The Whore-Mother Read Free Page B

Powers and Callaghan backed with them.
    â€œStan in the front o’me,” she shrieked at the waiting Kelly. “You’re the one that tied her,” she screamed, and pointed the shotgun at his legs and squeezed the trigger. But it was harder to pull than it had been before. She was frightened now and weakened by the storm, and the dragging with two fingers on the trigger lifted the barrel of the gun from Kelly’s legs. She scattered his guts for yards over the paint-stained street.
    The kick of the gun threw her back on her heels and she sat down in the street. Kelly lay about her, his eyes staring at the lamp post. He was eighteen. He had never had a job and had never looked for one. It had never mattered before. There was always British welfare. Now it would never matter. The little woman got up slowly and picked up the shotgun. They watched her limp awkwardly away to her house and her husband and her child.
    Powers and Callaghan walked to the car. Somebody could look after what there was of Kelly. He was non-operational now. McManus drove them away.
    â€œThat one’s a vicious oul bitch,” Powers said like a man who had been wronged and could see no reason for it.
    That night the McGonigals’ house burned down. Mavis was in the Royal Victoria Hospital. Her father and mother had no such refuge. The army took them in. Young soldiers fed and sheltered them.
    â€œHere, m’am, take some of this,” they said, and tried to coax tea or soup or something into her.
    The mother and father sat, huddled and staring but not seeing. “Oh ma poor wee darlin,” the man intoned like a litany and his tears were endless. The woman sat stiffly and like a corpse and stared in tearless desolation at nothing or some secret thing.
    The police came for them in the morning, big red-faced men in middle life. One of them coaxed gently, “Come on, missus, don’t be afeard now. Nothin’s gonta harm you. Your wee girl’s gettin better.”
    â€œDo you have to part them, constable?” a young army officer asked him.
    â€œOch, no, sur, nothin of the sort, sur,” he said, “we’re just gonta tuck them away where there’s no harm. Poor oul souls. Och, that poor wee girl. They’re a right parcela fuckin cunts, thon boys.” He looked uneasily at the officer. “If you’ll excuse that class of talk, sur.”
    McManus wrote his letter to his sister on his scraps of soiled newsprint in the dark, under the covers. It said:
    1. When 2. you 3. get 4. my 5. next 6. letter 7. please 8. do 9. exactly 10. what 11. it 12. says 13. or I’m 14. dead 15. Johnny.

THREE
    B OTCHED operations have to be explained. Simple operations that are badly botched have to be explained away.
    Powers stood stiffly before the kitchen table in the house in Andersonstown and cast a cold eye on the three men who sat stiffly behind it. Their voices lapped about his ears; one part of his mind listened for sudden questions; the rest of it swam in a pool of obscenities that were the only words he could find to fit his judgment of his judges.
    McCann glowered up into Powers’ muscle-tight face and said, “It was a plain wee job. Four trained men and the Springfield Women’s Revenge Committee had to tar and feather one wee hoore five feet to the top of her skull and six-stone weight. Christ, one of youse coulda done it handcuffed. The wee girl’s oul man was let get her away and her wee limpin oul mother shot the arses off half the committee and spread Kelly’s guts all over the street. There’ll be an accountin. . . .”
    Powers stared straight back at him and thought, “. . . bigmouthed arse-hole. When was the last time you handled a gun? What are you, anyway, stickin out your poor wee chest. . . .”
    There were blocks of silence in the small kitchen. They isolated words and thoughts in sharp metallic channels, enlarging them in the mind, barbing them