by Nick Laird
“Margo?”
Her voice rang small and tremulous. She said it again, louder.
“I’m awake,” came the response.
“It’s raining pretty heavily.”
Margo didn’t respond.
“I feel like the whole hut is about to slide down the hill.”
They lay there and listened. A tapping sound began and Liz realized water was dripping from the roof onto the foot of her sleeping bag. She freed her arms and found her torch and turned it on, stood up unsteadily and hooked it to the ridge post.
“I’m going to have to move your—”
Margo screamed.
“What is it? What is it?”
Her sleeping bag thrashed around and unzipped and Margo was out standing in her tracksuit bottoms and fleece beside Liz, then holding onto her, then standing atop the rucksacks.
“Eyes! Below the boards!”
“What?”
“A pair of eyes below the floor, looking up! I just saw them.”
“Human eyes?”
Paolo’s face appeared at the little entrance to their room.
“Someone’s under the hut!” Margo screeched.
They shone their torches down between all the gaps but saw nothing now but mud and darkness.
Margo insisted that Paolo sleep in with them. Stan had slept through the whole thing and they left him now in the outer part of the hut. Paolo settled in by the entrance, and Liz lay between her cameraman and producer. Paolo stretched out on his back, and she faced away from him. She tried to forget that he was lying beside her and shut her eyes. But she could feel Margo’s breath fluttering across her nose. She pulled a T-shirt out of her bag and covered her face with it. She found herself pushing her bottom backwards an inch or so against Paolo, and he turned and pressed against her and she pressed back. They lay there spooning and neither of them moved for several minutes and she didn’t know if he was awake or not. She tried not to hold her breath or think to herself what it meant. It was nice, for a moment, to try to live without meaning one thing or another.
CHAPTER 21
The lobby of the Mitsis Alila Exclusive Resort & Spa in Rhodes was a cool sanctuary of soft wicker seats and white marble. A girl in white offered them flutes of pineapple juice in which small pink flowers floated. All the staff wore white, as if they were manning a sanatorium, or were members of the cult of luxury, gliding behind the marble desks and between the marble columns and around the tinkling marble fountain diligent and capable and silent as angels. She and Stephen had barely spoken for the previous three hours, but to enter this grand, quiet space soothed them both. Like Heaven’s waiting room. Now, as they stood at the check-in desk, Stephen took hold of her hand and she let him.
They were on the seventh floor with a sea view. A large, clean, anonymous hotel in a hot country is an Ulsterman’s idea of paradise, provided it’s not too hot, and provided the all-inclusive deal they’ve booked includes alcohol. Alison opened the door to the balcony and the heat came at her like she’d opened a furnace. There was the steady iteration of the waves, hissing intake and backwash, and she stepped out to see a narrow strip of yellow beach dotted with the hotel’s white umbrellas, the cloudless sky, the sun dazzling on the toiling sea. How happy she would have been.
“Stephen, come out here and look at this view.”
“I’m coming.”
“Isn’t it lovely?”
“It is.”
They ordered up steak and chips for two, a bottle of local Shiraz, and watched a movie about fishermen caught in a horrific storm. Alison had gone through the movies they could choose and tried to pick something in which no one was shot, a surprisingly difficult task. Stephen made Alison turn off her phone. It sat there on the desk, though, and she kept glancing over at it till finally he lifted it and placed it in the drawer. It was a portal to sadness. The sheets were clean and white and cool, but when Stephen reached across the bed to hug her, she pulled away. “Not yet,” she said. And: “I feel too far from you.”
—
The next morning the beach was busy, but they had loungers and umbrellas reserved for hotel guests. When they came up to get changed for lunch, Alison, who had been quiet but calm, went into the toilet and came out looking distressed.
“You want to tell me?”
“No.”
“Are people saying stuff to you?”
“On Facebook. And I made the mistake of reading the comments under the Sunday Life piece.”
“I thought you couldn’t get it online.”
“I subscribed.”
“Alison. Why don’t you just go off-line for a while?”
“But maybe we need to go through it. To see how people are going to react.” She lifted her phone, and read, in a flat, emotionless voice, “I was at school with her. She was always desperate. Didn’t realize she’d go this far, though.”
“Don’t, Alison.”
“I can see why she married a mass murderer. He was the only one who’d have her.”
“Leave it alone.”
“I know it’s off point but did anyone order a meringue? . . . It’s like the twenty-first century never made it to Mid-Ulster. . . . He should have been shot years ago. It’s scum like that—”
“Stop it,” Stephen shouted and grabbed her phone from her.
—
On the second day they lay under the umbrellas and drank beer by the smaller pool, where there were no children, while Alison tried to signal to passing parents, with her smile, that she did have kids and liked them, but was glad to be rid of them just now. After the buffet lunch they slept all afternoon in their room with the curtains drawn. Alison woke first and sat on the balcony in her new purple sarong and straw hat and watched the beach below. Rows of white umbrellas obscured most of the occupants, but here and there you could see a hand reaching for sun cream or the pink exposure of some brave soul who wanted the full force of the rays. Several children ran in and out of the shallows shrieking. A saggy old man in board shorts and a young woman in a leopard-print bikini walked hand in hand along the shore. Far out, beyond all the cheery activity, the flat expanse of the blue sea shivered and roiled.
