Sean Culloty and Dinny Young lingered for a moment at the doorway of the nursing home bedroom to which they had been summoned. Sean glanced down the corridor. A tiny old woman in a dressing gown shuffled away from him, her head stooped over her walking aid. A nurse walked beside her, offering encouragement. From what Sean could see over Dinny’s shoulder, the dimly lit room was small and neat, with a narrow wardrobe, a chest of drawers and a semi-obscured bed. A St Brigid’s Cross hung on the wall to the left over two cushioned chairs.
A gravelly voice rose up from inside.
‘I’m not asleep, you know.’
A bedside light switched on as they entered the room. The old man lay on the bed, a turkey neck and loose-skinned bony forearms sticking out from under pale-blue pyjamas. He had thick hands, his fingers bent and splintered with old scars and nicks. His head was huge, appearing far too big for somebody with such a skinny frame. His hair was white, as were his eyebrows, which stuck out above penetrating and searching eyes.
Sean stayed back, but Dinny went right up to the bed. He held out his hand and said: ‘How are you, Bill? You’re looking well.’ His North Cork accent seemed to echo around the walls of the small room.
‘I’m not deaf,’ the old man said.
Dinny – whom Sean and the other players always addressed as ‘Coach’ – had forewarned Sean that the man was not inclined to take prisoners. ‘I know it’s probably a long shot, but the message was that he might have the winning of it for us,’ Dinny had said, the night before.
‘Oh yeah?’ Sean had replied, unconvinced. He regretted it when he saw Dinny’s eyes go cold.
‘He was something else, Sean. There’s nobody with his track record. And with the final in two weeks, I don’t think we can afford to turn down the possibility of any edge, any marginal gain. Do you?’
‘No, no,’ Sean had said. ‘Course not.’ He knew better than to argue when Dinny hardened his expression and tone of voice to steel. He’d heard the name, too, of course. Who hadn’t in Cork? But he still looked it up on his phone.
Bill ‘Boxer’ Barrett (born 21 October 1925) is a retired inter-county hurler and manager from the Blackrock National Hurling Club in Cork. He is most famous for winning five senior All-Ireland hurling medals with Cork in the 1940s and 1950s and going on to manage the team for a period of fifteen years, when Cork were successful on eight occasions. He was most noted for his attention to detail, his unique motivational skills and knowledge of the game.
Sean leaned over the bed, proffered his hand and introduced himself. He felt the old man assess him.
‘Help me up, there,’ Bill said, and reached out his arms. Sean lifted him – it was like picking up a small child. Once upright, the old man readjusted the pillows and duvet and said: ‘Pass me over that cardigan there. And pull over those chairs and come in close; I don’t want to be shouting. Close the door.’ His voice was somewhere between a growl and the sound of a JCB claw scraping rock.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘ye’re probably wondering why I called ye in.’ He cleared his throat and took a shaky sip from a glass of water on the bedside locker. Sean noticed Dinny shrug, like it was the furthest thing from his mind.
Sean was uncomfortable with the nearness of the other two men and the closed door. This whole situation felt strange; everything seemed compressed. His knees stuck out from the small chair and touched the bed. There was a smell in the room, that musty, stale smell he remembered from his grandparents’ house outside Watergrasshill. Especially near the end, after Granny Frances had died and Grandad Mick was so old. He’d always hated going there with his mother.
‘Fact of the matter is that I have something very important to tell ye both, and ye have to do something about it,’ Bill said with a stern expression.
‘Right,’ said Dinny.
The old man appeared to gather his thoughts as he tapped his forefinger against his lips. Then he looked up and glared at them, real venom in his eyes, like they were dirt the dog had dragged in.
‘First off, what happened ye last Sunday when ye gave away a seven-point lead to a bunch of red-useless hurlers who weren’t related to a team? Hah?’
No answer.
‘Why weren’t ye paying attention, letting Dublin – Dublin! – put it up to ye and nearly beat ye?’
Some spit had dribbled from his mouth onto his chin and he clenched his hands in his lap. A blood vessel had risen up on his neck.
‘Well, captain?’ he said, staring at Sean.
Sean blinked. He really didn’t need this shit.
‘I think the reason is this,’ Bill said, his eyes holding Sean’s. ‘Number one: ye know it all, or think ye do. Number two: ye just didn’t care enough. Ye were thinking: “Sure we’re in the final now, we’re seven points up – we’ll get a few more scores and that’ll see us home.” Ye were thinking: “We’ll be fine, they’re not much good, sure so what if they get a bit closer?” Ye were thinking when ye should have been doing and if ye cared enough ye would have. And you have to get this through to your players, captain. You too, Dinny. All those players have to care about their county and their teammates so much that they’ll die – die for them out there in a couple of weeks’ time. There’s no other way.’
