Now and in the Hour of Our Death

by Patrick Taylor

  He looked into the barley crusher. Another batch was done. He turned off the machine, glad of the silence when its engine stopped, the gradual thinning out of the petrol fumes. He waited for the drum to stop revolving, held open the mouth of a plastic bag, filled it, then squeezed the bag into one of the sacks the fertilizer had come in. He tied baler twine at the bag’s throat.

  The filled sack and the other ones he’d finished now looked like a lot of harmless agricultural supplies. That’s what the stencils on the sacks’ outsides said. FERTILIZER. The plastic lining was to prevent the fine powder leaking through the coarse sackcloth weave. They might look harmless, although Christ alone knew the damage this lot would do when it blew. But that wasn’t going to be Sammy’s problem. He’d be long gone.

  He humped the lethal sack over to its fellows and went out to the van to haul in a new sackful of unprocessed fertilizer. His thin arms ached, and he wanted a break. He’d told Erin and Cal that making the ammonal would take a wee while. He reckoned he’d earned a break.

  He took his tweed jacket from a nail in the wall, shrugged it on, and felt in the pocket for his Park Drive. He was gasping for a smoke—but not in here. He allowed himself a taut grin as he remembered a remark his father used to make. “I may be Irish, but I’m not that fucking stupid.”

  Sammy left the outhouse, closed the door behind him, stuck a cigarette in his mouth, and lit up. In the grass under his feet, he saw the sparkle of dewdrops reflecting the light of the sun. The air was crisp. And he’d been worried about the roof of the shed being rainproof? It wasn’t even fucking well raining, but then, he worried about everything these days.

  Sammy walked to his cottage. A cup of tea would hit the spot.

  He paused before the door and stared at a spider that had been spinning under the eaves. The spokes and circles of the web shimmered like strings of diamonds. From the centre of the web, the spider scuttled toward a bluebottle, which struggled, enmeshed, doomed.

  Poor bastard, Sammy thought. I know how you feel. He picked up a stick from the ground, shoved it into the gossamer, and ripped a hole. The spider retreated back under the eaves. The bluebottle tore free. “Go on, bugger off,” Sammy said as the fly buzzed drunkenly away.

  From overhead, he heard the cries of curlew, liquid, plaintive. They’d be heading for the high moorland to keep company with the grouse that lived in the heather there. The rich bastards that held the shooting rights had been blasting away at the birds since August 12, the opening day of grouse season. Poor bloody grouse, minding their own business until they got chased from their hidey-holes by beaters or dogs and some shites killed them, just for sport. Did they not think enough things were getting killed in Northern Ireland?

  And who was Erin going to be killing? He wished to hell he knew. Perhaps he could figure it out for himself.

  He let himself into his cottage. It was dark, despite the brightness outside. Sammy opened the curtains, shoved the kettle on the stove, and waited for it to boil.

  Erin’s target had to be something close, and something big. If she intended to use the tractor, once he’d stolen it, and to fill its bucket with ammonal, they’d not be able to drive it very far from the shed here where he’d hide it. Omagh was too far away to the south. The nearest decent-sized town was Newtownstewart, but there was nothing there worth hitting.

  Derry, Londonderry you’d call it if you were a Loyalist, was twenty miles to the north. It was the headquarters of the British army 8th Brigade and the Strand Road police station, the RUC’s interrogation centre. Either of them could be a tempting target.

  The kettle boiled. He made a cup of tea.

  Sammy considered Derry but decided that, although Erin might be bound and determined to have her revenge, she was far too clever to let her grief over Fiach blind her to the lunacy of trying to hit something there. The city was too far away, and anyway the security there was as tight as that in Belfast ever since Bloody Sunday back in January 1972. That day, in Derry’s Catholic Bogside district, soldiers of the Parachute Regiment had tried to break up a civil rights march. There’d been a riot, and the bloody Brits had shot and killed thirteen men and youths and injured seventeen others.

