High Dive
Page 9
“Heard about your initiation,” Colum said. “Aye. The dogs. That one’s getting nice and famous. Though I expect he was only preparing Your Majesty for obstacles others might raise.”
Don’t give in, Dan thought. But he gave in. “What did you hear?”
Colum grinned and scratched his neck, staring at the ground as if it were the future. “Other option, course, is he just wanted to give you nightmares. Dawson McCartland’s nice like that. Fuckers love a good nightmare.” He clicked his fingers. “My first time? They gave me a gun and an address and that was that.”
“I won’t be doing any of that stuff.”
“What?”
“House calls.”
“Ha,” Colum said, and allowed himself an unusual pause. “Demoralises the police, stiffing them at home. Shows all the other police there’s no place that’s their own to relax, they said. Hadn’t even occurred. I was even younger than you, probably. I was seventeen. So I’m realising quick I’m going to have to get a ride into an Orangies’ area. And I’m realising a certain amount of planning needs to be done for the runback, though I’ve got only a day to do it. So the day comes and I’m wearing a Rangers badge, right? Though it kills me, so it does. And I’m wearing a pair of Beatle boots I got hold of from a fat lad. And all the while they’re not telling me much about this guy I’m going to stiff or any real advice, tips if you will, but I’m used to that, aren’t I? Grandfather used to be an Ulster fiddler, a virtuoso in Donegal—really. Took an awful reddener when he forgot his music one day. None of those fiddler men would let you in on their performance practices, no way; that’s what I’m sayin’. It’s a similar thing. So anyway, I go and stiff the guy and his wife comes screaming into the hall, looking at the pool of blood. Cool as anything I was. Just did the thing and left.”
Dan nodded. “Sure.” People were always heroes in their own telling.
“Yeah,” Colum said. “It was only once I got back to my district and had my first pint that the whole thing went right up on me. Shaking all over I was. Been shaking mostly ever since.”
He had Dan’s attention now. Night clouds moved across the moon. In a brief breeze an empty can rolled towards them and Colum’s shoulders did a jump. They laughed.
—
A whining sound. A few thin flickers of light. Colum got up. “Here we go,” he said, newly hard in the face, oddly impressive-looking. He picked up the bags. They ran to the end of the alley.
“Wait.”
Dan did as he was told. The black Saracens were creeping along the Falls, slow and certain. The walls flanking this section of the road were painted black, a mass redaction of the murals of Bobby Sands and other heroes. The sound of heavy boots. Foot patrols moving behind and alongside the Saracens. Even if Colum had brought his gun with him, there was no way you could see the men well enough to snipe them. All of the officers were wearing black. Anything else would have spoiled the decor.
They watched as two RUC men broke down the first door to a Catholic home. The groan of the wood giving in. Dan’s heart going hard. In the first open bag a dozen plastic bottles. Each of them was three-quarters full with white paint and water. “Quick now,” Colum said. They scrambled to unscrew five or six lids. In another bag they had waterproof sheeting tied around chunks of dry ice. They started squeaking fragments of dry ice into the open bottles of paint, screwing the lids back on. Colum slapped Dan’s face. “Quick, I said.” Running.
Out into the open road. They got alongside the Saracens, a taste of smoke in the air, a soulful adrenalin building. A woman dragged out onto the street was saying “Don’t you touch the inside of my house!” Men from the foot patrol were running into her home and another man, lank and stooped in the dim of the moon, had his hand around the woman’s mouth. Colum hurled the first bottle. The lazy grace of it in the air and the little crackle and pop as it hit bodywork and exploded. Better than when they’d rehearsed. Perfect. White paint sprawling out on the Saracen, white paint dripping and pooling. Dan hurled two bottles. His blood was swaying. Hurt to breathe. Neither exploded. He needed to throw them harder, higher. Colum was shouting “Pots and pans! Pots and pans!” without a single tremor in his voice.
