Northern Spy

by Flynn Berry

  “Do you want plum jam or apricot?”

  “Apricot.”

  I hand her the jar and we both start to eat, quickly, my mother with her usual neat strokes, and myself with more mess. Her generation holds a knife and fork differently than mine. I lick jam from the knife, my tongue grazing its sharp edge.

  My mother sets down her fork and wipes the corners of her mouth with a napkin. “I’m going to try and visit Eoin today,” she says. “He might be able to help.”

  “Eoin Royce?”

  She nods. Her friend Sheila’s son was stopped last year outside the holiday market with two semiautomatic rifles in a duffel bag. He’d joined the IRA as a teenager. I can’t remember all the charges. Conspiracy to commit murder, membership of a terrorist organization, possession of banned weapons, enough for a life sentence.

  “Where is he?”

  “Maghaberry,” she says. “I’ve already requested a visitor’s order.”

  “Will he give you one?”

  “Yes.”

  She used to watch him for Sheila sometimes, when he was little. I have a vague memory of him as a shy, skinny boy, playing with us in a paddling pool.

  “Why would he want to help?”

  “He’s changed. He’s become religious in prison.”

  I laugh. “Wasn’t that always the problem?”

  She levels her gaze at me, and I feel myself tense for the usual fight with something like pleasure. It’d be a relief, under these circumstances, to have our normal argument.

  She says, “I’m not getting into this with you again.”

  “Don’t say it like that, like it’s something I keep bringing up.”

  “You did bring it up,” she says.

  “No, you said Eoin Royce had found religion like it was a good thing.”

  “It is a good thing.”

  “How can you have lived here for fifty-eight years and still believe that?”

  “Religion doesn’t make people violent, Tessa.”

  “Yes, it does. It encourages them.”

  Both of Eoin’s rifles were loaded, and the holiday market was crowded with people. He was stopped outside the north gate, near the carousel, where a dozen children were riding on the painted horses.

  “Do you not mind that we have segregated schools?” I ask. Not only schools. Graveyards, bus stops, barber shops.

  My mother turns from me to open the fridge, her shoulders hunched. Watching her, I feel myself come loose. She’s too distracted to fight with me. She starts to move things around on a shelf, searching for cream.

  “There’s only semi-skimmed,” I say.

  She nods, and tips the milk into her coffee. Normally she’d complain. I can hear Marian imitating her: Girls, you know I can’t be doing with semi-skimmed.

  If Eoin does agree to help, he should be able to find information about Marian. He’s with other IRA prisoners, with dozens of visitors coming and going, bringing in news.

  “Do you think it’s an act?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “His change of heart. Is Eoin actually sorry?”

  “I think so,” she says.

  The detectives restrained Eoin quietly, without drawing attention. The market remained intact. People walked under the fairy lights along the rows of red-and-white painted stalls, drank mulled wine, bought presents for their families. A few feet away from him, children carried on riding the carousel.

  * * *

  —

  After clearing away our dishes, I carry Finn outside. He rocks forward, testing his weight on his hands, trying to work out how to crawl. Past the garden wall, the sheep field dips and then rises over a hill. Through the sliding door, I can see my mam on the phone with her brother at the kitchen table.

  A picture of Marian is taped to the fridge, from her birthday dinner at Molly’s Yard, and I look at her bright eyes, her red lipstick. Marian’s not vain, but she does have elaborate regimens. Recently, on seeing all the expensive cosmetics and pots of lotion in her bathroom, I said, “How can you afford this?”

  She shrugged. “No overhead.”

  Paramedics here don’t make much money, which is odd, considering the utility of their job compared to, say, mine. But she lives in a postage-stamp-size flat. Her budget doesn’t have to cover a mortgage, childcare, or student loans, like mine.

  “You should save,” I said.

  “What’s the point? I’ll never be able to afford a house anyway.”

  We’re only two years apart, but lately it has felt like more.

  A few weeks after he was born, I brought Finn over to her flat. We’d been up for hours, but Marian had just woken. At the door, she rubbed her eyes, smearing last night’s mascara, and I had the completely foreign sense that she might not want to see me, that we were intruding.

  She’d had friends over the night before, and the flat was littered with empty bottles of red wine, a wooden salad bowl plastered with wilted leaves, a scraped pan of lasagna. Her friends had stayed late talking and listening to music. Some of them had gone on to Lavery’s.

  My weekend wasn’t worse, but it was incomparably different from hers. It had involved a fair amount of toil—cleaning, laundry, washing—and very little sleep, but then here was Finn, curled against me, gripping my shirt in his small hands, blinking around the room.

  “I think he’s hungry. Sorry, do you mind—?” I asked, suddenly shy about nursing him in front of her. Marian cleared a tangle of clothes from her velvet armchair. While I fed him, she began to clean up from the party. I hated feeling different from Marian, like one of us must have betrayed the other for our circumstances to have diverged so much.

  She seemed defensive about having still been in bed. I wanted her to know that I didn’t think her weekend was silly or inconsequential, that I didn’t judge her for her freedom or how she used it, that I didn’t feel sorry for her or for myself. One of our lives wasn’t smaller than the other’s.