Stephen came out in his boxers and sat across the plastic table from her. Since it had all come out, he’d adopted a dozy expression and a kind of ambling gait, as if he’d early-onset Alzheimer’s and a vaguely sprained ankle. It was all, Alison felt, too self-conscious to be real, and in any event it seemed to suggest that he was in pain, that he was struggling, which she thought was a bit rich in the circumstances. She looked back down at her guidebook.
“Anything interesting?”
“Oh this and that.”
“Like what?”
“Waves of invaders. Crusades. Sieges.”
“The usual.”
“There were two thousand Jews on the island that the Nazis deported and killed.”
“Terrible.”
“One of that band Pink Floyd used to have a house here.”
“Oh yeah?”
She nodded and stood up, handing him the book.
“I’m going to have a shower.”
“Want me to join you?”
Alison looked back at him with such a withering glance that Stephen blushed. He heard her lock the bathroom door.
—
In the evening they chose the Zorba restaurant—the hotel had five—and ended up drinking two bottles of red wine over dinner. They’d both ordered moussaka, and Alison had finished with the cheese course and Stephen had chocolate tart. A band had started inside, and was embarking on a shaky cover of Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro.”
“This is the life,” Stephen said.
“It is,” Alison quietly confirmed.
“Are you going to be miserable all holiday?”
She looked up at him, shocke
d.
“I’m devastated.” He said nothing so she repeated it. “Devastated.”
“I know.”
“You shouldn’t talk to me like that. You might have had time to get used to—”
Another couple was being led through the doors outside to the terrace, towards the empty table next to them.
“Anyway, we’ll talk about it later.”
The couple nodded hello and they nodded back. Once they’d sat down, the woman said quietly to her husband, “Well, this is better.”
Northern Irish. Alison looked over and said, “You fleeing the band?”
The man laughed. His striped shirt was very similar to Stephen’s. He was midthirties perhaps, the woman a little younger.
“Right enough, they set up just by our table.”
The woman nodded. “I couldn’t believe it. I thought they were going to wait till we left, but they just started playing. I couldn’t hear myself think. At least we’d finished the food.”
“It’s much nicer out here anyway.”
“Is there someone in swimming?”
“We thought so too, but I think it’s a buoy bobbing about.”
There was a silence and finally the woman said, “The hotel’s lovely, isn’t it?”
—
“You want to hear these?”
Stephen sat in the bath and Alison stood in the doorway, iPad in her hand.
“What?”
“Messages.”
“Do I?”
“Not all bad. Some very sympathetic.”
Stephen said nothing.
“There’s one from Judith saying they had three phone calls last night and the person hung up without speaking.”
“Jesus.”
“I got one through the Donnellys’ e-mail from someone called Ivan Clements from the Belfast Telegraph.”
“Delete it.”
“OK, but there’s one headed ‘University of Ulster Oral History Project.’ Can I read it to you?”
Stephen nodded.
“Dear Alison,
My name is David Boyd and I’m a researcher at the CAIN Centre for the Study of Conflict at the Coleraine campus of the University of Ulster. We have put together a large archive of oral testimony to do with the Troubles, and I wondered whether it would be possible to interview your husband Andrew Stephen McLean. Our archive includes interviews with hundreds of people involved in and affected by the Troubles.
Please rest assured that the interview is for a sealed archive and would not be opened or released until after the participant’s death—
“There’s a whole load of documents attached from something called CAIN, C. A. I. N., and it’s—”
“Delete it.”
“Well, hold on.”
“Delete it.”
“Shouldn’t you think about it?”
“Alison.” He sat up. The water in the tub sloshed back and skited up on the tiles.
“It’s just that people think of you . . . You should be able to tell them your story . . . What happened to you—”
“What happened to me isn’t relevant. It’s what I did.”
“It was a different time . . . Don’t you remember you said—”
Stephen snorted.
“If people knew the situation. You were almost a child—”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Maybe it shouldn’t be up to you.”
Stephen looked at her. “Who else would it be up to? You mean you?” He blinked at her.
“No, of course not. I mean . . .” She lowered the toilet lid and sat on it. “There’s no point arguing. I only meant maybe you owe it to everyone, to the country, to tell the truth of the situation. To tell the whole story, warts and all.”
Stephen sighed.
“In the classroom, you know, I’d sit my kids down and make them tell me exactly what happened. Then make them apologize to each other.”
“In your class?”
“Yes.”
“With six-year-olds.”
“Eight- and nine-year-olds.”
“Alison, I—I killed people. It’s not like I stole their lunch money.”
“Maybe you need to put your side of it.”
“My side?”