Dan went to ground, grit in his elbows, and pressed more fragments of dry ice into bottles. He sprinted, the bags banging on his shoulders, and threw a bottle at an RUC man—missed—but then one of Colum’s bottles looped and the man’s uniform was half white and the man yelled, fell. Another Saracen backing up to the front door of the next Catholic home to be searched and torn apart. Another throw. Dan was screaming “Pots! Pots! Pots!” and like magic windows were opening all down the street. Colum must have lobbed another bottle high—Dan could see it coming down almost at a vertical—and paint exploded over the roof of a Saracen. A precision hit. He’d got Colum all wrong. Loved the man in this moment. Loved him. Catholic women were leaning out of windows banging pots and pans. The whole street waking up and making noise, ensuring others rose and joined. Don’t let these men rip our floorboards up. Don’t let them call our freedom fighters terrorists. Some of the women were throwing glass bottles stuffed with burning hankies towards the blotches of white, tiny bursts of fire near the targets, three and then six and then more. Other women were in the street in nighties. They were standing in the way of the Saracens and banging their pots and pans above their heads, shouting “Put the fires out if you like! Go on then!” Shouting “What’s a taste of water then? Give us a shower!” All this as Dan ran into another dark alley, the last of his bottles used up, changing into clean clothes and beginning the long jog home.
—
In training he tried to show that he was hungry for knowledge. There seemed to be an infinite supply. There was more artistry to violence than he’d ever expected, more technique and philosophy. Months rolled by with only paint-bomb operations. Less a war than an apprenticeship—someone finally taking him under their wing. They told him they thought his future was bright.
In a warehouse space that smelt of raw meat they taught him how to open and split a shotgun cartridge. They taught him that candle wax in the tip made it hold together on impact. Mercury in the cartridge made it more deadly. Garlic purée in the cartridge put poison in the blood. They taught him to smear axle grease on a bullet to make it fly through reinforced doors. They taught him to pack cartridges with rice to slow them down. They showed him all the things you could do with the looped brake cable of a pushbike. A knife in a body needs to be twisted upward. Bulletproof glass has a blue-green glint. If a friend’s car is stolen, call Sinn Fein on this number. If a friend’s family is persecuted, call Sinn Fein on that number. Golf courses are for golf and the storage of weapons. Some people relax by emptying magazine after magazine into oil drums, tree stumps, the tyres of abandoned cars; others prefer the cold sophistication of invention, electrics, tricks with cassette-recorder parts. You can hammer away at Semtex with a rolling pin, shifting its shape to fit a suitable space. You can do anything you like, just don’t get any on your hands. On his nineteenth and twentieth and twenty-first birthdays Dawson sent packets of cash.
2
A book called Everyday Baking lay open on the kitchen table. Dan nibbled at his lower lip, pretending to pay it close attention. Every now and then his mother would ask him to call out an amount or instruction and whatever reply he gave would cause her to come up behind him, freckled forearms resting on his shoulders, floury hands made rigid in concern for his clean shirt, as she leaned down and kissed his ear. This whole gesture of affection was, he knew, a way of perusing the recipe page and checking he hadn’t fucked things up. It was expected that her sons, left unsupervised, would fuck things up. All three of his older brothers had moved away. Bobby, deaf, to a special home called St. Joseph’s in Stillorgan. Tom to Scotland where he worked on a farm. Connor to America, happy to spill his secrets, each letter alive with new girls’ names. Lisa. Mary. Kimberly. Dawn.
Six oz softened butter, the recipe said. Six oz granulated sug
ar / caster sugar. Two large eggs, quarter-pint strong coffee, three tablespoons whisky. She was making a coffee cake. Halving the relevant amounts, presumably; the two of them would never get through it otherwise. It occurred to him to check this with her but he opted instead for a swig of vodka and water. There was an unspoken agreement that he would not challenge her while the oven was on, and a supplementary understanding that he’d challenge her rarely when it was off.
“Do you want some of those potato wedges?” she said. “As a starter, tide you over?” She was moving towards the fridge, the dull thud-thud of his father’s old five iron measuring out her steps. His mother had a hip issue, needed a stick to walk, but in the kitchen there was an unexplained preference for the golf club. “Are you hearing, Dan? A potato wedge I said.”
He shook his head. An image came loose. Last night’s dinner was an old sock, a blood clot and some pieces of warped plastic. Main courses were her undoing. She was better off sticking to desserts. His mother’s cupboard of accompanying condiments was a treasure trove of precious clues. If it arrived with mint sauce you knew you were looking at lamb.