Bill began to wheeze and then cough violently. He leaned forward and convulsed in time with the wet, barking hacks that were discharging from his mouth. Sean watched in alarm. Dinny rose and tapped Bill’s bony back, gently at first, then forcefully, until the coughing eased and a gnarled hand pointed at the glass of water on the locker. Dinny gave him the glass. Sean realised that, sitting closer to Bill, he should have been the one to attend to him. His resentment grew; he was angry now that he had agreed to visit this stupid, bitter old man. They had nothing to learn from his cliché-ridden ranting and Sean could have been at home with Aoife, resting up or doing a bit of prehab, with a crucial training session ahead of him the following evening.
‘Bloody chest,’ Bill said. ‘Pass me that yoke there.’ He nodded to the inhaler on the bedside locker. Sean gave it to him, taking the glass and setting it back down. Bill puffed the inhaler twice.
‘You know,’ he said to Sean as he put the inhaler down on the duvet. ‘You know you don’t own that jersey?’
‘I know that,’ Sean said, hiding his annoyance. He wondered if this stuff had really worked back in the day.
‘You have it for one year and that’s all,’ Bill said, and took another few breaths. ‘And better men had it before you and better men will have it after you and, by Jesus, if you disgrace that jersey and those men.
‘And that goes for you too, Dinny. I know your players are skilful and fit – I can see that. But if they think that fitness, or skill, wins an All-Ireland, they’d be wrong. They’d be very wrong because what they need most of all is heart.’ He pointed to his chest and hit it a couple of thumps. ‘They have to have the will to win and it has to be so strong that losing is impossible. Completely impossible, not going to happen, no way. Willpower, spirit, heart, backbone, guts – that’s what’ll win it for ye. And if ye don’t have it, that’s what’ll lose it for ye. Oh, ye need the rest of it too, but without that, you’re wasting your time. You might as well forget it.’
His eyes moved back and forth between Sean and Dinny, as if he were trying to decide which of them was more contemptuous.
‘Ye’ll have to be tough, and by tough I don’t mean the fella who hits his marker off the ball and gets sent off. I’m talking about the fella getting the belts and coming back for more. Laughing at them – that’s tough. The fella who’ll put his hand up, get a slap and put it up again the next time. The fella who’ll go for the pick even when he knows he’s going to be cleaned out but he’ll do it for the free, he’ll do it for his team. That’s tough.’
Sean fought an urge to look at the time on his phone. He didn’t want to leave it too late before he ate his pasta.
‘While I think of it, Dinny, will ye ever get rid of those short puck-outs? I don’t care how good young Malone is. Lob the ball down to Shaughnessy and he’ll win his share of them.’
Dinny nodded and smiled at him.
The old man grunted. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I’m not pointing fingers at ye two, but the fact of the matter is that there’s a traitor in the camp and ye have to find him and weed him out.’
A heavy quiet enveloped the room. It deepened the air, made it seem thick and cloying. The rasping of the old man’s breathing accentuated it.
‘Dinny?’ he said. ‘Sean? Somebody is going to betray ye on the seventh of September. And ye have to find out who. Ye have to do it now, before it’s too late. The man who’s going to stab his teammates in the back. The traitor, ye have to find the traitor.’
He held up his hands and stopped. He closed his eyes and tried to steady himself. He’d begun to shake and spasm in an effort to repress another coughing fit. A low humming came from his mouth. Sean turned to Dinny and lifted his eyebrows. Dinny shook his head, no.
Bill pointed to a drawer in the locker.
‘There’s a clean handkerchief in there, will you take it out for me like a good man?’ he said to Sean. He wiped his forehead and neck with it and pushed it into the breast pocket of the pyjamas.
‘I have a question for the both of ye now and I want ye to ask everyone in the whole group this question too. How many are there, these days, Dinny? Including selectors and everyone?’
‘Fifty-eight, Bill,’ Dinny said.
‘Lord God,’ Bill said. ‘Anyway, I want you both to think about this. Before you answer I want you to think about it very carefully.’ He was holding up a finger in warning. He put his baleful eyes on Sean and said, ‘What I want to know is this. Sean, are you the traitor?’
‘No!’ Sean said, almost gasping the word out.
The old man nodded, his forehead furrowed.
‘Dinny? Are you the traitor?’
‘No,’ Dinny said. ‘I am not.’
The old man sighed. ‘Right. Now. That’s a start. As far as I’m concerned you’ve both made a vow here this evening. Not to me, but to each other and to the rest of the group. A vow that you will not let your teammates down. Your county. Cork hurling. Cork hurling!’
