Little Criminals (38 page)

Every Monday, after breakfast, the two old men shared a pot of tea at Sweeney’s, while Stephen helped Sean Willie with any clues he hadn’t finished. The two had fallen into a host of such companionable habits.

Stephen Beckett and Sean Willie Costello had been classmates at the national school in Harte’s Cross in the early 1930s. They played hurling together for a while, until Sean Willie lost the thrill of it when a length of ash laid against his forehead left him unconscious for two days.

A few years later, when Stephen left for England, Sean Willie stayed on as a farm labourer. His parents had both died of TB before he got out of his childhood. Sean Willie had an uncle, a veteran of the war of independence who had worked for Michael Collins in Dublin. The uncle did his duty, and dirty work it was by all accounts, then he returned to Harte’s Cross to manage a pub. When Sean Willie was orphaned, his uncle paid a neighbour to look after him. At the beginning of the 1940s, his uncle emigrated to Boston, and Sean Willie never heard from him again. Word came in 1963 that his uncle had died the previous year.

Back in the 1940s, Stephen had written home twice, encouraging Sean Willie to join him on the London building sites, but his friend wasn’t interested. It wasn’t just that he had enough work, he liked the work he did, labouring on local farms. Although he never grew much beyond five feet tall and he seemed slight and fragile, he had muscle enough to foot turf or scythe meadow, and he could spend the day bent over, remoulding drills and ridges after the weeding, and do it long after many a bigger man had given up. The way things were, he knew he’d never get a bit of a farm of his own, but he lacked the hunger for land that seemed to be rooted in so many around him. He liked the hard work, the rhythm of the year, the direct connection between the work and the consequent flowering of the fields. Even when he lay down exhausted, even in the truly bad years when the wages were hardly enough to keep him going, he could feel in his aching muscles the certainty of a deed done, a day spent. He was aware of his own poverty, and if he hadn’t had the little house in Coulthard Lane that his uncle had left him he’d have been in trouble. Even those in the town who were well off didn’t have a lot. A few families were prosperous, and labourers and servants were cheap, but back then there were no lords or ladies in Harte’s Cross, and those who got above themselves could be put in their place with a mocking glance. Sean Willie felt at ease amid the streets of Harte’s Cross and in the fields of the town’s hinterland, and among the people he found there. The cruel certainties of a hard life at home were infinitely more attractive than a better life amid a jungle of strangers. Within a few years of his retirement, his weekly state pension was more than he’d ever received in wages. His needs were few and he had built up what he called a tidy sum in the Harte’s Cross credit union.

After more than forty years away in London, Stephen Beckett had been back two weeks in Harte’s Cross, and more than half convinced he’d made the wrong decision, when he met a small, stooped old man in an ancient felt hat coming out of Tubridy’s newsagent’s. The two old men looked at one another for a few moments, then Sean Willie grinned, took the roll-up from between his lips and said, ‘Sure, didn’t I tell you you’d never settle down in that pagan nation? Welcome home.’

They were very different men from the boys who’d been friends. Stephen had become a detached and sombre man, Sean Willie a thoughtful and mischievous one. They had little in common except memories of the old days, and later on when they talked about their youth each man sometimes remembered a Harte’s Cross that was very different from the other’s memory.

Sean Willie had never married. ‘I hadn’t the time,’ he said. Stephen had an idea of what the marriage prospects might have been for a poor, slightly odd farm labourer in the Ireland of Sean Willie’s youth.

‘What did you do with your time?’

‘I worked. I watched a lot of movies. And I read.’

There was hardly a flat surface in Sean Willie Costello’s small house that didn’t have a book resting on it. He had shelves of paperbacks, blue Pelicans and orange Penguins, that he collected in the 1960s, and a selection of paperback classics. A catch-all collection, most of them second-hand, from George Orwell to Mickey Spillane, from the
Wind in the Willows
to
War and Peace
, Jane Austen to Joseph Heller, Stephen Spender to Stephen King, James Thurber and Myles nGopaleen. Books about history and books about movies, a book on how Houdini did his tricks leaned against a history of the 1926 General Strike in Britain, which was next to a volume of William Plomer’s poetry. The pages were discoloured, some of the spines frayed. There were several favourite books he re-read every year and some of those had been replaced over the decades as they became tattered.

