Deadly Confederacies Read online

  Praise for Martin Malone

  ‘Martin Malone writes stories of profound originality. He has a great sense of history and how it can be made special for a modern reader. His work searches out the spirit and language of many countries, and it is enticing from the first sentence ... a writer to watch.’

  – Stand UK

  ‘A brutal story, brilliantly told’

  – Alan Sillitoe

  ‘Powerful, disturbing, and profoundly moving’

  – The Good Book Guide

  ‘Extraordinarily accomplished and beautifully realised’

  – Irish Examiner

  ‘A human story told with real emotion and sensitivity … Malone brings this story to life with an insight and understanding as only one who has been there can … an excellent read’

  – Morning Star, UK

  ‘A traditional Irish story with occasional stunning images’

  – The Irish Times

  ‘Dark, bleak, and horribly probable, the book is also perversely humorous’

  – Evening Herald

  ‘There are no corny lines here – Malone’s humour being of the pitch black variety’

  – Sunday Tribune

  ‘A brilliant piece of observation … full of humour’

  – On Track

  ‘This is a profoundly moving novel, complex and full of fascinating insights’

  – UK Kirkus

  ‘A fascinating story, skilfully told’

  – Irish Emigrant

  ‘This bleak but sublimely written book packs a great deal into its short length, not least a brutal murder’

  – Whichbook

  DEADLY CONFEDERACIES

  martin

  malone

  DEADLY

  CONFEDERACIES

  and other stories

  DEADLY CONFEDERACIES

  First published in 2014

  by New Island Books

  16 Priory Hall Office Park

  Stillorgan

  County Dublin

  Republic of Ireland.

  www.newisland.ie

  Copyright © Martin Malone, 2014.

  Martin Malone has asserted his moral rights.

  PRINT ISBN: 978-1-84840-3

  EPUB ISBN: 978-1-84840-3

  MOBI ISBN: 978-1-84840-3

  All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.

  British Library Cataloguing Data.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  New Island received financial assistance from The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon), 70 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, Ireland.

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Sean Judge;

  actor, director and a friend to the Arts.

  The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

  Don’t go back to sleep. ~Rumi

  Also by Martin Malone

  Novels

  Valley of the Peacock Angel

  The Only Glow of the Day

  The Silence of the Glasshouse

  The Broken Cedar

  After Kafra

  Us

  Short Stories

  The Mango War & Other Short Stories

  Memoir

  The Lebanon Diaries

  Radio Plays

  Song of the Small Bird

  The Devil’s Garden

  Rosanna Nightwalker

  Stage

  Rosanna Nightwalker

  TV

  After Kafra

  Versions of some of these short stories appeared in/on, The Sunday Times, the Sunday Tribune, Stand UK, Literary Orphans Journal USA, RTÉ Radio 1 and Commotions.

  Martin Malone’s short stories have been broadcast by BBC Radio 4, the BBC World Service and RTÉ Radio 1, and published in The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Bridport Anthology UK, The Fiddlehead Can, The Malahat Review Can and Phoenix Best Irish Short Stories.

  Twice shortlisted for a Hennessy Award (Mingi Street), he is a winner of RTÉ’s Francis MacManus Short Story Award (Love in a Cold Shadow) and the Killarney International Short Story Prize. Halabja was longlisted for the 2012 EGF Sunday Times Short Story Prize, the world’s largest prize for a single short story. The Stand House won the 2013 Cecil D. Lewis Literature Bursary Award. A day unlike any other was shortlisted for the 2013 RTÉ/Penguin Short Story Award.

  Contents

  The Caulbearer’s Awakening

  Love in a Cold Shadow

  Big Sis’s Little Trouble

  The Archbishop’s Daughter

  Taming the Wolves

  A day unlike any other

  A Lasting Impression

  Thursday Market

  Café Phoenicia

  Wicked Games

  The woman who wanted to do nothing for ever and ever

  Halabja

  Deadly Confederacies

  A Sort of Jesus Disappearance

  Doll Woman

  Netanya

  Prairies

  Ritual

  If Something Doesn’t Get better

  That Time in Kurdistan

  House of Dara

  The Red Caboose Motel

  Mingi Street

  The Stand House

  The Caulbearer’s Awakening

  There is an outdoor toilet in a yard, concreted over except for the verges where Nana grows pansies and other sorts of flowers. My favourite is an orange flower that gives off a strong scent of wet peaches. She tells me their names, but I always forget. A garage faces an empty street of boarded-up houses. A takeaway on the corner of the next street is owned by Peter, and he wraps his fish and chips in reams of white paper. He’d asked Glen and me what part of Ireland we lived in, and we said the south, and he said it was good that we weren’t anywhere near the trouble.

  The people who work in the shops are different to the ones at home. Here, they smile a lot and call you ‘Love’ or ‘Darling’, but mainly it’s ‘Love’. Back home, they scowl as though we owe them something, and we do. I know this because Mam sends me to the shops to get stuff on tick. I don’t have a problem with this, for everyone in our street is aboard the same Titanic. But we don’t get called ‘love’, and I suspect that even if our slate were clean, ‘love’ would never leave the mouths of those shopkeepers.

