She walked into my father. Melody Nash met Henry Smart. She walked right into him, and he fell. She was half his weight, half his height, six years younger but he fell straight over like a cut tree. Love at first sight? Felled by her beauty? No. He was maggoty drunk and missing his leg. He was holding himself up with a number seven shovel he’d found inside an open door somewhere back the way he’d come when Melody Nash walked into him and dropped him onto Dorset Street. It was a Sunday. She was coming from half-eight mass, he was struggling out of Saturday. Missing a leg and his sense of direction, he hit the street with his forehead and lay still. Melody dropped the beads she’d made herself and stared down at the man. She couldn’t see his face; it was kissing the street. She saw a huge back, a back as big as a bed, inside a coat as old and crusted as the cobbles around it. Shovel-sized hands at the end of his outstretched arms, and one leg. Just the one. She actually lifted the coat to check.
—Where’s your leg gone, mister? said Melody.
She lifted the coat a bit more.
—Are you dead, mister? she said.
The man groaned. Melody dropped the coat and stepped back. She looked around for help but the street was quiet. The man groaned again. He drew his arms in and braced himself. Then he crawled one-kneed off the road, over the gutter. Melody picked up the shovel. He groaned again and vomited. A day and a half’s drinking poured out of him like black pump water. Melody got out of its way. The stream stopped. He wiped his mouth with the filthiest sleeve that Melody had ever seen. He put his hand out. Melody understood immediately that he wanted the shovel. She held it out to him. She could study his face now. It hadn’t been washed in ages and the specks and lines of blood gave him the look of something freshly slaughtered. But he wasn’t bad looking, she decided. The situation — the coat, the puked porter, the absent leg — wouldn’t let her take the plunge and call him good looking, but he definitely wasn’t bad looking. He clung to the shovel and hauled himself up. Melody stepped back again to get out of his shadow. He stared at her but she wasn’t frightened.
—Sorry, mister, said Melody.
He shook his head.
—Did you see a leg on your travels? he said.
—No.
—A wooden one.
—No.
He seemed disappointed.
—It’s gone, so, he said. —I had it yesterday.
Then Melody said something that started them on the road to marriage and me.
—You’re a grand-looking man without it, she said.
Now he looked at Melody properly. She’d only said it to comfort him but one-legged men will grab at anything.
—What’s your name, girlie? he said.
—Melody Nash, she said.
And Henry Smart fell in love. He fell in love with the name. With a name like that beside him he’d find his leg, a new one would grow out of the stump, he’d stride through open doors for the rest of his life. He’d find money on the street, three-legged chickens. He’d never have to sweat again. Henry Smart, my father, looked at Melody Nash. He saw what he wanted to see.
I know what Henry Smart looked like. She told me, sitting on the step, looking down the street, and up, waiting for him. And later on when he’d gone for ever but she still looked and waited. Her descriptions, her words, stayed the same. She never let her loneliness, hunger, her misery change her story. Her mind wandered and then rotted but she always knew her story, how she walked into Henry Smart. It was fixed. I knew what he looked like. But what about her? What did Melody Nash look like? She was sixteen. That’s all I know. I see her later, only five, six years further on. An eternity. An old woman. Big, lumpy, sad. Melody Smart. I see that woman sitting on the step and I try to bring her back six years, I try to make the age and pain drop off her. I try to make her stand up and walk back, to see her as she had been. I take three stone off her, I lift her mouth, I try to put fun into her eyes. I give her hair some spring, I change her clothes. I can create a good-looking sixteen-year-old. I can make her a stunner. I can make her plainer then, widen her, spoil her complexion. I can play this game for what’s left of my life but I’ll never see Melody Nash, my sixteen-year-old mother.
She worked in the dark and damp all day. She squinted to fight back the light. Her hands were ripped and solid. She was a child of the Dublin slums, no proper child at all. Her parents, grandparents, had never known good food. Bad food, bad drink, bad air. Bad bones, bad eyes, bad skin; thin, stooped, mangled. Henry Smart looked at Melody Nash and saw what he wanted to see.
—What’s your name, girlie?
—Melody Nash, she said. —How did you lose it?
—I haven’t a bull’s clue, said Henry.
