Northern Spy

by Flynn Berry

  “You can come out,” says a man, in a tired voice. I have to force myself to look at him. No ski mask, no gun. He says, “There was an accident.”

  Slowly, holding on to the counter, I pull myself to stand and follow the man outside. Down the road, more people are emerging from the shops. A flatbed lorry is stopped in the street. From its back posts, blue ties twist in the breeze. A stack of broken pallets lies on the ground behind it. The ties must have broken and the pallets crashed to the ground, with a sound like a detonation.

  Sawdust rises from the debris. A few people have started to laugh. Others are standing in the road with shocked faces. The driver sets himself in front of the pallets, like someone might try to take them. He says, to no one in particular, “I didn’t tie them on myself, they did that at the yard.”

  I stumble into the Wildfowler. After the dazzle of the road, spots float across my vision. Everyone has run outside, their chairs knocked to the ground. Plates of half-eaten food have been abandoned on the tables, burgers and chips, a dish of melting ice cream.

  My sandals crackle on the broken glass. In the toilets, I look in the mirror at the blood dripping down my forehead, then take a fistful of tissues and hold them against the cut.

  A woman with silver hair comes inside. I recognize her, she works at the village library a few mornings a week. “That was the last thing any of us needed,” she says, resting her hand on my arm.

  I lower my fist, and the tissues are bright red with blood. “Will you need stitches?” she asks. “I can give you a lift.”

  “No, it’s nothing. Thank you.”

  We squeeze hands and I walk back across the restaurant, past the broken glass, the plate of chips softening in the sun.

  I stagger down the lough road toward home, covered in sweat and dust. It’s still a beautiful day. Sunlight glows on the pines, the rosehips, the water. I can hear sirens now, the emergency services coming to check for injuries and clear the road.

  At home, I take off my dress and drop it in the hamper, then pull on an old pair of Tom’s rugby bottoms, tightening the cord until they fit around my waist. Once the dress is washed, maybe it won’t seem tainted by today, though I already know I’ll never wear it again, like the jumper I had on that day on Elgin Street, and the necklace I took off my throat while walking away from the collapsed building, like having it on was disrespectful, frivolous.

  13

  The tide has gone out in the lough. I walk toward the water across the wide stretch of sand, my jeans and towel rolled up on the rocks behind me. The heat has faded with evening, though the air still feels warm on my bare skin. Shafts of sunlight drop between the clouds onto the surface of the lough. A few boats are out, and around them the water shimmers.

  The threat level hasn’t been lowered yet. A bomb was found this afternoon on a train in Lisburn. Something had gone wrong with the timer, so it hadn’t detonated. The police are out searching trains and buses for other devices, though they might not find any. That might be it.

  I breathe in the mineral air, noticing that the last of my headache has vanished. This stretch of the lough is protected. A Neolithic logboat is buried in the sand, and at low tide you can see the remains of early Christian fish traps from thousands of years ago. I remember when the chessmen were found nearby. The pieces had been carved by Vikings, and then one day they surfaced from the mud.

  I wade into the water. A hoop of seaweed floats by my ankles. I duck my head under the surface, and shivers crest over my scalp. My body tightens in the cold water, like a loose screw. I’ve hardly been aware of it all day, but now can feel every inch. My lips and the backs of my eyes tingle from the cold. The dust and sweat, the sun cream and insect repellent are all gone into the water, just like that. I feel clean.

  I stroke toward the center of the lough, ribbons of cold water slipping over my body. This is the first time since seeing the helicopters that I’ve been away from my phone or the radio. I won’t know if anything happens, the bad news can’t find me here. I dive back under, swimming a meter below the surface until my air runs out, then settle into a slow crawl. I travel far into the lough before finally turning back.

  When I come out, my teeth are chattering. Blood branches over my foot, following the raised lines of my veins. I must have scraped myself on a rock in the water. I bend down, rinsing the scratch.

  I don’t know what makes me look up. My legs suddenly lighten, like I’ve stepped to the edge of a cliff.

  My sister is standing a few meters away. Her hair has been bleached blonde and cut to her shoulders. She looks exhausted, the tendons standing from her neck. Her skin is stretched tight over her forehead and cheekbones.

  “What have you done?”

  PART TWO

  14

  A part of me had expected to forgive her. I’d expected her presence, her familiarity, to shake something loose in me, but it’s the opposite, seeing her is like touching a live wire, and I’ve never felt so angry.

  Marian points at my foot. “Are you okay?”

  I look down at the blood, though my skin is still too numb from the cold to feel the scratch. “Are you in the IRA?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Marian closes her eyes. I can see their shapes behind the lids, like two marbles.

  “I thought you were a paramedic.”

  “I am.”

  “Is that supposed to balance things out?”

  “They asked me to become one,” she says. “They wanted one of us to have medical training.”

  The dizziness makes it hard to stand upright. She became a paramedic six years ago. “How long have you been in the IRA?”

  “Seven years.”

