For All The World

Book 1: Cullen's Celtic Cabaret

by Jean Grainger

Genres: Historical Fiction; Women's Fiction; International Crime & Mystery; Historical Mysteries

Synopsis

Dublin, Ireland and Valencia, Spain 1917.

Peter Cullen has no money and no prospects, but he has talent and the will to succeed. All he needs now is luck.

May Gallagher is determined to make her own way in life, even if it means defying her parents' plans for her.

Nick Gerrity is ready to turn his back on his past and start anew, but his secrets might just catch up with him.

And Aida Gonzales, destitute and alone, discovers an unexpected lifeline in the midst of the carnage of World War I.

Together, as the war to end all wars wipes out an entire generation, these four young people will take a chance to break free of society's shackles and forge a new future of glamour, glitter, and greasepaint.

For All the World is Book 1 in the Cullen’s Celtic Cabaret Series.

Release date: August 17, 2023

Print pages: 284

Sample

 

Chapter 1

Dublin, Ireland,

PETER

He felt it as much as heard it. The deafening pounding of stamping feet on the wooden floor of the Gaiety Theatre, the rapturous applause that never wavered in intensity as the entire cast took their second encore, and then got even louder and warmer as the other actors slipped back into the wings, leaving only Peter and the actor playing Macbeth standing side by side on stage, their arms held out to the audience.

It was intoxicating, the waves of sheer love coming from the full house, the calls of admiration ringing down from the gods. He couldn’t believe he’d actually pulled it off, playing a leading role at only seventeen years of age.

He’d been seven when he’d first sneaked into the Abbey in the shadow of a lady’s dress. He was small for his age, and she’d had so many hoops and such a large bustle, the doorman never spotted him scuttling past on his knees. It was the opening night of John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, and there was all kind of commotion because of a reference to Pegeen Mike, the girl of the place, being in her shift, which sent the ladies and gentlemen of the audience into a right spin altogether. Little Peter had watched, enthralled, as the audience rioted and the Dublin Metropolitan Police had to be called.

He sneaked into lots of shows after that, and though none of them were quite so eventful, he learnt to love the theatre.

By the time he was eight, he was running errands for the stage manager, Mr Griffin, fetching and carrying in return for watching the shows for free. Mr Griffin gave him the odd penny, and the regular cast adopted him as their mascot and let him come backstage. He made himself useful, listening to them say their lines and correcting them if they went wrong. He wasn’t much good at the books – he’d left school too young – but he had an incredible gift for recall. If he heard a poem spoken, or a prayer or a song, he could remember it straight off, not a bother in the wide world. And if he heard an actor read their part just once, then he’d know it by heart, better than them. Not only that, he could mimic the exact way they said the words – the women’s voices just as well as the men – which made everyone laugh.

Mimicking people was why he’d left school before he’d learnt much of anything. He’d gone to a little national school up on North King Street, St Michael’s, where there were no desks and forty children in each class in the room. The brothers who taught there were cruel, and one day one of them caught him imitating Brother Constantin to amuse his friends. The priest picked him up by the hair and dangled him until he cried – he was only seven – and then asked him why he was crying. Peter shouted at him, ‘Because you’re hurting me, ya big thick eejit!’ And he got a beating for being cheeky, and so he never went back after that.

He spent the next years trying to help his mother, giving her the few secret pennies he earned at the theatre to buy bread when his father had drunk his wages down the pub, like he always did. He begged shops for half-rotten vegetables, ran to the pawnbroker and the money lender, trying to keep the show afloat. At last he turned ten and was old enough to get a proper paid job as a messenger boy at the Guinness brewery, where his father worked.

Peter liked his job. He started at five in the morning and finished on the dot of one; another messenger took over then. It meant he got to meet all kinds of people and knew the city like the back of his hand. And it gave him the rest of the day to hang around the Gaiety Theatre. As he grew older, he even got to be on stage, carrying a spear or a pitchfork if a crowd of soldiers or angry peasants were needed, and for that he was paid sixpence, which also went secretly to his mother.

