Return to Killybegs

  —Neither am I. I’m going to write for a while, then I’ll join you.

  —Who are you writing to?

  —Nobody. Just things that are going through my head.

  Her friend in Strabane had made an apple crumble, and she’d wrapped up half for me. It was almost the meal of a free man.

  Sheila had been stopped by the Garda Síochána as she was arriving. From her description, I recognized Seánie, the old guard who had come to see me, and the younger man who didn’t leave his side. Their car was parked farther up the road. Dublin had not appreciated the article in the Donegal Sentinel and they had been mentioning Killybegs on the television.

  —Thanks to that damned journalist, the whole of Ireland knows where your husband is hiding.

  —He’s not hiding, my wife answered.

  All the same, I needed to be on the alert going out, doing my shopping, coming into town. I had to be cautious walking the mile or so between Killybegs and my cottage. I should avoid pubs, gatherings, everything that could put the locals at risk.

  —The locals? Sheila asked.

  —This isn’t our war, the older peace-keeper had responded. We’re not accusing anyone or defending anyone. We just don’t want the killers skulking around.

  I asked her if they had been unpleasant. No. Not at all. Just worried about what was going to happen.

  She told them that the following Tuesday she’d be coming back with a visitor, a friend, a Frenchman.

  The gardaí responded that it wasn’t the French they feared, but all the Irish the world over.

  —Do you think that the IRA could give him trouble? the younger guard asked.

  —No. They’ll neither give him trouble nor stop anyone else doing so, Sheila answered.

  —So it’s bad, murmured the old guard.

  We got up from the table. The washing up could wait until next year. Sheila hesitated, came over to me. I took her in my arms, my face buried in her grey hair. It was the moment for making resolutions. We stayed like that for a minute, our shadows dancing on the wall.

  —Good luck to us, my wife whispered.

  —Good luck to you.

  Her warmth, her autumn skin, the wood smoke in her hair. I hugged her sobs against me.

  And suddenly, her voice, loud and abrupt.

  —My God, Tyrone! What have you done to us?

  It was a grief-stricken cry, not a question. I wrapped her even closer into me. I was crying, too, though my body didn’t give it away. An orphan’s grief. With nothing left, no mother, no father, no home, not even the earth to nourish him or the heavens to protect him. A terrifying solitude, silence ever after. And the cold for all time, such cold. I was disgusted with myself. I was crying on my own behalf.

  —What’s to become of me? my wife asked.

  I told her that there was Jack, her friends, her country.

  —You were my country, wee man.

  And she pulled away from me, masking her sorrow with her hand. She lay down, still wearing my jumper and her socks, and turned to face the wall and search for sleep. We had both lost it, this sleep. Her for the past ten days, and me for twenty-five years.

  17

  Since my release from the Kesh, the IRA had decided to put me into retirement. I was too visible, too well known. The Army Council asked me to behave as a political activist. I participated in peaceful protests, joined the marches beneath pictures of the hunger strikers. I would walk alongside the crowds, my wreath in hand. For the commemoration of the Easter Rising, I didn’t march in the black uniform of our soldiers, but in the rows of prisoners’ families. In the eyes of everyone, I was a veteran of the blanket protest, a veteran of the dirty protest. A former combatant.

  One day, when I was drinking with Sheila in the Thomas Ashe, a British soldier approached our table and asked me my name. His officer came over to me, smiling.

  —Let it go. Meehan’s retired at the moment.

  And Sheila put her hand on mine.

  —Let whatever happens happen, the MI5 agent had told me.

  I didn’t influence anything. I didn’t provoke anything. I let events unfold. I told myself that perhaps having accepted treason would satisfy them. I was an agent in their eyes. But I hadn’t betrayed. Not yet. I hadn’t said anything, done anything, denounced anyone. Just that Parisian conversation that they took for a pact. I had a crazy idea. I hoped that it would all stop there. That they’d never ask me for anything, ever.

