by Jonathan Lee
“You’ll be on the right side of history.” These words had seemed absurd when Dawson had first said them. But these days Dan felt, with increasing confidence, the rightness of what he was doing. Volunteering offered him a purpose. He nurtured it. He was reluctant to see the bulk and heft of his own opinions whittled down into something more subtle. He’d seen, among many other volunteers, that subtlety tended to sit side by side with doubt.
“We need types like you,” Dawson had said. “Idealists with a brain.” But being an idealist, if that’s what he was, didn’t obligate him to tell the truth, did it? It meant adhering to the truth, probably. A bigger truth, a conviction and a faith, which was something different. And why would he tell his mother that they had received another threatening call? Why would he let her lie awake at night thinking Prods wanted them dead? Why would he make clear to her that specific people, actual individuals who had this actual phone number, wanted to see the end of him and the end of her because—despite believing in a similar God—their ancestors disagreed over the sufficiency of Scripture, the completeness of certain words in a book, the authority and office of the Pope? He was determined to keep her in the dark. She knew there were risks in living around here. (There were risks living anywhere, she said; there are risks in every town around the world, and why should I be forced out of my home?) A man breathing hard down the line would add nothing to her armory.
The tinkle and squeak of cutlery now. “Shall I wet the tea?” she said.
“No thanks, Ma.”
“Go on.”
“I’m fine with the drink I have.”
Another sip of vodka. She shook her head.
These days his doubts tended to surface in very specific situations: after a glance from a neighbour; sometimes after sex. A girl on the mattress in the garage. Sad Samantha from the Falls. Samantha who was always calling him cold even though, in the private spaces of his head and heart, nothing would stay still. After making love, questions filled the space vacated by desire. Were the other three Catholic families on this road receiving the same anonymous calls? What did it mean if they weren’t? He’d watch Samantha fall asleep, her face alive with light from his father’s hurricane lamp, the glass chipped in two places and going slowly grey. He slept in the garage when violence was high. Lately that meant almost always. Best place to protect their home if anyone broke in. His mother thought he liked to sleep there to stay cool.
Lately he’d had to introduce, much to his mother’s consternation, a household rule that only he could answer the phone. He told her it was important that their telephone number be perceived as his business line. She’d frowned at that and then offered, with no diagnosable irony, to be his secretary. Keep a diary, she said. I could keep a diary of your plumbing jobs, electric jobs, your wire-work and the like. To hear her offer this made him want to cry.
People said they couldn’t find work in Belfast, but as far as he was concerned there was plenty to go around. You couldn’t rely on an employer because most of them were Prods who—fair enough—wanted Prods. So then: work for yourself. Between 6 a.m. and 11 a.m. each day he did lighting for businesses and homes. Between 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. he mainly focused on plumbing. In the interim hours there was the army, and that took up more and more energy. The peelers seemed to think he was gainfully employed (which he was) and honest (which he mainly was). In a neighbourhood where half the people were on the dole, he wasn’t a priority problem. One or two liked to rough him up a bit, call him a Fenian cunt, but they had never once handed him over to Special Branch. No one had connected him to the Provos.
His mother cleared her throat. “So that Dawson man came round.”
He looked up from pictures of cherries reclining on icing. “And you were going to tell me when?”
“Would it be important?”
“What did he say?”
“That man.”
“What did he want?”
“Well, I asked him if it was an electrics query, didn’t I, and he said yes. He said it very probably was.”
“Very probably was.”
“You know how he’ll talk.”
“You answered the phone.”
“You’ll listen. He came round in person. A mouth for mystery that man. Said, ‘That’s right, it’s an illumination issue.’ Illumination issue! To describe the lights!”
She returned to her work. The kitchen’s one light—a long fluorescent tube, 60 watts, drywall patching involved—made a ghost of her. He felt sure the loose skin falling from her throat was a new thing, like the thinning of her hair this last year and the swelling of her ankles before that. The ageing process, with its small adjustments, seemed to pick on one or two small items at a time.
When he was growing up in this house there had been a picture of a long-haired Jesus in here, above the fridge. The dull buzz from the fridge had seemed to creep so coolly from Our Saviour’s eyes and his half-smile seemed to speak of a love for acid rock. In the background of the picture was a woman in a blue veil standing in a burning bush. As a child he’d always looked at it and thought, If the bush is burning she should go stand on the grass. The parables he liked best as a kid were the ones based in common sense. It took him years to start despising their simplicity.
His father had loved that picture of Jesus. Stared at it in the early days, when they still said grace before meals. Why did they stop? It was hard to recall. Buried the picture with him. A new suit, a new tie. He had looked much smarter in death than he had in life. Hair combed and skin smelling of cologne.
His father’s necktie had been secured with what the undertaker called a half-Windsor. To Dan’s eyes the knot looked lopsided. He was fourteen. He wanted to improve it. To improve it he had to remove it, put the tie around his own neck, remind himself of the rules. He felt he was dressing for school but after the funeral he didn’t go to school for weeks. He walked the streets instead, met people who told him they’d look out for him, pay him for little jobs. Once the knot was nice he slipped the tie back over his father’s head, unsettling only a little of the make-up on the ears.