A week ago he’d had his first real break. The actor who played the porter in Macbeth had gotten too much into character and was so drunk he could hardly stand up. The director, Louis O’Hare, had heard Peter mimicking the porter’s lines, and the next minute, he was being dressed in the porter’s costume. He was rigid with fright, but he tried out the piece of advice he’d heard given to the cast by Arthur Shields, Dublin’s best-known actor, who had popped in one day to see how rehearsals were going. Like Arthur said to do, he breathed deeply in and out, and the nerves left his body with every exhale.

When he walked out on stage, any remaining fear he’d had just melted away. He wasn’t Peter Cullen playing a drunken porter. He was the drunken porter. O’Hare was so pleased with his performance that the original actor was relegated to being Peter’s understudy and sat in the wings sulking for the rest of the run.

Until tonight, when a different actor had let Louis O’Hare down.

Christine Kemp, who acted Lady Macbeth so brilliantly, that afternoon lost a baby she didn’t even know she was carrying and was in the hospital haemorrhaging half to death apparently. He’d heard the women gossiping before they shut the door on his flapping ears. He’d been sad to hear it; Christine was lovely, and sometimes if she got flowers, she gave him one to take home to his ma. Everyone was mad about her. But the show must go on. Except Christine’s understudy, who had never once been called upon, had disappeared for a last night of passion with her soldier boyfriend, who was being shipped out to France tomorrow. Peter was sent out to search every pub and place she might be, but he returned alone with only fifteen minutes to spare until the curtain went up.

‘I’m so, so sorry, Mr O’Hare. I can’t find her.’ He was nearly in tears of disappointment himself. This was the night his siblings were coming to see him play the comic porter. The tickets were two shillings each, but Mr Griffin had given him four free tickets on the proviso he didn’t say a word. Even cast members didn’t get free tickets when the show sold out, and this one had filled the theatre every night. And now they had no leading lady.

Instead of howling and tearing his hair out, Louis O’Hare looked Peter up and down. ‘You know this whole play backwards, don’t you?’

‘Yes, Mr –’

‘Millicent!’ barked the director over his shoulder at the make-up girl. ‘Take Peter here and dress him up as Lady M, and tell Joe he’s back on as the porter.’

‘Mr O’Hare!’ Peter was horrified. What would his brother and three sisters think if he pranced around up there in women’s clothing? ‘Mr O’Hare, I can’t! I’m a boy!’

But Louis O’Hare was a man with his back to the wall. It was the last night of the show, and he needed the ticket money to turn a decent profit. ‘Don’t matter a rattlin’ damn if you’re a gorilla. You’re doing it. Besides, all the female parts were played by boys back in Shakespeare’s time, when women weren’t allowed. I’ve heard you imitate Christine – you have her to a T. Now off you go to the dressing rooms. I’ll make it worth your while if you don’t make a dog’s dinner of it. There’s a good lad.’

The strange thing was, even though he was a boy, as soon as he set foot on the stage, he changed into Lady Macbeth, every bit as much as he’d been the comic porter. And the applause…on and on and on. The theatre in all its forms was a drug, and he was addicted. This was what he would do for the rest of his life.

***

Later, after the whole cast had congratulated him – they knew as actors what a hard thing he had done, to play someone of the opposite sex with such conviction – he sat and gazed into the mirror, wiping the greasepaint from his face.

He was in Christine Kemp’s dressing room, and it wasn’t the cramped cupboard he’d had to put up with when playing the porter. Here the mirror had the bulbs all around it, like he was a proper star. The golden wig was hanging carefully on the hook – Millicent in costumes told him she’d batter him if it got a tangle – the scarlet and gold velvet dress so wretchedly uncomfortable that he wondered if women really wore such garments was draped over the back of a chair, and Lady Macbeth’s stiff white ruff was in its box.

