Chp 3 Fin's Journey

“Now come right here, you Fenian bastards you!"

No doubt, about it then, said his lipless tooth-aching smile, he’s talking to us so he is!

“And how might we be of help to you'se two fellah's, this fine day?” replied Terry through half-amused, sun-squinted face.

“What the….Ye cheeky wee gets you'se….You'se calls us officers….”

Here, my very breath snagged. Because surely, I thought, as I began swallowing loudly, downing quarts of non-existent draughty air, why should they pay us any mind at all!

“Hey mister we aren't no Fenian's” said Terry, still as cool as you like, “We’re not lads fit enough to sew a patch on those heroes' trousers.”

Triumphant-faced, Terry sloped off a sly wink and a smirk at me, one that said 'you betcha, we's are guilty of something so we are!', but which, catching sight of my paling-white face, turned instantly aghast.

“The pair of ye, stinking rogues", screamed 'Tiny Dublin', “born traitors, the pair of you!”

Yet 'Tiny Dublin's' heated response was as nothing compared to 'Stretched Dublin's sudden rage. Wordlessly, he brought the butt of his rifle down smashing it square and hard into Terry's still-upturned squinting face. Clean and spiteful, it struck first left, then right, before we’d any chance of turning and taking well-heeled flight. Only, long after breathlessness had taken hold and we’d reached the safety of our own farm gate, did I chance to look at Terry. He stood there beside me, leaning beside me, the gate taking his weight, trying to rub away the blood and tears running down his gashed and blooded face.

“We were lucky there,” somehow he’d managed to say; "talk is the guards have taken to kidnapping young fellah's. We’re too good to have around when there’s mines need clearing.”

While still wincing at the memory of his battered face, I remember pulling hard on my brakes, hearing from somewhere below my lofty perch, a menacing motorised growl. From here, the old boreen steeped unforgivingly, but ensuring I reached the bottom not by the most direct route but via its rutted road seemed only a half-concern. For seconds after beginning my descent, I could not avert my eyes from the arising billowing ashen clouds cloaking invisible the small town I knew lay asphyxiating somewhere beneath.

Into the parading heart of this choking blindness I sped. Breath held to bursting all the way down that smoke smothered road, and it was while hugging its cambered right side, I began hitting one after another of unseen obstacles still wondering how I'd managed to somehow keep upright and moving, even while I puzzled over the first swathed glug of briny blood that gushed down my throat, not till I'd chewed a great chunk down, realising it was my own bitten through tongue.

Suddenly the smoged denseness began to thin, and I met the full horror (a scene worthy of The Book of Revelation itself) of the devastation around me.

Nothing made of wood or brick escaped that day. All reduced to ash and crumbling stone and endless interspersions of splintered glass. Great chunking wounds smashed into the front and back of buildings, their insides strewn outside, and the road a continued rubble gauntlet stretching another twenty yards ahead before narrowing to an alleyway, where the stockpiled remains of a wrought iron bedstead, a wardrobe and several front doors and window frames formed a now mostly bludgeoned to nothing barricade.

Then, from somewhere over chains of fluted roofs, sending purling shivers down into the depths of my soul, the unmistakable earth-quaking of rolling steel. Yet, by then, no less than my abandoned bicycle, those steadily more faint rumblings choruses no longer held significance for me. No time to rest even, as the momentum from my leapt-from bicycle carried me unstopabble right through the cut low ivy-gabled threshold. Finally, I'd reached my destination.