by Jonathan Lee
“Which is?”
“We get our country back.”
Bobby Sands on hunger strike, waist all withered, the awful embroidery of his ribcage.
“It’s not my place, Dawson, but it’s huge. I mean, as a statement. Think about it before you—”
“You’re right,” Dawson said. “It’s not your place.”
“But come on, what if—”
“If we don’t eliminate them all? We say that was never the intention. We wanted to show the mainland’s not secure. It’s almost more effective. A symbol’s a symbol. A lot of thought by bigger brains than yours has gone into all this, and I have somewhere I need to be. This isn’t going to fail, Dan.”
Vigilante attacks. The contagious spread of surveillance. Dan could see ways for it to fail. “To take out the Prime Minister, though. Come on.”
“With her in place there’ll be no peace, Dan. You’re acting like this hasn’t been talked about before.”
“There’s a difference between talk and action.”
“Not when one follows the other, same sentence, same breath. With her in place…She thinks she’s the queen of us, Dan. Queen of our land, governing from a distance, quoting fucking Victoria. Even my mammy wouldn’t quote from a queen, Dan, and she named me from a book called Mosquitoes. Thatcher might govern in her own tight circle but she’s no right to power here, none at all. She’s queen of nothing, and we’ll treat her with the same respect she’s granted us. Let her taste a little bit of equality. Let us take our freedom back. If you were in on this operation, Dan, you’d be the luckiest man alive. Go down in history. The guy who made sure no more civil rights men got finished—with a bullet, with a stone. It’d be the last job you’d ever do.”
“Because I’d be locked up in the fucking Maze, that’s why.”
“Possibly. Though you seem to be one of those buoyant little jobbies who resists the flush. If anyone’s getting scooped it’s probably Patrick. He knows he’s owed the prestige. Men get tired. He’ll take his dog to the far side of the fair, same as you want to do.”
He took his asthma inhaler out again and inhaled. Held the air in his mouth for a good few seconds and then opened his lips, relaxed.
“Explore it.”
“What was that, Danny? Did the individualist speak? I was sucking at my can.”
“Explore whether he needs a second man.”
Dawson smiled. Ancient Jones’s TV blared. “Certain toothed whales,” Attenborough’s voice said, “can generate 20,000 watts of melodic song. It’s a song that can be heard for many miles.”
“Been reading a book about Leonardo,” Dawson said. “Your scythe got me thinking on it. You know how he sold some of his more obscure sculptures?”
“I’m sure you’ll tell me.”
“He sold them by telling people they couldn’t have them. By saying they were already sold.” He shook the asthma inhaler and took another puff. “We’ve all a lot to learn from artists.”
4
You choose the parts of the story to tell. It’s the only way you can make it yours. Eight days before Brighton there was news. Loyalists had bombed a meat-packing warehouse on the Springfield Road, a building that had stood in the shade of Greater Shankill. Dawson said they should go and inspect the damage. “See what we can do.”
Dust and a scorched plastic bag. Flies buzzing and alighting on the ribs of pigs. There was a thick smell of iron in the air and people were rummaging through debris, side glances from gaunt faces; some meat already packaged was able to be saved. After a point you had to look away, turn inward, but inwardness had its problems too. His thoughts went to the call he’d received from his brother Connor last night. One of those conversations that consists of a single question approached from different angles: What have you got yourself mixed up in, Dan? It was dark how far information could spread, its liquid capacity to escape you. There was a night as a boy when Connor had pissed himself. Dan remembered laughing.
They were sitting on large metal storage cylinders. Dawson today wore jeans and a T-shirt, his arms and neck thin, the neckline too baggy, a portion of his hairless chest revealed. The change of costume made him a child. He played with a bottle cap as he talked. He pulled three Polaroids from an envelope.