It was taking him a while to come back to himself, but with each wipe of the cotton cloth, Lady Macbeth disappeared and seventeen-year-old Peter Cullen came back into view: floppy blond hair and navy-blue eyes, a symmetrical face, a dusting of freckles over his nose, straight brown eyebrows, a delicate but square jaw. He suspected it was because he could pass as a girl that Louis O’Hare had risked giving him the part. Without the ruff, his Adam’s apple showed, but that was the only sign of his manliness. He didn’t care. He was surrounded by big strong fellas all day, who just cursed and fought and drank, and he had no desire whatsoever to emulate them. He wasn’t puny himself, far from it – he was lithe and athletic – but he still had some growing and filling out to do. His beard, before Millicent shaved it off, had been soft and fair; it would coarsen in time.

Anyway, he was glad he looked nothing like his father, a swarthy man, wiry and strong from a lifetime of rolling Guinness barrels in the brewery. Kit Cullen was handsome in his own way, but Peter hated him, and so he was happy when Ma said Peter took after her brother, Anthony, who died of scarlatina when he was twelve. Same cupid’s-bow lips, she said.

Peter had no idea what that meant, so he asked Kathleen, his older sister, and she explained. He wasn’t sure having bow-shaped lips was a good thing at first, but it seemed it was. Women liked it anyway; he’d discovered that. His pouting mouth drew their attention. The girls in the canteen and the laundry would tease him when he came delivering messages from the bosses at the brewery, calling him their lover boy, offering to kiss him, saying how they’d like to take him home.

One old woman who worked in the tannery, with thread-veined cheeks and hands like sandpaper, told him that if she had him, she’d put him in a glass case and throw sugar lumps at him. He’d told his ma and Kathleen this, and they’d howled laughing, explaining it meant she thought he was nice. But he thought it sounded daft.

He was relieved May wasn’t here tonight. They’d been walking out, nothing serious. She was a nice enough girl. She’d come to the theatre when he was playing the porter and waited at the stage door to get his autograph; somehow it had ended up with him offering to walk her home.

She was too middle class for him. It turned out she lived in Ranelagh in a lovely red-bricked double-fronted house with a garden out the back, and she told him her father was high up in the bank and her mother from a big farm down the country, so he decided not to tell her about his own background; it would only shock the poor girl.

She was mad about the theatre, knew all the actors and was always talking about this production or that one. She said she’d been in a few productions, amateur, but her parents didn’t approve.

The theatre had widened his vocabulary and given him a range of accents to choose from. His fellow actors were all what his father would call toffs, from places like Rathmines and Ranelagh. The fella playing Macbeth was English but lived in Seapoint, and Duncan and Banquo were from Dún Laoghaire, which was fierce posh. So he’d let May believe he was from somewhere like that, and now he was stuck with the lie.

Luckily there was a drive once a year by the wives of the Guinness bosses; they brought in all the clothes that didn’t fit or were too worn for their husbands and sons and let the workers take what they wanted. This spring he’d found a pair of black trousers and a smart white shirt that were nearly new, and Kathleen took them to work with her and had them washed and pressed with one of the laundry’s heavy irons. He’d even found a pair of proper shoes, a little big for him but fine with two pairs of socks. So he was able to look respectable when he took May out for a cup of tea or a walk in the park.

And so far he had managed to avoid being introduced to her parents, who might ask more searching questions, and he’d make sure to finish with her before she found out where he was really from.

As he finished changing into his one set of good clothes, which he now wore to the theatre instead of his workman’s clothes and hobnailed boots, the dressing room door burst open and his sisters, Maggie, Connie and Kathleen, came running in, followed by his older brother, Eamonn. The girls were bubbling and laughing with excitement.

‘Holy Moses, Peter, was it really you?’ Eight-year-old Connie’s eyes were shining with wonder at it all. ‘We was lookin’ for ya in the porter’s dressin’ room, and the man said you was in here, and he said not to say, but it was you playin’ that woman. I swear I never knew it was you! I couldn’t believe it when he said you was playin’ a mot.’

‘Shh, don’t be tellin’ anyone. I wouldn’t normally be doin’ it, but our lead actress is sick, and I had every line of the play off by heart, so Mr O’Hare – he’s the director – he made me do it at the last minute. And it’s good you didn’t know it was me.’ He glanced at Eamonn apologetically as he buttoned up his white shirt. ‘I’m not plannin’ to make a career of playin’ women, just so you know, and maybe better to not say anything about it at work. Wouldn’t want Da findin’ out.’

