by Jonathan Lee
“I put the gloves back on and I go upstairs.”
“The lift, I suppose?”
“Stairs. Put my sheets over their sheets, on the bed. Change the pillowcases.”
“And you stay the night, wait for Patrick. And when Patrick’s there…”
“Finalise plans. Fire exits. Intelligence.”
“And the last day of your stay.”
“We do the job.”
The 555 timer.
The 470K ohm resistor.
The 5m ohm resistor.
The PNP transistor.
A poetry even to the grimmest of things. Everything given its beautiful due.
He would unwrap the slab of Semtex from its wax paper. He would pop the bath panel. He would set the timer, bury the bomb, and they’d get themselves back home.
“No.”
“No?”
“When Patrick arrives your thoughts stop. You do whatever he tells you to do.”
Stones protesting under Dawson’s arse. Looking at Dan with new energy now. Speaking in a rich warm voice, a kind of incantation. “The Lord Chancellor,” he said. “The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. The Lord Privy Seal, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. The Chief Whip, the git, the slimy perv. The Minister without Portfolio. The Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Fuckery. The Secretaries of State for the Home Department, for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, for Defence, for Education and Science, for Employment, for Energy.” He coughed. “For Environment.” He coughed again. “For Health. Trade and Industry. Transport. The Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister. The Secretaries of State for Scotland and for Wales and for good old Northern Ireland.”
They listened to the sea.
“I know. I’m ready.”
“Are you, though? There might be extra days, Dan. When it’s planted, we might send Paddy home, and ask you to stay extra days.”
“No. Pointless.”
“Info. We’ll keep in touch. You’ve got the pager, haven’t you? If a guy’s got an electrical business, he needs one of those these days.”
“I’m not sleeping in that room while the thing’s maturing under the bath.”
“It’ll be meditative.”
“Dawson.”
“Like a fine little cheese. But look, there might be no need. Depends on whether we need to keep an eye, find out more about the Iron Vagina’s movements, make adjustments to our Plan B before you get back to Belfast, doesn’t it?”
“And the Plan B would be…”
Dawson grinned. “You’ve got to picture it, Dan. The result. Focus on that. Build a little moat around yourself. Imagine this little city burning.”
“It’s not a city, it’s a town.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Well then,” Dawson said. “Let’s call the whole thing off.” He looked up at a girl in a short skirt walking by. “It’s like Belfast could be, this place is. But with a better class of quim. You’re rehearsed?”
“I’m prepared.”
“It’s a long old timer, Danny. Four weeks a-ticking. I’m trusting you and Paddy.”
Dan said again that he was prepared. It was true. He really was. He felt that if a bullet was going to hit him now it was coming from a gun that had already been fired.
But then: there’s always the unexpected. That’s the real juice of life. He wasn’t prepared for the embarrassment and self-reproach he’d feel when, departing from the script, he’d hear himself asking the receptionist which room they would put Thatcher in. She might remember that. And he wasn’t prepared, either, for the way that, looking at her skin unspoiled by make-up or injury, he’d sense within that receptionist girl not arrogance, not ignorance, not the hoped-for signs that she liked to serve the ruling elite. The way he would see only an openness to life, and a need to be liked. She would blink a lot. She would touch her hair. He liked the weary belligerence that darkened her face each time she put pen to paper. She was an uncertain and determined person, and in that uncertainty and determination he was surprised to find something he recognised. He saw it for an instant and then forgetfulness came, affording him its useful distance.
How many staff members would be there in the early hours of 12 October when the bomb, on its long delay timer, would explode under the bath? Couple of night porters, probably. That’s all.
Twenty-four days,
Six hours,
Six minutes.
A poem by Daniel in the lions’ den.
5
With Patrick in the bathroom of 629. You know the moment will stay. The blood shining in your veins, the room alive. Ready to begin your work.
The lino felt oddly liquid under his hands. The press of it through rubber gloves. Objects arranged around them looked like floating debris. Things that were shipwrecked, lost.
Patrick’s gloves were old, a superstitious thing. One forefinger had split a little at the tip. Patrick had black tape wound around it. In that black tape there was truth. They had planned this, rehearsed. They were not here on impulse.
The 555 timer. The 470K ohm resistor. The 5m ohm resistor. The PNP transistor. You could convince yourself you were making any number of contraptions. The mere fact you were making anything at all helped grant you part of the distance you needed for the job. In the midst of creation you couldn’t envisage the myriad ways in which your work might destroy or be destroyed. The electrolytic. The capacitor breadboard. The jumper wires, the battery.
