A Star Called Henry Read online

  More newspapers were put on the mattress, carefully and slowly as Granny Nash read down through the columns and tut-tutted and sniggered. She tore off corners, left neat holes in the middle of pages and hid the pieces under her shawl. My mother’s groans came out of the clouds of steam. I charged right in and ripped the pages from the bed. I tried to knock over the buckets. I screamed and kicked as the tingling hands that had brought me into the world picked me up and dumped me gently on the landing outside.

  —Stay out here for a while, little manny.

  A rope was tied around my waist and to the stair-rail. I pulled and pulled and scraped at the hempen veins of the rope until my blood had drenched them. But it was too late. A new cry filled the room on the other side of the door. Alexander came first and, before I’d got used to that invasion, Susie joined Alexander and I was the oldest. The little man of the house. I smelt milk that should have been mine, and went mad.

  Alexander this, Susie that, name-dropping all day long, the only thing my mother and father had left in common, the odd time he remembered who he was and came home. They patted me when they could catch me, but would they drop my name? One word, two syllables, so easy to remember. What about meeee! Then there were no names at all. She was closing down, packing up to join the stars. He was off, away knocking heads for Dolly Oblong, wearing his big thick heart on the sleeve of his bloodstained coat. He wasn’t with us any more. There was no tap tap outside on the street when Alexander and Susie were being born. He was on important business, delivering love letters from Dolly to Alfie. He’d come home now and again, wherever the latest home was. He never took the leg off; he didn’t have the time and he knew I’d have my teeth into it the second he put it down. So he got up on the bed with the leg, made his noises, filled my mother, and went. To his new life. And, sometimes, he’d look my way and recognise me. He’d smile, and go.

  I broke free of the room, pulled the door from its hinges, and attacked the house. I dug my heels into the stairs, smashed the banisters. I rolled down the stairs and steps, out onto the street. I screamed at the sky.

  —Where are you off to, Sonny Jim?

  —UCK OFF! I roared.

  And I invaded Dublin. Out under the horses and the wheels I went, through the puddles and hawkers, dung and carters, the noise and the soot, in bare feet that became as hard as the stone under them.

  —Seven plums a penny! Seven for a penny!

  I hit the bad streets of Dublin, a three-year-old earthquake, a bomb going off, a complete and utter brat.

  —Cheaper the apples! Even cheaper the apples!

  Infested, hungry and unloved, I fell in with the crowd. I wandered up and down outside the house, a wolf in a rusting cage. I slid under big legs and climbed along the railings. I looked up at women’s faces, passing women and women on the other steps. Remember me? The Glowing Baby. The baby who made you smile. They looked at me and saw the screaming get from the top back in No. 7, the little get who made his poor mammy’s life a red hot purgatory long before her due. Or else they didn’t look at all. They’d enough on their plates, screaming gets of their own.

  But I loved the street, from the second I landed on it. The action, the noise and smells - I gobbled them all up, I was starving for more. I was looking at misery that matched my own. I was at home in the rags and scarcity, dirt and weakness. And there were new things too, colour, laughter, chaos and escape. It was glorious. It was my world and it could be as big and as small as I wanted it to be. There was a corner and, beyond that, more corners. There were doorways, and more doors inside. There were carts and cabs and the music of tram bells coming from beyond the packed houses, somewhere I couldn’t yet see, but near, around more corners and off. There were hawkers’ shouts and foreign accents, and new smells spilling over the old ones. I heard a foghorn and it told me that there were places far away.

  —Where’s your mammy, little man?

  —UCK OFF.

  —Holy God. What’s your name?

  —HEN’Y.

  I was there, at home, an instant street arab, welcome and ignored. I fought my corner. I looked and learned. A police whistle, an ice-cream seller’s bugle, wheels going over stone, women shouting for their children, a woman fighting the price of a brush—

  —D’you call them things bristles?

  —Good bristles, yes. Feel, please.

  —I can see them from here, sure. It’s hardly a brush at all. It’s only a piece of oul’ wood that needs a shave. If I gave you a penny for it, it would be only to give it a home.

