Full Circle

“Let's just put it into perspective, yeah?” Donal leaned forward into his point.

“Some stranger parks his arse in your house; claims it as his own and boots you out. You with me?”

Ciara nodded dejectedly. Suspecting what was coming.

“But not only that, the fucker then builds a wall around your own house to keep you out! Can you even imagine the humiliation? You couldn’t even comprehend. You’ve no right to judge.”

“Ok, ok I’ve never been through that but seriously, that was hundreds of years ago. Anybody affected by it is long dead.” Said that before, she thought.

“And should we forget them then? Let the injustices of the past lie? Scratch anyone and they bleed and some wounds bleed through the centuries.”

“Scratch any patriot in this country and you’ll find a terrorist,” she fired back limply.

“I'm not a patriot. I just know right from wrong.” Blunt Donal again. Scything down her protestations like barley.

“But hasn't it been long enough?” she offered. The blunt edges of her words were beginning to sound hollow again.

“The past is all we have. It shapes us and defines us.” This thread again. The rat-a-tat-tat delivery was coming. “An occupying power first seeks to destroy any defences; then it works deeper, destroying culture, anglicising place names, eroding education so the roots are rotten and the state topples. Only those who fight for freedom can save it – the tree of Liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots.”

“So you’re not a patriot? What are you then?” She tried tearing at his rhetoric stitched from his forgotten heroes. Dead white men who spoke to him in Uni halls of residence. Great minds strewn amongst the Che Guevara posters which would be going for half price in the Union by the second term. “One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist.”

“Not if they're in the right,” came the rehearsed response.

“And who decides that?”

“God. And he makes martyrs.”

“What good is a dead martyr?”

She knew where this was going. He continued.

“Who else is going to stand and fight? Do we just let our country be taken? Made to furtively learn our own language in hedgerows and play our traditional games in secret? You're so bloody fond of quotes - what's that one about 'When they came for me there was nobody left to speak?’”

“I prefer Kenny Rogers' version.”

“Don't be flippant.”

“Sometimes you gotta fight to be a man.” She mocked.

“What's the bloody point arguing with you anyway? You never change.”

Full circle. Back to the start.

With his final, magpied words he summed up everything; barrowfulls of tears; acres of lost lands; pits horribly stuffed with the dead and the hideous, vertiginous tidewash of déjà vu that pursued every sense of what Ciara thought of him and of her Godforsaken homeland:

“Let's just put it into perspective, yeah? There is no future. There is no present. There is just the past, happening over and over again: Now.”