Personal Trauma vs. Collective Trauma Theme Analysis

There he saw the little boy who had arrived at Christmas with his mother, to the Turret Flat, come running into view. He had some sort of unusual stick in his hand. A black cane, with a silver knob—like Fred Astaire might use for dancing. He was flailing it about in the wind. The square of hedges around the sheltered spot that Mr Tomelty had created, or an earlier owner, was bending and shuddering, like a circle of powerful horses. Threshing the bitter grain of life. The little boy was soundless because the window was closed, but Tom adjudged he must be singing. The child was now twirling himself all about, as if the cane had not been enough of a thing to be twirling, in his short trousers, happy in the wind, the cold, oblivious.

He was appalled by his visit to the nick, but at the same time he knew that deep within there was a pride in him, a pride in something that had only seemed terrible and mayhemic long ago. Now it felt like some kind of epic thing scribed on his heart with a tattooing needle. Like those strips of indecipherable Tibetan script on a flag. He couldn’t read the words and symbols but he felt they spoke of things that were just, and integral, and right.

It neatly made him angry now—and he knew it was illogical, he probably looked a great deal put out and vexed, though no one was on the road to see it—that she was always in his mind as the person she had been when she departed. Not young, not old, but human and beautiful. Why would that make him angry? He was angry with who, with what? It was his duty to remember her. It was his duty to remember her. But he was old, he was old, and he had never wanted another, never. He was old and she was gone, never herself to be old.

They didn’t have long in the new house in Deansgrange, in truth, before the little changes. At night she would go to sleep like a body interred—he could barely hear her breathing. She lived so lightly the traces were hard to see. He would hunt for signs of her. Traces of June. Later, a few good years on, he’d come home of an evening and go about the house, looking for her and the children. When he called out to her she mightn’t answer, because sometimes she wasn’t there. In the last times, when he called out, and she was there, she never answered either. Even alive she was every so often like someone you remembered that you had loved.

And if the nuns didn’t know, they must have been blind, dead, and dumb. Because he did it to a dozen girls, over the years, how many I couldn’t say. Oh, and always so nice to him, Father Thaddy this, and Father Thaddy that, they worshipped him, and baking three cakes for him every now and then, [...] and one time he tore me, you know, in the backside, and the doctor had to come, and he said, hmm, hmm, yes, yes, she has colitis, saying it clearly for the nun, the poor little thing, that’s very sore, [...] —yes, Sister Brenda was there, while he was fucking scoping my bits, Tom, and all the tut-tutting of her, and the hands of her going like a butterfly, dear me, dear me, how on earth does that happen.

The only thing he had been good for in his brief sojourn in the army had been sniping. He had just had a steady eye, so unlike many serving soldiers, he had killed a fair number of the enemy. He wished he hadn’t. He wondered now about those lives he had ended. Mostly local men among the Malayan rebels. They had given him an honourable discharge after a year of that. He had begun to be sleepless, and to have nightmares when he did sleep. The army doctor had called it ‘gross stress reaction’. Doctors had to give even terror a name, he supposed. […] As soon as he hit Irish soil, though, mercifully, his symptoms began to subside, slowly, and then he had a notion to try the police. […] They liked his rifle skills, and the recruiter had a great regard for the army. Lucky Tom.

Up early, get your grub, obey your commands—the army was something of a tonic, and no war ever seemed to compare with what they had already endured. Nothing as terrifying as the shadow of a dark-soutaned Brother by your bed, in the deep night, to drag you out either to lather you or fuck you. No Malayan fighter, magnificent, fearsome and dark, ever as terrifying as the small shopkeeper’s son in his measly garb, given a coward’s power over you by virtue of being at least a grown man. No wonder they released the boys, like knackered greyhounds from the cage, at sixteen, before they gained the muscles and the strength to fell the Brothers with righteous and merciless blows.