  His travel bag is packed, and on the double bed we shared. The sun is pouring in through the sash window, and it carries a scent of window polish. Nana had taken down the net curtains to wash. She said they had gone dirty-looking. She’d said this in a self-wondering manner, as though her eyes had been letting her down, if the sun hadn’t come full on the window she would never have known. The window itself was grimy and dusty, with bird dirt on the sill. Nana’s a short woman with grey hair that she buns under a net. There’s a slightly wounded and worried look to her features – wounded by things that had happened in the past, and anxious about the future. She has peculiar friends, like Mrs Hickory, who keeps black poodles and who is always giving out about Pakistanis, and Mrs Dickory, who lives in Canton and makes home-made lemonade, and had been married and divorced three times. I wonder if she calls her exes �
��love’? Maybe the Welsh don’t in such cases.

  Aunt Paula never comes into our bedroom. She more or less keeps to herself, her bedroom, the good sitting room and the kitchen. She watches TV with Nana in the not-so-good sitting room, mostly Coronation Street. She is always talking about Sandy in Crossroads; he is in a wheelchair and has long, fair hair. Uncle John had said the wheelchair was a better actor than Sandy, and she gave him a cutting glance. He pretended not to notice, like it was a normal thing for people to be giving him such a look. His feet smell, and he leaves his shoes outside the bedroom at night to stink up the long and broad landing. Nana doesn’t like him. They don’t like each other. I often wonder what keeps married couples together.

  I say to Glen, ‘Are you okay?’

  He nods. He is better looking than me. People find it easier to get along with him. They don’t say so outright; they say that I’m like Grandad, which is the same thing as saying it. I hand him my comics, the glossy ones, DC thirty-two-pagers, of Batman, Jet, Superman, for keeps. ‘For keeps, Moss,’ he says.

  He is surprised, because I don’t part with anything unless I’m getting something in return. The look of surprise is phased out by one of concern, and I can see that he is thinking about his knee, and whether or not the lump there is more serious than people are saying.

  I say, ‘I said so, yeah. Of course.’

  ‘I can swap them … for sure?’

  ‘Why would you want to swap them?’

  ‘Just saying, if I wanted to …’. He is establishing true ownership.

  ‘You can swap them.’

  ‘I won’t unless it’s for the Thor comics, Moss, and that’s a holy promise.’

  ‘That could be a fair one, if they’re in good condition.’

  It is what we do at home, swap comics. Weekly, we get the Victor, Tiger, Topper, Hotspur, and when we’re finished reading these we exchange them with our friends for the likes of the Wizard, Beano, Dandy or Valiant. Mam gets in the Bunty and the Mandy to read, but we don’t bring those along on our swap outings. Lately, though, our thoughts have turned from swapping to collecting. Glen has this idea fixed in his head that our comics will become very valuable in time, if they’re kept in good condition. According to him, it makes perfect sense. Old automobiles, he cites as examples, and antique furniture. Antique comics.

  ‘I’m sorry you’re going home,’ I say.

  ‘No more two-a-sides,’ he says.

  We used to kick a ball about in the park, and sometimes we matched up against two other boys. The other day, we beat two Iranians thirty-one to fourteen. We played in the hot sun, with Glen sticking too near the goal area because of his knee, till one of the Iranians threw up near a fresh dog turd he had skidded on.

  Grandad looks in. He is wearing a grey suit. He has a narrow face, with hollow cheeks and the same blue eyes as Nana. Nana comes from a farming background in Rush. Her people used to collect seaweed from the beach and use it for fertiliser on their crops. We have loads of photographs of Nana’s people, but we don’t know who they are. She is going to write their names on the back of them, she says, one day. Sifting through photographs of people you don’t know is like looking at blank headstones.

  ‘Are you ready, Glen?’ Grandad says.

  ‘Yeah … okay.’

  I like having a bedroom to myself. I like the way the morning sun shines in through the window and wakens me, caressing my face. I like listening to birdsong, and the noise of passing traffic, and the small talk of Nana and Maureen, the next-door neighbour who talks. The neighbours to the other side are alive and well, but they don’t talk to Nana. The next-door neighbour who talks to us has ginger hair, and is very pale and freckled. Gwyneth, her mother, lives in the house with her, but she never comes out. She is ninety-six. She has lived in Albany Road all her life. Maureen says her mother is fretting about a newspaper article she had read about the houses in Bangor Street being set for demolishment in twenty years’ time. I’m looking down at them. I check that my willy is inside my pyjamas in case they look up … it slipped out once before without my knowing.

  ‘Can you imagine,’ Maureen says over the top of the wooden fence, which is much lower than the fence the other neighbour had had put up, ‘I said to Mum that it’ll never happen. Our street is safe as … as … houses. “You’re not to worry, Mum” I said … but she worries, she’s such a worrier, love her.’

