In the Morning I'll Be Gone

  And I thought about poor incompetent Tom.

  But he had survived.

  And that was the great thing, wasn’t it?

  To live.

  I drove the BMW north through the rain, hugging the coast of Ireland until the land suddenly came to a halt in the wild broken country that had once been the sea bridge between Alba and Hibernia.

  I had been home from England three weeks now. Hunkering in my house in Coronation Road. Waiting for a letter or a phone call.

  But no one had contacted me. I didn’t know where I stood. I didn’t know anything.

  I drove north through Ballypatrick and Ballycastle and Ballintoy.

  I parked at the Giant’s Causeway and when the rain cleared off I got out my Walkman, zipped my leather jacket over my hoodie, and went out onto the rocks as far as they would go into the north Atlantic.

  It was well after midnight. There were no people, birds, anything.

  I could see a few lights from the villages on the Kintyre peninsula in Scotland. Nothing else. I sat on one of the hexagonal columns closest to the water and put Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy into the player. I fast-forwarded the cassette until I got to “No Quarter.” I burned a little cannabis resin and rubbed it into a roll-up.

  I lit it and pulled back my hood. The sky was mirrors. Bleary-eyed stars whose true names and stories we were destined to know nothing of. I drew in the black cannabis. I held it. I let it go. The moon knew. Much she had seen in her four-billion-year ellipse. It would be a long time before she forgave our sacrilege of coming unbidden into her presence in 1969.

  I closed my eyes. It was warm. There was an odor of salt and spray. The sea breaking gently on the cape, on this hidden path between the kingdoms. The path that still exists for those who can truly see. I lay back on the flat rocks.

  “What’ll I do now?” I said aloud to the sea. “What’ll I do now that I have set the world to rights?”

  The sea, as always, kept her own counsel. I’ll lie here and offer myself to Lyr, the god of broken water. The cassette ended. The water lapped the stones and the great stave of night had only this one faint note in all that epic silence.

  I slept. Dreamed.

  Gray light.

  Yellow light.

  Dawn over Scotland.

  I got up and shook the stiffness from my bones and walked to the car.

  I drove to Ballycastle and caught the first ferry of the day to Rathlin Island.

  I was the sole passenger and the crossing was calm over a strange, milky, phosphorescent sea. We docked on the little stone pier in Church Bay.

  I asked directions to Cliffside House. Up along the road toward the West Lighthouse, I was told. I walked the hilly road and found the place. It was at the end of an isolated lane through oak and hazel trees.

  I had expected this.

  I could hear the ocean all around.

  The house was a three-story medieval fortified manor built of massive stones that had been repointed and whitewashed. The gate was a large iron swing bar over a cattle grid. A sign said “Strictly No Trespassing.”

  I opened the gate, stepped across the cattle grid, and walked under two massive white oak trees.

  The front door was painted red and was Canadian maple four inches thick.

  The windows were bulletproofed.

  I knocked on a brass knocker shaped like a goat’s head.

  “It’s open,” she yelled from inside.

  I turned the handle and went in.

  I found myself in an eighteenth-century manor house with thick stone walls that were decorated with shields, ancient bows, and claymores.

  There was even a harp.

  The furniture was wooden, handmade, ancient.

  “I’m right at the back of the house, Sean,” she said.

  I walked through a small living room, an old-fashioned kitchen, and found myself in an airy modern conservatory. She was sitting on a rattan sofa with her back to me, looking out to sea.

  The conservatory window was made of one enormous sheet of curved plate glass. I saw now that we were almost at the edge of the cliff. To the west Malin Head in County Donegal, the northernmost point in all of Ireland, seemed close enough to touch. To the east the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland was even closer. I didn’t know what we were looking at to the north across thirty miles of blue Atlantic Ocean. Islands in the Hebrides? I wasn’t going to ask. I wasn’t here to talk about the view.

  She raised herself a little to look at me. Her eyes were green and her hair was cut into a Louise Brooks–style bob. She was wearing jeans, a black sweater, socks.

  She could have been anything from twenty-five to fifty-five.

  “Have a seat,” she said.

  I sat on a leather armchair next to a telescope.

  “Would you like some tea?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “I want, I want . . .”

  But my voice was flat and weak and the words died.

  “I’ll make the tea,” she said.

  She got up and went into the kitchen.

  I watched a tiny sailing boat cutting west into the impossible expanse of blue sea. I wondered whether the landmass behind the Kintyre peninsula was the Isle of Arran in the Firth of Clyde, where St. Brendan the Navigator had rested before his journey to the New World.

  She came back with a teapot wrapped in a handmade cosy.

  “Shall I be Mother?” she asked.

  “All right.”

  “Milk and sugar, isn’t it?” she asked.

  I nodded. She poured the milk and sugar into a bone-china teacup and passed it to me on a saucer.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I sipped the tea and we sat there saying nothing for a few minutes.

  When my tea was done she offered me another cup.

  I shook my head.

  “Why did you come here, Sean?” she asked.

  “I have questions,” I said.

  “And you think I’ll have the answers?”