His face took on a tightness and he clenched and pumped his fist, his breathing ragged and raw.
‘And I believe you,’ he said, nodding. ‘But you have to ask everybody else in the group that question. They have to look you in the eye and say “no”. That’s vital. Sean, you ask the players. Dinny, you ask the backroom team.’
Sean noticed the pallor of the old man’s skin. Sweat had stained under his arms and a sheen of it slicked his forehead and his neck. The door opened and a nurse walked in holding a small transparent plastic cup containing pills.
‘Hello, Bill, time for …’ she said, and then stopped mid-stride. She looked at Dinny and Sean, who had stood up and moved back to give her access to the bed. Her mouth opened when she recognised them. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well, it’s a bit late for visitors, but ye won’t be staying long, will ye?’
‘God, no,’ Dinny said. ‘We’ll be leaving shortly.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Well. I’ll just leave these here so.’ She placed the cup on the dresser. ‘You should take them soon, Bill, and I’ll drop in again in a while. We’ll leave the door open; it’s not great to have the room so stuffy.’ She scrutinised him. ‘Are you okay, Bill?’
‘I’m fine.’
Bill scowled at her as she left and beckoned Dinny and Sean to come close again. He inhaled and pursed his lips and let a long weary flow of air out his nose. He scrunched up his face as if a bad smell had just entered the room.
‘I have to tell ye something. Ye need to know this. It’s very important.’
He shook his head from side to side.
‘In 1955 we were going for four-in-a-row. We were on a great run; we beat Wexford by three points the year before. We’d a great team. We had Ring and Josie Hartnett and Willie John and we had a fantastic full-back line. Lord God, they were mighty. That year my brother Ted came onto the team too. He was wing-back. We played Wexford again in the final and they were the coming team, they had the Rackards and Nicky O’Donnell and Padge Keogh. They were very good, but we were getting the better of them until Christy got hurt. He couldn’t hold the hurley, his hand was broken and he had to go off with a quarter of an hour to go.’
Sean knew that the old man wasn’t seeing them any more; he was looking past them, his face drawn tight. Sean was no longer thinking about the time or his dinner. Something different was happening now, something beyond all the guts and the pride in the jersey rubbish. He leaned forward.
‘They came back at us and Nicky Rackard got a goal with ten minutes left and the teams were level. We got a free in front of the goal and I missed it,’ he said, and grimaced. ‘Wide. From right in front of the goal about thirty yards out. Then I missed another free, a bit further out. Just before the final whistle the ball broke to me in front of the goal only five or six yards out and I was completely loose. All I had to do was hit it past Art Foley and … whatever happened, I took my eye off it and I dropped it and it was cleared. Wexford scored and the ref blew it up.’
He lowered his head.
‘We lost by a point.’
With these words Bill appeared cowed, his eyes doleful, almost frightened. All the aggression and certainty had tumbled away, leaving him as exposed and vulnerable as a straggly looking tree in winter. He continued, head downcast.
‘Ted broke both his legs in a car crash the following December and he never played again. And he went to his grave six years ago without an All-Ireland medal because of me. Because on that day in 1955 I was the traitor. Me.’ He pointed to himself. ‘I betrayed my teammates and Christy and Ted, and the whole county, and I have carried that every day since. Every day. That’s a lot of days; it’s been a long time.’ He paused. ‘And it’s often the first thing that comes into my mind in the morning, when I’m awake in the dark, looking at that wall there,’ he said, almost in a whisper, as he nodded to his right.
He pressed his cheeks with his thumb and fingers and rubbed them up and down the skin.
‘Close that door there again, Sean, like a good lad,’ Bill said. ‘Don’t mind her.’
Sean did what he was asked and sat back down. There was a long pause.
‘The day we closed the coffin on Ted,’ Bill said, his voice breaking, ‘I had to tell him I was sorry because I couldn’t when he was alive. I couldn’t. I put my medals in there with him because they never mattered a damn to me after ’55, and I’d have given them all up for him to have one of his own.’ He pursed his lips and winced.
‘Ye don’t know this because ye’re young, but when ye attend each other’s funerals – and ye will – ye’ll think about what ye’re doing every day now, all the training and everything and what will happen on the pitch in two weeks. And one of those fifty-eight people, or more than one of you, might have to apologise to those men in their coffins.’ He met their eyes again and shook his head. ‘Dinny. Sean. You don’t want that man to be you. By Jesus, you don’t. Because that’s what I’ve been doing all these years, and I’ve nearly buried every last one of them.’ He took the handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face.
Dinny turned his eyes towards the window. Sean looked down.