If he said he regretted the deaths, if he let remorse in, then wasn’t he admitting that the whole foundation was rotten? That his whole life had been a waste? That he had killed all those people for no reason? No, you couldn’t do that. You made your bed and you lay in it. You could be forgiven only by God. It wasn’t like a switch was flicked: lights on. There was forever slippage, confusion, uncertainty. Of course he regretted it. His life, his whole life . . . But how could you draw a line between what he regretted for himself and what he regretted for others?
“Well, you did what you did but you had reasons, didn’t you? They might have been terrible reasons, they might have been inadequate, they might have been wrong, but there were reasons. Shouldn’t you give them? Shouldn’t you try and explain? You’re not a psychopath.”
“I said no!”
It occurred to Alison now that she wanted Stephen to suffer. She was suffering and it was his fault. It was outrageous that he was here, alive and well, and all those people he had killed were not. It also felt important that he have a story, a linked chain of events that explained—thus excused—why he’d done what he’d done. The terrible things. She found she was looking at his hands intently.
“What about when the Shinners tell their story—their glorious freedom fighting.”
This was an argument Stephen could never resist. Whataboutery. Northern Ireland’s favorite form of rhetoric. She closed the three folds of the iPad cover gently.
“He says the project’s talking to lots of”—she baulked at “terrorists,” which wasn’t the word the e-mail had used either—“of people who were involved. The protagonists. You’d be one of a whole load.”
“I couldn’t be using anyone’s real name.”
“Isn’t it all out now?”
“Mostly. But. You know.”
“What?”
“There’s others, like, that were involved, you know.”
He looked up at her with his usual squint amplified into something approaching discomfort.
“Like who?”
“For one, the guy who gave the say-so.”
He turned on the hot tap.
“What happened to him?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
“You don’t betray your commander.”
Alison nodded as if she understood. She felt she was being asked to share in some elaborate fantasy and couldn’t, even if she’d wanted to. She said, “I’ll tell him you’ll think about it.”
—
What is a honeymoon for? Alison knew that they were meant to make memories they could live off for the rest of their lives, salt away the incidental moments they could return to and talk about. She booked massages, she booked a boat trip out to see some birds.
It wasn’t that she was always thinking about it.
But she was never not thinking about it.
Every glance between them now was freighted with this new, shared, terrible knowledge. Complicity.
They drank hard at night and during the day lay by the beach or the pool. In the afternoon Alison went wandering by herself for an hour or two. She visited the Lindos acropolis, the sailors’ houses—wandered the cobbled lanes and seafronts. Each shop selling beach mats, brightly colored beach towels, inflatable animals to ride in the pool, bats and balls for the beach. She picked up trinkets—painted Marianic icons, ships in bottles, blown glass elephants and seals and lions—and set them all back down.
On the day of their boat trip round the jagged headland, they w
aded in from the beach up to their knees to get to the boat and then two of the skinny little Greeks had to haul Alison up over the side. They picked up six more passengers from another hotel’s pier and started out. White birds took turns to fold themselves up and plunge into the sea. Little blocky white cottages sat high up on the parched yellow mountains. Stelios, the captain—or at least the one steering—called out distances and dates and facts, but it was impossible to hear him above the noise of the engine. They finally reached a bare rock in the sea where hundreds of cormorants hunched together and gabbled and squawked and shat. They were wretched, charred, evil-looking things. The boat circumnavigated the island and headed back, and Alison wasn’t sad to leave the shivering, ragged birds behind. The repetitive throb of the outboard, the lift and drop of the boat were hypnotic, and with the sun on the face, with the sea spray, the smell of petrol and salt, she felt herself relax, and inserted her arm into Stephen’s, and they sat there like an old couple, arms linked, watching the lacy wake behind them disperse, the surface resume its pitted façade.
When they went back to shower and change for dinner, she found the man Boyd from the University of Ulster had replied with a list of possible dates. Stephen, sitting on the balcony, eating a packet of foreign crisps whose flavor he could not discern, suggested—casually—the day after their flight home. Suddenly there was no drama about it: It was like he was setting up a meeting for a wee painting job. Which maybe he was. The newspaper article, the messages, the unending knowledge of being hated, of being really hated again by the large anonymous public, had worked on him. It felt unfair. She understood he wanted to tell someone why the thing had happened, how he was not that person, how he was a changed man. He wanted to offer the view his own mind had provided to his soul. Don’t worry, the mind said. You did your best with a bad hand.
Alison felt she had come round to the opposite opinion; she’d worked out that in the privacy of a room, in the silence of a mind, you didn’t have to confront or reflect, you could just pretend that everything was fine. For whole hours at a time they appeared to be normal people, and anything that brought it back to her—the violent cover of a paperback book by the pool, or the family at the next table talking about “terrorists,” even if they meant ISIS—had to be ignored, out-talked, refused completely. The thought of Stephen speaking about it in detail—to anyone, anywhere—suddenly repelled her. It was precisely the details she couldn’t handle.