Carn Read online

  To Dympna and Bernard McCabe

  Contents

  Part One

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  Part Two

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  Part One

  I

  The night the railway closed.

  That was the night the clock stopped in the town of Carn, half a mile from the Irish border.

  For over a hundred years, the black steam engines with their tails of smog had hissed into the depot at the edge of the town.

  It was inconceivable that it would ever be any other way.

  So when the official from the headquarters of the Great Northern Railway arrived to address the assembled employees, they were somewhat taken aback by his frosty detachment. “Do you realise?” he said, “that there are as many passengers using this line now as there were a hundred years ago?”

  He went on to read them lists of percentages and figures, quoting from various complex documents. They looked at him open-mouthed. Then he removed his spectacles and said, “We are left with little choice but to close down the branch line in Carn.” He said that they greatly regretted the decision but it had been given very careful thought and it had been decided that there was no other possible course of action. Then he said goodbye and was gone.

  The workers were stunned. They cursed and swore and went from that to reason and desperation and how to cut costs. They stayed in the Railway Hotel bar until the small hours, but the more they argued and debated the more helpless they felt. They went over his words again and again. And the more they repeated them, the more they realised how serious he was. By the time they emerged into the light of the morning, it had well and truly sunk in.

  By the end of 1959, there would be no railway in the town of Carn.

  After that, all talk of the railway began to gradually recede and after a while it was as if it had never existed. The place went to rack and ruin. Within a matter of weeks, the town plummeted from aristocrat to derelict. Under cover of darkness, rocks were hurled through the windows of the depot. Sleepers were torn up and used to make garden fences, or simply left to rot on waste ground. Paint peeled off doors. Many of the workers emigrated to England and America, standing with their suitcases on The Diamond, waiting for the bus to take them to the ferry terminals of Dublin and Belfast. Those who remained loitered at the street corners, dividing their time between the bookmaker’s and the public house. They turned away sourly from each other and looked up and down the deserted main street. It got to the stage where no one expected anything good to happen ever again. It might happen elsewhere, but it would not happen in Carn. Not as far as they were concerned.

  Above the jeweller’s shop the clock stood still at three o’clock and nobody bothered to fix it—and that was the way it stayed for a long time.

  On a warm summer’s evening in 1965, when James Cooney, formerly of The Terrace, Carn, drove his Zephyr down the main street of the town, he could not believe his eyes. He stared aghast at the dilapidated shopfronts and the cluster of lethargic layabouts at the corner, at the broken pump skitting its umbrella of water all over the cracked paving slabs. He shook his head and turned the car towards the outskirts where he had just bought a new bungalow. As he lay in bed that night, his mind was whirring with schemes and possibilities.

  At fifty years of age, he knew now, he hadn’t even started.

  It was not long before the citizens of Carn began to notice the imposing figure of James Cooney. They remembered him as a quiet retiring youth who had worn his brother’s trousers three sizes too big for him and carted offal from the abattoir in a zinc bucket. They found it hard to reconcile their hazy memories of him with the confident strut of the man who now walked the streets daily. They assumed he was on holiday.

  But it soon became apparent that James Cooney was on no holiday. His wife and children were installed lock stock and barrel in the bungalow. James Cooney had come to stay.

  He’s mad, they said.

  He’ll rue the day he left America or England or wherever the hell he was to come back here to this kip. Godforsaken hole. Someone suggested that he had been run out of America. “I’d like to know what has him here all the same,” said another.

  It was not long however before news of his intentions reached their ears.

  A factory? they said. Then they shook their heads.

  It won’t work. Look at the railway.

  In the bars, former classmates said of him, “Who does he think he is? I remember Mr Clarke booting him around the classroom. He couldn’t add two and two.” Many of them vowed to have nothing whatever to do with his projects. They weren’t going to be caught out twice. They would show James Cooney they weren’t born yesterday. They were no fools.

  But James didn’t mind. He just shrugged his shoulders and looked elsewhere for assistance. It didn’t take him long to realise that there were many in the neighbouring towns across the border who would be more than willing to give him all the help they could.

  And when the skeleton of metal girders appeared on the skyline, erected by northmen who crossed the border enthusiastically in their cars every day, the most vehement opponents of James Cooney began to re-assess their position. As the building went on and the structure took shape, the people began to regret their lack of co-operation. Their sons and daughters became impatient when they saw the northmen drinking in the public houses. There was nothing they could do but swallow their pride. To cover their tracks they began to praise James Cooney from the heights. They said he had been the best pupil ever in the primary school. They invented stories of his childhood enterprise and industry. They claimed that his good fortune abroad had come as no surprise to them. Then they packed off their children to the factory where the neon letters CARN MEAT PROCESSING PLANT rose boldly over the meagre rooftops of the town.

  The streets filled up with cars. Workers thronged the square and The Diamond at lunch hour. The plant horn hooted every morning as if to say, “Wake up Carn!”

  The jeweller’s clock had to be fixed so that the workers could be back in time after lunch. James Cooney called them all by their Christian names and winked intimately at them as he passed by on the factory floor. He gave them bonuses for extra effort so that by the time the factory had been in operation a mere year the workers were so absorbed in their work the only people left who cared anything for the railway or even the memory of it were the old people with one foot in the grave.

