Mike O’Halloran is a Galway City based writer who has previously published short fiction in The Sunday Tribune and Crannog. He is currently writing a novel, the working title of which is Hunger. The story is one that merges the political and the personal. A radical Dublin family that was steeped in 1960’s optimism, disintegrates under pressure of turbulent events during the time of the republican hunger strikes of 1980/1981.

Dublin 1973

Novel Excerpt: Hunger. Author Mike O’Halloran

My father and the other two men from the party are poring over a map at the kitchen table when I enter. My mother looks at me through the mirror over by the dresser, where she is adjusting her lipstick. She wears that look I have always associated with her, even if I have had to wait for middle age before I can name it. Appraising.

‘How’s my girl? Coming on the canvass with us?’ my father says.

‘Yes. I can’t wait.’

‘That’s the girl,’ Sean Hanratty says. He’s the chair of my father’s cumainn. ‘That’s the spirit. You’ll go far,’ Dan Bermingham the auctioneer says.

They were always telling me I’d go far, those men. Perhaps they only said it to please my parents. Maybe they believed it.

‘I’m putting you in charge of granddad,’ my father says.

I look out the window. It is February, but there isn’t a hint of spring on the bare trees. It’s a dry day, but it looks awfully cold outside.

‘Mrs Kelly can get him ready. She’ll wrap him up well,’ my mother finally says something to me, through the mirror.

‘Ok.’

I look at my mother. Or rather, her back. She is dressed in a plain green skirt and blouse. Since the start of the week, she has put away her fur coat. Whenever she leaves the house now, she wears her most unfashionable overcoat. Plain grey with a slim belt. She’s also changed her jewellery. Her chunky pearl necklace has been replaced by something so slim you mightn’t notice it.

Since the election was called, she has even changed her regular rose colour lipstick to a light shade of pink. At 13, I know the reasons for these changes. I’ve heard her say it’s important she doesn’t come across as ‘too showy in front of the women,’ whenever she is accompanying my father during elections, and especially in poorer parts of the constituency like Kilbarrack. ‘You must always let the man stand out. He can’t be upstaged by his wife.’ She’s told me that like she’s teaching me a lesson.

‘Old Mister Madigan is a bit unsettled today.’ Mrs Kelly, stout and double chinned, who everyone calls Mrs even though she isn’t married, has appeared at the kitchen door. She looks from my mother to me and back.

‘Marianne can wheel him around the hotel for a while. That usually settles him. We can take him around the shopping areas then,’ my mother says to my father.

‘But its cold out,’ I say.

‘It’s a reminder to everyone of where our party is coming from,’ my father says.

‘It’s very important he’s seen. Every vote counts,’ says Dan Bermingham to my father.

‘It’s cold.’ I look out the window at the slate grey sky, so near you can almost touch it. Mrs Kelly, arms crossed, is waiting for us all to make up our minds.

‘It’s what the man would want himself, if half of what I’ve heard about him when he was in his 20’s is true,’ my mother says to my father. She laughs. All the men laugh. She sits and puts her lipstick roll into her handbag. She hasn’t laughed as much as the men.

My granddad is in his wheelchair, two nights ago. There’s a blanket around his legs, and he is grinning stupidly at well-wishers in the hotel bar. He’s been like that on and off since autumn, and in the last few weeks he’s been like that a lot. Whatever is wrong with him is speeding up.

Rain has begun to fall on the kitchen window, adding to the wintry feel of the morning. I know why they want granddad to be seen, but something feels wrong about taking him around the supermarkets and shops. My father is looking at me with that concerned expression he wears whenever he is listening to a constituent.

‘The best thing to do Marianne, is to consider what your grandfather would want if he was of sound mind. He’d be mad with the lot of us if he thought we’d keep him out of the campaign because he’d gone a bit forgetful.’

‘I agree’ my mother says. ‘Get yourself ready and wheel granddad around the hotel for a while. That will settle him,’ she says to me.

They’re probably right. It’s what he’d want, I tell myself. The rain is now lashing against the kitchen window.

I finish getting ready for the day, and when I come downstairs again granddad is alone in the hallway, in his wheelchair staring at the front door. His medals from the War of Independence that are great for getting votes, have been pinned to his chest. I grab the handle of the wheelchair and push him into the kitchen where my father and the men have their heads still stuck in the map.

‘Why did you leave him on his own in the hall?’

My father puts on his concerned face again. Sean Hanratty and Dan Bermingham smile to each other.

‘Don’t smirk at me.’

‘Calm down Marianne,’ my father says. ‘We’ll start at Kilbarrack Shopping Centre,’ he says to the two men.

It is a day of climbing in and out of the car in the wind and rain, trying to keep granddad as warm and dry as I can. The convoy of 50 or so cars covered in posters, a loudhailer blaring from the car in front, goes from the new shopping centre at Kilbarrack to the shops in Raheny village, on to those in Killester, then onto the one’s at the Artane roundabout, before finally finishing at the supermarket at Sutton Cross. My granddad is painfully slow getting out of the car and into his wheelchair. I hold an umbrella almost as tall as myself over him while this is going on, but it’s impossible to keep him completely dry.

My father shakes hands. Greets loads of people. A canvasser with a pen and a large notepad goes with him all the time, recording all the requests for help he receives. In Kilbarrack a woman wants her sister moved out from the city to be close to her. In Raheny a man wants help for his son to get an apprenticeship. At Sutton Cross, a woman proudly tells him her four sons are all studying to be doctors, and then she goes into a long moan about people on corporation estates who have their houses built for them by the government. My father listens to her, gravely. But the conversations are mostly rushed. Shoppers skirt and fly by us to escape the weather, snatching leaflets from the canvasser’s hands. I get angry today when I think about it; the people running by, largely ignoring the old man in the wheelchair with the medals pinned to his chest, the grin stuck on his frozen face, and the girl hovering over him, one hand holding an unwieldy umbrella and the other clasped around the wheelchair handle.

When I wake, I have the feeling he has been coughing for some time. It’s a feint sound, travelling up to me from the downstairs bedroom, the one my dementia suffering mother sleeps in now. Ironic, I sometimes think I’ll call it the dementia room.

I lie in bed, eyes wide open. His coughing gets louder. Please stop coughing granddad. Please. It comes in fits. I beg God to stop it and sometimes it stops. But then the next fit starts, and my ribs tense again. I try holding my breath in the weird belief that this will somehow stop the terrible coughing. I wish my parents would wake up. Why can’t they hear what I hear even though they sleep closer to him? Why is it me who must hear?

This is all because of the fucking stupid medals, I think.

A glass of water would help him. But I’m scared of going into his room since he recently began asking for Eileen my granny, who is dead since I was six.

Suddenly a door opens. I hear my parents murmuring. At last. A light is switched on. Its yellow strip outlines my bedroom door. Footsteps make their way downstairs. Sometime later granddad’s coughing dies away.

Morning. I hear him coughing again. I dress slowly. My footsteps on the landing are reluctant. The doorbell is ringing. My mother rushes to the hall door. Doctor O’Meara comes through.

‘His lips are gone blue. He won’t stay still or open his mouth for the thermometer,’ I hear her say.

Minutes later Doctor O’Meara uses the phone in the hall to call for an ambulance. Then he leaves. My mother tries calling the campaign office. I tiptoe downstairs. ‘The line is dead again,’ she sounds exasperated. She rings the hotel reception. Speaks to George, the manager. ‘Drive down to Raheny. Find Adrian. Tell him it’s serious and that they’re taking him to the Mater. Not a word to anyone else.’

She turns to me. ‘Go in and see your grandfather.’

I burst out crying.