by Jonathan Lee
“Try knocking next time, please.”
Dawson’s eyes did a second sweep of the garden. “You always were very polite.”
He wished he’d never given Dawson a key, but what were the options? All of the excuses had seemed to write their own solutions. “My mother is always looking out the window.” Tell her to draw the curtains. “The neighbourhood kids kick footballs over the fence.” Tell the kids to kick their footballs elsewhere. In the end he’d given Dawson what he prized above all else: access. If you lived in a Catholic area, as Dawson did, you were always looking for places to hide gear. You were safe from burnouts but vulnerable to searches. The advantage of being here, an odd one out on a Protestant street, was that everyone assumed you’d never be so stupid as to risk keeping weapons in your home.
With great delicacy Dawson picked a piece of lint from his shirtsleeve. He seemed to be waiting for a conversation to occur to him. These days he was less of an accountant in appearance. More a flamboyant lawyer. He wore suits with silk linings. Starched white shirts with double cuffs. Every day seemed to bring a new set of cufflinks. Some thought he was aping his daddy, a partner in Madden & Finuncane, and the other thing in development was his impatience with direct questions. Statements he’d answer. Mumbled asides he’d deal with straight away. But in the years they’d known each other Dan had noticed, more and more, that if you decorated your thought with a question mark you rarely got him interested. He’d wait in silence for another sentence, working towards a topic in his own time, on his own terms, sideways, a guy working a piece of furniture through a door.
“You should get yourself some gloves,” Dawson said. “Those hands’ll blister up.”
“Nice of you to worry.”
“Protecting my investment.”
“You need to feel the stuff.”
“Come again, sweetheart?”
“With your hands, to feel them, the weeds.”
Dawson began excavating something from the corner of one eye: a loose eyelash or a thin moon of sleep. He put his glasses back on and raised his heavy eyebrow. “What’s that stuff, then?” His nod was directed at the bamboo-like weeds marshalled skinny against the fence, impossible to uproot.
“I don’t know.”
“Spring-cleaning. Nice idea. Out with the old and in with the new, get your cassie looking nice.”
Dan watched Dawson’s gaze fall on a particular paving stone. The slabs around it were chalky with scratches. If you lifted the unmarked stone, as Dan did most mornings in a fit of something that could look to the untrained eye like paranoia, you saw a wooden hatch. The hatch opened onto a disused well shaft. You darted your hand down, keen to get the daily check over with, searching out a piece of thin rope wound around a nail. To tug on that rope and feel the necessary weight was a relief that bordered on bliss.
Dawson said, “Not having a general clear-out, are we?”
“Fuck off.”
“Ah.”
“Ah what?”
“Ah you’re pretty when you’re angry.”
“It’s risky, Dawson. It’s bad enough that the garage is a lab.”
Detonators, chemicals. A hundred empty bottles under ancient cotton sheets. Dan could picture it all as he spoke. Overhead the sun was getting lost behind a film of cloud but there was still a spring warmth in the air, apricot scent of cowslip.
“You’ll be rewarded, Daniel.”
“What for?”
“Aye. You’re on an upward curve.”
A number of expressions chased one another across Dawson’s face: vulnerability, viciousness, an extraordinary half-comatose brand of introspection.
“What is it I can help you with, Dawson? You still haven’t said.”
“Bad mood you’re in for sure.”
“No.”
“I have a nice plan.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Very nice, very special.”
Always a game. Liked his nice plans to be revealed with theatrical slowness. “Tell me the plan, then, before it’s autumn.”
Dawson readjusted his shirt cuffs. He liked no more than an inch of white to show where the suit sleeves ended. His eyes alighted on the grass whip stuck in the fence post. “A scythe,” he said.
“Grass whip.”
“It’s not a very subtle sculpture.”
“It’s stuck. Give me a hand with it.”
“My oxters’ll get sweaty. It’s always the lefty that goes first.” They grabbed the handle and pulled. “Reaper came, did he, Dan? You pulled a quick judo throw on him?” The blade squeaked out. “More and more you’re my hero, Daniel. I think of you as a supernatural.”
