Northern Spy

by Flynn Berry

  “Because they only happen to women?” Marian suggested.

  At some point, the doctor fitted an oxygen mask over my face. I could feel the baby moving downward. I haven’t tried to describe to anyone the moment when he was handed up onto my torso. My eyes were closed and I felt a warm, wet shape on my stomach, larger than I expected, slippery limbs moving, and gasped before lifting him to my chest.

  * * *

  —

  When my mother returns, I’m still on the floor beside the hair dryer, with Finn asleep in my arms. She looks down at us. “What’s happening here?”

  “He wouldn’t stop crying.”

  “Did you try feeding him?”

  “Of course I tried feeding him.”

  “Formula?”

  “No, I nursed him.”

  “Your stress isn’t good for him,” she says. “He’s getting your cortisol in his milk.”

  “So it’s my fault?”

  She sighs. “Do you want me to put him in his crib? Or are you planning to sit there all night?”

  I let her lift the baby from my arms. While she sets him in the crib, I take one of the plastic containers of pumped breast milk from the freezer. She might have a point about the cortisol. I’m not entirely sure how it works, but I wouldn’t drink a pint of vodka or espresso and then nurse him, and this fear is stronger than alcohol or caffeine. It might be clouding my milk, agitating him.

  I hold the container under the hot tap, and the frozen milk starts to melt. I pour the milk into a bottle and set it in the fridge, feeling for a moment normal, suburban.

  “I’m going to make tea. Do you want one before you head home?” I ask, and my mam nods. I let myself believe that the day is over, that I’ll make our tea, switch off the lights, and go to bed, leaving the dishwasher to churn in the darkness. Instead, we slump onto chairs at the table. My mother takes off her glasses and rubs the raw indents on the bridge of her nose.

  “Were you nervous to see him?” I ask.

  “Eoin?” she says, sounding baffled by the idea. She might be remembering the little boy in the paddling pool, who closed his eyes while she rubbed sun cream onto his face. I want to tell her that doesn’t mean anything, he’s thirty-four years old now and in prison on a life sentence for conspiracy to murder.

  “Eoin told me the IRA has done this before,” she says. “He said it’s a new tactic, forcing ordinary people to do their robberies for them. They don’t want their own lads lifted.”

  “Why didn’t Fenton tell me that?”

  “The police don’t know. The ones Eoin heard about were home invasions, and no one was caught.”

  “What happened to those people afterward?”

  “They went home.”

  “Why can’t Marian come home then?”

  “He thinks it’s because hers went wrong, with the surveillance camera. He reckons she’s in a safe house now. He said he’d ask around.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  “Yes,” she says, folding her glasses. “Well, I trust that he wants to help.”

  “Did you ever see Marian with a second phone?” I ask, and my mam shakes her head. “Fenton said she had a burner phone.”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “The police found it in her flat, inside the fireplace.”

  “They must have planted it,” she says firmly.

  “I don’t think Fenton’s bent.”

  “Then someone working for him must be,” she says.

  “Do you think Marian might have been buying drugs?”

  “Catch yourself on,” says my mam, but, then, she never took MDMA with Marian at a concert. It’s been years and years, but still.

  I stand to rinse our mugs, leaving the sodden bags of chamomile in the sink. “Did you go somewhere afterward?” I ask, trying to keep my voice light. We both know the prison closed for visitors hours ago.

  “I had to drive over to Bangor,” she says. “I had to tell the Dunlops about Marian, before they heard it somewhere else.”

  “Oh, god.”

  “They said they don’t want to have to let me go, but they can’t be involved in this sort of thing.”

  My mother has worked for the Dunlops for fourteen years. They’ve met Marian.

  “They were having a party,” she says. I picture her standing alone at their front door, feeling nervous, with their guests’ glossy cars pulled up on the gravel behind her, and this image hurts as much as anything else has over the past two days.

  The Dunlops made her wait in the front hall while they excused themselves from their party. She overheard Miranda telling the guests that it was her cleaner, and the surprised, amused noises they made in response.

  My mother had prepared for the party. They’d hired someone to cook on the day itself, but she had done everything else, all the shopping and cleaning and arranging. She had swept the floor, chosen the ingredients, polished the silver, bought the ice that was chilling their champagne.

  While my mother told her employers that her daughter was missing, their guests carried on talking and eating in the dining room. A slab of salmon was on the table, with bowls of sea salt, double cream, and crushed juniper set out alongside it. Occasionally the sound of laughter came from the other room. Miranda asked my mam if she’d known her daughter was a terrorist.

  “I told them Marian’s not in the IRA,” she says, “but they didn’t believe me.”

  Miranda and Richard told her to plan to come in on Monday, since they needed some time to consider their decision. When she returns, the dirty tablecloth and napkins from their dinner will be in a pile on the laundry room floor, smeared with butter and wine and lipstick, and crusted plates and roasting pans will be stacked by the sink. They always leave the washing for her.

  10

  It’s after two in the morning. Finn has just gone back down after nursing, and I’m filling a glass of water at the kitchen tap when I see torches in the field behind my house. I stand frozen at the window, aware of my breathing, of the lock on the sliding door, of the baby asleep in the other room.