He finished his vodka and excused himself for a few minutes. “Got to feed the dogs,” he said. He let them chase each other around the small garden in tighter and tighter circles, until one rolled over and they fought. When you scratched behind the brown one’s ears his eyes went dreamy and slow.
3
Dan found out about the Grand Hotel operation in March of ’84, the week of his twenty-fourth birthday, a quiet celebration at the Harp. Many of the volunteers in the pub that night were people he didn’t know. At times, talking to them, he couldn’t shake the sense that they were soft. There was a langour about them. A blurriness to their beliefs. It seemed rare these days for recruits to be put through the kind of initiation he’d experienced six years ago in the field with the dogs, or to be put through any initiation at all. There were worries about retention. Bobby Sands’s body had been cold too long. An army needs its poster boys.
For the fourth or fifth time in his life, drink in hand, the lights in the bar he was in went off and he heard the whine of the Saracens. The door broken down. The Brits charging in over splintered wood. Paras puffed up by flak jackets worn under their tunics. Ireland at night was a repeating dream.
“Could have knocked,” said a drinker, staring down at the ruined door. There was laughter. The Paras said sit on the floor. Everyone groaned and sat on the floor. They wanted information about someone called Micky McGee. No one knew a Micky McGee, or else knew so many Micky McGees that it was impossible to pick among them, and the added complication was that there were people in that bar who would rather have died or lost a hand than told the truth to a Para. Dan sat with his elbows resting on his knees.
One of the Paras started pouring pints of ale. He asked what was on the table next to Dan. Bottle-shaped. Wrapped in silver paper. No one said a thing. It didn’t take a genius to work out what it was. The Para wasn’t a genius. He took a sip of beer and asked ag
ain. After a certain amount of asking his face had the coarse blush of a good bolognese and he allowed the beer to run on from the tap. It began to flood the floor.
This was above all a waste of beer so Dan stood up to explain. “It’s my twenty-fourth,” he said. “Five of us at our table. One of them brought me a present. The others are certified cheapskates.”
More laughter. Mick Cunningham shouting “I’m no fucken cheapskate!” The beer tap was still running. The landlord looked broken. Beer pooled on the ground and broke out in thin streams that carried sawdust and dirt to the walls.
One of the Paras asked for the bottle. People for some reason were looking to Dan. He nodded. No point battling these guys on every single thing. Hand to hand the bottle was passed to the Para. The Para unwrapped it and made a show of being impressed. “Good Scotch,” he said, and helped himself to a slug of Scotch. “Not bad at all. Really.”
A second Para took an interest in Dan. Said: “On your birthday it’s customary to do a dance.”
“What?”
“Do us a jig, if you please.”
“Fuck off.”
A third Para fiddled with the radio behind the bar, found an Irish tune. Da di di, da da, da da. Sweaty brow. Greasy eyes. All the sticky charm of a congealed school meal.
“Do a little Taig dance. A little Irish jig.”
“Get lost,” he told them.
The Para who’d been pulling pints now pulled the bolt of a Sterling down. “Have a go,” he said. “It would be lovely.” Two of the younger Paras looked to the floor in shame, guys whose sense of fairness perhaps hadn’t yet been pressed away, and one tried and failed to intervene.
Dan standing. The room silent. He told the Para he wasn’t in the mood to entertain.
“I think you should.”
“No.”
“How sure are you?”
“Fuck you.”
“Doing a little jig for a minute, that’s all I’m asking. Save your friends some trouble.”
He didn’t even know a jig.
The Para with the Sterling pointed it at Martina’s bare legs. This act of unsubtlety extracted a groan from the crowd.
Martina looked up at the Para. “I dare you,” she said. Her defiance made Dan twitchy and proud. The anger she’d managed to salvage from a short cruel youth, all the shit she’d sucked up her nose while her father watched, all the poison pinned into her veins.
“Dare him,” the Para said, and pointed at Dan. Seemed to be under the misapprehension that he’d said something terribly clever. “Go on, boy, just a little dance for this girl here. Do that and maybe I won’t take her out back for a prize.”
There was the exchange of swear words. There was Martina’s hair being pulled. There was another of the Paras saying, “This has got to stop, Rob.” There was Jim Callaghan getting a baton in the ribs for intervening. And finally there was Dan standing there, in the middle of the floor, shifting his weight from foot to foot, the Paras clapping, cheering. One or two of the drinkers were clapping too. Most were staring down into their drinks.
Afterwards Martina drew her legs into her chest and sat by the window, saying nothing.