He looked down at the ground where his foot should have been, and hopped away out of the porter he’d just thrown up. He wanted nothing to do with it; he was already a new man. He was thinking quickly, planning. She’d seen him falling on his face and then getting sick, one of his legs was missing — he knew he hadn’t been impressing her. But there were other ways to catch fish. He looked at Melody, and back down at the ground.
—It was my good one too, he said.
—Your good one?
—Me Sunday leg.
—Oh, said Melody. —It’ll turn up, mister, don’t worry. Maybe you left it at home.
Henry thought about this.
—I doubt it, he said. —I lost that as well.
She felt sorry for him. No leg, no home — the only thing holding him up was his vulnerability. She saw honesty. The men Melody knew showed off or snapped at her. Mitchell the rosary beads, her father, all men — they were all angry and mean. This man here was different. She’d knocked the poor cripple onto the street, his face was bleeding, he’d no home to hop home to — and he didn’t blame her. She saw now: he was smiling. A nice smile, he was offering it, half a smile. He didn’t look like a cripple. She liked the space where the leg should have been.
—Will we go for a stroll, so? he said.
—Yes, she said.
—Right.
He wiped the blade of the shovel on his sleeve.
—Let’s get this gleaming for the lady.
He let the spade hop gently on the path. Melody heard music.
—Now we’re right, said Henry Smart.
He held out his arm, offered it to Melody.
—Hang on, said Melody.
She took off her shawl and wiped his face with it. She dabbed and petted, removed the blood and left the dirt — that was his own, none of her business. It didn’t bother her. Dirt and grime were the glues that held Dublin together. She spat politely on a corner of the shawl and washed away the last dried, cranky specks of blood. Then she put the shawl back on.
—Now, she said.
They were already a couple.
He leaned on the shovel and offered her his free arm. She leaned on him and off they went, on the ramble that would still deliver her smile when she recalled it many moons later, when she told us all about it on the steps of all the tenements we were thrown into and out of. A Sunday in June, 1897, when the Famine Queen, Victoria, was still our one and only. A glorious summer’s morning. It took getting used to, the rhythm of their stroll. He’d lean out over the abyss that was his missing leg. She, clinging to his sleeve, would follow him out there. Then he’d haul himself in and forward on the handle of the shovel. She’d be pulled after him, then out again and forward. There wasn’t much room for talking. The cobbles were tricky, corners were impossible. So they went straight ahead, out to Drumcondra and the countryside.
Who was he and where did he come from? The family trees of the poor don’t grow to any height. I know nothing real about my father; I don’t even know if his name was real. There was never a Granda Smart, or a Grandma, no brothers or cousins. He made his life up as he went along. Where was his leg? South Africa, Glasnevin, under the sea. She heard enough stories to bury ten legs. War, an infection, the fairies, a train. He invented himself, and reinvented. He left a trail of Henry Smarts before he finally disappeared. A soldier, a sailor, a butler — the first one-legged butler to serve the Queen. He’d killed sixteen Zulus with the freshly severed limb.
Was he just a liar? No, I don’t think so. He was a survivor; his stories kept him going. Stories were the only things the poor owned. A poor man, he gave himself a life. He filled the hole with many lives. He was the son of a Sligo peasant who’d been eaten by his neighbours; they’d started on my father before he got away. He hopped down the boreen, the life gushing out of his stump, hurling rocks back at the hungry neighbours, and kept hopping till he reached Dublin. He was a pedlar, a gambler, a hoor’s bully. He sat on the ditch beside my mother and invented himself.
—You didn’t tell me your name yet, she said.
—Henry Smart, he said. —At your service.
Was it a name to compensate for the missing leg, a name to match hers? He fell in love with her name — Melody melody Melody Nash — and she fell in love with his.
They held hands.