  Prison had changed me. That’s what people murmured behind my back. Before the dirty protest, I used to drink. I’d empty my pint glasses same as anyone else on this island. But since I’d got out, I’d taken to the drink. It wasn’t the same thing. I knew some army mates like that. They’d drink on the sly, farther and farther from their ghetto. They’d get other people to order their vodka, they’d send a youth to the off-licence and let him keep the change. They’d miss meetings, forget orders. As soon as they became a security liability, the party would let them go. Then they’d pour their drinks down the drain, they’d make promises. They’d wear Pioneer pins on their lapels to be recognized as teetotallers. They’d drink soft drinks with the look of a drowned man on their faces. And they’d often go back on the drink again.

  I had pains in my stomach, my joints, my head. Every morning, I limped when I got out of bed before being able to walk normally. I shook. Beer was my water, vodka my alcohol. I had bought myself a green leather and metal flask, calculating how much it could hold.

  Twice, the owner of the Thomas Ashe had discreetly asked me to leave. On the third time, I called the bar to witness. This bastard was throwing out Danny Finley’s friend. I tore off the tablecloth covering the big sandwich table. I threw it over my shoulders like a prison blanket. I shouted from the middle of broken saucers and scattered bread. Didn’t that remind them of anything? Really? Would they like me to shit on the ground to jog their memories? Some IRA guys intervened. Everyone was going to calm down. It was in the street we were waging war, not in our pubs. I left the bar. And I came back the following day to apologize.

  The IRA had advised me to do so. Waldner had ordered me to.

  Even before I became a traitor, I was becoming troublesome. The MI5 agent wondered whether I might not be doing that just to be rejected by my community. To render myself out of order, useless. He reminded me that nothing had changed. I had killed Danny, Jack was in prison and Sheila was still vulnerable. I had to quit the rowdiness. It was an order. So I made myself drink less, and less again. Then to drink like before, when I felt like it.

  But I knew that I was no longer in control.

  Bobby Sands died on 5 May 1981, after sixty-six days of hunger strike. As he lay there dying slowly, he was elected an MP in Westminster, but that wasn’t enough. Francis Hughes died on 12 May, aged twenty-five, after fifty-nine days’ hunger strike. Patsy O’Hara and Ray McCreesh both died on 21 May, at twenty-three and twenty-four years of age, after sixty-one days’ hunger strike.

  On 22 June, when the IRA Belfast Brigade decided to shoot down a Long Kesh warder, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee and Michael Devine were about to die.

  There was a black shroud over the whole city. The IRA had a duty to react.

  Frank ‘Mickey’ Devlin had joined us upstairs in a brick house in the Divis Flats area. There were three of us sitting on the floor in the small bedroom.

  Mickey tapped me on the back, pleased to see me again. He nearly got out a pen to tease me, but didn’t bother in the end. Catching sight of the crucifix, he crossed himself. And then he gave the pope a wink.

  On coming in, he had asked our hostess for some tea. She knocked on the door and Jim O’Leary opened it to take the tray.

  —The street is quiet, she said.

  Then she left again without a sound.

  —Tea, Tyrone? Jim asked.

  —Tea, I replied.

  Mickey took a few photos from under his shirt. Five snapshots taken from a distance. He lin
ed them up on the carpet like a game of cards.

  I went to pull the curtains and turn on the light.

  The others were bent over the documents.

  —Weird-looking guy, Jim said.

  —His name’s Ray Gleeson. He lives close to Cliftonville, in a mixed estate.

  —A Catholic? Jim asked.

  —Yeah. He’s fifty-three. He’s been working for the prison service since 1962 and in the Kesh for the past four.

  Jim handed me a photo.

  —A friend of yours, Tyrone?

  Popeye.

  My screw. In civilian clothes. An oversized suit, a shapeless shirt, his bald head, his cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.

  I went over to the bedside lamp, using the darkness as a pretext, turning my back to them. Popeye. My heart was pounding, my head, an anxious drumming that everyone must surely hear.

  —Do you know him?

  —No, I replied.

  I bent down. I looked at the other images. Popeye inspecting the underside of his car as a precaution, Popeye walking in the city centre, Popeye stopped at a red light.

