the bitter temperatures outside.
He’d had to smash a hole in the ice to kill them. There was no other way once they were trapped, without risking a bite or a scratch. It was tiring work, fuelled by the exhilaration of wielding a great big stick, scything down over your head to smash through the frozen crust – with the fear of overbalancing and following it into the black water below.
It was a rotten job. Macken had to watch for the rats, set the traps, gather them up and hold them under the cold, cold millpond water, until the creatures drowned. Or froze to death. Stopped moving anyway.
And as Macken watched for the rats, Danny followed him around with his own smaller stick. Danny used to say it wasn’t fair to kill the rats – they’re just getting food for their wee families. He always wanted things to be fair. But everything Macken did, Danny tried to copy. He used to beat the ice to help. Hardly made a mark. Macken tolerated him. Made sure he didn’t fall in. That was also part of the job. Keeping an eye on the wean. Protecting him from the rats.
Macken screwed his hands into fists in his pockets at the memory. He knew he hadn’t protected him. He’d once given him the twin of the medal round his own neck, ‘to guard against harm’ he’d told him. And then abandoned his trusting little brother to his death as sure as if he’d drowned him in the mill race.
Too painful to think about. Macken forced himself to remember the rats instead. They were never known by their true name. Just like anything awkward or unwelcome, he thought. Catholics were Romans or Papists or Fenians. Is it the venom into which you dip a word that turns it into an insult? wondered Macken. A century ago, the Fenian Brotherhood had risen up against Britain. Nothing to show for it, bar another round of sentimental ballads. And those failed rebels had themselves reached back into myth to borrow their name from the legendary warriors of the Fianna.
But these days, ‘Fenian’ was an insult. They’ve not just taken over the country, thought Macken; they’ve even taken over the words.
So Macken’s childhood war was against the Quare Fellas, not the rats. His mother taught him that speaking their true name aloud was a summons. He learnt to talk in guarded tones about the Quare Fellas instead. Even now, just thinking about them roused vague feelings of unease.
Macken considered himself a rational man. He had gradually let fall the leaves of belief. There had been no sudden break with the Catholic Church. Just a gradual drift away. It was only when he encountered prejudice that he felt he was any kind of a Catholic. And that was more a gut reaction against bullying. He was the opposite of a fair-weather friend. Only being under attack brought out the Catholic in him. The rest of the time, he wasn’t really interested.
But superstition was different. Visceral. Too deeply ingrained to discard. All he had left of his Catholic upbringing was the guilt. And superstition was all he had left from his mother before that. It was a comfort.
Macken’s mind drifted back to that winter at the watermill. Falling temperatures and hard ground had driven the Quare Fellas inside the sheds to threaten the Christmas flour. So Macken hunted them down and drowned them.
They had to be drowned, because his father did not want dead and dying vermin in the Christmas flour. The traps were his father’s own invention – humane in that they were not an immediate death sentence. That was left to the son.
Macken recalled setting the wooden cage traps with bait where he spied the Quare Fellas’ droppings or holes gnawed in the sacks. In the mornings, clumsy with thick gloves, he would gather the cages into a bucket, heavy now with scratching, squirming, squealing life, for the walk to the pond.
His father warned him not to leave the bodies in the water afterwards. It wouldn’t be clean. So Macken and his brother built pyres. On top went the sodden, slick, dead things, to burn in a crackling, fat-spitting, hair-fizzing, hand-warming show for any village kids with nothing better to do than watch. Which was all of them.
Once, Macken had complained about the bitter cold that chilled his core as he smashed the ice. His father had given him a look of disgust.
‘You have to choose which side you’re on, boy,’ he had said. ‘Yon Quare Fellas or your family. Do whatever it takes to keep them out and keep them down.’
His father had said they had to save the Christmas Flour. Though it was only the same flour as the rest of the year, with a handful of spices mixed in. The Quare Fellas couldn’t get enough of it.
Even now, Macken didn’t like to say their true name. It was the same with the wean. Macken felt as if his insides had been ripped out.
*
He gazed through the windscreen, still in something of a dream. Leaves danced in shafts of sunlight threading through the trees. They looked to be neither falling nor rising, but spinning and skipping ahead of the car like dolphins leading a ship to harbour.
That’s how it was, just before everything exploded around them.
CHAPTER 10
Macken pitched forward into the dashboard, as a deafening staccato of bangs exploded inside the car. He covered his head with his arms.
All was confusion and noise. The engine stalled. Macken heard panic around him. His ears were ringing. Bellowing from his right. Fading in and out. ‘Get out! Get out!’
Macken’s door was jammed. He leant back and kicked it as hard as he could. It yawned open and he dived out, falling awkwardly into a hole. Adrenalin picked him up and carried him scrambling into the bushes.
He cowered, fumbling with the fastener on his holster, feeling helpless waiting for the next explosion of violence. From across the road, he heard Gracey shouting.
‘What are you doing? You fucking nearly killed me!’
He saw Gracey shaking Cedric by his lapels. The constable’s gun lay on the road.
Macken was bewildered. The car was nose down into a trench. The windscreen was shattered. But there was no sign of attackers nor any follow-up to the initial shooting.
Gracey threw Cedric to the ground. Exasperated, he turned to see Macken peering from the undergrowth.
‘Get up Jolly, for God’s sake. It’s clear.’
Macken slowly stood up, wincing as pain rushed into the space left by his ebbing fear.
‘It turns out Jolly that the enemy within isn’t you after all. Or the IRA. That genius Cedric is the man trying to kill us. His gun went off when we hit that hole there.’
Gracey angrily shook his own Sten. ‘Listen to that rattle. They’re rubbish.’ He shouted over at Cedric. ‘And he hadn’t got the safety catch on, had he? He could have done the Fenians’ dirty work for them, fuckin’ eejit! The sooner we get those new Sterlings the better. Hopefully before we have to take on the IRA for real.’
Macken pointed to the trench. ‘What about that?’
‘Ah, the bloody Specials,’ explained Gracey. ‘We’re near the border. They’ve probably been digging up roads since we heard about the election. You know what the B-Men are like. Anything for a bit of overtime.’
Macken
