Return to Killybegs

by Sorj Chalandon

  I rang. Mike O’Doyle opened the door. He saw my bag. He nodded.

  —I’m coming, he told me.

  He didn’t ask me in.

  Through the open living-room door, I could hear him making a phone call. Abbie, my wee goddaughter, half-opened the curtain. She must have been kneeling on the couch. She saw me, recognized me, gave me a little wave, smiling.

  —It’s Tyrone!

  I could read my name on her lips.

  Mike was facing the wall, telephone at his ear. He was pulling on his jacket with one hand. The wee one tapped the windowpane with her finger. She signalled me to come in, beckoning with her fingers. I shook my head. No, sweetheart. It’s late. I can’t. I pulled her favourite funny face, hand miming a telescope at my eye and a pirate’s grin filled with my ruined teeth. She laughed, turned around to tell her father. He raised a hand impatiently. Then she opened the curtain more. With a sweeping gesture, she showed me the Christmas tree that was set up in the corner of the room. It was twinkling slowly. I smiled, held back a sob. What a beautiful Christmas tree, wee Abbie. I stuck my thumb up. She clapped. Mike put away his mobile phone. He came over to his daughter, looked at me. Him in that warmth, that happiness so violent. And me in my frozen night, my winter. A pane separated us. A white lace curtain, held back by a child’s hand. Mike the darkness, Abbie radiant. He who knows, and she who doesn’t.

  —Our revenge will be the lives of our children.

  I had said that at Danny’s graveside. And it was done, Abbie.

  When Mike pulled the curtain across, over his daughter’s eyes, I closed mine. I would keep that moment. That carefreeness, that innocence, and that love for me.

  The first car had parked on the pavement, lights cut, between the O’Doyles’ front door and the street, the same way the British armoured vehicles used to do when concealing an arrest. I recognized Rory, a guy from the Short Strand area. He was behind the wheel. He had left the engine running. Beside him was Cormac Malone, a member of Sinn Féin’s Ard Chomhairle and a friend from way back when. His presence reassured me. I was in the hands of the party, I hadn’t been handed over to the army. Neither of them turned around. They were looking straight ahead, as concentrated as if they were driving on a motorway in the pouring rain. Peter Bradley was sitting in the back: Pete ‘the Killer’, who had spent more time in English prison cells than in his living room.

  Pete didn’t just fight the English, he hated them. For him, there was no difference between a soldier and a child. They were killing our kids? We should kill theirs. Blow for blow, grief for grief. He confused Loyalists and Protestants. Like the racists on the other side, for whom every Catholic is a potential IRA man, he’d say that no Presbyterian was innocent. Bradley was terrified by the idea of peace. War was his life. After the ceasefire, some of the other Bradleys took the dissident route, joining the handful who refused to lay down arms. He was tempted. He hadn’t done so. Even disbanded, the IRA was still his army and we were his OCs. So he just made a lot of noise in the pubs, invoking Bobby Sands and swearing that ‘those guys’ would have continued to fight.

  On Friday, 17 May 1974, Peter Bradley and his fiancée Niamh were visiting Dublin. For the first time in their lives, they had crossed the border. He was twenty-one, she was nineteen. Their wedding was set for 14 September. They had visited the GPO on O’Connell Street, where Connolly and his men had proclaimed the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic at Easter 1916. They had kissed on the Ha’penny Bridge, the footbridge of lovers that straddles the Liffey. They had wandered up Grafton Street and dreamed they were rich and students. Pete had bought a pair of shoes and Niamh a white blouse. At half past five they were walking down Parnell Street when the first bomb exploded. The second blew up on Talbot Street. The third destroyed South Leinster Street. Niamh was blown to pieces, projected head first against a wall by the violence of the blast. When the firemen and the Garda Síochána arrived, Peter was comforting the dead body by trying to stick its arm back on.

  One hour later, a bomb exploded in Monaghan, a town on the border. Twenty-seven dead in Dublin, seven in Monaghan. Amongst them were a pregnant woman, an Italian woman and a Jewish French woman, the daughter of camp survivors.