  “Aye, I do,” I said.

  She folded her hands across her lap.

  “Go on, then,” she said.

  “What happens next, Kate?”

  “For you?”

  “For me.”

  “Whatever you want to happen, Sean. Do you want to continue your police career?”

  I don’t know.

  “Why are you keeping Dermot’s name out of the papers? It’s been a month since his death was announced in the Republican press and I haven’t heard his name mentioned once in relation to the Brighton bombing.”

  “I imagine that it suits the purpose of Scotland Yard to assume that the bombers are still out there . . .”

  “So they can fit someone else up for it?”

  “You would know more about the ways of policemen than I.”

  I leaned back in the chair and smiled at that.

  “The ways of policemen . . .” I said to myself.

  She put down her teacup and took my hand. “It’s been a terrible few months for you, hasn’t it? You must be exhausted.”

  I nodded. Exhaustion wasn’t the word.

  “What’s your real name?” I asked.

  “It’s Kate,” she insisted.

  “Is it really?”

  “Shall I tell you about this house?”

  “If you want to.”

  “My grandmother’s house. My father was Irish. Of a sort. Didn’t I tell you that?”

  “Yes. You did.”

  “She had it built over an old fort. She liked the place because of its defensive properties. The walls are two foot thick. There’s an escape tunnel that leads to the cliff path. Quite the character, was my grandmother.”

  She smiled and looked through the window.

  A tiny sailing ship tacked, freezing in mid-water, before sliding northward across the sea.

  “Is my future safe in the RUC? What are you going to tell the chief constable?”

&n
bsp; She laughed. “That’s what you’re worried about?”

  She leaned across and gave my hand a squeeze. “As long as Margaret Thatcher draws breath no one can touch you, Sean.”

  “So I can resume my career in the CID?”

  “Anytime you want with any rank you want at any station you want.”

  “I was that good, huh?”

  “You were that good. You kept history on track.”

  I shook my head. “I did nothing. I didn’t stop the bombing. I didn’t prevent those people from being killed . . .”

  Kate let go of my hand and shook her head.

  “I shouldn’t be telling you this,” she said in a half-whisper . . .

  “What?”

  “You saved her life.”

  “Who?”

  “The prime minister.”

  “How?”

  “As soon as you called Tom, he got through to me, and although we didn’t think there could possibly be a bomb, we had to get her out. No fuss. No drama. We woke her and Denis and she and her staff were all across the street when the bomb went off.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Of course, this information can never be allowed to come out. Everyone has had to sign the Official Secrets Act. This is a deep one. This one has been sealed under the hundred-year rule.”

  “But her room was untouched, it wouldn’t have made any difference.”

  “Again, that’s the official story. In fact her room was completely destroyed by the bomb. Dermot knew what he was doing. He knew where she had stayed in the past and where she would likely stay again, and he planted his bomb for maximum effect. He knew that her room would be thoroughly searched, but a few floors above . . . Well, they might be a little more lax about that. And as we all know now, sniffer dogs cannot detect Semtex.”

  “Tom knew this when I met him at the hotel?”

  “Of course. We thought it was bollocks but you don’t think we’re complete idiots, do you?”

  Bloody Thatcher. Jesus. Maybe Dermot had had the right idea.

  She patted my arm. “As I say, Sean, you kept history on track.”

  “For good or ill.”

  “For good or ill, indeed, but it’ll go the way it’s supposed to go.”

  “And the PM knows it was me.”

  “You’ve got the golden ticket, Sean. You can do anything you want; as one of my earthier colleagues said you could fuck the Princess of Wales in the dining room at Balmoral and no one would say boo to you . . . You wouldn’t be the first one either, but that’s another story.”

  I sat there for a long time. My tea grew cold.

  “Why do you do this? What’s in it for you?” I asked.

  “For me personally?”

  “For you, for the service, for the Brits? Why?”

  She withdrew her hand from mine and folded it back on her lap. She was sitting there with her legs curled underneath her. Feline. Intelligent. Sinister.

  “We play the long game,” she said.

  “The long game?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is this long game?”

  “Do you study history, Sean?”

  “Some.”

  “I’ll tell you a little story. After victory in the Franco-Prussian war, an adjutant went to General Von Moltke and told him that his name would ring through the ages with the greatest generals in history, with Napoleon, with Caesar, with Alexander. But Moltke shook his head sadly and explained that he could never be considered a great general because he had ‘never conducted a retreat.’”

  “And that’s what you’ve been doing here, is it? Conducting a retreat?”

  “That’s what we’ve been doing since the first disasters on the Western Front in the First World War. Conducting as orderly a retreat as possible from the apogee of empire. In most cases we’ve done quite well, in some cases—India, for example—we buggered it.”

  “And Ireland has the potential to be the biggest disaster of all, doesn’t it?”

  “Oh yes. If Britain pulled out tomorrow we could be looking at thousands of casualties, right on our doorstep. It would be quite intolerable.”

  “It wouldn’t be thousands, it would be tens of thousands.”

