Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

“Nah, just me falling off me bike,” I say. “Is that a bit of a foreign accent you have there?”

Sonia smiles, pleased, but before she can answer Touched cuts her off.

“Sean,” he mutters, staring at me with interest.

“What?”

“Let’s see your foot,” he says.

Without self-consciousness I lift it onto the table.

“Does that mean you can’t run or lift heavy things or anything like that?” Touched asks with a bit of concern.

“Nope,” I say, and then ignoring Touched, “So, Sonia, have you been over to Ireland ever?”

“I have yet to visit, but I am passionately engaged in the struggle for you to free your homeland from the imperialists.”

Oh boy, here it comes, I say to myself with some prescience.

“Yes, Sean. It is a tragedy. The tragedy of the green. Since Elizabeth the Bloody sent the English into your country, it has been four hundred years of oppression and terror.”

Gerry cannot let his wife fall into doctrinal error and he takes up the conversation:

“Sean, as you probably know, the English came over with Strongbow, so it’s eight hundred years of oppression.”

And now Touched, seeing this an opportunity to propagandize, throws in his two cents:

“Eight hundred years, Sean. That’s why we have to fight the stubborn English-loving Protestants of Ulster who still won’t permit their Catholic brothers in the Six Counties to join with their fellow Irishmen in the South. We have repeatedly told them we would make them welcome and we even put the Orange Order’s color on our own national flag. But they’re different from us, Sean. They have no real culture or sense of pride. They’ve had their chance to be convinced by reason, but neither they nor their masters in London will listen to reason. That’s why it’s the time for force, Sean. The time for force.”

My smile fixes and I nod but actually I couldn’t care less if Northern Ireland was part of the Republic of Ireland or Britain or the People’s Republic of fucking China. I hadn’t lived there for six years and every year that passed I found it harder and harder to give a shit. And Touched was wrong. I’ve met plenty of Protestants and Catholics and they’re so alike that the differences between them have become ridiculously exaggerated. Freud, I think, calls it the narcissism of the small difference. Ethnically, culturally, and even spiritually, they’re the same bloody people. Not that you could convince these eejits.

I’ve zoned out for a minute and when I zone back in I find that they’re looking at me, waiting.

“Sorry, what was that?” I ask.

“Jesus, get some coffee in ya. Pay attention. I was just saying, Sean, that it’s like history was put on hold for fifty years. Sonia here doesn’t realize that in the 1970s a bunch of men arose in the North with the vision of Michael Collins. Us. Me and Gerry, a new generation. Our generation. The IRA. We decided to use force against the might of the British Empire. Have to. Brits don’t understand anything else. People say, ‘What about India?’ Well, I say, ‘What about Palestine in ’47?’ Eh?” Touched says, triumphantly.

“Didn’t the IRA kill Michael Collins?” I ask naively.

Touched starts mumbling some lame reply while I take a good look at Sonia. Perhaps the smartest person in the room. Certainly if the bios were correct the only one of us who had been to university. How exactly had she ended up falling for this nonsense? How had she met Gerry in the first place?

“How did you meet Gerry?” I ask her.

She laughs.

“We met at an Ireland-Quebec friendship dinner in Boston,” she says, a surprising and surprisingly boring answer.

“I never heard of such a thing.”

“It is part of the small-nations commerce initiative that the Boston Chamber of Commerce ran last year. I am in the Chamber of Commerce and my mother was from Quebec,” she says, except that she pronounces it Kaybeck.

“Are there a lot of similarities between Quebec and Ireland?” I ask and steel myself for the floodgates to open, which of course they do.

“Quebec, like Ireland, is oppressed by a tyrannous neighboring culture. Our voice has been drowned out. A free Quebec would be a bastion of socialism, liberty, and idealism in North America, just as a free socialist Ireland would be the ideal counterweight to imperialist England. This is something you don’t know, Touched, but the Quebec people…”

I cease to listen. One of my attributes. In my book, Quebec’s only interesting because it’s a quirky, French, Catholic part of Canada. If Quebec were ever independent it would be a dreary, white, monoglot, Catholic country. Probably turn fascist in a decade. Still, it decides me. She’s not the smartest person in the room. Not her, not Touched, not Gerry, certainly not Seamus. Dangerous, yes, but they weren’t going to outthink me. Her lips stop moving, she has finished her lecture.

“Vive le Québec libre,” I say. It makes her smile.

“One day, and I hope to see it, all small nations will be free. Ireland was the first of the twentieth century’s great liberation movements to succeed, an inspiration for all of us,” Sonia says. Her face is flushed and she’s out of breath. Her chest heaving in and out. And suddenly she doesn’t look at all unattractive. The top button of her sweater has come undone and you can see the outline of her very pale breasts. Her lips are glistening a little in the light and her… Jesus, get a grip, Michael, your life’s too complicated by women already.

I take a large mug of coffee, and through the enormous kitchen window I see Kit and Jackie coming back, wet, sandy, happy, arm in arm.

They clean the sand off their feet, grab towels, and join us at breakfast.

“How was the surfing?” Gerry asks, giving Kit a hug.

“Well, at first I wasn’t stoked at all because it was, like, a little gnarly out there. But Jackie, like, totally rocked, you should have seen him, and so I followed him and took a few and it was good,” she says excitedly.

“It was good,” Jackie says, stepping onto the deck to strip off his wet suit and pulling on a T-shirt over his boxers. His bruises are healing nicely, and wet, tanned, and sober, he almost looks quite the handsome little surfer boy. The newcomers sit.

“Have you seen much of America so far, Sean?” Sonia asks.

“No, not really, flew into New York, saw a bit of that and then I came up to Boston looking for work, hardly seen any of the country.”

“And speaking of accents, sometimes it’s almost as if you sound a bit American,” Sonia says without suspicion. But still it sets the alarm bells ringing. It’s something I’m aware of. I’ve been trying to fight against it but after five years living in America, of course I had lost some of my Irish accent and colloquialisms. Regardless, I’d have to damp that fire immediately.

“Yeah, I pick up accents very quickly, it’s one of my failings.

You should have heard me when I lived in London. I was talking like Mick Jagger after a few months. I suppose it’s a symptom of a weak personality. I’m definitely a follower not a leader,” I mutter with a touch of meekness and embarrassment.

Gerry nods wisely.

“Don’t worry about that,” he says. “Can’t have too many leaders, Sean. Every group needs followers. Men who will obey and do their duty. In any case, it’s nothing to be ashamed of-you, me, Touched, and Jackie all came from the Old Country originally and only Touched has preserved the exact timbre of his north Antrim dialect. He won’t be swayed by anyone.”

Gerry laughs. Sonia looks at him with frustration.

“I’ve forgotten what I was going to say. Oh yes, now I remember. All I wanted to say is that if he hasn’t seen much of America we should show him some things. We’ll have to drive out to the Cape, although I know you hate the Cape, but it doesn’t matter and we’ll have to go there and up to the cabin in Maine, or better yet, Nantucket.”