  The Loyalist militia from the Ulster Volunteer Force had decided to bring the war to the Republic of Ireland. They had done so in their own way, without warning. They wanted to kill papists, and the British security forces were accused of having assisted them.

  That day, sitting amongst blood and scraps of flesh, Peter Bradley became Pete ‘the Killer’. It would no longer be for Ireland’s liberty that he’d fight, but to avenge Niamh, his own youth and his mangled life.

  Beside him in the car was Eugene Finnegan, the Bear Cub. He opened the door and stepped aside so that I could sit between them on the back seat. The warmth was stifling, but the smell of Cormac Malone’s aftershave welcomed me. It was an eau de toilette that I’d brought him back from Paris. I was clinging to the tiny details. To miniscule hopes. Why wear the aftershave I’d given him as a gift? What did he want to tell me? That I needn’t fear anything? That he was my friend? I searched out his eyes in the windscreen reflection. He had the absent gaze of someone you pass in the street.

  A second car parked across the way. They exchanged a brief flash of headlights. Mike ran over and sat up front. The Bear Cub got in beside me. He jostled me, pressing me against Pete. The Killer placed a hand on my knee. He took hold of it with an animal grip. I was his prisoner and he was letting me know.

  We drove through the heart of our enclaves, heading along the familiar streets. I knew them as well as you know a man. Each house had its history, every door its secret. They were giving me a sign. I was saying goodbye to them.

  One evening in 1972, at this crossroads, Cormac Malone should have died. Since then, he’d close his eyes whenever he went through it. On this night, too, he turned away. The Loyalists had arrived from Shankill. They had fired at him through their open car window, driving at full speed, not concerning themselves with the old man talking to him. Cormac saw them coming. He threw himself on the old man, pushed him to the ground with his walking stick and his vegetables and covered him with his body, but it was too late. Three bullets in the back, two thousand people at the funeral. Cormac hated the survivor he had become.

  In October 1974, under this streetlight on the Springfield Road, Cathy and Jim’s son Denis had been killed by a plastic bullet, shot through the embrasure of an armoured vehicle. He was going to get some milk from the shop. He died at the age of thirteen, on the pavement, a £5 note clutched in his hand.

  At the end of February 1942, in that little garden, against that red Beechmount door, an IRA man had handed me my first gun.

  We crossed the border at six in the morning on Saturday, 16 December 2006. Pete’s hand was tight on my knee. Cormac had slept, the Bear Cub, too – snoring lightly, his forehead against the pane. We were in the Republic of Ireland. I was returning home. The party had reserved the lounge of a Dublin hotel and booked a press conference. Sinn Féin wanted to demonstrate that the British were continuing their dirty war. After having tried to crush our resistance, they had infiltrated it and corrupted some of its members.

  Everyone had put on a tie before leaving the vehicles. I was the only one with an open shirt, looking like someone who had been in police custody overnight. The room was full. I arrived on foot, freely, surrounded by the men. I was overcome with dizziness. The cameras, the microphones, all those journalists talking at the same time. What did they know about me? About our struggle? What had they come here for? To hear what? Find out what? Report what? For them, the war had been so easy to describe. The good British, the bad terrorists. Everything had already been said. They didn’t believe in the ceasefire. ‘Manoeuvre’, ‘tactics’: they drew their headlines from the big bag of doubts. When they had to admit it was really happening, they confused political volition and military surrender, then turned away from us. Peace? Uninteresting. Hope is
harder to sell than fear. And suddenly, without any warning, here they had a traitor to sink their teeth into, a spy, a thrill. An old and lingering odour of war.

  Cormac was behind me, accompanied by another Ard Chomhairle member. They were grave and sullen. When the microphones were held out, I confessed. Nothing more. That way the British would know that I had given myself up.

  —My name is Tyrone Meehan. I am a British agent. I was recruited twenty years ago, at a vulnerable point in my life. I was paid for handing over information ...

  I inhaled deeply. The breath was coming back to me. There. It was done. That confession had been stuck in my throat for all those years. I had repeated it night and day. I had uttered it in a low voice in the streets, at pub counters, in the heart of tricolour marches. I had said it quietly with my eyes. To Sheila, to Jack, to my comrades, to my friends. I would have really loved someone to hear it. And I prayed so hard that nobody would find out. At night I wanted deliverance. In the morning I’d still partly believe I was the great Tyrone Meehan.

