by Colum McCann
What the Irish themselves worry about is that they will somehow keep on delaying, but he will not allow it, the endless riverrun, riverrun, riverrun. He will be over eighty when Andrew goes to college. The father mistaken for the grandfather. The distant ancestry. All those ancient ghosts. There were sixty-one children born in Northern Ireland the day Andrew was born. Sixty-one ways for a life to unfold. The thought slides a sharp blade of regret down the core of his spine. His son is just five months old now, and he can count on just four hands the amount of days he has spent with him. How many hours has he sat in the stark chambers listening to men argue about a single comma, or the placement of a period, when all he wanted was to return to the surprise of his very young child? Sometimes he would watch them as they talked, saying very little or nothing at all. Kites of language. Clouds of logic. Drifting in and out. Caught on the moving wave of their own voices. He heard certain phrases and allowed them to take him out over the treetops, into what the Northern Irish called the yonder. Immersed in the words. Sitting at the plenaries, waiting. The brittleness in the room. The cramped maleness. A relentless solicitude about them, they would hold up a hand and tell people they did not deserve the reverence, but it was plain to see that they needed it.
Some days he wishes that he could empty the chambers of the men, fill the halls instead with women: the short sharp shock of three thousand two hundred mothers. The ones who picked through the supermarket debris for pieces of their dead husbands. The ones who still laundered their gone son’s bed sheets by hand. The ones who kept an extra teacup at the end of the table, in case of miracles. The elegant ones, the angry ones, the clever ones, the ones in hairnets, the ones exhausted by all the dying. They carried their sorrow—not with photos under their arms, or with public wailing, or by beating their chests, but with a weariness around the eyes. Mothers and daughters and children and grandmothers, too. They never fought the wars, but they suffered them, blood and bone. How many times has he heard it? How often were there two ways to say the one thing? My son died. His name was Seamus. My son died. His name was James. My son died. His name was Peader. My son died. His name was Pete. My son died. His name was Billy. My son died. His name was Liam. My son died. His name was Charles. My son died. His name was Cathal. My son’s name is Andrew.
THE RAIN OUTSIDE still hammers down. Luggage carts hurry to and fro. He lifts a biscuit, blows the tea cool. Sunday nights to Ireland. Wednesday nights to London. Thursdays to Washington D.C., at his law firm. Friday nights to New York. Sundays back out to England and Ireland again.
Sometimes it feels as if there is no motion at all: thousands of miles in the decompression chamber, the same cup of tea in the same cup in the same airport lounge, the same city, the same neat car.
He wonders what might happen if the plane were delayed, how easy it would be to go home, ascend in the elevator, to turn the key, flick on the lamp, become that other man on whom he is equally intent.
HE IS GUIDED last onto the plane. A special privilege. As if he could be unseen. A nice thought: to be truly unseen. To own an influential anonymity.
He was always recognized in Washington. The push, the shove, the backslap. The corridors of power. What he disliked were the galas, the garden parties, the red carpets. Flashbulbs, press briefings, TV cameras. The irksome necessities. He was recognized in New York, too, but nobody seemed to care. The city was so brash that it was obsessed only with itself. In Maine, he felt at home, amongst his own people.
Out here, in this nation of cloud and air, they all know him, too. They are quick to hang his suit jacket, place the small bag in the overhead bin. He glances across and is glad to see that the seat beside him is free. No need for the kind nod, or the apologetic half-grin. He has his routine down firmly now. The window seat. Briefcase tucked down beside him. Shoes gently lifted, though not fully taken off, not yet. Something vaguely rude in the idea that you remove your shoes before liftoff.
The stewardess moves along the aisle. A tray, a tongs. He reaches for the white towel, holds it to his brow, and then cleans in the depths between his fingers. How quickly the towel grows cool. For once he wishes he had one of those confounded portable phones. What is it they call them? Cellulars. Mobiles. Handhelds. Just to call home. But his refusal to get a phone has become a point of honor now. He clings to the idea, an old-fashioned beating of the chest. He has spent sixty-odd years without one: no point in beginning now. Ridiculous, really. All his aides have them. His negotiating team. All the reporters. There have even been times, just before takeoff, when he borrowed one from his fellow passengers, just to make a quick call to Heather. His hand over the mouthpiece so as not to appear rude.