  He frowned and tried to concentrate. What was she going after? There were army observation towers, great four-legged, menacing, spidery-looking structures built in a chain that ran from County Armagh south of here, but they were all on high ground.

  Paying little attention to what he was doing, he burned his lip when he tried to sip his tea. That was bloody hot, so it was, and so were the towers as possible targets. The troops manning them could see for miles. They weren’t going to let a tractor with a front bucket come within a mile of them without stopping and searching it. They were so security-conscious that their garrisons were inserted or extracted by helicopter. The Brits even used choppers to take the rubbish away.

  Those buggers in the towers had machine guns and could call in Lynx, Puma, Wessex, or Gazelle helicopters. Or perhaps one of those bloody great twin-rotor Chinooks filled to the gills with soldiers of the Parachute Regiment, the same shites who’d fired on the march on Bloody Sunday.

  The towers were all in South Armagh, where groups from the Special Air Service, the SAS, were stationed undercover. The British government protested that it wasn’t true, but Sammy and every other Provo was fucking sure that those shites had orders to shoot to kill.

  Christ Almighty, could he not stop thinking about people getting killed?

  His tea tasted bitter, and he carried his cup to the sink, telling himself to stop brooding and concentrate. What was left that would be worth using five hundred pounds of explosives to take out?

  Sammy nearly dropped the cup.

  Strabane. It had to be Strabane. The town was only five miles away. It was quite small, but there was an RUC barracks. That was the police station where they’d taken Fiach’s body. Strabane. It had to be; it absolutely had to be. There was nothing else close enough, nothing anyway that wasn’t too strongly defended, and he knew there were no soldiers there. Nobody but peelers guarded the place.

  Sammy left the teacup in the sink, grabbed his bicycle clips from a table, and slipped them over his trousers at the ankles. The sooner he got that information to his handler, the better. He knew now exactly what he was going to tell Spud. He’d give the Special Branch man half the information, where the attack would be, but demand, that was the right word, demand that he, Sammy, be sent to England before he’d pass on the day and time of the assault.

  He opened the cottage door and hesitated, turning over a new set of ideas. Not only could he tell Spud there was a big attack coming, but Sammy had found out this afternoon that Eamon and some of the escapees would be part of it. Christ, it was fucking brilliant, so it was. Spud would be a hero with his superiors. Heading off a major attack, rounding up wanted Provos, and all because of Sammy. They’d have to get him out in exchange for that much information, wouldn’t they?

  And, Sammy grinned from ear to ear, even if he hadn’t been able to give the E4A man the exact timing of the Kesh escape, the mere fact that it had happened and Sammy had been able at least to drop the hint something was up in the prison would be further proof that he was a reliable source of top-class information and that the new info he was ready to pass on could be trusted completely.

  He closed the cottage door behind him, pausing only to notice that, already, the spider had repaired her damaged web and was waiting patiently in one corner for the next hapless fly.

  CHAPTER 27

  VANCOUVER. SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 1983

  “If only those whales could fly, Becky, I think they’d soar out of that concrete pond and back to the ocean.”

  Fiona sat with her friend and a handful of spectators in the bleachers of the orca exhibit at the Vancouver Aquarium, watching two killer whales cruise round their enclosure. The animals’ grey-white saddle patches shone beneath the surface. Their dorsal fins sliced through the water and left shallow rippl
es.

  The male breached, hurling himself into the air. Sunlight sparkled from his glistening body. For a tiny moment, he hung suspended by some enormous force before slamming back to submerge, slowly waving a lonely pectoral fin. To Fiona, the gesture looked like a silent appeal for help.

  The whales were magnificent animals, fascinating to watch, but Fiona was certain they didn’t belong in captivity. She felt sympathy for all creatures that had been deprived of their freedom and remembered the rufous hummingbird. He was small but could go where he pleased; the whales were vast yet must live out their days penned in—like Davy.

  Thinking of him hurt, but the feeling was less intense than it had been before Tim and Becky had both suggested that rather than try to make his memory sink, she should let it surface, even if, by coming into the light, it made her ache.