  I confessed. The men led me outside, pursued by dozens of questions. I got back in my seat, between Pete and the Bear Cub. My hands were shaking slightly. The Killer didn’t catch my knee this time. They brought me to the countryside, a few miles beyond Dún Laoghaire, to be questioned by the IRA. They hadn’t understood that that soulless admission for the press was also addressed to my own side. I would remain silent. I had said too much. It was already past the time to stop talking.

  I found myself back on the street on 20 December 2006 at nine o’clock, after four days of questioning. They didn’t touch me, or even mistreat me. They had given up.

  —We’ll leave it there, Tyrone, Mike said to me after turning off the camera.

  —I’m free to go?

  —That’s right.

  So I walked. Along the harbour, towards the city. I was wearing black sunglasses, and my cap was pulled low the way I’d worn it as a soldier. My photograph had been all over the newspapers. It was still hanging about, at the bottom of the page. Two faces placed side by side, the young Tyrone and the bastard. The bright-eyed kid, standing with other combatants, his cheeky grin in Crumlin Gaol. And the dazed old man between Mike and Eugene, grey, dishevelled, lips dry, gaze absent, surrounded by microphones like the guns of a platoon. A ball of anxiety. At that hour, from the north to the south of Ireland, loud-mouthed hardmen were dreaming of putting a bullet in me. The pubs were humming with my name, eyes were searching me out. Others were swearing to have known me. They were interviewed over and over on the national airwaves.

  —You really didn’t suspect anything?

  Sheila had hidden €150 in my bag. Three €50 notes, folded in a paper napkin with my sandwich. I took a bus as far as the city centre. My head and stomach ached. I had never felt comfortable in this city, I had become a threat to it. I decided to get to Donegal by coach. No station to get through, less moving around than on a train. Once you’re sitting down, you’re sheltered. The first Bus Éireann bus was leaving at one o’clock. I sat right at the back, on the left, to avoid the driver’s large rear-view mirror. I ate Sheila’s sour egg, onions and soggy bread.

  Several seats away from me, I saw my photo spread out. I shrank back into my seat. I needed to sleep.

  I closed my eyes in Navan. For a few minutes only. Virginia, Cavan. My country was flashing past in silence. At every stop I’d turn towards the glass, my hand shading my forehead. Ballyconnell, Ballyshannon. The driver was having fun with the sheep on the road, a fallen tree, and that American tourist who got on in Pettigo and took a photo of the inside of the bus.

  —In Ireland, it’s a euro per passenger to take a photo! the driver muttered into the microphone.

  She blushed, apologizing comically, before the laughter reassured her.

  We drove through Donegal. It was getting dark. I could feel the boundaries of my childhood battering inside me. Almost five hours on the road.

  —Killybegs! Upper Road, shouted the driver.

  He was a short redhead, with funny blue glasses. A farmer, who looked like he’d borrowed them from a Trinity College student. I went up the aisle silently. My scarf was covering my mouth. I was the only one getting off. He hadn’t opened the door. I was forced to turn around, to look at him. He operated the lever.

  —Good luck, the driver said.

  I was on the step, I turned around. He was watching me. I nodded. You say goodbye to your passenger. See you. I hope we won’t have rain. But not ‘good luck’. I didn’t respond. He nodded and closed the door behind me.

  I crossed the village. Walked towards my father’s house. I was bent over, pains in my legs, tired from everything. It wasn’t yet completely dark when I got to the path. The huge fir tree, the old slate roof. Thrown into the brambles was a tar bucket and a large brush.

  Traitor!

  The graffiti was scrawled across the wall.