What sometimes came to mind when he was working on a device was a day in his childhood when he’d built a bookcase. Laying out pieces of paper with his father, screws and spanners and nails, screwdrivers and hammers and cold beers with beads of coolness on the cans. It didn’t matter that the bookcase, once built, held only four or five books and a load of worthless tat: candlesticks, crystal dogs, paperweights; items from his mother’s collection of clutter. The point was to build the thing, to have it there in the room. The bookcase cast a shadow across the mantelpiece most mornings. It pitched photographs and wilted plants into blackness.
The 555 timer. You had to put it in its own bit of space. It had to be free to breathe, the output connection pointing to your right. You had to move it to the dead centre of your breadboard, framed by the rows of tiny holes. The advantage of building your timer device at the operation site was that you were less at risk during travel if a stop and search happened. You were carrying ordinary old wires and video-recorder parts, an electrician on a job. You could show peelers an electrician’s calling card with a phone number on one side. The number would go through to an answerphone and on that answerphone you’d have Martina’s voice, its staggering gravel, saying the lines are all busy, please leave a message, someone from Sunnyside Electrics will return your call. You built a history for yourself and made people a part of it. They felt involved; they started to exist within its architecture. Dawson in his more lyrical moods liked to say the world was full of people who in their daily lives looked without seeing, felt without feeling; people who wanted to be carried away by a wave of false logic more soothing than what they knew.
They’re halfway through their work when Patrick whispers words about the tourists outside the hotel, men and women clutching their shiny travel guides, seeking out the Royal Pavilion, the Regency architecture, the Victorian aquariums, the Pier, the pebbled nudist area beyond Duke’s Mound (had he been reading a guide himself?). Good for them, Patrick said. He envied them and wished them well. The men and women on Britain’s streets were on the winning side of a war, and on the winning side you barely knew there was a war at all. You didn’t spot the cracks in the pavements, the weeds in the joints, the empty ice-cream shops with damp external walls, the blistered paint, the rusted bars on basement windows, the bird shit, the rain stains, the homeless people, loss. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen.
Patrick. Patrick who, during internment, served two years in detention without trial. Patrick who’d spent some of his ch
ildhood in Norwich. Patrick who believed British cities and towns were where the war could be won. Patrick who said you don’t get an enemy to listen by shouting loudly from afar; you do it by whispering in their ear. It amazed Dan how simply you could summarise a life. Never felt at home in Norwich. Came back to Belfast to help with civil rights. Got locked up. Became the Provos’ best bomber. An army feeds off injustice. The stories of its soldiers are only strange when stripped of context. Build a moat around yourself.
Wasn’t full-on IRA when the authorities got hold of him. Patrick had existed only at the fringes. But the aim of the arrests wasn’t so much to catch IRA guys as to catch innocent people you couldn’t get a proper court order against. People who, being Catholics, might have information about suspected terrorists. “Take these people,” Patrick said to Dan. “Shake them up. Burst an eardrum. Blacken an eye. Terrify them into staying well clear of Republicans. That’s their powerful, simple idea.” You killed the cause by isolation. Picked a guy up again and again until other innocent people said, “Oh, he must be involved with trouble,” at which point the isolated guy was at the RUC’s mercy. If he got a bullet in his head people would have a narrative to hand that explained why he deserved it.
Patrick asks what happened with your father. What happened, what are the facts? The fact your father worked eighteen hours a day in the tobacco factory. The fact he made the move into odd-jobbing around town in pursuit of greater freedom. Plumbing, wiring, checking timber for defects. Shakes, knots, resins. The hole in a brick is called a frog. Preparing the installation of lighting systems; testing equipment; balancing on scaffolding; pushing wheelbarrows along planks; swearing like he was supposed to swear, a manufactured vulgarity that cost him a little of who he was. He was doing whatever he could to get by and to purchase that shabby family home. Someone decided to toss a brick at his head. His eyes became mere things, marbles. A son sees that and what does he do? Tidies his talents into a different channel. There’s more to say but what’s the point in saying it, in going on and on when life itself can be so brutally abbreviated? A random act. Can’t even pick a culprit. System itself is bad. Take apart the system. Dan imagined the tourists outside the hotel coming into this bathroom and gathering around, cameras suspended from treated strings around their necks, special shapeless walking shoes in creative shades of beige, watching him make the timer for this bomb. He imagined them saying, Ah, he wouldn’t have done it if his daddy hadn’t died like he did. Might as well say he wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been born. All of us love a single motivation. Saves us from thinking too hard.
Moving pieces around. Keeping the gloves pulled high around the wrists. Fingertips feeling no slackness.