Kit Cullen already thought theatre people were all ‘pansies’ and had shown no interest in coming to see Peter playing the comic porter. He’d forbidden Peter’s mam to go either, and she was so downtrodden, she hadn’t dared defy him. God knew how Kit would react if he found out his son had been playing a woman.

‘Ah, it’s grand, Peter,’ Eamonn said, with a wave of his hand. ‘I never copped it was you, so I’m sure no one else did either, so don’t be worryin’ about that. C’mere to me, I hated all that stuff in school. Remember Jonesy tryin’ to teach me poems and all that? Couldn’t get outta there fast enough. But you were somethin’ else up there, and whoever they thought ya were, they all were glued to ya.’

Peter grinned at Eamonn fondly. His brother’s strong working-class Dublin accent was incongruous in these sumptuous surroundings, but he had made the effort to come and was doing his best not to mind that his brother had played a woman up there on the stage. Eamonn took after their father, but only in his looks. When it came to personality, Kit was surly and often drunk and communicated mostly with his fists or slurred nonsense. But Eamonn, who was a couple of years older than Peter but had stayed at school a while longer, was a great laugh and could rattle off stories nineteen to the dozen with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

‘And you were amazin’, even if you were havin’ to act being a lady – that must have been really hard,’ fourteen-year-old Maggie added, hugging him. ‘Like, I never knew yer wan was you, but when she was goin’ on about the blood on her hands, “Out spot,” I was on the edge of me seat, I swear.’ Her china-blue eyes and copper curls made her look fairly theatrical herself, Peter thought.

‘Lady Macbeth was desperate altogether, wasn’t she?’ piped up Connie. ‘Poor auld Macbeth, ya’d feel sorry for him, wouldn’t ya?’ She was so sweet, with her blond pigtails and her best frock on, a faded blue one that had been Kathleen’s and then Maggie’s.

‘Ye would not! The big eejit, believin’ all that rubbish outta them witches, and his mate Banquo after tellin’ him not to trust them, but he wouldn’t listen ’cause he was dyin’ to be the king.’ Maggie’s mad mop of curls was loose; their mother would have a fit if she saw her out without a hat. ‘He was just a greedy bas –’

‘Maggie Cullen!’ Kathleen gasped, ever the older sister. ‘Do not use that language in here.’

Maggie giggled. Their ma would wallop her for cursing, but all the women in the button factory where she worked said desperate things, and Maggie picked it up like a sponge.

‘And you’re not supposed to say the name of that play in a theatre anyway. You’re supposed to call it “the Scottish Play”, ’cause it’s cursed and terrible things happen to people who say that word…’ Peter spoke in a spooky voice that frightened Connie and made Eamonn laugh.

The door flew open again, and this time it was Mr Griffin, the stage manager. He was fat, with a huge bushy moustache and a shiny bald head. He could be snappy, but Peter knew he had a heart of gold under the gruff interior, and tonight he was beaming as he handed Peter a brown envelope out of the pile he was carrying.

‘Your wages. Three weeks as the porter and an extra bonus for playing Lady M. It was a mad idea, but you did great. Well done, son. You pulled it off, and no one noticed you were a young fella. Louis had to rush off to the hospital to see poor Christine – we’re hoping she’ll pull round. There’s a great lady doctor there, Kathleen Lynn. Anyway, he wants you to know you really pulled his fat out of the fire this time, Peter, and when we audition for Hamlet, you’re to show up and he’ll find you a part.’

‘Thanks, Mr Griffin.’ Peter was almost dizzy with delight. Visions of playing the Dane himself danced through his mind…

‘Maybe he’s got you pegged as Ophelia,’ joked the stage manager, before he rushed off to deliver the other envelopes, leaving Peter smiling ruefully. It wasn’t the dream to be playing women, but he was on stage and he was acting and that was all that mattered.

‘Well, go on…open it,’ Eamonn urged, and Peter realised the eyes of all his siblings were fixed on the envelope. He’d been so excited about O’Hare’s offer to join the troupe that he’d forgotten about the money. And in fact he had no idea what to expect. When he’d been told to play the porter, no one had mentioned wages. Lady Macbeth had come out of the blue. What did actors earn anyway? Did they make a good living?

