The Living

by Léan Cullinan

  He sprayed laughter in my face. ‘Oh, don’t come over all moral high ground now, Cate Houlihan. You’re the one with a fucking gun-runner for an uncle.’

  I tripped over my reply, as what Matthew had just said trickled through to my brain. Our eyes met. Mine, treacherous, began to brim with tears. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘My god, Cate, do stop pretending to be so naïve.’

  ‘What? My uncle? What?’

  He sighed, his expression disbelieving. ‘Your uncle the suspected bank robber? Your uncle the convicted arms smuggler? Your uncle, Cate – Fintan Sullivan, RI-fucking-P. For crying out loud, wake up!’

  There was a long silence. I had no words.

  ‘Oh, my god,’ said Matthew, in an entirely different tone. ‘You didn’t know?’

  The boil was lanced. Loops of deflated tension hung from the trees like opera-house swags. We couldn’t look at each other. I cried silently. Matthew stood with his face in his hands.

  Eventually, I took a step towards him. He looked up. ‘I didn’t know,’ I said.

  But here was the thing I realized as I spoke: I did know. I’d known all my life. I’d simply kept it secret from myself until now.

  I knew, in the way you know your address or your granny’s birthday, that Uncle Fintan had been involved in some questionable activities in his youth. But somehow, I’d managed to assume that it was no more than what most people were doing at the time. My own law-abiding father, after all, had gone so far as to throw a half-brick at a window of the British Embassy after the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972. Uncle Fintan had been a tearaway, was the impression I’d grown up with, who might have done one or two things to blush about, all forgiven and forgotten now.

  But gun-running? Bank robbery? I tried to reconcile these notions with the man I’d known. The mild, smiling uncle, whose sentences never quite, who had always tended, unlike other adults, to engage me in conversation, enjoying and encouraging our shared interests. The man who helped me out when the constraints of home life grew too great to be borne.

  The man whose old associates made his widow flinch. Whose friendships, in life, were enough to rock his marriage. Whose sister … Why was I thinking about Mum now? I recalled her vehemence, all through my childhood – ‘This is about blood.’

  But anyway! Everyone agreed that partition was a dreadful burden on Ireland – North and South – and that those who took up the armed struggle, while not exactly to be applauded, were nonetheless doing something that a compassionate person couldn’t wholeheartedly condemn.

  Except … of course … not everyone agreed, as I’d eventually discovered at university. Truth be told, I no longer agreed myself. And yet, it turned out, the ancient assumptions of my childhood had not caught up.

  A memory from Irish college sprang to mind – the whole lot of us, singing the college song at one of the daily flag ceremonies. Declaring ourselves in aghaidh gaill sa tír seo – ‘against foreigners in this country’ – belting out with muscular enthusiasm those rolling phrases full of cheerful xenophobia and vague exhortations to readiness. We’d sung it with such fierce, uncomplicated pride, and followed it up with the national anthem, including the extra verse that felt like a shared secret. At fourteen, I’d swallowed it whole, along with all the other rhetoric.

  It was a generational thing, I suddenly realized, this attempt to pass on beliefs and attitudes to a fresh cohort. But without the experience to underpin them, no matter how heartfelt, beliefs and attitudes ring hollow. Our parents’ conclusions do not fit us: if we try to adopt them wholesale, we warp ourselves.

  God, the sooner Mícheál got out of there, the better.

  THE LIGHT WAS beginning to fade, the tree trunks to turn blacker. A fine mist was contemplating turning into rain. Matthew spoke at last. ‘Cate, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have lost my temper.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I heard myself say.

  ‘Should I go?’

  Should he go? The question seemed absurd, an irrelevant speck in this awful lump of knowledge I was chewing. ‘No, I want you to stay,’ I said.

  ‘Do you think we could go somewhere warmer?’

  ‘My car is parked back by the Papal Cross.’ We turned, oriented ourselves, and set off.

