Acts of Allegiance

by Peter Cunningham

  ‘I’ll cry off, get a cold, have to be somewhere on business. It’s much the best decision.’

  ‘Please,’ Bill said as his upper teeth were revealed. ‘It’s not everyone gets invited into that particular hinterland. And when you come back home, you’ll be able to report every detail of what happened.’

  19

  WATERFORD—ARMAGH

  November 1974

  Dawn felt its way into the corners of the land. Bobby drove, both hands on the apex of the wheel. He smelled of strong, cheap cologne. You always got Bobby on such occasions, never Bobby and Auntie Kate. It was said that she refused to socialise with him because of his drinking, but Bobby’s explanation was that someone had to stay at home and mind the pub. We crossed the border below Newry shortly after ten o’clock. Mirrors reflected from high towers. High above road blocks, Tommies in full camouflage with automatic weapons were inlaid in the starved setting. Beside a closed public house Bobby took out the sandwiches Auntie Kate had made, and a bottle of Powers Gold Label.

  ‘Different country, boy,’ he said more than once. ‘Different people.’

  I tried to put myself into Iggy’s mind, arriving in this hinterland for the first time. Such starkness compared to Waterford. Few friends, a new school, a new way of talking.

  ‘When I was a kid, we used to dream of coming up here to fight,’ Bobby said and picked at his false teeth with the car’s ignition key. ‘Of going to war up here. We had the guns, you know, oh yes, and your grandfather knew about it. We were hardy young fellas.’

  ‘The Flying Squad,’ I said.

  He looked at me with surprise, as if something indelicate had suddenly appeared. ‘How did you …?’

  ‘Iggy showed me the picture years ago,’ I said. ‘In Fowler Street.’

  ‘Kids, we were just kids.’

  I wanted to ask him who the third member of the trio with pistols was, but Bobby had changed the subject, and something about his expression told me to leave it.

  ‘The Brits say the lads up here aren’t soldiers but criminals. Fuck them! Look at Israel! Look at colonial America! Mark my words, one day the balaclavas will be wearing the suits, sitting around a table, discussing money and who gets what government portfolio.’

  He poured whiskey into our glasses with excessive bonhomie. ‘Harold Wilson wants to get to the core of things. Wants to walk out of Northern Ireland and turn the key, said as much. But he can’t, so he’ll have to sit down and talk to the lads, criminals or not.’ Bobby’s face became enlarged with excitement. ‘I mean, this year they’ve already bombed Parliament—fuckin’ Parliament!’

  We moved north by way of high banks and stone walls, drenched cottages, the occasional bungalow with dormer windows, lanes that disappeared into hills. The little chink into the past that had opened for just an instant had closed again, like an oyster. Families filed into country churches of both denominations. Around a bend, the twin spires of the great cathedral suddenly sprang from the horizon.

  20

  ARMAGH

  November 1974

  Bishops and archbishops filled the high altar, as well as priests, deacons and altar-boys got out in white surplices. The men to be ordained knelt in a wide semi-circle. A choir resounded and crosses glittered. It was like attending the premier of an opera. Ten pews from the front, Bobby genuflected deeply, then slipped in and knelt for a minute, head in hands, the smell of drink off him now predominant. He sat back, whistling air, then nudged me and nodded his head towards the pew in front where two young neatly dressed men and two women in hats were seated.

  ‘Ted’s widow,’ Bobby whispered.

  Her face was long and heavily made up under a black straw hat. Her sons—Ted’s sons, Iggy’s half-brothers, both in their early twenties—wore dark suits. One of them was cleanly shaven with neat fair hair; the other had a heavy red beard. Beside them, sitting awkwardly, was a hatless woman, heavily pregnant, her dark hair already turning grey. Jennifer, Iggy’s wife.

  Bobby leaned forward.

  ‘Mrs Kane?’

  Four sets of eyes turned around.

  ‘Bobby Gillece from Waterford, how are you? And this is Marty Ransom.’

  She stared at Bobby and then smiled broadly.

  ‘You made it!’ she cried. ‘Boys! Look! Your cousins from Waterford are here!’