  I stare at my sister. Her face is pale and dry, her lips chapped. “Did you leave a bomb at St. George’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were holding my son.”

  Marian bites her top lip between her teeth. “Yes.”

  “You’re never going to see Finn again,” I say sharply. “You’re not coming anywhere near him.”

  “He wasn’t in danger. It—”

  “Shut the fuck up.” I cover my eyes with my hand, then shake my head. “All right, let’s go. We’re going to the police.”

  “I can’t, Tessa.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Let me explain,” she says, and I consider my sister’s tired eyes, trying to decide if I actually want to know anything more. It will only harm me, in the end. From here, I can see the roofs of Greyabbey, sunlight pooling on the slate tiles.

  “Where have you been?” I ask.

  “South Belfast,” she says, and I let out a sound like a laugh. I was in south Belfast yesterday, desperate to find her, and she was a few minutes away. “In a rental house on Windsor Road.”

  “Have you used it before?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “For what?”

  “Meetings,” she says vaguely, and I wonder what might fall under that term.

  “Do those people know you’re here?”

  “Yes. I told them the truth. I said that I needed to come see you, so you’d know I was all right,” she says, and I look at her in disbelief, wet in my swimsuit, thinking, Is that why you came? Is that what is occurring here?

  “Can we sit down?” she asks.

  I pick my way over the sand to a small, wooded island exposed by the tide. The lough has dozens of these islands, some small enough to support only a single tree.

  Marian follows me. My arms and legs are mottled from the cold, and mascara is smeared under my eyes. The neoprene straps of my swimsuit run over my shoulders and into a low dip at the back. I hate to be wearing only a swimsuit right now, like that makes my fury less serious.

  At the island, we climb the driftwood steps and sit on a bench facing the water. Marian smells the same, which i
s absurd, to think that she has been using the same rose oil over the past four days, in the midst of everything else.

  “I thought you’d been abducted,” I say, and she winces. “So did mam. Do you have any idea what that was like? I was out of my mind. You let us go through that, you didn’t even send us a message.”

  “I couldn’t, Tessa.”

  “Why did you join?”

  “Seamus Malone,” she says. It takes me a moment to place the name, then I can see him, a tall man with red hair, standing in a group of his friends at the Rock bar. He always wore a corduroy jacket with a sheepskin collar. “He gave me a book by Frantz Fanon.”

  “Who?”

  “A Marxist theorist.”

  “You barely knew Seamus.” He also went to grammar school in Andersonstown, but he graduated about ten years before us.

  “He was nice to me after Adam died,” she says.

  “You never told me.”

  Marian shrugs. “You were in Dublin.”

  I remember when Marian visited me at Trinity, how quiet she was while trailing after me around the galleries in Cabra, the canal where students sat drinking tins, the restaurant on Clanbrassil Street, the party at the Bernard Shaw. She barely said a word.

  I’d noticed that my sister dressed differently than my friends, that she looked out of place, and then felt ashamed of myself for having noticed. I’d thought, stupidly, that Marian was intimidated by the larger, wealthier city, or by my friends, who spoke faster than her, wore different clothes, had seen and read different things, when really she’d just been preoccupied. She was already being recruited.

  “We talked about Adam,” says Marian. “Seamus would come round to ask how I was doing, if I wanted to go for a coffee.”

  Adam had been one of the students in Marian’s upper sixth form. They were both twenty when he took an overdose. I knew they had friends in common, but they hadn’t been especially close. I should have been the one to understand how much his death would affect her anyway, not Seamus.

  “He was the only person who would talk about Adam with me. Everyone else pretended the problems didn’t exist.”

  I don’t need to ask which problems. Third-generation unemployment, segregated schools, class discrimination, crumbling state housing. All of this money coming into the city from film shoots and tourism, cruise ships, construction, and none of it making its way to west or east Belfast. The game was rigged, the money only going to people who already had it.

  “Seamus made me actually think about what it means to still be a colony,” she says. He gave her books about England’s other colonies, and what the empire did in Cyprus, Kenya, India, all the reasons the British flag is called the butcher’s apron. He gave her Simone de Beauvoir, Jane Jacobs, Edward Said. She says, “He’d ask me, what do you think of that? Do you agree?”

  I close my eyes. Marian hadn’t been particularly good at school. Too dreamy, too inefficient. She’s bright, but she never understood when to rush during an exam or assignment. She was too meticulous. Teachers never pressed for her opinions or acted as if she had anything interesting to say, not like they had with me. The recruiters had known exactly what Marian longed for, the way they knew that certain teenage boys would want fast food and new trainers.

  Seamus invited her to join a political discussion group, she tells me. During the day, Marian worked at a dry cleaner’s, and at night, she met with the group to drink Turkish coffee and argue political theory. “He opened my mind,” says Marian.

  “You should have known what was happening.”

  Marian doesn’t answer. She might have been completely aware, I realize, that she was being groomed, prepared for something. The idea might have excited her.