—
Dan made tea. They drank it in the garden. The saucers were side by side on the step and Dawson’s biscuit remained untouched. No one ever saw Dawson eat—not ever. Dan had heard various theories. An intestinal complaint. A protein-only diet. A belief that being seen with your face in a sandwich ruined the myths a man created for himself. The other thing he never did was linger in the house. He worked on the assumption every building was bugged. He thought if a man was going to be caught he might as well be caught outdoors.
Dawson lit up a Newport. “Want one?”
“Why not.” It was useful, when talking to a guy like this, to have something in your hand.
Eventually Dawson said, in a much quieter voice than before, “We’ve work that needs a man of your skills, yes? You’d have seen the two house calls we made to those UVF members last week. Arosa Parade, near the Grove? Doing a job on the Loyalists in the heart of their territory, Danny. Important work, for sure, but—”
“Small.”
A nod.
“And?” Dan said. Then he rephrased, careful to avoid a rising intonation: “And you have me in mind, I assume, for a follow-up. To which I’d remind you, I don’t do guns.”
“Or knives. Or paper clips. I know, I know.”
“I’d be working with Patrick.”
“No. This one’s lonely. We’re having a try for keeping Patrick uninteresting. Mad Dog’s got a big job coming up.”
It was bait, this comment. Jobs so big that you couldn’t work in advance of them? They didn’t exist. Couldn’t work after, for a while—that made sense. “What’s his big job, Dawson?”
“Curiosity’s another of the tragic flaws, Danny.”
“Fine.”
“Still not read your Shakespeare, have you?”
“Enough, Dawson.”
“Unaccommodated men,” he said, and blew a smoke ring. Dan watched it widen and die. “Every society’s got them at the edges of the public space, haven’t they? But no, we need to put Patrick on the subs bench a little while. The op he’s on—it’s not for you. Though tell me, what do you think of the name Roy Walsh?”
Familiar somehow, but Dan couldn’t place it. “I picture a glittering jacket,” he said. “Grinning game-show host.”
“I’ve just come from a little Army Council meeting, is all. We’re toying with a couple new aliases.”
The piece fell into place. Roy Walsh was the name of another volunteer. In which case, hardly a good alias.
Dawson listened to Dan’s concerns, blowing smoke again. “Opposite,” he said. “Confuses the old authorities, so it does. The real Walsh is a Red Light right now, see? In the Special Branchy books. Which is to say, given he can’t visit the mainland, he’s got an alibi tighter than Gerry Adams’s arsehole.”
“Heard it was pretty loose.”
“No,” Dawson said thoughtfully. “Verbal incontinence, that’s Gerry’s main issue. My own idea of a CEO? Leave a bit more to the imagination. Be a bit more like God.” He took his asthma inhaler from his trouser pocket and twirled it in his left hand. Then he pocketed it again and took a nimble drag on his Newport. He said, “Forget Patrick’s job. This other one I’m putting you on is plenty big. Large impact, high value. But simple, for a man of your skills.”
“They’re all simple in the strategy rooms. It’s when you’re there, s
weating into the Semtex, peelers approaching you east, south and west—that’s when it gets tricky.”
“You go north, in that situation, no? Simple. Easy. I tell you, for me it’d be a fucking relief to go north. Instead I’m stuck at home, strategising, with a one-eyed woman who’s always nagging me to go south.”
Dawson waited for the laugh, accepted it with a wave of his hand, smoke creeping out of his mouth. “I disgust myself daily,” he said, crouching to press his cigarette into a paving stone. “Also, you’re the expert, but it’s not advisable to sweat into the Semtex.”
“You’re thinking of a car charge, I suppose.”
“There’s been enough charges under cars,” Dawson said. “There’s been enough Nissan Sunnys and Land Rovers. This one’s an arty kind of operation. Right up your street.”
“Local.”
“Everything’s local. The wonders of transport. This one’s across the Irish Sea. Larne–Stranraer ferry. You must be familiar? It’s being used—you’ll like this—to move fifteen Brit Army trucks a fortnight. Fifteen. Two- or three-ton trucks, it seems. Ones bringing blankets and uniforms from Scotland. Supplies for the Province troops. Comforts, so they can be well rested when they kill us.”