  We did not speak on the way back to the car. My mind was boiling. Had Matthew really been sent to spy on me because my uncle was once involved in Republican activities? If so, it just showed how blinkered and small-minded these people were. Some intelligence service. I thought hard, and could not identify a single thing I’d done that might suggest my sympathies tended in an unsavoury, let alone an illegal, direction.

  He’d lost his temper. He must have been caught in the heat of argument. Exaggerating for effect – making me think all that nonsense about my lovely uncle, who was barely cold in his grave. Bastard. I felt a roar building in my chest, and balled my fists in my pockets to steady myself.

  Think, Cate. Be reasonable, as the man said.

  We reached the car; I opened it and got in. I watched Matthew fold himself into his seat and nearly started crying again. I wanted so much to clamber over the handbrake and hug him. He was a liar and a traitor. He was a spy. He had spoken ill of the dead.

  I tried not to look at him. My face burned.

  ‘Cate, are you all right?’ His voice was once again soft. Spoke to the centre of me. I did my best to push him out. But even as I tried to collect my thoughts to deliver the cutting arguments that would make Matthew take back what he had said about Uncle Fintan, I felt my anger dissipate.

  He sat perfectly still, waiting. I started the engine and backed slowly out of my space, then rolled towards the car-park exit.

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Far from it.’ We were silent for another few minutes, and then he said, ‘There is one thing you should know.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’m not – I’m not with the intelligence services any more. I resigned.’

  We had joined a small queue to turn on to the main road. I looked at him. ‘Wow.’ I moved out and headed downhill, towards the quays.

  ‘Well … to be totally honest, they offered me the option. I wasn’t really cut out for it. I’d known that, even before. That life – it wasn’t for me. But, well. Things got a bit more complicated after Belfast. I was pretty seriously out of line.’

  ‘Hey, you did a great job of making sure I didn’t blow the place up, didn’t you?’ I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice.

  ‘Oh, Cate, don’t be like that.’ Tired and pleading, no longer angry.

  ‘Sorry, Matthew, but you’re the one who was sent over here to spy on me.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘No. I’m sorry. I haven’t been clear, have I?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘My being sent here didn’t have anything to do with you.’

  ‘But you said—’

  ‘No, I originally came over because of John.’

  ‘John Lawless?’

  ‘Yes. Leading expert on Irish Republicanism, and apparently a little too cosy with various breakaway groups. My mission was to worm my way into his confidence.’

  I gaped at him. ‘And what did this … staunch nationalist with dissident Republican connections make of an inquisitive Brit showing up to learn his secrets?’

  Matthew smiled, and something in me crumbled. ‘Well, I’ve studied the subject quite extensively – I do know my stuff, so that helped. Also, it didn’t hurt that my research was trying to prove duplicity on the part of the British. And I played up the Antrim connection.’

  ‘Your cousins that you used to visit?’

  ‘Indeed. But you’re right. I hadn’t got very far.’

  We had hit the eternal crawl of cars along the river. I was still mired in confusion. ‘How did you know all that stuff about Uncle Fintan?’ I took a deep breath and hoped I wasn’t going to find out something irreparable. ‘Did he – in Belfast – was he … involved?’

&
nbsp; Matthew shook his head. ‘No. He’d been in retirement for decades. The things I mentioned, I learned when I was investigating Eddie MacDevitt’s book.’

  Oh, of course. That book was at the bottom of practically everything, it seemed.

  ‘The government got wind of one of the claims MacDevitt was making.’

  ‘Which government? The British?’

  ‘Yes, the British. Though of course the Irish were fairly interested as well – as your friends in the car with the musical number plate will attest. Anyway, they wanted to find out what he was basing this one particular claim on, and whether it was likely to cause the British government any real trouble, and as I was in Dublin anyway, they asked me to look into it.’

  ‘Ha,’ I said. ‘Not only were you in Dublin, you also happened to be in a choir with the unlikely linchpin of Bell Books, yes?’

  He spoke very quietly. ‘I’m sorry, no. I joined the choir later on.’