A menu is slipped into his lap, but he knows this month’s choices by heart: lobster bisque, garden salad, chicken cordon bleu, Asian noodles, beef tenderloin, mushroom risotto. The British are working on their culinary reputation, it seems. Their best, their brightest. They are a tough, intransigent lot, though they have softened a good deal in the past year or so. Embarrassed by what they have done for centuries in Ireland. Ready to leave. To hightail it out of there. They would wipe their hands clean in an instant, if only they didn’t have to do it in front of the world. They seem stunned that Northern Ireland somehow exists. How did they possibly ever believe that the country could have been good for them? What it all came down to was pride. Pride in the rise, and pride in the fall. They want to be able to leave with a measure of dignity. Tally-ho. Ta-ra. Voyeurs to their own experience. Living at an angle to the moment. And the Irish, down south, with almost the exact opposite dilemma. Embarrassed by the fact that it was taken away. Centuries of desire. Like the longing for a married woman. And now suddenly she is there, within your grasp, and you’re not quite sure whether you want her at all. Second thoughts. Other dowries. The mildew in the room where the past is stored. The Unionists, the Nationalists, the Loyalists, the Republicans, the Planters, the Gaels. Their endless gallery of themselves. Room after room. Painting after painting. Men on tall horses. Flags into battle. Sieges and riverbanks. The alphabet soup of the terrorists.
At first he couldn’t understand the accents. The spiky consonants. Angular and hard-edged. It seemed to him like an altogether different language. They came to the microphone. He had to lean forward to try to decipher it. The small punctuations of grief. Ach. Aye. Surely. Not our fault, Mr. Chairman. Six into twenty-six won’t go. They kicked the bloody door in, so they did. They pushed wee Peader out the helicopter. All due respect, Senator, we don’t talk to murderers. If Mr. Chairman would like to know what it’s like why don’t you come, for once, to the Shankill?
They were dumping out the contents of endless drawers on the floor. But he soon caught on. He began to tell the difference between a Belfast and a Dublin accent, between Cork and Fermanagh, between Derry and Londonderry even. All the geography that went into words. The history behind every syllable. The Battle of the Boyne. Enniskillen. Bloody Sunday. There was a clue in every tiny detail. Gary was a Prod. Seamus was a Taig. Liz lived on the Shankill Road. Bobby on the Falls. Sean went to St. Columba’s. Jeremy to Campbell. Bushmills was a Protestant whiskey. Jameson for Catholics. Nobody drove a green car. Your tie was never orange. You went for holidays in Bundoran or you went to Portrush. Fly your flag. Pick your poison. Choose your hangman.
Lord, it was a tangled web. One he would do well to sleep upon. One that needed an eternity of rest.
Still, he had grown to like them: the politicians, the diplomats, the spin doctors, the civil servants, the security men, even the loudmouths outside the gates. All of them with their own particular music. A certain generosity to them. All the dirty laundry somehow made eloquent. He was told once that any good Irishman would drive fifty miles out of his way just to hear an insult—and a hundred miles if the insult was good enough. The self-deprecation. The effacement. The awareness. There was something about the endless wrangling that has caught him in the glue pot and kept him there. The confounded intricacies. The edges of endea
vor. The fascination with the impossible. He wanted to stay alert to what might be learned. And there was always a key in the anonymous moment. The women in the canteen. They nodded at him and caught his eye. The sad smile. The generous delusion. The lean forward. God bless you, Senator, but it’s a fool’s errand. Well, be that as it may, but I’ll still take the part.
HE WAS NOT beyond knowing that they thought him—when he first arrived—a quiet patsy. The Arab. The Yank. The Judge. Your Harness. Mohammed. Mahatma. Ahab. Iron Pants. They even called him, for some reason, the Serb. He wasn’t interested in playing himself Irish or Lebanese. Not for him the simple ancestral heart: he wanted to make himself the smallest continent possible.