  —Why him? I asked.

  The question slipped out. A crazy question. I stopped breathing.

  Mickey looked at me strangely. Without knowing it, he helped me bail myself out.

  —Why a Catholic, you mean?

  —Yeah. Why a Catholic.

  Jim shrugged vaguely. He answered that the mixed neighbourhood would make the getaway easier.

  The younger guy spoke. I barely knew him. He had a know-it-all air I didn’t like. He told me that hunger strikes were our priority and that the IRA should respond on this terrain.

  I looked at him. I smiled coldly.

  —Terry? It’s Terry, isn’t it? You’re not by any chance in the process of explaining the situation in prison to me, are you?

  He froze, surprised by my aggression.

  —You want to teach us military tactics? Is that it?

  —Calm down, Tyrone, murmured Mickey.

  He put away the photos, his eyes on me.

  —A screw is a screw. Who gives a fuck what religion he is?

  I nodded. I needed to calm down. He was right.

  —If your friends are looking at you strangely, it’s fucked, Meehan. That means you’ve said too much, or maybe not enough. If you get pissed off instead of laughing or laugh instead of getting pissed off, they’re going to have doubts. And doubts are lethal, Waldner had warned.

  So I put on my Tyrone manner again, cursing the lukewarm tea.

  —On Thursday, he starts work at eleven. It’s quiet in his area. He’s always done the same thing. He pulls off, arrives at the Clifton crossroads, and puts his seatbelt on while waiting for the light to turn green. We can get him there, Terry said.

  —He doesn’t take any precautions, doesn’t change his route?

  Terry smiled at me.

  —Other than looking under his car, no. He does nothing.

  —You’ll do it next Thursday? Jim asked.

  —The sooner the better, I replied.

  I’d taken control of my emotions once more. Mickey looked at me, nodding. Jim glanced at him from the corner of his eye. I could sense their relief. The old Tyrone Meehan had come back to them.

  —Who’ll be on the job?

  —Me, Terry, three guys from Divis, and a girl on a bike to collect the guns, Mickey replied.

  —Jim?

  O’Leary shook his head.

  —You know me, Tyrone. I handle the powder better than the gun.

  —Explain your presence here, so.

  I was using my commanding tone of voice again.

  —Procedure hadn’t been finalized. We had thought at first of booby-trapping his car, but as he checks it every morning ...

  I cut Jim off, my hand raised. I imagined the red-haired cop and the MI5 agent witnessing the scene. It was the first time my imagination had summoned them.

  Curt tone.

  —Mickey? Next time, you settle that in advance. This is a military briefing, not a public debate.

  Mickey nodded. He got the point loud and clear. Jim stood up.

  —The less you know ..., he said as he left the room.

  Jim O’Leary was a bomb-maker. ‘Mallory’, as he was called in the movement. He was a soldier, uninterested in politics. He considered that in every circumstance, the gun should command the party. He was against secret negotiation, dialogue, compromise. ‘Brits out!’ Like my father, those two words were the sum total of his agenda. He didn’t dream of peace in Ireland but of routing the British. He wanted to fight them, send them packing, humiliate them and, only then, negotiate the terms of their defeat.

  Jim was a technician. Secretive, patient, hard-working, he spent his days and weeks developing increasingly efficient explosives. His creations were tailored to the job, booby-trapping cars, doormats, letters. A mine intended to blow up armoured vehicles while they were driving through the countryside was not designed in the same way as a bomb planted in a town, along the route of a foot patrol. The milk bottles sitting peacefully outside houses were a threat to the enemy, as were Belfast’s electricity poles, gas meters at leg height, even the smallest crack in a wall. The British were tearing down our flags? He would booby-trap the flag poles.

  Jim O’Leary was wary of military explosives that came from Hungary or Czechoslovakia. He was a peasant. He preferred the crude contraptions used in our campaigns. A big bag of weed killer, sugar, acid, a little of Ireland’s earth, soap flakes to infect the wounds, bolts, nails, and the job was done.