—
At the end of the week, waiting for the shame of the dance to cool, telling himself his life would contain no more moments like that, thinking of things he should have said and done, he came home early from an electrical job and decided to work on the garden. Quiet was what he wanted, the quiet only your own private land can provide. His mother was over at the club playing cards. She was a fierce cheat. Twice he’d had to beg them to restore her membership, and last week he’d promised a council of intimidating old women, frowning behind slow blooms of cigarette smoke—Mafia lords in a fucking film—that he’d be happy to provide transportation to other members of the club should they see fit to exercise the Christian principle of forgiveness. He’d nailed it with that form of words. The Christian bit was of limited interest to these old girls, but the offer of free transportation was a tangible earthly perk. Heads turned. Words were whispered. If he could promise a touch of assistance to those who struggled for lifts, who were less mobile or lived alone, well then, yes, they might see fit to overlook the unfortunate incident, which they were sure had involved no malice. It would be a nice gesture, altogether.
The sun today was low in a cold sky. Made his teeth hurt to look at it. He closed the kitchen window and went searching for some gardening gear.
On his knees in the cupboard under the stairs he tried on his father’s gloves. Too large. His father had been sausage-fingered. Big angry hands on a quiet determined man. A miracle, really, that he could do the fiddly work he did. After leaving the tobacco factory he’d retrained as an electrician and odd-job man. Said that the freedom inherent in self-employment more than compensated for the lack of security. By working nights and weekends—a peculiar kind of freedom, it seemed to Dan then—he’d earned just enough money to buy the family this narrow terraced house on what was then a safe, mostly Catholic street, and to pay down the mortgage each month. The back garden was a source of pride and worry. Every week weeds would sprout between paving stones. Every Tuesday morning, for fifteen minutes, his father would pull them up.
Growing up in this house Dan had seen riots break out in ’69. He’d seen the British Army mobilised to restore order. He’d looked on, with mounting excitement, as the barricades went up between Catholic and Protestant communities. By climbing trees you could swing yourself over to the other side, hide-and-seek, play You’re the Brits and We’re the IRA, chanting warnings, your voices charged with drama, bright with it, giving off imagined glory. He’d stood side by side with Jackson, a crayon-eating kid from the Ballymurphy, as authorities pulled the trees down in August ’69. In July of 1970, during a gun battle around the Falls, he was forced to stay indoors with his mother. The safety was as smothering as this cupboard. Gunshots cracking through the dark. To be a ten-year-old boy prevented from fighting—it had struck him as bitterly unfair.
Rust had made a hole in his father’s shovel. There were blisters of rust on the spade. Rust and dried mulch had ruined the garden shears and you could barely open the blades.
In a plastic bag in the cupboard he found rinsed-out soup cans that his mother was keeping for what? Made him think of coffee-jar bombs hurled at Land Rovers. He’d seen his older cousins spring-load and throw them in fits of youthful excitement, an excitement he’d been desperate to take as his own. At some point the civil rights marches became minor riots. He went on a march with his dad, Connor, Tom, a family. The rainy weather had no effect on their mood. Adrenalin, sense of purpose. People broke rank and punches were thrown. Sound crowding in on you, people grabbing at your clothes. A brick struck his father on the head, side of the head, temple. Didn’t see the moment of impact. Saw the deepening bruise. It was more than sad. His father on the ground, one eye half closed, rain falling on his pale face, washing it. He might have survived if the police had listened. They said he was faking. They said it was a trap. One, in desperation, kicked his father in the stomach—a way to prove he was alive. His father didn’t move. The policeman shuddered. What do you do when the people making the rules aren’t interested in fairness? When they choose who to protect based on religion, race, history? The police are scum. People who join the police are scum. Dan hurried through this thought and went out to buy new tools.
—
Brand-new serrated grass whip in his hand, eleven-inch blade and a hardwood handle. The patio was a thin little runway of paving stones, modest but clean. Flower beds bordered it on three sides: tangled briars, creeping thistle, the hollow stems of other plant life he couldn’t fairly name. He’d let domestic duties slide. It felt good to tick off some jobs. His great discovery, coming out of adolescence, was that being busy gave you energy.
Three hours he worked at trying to clear the weeds. The grass whip, while effective for ripping into stubborn stuff, was curiously unsatisfying to wield. To get any rhythm going you
needed to angle your body in an unnatural way. As time passed pain collected along the right flank of his back. Twice he managed to embed the tip of the blade in a fence post. The effort to extricate himself from these errors was tremendous. After a third comic wrestle, jerking and pulling and cursing as the blade refused to budge, he decided to leave it there. He began using a severed stem from the most mysterious weed group in the garden, the stuff that looked a little like bamboo, to thwack and flatten nearby brambles. The simplicity of this new method pleased him: Nature against Nature. Before long, though, the stem broke and he admitted to himself, with a reluctance that tugged hard at his biceps and thighs, that it was time for the shears and the rake.
He clenched his jaw against the sound of metal combing stone and then there was another noise: small metallic rattling. The back gate began to grumble, the hinges started to rasp. He took the trowel in his hand as if that would help and watched as a shoe came into view.
Dawson McCartland. The perennial interrupter of progress. “Danny,” he said. “Nice day for it, eh?”
“Average.”
“Average is nice,” Dawson said. “Don’t underestimate the pleasures of average.”