Money was always tight in their house, and the Cullen family lived week to week, even though everyone except Connie and Ma worked. These days Eamonn rolled barrels with Da in the Guinness brewery, Maggie worked in the button factory and Kathleen as a seamstress in Arnotts in town. But Kit Cullen still threw his own wages down his neck in the form of the very stuff he spent the week slaving to make, and any of his children’s wages he could get his hands on as well.

Peter felt the envelope before he opened it – no coins, which he found strange. He eased the gummed flap of the envelope open, reached in and felt paper. His heart sank. He hoped it wasn’t a cheque – only rich people had a bank account – but more likely it was an IOU; he knew well Louis O’Hare was big on owing money to people. He extracted the rectangle of paper. It was a ten-pound note.

‘Ten pounds? For three weeks’ work?’ Kathleen was astonished. ‘That’s not right surely?’

‘Maybe it’s a mistake?’ Peter said, as amazed as his siblings. He got nine shillings a week as a messenger boy, which was less than two pounds a month, so could he really have earned so much in three weeks? Is that what the theatre paid, for doing something that wasn’t hard work for him at all?

‘Don’t say a word, even if it is,’ Maggie said wisely. ‘Wait till you see if he asks ya for it back.’

‘Yeah, maybe I’ll do that.’ It was wonderful to have so much to give to Ma. She could squirrel it away and use it all for herself and her children, unlike all the other wages coming into the house from Eamonn and the girls, which her husband bullied out of her. He felt an urge to celebrate first, though.

‘Will we go for a wan and wan?’ He grinned at them.

The suggestion made his younger sisters squeal with delight, but Kathleen looked cautious. As the oldest daughter, she carried the burdens of the family on her shoulders.

‘We shouldn’t. The gas man is callin’ Thursday and Da emptied the meter, so we need all the money we can get…’

‘Ah, Ka.’ Eamonn put his arm around his older sister. ‘It’s only a few chips and a bit of fish. We can surely do that after Peter’s big night, so will we let him enjoy himself?’

‘All right, but three between the five of us, right?’ Kathleen smiled and raised an eyebrow.

As they set off for Burdocks, the brand-new fish and chip, his siblings chattered on and on about the money and the play, but Peter tuned them out. He was an actor, a proper paid actor. It was incredible. Nobody he knew was anything like that. Everyone was a docker or a cooper or a driver or something like that, but he was an actor. And not only that, he was making proper money – money his da need never know about. Things were looking up for the Cullen household.

 

 

 

Chapter 2

The five of them crept up the tenement stairs in the dark, avoiding the rotten floorboards that made it a treacherous climb. Their rooms on the third floor of Number 11 Henrietta Street were all they could afford, and those rooms were leaky and cold and miserable. Peter tried not to rub his elbows on the walls. They were painted with Raddle’s red and Ricket’s blue, which killed the germs, they said, but your clothes were destroyed if you rubbed it, and he wanted to keep his one good shirt clean.

It was hard to believe the grand Georgian townhouses of Henrietta Street were once home to Dublin’s elite, toffee-nosed lords and ladies who thought of Dublin as the second city of the British Empire. Traces of old magnificence still remained: large and wide front doors, brass boot scrapers set in the granite steps, decorative fanlights, intricate coving and ceiling roses, sweeping staircases with elaborately decorated banisters. But these days Henrietta Street housed Dublin’s poorest of the poor, broken men and beaten-down women squashed into every room like sardines, their shoeless children dressed in rags and living on bread and watered-down porridge.

His mother did her best for them all, feeding them better than most, washing and scrubbing, hanging out her family’s laundry to dry on the wires that crisscrossed the street, anchored in the brickwork by five-inch nails. But with only one toilet and one tap in each house, shared between all the families who lived there, it was a struggle, and the pervasive smell of human waste assailed Peter’s nostrils as he climbed to the third floor. A hundred people in a house meant for one family could make for terrible smells.