‘Because you never think about what you won. Dinny, you might already know this, but you don’t, Sean. You never think about what you won. You think about what you lost, and when it’s gone it’s gone, and if you are to blame for that, you have to carry that load. Forever.’ He shook his head again from side to side, as though in disbelief. ‘And it’s a heavy load,’ he said, the words coming out viscous and hoarse, bearing such a weight of sorrow it seemed as if he would be crushed under them.
The three of them remained still for several moments in the quiet that followed. Sean picked up the glass of water and offered it to Bill, who looked at it as if he didn’t know what it was for. He looked at Sean as if he didn’t recognise him. But then he rallied. He inhaled and exhaled a few times, sipped the water and nodded his head and tapped his hand against his thigh.
‘Have you a brother at all, Dinny?’ Bill said.
Dinny shuddered as if struck and said thickly, ‘No, Bill, I don’t.’
‘Have you, Sean?’
‘No,’ Sean said, noticing that Dinny’s two hands were now clasped tightly between his knees and throbbed with the intensity of the grip. He tried to see Dinny’s expression, but his face was turned to the window.
The old man grunted.
‘I don’t want either of ye or anyone else to be carrying that load but if ye lose that match that’s what will happen. It was eleven years before Cork won another All-Ireland in ’66 and the same thing could happen to ye. It could. I was hard on ye earlier, but the fact is that Clare will be harder on ye. They’ll stand down on yere necks if ye show one bit of weakness, one slip. And ye’ll be hard on yereselves too, and that will go on and on for the rest of yere lives. Ye have to find the traitor and get rid of him. Ye have to be pure ruthless. There’s winning and losing and nothing else. Nothing.’
He took in another bit of air and let it out. He puffed his inhaler twice. He held up a finger and shook it, but it was to himself this time, not to Dinny or Sean.
‘The other side of the story is this. Sean? You and those other players? The only reason I questioned ye is that I know what ye’re capable of. I know it; Dinny knows it; we all know it. Not only that. Ye were born to do it. Ye were put on this earth to play in that match and to excel and to drive and drive and drive on until ye win it. Everything about yere lives has a purpose and in a few weeks ye will fulfil that purpose and bring the cup home. I know this. I know it.’
He smiled at Sean, and his face was completely different, lit up, like another man’s entirely. It was something to see, his eyes wet again but soft now too, transformed.
‘I know it,’ he said, in a whisper that went through Sean like a bullet. ‘And when that happens, it’s glorious.’
Sean smiled in reply. Another quiet filled the room but it was lighter. There was air again.
Dinny stood up and Sean followed his example. Sean could sense an electric ripple of change. Something had happened, though he didn’t know what. He wanted to stay, to hear more.
‘I’ll leave ye to it so,’ Bill said from the bed, his eyes now closed.
Dinny and Sean put the chairs back in the corner and left the room. They walked down the long corridor in silence, side by side.
At the nurse’s station a young orderly asked them for a selfie and they smiled and complied but they did not speak to him. A few nurses and some visitors watched them from nearby with a kind of hushed wonder. The reception area was empty and they walked past it and out into the dusk.
The car park was quiet except for the beeping of a truck reversing somewhere at the side of the building. They walked to their cars, which were close by each other.
Sean was confused. He wanted to ask Dinny what had happened, what it meant and what they should do about it. But he didn’t know what to say. Dinny held out his hand and Sean shook it.
‘Thanks for coming, Sean.’
‘No bother, Coach,’ Sean said.
‘Right, so,’ Dinny said. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘See you tomorrow,’ Sean replied and he sat into his car. He started the engine and put on his seat belt. He took the phone from his jacket pocket and turned off Airplane Mode.
He sought out a number in his contacts – one he had been staring at often in the last few days since he’d finally gotten hold of it. He looked at the name and number for a long moment.
As Sean put the phone down on the passenger seat, he realised that his breathing had quickened. He licked his lips and opened the driver-door window. He took a sip from his water bottle. His eyes were drawn to the entrance of the nursing home, now lit by lamplight. He thought about Bill Barrett inside, lying frail on his bed, looking at the wall on dark mornings and remembering a match he lost over half a century ago. He thought about Ted Barrett, in his grave of six years, somewhere in Cork city, the medals in a small mound beside his body. He imagined the medals still shining there.
He wondered how many hurlers, down through the years, had been put in their graves with their medals. He pictured trembling hands removing the medals from the padding of small black boxes and slipping them into the breast pockets of suits, or down the soft white lining of the coffins. All those hurlers reduced to bone and dust after all this time, in graves all over Ireland, their medals shining a soft light beside them under the earth.
Sean looked out the open window. A crow called from the big trees to his right and another answered. They both took flight and passed low over the car park towards Lough Mahon and the sea. He watched them until they faded away to nothing in the darkening sky.