Years later, looking into the night sky, counting her children. Poor ruined mother. She sat in the rain, the hail, the heat. She turned her back on the houses behind us and stared up at the soothing night. Behind her, the damp, scabbed walls, the rotten wood, the wet air, the leaking, bursting ceilings. Decomposing wallpaper, pools of stagnant water, rats on the scent of baby milk. Colonies of flies in the wet, crumbling walls. Typhoid and other death in every breath, on every surface. Banisters that shook when held, floors that creaked and groaned, timber that cried for sparks. There was no rest, nowhere she could lie down and forget. Shouts and fights, rage and coughing, coughing — death creeping nearer. And the rooms behind the steps got smaller and darker and more and more evil. We fell further and further. The walls crumbled and closed in on us. Her children died and joined the stars. Rooms with no windows, floors that bred cockroaches. We cried at the smell of other people’s lousy food. We cried at the pain that burned through our sores. We cried for arms to gather and hold us. We cried for heat and for socks, for milk, and light, for an end to the itches that stopped us from sleeping. We cried at the lice that shone and curled and mocked us. We cried for our mother to come and save us. Poor Mother. Finally, finally, we crept down to our last room, a basement, as low as we could go, a hole that yawned and swallowed us. We lay down and slept in the ground water of the River Liffey, we slept piled together with the sewer slugs and worms. Mother sat on the crumbling steps, she turned her back on the sweating, appalling facts of her life and looked up through the acid smoke at the stars that twinkled over Dublin.
They got married in a side chapel, in the Jesuits’ church on Gardiner Street. Her father gave her away (and died the year after). The best man was Henry’s colleague, a bouncer called Brannigan. The bridesmaid was a scrawny girl called Faye Cantrell who scratched so much and so loudly that the priest told her to stop it or he wouldn’t let her friend get married. So she put her hands to her sides and concentrated so hard on keeping them there that she wet herself.
Melody was three weeks shy of her seventeenth birthday. She sailed out of the church, lifted by the smells of burning candles, the newly varnished pews and Faye’s piss. There were kids outside, a scabby-headed mob, waiting for the grushie. Henry took a handful of farthings and ha’pences out of his trouser pocket and flicked it so that, for a second, the coins covered the sky. The children watched, enthralled, then woke up, ran and beat and mauled each other to get at the money. The losers turned for more. They stood there, the snot running out of them in ropes and waited for more of Henry’s magic. But there was none.
There was a party in her parents’ room on Bolton Street. Nothing swanky, a few bottles and some music. The neighbour women queued up to hand over the wisdom to Melody.
—Remember now, love, said old Missis Doody from the back parlour. —Give the babby half a bottle of stout every night and that’ll kill the maggots.
—I’m not having a baby, said Melody Smart.
—Of course you’ll be having a babby, said Missis Doody, a woman as old and as dirty as the house. —We all had babbies. I had five or six.
— I’m not having a baby now, said Melody. —And I don’t know who told you any different.
Ah now, said old Missis Doody. —One-legged babbies you’ll be having. One after the other. They’ll out-hop the hoppers.
And Missis Dempsey from the step next door told her all about syphilis.
—It’ll rot the brain out of you, love, she said. —You won’t get it, of course, but he might. And then he’ll pass it on to you, so you’d want to be careful. Rots the brain till you fall over in the street because your legs don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing. You die screaming and roaring, there’s no cure at all for it. If you’re lucky they’ll bring you to the Locke Hospital and smother you with a pillow. That’s what they do to the unfortunate girls that catch it off the sailors. Just make sure he comes home every night and you’ll be alright. Or rub a bit of whitewash from the wall of a church on him. When he has his dander up, if you can follow me; you’ll learn, don’t worry, love.
Melody was mystified; she was numb. Woman after woman sat beside her, one on each side, and whispered the deadly secrets into her maiden ears. Now, if you smell a fancy woman off his coat you should boil it in water with the head of a Malahide mackerel. She’d gone up the little side aisle in a state of sexual innocence, kissed only by one man and no further. She knew that sex happened, like she knew that God was up there behind the clouds. She knew that women went inside to their houses for a while and came out with babies. Two good pulls like that now and he’ll leave you alone for the rest of the night. She’d heard noises under the dark stairs. He’ll never be off you, you mark my words. With the leg made of wood there the blood needs somewhere else to go. She was impossibly innocent. Her mother had told her that she’d have to stay in her new home for three whole days after the wedding night. She was ready for the lock-in but she didn’t know why. A nice leaf of cabbage will do the trick. She lived bang in the middle of a place that survived on the buying and selling of sex. It was in the air; its stains and howls were everywhere around her, the cries, whoops and gasps, babies and brats crawling over every square foot, brassers and sailors holding up every corner for miles around and, God love her, she’d never noticed. And now, she was being bombarded. If he makes you do it the way the dogs do you’ll end up with twins or even triplets or more. Unless the straw in your mattress came from under a priest’s horse. She looked around for her husband, to see if she’d see the monster she was being told about by these calm and bitter women. She couldn’t see him. She couldn’t hear him, his laugh or his leg. She couldn’t breathe. I got this jar of stuff from a Jewman and that got rid of it before I had the lid back on it. She thought she was going to die, just a few more whispered words would kill her; her tongue was beginning to swell.