Dawson said a young girl had been walking home with her older brother when the device went off. It was well known, he said, that Catholic schoolkids used that side alley over there because it snaked down to the Ballymurphy. The first Polaroid of the girl was a profile shot. Nine or ten, Dan guessed. She was a strawberry blonde, smooth-skinned, with faint auburn freckles. Perhaps there was a slight twist of grief in her eye. The second picture was another profile shot, the other side of the girl’s face. The eyelid here was huge, swollen. Her skin was wet and red, pitted, and the cheek seemed to want to slide into the nostril.
“Blast injuries,” Dawson said. “For the sake of killing off some Catholic jobs, they spoil a little girl.”
A man used his walking stick to prod a piece of meat. The meat leaked thin liquid as it moved. There was corrugated roofing leaning against a ruined wall. A priest arrived with a weeping old woman. They began to mutter Hail Marys.
The third picture was of a man in his twenties laid out on the ground with his eyes completely closed.
“Your bomb ends the other bombs, Danny.”
What was England, back in the day, before they started killing for land? A tiny offshore island, Dawson said. An island sad and cold.
“Why show me these?”
“This girl’s father said to me…he said…he said, is this what we get for…”
Could Dawson really be fighting back tears? Something unconvincing about the swift onset of grief, the glistening eyes, the bony hand that moved from his chin to his knee like an actor’s sure gesture on a stage. It was left to Dan to guess at what the girl’s father had said.
Is this what we get for being good parents?
Is this what we get for not rocking the boat?
Is this what we get for teaching our daughter to turn the other cheek?
Who’d bombed the meat-packing warehouse? Not him. Not Dawson. Not anyone they knew. Blame lay elsewhere, with designated enemies, so why did he feel so guilty? Anger was the emotion Dawson must have hoped to stir, but he felt no anger at all. Nothing dissolves, nothing affrights. There was the rising sense, during this moment and a dozen others like it, that Belfast’s carnage stole not only the victims’ lives but large parts of the witnesses too. You disintegrated into the recriminations, the headlines, the pictures. You scattered yourself into proofs, warnings, suspicions, arrests. You rode out into the dark outrage of others, saw human loss shaped towards political ends, and though you hoped for the occasional gleam of uncontaminated compassion it seemed that the world was dimming. He remembered laughing at his brother and his piss-wet bed sheets. He was struck by his father for laughing.
—
Second thoughts? Yes. He’d had second thoughts, third thoughts, fourth thoughts. But doubt was a disease, a sentimental curse, and in the long run his actions would save lives. A new prime minister. Politicians seeing they were vulnerable on their own doorstep. Seeing that this war could cut both ways. The beginning of the end of apathy, maybe. The start of an understanding. And if one or two innocents died, if that occurred and couldn’t be helped, it would be no worse than what happened on the Falls every other day.
The truth was that on an operation you felt clean of guilt and will. It was day-to-day Belfast life that made you dirty. The nowness of being undercover, the sprint of adrenalin in your blood. It seemed to have a purifying quality. Everything you did was so silently precise, every step had to link so carefully to the next, that when you finally lay down at the end of the day your mind was a vast empty space. No doubt, no regret. All miseries for a moment receded. They made space for the satisfaction of a job well done. The gloom stayed away provided that, the next day, you got up at five to do the same again. There was something nimble about
deceit. He tried and failed to remember a time when he’d felt appalled at the thought of it all. He pictured his mother going to church every Sunday, the glare of stained glass coming alive in summer, loneliness of winter dusk gone. A recent revival of her interest in religion. He wondered if she was ever praying for him. It made him sad to see how much faith she put in Jesus Christ when Christ, for his part, never seemed to have heard of her.
The Grand Hotel. You could hear in the name that a collapse was overdue. Nothing noble stays whole forever. Shakespearean, Dawson would say, though Dan preferred to see it as a simple daily process of decay: metal turns to rust; plant life turns to mulch; fixtures peel from walls and people have to die.