Eamonn, who had gone ahead, stopped and turned, shushing the chattering girls with his finger to his lips. Lying across the stairs, the stink of porter strong off him, was Larry Maguire, their father’s most hated neighbour. And that was saying something, because Kit Cullen hated everyone.

Larry was fond of a drop, as they said, but that wasn’t why Peter’s father despised him. The reason was, Larry regularly mocked Kit Cullen’s claims that he had fought in the Post Office last year with Pearse and Connolly and the rest of the men who signed the Proclamation of Independence, declaring Ireland to be free of the old enemy. The valiant rebels fought for over a week, and the British hammered them back, and everyone feared there’d be nothing left of the city by the time it was done. Peter and Eamonn couldn’t get to work. Henrietta Street was on the north side of the Liffey, same side as the Post Office, where most of the fierce fighting took place, and at any time, they might have had to evacuate. Ma made them stay inside – well, Peter and the girls. Eamonn slipped out when Bridie Cullen wasn’t looking.

Peter’s father had turned up four days after the fighting began, claiming all sorts of heroics. Nobody believed him, but fearing his meaty fists, they kept silent. Only Larry Maguire was brave – or rather drunk – enough to jeer him, telling everyone Kit Cullen was in the back room of O’Donnell’s pub out in Drimnagh for three days and nights during the Rising that saw the city in flames.

‘Is it not a great wonder,’ Larry was heard to remark often and at great volume in the halls of the house, ‘how the English were draggin’ every last man jack of the Volunteers in for questioning, but they never so much as raised an eyebrow at our brave Kit, and he such a hero for old Ireland? ’Tis for all the world like a miracle, so it is, and aren’t we lucky such a bright star of a free Ireland is still here to tell the tale?’

Larry had two enormous brothers who could flatten Kit Cullen in three seconds flat if he challenged Larry to a fight, so Kit pretended to laugh it off as the ravings of a drunkard and took out his bad temper on his family instead, doling out even more insults and digs than usual to poor Bridie and his children.

Peter sighed as Eamonn stepped carefully over Larry, trying not to wake him. This was so stupid, such a Neanderthal way of going on. Getting plastered, battering people, working like a dog for a bite in your mouth and to pay the rent to a landlord who enjoyed fine port and a feather bed in the leafy suburbs of Dublin, well away from the inner city. If only people used their brains and not their fists, or guns for that matter, things would be so much better. He longed to get out, get away from here. He loved his ma and Eamonn and the girls, but he wasn’t like them, he knew that. They couldn’t see a life beyond this place, this poverty. They believed it was all they deserved. Peter didn’t necessarily believe he deserved better, but he was determined to get it anyway.

He would be eighteen in the summer, and he’d been giving his ma all his wages since he was ten, but as he followed Eamonn over Larry’s snoring body and turned back to lift little Connie across with Kathleen’s help as well as give a hand to Maggie, he decided for the first time in his life to tell his mother a lie. He’d say he was sure Mr Griffin had made a mistake and only meant to give him a one-pound note, not a tenner, so he would have to give him back the rest. And then he’d use the other nine pounds to do something different for himself. He didn’t know what the future held for him yet, but it didn’t involve staying in the tenements and drinking himself into a stupor every night, that was for sure.

Eamonn eased the door of their rooms open; it was really just one big room of the original house divided into three by thin partitions. The living room, if you could call it that, was where they cooked and ate, and also where he and Eamonn shared a settle bed that was pulled out at night and folded away during the day. The second space was their parents’ bedroom, and the last, which was tiny, had a double bed the three girls shared. Despite his ma’s best efforts, the whole place smelled of damp and body odour.

Peter’s heart sank as he entered the living area. It was after midnight and he just wanted to sleep – he had to be up at half past four for work – but his father was still awake, sitting on the settle that his sons needed to sleep on, dressed only in his vest and trousers, his braces hanging down and his forearms on his knees. He didn’t look up as they entered. The gas lamp was lit, and there was a bottle of stout on the table next to an empty glass.

The girls slipped away into their room, all their happy chatter and good spirits evaporating into a scared silence.

