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him to run, to get away from there before the gunmen turned their weapons on
him, too, only unable to speak, his own blood choking his words. His father
crawling to the bank, collapsing there, the masked Irishmen stepping on him,
drowning him, shooting Dadda again. Halloran blinked, long and hard, but the
visions would not disappear. Scenes from his military service, the killings,
the terrible battle at Mirbat, the disillusionment with it all, the women who
had drifted in and out of his life, the mother he had come to revile because
of the craziness inside her head, the beatings he had dealt to others of his
age who dared mock her affliction, and who dared spit the word 'Britisher' as
a curse at mention of his father, even though Dadda's birthplace was County
Cork and the beatings Liam received when his anger and frustration were no use
against the gangs who taunted him. Halloran staggered with the intensity of it
all. A blurred figure appeared, walking towards him through the
hallucinations, the recognitions, arms out to him, calling his name
beseechingly, and he could feel his Mam weeping, although she was but a
spectre, not yet clear in his vision. She drifted through the eidetic imagery,
coming closer, her voice faint, begging for his embrace. And as she drew near,
dissolving in and out of projections of his past, her head was distorting,
becoming bent and twisted, as were her hands, pulping and spurting blood, as
they had when she'd deliberately walked into the threshing machine on a
neighbour's farm her arms and upper body churned by the machinery, her head
smashed and almost lopped off . . . as it was now, tilting, collapsing,
hanging by bloody threads on her chest. Halloran screamed. But the memories
were relentless. There was the big priest, Father O'Connell, warning Liam that
the wildness had to stop, that the Good Lord Jesus would punish the boy for
his wickedness, that his cankered soul would be damned eternally into Hell.
The priest came at him
unbuckling the thick strap he wore around his waist, winding the buckle end
around his fist, raising his arm to flail the boy, the man pity as well as
fury raging in his eyes. Then gone, before the black-robed priest could bring
down the leather scourge. Replaced by one of the gunmen who had murdered
Liam's father, the cousin of Liam's mother. A man she had accused all those
years ago, her accusations laughed off, sneered at. And here he was, sneering
at Halloran again, a ghost not exorcised, even though the man had blown
himself up a few years after the killing, along with a companion, the homemade
bomb they had been carrying in the back of their car towards the border too
delicate or too faulty for the rough, pitted lanes they had chosen to travel,
the jigging and jogging causing wires to touch or to dislodge so that the
boyos were blown sky-high, and the only person to celebrate the occasion was
Liam, who could not understand how the assassin of his father could be
venerated as a hero by the local townspeople, blessed by the Holy Roman
Catholic Church when his bits and pieces had been returned for burial on
consecrated ground, Father O'Connell himself pleading God's bountiful mercy
for this poor unfortunate's soul, speaking of him as a martyr to the Cause,
this killer who had robbed Liam of Dadda, who had laughed and sneered Mam to
her death, who sneered at him now in this very room. Halloran yelled his
outrage at the apparition, shaking with the emotion, every muscle and cord in
his body stiffened rigid.
Then it all began to darken and fade, the memories slipping away, fresh ones
barely glimpsed until one bright spot remained; it seemed a great distance
away, too far to be within the walls of the house itself. It grew in size,
coming forward, the movement steady, a gliding, the object soon recognisable,
its surrounds slowly filtering through, misty at first, but gaining substance.
The tabernacle was on an altar, the altar itself raised above three broad
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steps, before the steps a Communion rail, the kneeling cushions and then the
pews on either side of the centre aisle. Liam, a youth, creeping towards the
front of the church, in one hand a metal can from his grandfather's workshed,
in the other a lit devotional candle. He swung over the low rail, leaving the
candle on top, and mounted the steps. Doubt, guilt fear urged him to open the
tabernacle, to save the chalice containing the Communion wafers he knew Father
O'Connell always prepared the night before early Sunday mass; but he didn't,
too afraid to do so, for it would be like opening the door to God, Himself,
inviting Him to witness the sacrilege Liam was about to commit, and perhaps
God if any such creature really existed might take away the hatred, the one
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