  After he had crossed that hurdle, it was a clear run for James Cooney. He seemed to be everywhere at once. He organised festivals and opened them himself. His photograph stared almost every week from the front page of the local newspaper. He became president of numerous societies and chairman of the council. All in the space of one year. It seemed that from deep inside his bungalow on the edge of town he was transmitting atomic energy that was rapidly changing everything for miles around.

  Having observed the success of James Cooney, a teenage girl just out of school rented a premises for herself and filled it with clothes she had bought in the city. Above the door she painted a sign in crazy whorled lettering: “She-Gear for She-Girls!” Then a television shop opened up offering attractive rental rates and in no time at all the humdrum daily conversation had been invaded and supplanted by the interweaving plots of American soap operas.

  A businessman from across the border moved into town and set up
a supermarket, the like of which had never been seen before in the county not to mention the town. Vast lettering promised ridiculous knockdown bargains. THE FIVE-STAR SUPERMARKET it was called. Its proprietor, a mild-mannered man with a soft northern voice, got to know all the locals by name and slipped many of them small presents with their first orders. His name was Alec Hamilton and before long, they were speaking of him as if he and all belonging to him had been living in the town for generations. The supermarket became the most popular shopping centre for miles around.

  But not to be outdone, James set his wheels in motion once more. He purchased the run-down parish hall, painted it a garish pink and completely refurbished its interior. He fixed a giant imitation precious stone above the door. This premises became known as THE SAPPHIRE BALLROOM. Where once shy young couples had jigged to the sound of an accordeon band, now abrasive youths aped dance crazes from England and America. Bikers from northern towns loitered at the back of the hall. The dancers hung about the streets until all hours singing and cheering, then parped their car horns noisily all the way home.

  James Cooney’s appetite was well and truly whetted by the success of his dance hall venture. He purred inwardly when it was said to him, “Just how do you do it?” Other businessmen felt three inches tall beside him.

  It was to put himself out in front once and for all that he decided to build the Turnpike Inn. On his way home from one of his routine visits to the factory he dropped into a hostelry, ostensibly to have a bottle of stout but in fact to put a proposition to the grey-haired owner with the white apron. When he heard what James had to say, the owner screwed up his face and muttered to himself saying, “I don’t know Mr Cooney.” But James Cooney’s time in Boston and New York had taught him nothing if not persistence so day after day he haunted the place until the owner’s spidery signature went on the piece of paper that he produced from his pocket. When the owner went out to tell his wife, James Cooney had a good look at his new acquisition. The smell from the outside toilet wafted to his nostrils. Slops dripped indolently on to the sticky tiles. “Jee-zus,” he said under his breath.

  Not long afterwards, the JCB crawled up the main street like a prehistoric beast. It took one step back and then one forward and when it retreated again, half the wall was gone. It didn’t take very long to get rid of the rest. Some of the old people who were watching felt as if lumps of themselves were being wrenched away. Rumours spread like wildfire through the factory. Exotic nights of drinkfilled promise appeared before the workers. The other publicans cursed him. But nothing would stop him now. He had been quick to notice the change in the people since he had built the meat plant and given them money for their televisions and records and fridge-freezers and clothes. He knew the eagerness with which they watched detectives from the Bronx roar down highways bigger than any roads they had ever seen in their lives. He monitored their speech which took its cue from the soap operas and the songs. That said something to James and his days in the Big Apple had left him well-equipped to deal with it.

  He lay awake at night with names racing through his head, highways and skyscrapers and skating waitresses merging into each other. Then one night he jumped up suddenly in bed and his wife grabbed him as if he was making a suicide leap.

  “The Turnpike Inn,” he cried triumphantly.

  The minister who came to cut the tape stood in the midday sunshine smiling at everyone and tapping ash on to the mud the JCB had left behind. His stomach slumped over his belt in despair, haplessly restrained by his striped nylon shirt. He drummed on his lapels with his fingers and waited for the people to ask him questions. When nobody asked anything because they were too stunned by the speed with which James Cooney had completed the whole thing, the minister went on to make a speech. It started off being about Carn and the great railway junction it had been but it went on to being about James Cooney. Men like him were the future of the country, he said. He gestured towards the Turnpike Inn. “A short time ago,” he continued, “this was just a small, pokey little—no offence to the previous owner—smalltown bar. And now it is a thriving modern tavern-cum-roadhouse which will give employment to . . .” He leaned over and whispered to James. “To ten people,” he went on. “This is indeed a marvellous achievement. Carn has come a long way in the past couple of years and long may this progress continue. With men like James Cooney here, we need have no fear ladies and gentlemen that it will. I now pronounce the Turnpike Inn formally open!”

  The sound of clapping filled the air as he cut the tape and when the furore was abating a woman tugged at his sleeve and asked him would there be any chance of a council house.