  We weaved north-west, hugging the border, as the evening began to close in. A motionless column of smoke stood on the roof of a whitewashed cottage half-a-mile away. Ahead of us, the Kane brothers drove their mother and Iggy’s wife, who, I had learned, was due to give birth before Christmas. At least four other cars, carrying the newly ordained priest and his extended family, followed behind. I had seen no soldiers, no police in the church, but they had been there, I knew, not just the plainclothes stooges from the UK Special Branch, or case officers from MI5, but also the handlers from Dublin who were at home on this beat, men planted in the local communities. I put my head back and became detached in the way I always did in the presence of danger. My ears closed. I hated what I was doing. And yet women in England had been murdered on buses.

  ‘The new priest is a right character, isn’t he?’ Bobby chortled.

  Earlier, we had all stood outside the cathedral for photographs. The thin wind had made the women shiver, but I had seen the way the Kane lads had looked at one another when they heard how I spoke. And when I had asked them how Iggy was, they had turned away, as if my saying his name aloud in such a setting confirmed their worst suspicions.

  ‘Where in the name of God are they bringing us at all?’ Bobby asked.

  A cold river below us snaked through wet farmland, snipe grass, stark straggles of gappy hedges. Steep dark hills to our right. The river was the border between Ireland’s separate jurisdictions and much of this terrain was no-man’s land.

  I hated what I was doing, and because of that I suddenly hated Alison, something I had not previously thought possible. Of course, as I had read in some worthy journal, the person I really hated was myself, for, just as all the characters in our dreams are different manifestations of ourselves, so the objects of our deepest abhorrence are trapped in the parts of us that have fallen into the lost abyss of our souls.

  I was mostly deaf, and my fearful, milky vision of the road ahead kept leaping in and out as I recalled the descriptions of what had been found after some of the explosions. A man’s finger with a wedding band attached. Body matter like tripe stuck to broken windscreen glass.

  And yet … and yet Iggy Kane was part of our family, my father’s nephew, and the rules for families are unlike any other rules. Despite despising Iggy for what he had done, and was continuing to do, my father would have appreciated that someone linked to him by blood came into a different category. Especially the only son of Uncle Ted, the brother he had loved. He might decide to give Iggy a final warning, or make an exception. He might well draw the line when it came to such an extreme act as I was involved in. I realised with a sickening jolt that however minuscule the possibility, there still existed a chance that my father might one day reappear, and if he did, I would have to explain how I had lured his brother’s son to his death.

  I decided to crash the car: to lurch sideways into Bobby, grab the steering wheel, ram it hard over and plunge us into the river. I would be killed, but I didn’t care. Bobby too. But what if we didn’t die? If the car merely slid pathetically into the current and we had to crawl out with bruises and other injuries? Or we were rescued, cut from the wreckage by firemen and brought by ambulances to Armagh? Bobby, if he survived, would report on what I had done. The fucker tried to kill us both! I knew years ago he couldn’t be trusted! On the other hand, I could probably, with luck, drown him, that’s if we made it into the river, but the people in the cars behind might see me doing it. Or, looking on the bright side, during the crash, Bobby might be convulsed by the heart attack he was widely expected to suffer, go blue with terror as we nose-dived, suck for air, gasp his last. Was there a steeper inclin
e to pitch us over? I could see the river clearly and my breath came in great gasps.

  ‘Marty? Wake up! We’re here.’

  Chippings popped under our tyres. The car park was set down like a viewing point above the river, a platform from which to inspect the misty fields and tiny hills of the Republic. Members of Iggy’s family were already assembled, smiling, as if proximity to the border was a happy thing.

  ‘How will we ever find our way home?’ Bobby asked, even as it was clear that he didn’t care.

  The walls of the Ramblers Inn were painted livid green and a tricolour fluttered above the gable. Other cars were pulling in now, and parking, but besides our group, I could see no one else. I was seized by a burst of hope: he had decided not to come. Bobby locked the car and said, ‘I’d give my eye-teeth for a half-one.’