  And I needed to know she felt the same. That she didn’t pity me, alone in the countryside with an infant. Or the opposite, that she didn’t think I’d become smug and insufferable.

  Marian might not be able to have a baby. Three years ago, she had an ovarian cyst removed, and afterward was told she has asymptomatic endometriosis. Her obstetrician put her odds of a pregnancy at about half. It’s very hard to wrap your mind around that percentage. Marian said she’d be more optimistic if the odds were slightly worse, that she’d be able to convince herself she’d be in the lucky, say, 40 percent.

  After her surgery, I promised to help, if the time came, to donate an egg, or be her surrogate. It will be difficult for her to adopt while Northern Ireland is a conflict zone.

  When Finn was born, I watched Marian look around the maternity ward, and knew she was wondering if she’d ever be there herself.

  So we were quiet in her messy flat, me nursing the baby, her upending a bottle of red wine in the sink. I wondered if she wanted me to leave. But then Marian said, “My friend brought baklava last night. Do you want some?”

  I nodded, and she sat down across from us and handed me a plate.

  Since then, we’ve slowly reverted to normal. We’ve gone back to complaining to each other about our lives, cheerfully competing over who had the worse day, criticizing each other, arguing. Our last argument, about a film that she liked and I hated, went on for so long that near the end I thought we were about to switch sides and argue the other’s point.

  The two of us shared a room until I left for university. I’m so accustomed to her company, her physical presence. I would drive to the cottage on the coast now to feel near her, if the police weren’t still searching it. The last sighting of her wasn’t in Ballycastle, though, but during the robbery in Templepatrick.

  On the sofa, my mother rubs her eyes, then notices Finn watching her and pull
s her face into a smile for him.

  “When are the visiting hours at Maghaberry?” I ask.

  “Four to six,” she says.

  “Can you mind the baby before then?” I ask, and she nods. Templepatrick is only thirty miles north. The staff at the petrol station might have noticed something useful, and I can be there and back within a couple of hours.

  I set Finn on the bed while I dress, to have a little more time with him before leaving. He pushes himself up on the duvet, delighted by its soft, broad surface, while I pull on jeans and an oversize jumper. When I turn around again, Finn has found the label on the pillowcase. I curl on the bed next to him, rubbing his back while he lowers his face toward the label, his eyes wide. A few weeks ago, Marian said, “Why tags? Is it all babies or just him?”

  “I think all babies.”

  She pretended to gobble his arm, and Finn kicked his feet to acknowledge her without looking away from the label.

  My mother leans against the doorframe. “I need to leave at three, Tessa.”

  “Sorry, I’m going.”

  6

  The sky and the surface of the lough have gone dark. Along the coves, the cypresses twist in the wind, and sailboats with furled masts strain against their anchors. I hear thunder, then a curtain of rain drops on the roof of the car. The rain sweeps out across the lough, stippling the surface while beneath the tide churns in from the sea. The tide here is one of the fastest in the world, though from here you can’t see the fathoms of water rushing under the surface.

  A bolt of lightning seems to freeze the rain in midair. I flex my hands on the steering wheel, speeding past the large Georgian houses outside Greyabbey, with their deep windows and warm kitchens. I feel a twist of envy for the owners, but they’re probably scared at the moment, too. That’s the point of terrorism, isn’t it, for even people like them to feel scared.

  Two army helicopters are making their way north over the lough, cutting a swath through the heavy rain. You always see them in pairs, so one can return fire if the other is shot down. They’re flying with their noses tipped down, moving fast despite their weight, their heavy plates of matte-gray armor.

  When I came down this road a few weeks ago, there was an army roadblock. It was raining a little, and in the drizzle the soldiers looked surreal, suddenly appearing on a quiet stretch of road between potato fields. It took ages, it always takes ages.

  In Belfast, I merge onto the Westlink, looking at the backs of the houses crowded along the motorway. The satellite dishes, sheds, downpipes. Some of the houses have small sun decks. I can almost see into the rooms before they slide past. Then the motorway lifts onto a ramp, and the city stretches away for miles. I feel despair, looking out over the rows and rows of brick terraces. Their safe houses aren’t always remote. Marian could be inside any of them.

  The motorway curves through the city’s fringes, past industrial estates and bonded warehouses. After another few miles, a blackthorn hedgerow runs along the motorway, then it falls away to a view of open countryside.

  Wind turbines rotate in a field. Marian might have seen them, too. They had arrived at the service station from this direction, the northbound carriageway.

  A sign appears for Templepatrick, and I steer toward the exit. At the end of the slip road, the service station comes into view. A few people are standing at the pumps. The drivers fueling their cars look relaxed and casual, like this was never a crime scene. They shouldn’t be here, the pumps shouldn’t even be working.

  I step out of the car into the wind and the rain, the wet air smelling of petrol and exhaust fumes. It was hot yesterday when Marian was here. A yellow rapeseed field stretches behind the station. Marian might have noticed it as the three of them crossed the car park. I move slowly, like I’m following them, three figures in black ski masks, holding guns down at their sides.