  “That lasted a year,” she says. Then one day Seamus asked if he could borrow her flat for an hour. He needed someplace private to speak with a friend. Marian spent the hour in a kebab shop, eating a merguez roll.

  From then on, every week or so, Seamus would say, “Do you mind giving us an hour?” And Marian would leave her flat and go to a café, or to the cinema, or to walk in circles around the city. Eventually Seamus asked if he could store a box at her house, then if she could deliver an envelope to an address in the New Lodge, and eight months later she was driving a car loaded with Semtex explosive from Dundalk to Belfast.

  She swore the oath. I, Marian Daly, am a volunteer to the Irish Republican Army. She was sent to a training camp in Donegal, an isolated compound near the Glengesh Pass, where the new recruits spent three weeks learning close-quarters combat, counter surveillance, night maneuvers. Marian tells me that she sat at a table for hours learning how to chamber and fieldstrip a rifle.

  “Was that fun? Did you enjoy yourself?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “You’re like children.”

  “We were,” she says, though in a different tone than mine.

  While Marian was at the training camp, I’d thought she was on a hiking trip in the Cairngorms in Scotland. “Did you ever come close to telling me the truth?” I ask.

  “No,” she says, and I’m surprised at how much this stings. I’d already come up with three or four occasions, like our holiday in France, when she must have nearly told me everything.

  “Why did they choose you?”

  “They wanted to recruit women,” she says. “We’re less likely to be searched.”

  “There were other women.”

  “But I would have done anything. I loved them.”

  “Do you still?”

  “Yes.”

  I stare across the water while she tells me the names of the three men in her active service unit. Seamus Malone, Damian Hughes, and Niall O’Faolain. She says they’re like her brothers. They’d die for her.

  “You’ve all been brainwashed.”

  “It’s not that simple,” she says. “Should Kenya still be a British colony? Or India? It’s meant to be for the greater good.”

  “No one asked you to do this for us.”

  “Because they were scared of reprisals.”

  “No, Marian. Everyone’s scared of you.” I feel suddenly exhausted. My head seems too heavy to hold up. “Are you saying you don’t regret joining?”

  “I’m saying it’s complicated. I want a free Ireland.”

  “What have you done?”

  “We bombed power stations.”

  That was her unit’s specialty, she says. They bombed power stations in Armagh, Tyrone, and Antrim, causing blackouts, the lights blinking off for miles around each one. The power firms had to spend millions on repairs.

  “What was your role?”

  “I built the bombs.”

  Of course she did. Marian would be good at it, for the same reason she wasn’t good at school—her absorption, her cautiousness, her ability to go down a rabbit hole for hours. Seamus might have understood that from the beginning, it might have been part of why he chose her, because he knew her better than I did.

  Each bomb took about eight hours to assemble, she says. She used Semtex, mostly. Sometimes gelignite. She worked out of a farmhouse on the River Bann. When I thought she was in Belfast, she was often at the farmhouse. It doesn’t seem possible that she could have kept up the lie all this time. The River Bann isn’t particularly close.

  In the farmhouse, she built bombs for six power stations. It’s still there, of course. The dining table where she worked, the kitchen where she took breaks, the patio where she talked with Seamus, Damian, and Niall. Tea of hers might be in the cupboard, one of her cardigans might be draped from a hook.

  The wet fabric of my swimsuit has absorbed the cold, and I start to shiver. I think of all the times I’ve told Marian how scared I am for Finn, how terrified that he’s not safe growing up here. She always told me not to worry.

  “Did you ever consider what you were doing?”
<
br />   “No one was hurt,” she says. “The point was to damage commercial property.”

  The power firms were all English. If they were forced to leave, the reasoning went, the British government might eventually leave, too.

  “You left a bomb at St. George’s. Would no one be hurt there?”

  “Nothing was going to happen,” she says.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I made it. It wasn’t a viable device.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Someone from the government approached me in the spring. He asked how I’d feel about a cease-fire.”

  He asked her about peace, about progress. Marian makes it sound like a conversation, not a recruitment.

  “Are you saying you’re an informer now?”

  “Yes.”

  Since the spring, Marian has been meeting with him about once a week. Mostly, she says, a car will pull up beside her on a quiet road, and her handler will be inside. He will drive for a few minutes while she tells him about her unit’s plans. She knows that the government has others like her inside the IRA, maybe a dozen.

  “I thought you loved them.”

  “I do,” she says.

  “But you became an informer.”

  “We’re having peace talks,” she says, and the hairs stand at the back of my neck. I’ve been waiting to hear that for so long.

  Marian tells me that a handful of IRA leaders are in secret talks with the government. The leaders won’t tell the rest of the IRA about the talks until they reach a deal, to avoid causing a split in the movement. Some of the hard-liners won’t want to abandon the armed struggle.

  For now, IRA operations are continuing as usual, while Marian and other informers work in secret to protect the peace process. A major attack at this stage would make the talks collapse. The government would walk away. All the informers and their handlers are trying to make sure that doesn’t happen.

  “Does anyone in the IRA know what you’re doing?”