  Nothing had been forced. The key turned in the lock. I left the shutters closed and put on the latch and chain. There were still a dozen candles on the shelf, and a bottle of alcohol for a lamp. I lit the remains of a tall candle. I didn’t want anyone to see the light from the road. I didn’t get undressed. I left my scarf, cap and gloves on. The fire could wait until tomorrow. I lay down like that, with my shoes on, buried under our bedcovers and the ones from Jack’s bed. I opened my flask of vodka. Half-empty. I drank all of it in one swig. I listened to the silence. The winter of my childhood, with Christmas in the distance. I toasted my return. My mother’s misfortunes. My father’s fists. I could see my brothers, my sisters, all crowded into the big bed and on the ground on straw mattresses. I counted their shadows in the darkness. Cheers to all of you, my loves. The night is going to be long. The longest night a man has lived. And even if he wakes again, the day will never come again. Nor the spring, nor the summer, nothing else but night.

  23

  Killybegs, Wednesday, 4 April 2007

  The explosion woke me at three in the morning. Violent, in crashing echoes. Lightning. A tree in the forest was struck. I was in a sweat. I rekindled the fire, slipped a cardigan over my pyjamas and drank a beer while watching the flames.

  Yesterday evening, going to bed, I hummed to myself. My voice surprised me. I was sitting on the bed, a biography of James Connolly lying on the blanket. I strained my ears, as if someone else had come into the room. Beer, vodka, nervousness, drunkenness. I hummed to myself like one who has become detached from his mind. I lay down. I read. Just a page to help me find sleep. Wounded by the enemy and then looked after by the enemy, Connolly was unable to stand on the day of his execution. So he was shot in a chair. On 12 May 1916, the day of the killing, the surgeon who had saved his leg asked Connolly if he would be so kind as to pray for him, and for all those who were going to put him to death.

  —Yes, sir, Connolly responded, I will say a prayer for all men who do their duty according to their lights.

  I reread that sentence, pronouncing each word aloud.

  —... according to their lights.

  Connolly had prayed for the executioners because they believed they were doing their duty. I got up, tore the page out and stuck it into my notebook. Then I drank a beer. The last one – the one that always comes before the next one. It was a lager light as water. I polluted it with the vodka. I drank it in pints, mixing the spirit and beer together in equal parts.

  I went to bed drunk, then woke up terrorized. It wasn’t lightning. A broken cry, of steel and iron. Not far from the house, on the path, perhaps. I took up a torch and Seánie’s hurley, my hand clenched on its wrist grip. It was dark. There was nothing outside, just me. I circled the house. Noise behind me. The rustling of the forest. A fox, or a field mouse hunting.

  —I’m right here!

  I roared:

  —Tyrone Meehan is at home!

  My hair was flying about in the sea breeze.

  —I’m ready for you, you bastards!

  I looked at the sky. It didn’t look like a s
torm was coming. The moon was bathing the low stone walls and the tops of the hills.

  I had been woken by a night explosion, a din from memory, remorse hitting me in waves, shattering my dreams.

  I went back inside. I opened the bottle of vodka. Pour, pour, pour. There, that’s it. The bubbling of a can of beer opening. I mixed them right up to the brim. Still drunk from yesterday, already drunk for today. And who is there to judge me? I’m talking with the rats. I have woodlice for friends. I share my bread with the ants, my soldiers. Whole units of them, marching under my orders. In my father’s house, I am in charge. I opened the curtains and the window wide. I wanted them to see me in the middle of the night. In a few hours, a pale brightness would light up the horizon. The first birds. The forgiving morning. Another new day and I would be alive.

  It was not an explosion that woke me, it was the echo of an explosion. Its eternal memory. Twenty pounds of a combination of ammonium nitrate, diesel and TNT, packed by Jim into an iron dustbin filled with nails, bolts, filings, shards of glass and steel balls.

  It was the end of October 1981. The hunger strike had ceased several days earlier. We were aching for revenge. Jim had manufactured three similar devices, all of them hidden on the first floor of a ruined house in Divis Flats. The guy in charge of logistics had asked him for a remotely controlled device. The first bomb was supposed to explode on 11 November to disrupt the Remembrance Day memorial ceremonies. The IRA had decided that the attack would take place in an open-air car park several streets away from City Hall, during the reception being given there.

  I have never liked bombs. To my mind, since World War II and the Blitz on Belfast, that word was German. I don’t like the idea of scheduled death.