“You’ll never get the kind of volume of fertiliser, or whatever you’re wanting, onto one of those.”
“We are on there. That’s the point. Not fertiliser—a human presence. I know that’s tough to grasp for a robot like you. For a guy who fiddles with wires for a living. I’m a people person. Our army is full of them. It’s only your area that’s chilly. So I’m talking about a flesh-and-blood volunteer, Danny, a civilised human person, someone who doesn’t operate at a remove from reality. Sixteen-year-old lad, very mature, cousin of McCluskey C. He’s a ship’s hand and—screw Mick’s mother—he’s noticed a pattern. He’s noticed that the fifteen trucks get loaded at Stranraer every other Saturday morning, arriving at Larne in the afternoon. The last three of the trucks are, he says, packed with soldiers.”
“You’re just giving me facts,” Dan said, refusing a second cigarette.
“You asked for facts.”
“I asked for nothing.”
“None of us does. Óglaigh na hÉireann. The Army of People Who Ask for Nothing.”
“Objectives,” Dan said, but at that moment Dawson’s eyes widened. Voices were coming through the fencing: the home of Ancient Jones.
A second, two seconds, and Dan recognised these voices as the talk of people on TV. Muffled but neat. Scripted. Ancient Jones was ninety-four and the best kind of Protestant around, but he liked to have the volume as high as his heating. Twice Dan had helped replace blasted component parts, fried audio elements. When he was hot, Jones opened his windows wide. He sat there flooding half of Belfast with sound waves from obscure wildlife programmes, repetitive weather reports, golf. An alternative to taking off one of the jumpers his bulky niece kept knitting.
“Elderly,” Dan explained.
Dawson frowned. “Objectives. The objectives will become clear when you hear the plan. The plan is to plant one of your speciality packages at the side of the road and take out the last three trucks on a Saturday afternoon in two weeks’ time. Ones that will be packed full of soldiers returning from Scotland. Sitting ducks. Quack quack quack. No need to get our gear on the actual ferry.”
“Single-lane traffic.”
“Yes.”
“Parked cars.”
“No.”
“Lay-bys.”
“One.”
“Civilians.”
“Not a touch.”
It sounded doable, possible. Certainly not off-the-scale absurd, which he realised now he’d been hoping for. Because how could he refuse a clean, high-impact job like this? He was enjoying his lighting work at the moment. That and the plastering and driving, and trying to learn his Spanish for a half-hour each night. Puedo, puedes, puede, podemos. Secret operations gave a buzz and as a result they wore you away. With languages he’d keep his options open. Widen out the places he could live and work if things got worse. Spain. France. He’d have enough money in a few years to get out of here. By then he would have done his bit to save the place, he’d be able to pay someone to look after his mother, maybe take Bobby with him, clumsy deaf Bobby, get him out of St. Shitpit. And at the same time the idea of the ferry job was swelling in his mind now, taking on detail and colour, and there was an ugly excitement to it all—a challenge to be met.
“What would you need, Danny? What doings to make it happen?”
Dawson had moved closer, the pearly buttons of his shirt giving off a gleam. Ancient Jones’s TV was blaring facts about sharks.
“I’d want a caravan.”
“Caravan?”
“As though a family is having a weekend away.”
“Good,” Dawson said. His features had settled into a look of grudging respect. “And what would you need, in that caravan? Three trucks to take out, remember.”
“One thousand five hundred of mix. Home-made. Get one of your more competent Red Light lot to make it.”
“Good. Clear. Now the detonators.”
“If I do the job, which I’m not saying I will—”
“You’re briefed. It’s agreed.”
“If it’s something I can do justice to—”
“Listen to yourself! You sound like a bloody pub singer down the Shankill! Five years ago—”
“Six.”
“—you were an innocent babe. I like innocence. I pay a premium for it.”
“I’ll bring my own detonators. I’ve had it with the quality of detonators being produced. You risk everything and then the operation whimpers into nothing. It’s stupid there isn’t a standard agreed testing procedure, in advance. It’s not rocket science.”
“And I’m not the Pope,” Dawson whispered, crouching to stub out his cigarette. “When you’re appointed Chief Explosives Officer, you can issue these decrees, can’t you?”