When Sean Willie was younger, he’d spent much of his spare time in the local cinema – which in the late 1970s closed down and was turned into the town’s MegaMarket. He knew the dark streets of New York and the wide streets of Los Angeles as well as he knew the hot landscape of Monument Valley. He followed the careers of the John Waynes, the Robert Mitchums and the Humphrey Bogarts, but he also came to know the character actors, the Elisha Cooks, the Neville Brands and the Jack Elams, as well as he knew the bit players in the daily life of Harte’s Cross.

Sean Willie was there in the scorching desert heat, watching Spencer Tracy stand up against prejudice, and down south in towns more inbred than his own, as Gregory Peck brandished his integrity. He skulked in urban alleys with Richard Widmark and Robert Ryan, went to prison with James Cagney and learned from Richard Conte that some smiles can’t be trusted. In gangster movies and cowboy epics, he recognised diluted versions of the great classic stories and subjects dealt with in his paperbacks.

The decades of watching movies and reading made Sean Willie a good man to have on a pub quiz team. Always popular, in his old age Sean Willie became a town fixture, fondly respected. The movie man, the quiz man, the man who could tell you when any battle was fought and who won, or who got an Oscar for what role and which racehorse won the Grand National in any year going back to the 1930s.

Sean Willie’s passion for Hollywood movies led someone to label him ‘Sean Wayne’, and it never occurred to Sean Willie that the nickname, applied to a very small man, might contain an element of mockery. At least, it was not something he acknowledged. Whatever bit of ridicule might have been originally intended had long been erased by affection.

Over the past few years, he’d collected dozens of movies on video. Most of them he recorded from the TV, some he purchased from the bargain rack in the local MegaMarket. They were sorted into categories, mostly Westerns and gangster movies from the 1940s and 1950s. He had recently bought a DVD player.

Stephen Beckett had never had the cinema habit. It was all Hollywood mush, kiss-kiss, bang-bang. Under Sean Willie’s guidance, he found himself drawn into a routine, watching one after another the movies of particular directors or stars, with Sean Willie explaining the background and the links between them. He described the differences between the kind of movies produced in the heyday of the big studios – the soft-focus romance of Paramount, the glamour of MGM, and his favourites, the dark, shadowy tales churned out by Warner Brothers. His heart, he said one evening, was with the Hollywood of the forties, fifties and sixties. ‘It’s all over, now,’ he told Stephen. ‘There’ll always be the odd good one, but mostly they want shite that’ll amuse fat teenagers in Ohio while they’re chomping on their hot dogs.’

Stephen Beckett and Sean Willie Costello ate together, they drank together, they watched movies, they met most days and had rambling conversations and they went for long walks. For Stephen, it no longer seemed like he was killing time until death was ready to take him. He recognised in his old friend a funnier, sadder, more complex person than the quaint town character that his image suggested. For Sean Willie, it was a companionship he hadn’t felt since childhood. The security of that companionship allowed him to acknowledge to himself the loneliness of the decades in Harte’s Cross, though it was not something he could ever talk about, even with Stephen.

They sometimes talked about the lives they had lived. Stephen never liked talking about his time in the war, but Sean Willie was fascinated. Having Stephen to talk to about a great event he had read about in detail was like having a small bit of history in the kitchen of his own little house. One evening, over a bottle of Scotch, Stephen told him about Benny. He talked about how he often thought that it might have been him, not Benny, lying on a dirt road in France, his life seeping away. All it would have taken was for the German sniper to move his sights a fraction to the left. Benny would have had those years of work and family, all the good things and the bad things.

‘Regrets?’ Sean Willie asked.

For a moment, Stephen thought about the two German soldiers executed in a ditch, but he’d never talked about that to anyone and he wasn’t sure he could explain what he felt, the small rightness and the huge wrongness of it, so he shook his head.