Eamonn approached Kit the way you might stalk a wild animal, cautiously, making no sudden movements. And Kit Cullen was like an animal, thought Peter. He was hairy like an ape, and his shoulders and arms were huge.

‘We might just pull out the settle there, Da…’ Eamonn said quietly.

Kit didn’t move.

Peter and his brother exchanged a look. This could go any way. Kit could just stand up and go into his own bed, and they’d pray not to hear the animal sounds of him forcing himself on their mother through the thin partition. Or he could try to pick a fight and batter them. Or he could be all bonhomie, demanding his sons drink with him and listen to endless rambling and entirely fictitious stories of his great bravery in the face of the English. If he got started on his hatred for England, they’d be there until it was time to go to work.

‘Da?’ Eamonn tried again. Their father sat with his fists clenched in his lap.

Peter tried then, leaning down to speak. ‘Da?’ He hated how meek his voice sounded, but he knew the slightest intonation that displeased Kit could result in carnage.

This time his father looked up, and his hard, unblinking eyes were full of hate. ‘Tell me, Peter…’ His voice was gravelly, menacing, but not slurred, so he hadn’t taken much drink, not enough to slow him down. ‘Tell me what made ya think that ya could make a show of me like that?’

Peter glanced at Eamonn in alarm. ‘What? I don’t –’

The next thing he knew, he was pinned to the inside of the door, his pressed and washed shirt in a ball in Kit’s fist, his father’s scarlet face inches from his.

‘Shamin’ me on purpose, was it?’ Spittle landed on Peter’s cheek, the horrible stench of his father’s breath turning his stomach. ‘Makin’ a fool of me, dressin’ up like some kind of a faggot, so the whole place can burst their arses laughing when Larry Maguire goes shouting up and down the halls about Kit Cullen’s young fella prancing the boards painted up like a tart?’

The sweat of fear poured from Peter, running down his back. Larry… He should have thought of Larry. The theatre bar was one of the few places left that hadn’t barred the old drunk, and he often hailed Peter from his stool at the counter. ‘Peter Cullen, son of the famous war hero! Ha, ha, ha!’

‘Da, it wasn’t like that…’ he managed, but his father was pressing hard on his windpipe and he couldn’t force any more words out. It was nearly impossible to breathe.

‘Da, let him go!’ Eamonn tried to intervene but got his father’s elbow in his face, sending him reeling.

‘Down the docks till this time, were ya?’ roared Kit, jabbing Peter in the stomach with his fist as his right hand tightened even more around his son’s throat. ‘Got a few bob for that skinny little arse of yours, did ya?’

‘We were at Burdocks chipper, Da,’ Eamonn protested, scrambling back to his feet.

Kit ignored his older son and jabbed Peter in the stomach a second time. ‘Or up in Monto? With the rest of the brassers?’ He hocked a ball of phlegm and spat into Peter’s face, and as Peter, winded and choked, tried in vain to take a breath, he could sense the foul globule sliding down his cheek and onto his chin. He started to think it was the last thing he would ever feel, because the lights in his brain were going out one by one…

‘Kit!’ His ma’s voice cut faintly through the roaring in his head. He could see her; she was in her long nightdress, her hair loose.

‘Stop it! Leave him alone! You’re killing him!’

‘That’s right, defend yer little girl!’

‘He’s your son!’

‘He’s no son of mine.’ With an evil grimace, Kit Cullen tightened his already deadly grip on Peter’s windpipe and leant in closer, bright scarlet with rage. ‘No son of mine is a nancy boy. No son of mine gives Larry Maguire a reason to make a laughingstock of me!’ He drew back his meaty fist again, but this time Eamonn grabbed the heavy iron kettle off the top of the pot-bellied stove and swung it as hard as he could, catching Kit on the back of his head.

Bridie let out a shriek as Kit went down like a sack of spuds, and Peter slid weakly to the floor, gasping for breath. Eamonn dropped the kettle, the girls appeared, and all the Cullen family just stood and stared at their father, motionless on the threadbare carpet. He was face down but awkwardly twisted in the middle because his fat belly had forced his hips to roll to one side. A trickle of blood leaked down his neck from the back of his head.