  —Is good brush. I use it myself.

  —I can see that. Sure, the poor thing’s nearly worn away.

  A milkman filled a jug from a churn on the back of his cart. He tilted the ladle again and let more milk fall onto the milk already in the jug.

  —And a drop more for the cat.

  He handed the jug down to a woman and the jug and milk went under her shawl. He led the horse to the next door where the house’s women were waiting for their milk. Already, there was sex. I watched all the women. I followed them, I rubbed against them. I breathed them in and waited for them to arrive. I fell in love fifteen times a minute. I followed them to their doors. I heard their noise and bustle; I heard them crying. A woman crying - and there were plenty - made me furious and thrilled. You need meeee. Pick me up; I’ll take your tears. And I went weak when they were together, laughing or complaining or fighting; I needed the railings to keep me standing. Women together. The sounds they made, the way they walked, the shawls that wrapped and hid them. Oh God, those shawls. I wanted to climb in under and die for the rest of my life. I saw them looking at men. I watched their eyes following as they tightened their shawls and stood still. I wanted to feel their eyes. I wanted to get up to their eyes. I sat down on the street and ached.

  I stayed out until I was falling, and when I got back to No. 7 my mother was on the steps. I’d climb into her lap and stare into faces angry like mine. I’d spit and I’d gouge. I’d fight for the lap, for my rightful place under her shawl. We’d stay out there till Daddy’s tap tap set us howling. And often, always, it was the wrong tap tap, the tap tap of another leg. Some old veteran of some old war staggering home after a night of boasting and bawling. Dublin was suddenly full of one-legged men, their limbs left behind on the Empire’s battlefields or under the screeching levers and wheels that powered Dublin’s feeble industry. And they all walked past our door. I knew my father’s tap from theirs, the distance between his taps, their power and majesty, but the sound of any wood on the footpath or cobbles filled me with cruel hope.

  We moved to another house. I was put into the cart with Alexander, Susie, another new baby and Granny Nash. We were there to give it weight, to stop the straw from escaping out of the mattress. We were moving from Summerhill, to somewhere nearer the river. My mother pushed the cart and Granny Nash navigated as she turned the pages of Rousseau’s Confessions. I clutched my father’s leg, the one he’d worn to the butt the night I’d been born. I was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to find us. I spat on the ground at every corner and hoped that he would come looking before it rained and washed my marks away. Granny Nash lifted her bony hand, pointed right and we turned off Summerhill. My mother had to hold on tight to the cart as we sailed down towards the Liffey, down into a lightless hollow where the fogs met and fucked.

  Into a smaller, darker room. The walls were wet. The smell of earth and death came up through the floorboards. The window was a hole that offered nothing.

  Home.

  But we were back in the cart and on to Standfast Lane, a short stump of a street, a place made for lurking or dashing through, too narrow for carts, too poor for trade; even daylight stayed away. Into another crumbling house, down steps this time instead of up, down to a basement. The smell was waiting for us, daring us to keep going. My mother was behind me, wheezing, trying to manage her cough. I heard water settling and the house above us groaning like a ship fighting a rope, objecting to our presence.


  Home.

  My father must have found us because another baby arrived, after two funerals. Two Victors. They stayed only for a day or two - I saw neither of them - then went up to the stars, and hung on either side of twinkling Henry. My mother swayed as she tried to pick them.

  —There. See?

  She held our hair and made us look.

  And the new baby was called Victor too. No objection from my mother. No sobbing or hiding behind her hair. There were four children, countless ghosts and my growing, dying mother packed into the only corner of the room that wasn’t flooded, all fighting for space on the poor old mattress. We had nothing to burn and there was no mantelpiece for Daddy’s leg and the Blessed Virgin. We packed in together, too furious for cuddling and comfort. No light from the window, Standfast Lane wasn’t worth a streetlamp of its own. We crouched in the dark and all the one-legged men in the world tapped past, above us.

  I got out of there. I climbed over the family and paddled out of that kip. I took my time going up the steps. It was pitch, pitch dark, like climbing out of deep water. I felt something at my side. It was Victor. He’d followed me, climbed the steps all by himself; not bad for a nine-month-old whose only nourishment was whatever memories of milk he could suck out of our mother’s empty breast. I picked him up.