  With a hearty cheer, the priest was lifted shoulder high by the young lads and we began to walk towards the pub. Approaching the gable with its defiant flag, as my universe telescoped crazily on the pub door, as I wondered if, for once, Alison had got the day wrong, Iggy stepped from the shadows.

  Within the next few, infinitely elastic seconds I lived several lives. His face had not changed, in fact he could still have been the same boy—same square head and prominent cheekbones, same probing eyes that were now examining and re-examining every inch of the car park—but he had put on weight and his suit, including a waistcoat, was too small for him. His hair, longer than I remembered, licked over his ears. Good shoes. He took a step. I pushed to the fore. He was speaking to me. Saying something. His half-smile. What right had he to be so happy? And me? I had achieved small but significant advances for my country, albeit by unconventional means. Even as I fought to keep going, I was trawling at speed over the hundreds of times we had been together, and talked and played, and made ourselves the heroes of our games, with rules and codes and tricks to outwit our enemies.

  ‘Marty.’

  I halted. For Iggy alone, I drew two fingers across my throat, like a pirate.

  Time snapped. Iggy stopped dead. His blue eyes. To my right, at a distance of no more than five hundred yards, I could suddenly see the revolving blades. To someone of lesser height, they might not have been visible, but I could now make out the blur of a rotor.

  Iggy was already running back towards the pub. Men I hadn’t seen appeared, at least one with a handgun. A cry from Jennifer, Iggy’s pregnant wife. The priest said, ‘Is there something …?’

  The roar. Two Lynxes—huge—rose from the earth and swung in at us, noses down, like gigantic moths. Harnessed soldiers dangled in mid-air, weapons cradled. From the same direction, two camouflaged armoured personnel carriers and an RUC vehicle had burst to life.

  ‘Oh, no,’ I heard Auntie Mags say.

  Rifle fire caused one of the helicopters to bank sharply. The goggles of the gun crews. From behind the pub a jeep that had been parked out of sight hurtled for the river. The Kane boys were on their knees, hands behind their heads, surrounded by RUC men. Jennifer was steering Auntie Mags back to their car. Alone and bewildered, the newly ordained Father Joseph McGinn looked lost. Iggy’s jeep had forded the river and disappeared. The Lynxes hovered impotently between the public house and the border, as though a pane of glass prevented them from flying further. All at once the car park was full of policemen. A cordon of soldiers had formed an outer perimeter.

  Part III

  1

  WATERLOO

  December 1974

  Waterloo was never more beautiful than in winter. For reasons I never fully came to terms with, all my best memories of the Captain were set in those lovely crisp dawns when the foothills stood out like marquetry. Years later, I could still hear his feet on the wooden stairs, and the squeak of the back door, and was seized by an overwhelming need to be with him, my arm linked through his as we met the rising ground that led, either to the ridge, or, if we went left, into a series of large fields that plummeted into the valleys. Along the headland, the hedgerows were tinselled elaborately with spiders’ webs. As I cocked my ear for tumbling larks, a skein of geese flowed like a miracle of dark ink across the pale morning sky.

  By a gate, where an old horse plough had been abandoned, the Captain took out cigarettes and snapped one alight. My nostrils dilated. The sun began to inch into the fields as crows hopped between the grass tufts. In a clump of gorse, just for an instant, the gliding white tip of a vixen’s brush was visible. My father tucked me into him and we forged on, heads dipped into a sudden wind. His tweed sports coat had leather elbow patches and his dark hair was slicked flat with Morgan’s Pomade, whose leathery scent had become a part of him. I didn’t care about going home for breakfast. I would happily have starved out there if it could have meant us staying together.

  One such lovely morning, in bed, I reached over to fondle the neck of my wife and she turned away. Ten minutes later we were standing, face to face, me with fists clenched, she with tears running down her face.

  ‘How long has this been going on?’

  ‘Oh, what does it matter?’ she said. ‘Six months, if you must know.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘You don’t know him. He’s a businessman—he lives in Dublin. He’s married.’

  ‘I suppose he plays tennis.’