Still, he was sure some of them wanted a slice of anger from him. To stumble somehow. To say the wrong thing. So they could apportion the blame away from themselves. But he figured out ways to fade into the background, stuck to silence, looked over the rim of his glasses. He disliked his own importance in the process. It was the others who had brought the possibility here: Clinton, Reynolds, Hume, Major. He just wanted to land it. To take it down from where it was, aloft, like one of those great lumbering machines of the early part of the century, the crates of air and wood and wire they somehow flew across the water.
A RED EYELID of sun out the window. The vaguely scattered morning clouds. London below. The hum and flood of plane lights. His feet have swollen during the flight. In the overhead locker he reaches for his sweater.
He is vaguely embarrassed that Heather dresses him these days. She knows a Persian tailor who double-breasts his suits. It took a little while to step into the crease. Even the very word bespoke. The sweaters are from Cenci or some such place. Something comforting in them. A small surrendering to memory. Odd that desire is made true by distance. He can pull on the sweater and almost be back on Sixty-Seventh Street. Odd, too, how a life can so easily reshape itself. Perhaps the failure that irks him the most is the original marriage. It simply didn’t work out. They tried, he and his first wife, they hung on, they failed, what was broken was broken. Ashes do not become wood. What he feared early on was the idea that his grown daughter might see him in his new suit and ties, and that she would say nothing at all, that the silence would go right to the core of failure.
He hitches his jacket up on his shoulders. Onwards. Away. He is sixth off the plane. He allows the others to go ahead. His body still vaguely belonging to the cabin. That air in the back of his calves.
Halfway down the corridor he is surprised by a hand on his elbow. Bombing? Murder? Broken ceasefire? But it’s a young man, blue-eyed with a nose ring. Must have been sitting at the front of the plane. Vaguely familiar. Maybe a pop star of sorts. Or someone from the movies. Good luck, Senator, we’re praying for you. In an English accent. Odd to think of the young man praying at all. Mostly it was the older women of Northern Ireland who said that to him. Adjusting their hairnets. Wrapping their fingers white with beads.
He shakes the young man’s hand and strides along the corridor. But Lord, he hates this walk. Who will be there to meet and greet him? What sort of security detail? It always gets heavier on this side of the pond. Simply to walk him to another terminal. He can make out their shapes at the end of the walkway. A young woman with short blond hair lifts her hand in greeting: he recalls her name though he has only met her twice. Lorraine. And two new security men. Coming towards him briskly. No news on their faces, no sudden collapses. No apparent grief. Thank God for that.
—How was your flight, sir?
—Wonderful, thank you.
A small lie of course, but why whine? She’ll hardly whisk out a pillow for him. They move swiftly down the stairs, out to the waiting car, towards Terminal Two.
—Sorry, sir, but your next plane’s delayed thirty-five minutes, she says.
Lorraine has, on her belt, space for three phones. She juggles them with style and grace, hooks her fingers under the belt: the Wild West of telecommunications.
In the British Midland lounge they have reserved an area for him. Tea, pastries, yogurt. She hands him a memo and he scans it quickly. A report on Ahern and Blair. Concessions on the proposed North-South bodies. A clause in the Framework Document from three years ago. The status of the Council and the source of its authority. They are, it seems, approaching a tentative agreement on Strand Two.
For a moment he allows himself the luxury of a smile. Two o’clock in New York. Heather and Andrew will be sleeping.
THE NORTH, BELOW, is stunned with morning sunlight. Patches of bright yellow on the mud flats. The fields so wide and grassy. Lake and water-meadow. A silver estuary and a huge lake. One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west. The plane banks and the city of Belfast appears, always smaller than he expects it to be. The high cranes of the shipyards. The maze of side streets. The soccer pitches. The flats. The fretful desolation. Then out over the fields again, the incredible depth of green. He has never quite seen the land so bright before: a clear day through the morning clouds. He is used to its gray edges, its laneways, its high walls. They pull in over Lough Neagh. A vague sadness on touchdown, a tensing of the throat.