  I can’t see the people holding them, but they’re advancing steadily. The torches are being held level, angling through the darkness toward me. They seem to be pointing straight at our house. In a few minutes, their beams will catch the stone wall at the bottom of the garden.

  They could just be teenagers, out late. Except teenagers wouldn’t be moving at that pace, or in lockstep. I try to think of other reasons for two people to be crossing the field at this time of night, but in my bones I know that they’re IRA, and that they’re coming to hurt someone.

  The cottages on this road all look the same from the rear, eight identical houses backing onto the field. They might have counted wrong. They might be coming for my neighbor, Luke. He is a police constable, which makes him a legitimate target in their view.

  Or this is about Marian, and they are coming for me. Someone might have told them that I went to the police station, that I gave information, that I accused the IRA of abducting her, which would be enough for them to consider me a tout.

  I’m already under suspicion because of my employer. Almost every time I’m out with my mam in Andersonstown, someone asks why I work for the BBC. They consider me a sellout. They have bad memories of the BBC from twenty, fifty years ago, of English reporters asking their children to pose with grenades, of them cutting the news feed on Bloody Sunday.

  I’m standing next to the block of knives. I could lift the sharpest one, but if I do that, it will mean that this is real, that something is seriously wrong, when it might still be nothing, or just a conversation. They might only want to clear up a few things. I don’t know what happens during their interrogations, or how they decide whether to believe you. I know they’ve made mistakes.

  I need to get Finn out of the house, but there might be others w
aiting out front, or at the end of the road. They wouldn’t hurt him on purpose—they don’t deliberately harm children—but if I seem to be running away, they might shoot at me. I can’t step out of the house with him in my arms.

  The beams are growing brighter. They’re almost halfway across the wide field now. If I wait outside, those people won’t come in here to find me. They won’t come near him.

  Finn is sleeping with his knees drawn in and his bottom in the air, in a cotton sleepsuit. I lean over the crib, taking in his smell, his warm, solid shape, the soft cuffs of the sleepsuit at his wrists and ankles. He turns his head to the other side and sighs.

  I stroke the hair from his forehead. If they make me leave with them, Finn will be safe in his crib until my mam can get here. Crying, maybe. He always wants to be held as soon as he wakes.

  I pull a jumper on over my nightdress and step outside, sliding the door shut behind me. The torches are about an acre away now. I cross the lawn to the low stone wall at the bottom of the garden. Strands of hair blow across my face and I hold them back. Then I wait, rolling up my sleeves, aware of my bare legs in the cool air.

  Halfway across the field, the torches click off. My knees soften. Whoever’s out there is invisible now. I wait for two figures to materialize on the other side of the wall. In the darkness, I might not see them until they’re quite close. They often wear black tactical uniforms and ski masks.

  My ears strain, listening for the sound of boots in the grass. I wonder if it will make a difference to them that I have a son, that he’s only six months old.

  I wait, but nothing happens. No one appears. They must have stopped walking, or gone in a different direction. I cross my arms over my chest, rubbing my shoulders through the wool jumper.

  Finally, lights click on in the middle of the field, and then the torches are moving away from me. They illuminate the base of the hill, then sweep up its length. The elm at its top appears briefly, its branches suspended in one of the beams, and then they disappear over the ridge.

  I walk around to the front of the house and look at the row of streetlamps, at my neighbors’ darkened windows. No one is out here, no vans are waiting for me on the road.

  * * *

  —

  When I step back inside, the house seems different, like I’ve been away for years. A green light glows on the coffee machine. I look at the corked bottle of red wine on the counter and the bunch of parsley by the sink.

  Now that the adrenaline is fading, I’m so tired. And I can’t even tell myself that I was being delusional. The IRA might have taken me somewhere to be interrogated. It happens. It was reasonable of me to be afraid, just as it’s reasonable now to be afraid in a train station or a holiday market. My cousin reads electric meters, and his job has become impossible, since no one will open their door to a stranger anymore.

  And the worst part is that however scared I was just now, however desperate, it will have been so much worse for Marian. Her figures didn’t vanish, they came closer and closer.

  I lift Finn over the top of the crib, and he crosses his ankles in midair. His body is slack with sleep, rounded against the row of snaps on his striped suit. He turns his head at my shoulder, and I sit up with him for the rest of the night.

  11

  After sunrise, I unlock the sliding door and step outside with the baby. At the bottom of the garden, I climb over the stone wall and set out across the field, in a pair of welly boots, with a cardigan on over my nightdress. A few sheep follow us, braying, and Finn swivels his head to watch them. Every so often, he jolts in my arms with excitement at being so close to the animals.

  I follow a straight line from my house to the hill, scanning the ground for footprints or shovel marks. No one’s watching me, whoever was here last night will have left by now. Finn reaches toward the ground, crying for me to set him down so he can try to chase the sheep. “Not yet, sweetheart,” I say, then stop short. There is a hole in the ground ahead of us.