  ‘So what if he does? I listen to what he tells me; he listens to me. We talk, we talk, we talk.’

  At least we were in Waterloo, where the thick walls meant that such scenes could be conducted with discretion. I watched Sugar’s outline through her nightgown as she drew back the curtains, shook out a cigarette, flamed her lighter and sucked deeply. Birdsong rang out with harmonious irony; the hooves of Emmet’s pony echoed from the stable yard.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ I said. ‘I know it is.’

  ‘We’ve been through it all, Marty, so many times. I just don’t know you, that’s the problem, and it terrifies me. I haven’t a clue what’s going on inside you, or where that thing, whatever it is, is taking you. It’s as if I’m being continually deceived.’

  ‘So your response was to deceive me.’

  ‘There’s a difference between unfaithfulness and deception. At least I’ve told you. You never tell me anything.’

  My mind kept flying to all that I stood to lose when she left me, as I now knew she would, even knowing at the same time that her decision would be the right one for her and our children.

  ‘If he’s going to leave his wife, and since he can’t divorce her here, he’ll probably have to move to England. Is that your plan, too?’

  ‘He won’t leave his wife. We’re just two people who have collided in the dark.’

  ‘You make it sound like the dodgems.’

  ‘It’s not sex I’m looking for! It’s warmth, it’s friendship. So if intimacy with another man is the price for me to try and be happy, then so be it!’

  ‘I’m sorry for my shortcomings, but I don’t think I deserve to be cuckolded because of them.’

  ‘Have you any idea what it’s like for me? I’m living with a stranger! You’ve become a caricature of the man I married, going through the motions, driving up and down to Dublin, pretending to farm—but all the time it’s as if there’s another person there, in your job, doing whatever it is you do, that you won’t tell me about. Jesus, for all I know you could be murdering people and I wouldn’t know it!’

  ‘Sugar … ’

  ‘Shut up, please.’ She stubbed out her cigarette and, wrapping her gown tightly, wiped away her tears with the back of her hand.

  ‘The children and I are going to live with my mother in Carlow,’ she said. ‘Fleming is coming with us.’

  2

  DUBLIN

  December 1974

  It pained me most at weekends, on my way south, to drive within a mile of the house in Carlow. I once parked on the grass verge near the entrance, hoping I might see them, but then realised how much to type my position was, and how my wife might interpret it if she found me. Even worse, I realised, as I dro
ve off, would have been to see her happy with her new man, or to see him with my children. The extent to which I had ruined my life was never clearer. And all for what? I had betrayed my employers, and I had betrayed my wife. And although I considered what I was doing to be in the interests of my country, no one else would see it like that. At nights, on my own, in Waterloo, I often drifted off to sleep soothed by a fond image of my father drinking a gin and tonic and regaling pretty girls with one of his stories. Sometimes he was in Buenos Aires, sometimes in sub-Saharan Africa. He was not yet sixty, but his hair had gone grey, and he had become thin with age, but the vitality I remembered was still there, and unless you knew him, you would never know that this old man had walked out of another life.

  In one of the new coffee shops that had begun to sprout around the edges of the city—this one on the north side—a wheezing sound system played a loop of Christmas music.

  ‘I’m so sorry this has happened,’ she said.

  ‘She’s in Carlow, with her mother. I send her every penny I can afford. Her mother’s a bitch who makes it impossible for me to visit.’

  I had been to see my solicitor in Waterford, Dick Coad, who ran his practice in rooms over a shop in Gladstone Street. Dick, a man whose eyes seemed to rotate in unaligned orbits, advised me that, in his experience, if the fondness of the heart survived even minutely, then so, eventually, did the marriage.

  ‘Remember years ago in Waterloo when we spoke about how strange it would have been if Sugar had married Christopher?’ I asked Alison. ‘We wondered what you and I would have done. I sometimes think it might have been better, because I’m married to Sugar but I’m also married to you.’

  ‘You love her, Marty.’

  ‘But she’s not able to love me as I am. She knows what I’m doing, you know.’

  Alison’s eyebrows rose fractionally. ‘You told her?’