  “I really think that orcas are just a tad on the heavy side for flight.”

  “Lord, Becky, you really can be a bit too literal.” Fiona laughed, but said more seriously, “Don’t you think they miss their pods, their families? I wonder if they remember the places they were taken from? If you were shut up in a jail like them, wouldn’t you want to be able to escape, get back to your old, familiar haunts?”

  “I rather think I would want to escape, in fact I certainly would, but I’m not imprisoned and ‘England’s green and pleasant land,’ which I suppose is the place I was taken from, doesn’t mean much to me now.”

  Fiona was surprised to hear Becky say that about England. She assumed all immigrants had ties to their countries of birth.

  The waves made by the whale splashed against the pool’s walls. Breaking water always reminded Fiona of the river Lagan chuckling over rocks in the shallows below Shaw’s Bridge.

  “You don’t miss England?” she asked. “Not at all?”

  “Not much. I was only seventeen when I left Henley-on-Thames, and I haven’t gone back. I’ve no reason to, really.” She chuckled. “It’s been a long time, thirty-eight years since I came out here. I was lucky. My pod, the agèed parents, brought me to Vancouver, and it’s as green and more pleasant here than England ever was. You know the folks’re still living out in Abbotsford, bless them. I went out to see them last night.”

  “How are they?”

  “It’s a bit sad, but to use a word coined by one of my grade eights, they’re slowly ‘decrepitating.’ Both in their eighties and getting very creaky, but they don’t complain. Dad potters about in his garden. Mum still serves cucumber sandwiches. They never miss the Queen’s message on Christmas Day. The pair of them are as English as ever. I suppose in a way it is comforting to keep up with a bit of your old heritage.”

  “You’re probably right, but the only people I know from Northern Ireland who live here are a family called Ferguson.” She hadn’t thought of Jimmy since the night he’d appeared in Bridges. “They invited Tim and me to go round for a meal.”

  “Perhaps you should go. It never hurts to be reminded once in a while about what you’ve left behind.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Perhaps she should give Jimmy a call. Despite his connection to Davy, simply hearing his and his wife’s and Siobhan’s Belfast accents had been pleasingly familiar.

  Why not take Jimmy up on his offer and at least have a chat with Siobhan? Although Fiona had just met the girl, she was the only one Fiona knew who had faced up to the death of a man with whom, according to Jimmy, she’d been so deeply in love. At least Fiona assumed Siobhan must have managed to get over the young soldier because she was married now, with children. She wondered if Siobhan would be willing to talk about it, and, if she was, could that be taken as a sign that she had indeed weathered her loss?

  A disturbance in the pool broke Fiona’s train of thought. The orca was spy-hopping, pectoral fins on the water’s surface, his entire head raised vertically above. She stared into his huge eye.

  To Fiona, the orca’s brown eye was full of ineffable sadness, like the misery in Davy’s blue eyes the day she’d gone to the Kesh to tell him she was leaving him and leaving Northern Ireland. She knew that, try as she might, it was one particular scene she would never forget.

  The whale slid soundlessly below, barely disturbing the waters as he sank, and she tried to let the memory of that day submerge and take the sadness with it. She leaned back on the wooden plank that covered the concrete, taking her weight on her hands.

  She felt Becky’s hand on her own and the warmth both of the wood beneath her palm and from Becky’s hand above.

  “Are you all right, old thing?”

  Fiona heard the concern in Becky’s voice, forced a smile, and said, “I’m fine. I was just thinking.”

  “Dare one ask what you were thinking about?”

  How typical of Becky, to be sensitive to others’ feelings and be desperately afraid of overstepping whatever inner boundary her inborn English politeness had drawn. “Of course,” Fiona said. “I was remembering the day I told Davy I was going to Canada.” It pleased her that she could say that without hesitating and without feeling too uncomfortable. “It was visiting day in the Kesh. I think that seeing those orcas captive in that tank”—she nodded toward the pool—“I think that’s what brought the whole thing back.”