  I walk to the edge of the pit and stare down. That’s why they were here last night. They were digging up weapons. The IRA has guns buried on farms all around here, mostly Kalashnikovs, some Makarovs, bought from criminal organizations in Eastern Europe. I look back across the field at the row of small cottages, mine in their center.

  I wonder how long the cache was buried here, in view of my back window, how many times the herd of sheep flowing across the field passed over it, or lay on the grass above it. We often climb the hill at sunset. All those times, I was carrying my baby back and forth over an arms drop.

  * * *

  —

  Tom is taking Finn to visit his parents in Donegal. These three days will be the longest we’ve been apart. I start packing a bag for him, feeling thwarted. He’s only six months old, Donegal’s too far away, I should never have agreed to this. Also, I like Tom’s parents, and their house in Ardara, near the mountains. It’s not fair that I never see them anymore, that all of those holidays and dinners meant nothing in the end.

  I met Tom at a party. I was on the porch making a call when he came out for a cigarette, and we never ended up going back inside. I’d just started at the BBC, and I remember racing down the stairs every evening after work to where he was waiting for me. The weather was hot that summer, and we went to outdoor concerts, to beaches, to rooftop bars. He met Marian and my mam, and I met his friends at a beer garden, shy at first, and then laughing with his arm around my shoulders. We couldn’t get enough of each other. At parties we often ended up standing on the stairs or in a hallway, wanting to talk only to each other, to make each other laugh. We were married five years ago at his parents’ house, under a flowering pear tree.

  Last summer, when I was two months pregnant with Finn, I found a lip balm in our car. Not a lipstick, a clear balm. It could have belonged to anyone. A few seconds later, Tom came jogging out of the house and climbed into the passenger seat. We were on our way to a friend’s birthday party. “Oh, I found this,” I said, and Tom’s face went white.

  My first thought was that we were going to be late for the birthday party. For a moment, that seemed as serious a problem as his infidelity. Then the pain came, and kept coming.

  “Who is she?”

  “Briony.” They worked together, I’d met her at his office once. She’d seemed nice.

  Tom promised to end it. He said he’d been nervous about becoming a father, that he hated feeling old. Then later, in a different voice, he said, “You were always working.”

  “So were you,” I said, though it then occurred to me that he might not have been spending all of those hours at the office.

  I wanted to return to the summer we met and tell Tom what he’d done. He would have been heartbroken. But he’d also changed. He’d become less political, less curious, less open-minded. He’d started to care about different things. Money, essentially. Comfort. He said he didn’t want to live like a student anymore.

  And he was right, not that I’d been working more, but that we’d been spending less time together. He’d stopped wanting to go to certain concerts or exhibitions or parties, so I’d been going alone, or with friends.

  The trouble wasn’t his infidelity, exactly, but how it had proven the limit of his love. He’d said, more than once, that he’d do anything for me, and now I knew that wasn’t true, and I’d never be able to unknow it.

  At some point, Tom asked if we could move past it, and I said yes. I was two months pregnant, a divorce was unthinkable.

  “We’re staying together,” I told Marian.

  After a long pause, she said, “Is that what you want?”

  “We’re having a baby. I’m not repeating what our parents did.”

  When I was two and Marian was an infant, our father went to London to work on a building site. At first, he sent back letters and money, and then, very slowly, he stopped. He never came back.

 
He’s rich now. He started a bricklaying firm with two of the other men from the building site, which became hugely successful, and he lives in Twickenham with his second wife and three sons.

  I had lunch with him a few years ago when I was in London for work. He was late, which enraged me. I ordered the most expensive glass of wine on the menu, then another, and another. I was annoyed with him for choosing such an expensive restaurant. Even after he became wealthy, our father paid our mother only a tiny sum of child support.

  I watched him enter the restaurant, this man with bristling silver hair and a tailored suit, greeting the host and waiter in his rolling Belfast accent. The staff all seemed to think he was a nice man, and I wanted to correct them.

  After four glasses of wine, I asked, “Why did you leave?”

  For the first time, my father looked tired, unpolished. “I was only twenty-two, Tessa,” he said. “I was so young.”

  He hadn’t wanted to live in a council house with two small children. I knew from my mam that we hadn’t been particularly easy babies. Our father never mentioned those reasons, though. He told me about the lack of jobs in Belfast, especially for a working-class Catholic, until it sounded as if he’d emigrated for our benefit.

  Since having Finn, I’ve thought often about our father’s decision. I’ve pictured traveling to a separate country from my son, and then staying there, but I’d crawl back here on my hands and knees.

  “Well,” said Marian slowly, “you could be different from our parents.”

  “How?”

  “He could not emigrate,” she said. “You could not hate him.”

  “Could I?”

  “Of course, for your kid.”

  While Tom and I were still sitting in the car, I’d looked down at the lip balm and thought, very clearly: This was my first marriage. And I am going to have a longer, happier second marriage.

  In the weeks afterward, that thought had started to seem like nonsense, wishful thinking, but when I repeated it to Marian, she said, “Well, there you are. You already know what you need to do.”