This is for June, he kept repeating, muttering, muttering, like a Buddhist mantra, this is for June. And that fucker there, whose head I can see bobbing about as he drives that stupid little car, he looks like the black dot in a bubble of frogspawn, that creature there, indicating right, and left, and right, little flashing lights, on stalks springing open, retracted, heading to the back of the city now and up onto higher ground, motoring towards the mountains seemingly, is the lousy, filthy, fucking cruel, vicious shite of a man that well-nigh destroyed her, tore through her, a little girl without defences, week after week, his possession and his plaything.

There had been times when he simply didn’t care about himself anymore. He used to be tempted to drive through red lights in his little car, which was truly stupid, and truly murderous when he thought about it. Just now and then. And when that young man, what was his name, Purcell, something Purcell, Tim maybe, waved his army-issue gun around—he was a mechanic in logistics in the army, so why did he have a gun?—Tom didn’t feel anything remotely like fear. He just thought: you had best not shoot your wife. Shoot me instead. So they gave him a medal for that.

He had a sudden strong desire to tell his story to someone, as long as it was someone without ears. So he could speak but they couldn’t hear.

He hadn’t been obliged to shoot his rifle for many many years. There seemed to be a component of light also in this scope that he couldn’t see the origin of. There were the cormorants right in front of his nose, it seemed like, and the very barnacles on the black rocks, and the heavy skirts of dark brown seaweed, shrugging in the late tide. It had an aspect cold and wild. The cormorants looked like they had been carved violently out of the dark rocks. He wondered what it would be like to pull the trigger softly, ease his index finger through the small arc of it, and peg a bullet into a breast, and watch the bird fall, far far off and yet so near. But he knew in his heart he would never pull the trigger.

He was genuinely shocked when June took their humble bread knife from her gansey. She took it from her gansey, and then she went in under his coat like a bone-collapsing rat, trying to get in in a manner no human ever could. And she wriggled herself up onto his back, using his spine as a great brace, and she flattened herself like a huge plaster, not a human creature at all. He had clearly married a Trickster.

No crime more dark, more fucking pessimum, more beyond human mercy. To do this with the mote of June in your eye, her essence floating on the Irish wind. All the children gravely assailed. All the children in filthy Irish history, with no bugle blowing to announce their rescue, no arms of love to envelop them, no hand of kindness to wash their wounds. Priests! The boyos themselves, peddling piety and goodness. As pious and good as—but there was no entity, no animal, no thing, to compare to them. A shark was vicious, but it was all beyond the shark.

Possible court appearance. If the DPP thought there was evidence. What of the blood sample? Would that be enough? The word of an evil man, himself under scrutiny, judgement, sentence. But what did Tom care? He didn’t. He had served the only soul he cared about, not his own soul, or the souls even of his children, but the girl he had met in the Wimpy café, who had laughed at Billy Drury’s taste on the jukebox, and in laughing, with her bright face, fished out his deathless love.

Without her. The children in their childhood beds. Her in the summer-cold graveyard. Her remains in the execrable coffin. Her heart not beating. Her mind not thinking. Her face not brightening, darkening. No more her thousand different moods, her modes of mind, her enthusiasms, her hated things. And in the kitchen, on the breadboard, chill and dark, the sacred bread knife. Which in killing had not killed. In exacting punishment had not punished. In seeking to be the instrument of redemption had not redeemed.

Even the man highest up thought he should take early retirement, but something deep in him needed to go on to the end. Then the little party and the sombre words and the happy words. Then his niche in Queenstown Castle. His wicker chair, the characterful sea, and the stolid island. And then, those quiet nine months not only of new silence, but also—what could he call it? A sort of blossoming sense of relief, maybe, that the wretched Fates had done with him. Had noticed his great happiness long ago, and emblem by emblem taken it away from him. Then the day that Wilson and O’Casey came to him like Mormons, with the old rhododendron aflame at their backs. The screeching of the door and the whole thing cranked up again, like a Model T Ford.