The official plan—documented and shared with those who needed to know—was that it would be Patrick, not Dan, checking in at reception. Patrick was insistent that, if things went wrong, he would take the prison time alone. The Brits would look at the long-delay timer. They’d know someone with experience had built it. They’d look to Paddy. Paddy would say he’d checked in alone, built it alone, planted it alone. Leaked Council papers could back him up. It’s not just the Brits who can leak information. Only one head would fall.
“Then why doesn’t he check in himself?” Dan said. “Why not do it in reality, instead of just on the record?”
Dawson, hearing this, had laughed. “What I described is what happens if it all goes tits up, Dan. If he gets caught. But we don’t want it tits up, do we? We want it all tits down.”
Patrick was a man who’d done time, a man on police files, a man masterminding a dozen other jobs right now. They couldn’t risk losing their Chief Explosives Officer to the H-Blocks—not by having him walk up to the desk and ask for a room, a simple matter of admin. What if the hotel was under surveillance? Dan’s face was unknown to the authorities. He could check the hotel was safe, report back overnight. Patrick could wander into the Grand the next day, straight up the stairs, mute, confident, a colleague coming to discuss a job, and join Dan in the room. If things ever went wrong Patrick would simply say, “It was me. I’m Roy Walsh. Done.” The lie would sprawl out from there. People remember nothing of consequence. Hotels are a world within a world, a million strangers’ names.
If this seemed to Dan like a solid explanation, it still wasn’t the one he’d wanted. He wanted to hear that he’d earned the trust of the Council. The Larne–Stranraer ferry job had come off well, no civilian casualties. Three vehicles rolling in flames. Nine army men dead. A pure act of war to the extent any act of war can be that. One charge failed to do its trick, the only thing marring the op, but he was always telling them about the fucking detonators, never did understand why they didn’t seem to prize precision each time, and it was noted on the relevant files that the defect was not his fault. So: he was doing well. He wanted to hear that they’d selected him purely on merit for the important job of walking in and asking for a room, then assisting Patrick with the engineering upstairs.
“Tell me,” Dan said during a cold moment four weeks before, “are you sacrificing me? Is that it? No bullshit.”
“Patrick has other plans,” Dawson said. “Other seaside ops in the pipeline. Think we can use his face every time at every desk? No. Think I came up the Lagan in a bubble? No. He’ll be there when the important stuff’s done, and on the official version you’re clean.”
Ferry and then rail. Fewer security checks than air travel. He and Dawson drank vodka and Coke on the train down from Scotland. They sat on Brighton Beach watching seagulls walk and fly. And why was Dawson accompanying him here? Scared he didn’t have the commitment needed? Other people’s worries found a way towards your own. There was a team spirit in panic. Do I have the commitment needed? Do I really?
Schoolkids sprinting along the beach in plimsolls. Thoughts of Physical Education, the old concrete playground at his school, wearing his gutties, running around in circles in the cold, the warming smell of vulcanised rubber—a shadow of the scent you caught in class when you erased an answer from a page. When a breeze rolled in from the Channel the gulls paused to rearrange their wings. A better future. A fairer one. “Stand up and be counted,” Mick liked to say. “Then sit down and get cunted.”
You had to remember you were at war. Catholics burned out of their homes like heretics. Occupied territory. Legislative power held back. Impose a dictatorship and call it democracy. If the average Englishman knew all that was happening in Belfast they’d cheer him on, they would, they would…
“Before I watch you go in,” Dawson said. “Before I do my dis-appearing act. Before all that, I want to make clear that we’re clear.”
“We’re clear.”
“Are we, though?”
“We’re clear.”
“One more.”
Dan sighed. These team talks were depressing. “We’re clear.”
A shabby man in a red jacket walked along the shore, crazy hair, chattering to himself, happy.
“I ask for three nights. I pay cash up front. The hotel has space for me to extend my stay. They tell me my room number. I place it in the mental floor plan. I ask for another if necessary.”
“Chess.”
“Snooker. I’ve got no time for chess.”
“One move and the move after that, Danny. Something unbeatable about the sound of two balls crashing together. The last good thing, don’t you think, that British Army officers invented?”