“You’ll get yourself drunk,” she said.
“Hopefully.”
“You’ll want a biscuit the Gallaghers brought round.”
“What biscuits?”
“After you got Cal to reinforce their door.”
“On the house.”
“What’s that, Dan?”
“Cal put it on their house on the house. He didn’t charge.”
“Well, that’s grand. If you hold this a second I’ll get your biscuits down.”
He smiled. “Really, Ma, I’ll save myself for dinner.”
A short, thin woman who lived to fatten others up. Fuzzed-peach cheeks. Skin potato-sallow. Her arms of late looking empty, sausage casing squeezed of cheap meat. He knew it shamed her how little he ate. The slow-motion movements of his fork. The non-committal way he moved the food around his plate, picking, toying, never taking a second helping, never mopping up excess sauce with the bread. Hating the idea, in truth, that you’d want to take a clean hunk of bread and make it soggy. Toast was the thing he loved. Slice after slice in the morning, crispy at the edges and butter-supple in the middle. Bread was sufficient to keep him broad and strong if he added tinned fish during the day. Also those protein-dense snacks Mick’s brother procured for free from…He didn’t know where they were from.
A pip from the lemon in the bottom of his glass. Touch of citrus made vodka and tap water into a proper drink. The window bleary with steam and last night’s grease.
Many things about his mother remained a mystery to him, but he felt sure she was at her happiest when preparing food. There were still times when she went out to gather ingredients, but increasingly he tried to limit these excursions. The problem wasn’t so much her lack of mobility as her recklessness in the open air. If she saw an RUC man on the street she wasn’t beyond spitting at him or striking him, a frail woman swinging her stick and slinging abuse and bringing herself to ground in the process. In a fighting mood she was a nightmare to protect. Immune to reason. Deaf to it. Twice the RUC had retaliated, one officer with his truncheon and the other with the back of his hand. The second blow, administered a few months ago, had drawn one of the only real teeth from her mouth. Dan had come around the corner from the post office. He saw his mother on the pavement, legs spread, thick brown wrinkled tights. The RUC man was standing over her. The tooth was in his mother’s hand, extraordinarily long at the root, the slightest speck of blood on enamel that was the colour of mustard diluted and stirred. She looked down at it like a child with a new toy. The RUC man grimaced, tried to help her up, said she’d gone crazy and fallen. Possibly this was true. She said she’d been hit. The RUC guy seemed lost in a loop of wondering what he’d done or wondering how she got so good at lying. Dan found himself memorising the pattern of moles on the man’s face: one upper right on the hairline, three on the left line of the jaw. “That’s my mother,” Dan told him. “Be careful, that’s my mother.” And whether surprised by the evenness of Dan’s response or slow-plotting his next move, the RUC man simply stood there, arms at his sides, until Dan had got his mother halfway home.
An incident like that happened and you called Mick Cunningham. You imagined him at the other end of the line, pressing the receiver to his ruined ear, light pooling on the lunar landscape of his head. Cunningham called Dawson McCartland. Dawson McCartland called Mad Dog Magee, Chief Explosives Officer, your main reporting line. Magee circled back with you and the chain of command was a figure of eight, overcomplicated, tiring. There was a rule that you didn’t deal with personal matters personally, and another rule—linked—that authorisation for operations had to go through central command. It was a way of sanifying a plan, sweeping away elements of emotion. Useful in more than one respect.
His mother hobbling towards the stove, golf club clutched in her little blue fist. She positioned herself in the tight right angle where the cupboards met the drawers, freeing up all her fingers for chopping and peeling, the breaking of eggs.
It had been on TV, the RUC man’s death. The guy’s face in a box in the top right corner of the screen. A mole there, three here, telltale acne scars. A car bomb, the newscaster said, and later Mick would say to Dan that it had comprised three RDG5 grenades with five-second fuses, four ounces of TNT a piece. Someone had filled a ginger-beer bottle with sugar and oil and taped it onto the grenades. Someone else had added a juice carton of petrol. Someone. Someone. The contraption was attached to the steering column of the RUC man’s personal car and it sent him sky-high. The Belfast Telegraph ran the headline “PROVOS TAKE CREDIT FOR NEW FIREBALL.” At the weekend the Guardian picked up on the story. Someone sent Dan a clipping. Underneath the main piece was a box headed “WHO ARE THE RUC?”
