Michael Russell - The City of Shadows

‘If you want the shite kicked out of you, there’s a few of us would be happy enough. Are you up for that?’

Almost anything Vincent said would provoke a beating. He knew the look too well. There was a group of gardai, smoking close by. They were watching him too. It was the same look. He got up and turned away, without another word. He walked back through the Park, back to the river, back along the Quays. Everywhere there were people. They still filled the streets, more and more of them as he got closer to the city centre, where the parades and processions had continued all afternoon. The whole place was full of people celebrating this day that had been like no other. But for Vincent Walsh it was a day like every day again; like every day had been for years.

He walked into Carolan’s Bar. He nodded in response to the greetings, but there was nothing behind the smile he forced out of himself. He stepped in behind the bar. For a moment Billy Donnelly said nothing. Then he picked up a bottle of Bushmills and half-filled a tumbler. He thrust it into Vincent’s hand. Billy didn’t need an explanation. Hadn’t he known the outcome?

‘What else did you expect? I told you.’

‘You’re a fecking clairvoyant, Billy.’

Vincent put the glass to his lips. He didn’t want it but he drank it.

‘Jesus wept, Vinnie. If I’d a pound for every man here was fucked by a priest and never saw him again, I’d be the richest man in Ireland!’

‘You don’t know anything about him.’

‘I’ve met his sort in every jacks in Dublin. We all have.’

‘You’re a gobshite.’

‘I am and I wouldn’t know an angel if he was up my arse. It’s why I’ll never get to heaven. Go on, forget about working tonight. Get off and see some of your pals. Or take the bottle upstairs and shout at the moon.’

‘I’ll be better doing something, even listening to a bollocks all night.’

Billy grinned. He reached for the Bushmills again and refilled the tumbler. Vincent drank it down in one. He’d the taste for it now. He turned back to the bar and grabbed one of the empty glasses thrusting towards him.

‘Another pint if that’s the sweet nothing’s all over with now!’

‘In the glass or will I pump it straight into your great, gaping gob?’

‘If that’s what’s on offer I’ll have the pint afterwards so.’

Vincent laughed with everyone else. The cramped bar at Carolan’s smelt of stale beer and sweat and cheap aftershave. Once in a blue moon Billy Donnelly decided the place had to be cleaned properly, and for the next week it smelt so strongly of Jeyes Fluid that when the smell of the stale beer, sweat and aftershave returned, it was like the breath of spring. Vincent looked around at the noisy crowd of regulars; the screeching queens with rouged cheeks; the swaggering boys always giggling too much; the big men with moustaches and muscles and paunches; the tweed-jacketed pipe smokers who jumped every time the door opened and kept their wedding rings in their pockets. It wasn’t a place you could really say you belonged, but it was safe. It shut out a world where belonging was out of the question. The Guards knew what Carolan’s was and most of the time they left it alone. But there was a price for that. They paid a visit now and again, just to drink Billy’s whiskey and to remind him and his customers they were there on sufferance. And if the Guards wanted information, they got it. A sign behind the bar read: ‘Don’t say anything, Billy’s a fucking unpaid informer’.

That night Vincent Walsh laughed a lot and kept on laughing. He kept on drinking and drank too much, and Billy Donnelly was happy to let him. There were a lot of bad things that could happen to a homosexual man. Falling in love came high on the list. The kind of love that didn’t go away the next time you had sex was the worst. You had to train yourself not to care if you wanted to survive. And behind the laughter Billy could see that Vincent believed in something no one in Carolan’s Bar had any right to believe in. Love was still burning in his eyes. It would be a long time before he let it go. Billy knew. He had been to the same place. Twenty years ago a doctor had pumped his stomach and saved his life. There were days when if he’d met that eejit of a doctor again he’d have beaten the bastard senseless.

It hadn’t been such a bad evening in the end. Carolan’s was at its loud and irreverent best. The sound of laughter and the caramel-brown anaesthetic had numbed Vincent Walsh’s head and put his heart in a box, at least till the morning. They worked hard at laughter in Carolan’s. It was the language in which everyone spoke about everything; politics and the price of bread, sex and family squabbles, memories and dreams, religion and the litter in the streets, joy, sorrow, desire, bitterness, hope, resentment, love, hatred, grief; every ordinary pleasure and irritation that life delivered. Outside they spoke another language. And it was someone else’s tongue. The last recalcitrants were pushed, cajoled and kicked out into the street. Vincent started to pick up pots. The silence was as sobering as the prospect of washing the stinking glasses and emptying out the filthy ashtrays. Billy bolted the door shut.

‘We’ll have the one we came for and let the glasses wash themselves. There won’t be a saint in heaven lifting a finger with the day that’s in it, so why the fecking hell should we?’

Vincent smiled at the comfortable predictability of the words. Every night of Billy Donnelly’s life there was a reason why it was just the wrong time to wash the pots. He had no need of high days and holidays to put off till tomorrow what he was supposed to do today. It was often well into the next afternoon before what passed for clearing up in Carolan’s got underway. If you really wanted a clean glass for a morning pint you were better off bringing your own. But as Billy went behind the bar to twist the cap off another bottle of Bushmills, Vincent carried on collecting glasses. Yes, at some point he would go upstairs to the room in the attic and force himself to go to sleep. Not yet. So Billy poured two more glasses, humming the tuneless tune to himself that always indicated no more conversation was required. Then there was a loud hammering on the front door. Billy sighed, walking across the bar with his most forbidding landlord’s scowl.

‘Now which old queen thinks we can’t get enough of her company?’

He unbolted the door and pulled it open.

‘Didn’t I tell you to piss off — ’

He stopped. A tall, thin man in his forties stood in the doorway, smiling amiably. He walked in without a word, followed by three others, a little younger. Under their coats and jackets they all wore the blue shirts that marked them out as members of the Army Comrades Association, demobbed Free State soldiers and assorted hangers-on, who thought they’d knocked the bollocks out of Eamon de Valera in the Civil War, only to see him president of Ireland now. The Blueshirts modelled themselves on the Blackshirts and Brownshirts of Mussolini and Hitler, at least as far as shirts were concerned. Their political agenda hadn’t got any further than brawling with the IRA in the streets, but in the absence of IRA men to pick a fight with, and with drink taken, a bit of Blueshirt queer bashing wouldn’t have been out of the question. Didn’t they pride themselves on defending Ireland’s Catholic values above everything else? But what struck Billy Donnelly immediately was that these Blueshirts weren’t drunk, in fact they were coldly sober.

‘Now, you wouldn’t deny us a drink, Billy, not on a night when we should all be throwing our arms around each other with the holiness of it all. And when it’s starting to rain out there too.’

Billy didn’t know these men, whatever about the familiarity. He glanced back as the last one shut the door and bolted it, smiling. Billy knew that smile; he was a big man who would enjoy what he was going to do.