A hot pause. “Patrick’ll be in place for years.”
“Unless he goes out with a bang.”
“I want in on it,” Dan said.
“You what?”
“The job that Patrick’s doing. The bigger one.”
Why? Why had he said it? Why had he offered himself up? He didn’t know himself well enough to say. Career progression? Pursuit of a thrill? Misguided loyalty to Patrick? Wanting to be at Patrick’s side if risks were to be taken? Patrick who’d also lost friends on Bloody Sunday. Patrick who’d trained in Libya and knew all there was to know. Patrick who said one night as they sculpted Semtex in the warehouse that he and Dan were joint captains of a submarine. You put a periscope up, you see an enemy warship, you know your job is to sink that ship. Focus on the target. Remember it’s a target. Planting a bomb or pressing a button below deck. Same thing. Identical. In wars people die every day.
Dawson looked at him with dire eyes and said, “Pushy. Where did your modesty go, my little choirboy?” Then he sighed, chewed his thin bottom lip, glanced at the gate. “It’s a seaside jobbie. You know Patrick’s been involved with some mainland thinking, yes?” He was barely audible now; Dan leaned in. “Beach towns, cities. Stoking a few fires.”
“You were right. I’m not interested. After La Mon you’re mad to go that route. Tourists, restaurants, hotels. What about the Council directive? That stuff’s a PR disaster.”
“I knew a woman in PR once. She was nice despite it.”
“You’re away in the head to be thinking along these lines.”
“This particular plan, it changes everything. It’s the end of everything, Dan. After this job, give it ten years, there’ll be peace.”
Dan laughed.
“You have things to learn,” Dawson said. Dan was surprised to see he’d hurt him. “A stiffing is all about timing. Get it wrong and you’re out on your ear.”
“Who’s getting stiffed, then?”
“An assassination of a political figure. It works, but only when they’re alr
eady at a low, you know? That’s why the Kennedy thing made him into a dead god. He’d never been at a low enough ebb. When a leader’s shown their cruel side, and there’s a significant pool of haters within the moderates, and said leader has already made herself into a monster, even within half of her own country…Watching soldiers starve. Being brutal to the poor. Ignoring the north and the west…”
“You can’t seriously be talking about this.”
“I’m always seriously talking. Haven’t I told you before? Greatest tragedy of my life is people think I’m joking.” He bent down to remove a bit of soil from his shoe. “The conference. The hotel the Cabinet will be staying in.”
“The whole?” Dan said. “Come on, the whole Cabinet?”
Dawson smiled. “If you want more, you’ll have to come in for a meeting. The warehouse tomorrow.”
“The losses.”
“Legitimate targets. One or two staff, perhaps, but if they’re hosting our targets they’re legitimate too.”
“Staff are collateral damage, at best. Don’t kid yourself.”
“You’ll be surprised how contagious kidding yourself is. Every one of them is part of the political elite.”
“Maids, cleaners?”
“Serving the elite, then. The point is, Dan, you change, with one blast—”
“Timed in the night, to limit losses?”
“You change everything.” Dawson sighed and looked around him, lowered his voice even further. “Whitelaw’s Deputy PM. He, in the first instance, assumes power. We’ll need to talk about this in the warehouse.” He glanced again at the fence.
He couldn’t really be suggesting this. He couldn’t really be serious. “If he lives, you mean. And she…because we’re talking about her, aren’t we? She might not, you know.”
“No, she might be a vegetable instead.”
“And Whitelaw.”
“Whitelaw’s weak. Voices on the line suggest he won’t be in the hotel on the night, anyway. So he takes power. And it doesn’t take him long to see, with his experience of us to date, that he needs to put in process a free Ireland.”
“Alternatively—”
“Alternatively? Alternatively this conversation is coming to an end. But alternatively he hands over to Tebbit. That would be trouble. But, much more likely, Heseltine. Heseltine’s always hated Thatcher. Urged more moderation upon her, behind the scenes. He knows she made a bad play with Bobby Sands. Most of the Cabinet are looking for a way out. You don’t let a man martyr himself in front of the camera. With Heseltine as PM it’s the same end result.”