‘Is he dead?’ asked Connie in a breathless little voice, and Bridie Cullen let out a wail of horror.

‘What will we do, what will we do?’ she groaned. She had fresh bruising on her face, Peter could see as his vision cleared. His father had obviously taken his rage out on her before he and the others got back from the theatre. This was all his fault for agreeing to play Lady Macbeth, and now his older brother would be hung for murder.

Eamonn knelt on the floor, his fingers on their father’s neck, feeling for his pulse; the brewery had sent him to a first aid course last year. ‘Stop crying, Ma. He’ll live, worse luck.’

‘But what will we do, what we will do?’ she kept on asking, standing over him, wringing her hands. ‘He was trying to kill Peter! He was trying to kill his own son.’

‘I know, Ma. Kathleen, get somethin’ to bandage his head. The cut’s only shallow. If we wrap it tight, we’ll stop the bleedin’. Maggie, clean that kettle. Wipe it and scrub every bit of blood off it. We’ll tell him he was drunk and fell and hit the back of his head off the floor. With a bit of luck, he won’t remember any of it. Connie, go back to bed and go to sleep. We never heard nothin’ nor saw nothin’, right?’

‘But he was trying to kill Peter, his own son,’ Ma kept repeating in a bewildered voice. ‘Kit said he’d swing for him. I didn’t believe him – he wouldn’t kill his own son. But he did. He tried to kill him.’

Her husband stirred and groaned, and Bridie Cullen let out a terrified shriek. ‘Oh God, what will we do!’

‘Get Peter out of here, that’s what we’re going to do,’ said Eamonn, getting to his feet after tying up their father’s head wound with a piece of cloth Kathleen had ripped from her own skirt.

Peter pushed himself into a sitting position against the door. ‘You want me to leave here?’ His voice was hoarse, his windpipe so bruised.

Eamonn came to help him up. ‘Yes, and not just the house. You have to get out of Dublin, Peter. He’s tried to kill you once, and he’ll try to kill you again. We have to tell him you’ve left the country – it’s the only way.’

‘But where will I go? It’s the middle of the night. And I was going to audition for another part…’

‘I know, but ya can’t do that now unless you want to be dead. Ya have to get out of here, as far as you can go. Maybe that young wan of yours – May, is it? Hide out at her place till the mornin’.’

‘Ah, Eamonn, I can’t go running to her. She hardly knows me.’

‘Well, you have to get out of here anyway. And listen, when you’ve got where you’re going, send a message to me. Not here or at the brewery – Da works there. Maybe send it to where Kathleen works in Arnotts. She’ll see I get it. Tell me where you are, and I’ll let ya know how things are goin’ here. But go now, y’hear me?’

Peter knew his brother was right. He’d no idea what to do, where to go, but staying here wasn’t an option. Never had he seen such murderous hate as was in Kit Cullen’s eyes tonight. His father had intended to kill him, and he would try again, and if his mother or Eamonn tried to stop him, he’d kill them too.

His mind raced. He had the money Mr Griffin gave him in his pocket, a whole ten pounds, less the fish and chips. He’d already been thinking of moving on. But not like this, so fast, with no plans.

Where were his hobnailed work boots? He needed to pack a bag…

Kit Cullen moaned and started to push himself up before collapsing back again, muttering to himself.

‘Peter, just go. Quick!’ his mother begged him, tears running down her bruised face.

There was no time for him to pack; Kit was coming round too fast. He hugged Kathleen and Maggie briefly – ‘Say goodbye to Connie for me’ – and held his ma for a long second, whispering in her ear, ‘I’ll write.’

She clung to him, sobbing. ‘Take care, Peter. Take care. Please God, we’ll meet again in this world.’

Eamonn clapped him on the shoulder, and Kathleen tried to push his father’s donkey jacket on him, but he shook his head. He wanted nothing of Kit Cullen’s. His father groaned again, and his mother gasped and gave him a frightened shove towards the door.

In the hallway, he stepped over the still-unconscious Larry Maguire, the man who had started all this trouble, made his way cautiously down the rotting stairs and let himself out into the starry Dublin night.