I was driving the Shred Focking Everything van – Old Amnesia, as the old man calls it – up Kildare Street on Thursday lunchtime, when I suddenly spotted Ronan standing at the pedestrian lights opposite Buswell’s, with quite literally a notebook under his orm.
I gave him a blast of the horn to wake him from his little daydream, then he jumped into the front passenger seat with a delighted smile and an, “Alright, Rosser, you benny!” which is the usual way my son greets me.
I was like, “What’s the deal with the notebook, Ro?”
And he went, "Ine doing a bit of homewoork," which at first I took to mean that he was back watching the movements of various cash-in-transit vans going about their business in the city, taking down their licence plates, the number of personnel they used and the times at which they delivered money to individual banks – which was an actual hobby of Ronan's for a couple of years.
I was like, "Ro, I thought we'd been through this. You have the brains to make an actual honest living? You don't need to go that route."
“No,” he went, “Ine talking proper homewoork. Ine arthur being in the National Library. Ine doing some reseerch on the 1916 Rising.”
I was like, “The what?” and I genuinely meant it.
Ronan shot me a look like he’d just watched me pull a five-metre length of intestine out of the bottom of my Chinos.
“You’ve never heerd of the 1916 Easter Rising?”
“I played schools rugby to a very high level, bear in mind. So what was it?”
“It was the vodunteer uprising against British rule that lead to eer indepentince, Rosser.”
“Keep going. I’m definitely listening.”
“Jaysus, how could you not know about the 1916 Rising? Fifteen hundord-n-odd eermed rebels took over key buildings in the city centre. The GPO. The Fower Courts. The Boland’s and Jacob’s factoddys . . .”
"Are we talking about the GPO on
O'Connell Street?"
“Yeah.”
I laughed. "That's, like, so random, isn't it? How you can, like, walk around town and there's all this, I don't know, history around you that no one knows about. Anyway, why are you suddenly interested in it?"
He used to spend his summer holidays in Dr Quirkey’s Goodtime Emporium, kicking the fock out of the coin cascades and trying to steal whatever money dropped before the security gords responded to the alorm. They grow up so fast.
"Ine just inthorested," he went, "because me Grandda said his Grandda fought in it."
I was like, “Your Grandda? As in, my old man?”
“Yeah.”
“So – let me get this straight – my old man’s grandfather fought in this supposedly big thing that you’re talking about?”
“The Rising.”
I laughed. I was like, “It’s the first I’ve ever heard of it.”
"Well, the thing is," Ronan went, "I caddent foyunt any record of him. There's no Donie Kelly listed addywhere among the combatants."
“That was his name, was it?”
“Yeah. I got his beert ceert.”
“Well, bear in mind,” I went, “that your grandfather is a focking liar. The first three years you knew him, you were talking to him through two inches of prison glass – do you not remember that?”
I watched his little face drop then and I immediately regretted saying it. Ronan’s a lot more sensitive than he ever lets on and he worships the ground my old man walks on.
So I went, “I’ll tell you what, Ro, why don’t we swing out to the gaff and ask my old man if he can clear up the confusion for us?”
He was like, “Are you shewer?”
“Of course I’m sure. I’ve an hour and a half to kill before my next job.”
Twenty minutes later, we were sitting in my old man’s study and the old man was going through the pages and pages of notes that Ronan had obviously spent the morning scribbling down. He hummed and he hawed and occasionally he took off his reading glasses and went, “I must say, this is all very interesting.”
“He wadn’t in the GPO,” Ronan went, “because there’s the full list of the vodunteers that was in there. And he wadn’t in the Fower Courts, because he’s not on that list eeder. I went trew all the utter lists as well. He wadn’t in City Hall. He wadn’t in Stephen’s Green. There’s no mention of him addywhere.”
The old man was like, “Perhaps he used an alias,” and I could tell straight away the old man was bluffing him. You don’t need to own a Derby winner to know what horseshit smells like.
“An alias?” Ronan went. “Oh, that’s clever. That’s veddy clever.”
The old man had the cheek to even chuckle. “Well, he was, by all accounts, a very clever man, your great, great grandfather.”
Ronan excused himself then, presumably to go for a slash. The second he left the room, I turned on the old man. “You’re a focking disgrace,” I went. “Filling his head with lies like that. You know how much of a hero you are to him.”
The old man's face turned suddenly serious and he dropped his voice to a basic whisper. "I wasn't lying," he went. "I told him his great, great grandfather fought in the Easter Rebellion."
“So why wasn’t he in any of these places that Ronan mentioned?”
“Because he was on the Helga.”
“The what?”
“He was a gunner on the ship that blew up Liberty Hall. He fought in the Easter Rising, Ross, but he fought on the British side.”
"The British side?"
“Well, of course. You must have known what side of the fence we’d be on. I didn’t think Ronan was suddenly going to want all this detail.”
I was like, “Ro wouldn’t be overly fond of the Brits. It’d kill him if he found that out.”
The old man went, “That’s why he can never know.”