Worlds disappearing into pockets. The excitement of travel. Clean geometry, safe ballistics, each ball suspended and directed. Touch and withdraw with a thin polished cue. Resettle and aim. Dan blinked.
“I tell the receptionist—”
“In your nice rehearsed English accent.”
“I tell her I’ll pay cash up front.”
“You run an electrical business. You’ve a job at the Metropole. You didn’t want to stay there because you don’t like to mix business and pleasure. You’ve added on a weekend to breathe some fine sea air, and your father always said this hotel was the-oh-most-wonderful-place.”
“Don’t bring him into it.”
“You need stories in reserve, Daniel. Don’t volunteer them. Sure. But you need them there.”
“And if for some reason I’ve been watched. If Special Branch come down the stairs.”
“Or out of the back office. Or up from the basement. Or out of the sweet eyes of a nearby old lady.”
“I ask what’s going on.”
“You show them your surprise.”
“I give them the story, and if after a certain number of hours they seem to have something on me, then I say—”
“What do you say?”
I refuse to cooperate but this does not mean I’m guilty. I would like this noted on the record. I wish to be represented by Madden and Finuncane.
“Even if they’ve dragged you back to Castlereagh,” Dawson said. “Even if the walls are white and the door is white and the floor tiles are white and the blanket is white. You’ll sit there, naked, refusing to wear their wee white pocketless clothes, won’t you? And what will be in your private world?”
“My what?”
“Come on, get it on.”
“I’ll start to write in my head a book about glass.”
“Glass!”
It was a thing. He’d read a chapter in a library book, made some notes. The way its mass production came to change the world, showing up muck and clarifying perspectives. Mirrors, monocles, windows. Light entering rooms, touching floors, illuminating enclosed spaces and framing a view. Think about that and conjugate his verbs. Yo escapo, tu escapas. Something about the Spanish language made him want to laugh. The laughs were few these days.
“Glass,” Dawson said again, seeming to find something disturbing in the word. He tossed a stone towards a seagull. “Your gift for self-deceit, Dan. What a beauty of a gift it is. Pushing through panels to get at the plumbing behind, braiding wires between your fingers, wrapping secret little things in cellophane…I knew from the start that
you were a distance man.”
“I go to the downstairs lavatories.”
Dawson leaned forward and scratched at his ankle. “Woof. Dead on. You watch out for the cat that seems to like to bite the shite out of everybody.”
“Four cubicles there’ll be and I’ll check. If they’re all vacant I go into one and flush.”
“You make yourself a nice soft blanket of sound.”
“Stop interrupting.”
“The old sounds of the hotel’s plumbing overhead.”
“I unzip the bag that holds the bedlinen and towels. I smooth Vaseline through my eyelashes, my eyebrows. I use bog paper to dab away the excess gloop. I get my tub of hair gel—”
“Jimmy’s Wet Look, I hope. Supporting Bobby.”
“And I run some through my hair. Keep the hairs from falling out. If I need to take a crap I take a crap there, downstairs.”
“Everything’s evidence,” Dawson said. “Remember that, eh?” He put on a David Attenborough voice. He liked to do that these days, a reference to Ancient Jones and his screaming TV. “ ‘Unlike the grey wolf, the spotted hyena relies more on sight than smell—’ ”
“Very good, Dawson. You should have your own show.”
“Already have, more or less. You don’t think this is reality, do you? Now. When you’re back we burn it, Danny. The bedlinen, the clothes, even those nice new shoes. Burn it and forget and do your gardening. They’ll call you an animal, but forget it all. This is more serious than other jobs you’ve done. This is a big wee deal for you. I want everything back, to burn. I want you back, Pinkie, for the hero’s welcome.”
“Pinkie?”
Dawson hurled a stone. Toddler wandering nearby. Mother shot a disapproving glance. Dawson dipped his head and said, in a low voice, ashamed for maybe the first time in his life, “Carry on then, carry on.”