  Half the town surged inside and marvelled at what lay before them. John F. Kennedy and Davy Crockett stared at them from the red-velveted walls. Two American flags criss-crossed on the ceiling. Barbecued chickens turned slowly on a spit behind glass. In an alcove a monochromatic Manhattan skyline stretched upwards. The drinkers gawped at the vastness of the lounge bar with its sepia photograph of a market day in the thirties which took up most of one wall. They sank into plush seats and stared at the rickety carts and herded beasts, perplexed. They kept waiting for some figure of authority to come along and tap them on the shoulder, ordering them to move along. But nobody did any such thing. They stayed there until closing time and when they found themselves standing half-dazed in the main street, they swore they would never drink in any other pub in the town of Carn as long as they lived. They raised uncertain thumbs upwards and tried to focus as they shouted at the blue moon hanging above the railway, “James Cooney has done it again! He’s gone and done it again!”

  After that the Turnpike Inn became the focal point of the community. Many groups came from neighbouring towns to hold their meetings in the lounge and the function room. Public representatives hired out rooms on a regular basis. Older men left the grey interiors of bars they had frequented all their lives and came to sit with the eclectic clientele in the bright light of the lounge bar, the sudden gunshots on the television and the smell of cooking food not seeming to bother them at all. The middle-aged men who had previously confined themselves to the dark, anonymous corners of the hotels, now ventured forth with their wives who sat nervously beside them.

  That was the town in the year 1966. The old people staring at the wreckage of broken beer bottles and squashed chip bags on the streets outside the Turnpike Inn and the Palace Cinema (recently renovated and its display case adorned with a woman around whose half-naked frame the words MONDO BIZARRE curled provocatively), lying awake at night as the men in the sequinned suits tuned up their guitars in The Sapphire, wringing their hands and feeling that their time had prematurely come as the young people pushed brusquely past them as if to say, “There’s damn all you can do it about now. Why don’t you go off and tell some fool the story of the railway?”

  And James Cooney stood in the doorway of the Turnpike Inn thinking of the day he left with his gaberdine and his suitcase in spite of all the locals who had vehemently dissuaded him with graphic tales of misfortune in the predatory streets of New York. He shook his head and smiled to himself before going inside to finalise the arrangements for the Take Your Pick competition which would have them packing in any time after eight.

  II

  The Dolans were well known in the town of Carn. Matt Dolan had been shot dead in a raid on the railway in 1922. His name was revered. The schoolmaster in Benny Dolan’s class referred to him as “Carn’s true hero”.

  But there were others who were not so sure. Benny first became aware of this the night the custom-hut outside Carn was blown up. Late that night when he was in bed, he heard voices downstairs and thought perhaps it was his uncles who occasionally visited at a late hour but, as he stood on the landing deciphering, he realised that they were voices he had never heard before. And when he saw the policeman holding his father by the arm and leading him towards the door, his first instinct was to cry out but he could not. When the door had closed behind them, he ran downstairs to
his mother and asked her, ma why did they do it? But she just held him and kept repeating, “He didn’t do it son, he didn’t do it. They want him for everything that’s done son, they can’t leave him alone.”

  In the newspaper the following day there was a photograph of the blackened shell of the custom-post. Above it in large black type IRA ATTACK BORDER POST.

  When Benny’s father came home three days later, the uncles arrived late in the night. They stayed until the small hours conversing in taut whispers. Benny’s father related his experiences in the police station in slow, deliberate tones. They had been watching him, they said. That he had met men from across the border. Northmen. They had information, they said. Why couldn’t he sign the confession? It would go easier on him in the long run. The knuckles of his uncles whitened as they drank in every syllable. The fire flickered on their faces as they drew in closer to share it with him. It was light when he had finished his tale. The uncles stood in the doorway and gripped his hand warmly. “You’re one of the best,” they said to him. Then they set off down the road to catch the morning train to Derry. Benny Dolan didn’t sleep a wink after that, his dreams filled with burning custom-posts and running men, sudden cries at the back of his mind.

  After that, he became a hero in his class. He led schoolboy expeditions to the border where the northern police patrolled with tracker dogs. In the games after that, the blowing of bridges and the storming of custom-huts were incorporated with enthusiasm. They scanned daily papers for photographs and varied their make-believe exploits with each new development.

  When two IRA volunteers were riddled with bullets outside the town in September 1958, the boys worked themselves into a frenzy. They swore that they would invade Northern Ireland and kill all the protestants. They would murder all the policemen. No military personnel would be spared. They listened feverishly as the details of the barracks raid were related over and over again in the houses. The lorry had driven past the barracks by mistake and then reversed. A grenade had been flung and bounced back off the door, rolling in underneath the lorry. It had exploded and written off the vehicle, the barracks remaining unscathed. Two of the volunteers, one a popular man who sold vegetables from door to door, had fled for their lives and made it to within feet of the southern side of the border where they had been cornered by police and B-Specials. They had pinned them up against the wall of a barn and sprayed them with machine-gun fire. They had left them lying in their own blood. None of the boys could sleep much that night, thinking of the young man, not much older than themselves, staring out of dead eyes in a deserted barn in South Fermanagh, his head limp on his shoulders like a rag doll’s. Benny Dolan twisted and turned the whole night long.