  Marian had on her own clothes. A hooded rain jacket, jeans, the hiking boots she’d worn while walking along the cliff path. As they drew nearer to the doors, Marian might have been watching for a police car, bracing herself for shouts or gunshots. She could have died here yesterday, in someone else’s ski mask, with mud from the cliff path still on her boots.

  The automatic doors slide shut behind me, sealing out the wind. The inside of the station seems uncanny, like the replica of a service station on a weekday morning. It’s a good facsimile. The smell of coffee and pastries, the shining floors, the soft pile of tabloids by the till.

  I find a table by the window, and watch people come in to buy bottles of water, use the toilets, pay for their fuel. My stomach feels hollow. I could buy coffee and a danish, but the idea of eating something from this place seems grotesque.

  During the lulls between customers, the staff drift over to talk to one another. A girl in heavy eyeshadow chats with a boy whose uniform hangs from his thin shoulders. When he comes by to clear the tables, I lean forward. “Sorry, can I ask you something? Were you working yesterday?”

  He holds up his hands. “I’m not saying anything.”

  “No, I’m not a reporter. I just want to know what happened.” He moves away to wipe the next table, avoiding my eyes. “My sister was here.”

  His hands stop for a second. “So ask her yourself.”

  “She won’t talk to me about it,” I say, and his face changes. I can imagine someone—his mother, his girlfriend—asking him questions about yesterday, and him brushing them off, trying to change the subject.

  “Is your sister all right?” he asks.

  “Not really.”

  He sighs, then points at the ceiling, where a piece of cardboard is held in place with gaffer tape. It looks so ordinary, like something put up to cover a leak. “They shot into the ceiling,” he says. “And shouted at us to get the fuck down.”

  “What were their accents?”

  He shrugs. “They were all shouting at once. One of them told our manager to open the tills.”

  “Did they say anything else? Did they use each other’s names?”

  “No.”

  I don’t know what I’d expected, of course they wouldn’t give themselves away. I look up at the cardboard taped over the gunshot holes. “Is it strange for you to be here?”

  He shrugs, and I know what he’s about to say. “I’d rather be here than anywhere else. They’ve already hit this once, haven’t they?”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  For a moment we look at each other openly. Neither of us believes a word of it, of course. No one knows where the next attack will be.

  Marian and I were talking over breakfast last summer when the café shook. Closer to the explosion, windows had blown out, showering glass over the road. Belfast confetti, a poet called it. I thought we’d seen the worst of it, but then we turned the corner onto Elgin Street and saw that a block of flats had collapsed, sliding forward into the road, like a slumped cake.

  “Oh, god,” said Marian, and we started to run. I found myself on a fire line moving rubble, clearing the way for the rescue workers. I lost sight of Marian. She had run toward the front of the line to help treat the survivors, and I was scared for her. From my position, I could see a boiler in the rubble, and people climbing around it, shifting large pieces of wood and concrete. The gas line was leaking, you could smell methane in the air.

  We saw a survivor, an old man, brought out from the rubble, his hair and beard white with plaster dust. I remember his large bare feet on the stretcher and his calm expression, which must have been shock.

  Hours later, we were in a Japanese restaurant, sitting at a black lacquered table. Nowhere else in the neighborhood had power. The entire restaurant was silent, our faces fixed on a television showing live coverage of the search for survivors.

  We still had masks hanging around our necks, as did some of the people walking by outside. “You should eat something,” said Marian. I didn’t bot
her to answer. The chefs and kitchen staff were all standing behind the bar, also watching the screen.

  There was a girl trapped inside the debris. One of the rescue workers had heard her, but almost two hours had passed and they couldn’t find a way to reach her. They were using thin slats to build a tunnel between the pressed layers of wood and concrete and furniture.

  A woman appeared on screen, standing at the edge of the cordon, and someone handed her a bullhorn. “Grace, sweetheart,” she said, “it’s mum. I’m right here. Don’t be scared, darling, we’re coming to get you.”

  Beside me, tears coursed down Marian’s face. Another hour passed. On television, the rescue worker on top of the rubble raised his arm and closed his fist, and everyone else repeated the gesture to ask for silence while they listened for the girl.

  I can still see, very clearly, the man who was sitting next to us in the restaurant. He had one arm crossed over his chest and he was gnawing on the edge of his thumb. His eyes never left the television screen. He was the first to let out a sound, before anyone else knew, even before the presenters had realized. By the time they noticed, he was already on his feet, shouting, and the entire restaurant burst into cheers.

  A rescue worker was coming back out of the tunnel, crawling through the splints with one arm, and in the other he was holding a child, who was looking out of the tunnel with a firm, steady gaze.

  * * *

  —

  I call my mother from the car park outside the service station. “Can I say hello to Finn?”

  In the background, she says, “Who is that? Is that your mam?”

  Finn coos, and I say, “Hi, sunshine. I miss you, I’ll be home soon.”

  “He’s smiling,” she says.

  I follow the motorway back through the city. Farther ahead, Divis stands like a watchtower at the start of west Belfast, a stained concrete council block, with balconies sometimes used by IRA snipers. The men who took Marian might be from west Belfast. The block draws closer, looming overhead, and I exit onto the Falls Road.