  He didn’t have any qualms. No regrets, ever. But he followed one rule dictated by our command: no civilian victims. The IRA gave half an hour’s warning before detonating a bomb. Sometimes, though, that wasn’t enough. I was sitting with him one day in a Republican pub. A passer-by had just been killed on the street in broad daylight by one of our devices. The television was showing the images in a loop. The IRA had warned the police, but they hadn’t evacuated the street.

  —Fucking Brits! cursed a young lad, putting his glass down.

  —It’s the bomb that killed him, not the Brits, Jim spat back.

  The youth wasn’t from the area. He was mouthing off the way someone does when they want to be accepted.

  —Without the Brits, there wouldn’t have been any bomb, asshole! the stranger retorted.

  —Wrong. Without the guy who made the bomb, there wouldn’t have been any bomb.

  —The IRA doesn’t like being lectured! the stranger snapped back.

  He got down from his barstool. He wanted Jim to explain himself. He didn’t get within ten metres. Two of our boys stopped him. One of them took him by the neck, made him sit down again, the other spoke into his ear, indicating Jim with a nod of his chin. Jim was drinking calmly, his eyes locked on the young man’s. The kid discovered who he was facing. He was turning white as a sheet, his mouth hanging open, his large body sagged.

  When the operation was risky for civilians, Jim would remain until after the explosion. Once, he had cancelled a detonation because of a wedding. The patrol and the newly-weds passed a few metres from the remote-controlled bomb, the soldiers were sheltered by the cheerful bridal party of long dresses and suit jackets. Another time, with an IRA woman, he went back to find a bomb on the first floor of a Protestant den, where some Loyalist leaders were supposed to be gathering. Their meeting had been cancelled. He recovered the packet of Semtex that was hidden in the toilets. He was stopped outside. Eleven years in prison.

  —You’re a killer, Jim O’Leary, the priest had said to him on his wedding day.

  —You take care of my Mass, I’ll take care of your country, he had replied.

  Since that day, in support of her man, Cathy had never again taken Communion.

  When Fiona Phelan got on the bus, I followed her on board. She sat down the back, I took the seat next to her. She was surprised. The vehicle was almost empty. She gripped her bag on her knees. I stuck out my hand.
<
br />   —Tyrone Meehan, I was with Aidan in a cell in Long Kesh.

  Her face changed. The blood returned to it, along with her smile. She took my hand as though I was her son.

  —Tyrone Meehan? You frightened me, I’m sorry.

  She took a better look at me.

  —What are you doing in Strabane?

  She wanted me to come to her house, see her son, her husband. She was as moved as if it were a romantic encounter. I had to go back to Belfast that same night. I was getting off at the next stop.

  —Don’t tell anyone you saw me.

  —Even my husband?

  —Not even him, no. Nobody. I’m sorry about this.

  She was worried. The alarm that comes naturally to nationalist women up here.

  —What’s going on?

  Her hands in mine.

  —Nothing. All is well. I just wanted to know if you’d received a message from your son towards the end of last year.

  She looked at me, astonished. A message? The message! The one and only. She opened her bag, her red wallet. Carefully, she took out the words her son had written, protected in a plastic cover. She smiled sadly.

  —Still, tearing the Bible ... you shouldn’t do that.

  How had she got the note? Around Christmas, a man rang at the iron gate and she had looked at him through the window. He was outside, something small in his hand. He signalled to her and then threw it over the gate. Then she had shouted.

  —My other son went tearing out, my husband right behind him. I thought it was a Loyalist, a bomb. The guy shot off down the street.

  On the grass was a wee silvery seal on a keyring with a zip on its belly. Her son picked it up with the poker. Then he bent over, took up the toy and opened it.

  —When the paper fell into his hand, he squeezed his fist closed to hide it. And then he threw a worried glance at the street.

  He had spent eight years in Crumlin prison. He let out a joyful cry when he recognized the note.

  —He closed the door, slid the bolt, the chain, pulled the curtains. Then he asked me to hold out my hand.

  —News from our Aidan, my son said. And that wee devil was laughing to see me cry.