She was saved by the fight that broke out when a couple of moochers that nobody knew were caught helping themselves to the bottles of stout.
— Yeh dirty lousers!
Granny Nash jumped onto one of them and bit him on the cheek. His screams saved Melody. She got away from the women. But the sight of her mother hanging on to the poor man’s face filled her with fresh terror. Was this part of the wedding? Would she have to do it? The man was trying to save his face but his arms were stiffened by all the bottles and sandwiches stuffed up his sleeves. His friend was being pounded by Melody’s father, using her new husband’s leg. And her Henry sat on the table guarding the rest of the bottles. The neighbours queued up to have a go at the moochers but Granny Nash wasn’t ready to give up and hand over. She was growling and chomping like a scorched bitch from hell; her dirty old thumbs were crawling across the man’s face, looking for eyes to gouge. Faye was bawling and scratching herself under the table. Old Missis Doody was clapping her hands.
—Seven, EIGHT, open the GATE!
Melody had had enough.
—You’re ruining my day! she screamed.
Granda Nash dropped the leg.
—Sure Jaysis, love, he said. —The day would’ve been ruined altogether if they’d got away with the rest of the bottles.
But the fight was over. The moochers tumbled out the door and down the stairs, whimpering and crying, and they left a trail of blood that the dogs of the district followed and lapped. They also left the bottles, none broken, and most of the sandwiches, some of which could be straightened and eaten. Henry strapped his leg back on and went over to Melody. He had a face on him that was bashful and brave.
—Ready?
—Yes, said Melody.
It was time to go. They said their goodbyes. Melody wouldn’t kiss her mother; the moocher’s blood was still on her chin, her eyes were tiny and mad. They strolled the short walk to their new home. Melody held on to Henry’s arm and began to feel happy again. The air was cool and nice, she was married and walking home. Around a few corners, down a few dark lanes.
To No. 57, Silver Alley.
To a room in 57, Silver Alley. Up two flights of stairs, in the door, the top front room. A room of their own. A room with a window, a good working window that could be opened and closed. It had once been some child’s nursery. A hundred years later, the newly married Smarts felt lucky to have it. They had it to themselves; all this space and peace, they’d never had so much before. They stood at the doorway, getting their breath back, and looked in at their home. They had so much. They had good thick walls and a window. They had a mattress, fresh straw, a chair and a stool. They had a tea chest for the coal and another for a table. They had a window box waiting for flowers. They had a mantelpiece and a blue statue of Mary already up there. They had two cups not too cracked and two plates not cracked at all. They had knives, forks and one spoon. A water bucket, a basin, a good big kettle and a slop bucket. A paraffin lamp and a brand new bar of Sunlight soap. An old biscuit tin for keeping the food and a piece of gauze for over the milk. They had clothes on their backs and some to spare. They had a man who’d call for the rent for the landlord, a policeman called Costello, every Friday at six o’clock and it didn’t frighten them at all; they’d have the money stacked and ready on the mantelpiece. The floorboards were clean, their window was gleaming. Henry’s everyday leg was parked in a corner. They had a sheet made from flour bags, and sugar sacks for blankets. They’d a bit of bread and cheese in the tin, and a dollop of butter staying fresh in the water bucket. They had everything they needed; they owned it all.
He sat on the chair, she took the stool.
A room of their own. They could close the door and keep out the rest of the house. They could forget the darkness they’d climbed through, the unseen filth that made each step an adventure. They could joke about the banister that wasn’t there when they’d reached for it. They could ignore their drenched sleeves where they’d rubbed along the stairwell and the stench that had risen with them as they’d climbed the stairs. They could comment or not on the bloodied coughs they’d heard coming from the room below them as they’d passed, and could still hear now if they wanted to. They could hear claws in the attic, beyond the sagging ceiling, and claws behind their walls. They sat side by side like they were on a tram and, beautifully shy now that they were married and alone, they looked at the walls and at their window.