  Nana says, ‘The poor thing.’

  Maureen sighs and then continues. ‘I mean, she’ll be 116 if she’s around when it happens. She’ll be long gone … I could be gone.’

  I think they miss the point. Maybe people like to bank on having a nice place to haunt.

  Mam rings from the Vatican Pub in the evening. She asks how I’m getting on, and reminds me to be good for Nana and Paula, and not to be left alone with Uncle John.

  ‘I’m fourteen, Mam,’ I say.

  ‘Not yet,’ she says. ‘Don’t be in a hurry to grow up.’ ‘

  About Uncle John … what’s …?’

  ‘Who’s there with you?’

  ‘No one. They’ve gone back into to watch Coronation Street.’

  ‘Just don’t be … right. And …’.

  ‘And?’

  She is scaring me a little.

  ‘Has he ever … now, you can tell me … touched you, you know?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Has …’.

  ‘No.’

  ‘If he ever tries to, you go straight to Nana.’

  ‘Mam …’.

  ‘So, how is your pocket money lasting? I’ll send you over a couple of pounds with your grandad.’

  I’m in the bedroom, reading. The door is locked, and the window is open a bit because the night air is clammy. Maureen’s cat is up to something, or up on something, because the mewling is loud and the hissing louder. I used to own a black cat. My friends hung Maggie just to see the look on my face. They’re not friends any more. I’d spoken with Glen on the phone too. He said that some of the lads weren’t talking to him because he’d been on holidays to Wales and they hadn’t been anywhere.

  ‘Don’t let those lads bully you, Glen.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  Silence.

  ‘When are you going into hospital for the operation?’

  ‘Operation?’

  ‘I thought …’.

  He hadn’t been told. Shit. Then, neither had I; I just know. I’d wanted to ask him about Uncle John and if he had said anything to Mam about stuff, but he just kept pressing me about his knee and the hospital until I told him that it had to be looked at by a specialist, and there would be a small operation. Telling him this felt like a lie. I said it because he was going to find out anyway, and he was never going to let up asking me until he got the answer his ears wanted. His ears, because his heart already knew.

  ‘They’re going to chop it off,’ he said, his voice breaking.

  ‘No …’.

  ‘You know Mam is fucking always saying that you were born with the caal.’

  ‘Caul.’

  ‘I’ll have a false leg.’

  According to Mam, I was born with a piece of membrane – a caul – covering my face. She said that happened to one baby in a million, but she could have been exaggerating. I don’t know if there are other mothers who boast about having a so-called mystic in the family; God only knows what the neighbours say about her in private. Sailors used to pay good money for cauls because it was a seafaring tradition for the owner of one to never drown. Mam insists it’s a birth sign indicating a healing touch and an extra eye. Just like Great-Grandmother Jennifer, who, eh, drowned in the River Foyle, a fact that Mam described as an aberration, meaning that Aunt Jennifer hadn’t used her gift properly.

  On and on he went about losing his leg, until I heard Mam calli
ng him to hang up; there were others waiting to make a call. I thought she might have rung back to give out to me for upsetting Glen, but she didn’t.

  The next morning, Nana asks me to come down to the shops with her. It’s Saturday. This evening we’ll walk to St Mary’s Church for confession. It’s over a mile, but I don’t mind walking. So, in the shop, Nana buys bread and milk and packets of digestive biscuits. Then we stop at a fruit stall. The man calls her ‘Mrs’. Nana calls him ‘Nick’. She buys potatoes, bananas, pears and peaches, and as he’s bagging these for her she runs her eye on the postcard pinned to a canopy upright.

  She can’t make it out and squints hard, pushes her face closer. Then she draws away. Nick is smiling at me. He doesn’t look at Nana, and he’s trying hard to stop himself from smiling, but he can’t kill the weed of a smirk. I simply must read it, and the postcard is of a man and woman passing by a bathroom window. The man says, ‘There’s old Fred, washing his balls with a toothbrush.’ A funny card, but it’s not funny. What is, is Nana squinting hard to read it. I don’t think she’ll be reading too many more of Nick’s postcards.

  Shopping with Nana is usually a drop into town once a week. We take a bus, and eat lunch at Wimpy, or in Mackintosh’s department store, where she has an account. She always buys me a book or comics, and sometimes we go into the pictures. She has seen The Sound of Music eight times. Paint your Wagon she had sat through once. She said it was an ordeal. Zulu she loved. Mrs Hickory thoroughly enjoyed watching all the Zulus getting shot. She cheered madly, and the usher asked her to leave. ‘Ejected’ is what Mrs Dickory said. She had sat between Nana and Mrs Hickory.

  ‘Did you ever hear the likes of …’ she had said, shaking her head as she told Grandad. Grandad drew on his cigarette and exhaled, ran his hand over his hair, which he always kept oiled, as though it were an engine that would seize without it.