Since 1922 the Royal Ulster Constabulary has had a dual role, unique among British police forces, of providing a normal law enforcement police service while, at the same time, having a remit to protect Northern Ireland from the activities of proscribed groups.
Did Guardian readers need to be told what the RUC was? It was shocking, if they did. His mother had yawned and put the newspaper to one side.
He’d spent a long dreamless night thinking about the RUC man with the moles, wondering if there hadn’t been a better solution, wondering if he was wrong to have taken his mother at her word. A beating—that’s all he’d been after when he made the call. But to get a beating arranged he’d had to share her account of what had happened, and what sort of man hits an old woman? A pathetic man, a dead man. Move on.
Pans hanging down from hooks above the stove. These were a biding presence. His mother’s concentration, while cooking, was quite something to behold. The way her face coloured and her small blue eyes became unblinking. Her whole body seemed to coil as she creamed the butter and sugar. Her shoulders remained rolled, her back bent, until the bowl contained a cloud. She cracked eggs with one hand as the other hand continued beating and then there was the expert sieving of flour and salt, the three quick taps on the rim of the sieve, the slow circles made by her wrist when it was time, the precise time, to fold the dry ingredients into the moister part of the mix. When she said the word “syrup” to herself, a reminder of some future stage in the process, her tongue seemed to lick real love into the word, the language a sugary treat.
“One to two chopped hazelnuts,” he said. “For decoration, apparently.”
She moved behind him and leaned her forearms on his shoulders. “Later,” she said. “They’ll be for later.”
Stirring darkness in. The process of adding the coffee to the batter brought a new alertness to her features. With all her weight on the five iron she stretched up to retrieve something from the cupboard—a cake rack—and he was on his feet but she had it now, refusing help, whispering, “Pan, whisky, springform, syrup.” He could sense within her movements an excitement and anticipation that other parts of her life could not provide.
“Who was that?” his mother asked. She had a way of flaring her nostrils when suspicious.
“Electrical job for the club. Lighting.”
She smiled. Grateful for the lie? From the garage came the barking of dogs.
“Almost forgot myself,” she said. “Jan Henry? From the Donegall? She told me my fortune this morning.”
Jan was a Protestant, one of maybe two or three his mother was happy to talk to. She got all over town, didn’t mind crossing the line to read a palm.
“She said, first of all, that I’m soft and spongy these days. That I’ll be picking up vibrations from the universe. Positive vibrations, she confirmed. She said I’d be continuing to receive the benefits of wisdom.”
“That was first of all.”
“Yes. You think she’s loony?”
“I think she’s loaded.”
“Loaded?”
“Her life’s a dander in the park.”
“But do you believe it, Dan? That there’s good news ahead?”
“I do,” he said. “But I wonder how much of that news it’s in her gift to predict.”
“She’s gifted.”
“I don’t deny it.”
“Well then.”
“I’ve seen her car.”
“She said we were our own worst enemies, Dan.”
“That’s a stretch,” he said.
“It’s what she claimed.”
“She exaggerates.”
“No no.”
“She’s a storyteller. Accept her for what she is.”
“No, Dan, no. A cleverer woman there isn’t around.”
It was frightening and frustrating how easily she was deceived—by fortune-tellers, by door-to-door hacks, by her own son. The first big lies he’d told her came when he was an adolescent. Hidden magazines and skipped classes, little untruths that left him guilty and weary. But at some point the effort of remembering and repeating each fiction had taken on the shape of a game. Fatigue gave way to a determination to succeed. He began to realise he was good at lying and with each operation now he became more and more set on protecting her from the truth. That’s how he thought of it: protecting her from the truth. It was as if within the walls of his own life there was another person being born, an alternate Dan growing strong in secret. You had to work for what you believed in. It was the only thing a decent person could do. His father had said it was one of life’s few lessons. That and don’t mix your drinks.