  “Indeed. Would you like to hear some fortune-telling, Sean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mrs. Thatcher has survived the assassination. She will win the next election. Easily. And the one after that. At some time point in the 1990s, perhaps ten years from now, she will resign or lose to a Labor Party that has been shifted to the right. Never again will a Labor Party advocate a unilateral withdrawal from Ireland.”

  “If you say so.”

  “The Falklands War and the Brighton bomb have made it an inevitability.”

  “And then what?”

  “The IRA are becoming increasingly marginalized. They already know that their campaign has failed. They have failed to capitalize on the momentum of the hunger strikes. We know just how demoralized they have become.”

  “You’ve got one of your own on the Army Council, haven’t you?”

  “I couldn’t possibly comment on that, Sean, even if I knew that to be the case, which I don’t . . . But I will say that they have already begun putting out feelers to end this conflict through disinterested third parties.”

  “So that’s it, is it? That’s the next twenty years sewn up, is it?

  She laughed a little. “Twenty years? I can go farther than that if you want.”

  “Go on, then.”

  “Sometime in the 1990s there will be a ceasefire.”

  “No.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Ten years from now?”

  “Or perhaps longer. Fifteen maybe. But it’ll come. We’ll make a deal with the IRA. They lay down their arms and we’ll release all their prisoners, withdraw the British Army, and establish a power-sharing parliament in Belfast.”

  “Paisley will never agree to that.”

  “Ian Paisley will be the one leading it. The extremists will be the ones who make this deal happen, not the moderates in the middle. The moderates, I’m afraid, will be squeezed out of existence. It always happens.”

  “And then what? What happens next in this great scheme of yours?”

  “Well, then there will be a period of calm for a long time. There will certainly be IRA splinter groups who will commit atrocities but they will be marginalized and largely unimportant. Maybe this period will last another twenty years.”

  “We’ll be long retired or more likely long dead.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “All right, I’ll bite. What happens then?”

  “We cannot escape demography. By that time there should be a comfortable Catholic majority in Northern Ireland and hopefully after sixty years of European integration borders won’t even matter anymore . . .”

  The penny dropped.

  “So that’s when you withdraw. That’s when a united Ireland will take place.”

  “European money will have been pouring in for half a century. Incomes will have risen. The middle class will have expanded. The small Protestant minority will hopefully not rise up and begin a civil war.”

  “You’ll withdraw without a bloodbath. You’ll have managed the retreat.”

  “We will have managed the retreat.”

  I looked at her for a long time.

  Those eyes had seen much. That brain had thought much. I’d been wrong about her age. She was old. She was ancient. And she had lied to me about her position in the Service. She was much higher up the chain than she had let on.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  She opened her mouth and then closed it suddenly like a toad.

  She waved her hand dismissively. “I am not important.”

  I stared at her. I was cold. I got to my feet.

  “I suppose I should go.”

  She nodded. “Yes,” she said.

  “I don’t expect I’ll be up this way again,” I said evasively.

  “
I don’t expect you will,” she said. “Let me see you to the front door.”

  She walked me through the house.

  She opened the door.

  I stepped out into the autumn sunlight.

  The door shut heavily behind me.

  Rathlin. This is where the first people entered Ireland. This is where the human story of this island began.

  “Like I give a shite,” I said to myself, and walked under the oak boughs away from Cliffside House.

  I digested what she has told me and I tried to feel something: hope, despair, anything. But I was empty. This was a shadow play. A puppet theatre.

  She pulled the strings and at the other end of them I jumped. And to mix my metaphors: she’d known exactly how much line to give me. She was the master fisher, not I. I walked down her lane and I took a short cut over the stone wall and through the heather down to Church Bay and the harbor.

  I bought a packet of cigarettes and the Belfast Newsletter, which had just been delivered to the shop.

  I climbed aboard the ferry. The Isolde, a sixty-foot converted Second World War cargo boat. Getting on with me were a dozen schoolkids in uniform and an old man with a horse on a piece of rope. I lit a cigarette and thought about Kate.

  I felt used. Manipulated. But what had I been expecting? The job of the Prince was to rule, not to explain the game to the merest of the pieces.

  I finished my fag, lit another, and read the paper while I waited for us to get going.

  “MRS. GANDHI ASSASSINATED,” the headline screamed.

  Murdered by her Sikh bodyguards in retaliation for her assault on the Golden Temple. I read the report, which went on for four pages.

  It was horrific stuff. There had been retaliatory massacres of Sikhs in Delhi, gun battles in the streets.

  The Brits certainly had buggered up India.

  On page five another story caught my eye:

  CONSTRUCTION COMPANY HEIR SHOT DEAD

  Harper McCullough, CEO of McCullough Construction of Ballykeel, County Antrim, was shot dead last night by two masked men, as he drove out of the company car park shortly after 7PM. No terrorist group has claimed responsibility for this attack. A police spokesman has not ruled out robbery or an attempted kidnapping as a—

  I carefully folded up the paper and threw it in the rubbish bin. The last of the passengers got on: a couple of wee sprogs also in school uniform.