On the grass below, the shadow of the plane is squeezed down to its own size, then is gone. Welcome to Belfast International. Contents in the overhead bin may have shifted during flight. The stewardesses fuss with his jacket. He is whisked through security once more, out past the small café and the newsagent’s where he takes a quick glance at the newspaper headlines on the small metal racks. Nothing of damage. A good sign.
Outside, the vague smell of farmland manure hangs on the air. Three cars waiting. Gerald, his driver, greets him with a nod and a lift of the case.
In the car Gerald passes back a sheet of numbers. A small jump in his chest that it might be bad news, but it’s the baseball scores, copied from Reuters, handwritten. He scans them quickly. Opening day. Ah, yes. Hail and hallelujah. The Sox have won.
—A good start, he says.
—Aye, Senator. Oakland? Where’s that now?
—Way, way out there. California.
—Out in the sunshine.
—Keep the good news coming, Gerald.
—We’ll see what we can do, Senator.
The convoy pulls out through the airport, towards the M2, a wide motorway. Fields and hedges and scattered farms. Not much traffic until they get closer to the city. He could, quite possibly, be in any large American town, until he looks out to see the flags fluttering over the housing estates, sketching the skyline, claiming it, coloring it. The Unionists go for the Star of David, the Republicans fly the flag of the Palestinians. Small wars, large territories.
Written on a wall on the road out near Ballycloghan, in large white letters against the gray, a new piece of graffiti: We will never ever forget you, Jimmy Sands.
Which brings a wry smile to even Gerald’s face as they drive past, since it was of course Bobby they would never forget.
IN THE EARLY days—when the process was fresh—he would drive to the Stranmillis Tennis Club along the banks of the Lagan.
Nine or ten outdoor courts, all artificial turf. Sprinkled with gritty sand. Tough on his ankles. But he liked to get out and knock the ball back and forth: he played with the younger civil servants. They were careful at first not to try to beat him until they learned that there was a sort of unbeatability about him. He was relentless, he hung on, a backcourt player, he slid along the rear line, returning the ball safely over the net, time after time. The photos belied it, but he was sprightly.
The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity: he could play for hours on end in the Irish drizzle. He wore white shorts and long tube socks and a blue tracksuit top. Afterwards he would take the opportunity to laugh at himself in the changing-room mirror.
He was surprised early one morning to come off the northernmost court to see a group of women gathered together on the courts at the front of the club. He wandered quietly in amongst them. Signs were hung on the rear of the benches
: ALL IRELAND WOMEN’S TOURNAMENT. He liked that notion. At least in tennis they could play together. He was taken by the sight of an elderly woman who piloted her wheelchair along the back of the courts. A thick-boned woman with striking gray hair. She must have been ninety, but she carried herself quite well in the chair. A generosity to her. She stopped at the back of each court and marked the clipboard with a pencil, then called out to the players and the umpires. She had a singsong voice. He thought he heard an American accent, but wasn’t sure.
He came back later that day after a series of plenaries in Stormont. The usual bickerings. The day had sapped the fire from him. The tournament was still in progress. He loosened his tie and took off his jacket and slid in amongst the crowd to watch the final game.
The woman in the wheelchair was positioned at the back of the court. She wore a plaid wool blanket over her lap. She nodded at each point, and clapped at the end of the games: large, loud, animate. He couldn’t tell what side she was supporting, if any. Every now and then she let out a long laugh, and put her head on the shoulder of a younger woman alongside her. Small ripples of applause slipped across the evening.
These were the moments he liked the most. The refuge of the anonymous. The ordinary bits and pieces. Ireland unwarred.
The match ended to a round of polite applause and the elderly lady was wheeled away from the back of the courts. He saw her reach out for a small plastic glass of champagne.
She was left alone a moment and he noticed the edge of her wheelchair catch on the artificial turf.
—Lottie Tuttle, she said, stretching out her hand.
—George Mitchell.