  —Come on, I said.—Let’s go lookin’.

  I was five.

  Four

  He was Dolly Oblong’s faithful delivery boy. Alfie Gandon

  H says Hello. He carried the message all over Dublin. And he slept in a hole under a back stairs. He put his ear to the floor and fell asleep listening to the house. He guarded it while he slept. He gave his life to Dolly Oblong. He went back to her room only twice in those years and, once, he stepped aside as she left the house and went down the steps to a waiting cab. He was so overpowered by her magnificence, by the eyes made huge by belladonna, by the smell of peppermint that strayed from her mouth to his, he didn’t think of dashing down to open the cab door until the cab was a dying sound beyond the light of the streetlamp. And he cursed his stupidity. The chance to be of help, to touch her sleeve, and he’d let it go right past him. The fading horse’s hooves drove nails into his stupid, saturated heart.

  The visits to her room were short. Once, she gave him two pounds and the name of a man.

  —Mister Gandon does not like this man, she said.—He is not good for business.

  The second time she gave him five pounds and two names, on a piece of paper. He didn’t look at the names; he knew that this, his first look at her handwriting, would make him weak.

  —These men do not like each other, Henry, she said.—Mister Gandon thinks that this is what they would want.

  Henry. Her voice held up his name in front of his eyes. It caressed and slapped it. He took the fiver and fell out of the room. He stood outside and, again, cursed himself and his numb, useless tongue. It was too late to go back in, to start again. He had the money, he had the names. Two names on a small piece of paper. The perfect grease stain left by her fingers - it was heart-shaped; he could see it - where she’d held the corner of the paper, there for him to see and keep. And her writing - she was in the lines and dips, the ink was from inside her. He remembered the names, folded the paper and gently lowered it to the bottom of the pocket inside his coat, as near to his heart as he could estimate.

  Two names. Two unmarried brothers in one house. An easy job. The Brennans. Desmond and Cecil. A very easy job. In the kitchen window, not a squeak or objection. Up the stairs. No secret creak or hidden toy. Into the bedrooms. He tied them fast to facing chairs, to let them watch each other bleed. He sawed one throat, and then the other. He wiped the blade on his sleeve and left the room so the brothers could enjoy their last moments together. He went downstairs and found some biscuits.

  It took him three nights to get rid of the bodies. He dropped parcels into water all over Dublin. A heart went into Scribblestown Stream, a torso into the Little Dargle. He climbed down drains and into granite caves. He went further and used new rivers. Naniken River and the Creosote Stream. He was careful and fair. No river got too much. If an arm went north, another went south. It was a job of work, and he was tired. He felt like a man who’d walked all over Dublin.

  He was on his way back, to the hole under Dolly Oblong’s stairs, when he turned a corner, into a huge crowd. Flags and bunting flapped above him, lots of red, white and blue, some green and gold, and there was a band off somewhere ploughing through The Minstrel Boy. The crowd stretched all along the road, through Ballsbridge, over the canal, on into town. There was a roar that was getting louder, as if coming nearer.

  —They’re coming! They’re coming!

  He saw hats being waved, hats thrown into the air. The flags became frantic. The Minstrel Boy was getting nearer, beginning to sound like well-played music. Henry didn’t venture into the crowd; tight crowds made him feel like a one-legged man. He stayed at the back. God Bless Our King: the banner across the road explained it all to him. Edward VII was in town. Henry had forgotten: it was a holiday. He’d be busy later, on the steps. He’d need some sleep.

  He couldn’t see, but he could tell by the agitation running along the crowd that the King and Queen were on their way past. People got up on their toes, leaned on strangers’ backs for a second’s glimpse of the approaching carriage. There were children on their fathers’ shoulders. Servants hung from upstairs windows. There were more kids clinging to lampposts. There was clapping and cheering. The girls would be on their backs all night, raking it in for Dolly Oblong. Some of the older girls still talked about Victoria’s last visit; they still said God save the Queen every time they scratched themselves. He could see the plumes of horsemen. He watched the crowd as shoulders and heads turned with the passing carriage.

