Literary Yard

Search for meaning

By: Elaine Lennon

Christmas is blood red. Up on the hallway ceiling I can’t help but see it without looking, even with all the hours of scrubbing and bleach and white paint to camouflage the residue. There are still traces of claret and ruby and vermilion,  a reminder of a missing wine collection, a crimson orbit in a faded galaxy, jewels of memory.

I will proceed from truth. At least I will tell you what I know. Honesty is the best policy – isn’t that what they say? What follows is a fragmented biography. Of myself. My brother. What happened to us. What they did to us. What remains.

I watched as Rosedean slowly poured the cooling jam mixture from the stainless steel saucepan into the row of jars on the Formica counter top, her head wreathed in steam. She tipped the last scrapings from the bottom of the pan onto a tablespoon and tasted the spiced purple fruit and made a sound of approval, nodding to nobody in particular. Santa Claus is Coming to Town was playing on the radio. The light was fading. She looked out through the tinsel-shrouded window to the horizon, scored a brilliant tomato as though a bottle of ketchup had splashed its contents across the sky.

“Well, I did it. I rang the Guards on him,” she said, tapping the bottom of each jar with a skewer to make sure the contents were circulating and cooling.

“You did what?” I said distractedly, leafing through the pages of the television guide, marking up films I wanted to watch in the holiday with my yellow highlighter.

The aroma of the settling jam mix made the drab house feel edible.

“Called them about Barney and his messing with that picture of the lost cat.”

“What about it? Doesn’t he have enough of those thugs persecuting him?” I said, putting down the magazine. “Why shouldn’t he put up a poster for a missing cat?”

“It was where he put it, on that telegraph pole in front of the farm,” said Rosedean. “They took it personally.”

She brought the saucepan to the sink and scoured it with scalding water from the hot tap.

“Maybe they should have. It’s the only one for that stretch, he couldn’t help where it’s positioned, he put one on every pole for miles around. Anyhow they probably did kill the poor creature, you know your man lamps badgers, the savage. Why else would they have filed a complaint on Barney?”

Rosedean’s shoulders hunched with fury, elbows out, Brillo pad scratching painfully at stainless steel.

I put down my magazine. “Anyway. What did he ever do to you?” I asked. “Since when are you the witness for the prosecution against your own son?”

Rosedean put the pan in the drying rack and rubbed her hands with a tea towel. “Look out there,” she nodded at the pane of glass. “I wanted him to plant phormiums and flax lilies and cordylines five summers ago. The place would be a jungle by now if he’d done as I’d asked. Instead, he put in apple trees. And none of them pollinated properly. He never does as he’s asked.”

“Hire a gardener,” I said. “He’s not a horticultural expert.” I folded my arms and looked at my mother until the hairs on the back of her neck stood up. “It’s snowing. What difference does it make in December?”

Rosedean turned around, her hands on her hips. “You know as well as I do, he’s going to get us all into one big mess with his backchat and complaints. He should never have reported them to Phoenix Park.”

“He did not put those pig heads on the spikes at the barracks,” I said. “The dogs on the street know it was the footballers.”

“They blamed him just the same, the whole lot of them,” she said.

“One of those liars is the brother of a Ban Guard,” I said, “so of course they were never going to take the fall. You must have a short memory. They threw him down the stairs in the barracks and broke his ankle and ripped his hamstring,” I said. “He didn’t walk for almost two years. Remember?”

“You can never win with them lads,” she said, her voice level. “He should have let well alone.”

“It was your Solicitor who set them on him,” I said. “He was following her advice.”

She shrugged and put a teaspoon in a mug.

“And they brought him in that other time when he complained about Mad Sheerin trying to kill him after putting his Alsatian on him – and that was after he had first killed Reuben in front of him.” I sat forward at the table, covered in a white plastic cloth decorated with sprigs of holly, covered in tea stains.

“There you go, Barney and his cats,” said Rosedean. She switched on the kettle and watched it boil. “There’s just no talking to him. Sheerin and his family paid off the Guards long ago. They’ll never do anything with that fellow. The G.P. and them go-boys are all in cahoots. He could kill his own mother and they’d get the Director of Public Prosecutions to say he would have had to kill her twice in order to have killed her once. A couple more prescriptions for paranoid schizophrenia and he’d be out in a week getting ketamine from the vet and slaughering his own chickens and dogs again. Give me a break. Barney needs protection from himself, never mind Sheerin.”

“Barnes, it’s me, Christina,” I said, holding the Nokia tight to my ear, trying to keep out  the white noise from the supermarket muzak and the chatter of passing shoppers.