  “Is thinking about him still bothering you?” Becky’s voice was soft.

  “A bit. But not as much. He’s fading like an old sepia-tint photo, except that one image. It’s still clear as a bell.” That one, she thought, and the nightmare in all its horrid clarity.

  Becky’s voice was soft. “It’s going to hurt. There’s no question of that, but”—she squeezed Fiona’s hand gently—“I know the analogy is a bit hackneyed … but it’s like lancing a boil and letting the pus out.” She squeezed more tightly. “And it sounds to me as if you’ve had the courage to pick up the lancet.”

  Fiona looked down into the pool. The surface was flat, and through the aquamarine she could see the outlines of the two orcas in its depths. Wouldn’t it be nice, she thought, and silently chastised herself for even thinking the word “nice.” She spent hours trying to persuade her pupils to let “‘nice’ take a holiday” and find better synonyms. But it would be nice if her life could always be so calm as the pool was then.

  A streak raced from the depths. White Wings, a Pacific white-sided dolphin who lived in the pool with the orcas, rocketed through the surface and curved in a high, graceful arc before returning to cleave the water with its blunt snout, reentering the pool as cleanly as an Olympic diver yet leaving expanding circles of wavelets to disturb the tranquility.

  That, thought Fiona, was pretty much the way her own mind worked. She could still remember some of the psychology courses she’d taken at teachers’ college. It was Jungian, that was the word. Whenever she believed everything was going the way she would like, thoughts of Davy or the damn dream would come roaring up from the depths of her unconscious, just as the dolphin had surfaced. And as he had left his ripples as mementos of his coming, so did they.

  “I think,” said Becky, “you’ve started something, wondering aloud about jailbreaks. I think the dolphin’s trying to do a runner, too.”

  That made Fiona laugh. She squeezed Becky’s hand. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Whatever for?”

  “For listening. For making me laugh.”

  “You are, to use the expression of our Canadian cousins, entirely welcome.” Becky stood. “Judging by the way my tummy feels, it’s lunchtime. We should be moving along to the Teahouse.”

  “Right,” said Fiona, “and it’s my treat.”

  Becky chuckled in her turn. “Correct me if I’m misquoting Marlon Brando, but it’s ‘an offer I can’t refuse.’”

  * * *

  The Teahouse was packed inside, the buzz of conversation deafening. Fiona was pleased when the hostess was able to seat them at a quiet patio table, where she could look over a low hedge and across Burrard Inlet. The sun, now that the autumnal equinox had passed, was lower in th
e sky. Great cumulonimbus clouds stood, puffed, white ramparts, ragged grey anvils over the North Shore Mountains to her right and above Point Grey ahead. Below her, the water’s surface was a filigree of silver where the sun struck, dulled here and there by the clouds’ tattered shadows.

  “Isn’t that lovely, Becky? The sea looks like a Turkish plate I saw in an antique shop once. The copper had been worn away in patches, and the brighter pewter shone through.”

  “It really is very pretty,” Becky said. “Look how tiny the sailboats seem.”

  Fiona watched the boats heeling to a stiff breeze. “They’re having fun,” she said, remembering Bowen Island. “I do enjoy sailing with Tim.”

  “The good doctor’s back tonight, isn’t he?”

  “I’m going to make him supper at my place.”

  Becky raised one eyebrow. “Good for you, girl. Trite though it may sound, the way to a man’s heart is definitely through his stomach; and speaking of stomachs, I’m famished.” Becky picked up her menu. “And I could murder a glass of something white, dry, and very chilled.”

  A waitress came and took the drink orders.

  Fiona sat forward in her wrought iron chair and rested her forearms on the glass tabletop. She watched how intently Becky studied her menu. Her friend certainly enjoyed her—what would Becky call them? “Vittles.”

  Fiona was glad that she’d met Becky: someone who would listen, someone who put Fiona completely at ease, someone to whom she could open up as she had done at the aquarium earlier, a woman with the knack of being able to say the right thing and, more importantly, one who knew when to say nothing.