  —Fuck off!

  There were gasps. He saw people looking for the owner of the treacherous roar.

  —Fuck off!

  And he saw men grabbing at the legs of a small lad clinging to a lamppost, a small lad with an even smaller lad parked on his shoulders.

  Who was the angry little man hanging on for his life?

  —Fuck off with your hat!

  It was me up there, ankles scratched, the trousers being yanked off me. It was five-year-old me - July, 1907. I kicked at grabbing hands and tried to bury my fingers in the green-painted iron of the lamppost. Victor kicked and spat; he was doing his best to save us. But, inch by inch, we were slipping into the crowd. The King’s loyal Irish subjects admired our guts but they still wanted to box the ears off us. We were sliding down into their hands.

  —UCK, said Victor, and I loved him so much just then I let go of the lamppost to hug his legs. And we fell into the angry crowd.

  Why had I done it?

  We were under the feet of the crowd but I was far from ready to surrender. Victor already had his teeth, three tiny sharp needles, in a leg. I heard screaming above us. The socked leg went up and Victor went with it.

  Why had I told the King of Great Britain and Ireland to fuck off? Was I a tiny Fenian? A Sinn Feiner? Not at all. I didn’t even know I was Irish. I saw the procession from my perch on the lamppost and I saw the fat man at the centre of it. I saw the wealth and colour, the shining red face, the moustache and beard that were better groomed than the horses, and I knew that he didn’t come from Dublin. I didn’t know that he was the King or that the floozy beside him was the Queen. I didn’t even know what a king was; no one had ever read me a fairy tale. He looked like an eejit, yet thousands and thousands of people were cheering and waving for him. I was angry. He didn’t belong. I looked at his carriage and thought of the cart that had carried us from house to house to basement. And they climbed over one another to get half a goo at him. And I remembered women, face after face, looking down at me in my zinc crib, smiling faces, all the smiles and love, and my mammy and daddy safely behind them. This picture lit up for a second, less than a second, then was gone. And they were still cheering and smili
ng for the fat foreigner. So I told him to fuck off.

  And now I was paying for it. I protected my head with my arms and searched for Victor through the adult legs. I couldn’t see him but I could hear him far away. A metal-tipped foot scraped the back of my leg. Hands grabbed me. I was being hauled up by the scruff. Then I heard wood hitting the pavement, wood tapping the pavement. The tapping stopped and, suddenly, my scruff was my own again as the hands let go and I heard the one-note song of a mahogany leg slicing the air.

  A thud and a yelp and I was standing on my own and looking at my father. He balanced without needing to hop and brought the leg down on the cap of a man who was standing next to me. I heard bone breaking and screams and a police whistle. My father’s leg went under his coat. He had it back on in a blink and me in his arms before he’d taken two steps. More police whistles.

  —Where did you learn language like that? he said.

  —Don’t know.

  I held on to his neck. I knew the smell of his coat and I never wanted to walk again.

  —You’re a shocker, he said.—Off we go.

  —Victor, I said.

  —Who’s Victor?

  —Me brother.

  Then I saw him and pointed. He’d been left behind on the road. He was lying on his back, holding a black shoe to his chest and a grey sock in his mouth.

  There was little of the crowd left. I saw the rozzers coming at us, saw them over my father’s shoulder. I’d never seen so many in one place. They had their batons out and swinging. They pushed and charged through the stragglers. They were gasping to get at us, red and angry.

  —See what you’ve started now, said my father as he picked up Victor.—You can’t be saying things like that to the King. He’s a visitor.

  Victor let go of the shoe and put his arms around my neck, the way mine were around my father’s. I saw a baton rising up above my father’s head. And we were gone. I felt the baton’s shadow as it passed over my cheek. Then I felt the air get out of our way as my father made our escape. He took a crazy route through the gathering rozzers. The wooden leg sent him in mad circles and swoops, everywhere except straight ahead. Batons slammed the air and even other rozzers. I started to laugh.