‘Yourself?’

Sean Willie pointed to his temple. ‘It’s all in here. A whole life, I lived it in here.’ He showed his remaining yellow teeth in a mirthless smile. ‘I suppose it was just the way it worked out. Maybe it was what I was comfortable with. I used to quote a thing to myself.’ Cigarette in hand, he gestured towards the bookshelves. ‘It’s in there somewhere, a book of essays, blue Pelican. A fella writing about parades. The greatest pleasure, he said, belongs not to him that marches in the parade, but to the one that watches the parade from afar. I used to think that was true. Now that I’m in the home straight – a whole life watching the parade, that’s what I think I regret sometimes.’ Then there was warmth in his smile. ‘But, only sometimes.’

Sixteen years had passed since Stephen Beckett came home to Harte’s Cross to die. They went quickly, and there was a lightness to his life that he had never known. It was an unexpected bonus at the end of a long innings. And then one morning, as he and Sean Willie Costello wrestled with the last few clues to the crosswords, a man with a gun came into Sweeney’s Pub.

When the gunman pointed the weapon at Stephen Beckett’s crotch the old man flinched. Knowing that death was in the room, he felt a dread of it that he hadn’t felt for years. He was shocked to realise he wasn’t ready.

Stephen knew from the war how random the choice was of who lived and who died, and his wife’s sudden death told him that randomness was not confined to the battlefield. Death was perched above everyone’s shoulder, preening and stretching. It would come for him when it felt the whim. Once the kids were reared he felt a relief. No emotional attachments, no one depending on him. Death could come now or come later, he was prepared.

In Sweeney’s Pub that morning, he realised how much the sixteen years back in Harte’s Cross had changed him.

His glance calculated the distance to the gunman. Without thinking, he was measuring the gunman’s size, strength and weight against his own, working out the speed and angle he needed. Little fucker certainly wouldn’t be expecting any trouble from an old man.

When the second gunman left the pub and the little fucker came closer, it was doable.

The others held at gunpoint were civilians. Stephen Beckett wore a uniform and carried a gun for just three years, almost sixty years ago, and he still felt some impulse towards a duty that civilians didn’t have. He could see that Sean Willie was rigid with fear, and Mrs Sweeney was close to shock. He forced himself to speak.

‘Coming down here, waving a gun, why don’t you work for your money, the same as the rest of us?’

When the gunman pointed the gun at him, Stephen Beckett’s rage melted into fear. He knew what the gun could do and what it could take away, and he felt his every fibre flinch. When the gunman crossed to stand beside the booth, Stephen judged the distance to the man’s gun hand, measured it against his body’s frailties and the instant consequences if he failed, and he recoiled.

His surrender to his fears was the second great regret of Stephen Beckett’s life. His failure to act, and his knowledge of what happened afterwards left him feeling like something had scooped away much of his insides.

The pub owner, Maura Sweeney, hadn’t worked in the pub since the day of the robbery. She now dealt only with suppliers and sometimes helped out at lunchtime on the checkout at the family’s MegaMarket. The barman who was there that day now worked part-time as a school caretaker.

Joe Hanlon, the young garda on duty that day in Harte’s Cross, received the support of his colleagues and superiors in the wake of the hold-up. His uniform cap was found on a scarecrow, in a field near where the stolen Primera was burned out. ‘Nothing you could have done,’ his sergeant told him. ‘You’ll be right as rain.’ A month later he was transferred to a station in west Galway. ‘Nothing to do with anything,’ the sergeant said. ‘They like to move people around.’ Two weeks after that Joe Hanlon quit the force and took a job selling advertising spots on a local radio station in his home county of Tipperary. He told his parents that he found the guards too regimented, too restrictive, and his parents said he was quite right to go for the kind of job where he was his own boss.

Of the two other customers in the pub, along with Stephen Beckett, the young woman with the baby seemed none the worse. The third customer, Sean Willie Costello, died three weeks later.

It was a merciful death. He went to sleep one night and didn’t wake up in the morning. Every waking hour of the three weeks leading to his death was a fog of regret and shame.