  ‘Because I was in it?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  I set that aside for later consideration, and scrolled through what I could recall of Eddie’s book, trying to pick out any assertion that might have alarmed the British government. Trying now to see it from a totally different perspective. I could think of a few things in there that would embarrass our own politicians – or should, if they had any compunction – but the British? I could think of nothing. ‘So, what was the claim, then?’

  Matthew took a breath and held it for a long moment. ‘Cate, I need you to know that I’m trusting you. I should categorically not be telling you any of this.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, you know, I’m not going to … I won’t blow your cover.’

  ‘OK.’ He closed his eyes and went on. ‘Eddie claimed that in 1974 he’d taken a huge personal risk and informed an MI5 agent that the IRA were planning to bomb Birmingham. He said that the British did nothing about it.’

  ‘But why would that cause trouble now, when it happened in 1974?’ As soon as I’d spoken I realized how stupid I sounded. All my life I’d been hearing about Birmingham – that savage injustice done by the British to six innocent men, whose eventual exoneration epitomized ‘too little, too late’. But before the injustice, and separate from it, there had been a crime. People had died.

  Matthew said, ‘Seriously? You don’t think British people would be a tiny bit put out if they thought the government knew in advance about the IRA’s plans and did nothing?’

  A small spark of outrage. ‘The British government did plenty, Matthew. They weren’t exactly on their best behaviour after Birmingham, were they?’

  ‘Well, no. But that was afterwards. And the British public has magnanimously forgiven them for that little justice wobble.’

  I frowned, confused. ‘But that still doesn’t make sense. Eddie’s book is only at proof stage now. How did the British government find out about it so early?’

  ‘Martin Bright saw the first draft. He ran it past his lawyer, as a matter of routine, and the lawyer showed it to someone at the Foreign Office.’

  Now, who was Martin Bright again? ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘The London co-publisher … But hang on, I don’t remember that part at all.’ Was I so naïve, to use Matthew’s word, that I’d missed it?

  ‘Ah. Well. Actually, as it happens, that particular claim didn’t make it into the final version.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Pressure from the Foreign Office. The lawyer warned Bright that he’d be in hot water if he published the claim. Bright made George delete it. George did as he was told, despite Nicky Fay’s attempt to change his mind, because he needed the rights money. And I … checked to make sure it had gone.’ He sniffed. ‘Thanks again for that.’

  ‘Mmm.’ I asked the obvious next question: ‘Was it true?’

  ‘I couldn’t possibly comment.’

  This was too much. ‘You’re awful smug, you know, for a man who’s being driven down the north quays by the woman he’s been lying to for months. I should probably throw you out of the car.’

  He seemed not quite sure I was joking. I wasn’t either.

  We fell silent, rolling slowly along.

  OK. If I wanted to see this thing through, I was going to have to keep asking the hard questions.

  ‘What really happened in Belfast? What were you doing?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t go into the details. It was a surveillance job.’

  ‘They gave you a gun.’

  ‘Yes, well. The people I was watching weren’t very nice. I knew I’d miss the rehearsal – that couldn’t be helped, and I’d told Diane – but I was still hoping to make it to the Waterfront in time for the performance.’ He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, angling himself away from me, turning to look out the window. His fingers came up to pinch the tip of his nose.

  I waited for him to go on, and when he didn’t I turned to look at him. His eyes were dark with emotion.

  Eventually he said, ‘I got a phone call at around half past seven from one of my colleagues, who was in a real state over a security breach at the Waterfront. At first I couldn’t work out why he’d phoned me, but eventually I realized … it was you.’

  The hairs on the backs of my hands actually stood on end. I felt the skin buzzing.

  Matthew said again, ‘You were the security breach.’ His tone was gentle, ruminative, otherworldly.

  I listened to the blood rushing in my ears … ‘What? How on earth? I don’t get it.’

  ‘I know. I argued with them. I said there was no way you were a risk. It was a nightmare.’

  ‘So, what … did they think I was somebody else?’

  ‘No.’ He hesitated. ‘They knew who you were, all right.’