The walls were alive, looking back out at them. Crawlers and biters, cities under the layers. If they put their hands to the paper they could feel creeping and shuffling. Melody and Henry thought all walls were like that. They weren’t solid; they were never reliable. There was cow hair in the paste, invented to keep the room warm. It smelt to high heaven and back down to hell.
They looked at the cracked pane of their very own window. They saw the yellowed, blackened newspaper, filling the hole under the sill. The front top room, a room with a view. They could look out and see the world. They could see the smoke floating by, smuts the size of kittens, grey, stinking rain. They could go to their window and see other windows just a few feet in front of them, a big man’s reach over the alley. Houses bending towards each other, hooding the alley below, and ready to topple. Flaking brick and rotten wood; a good wind or a push would bring them down. Sneering replicas of their own room, leaning out towards them, they could see the houses dying. To the right of their window they could see the alley’s missing teeth, three houses that had fallen into fire five years before. Three houses and eighty-seven people, the flames licking Melody and Henry’s window. They could open the window and look down at the alley, at the stray dogs and children, bare feet and rickets, the beatings and evictions, the running dirt and pain. They could look out at their future. Ah sure, God be with the days. They could close the window and keep out the dead and the living, the screams and the heartache. Inside, they were happily married. Outside, they were doomed.
Henry and Melody sat on the chair and the stool. They were excited and frightened, frightened and excited. She was sixteen, he was twenty-two. My parents. My mammy and daddy.
I’m just around the corner, gathering steam. I was born in that room, or in a room just like it. I was born into that alley, that city, that small corner of the Empire. I’m looking for the door, trying to find my way in. It’s dark, but I’m nearly there.
They paid the rent every Friday night. Melody handed it over to Costello the rozzer, a big, fat Dublin Metropolitan policeman who first saw Dublin the day before he started work. He hated the place, the people, their accents and their dirt. They deserved their streets and their slums. Collecting the rent was a nixer. He loved it, especially when there was no rent when he knocked. He had a huge moustache that matched his gut and feet that spanned three parishes.
He counted Melody’s shillings and pennies. He weighed them on his palm, hoped they’d be a little too light.
—Grand so, he said after he’d waited long enough to make Melody worried.
He pocketed the money, dropped it down on top of more money. He wet the top of his pencil.
—Where’s himself the night? he asked as he pretended to write in the notebook he held gently in his mitt.
—He’s at his work, Mister Costello, said Melody.
—His work, said Costello. —He calls it work, does he?
Costello cracked Dublin heads for a living. So did my father. He stood in front of the door of Dolly Oblong’s, the biggest brothel on Faithful Place, bang in the middle of Monto. In her dark room deep inside the house Dolly Oblong, a woman few people had seen, scoured the papers for news of troop movements, stock prices, football results. She knew what boats were on their way, the big race meetings, the date that Ash Wednesday fell on, years in advance. She saw business everywhere; she knew everything. It was said that, in her day, and still a child, she’d brought spunk to the eyes of the Prince of Wales; he’d been brought to her through secret passages that had been dug especially for him. And immediately after that, she’d serviced an unemployed navvy, the Prince’s arse hardly back inside the passage. She’d fucked all classes, colours and creeds and her girls would do the same. She ran a house for all men. All men with the money and the manners.
And that was where my father came in. He stood on the steps all night and kept the peace. There was privacy inside for those who needed it and licence for those who wanted to whoop. The rozzers and clergymen could come and leave under cover of night. The sailors could come at any time they wanted. But they all had to get past my father. He stood there from six till six, all night long. The letter-in and chucker-out. Soldiers, butchers, politicians — they all had to pass his test. He glared at them as they came up the steps. He looked for something in their faces: crankiness, aggro, badness. If he saw it, they didn’t get past him. He was a great big man but there was more to him than that. Compensation for the missing leg, his body had a sharpness that was quickly understood. Sailors with no English turned back when they read the tilt of his shoulders. Ratarsed aldermen stopped boasting when they saw Henry’s eyebrow lift. Bankers stared at his chest and knew that he was incorruptible. Others just knew him; they knew about him. In one neat hop he’d have the leg off and their heads open and the leg back on before they hit the ground. He was a good bouncer, the king of the bullies. He often went a full week without having to take off the leg. He was polite and agile. He stepped aside and let the men in, the ones with clear faces, decent men looking for a ride or a bit of after-hours singing. They often tipped him. The girls liked him too. They paid him to buy them their cigarettes and sweets. Dolly Oblong would never let them out; she wanted them white-skinned and captured. She called them all Maria; the clients liked it. She hated the coarseness of the girls who stood on the steps all down the street and the snootiness of the flash houses, like the one she’d worked in for years.