“Don’t you think I know my own sister,” he said, “that Christmas beat all when you arrived.”

“I know, I was lucky not to be called Eve,” I said, my customary response to his kindness. He was always protective  of me, his little sister. “Maybe I should have been called Pudding,” I added, unconsciously tapping my rumbling tummy, full of a feed of burger and fries that lunch hour.

“Are you coming round later?” he asked. “Spurs are playing United.”

“I’ll be there in a couple of hours,” I said. “With bells on. And some fizz.”

When I got there the place was already surrounded.

Harmless. That’s what they called Barney. He was the kind of young man a Solicitor would call ‘sub-optimal’ if said Solicitor was a preening dishonest jackass. And so it proved, as it usually does, with practitioners of the law.

They had arrived in two squad cars. When Barney didn’t open the front door straight away they got a battering ram and broke it off its hinges. Another five cars and three vans were soon parked in the vicinity, the Armed Response Unit decked out in body armour and ballistic helmets, walkie-talkies on the go.

When you live where you grew up, you are confronted daily by petty memories and incidents of the past. The painful rivalries, jealousies and torments that are quotidian childhood events, barely forgotten, constantly ruminated over. They can be the ruination of a person. The past and present fuse to prevent a future emerging clean and free. There are signs everywhere. From people who have married well and look down on you from their four-by-fours, even though you know they’re covering up bruises and keep the house going on fifty quid of heating oil a year because the delivery driver lets you know when he brings the quarterly order and fills your tank half-full. The ones who’ve aged badly and look pained from years of ill health, compromised by pharmaceutical dependency and the solace of food. The busybodies who hover at every meeting to do with everything in the community, from the Council to the annual pantomime and the church choir, photos in the local paper every week and then they go and have the gall to show up with politicians every four years to bamboozle you with bullshit even though they know you’d sooner vote for a tree in their stead.

The same ones do the Census, ready to dish the dirt on their near neighbours, contrary to every concept of best practice. The last time one arrived he was a teenager from a half mile away and I took the envelope and ran him. I called the central office in Dublin to arrange to post it back rather than have a local read my private business. The following Saturday morning a pair of women showed up at the house screaming, simultaneously banging and clattering. I thought they were going to break in. I reluctantly opened the door a smidgin following this unwelcome wakeup call and the second woman scuttled like a hedgehog from around the corner to join her friend and I told them where to go. I shut the door firmly as the first one, a brunette wearing a pink woolly hat in the middle of May shouted at me, “You are refusing to do as the Government demands!” Two days later I got a letter from the local administrator warning  me I was breaking the law in refusing to hand over my completed Census form to the harpies and furthermore the Guards would be informed if I persisted in refusing to co-operate. I responded in kind with a Cease and Desist and told him not to let that pair in an ass’ roar of me ever again if they knew what was good for them. And they’re the good ones.

Barney raised his face to the pale sun and turned his back to the Guards, bending over to scratch the constant ache he had at the back of his calf. It was then the first shot rang out. It hit him in the lower back because the Guard’s Sig misfired and it ricocheted off the column at the front door. Barnes fell forward onto the porch and dragged himself through the doorway. Blood was seeping from his lower body, soaking through his jeans. You could hear him gasping. His fingernails scratched the laminate flooring as he squeezed himself over the mat well.

Two of the Guards stood up from their perch behind the wall and the one who shot Barney walked through the gate, pushing it fully open, doing a Dirty Harry, blasting a screeching, hissing Magnus with one shot that made the poor ginger creature explode in a mess of blood and fur. The other Guard paused, yelling at his colleague, “Stop!” But he didn’t. He let loose another shot into Barney as my brother tried to drag himself up to a sitting position inside the front hallway. He gripped the bottom spindle of the staircase railing. The next shot hit him in the back of his skull. His head was smashed and bits of it hit the ceiling as he collapsed in a twisted heap, scarlet pooling around him in ribbons of death.

The Guard followed into the house and shot him again, in the stomach.

Everything stopped.

“I wasn’t expecting him to stand up,” Guard Nevin said at the enquiry five years later. “It wasn’t my fault. He was armed and dangerous. He was trying to get up again, never mind that I’d already shot him a few times.”

“But he had dropped the gun on the driveway. It wasn’t even real. You knew that. And why did you then shoot his cat?” asked the Judge.