  ‘They knew? But that means …’ That meant … that meant that the British government considered me a threat of some kind. Panic began to rise, and, twining through it, fury. I gripped the steering wheel. ‘OK, so, they have, like, a file on me, or something?’

  ‘You’re in the database, yeah.’ He was trying to speak casually.

  The road here was completely choked up. We were going nowhere fast. I turned my head and looked him straight in the eye. ‘Why’s that, Matthew? Why am I in the fucking database? Did you put me in there?’

  ‘No! You’ve been there for years, as far as I know. It was nothing to do with me.’

  ‘Years? Really?’ I raised my eyebrows and waited.

  He met my challenge. ‘OK, then, let’s see. You come from an actively Republican family, more than one member of which has been tried for terrorism-related crimes.’

  More than one? Matthew raised a hand as though to say, ‘Bear with me.’ I let it pass.

  ‘You’ve attended meetings of Sinn Féin Republican Youth, and you’re the author of “Thirty-two Counties: An Honourable Goal”, published in Trinity News as part of a series of political opinion pieces.’

  ‘But that was years ago!’ I felt sick.

  ‘Five years ago, yes.’

  ‘I was in first year! I don’t think that way any more.’

  ‘Well, what do you want me to say? I’m not trying to defend them, I’m just telling you what was there to see. So. You live in a flat owned by Fintan Sullivan, who for all his excellent qualities … and I’m not saying he wasn’t a fantastic uncle … was known to have ongoing social connections with Republican terrorists, active and retired. You pay a rent that can only be described as nominal to a man who isn’t exactly rolling in cash. Your downstairs neighbours pay four times what you do.’

  I blinked at this, but said nothing.

  ‘Then you take a job with George “Mad” Sweeney – founder member of Laochra na Saoirse – and you act as a messenger between him and Sullivan. It’s not all that odd that we might have wanted to keep tabs on you.’

  ‘Now, hang on,’ I said, grasping at a passing straw. ‘What has George got to do with any of this? Laochra na Saoirse is completely defunct. I mean … I know Eddie’s book will ruffle a few feathers – but it’s not a
crime to tell the truth.’

  ‘Certainly not, but when you try to tell uncomfortable truths about powerful people you tend to run into difficulty.’

  ‘OK, I’ll grant you that.’

  ‘Though to be fair, George is pretty good at what he does. He’s thorough. I like that in a publisher.’

  Another thought struck me. ‘Wait a minute. If I’m in your precious database, why was Carmina Urbana allowed anywhere near Belfast? Why not just cancel us? Find another choir? Or tell Diane she’d have to let them prune out the bad wood?’

  ‘Well, first of all, it was sensitive. You’ll recall Diane’s history?’

  ‘Oh! The Jennifer Mallon thing.’

  ‘Yes. Bit of a tender spot for the government. Plus you’ve got the whole Daintree business. Hot young composer from a mixed background. Massed voices of the two islands singing as one, and so forth. Highly symbolic. It would have been rather difficult for the British to suggest that Carmina Urbana wasn’t on the level.’

  ‘But we are on the level!’

  ‘Yes, I know. And fortunately, it didn’t come to that, because … well, because, to be perfectly frank, nobody put two and two together.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Human error. Nobody cross-checked. The MacDevitt book and the Belfast summit were being handled by different people. And they’d have to have been doing a specific search to spot the connections, anyway, because the database has about four different spellings of your name.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah.’ The air lightened as he ticked off the variations on his fingers: ‘Cate-with-a-C, Kate-with-a-K, Caitlín, Houlihan, Ní Uallacháin – we’re basically no match for you Irish and your devious naming ways.’

  He was humouring me. British intelligence must be well up on the instability of Irish names. Surely.

  He went on. ‘But then of course you met Nicky Fay that day. Not a good move if you want to avoid attention.’

  ‘What, we met for two minutes. If that.’

  ‘Yes, and he gave you a package,’ he said gently. ‘Fay was under active surveillance, so they kept an eye on you for the rest of the afternoon. They nearly dropped dead when they saw you march into the Waterfront.’