He made a living. He walked home at six in the morning, dying for his bed and the weightlessness that arrived when the leg came off. He was reliable, steady, a father crying out for children.
—He calls it work, does he? said Costello.
Every Friday night.
—Yes, Mister Costello, said Melody.
—Looking after hoors is work, is it?
—I don’t know, Mister Costello, said Melody.
He did other things too, my father. He was reliable, he was steady. A man created from his own secrets, he was well able to keep other people’s. He did things for people. Sometimes Henry wasn’t on the steps of Dolly Oblong’s. He was somewhere else. He gave messages, he delivered lessons. He gave lessons that were never forgotten.
Costello gave his money a fat jangle.
—What about you, Missis Smarty? said Costello. —Are you one of his hoors?
—No, I’m not, Mister Costello.
—No, he said. —Sure, who’d want you?
—I’m off, said Henry to Brannigan.
—Fair enough, said Brannigan.
Brannigan watched Henry hop down the steps. He watched, then listened to the leg as Henry disappeared across the street, into the dark. He pushed out his chest to fill the gap left by Henry.
Melody closed the door. Peace at last. For another week. She wished her Henry could stay at home on Fridays, at least until after Mister Costello had gone. It always took her hours to recover. She cleaned the floor. She dusted the statue.
Henry waited. He waited for the message to come to him. There was no such thing as a quiet wooden leg. Sometimes, the tap tap of the approaching leg was message enough; he walked under a window — tap tap — and back, knowing that the money, the promise would be delivered first thing the day after, or quicker. Tonight, though, Henry needed silence. His was the best-known leg in all of Dublin — tap tap. He needed silence. He stood back in the dark. He listened. He heard the shouts and howls from the streets behind him. A baby crying from a window above, a bottle breaking, a batch of cats singing for sex. He was listening for a wheeze. Any minute now. Any second. He knew his man. He knew his week. It was Friday night. Any second now.
He heard it. The wheeze, and good leather on cobbles. The message. Henry opened his coat; he unstrapped his leg. The wheezing was louder, louder. Any second now. Henry held his leg. Louder, louder, louder. Henry lifted the leg.
Costello never knew what hit him. The weight of the rents pulled him quickly to the ground. He was already half dead. Henry had the leg back on. He stood over Costello, one foot on each side of him. He had to stretch; it was like straddling a sea-lion. Costello was face down. There was some of him alive. Henry leaned down to his right ear.
—Alfie Gandon says Hello.
Then he sat on Costello, hauled back his head and sawed deep into his throat. With a leather knife he’d sharpened that afternoon. Back and across the man’s neck, like a bow over a fiddle. Henry even hummed. Costello’s death rattle was a feeble thing; there was no fight or spunk in him. He quacked and properly died.
Henry stood up. He wiped the sides of the knife on the sleeve of his coat, the same sleeve my mother had leaned on on their first walk into the country. The dirtiest sleeve in the world.
Back home, pregnant Melody said her prayers before she climbed under the sugar sacks and tried to sleep.
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Additional information
| Dimensions | 0.9000 × 5.1000 × 7.7000 in |
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| Subjects | FIC051000, world war 2, family life, literary fiction, dublin, book club recommendations, contemporary fiction, alternate history, WWI, historical novel, historical fiction, family saga, relationship books, classic literature, historical novels, historical fiction books, marriage books, irish fiction, irish literature, easter rising, coming of age, Literature, historical, war, marriage, relationships, family, romance, Friendship, romance books, contemporary, book club, literary, humor, FIC014000, WWII, WW2, saga, Paris, 20th century, 1920s, 1940s, 1950s |