“I hate cats and the people who keep them,” said Guard Collins. “He got in the way. You know yourself. Only a twisted fecker would have a cat. What kind of a man would have one of them instead of a dog? Or a family? That house was big enough for a family. He shouldn’t have had a cat. And what’s more,” he said, straightening himself up in the witness box. “He was playing Fuck Tha Police on a ghetto blaster. You could hear it outside the gate! He was obviously gone the road. Crackers! Pure demented!”

The Superintendent in charge of the mission was called O’Brien. He listed all the weaponry they had brought to what became known as The Battle of Crow Hollow: seven Heckler & Koch .33 rifles; three Uzis; ten Bennelli semi-automatic shotguns; an array of night vision equipment and several pyrotechnic distraction devices which had lit up the garden like it was a New Year’s Eve fireworks display. And all because it was easier to shut Barnes up permanently rather than face any more of his complaints of a decade of brutal intimidation and bullying to the Park. A Commander called Clyne stood about six foot six with medals dripping from his uniform and said, “The alleged victim was found with a shotgun in his possession and we were simply going to retrieve it by prior appointment.”

I shouted, “That’s a barefaced lie!” and was dragged out of the court by more bluebottles, forced to wait out that morning’s session in the car park while they continued the character assassination they’d put out in the pliant media for the past four years, to complete the State-sponsored execution ordered at local level.

“Did you have a warrant?” the judge asked.

Did they never.

I’m living in the house now. I wasn’t in it a wet week when the harassment began, terrorized by nine  backwater families who arbitrarily decided they didn’t like the cut of my jib. The husbands crawl past the house in their cars and scream abuse at me and honk horns and the Prods even get together on the last Twelfth to egg the cut stone walls, out on a skite before drumming in Bundoran. That’s how I know it takes two years of rain to wear away albumen. The gable end of the house is still stained russet. I was too scared to get up on a ladder in case they’d run in and pull me down off it. They watch me like hawks. The inbreeders, the drug dealing son of a Guard, the farmers, the illegitimates, they’re all at it. Pillars of the community, running me off the road, putting me in the ditch, opening the gates and setting cattle on the lawn, pulling up the flowers and smashing the window boxes, threatening me every single day, God knows why. I can be sanguine about it to your face but to tell you the truth I’m never relaxed enough because they represent a clear and present danger and it’s gone on for years and I don’t know if it will ever stop. I sleep with one eye open.

I got a photo of Barnes enlarged to match his favourite Kurt Cobain poster still hanging over his bed because now he’s a member of the 27 Club too. I put Jelly Tots and Sam Spudz crisps and Sandwich Spread in my shopping basket every week because we both loved them. I search in vain for Royal Cola. You could only ever get it in one place in those days, The Stag’s Head over in Ballinalee. We’d stop in on the way to a match in Longford on Saturday evenings. I’d have a hot one or a Smithwick’s but Barney would never drink and drive, he was good like that. We’d buy a few extra bottles of the cola and stuff them into pockets already bulging with munchies, squeezing through the turnstiles and yelling ourselves hoarse in the dark as the team invariably succumbed to their opponents. After curry chips at the Mocambo on Main Street we’d head home as the sun went down, sated and squirrelly and excited about watching Match of the Day to see how Englishmen play football.

My mother was mentioned at the end of the death notice. An afterthought, which is what she had called Barnes. My damn son, the afterthought, she used to say. Cut down out of his father who didn’t even live long enough to see his only son grow up. I didn’t even count. She was fished out of a river near the N3 the following Christmas Eve. I was left to manage the obsequies. The most economical thing was to cremate her and forget she ever existed but she left a long trail of destruction in her wake. She sits in a jar over the fireplace in her sister’s house.

I hear the vicious yokes who murdered Barney in broad daylight have got counselling for their terrible trouble. The poor souls, the ignorant lugs who used to mock the teacher from the back of the class, flip erasers from rulers and then spend break time in the schoolyard beating the shit out of their smaller classmates. Obviously destined for twenty years’ service to a corrupt State before collecting a well-earned pension. Brave fellows all. Especially when armed and in pursuit of the poor guy they picked on for a decade purely because they could.

One of them hangs around at the bottom of my road each day, stopping me in the car each time I leave the house. It’s a full-time job. Yesterday when I was off to do the Christmas shopping with Las Ketchup blaring from the radio, he said, “Do you not get it yet? Are you deaf or something?” I remember him when he had no arse in his trousers. I looked at him, the rolls of fat falling across his sweaty collar, his puffed-up cheeks flaming with drink, and I silently comforted myself with the thought, one of these days I’m going to pull a gun on him and do what he did to my brother. Blow his bloody head off.

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