You had to attach your input leads to the left flank of the board. The intention wasn’t to connect them, just to keep the lead wires in place. You had to thread the lead wires into a chosen hole near the input. You needed to connect the wire lead from the RST of your 555 to the board, nice and slow, and then you had to use your jumper leads to connect up the two holes that you’d used to attach the RST and input. You were creating a circuit path with these basic tools, something that connected the pieces, the world shrinking around you to the size of a smoke ring, forgetting that this floor was a bathroom floor, a bathroom floor in an expensive hotel on the south coast of England, a hotel where the Tories would stay for their party conference in three and a half weeks’ time. Form a bridge. Form a link. Get the body of the resistor aiming upward, a needle on a compass pointing north.
THREE
Department of Hearts
1984
1
People say drugs cause dreams, but during his first twenty-four hours in hospital it was mostly memories that came. People and scenes washed in and washed out, a structure stolen from the sea, and a doctor playing with a twenty-pence piece began offering high-speed advice. Monitoring, lifestyle, myocardial. Nurse, perhaps a cappuccino please? A myocardial infarction, the doctor said, using his two fists to demonstrate the difference between myocardial and some other cardial, saying “pop,” saying a heart really looks like a fist covered in blood, saying smoking and fatty foods, saying any recent uncommon exertion, saying physical or mental stresses or family problems, saying in forty-five minutes we’re going to clear that artery of yours, don’t try and say too much in the meantime.
There would be a little screen.
Like a TV screen?
Yes, Mr. Finch, black-and-white screen in the theatre.
Call me Moose.
Mousse? As in the dessert?
As in the animal. Animal.
Are you amenable to students being present to observe? Three, four. Picture of a little bonsai tree, really. One little twig shape lengthening, that’s all. But they’ll learn so much from you, they will. Young. Doing their degrees. Going to be fine. Futures ahead of them. Simple procedure. Done it a hundred times. Futures. That and a few days in bed and you’ll be out of here. The rest is really up to you.
His mother telling him at the wedding, and before the wedding, that he was making a mistake. Didn’t listen. Didn’t worry. There was something reassuring about marrying a woman your mother wasn’t convinced by. It underlined to you the fact that you weren’t marrying your mother.
Mr. Waldman’s father-of-the-bride speech had contained only one joke—good to get Viv off my hands!—but Moose in his groom speech had the audience roaring, joke after joke about things Viv did and didn’t do, and when he sat down Viv put her hand on his wrist. He thought, She’s proud of me, that was a good speech, I worked so hard on that speech to make her proud. In the corridor five minutes later she slapped his face. “Performance!” she said.
“What?”
“Performance!”
He didn’t understand the accusation. She refused to elaborate. If he was performing he was performing for her, for her friends, for a family from whom he’d always wanted more love than he got. It was the first of many times he’d see her pretty neck go blotchy with rage. Not the best of starts. She cried when they drunkenly fucked that night, a bed covered with itchy red petals. He lay awake thinking of words that rhymed with wedding. He thought of shredding. Maybe dreading. Spreading. At times he lamented the fact he’d been born with a somewhat unsubtle mind.
Where was the paramedic with the big blurry nose? Where was Potato the Dog? People so easily swam in and out of your life.
The theatre. Mr. Marshall pulling his mask to one side. Mr. Marshall saying, “You’re about to feel much better.”
His tongue feeling clean. A huge weight lifted from his chest. But weak, still weak, the white lights of the theatre. Bluish smocks and masks. The dreamy creamy space emptying out. Performance. Two students who’d observed the whole thing standing in the corner, solemn, waiting to be told what to do. A distant nurse saying, “The boy said he fell on it in the bathroom!” Distant people laughing. Water. A plastic cup. Performance. Most delicious water he’d ever tasted. Light dimming and his daughter, sleep.
—
Growing up in Brighton, not yet known as Moose, he’d been told on many hundreds of occasions that he was destined for great things. This seemed like good news. He chose to believe it. He was good-looking, bright, popular, sporty. The idea that his heart would one day falter? That he would keel over before achieving what he wanted to achieve? Ridiculous. Absurd. As crazy as thinking life itself would one day stop shaping itself, however crudely, around his needs and wants. As unimaginable as the idea that he’d one day have such a precocious ear for failure that he’d mishear almost everything else. His heart was healthy, its welfare was secure, its beat was steady and vital and it was—like him—carefully contained, unbothered by the world, a private preciously effective thing that functioned without thought or doubt. Picturing his knowledgeless boyhood self now, he couldn’t help but laugh. The laughing hurt him even more than sighing did. The pain brought him briefly out of a thick half-sleep and made him ask, “Is my daughter still here?” A nurse wheeling
him along a corridor told him to try closing his eyes.
His supposed destiny as one of life’s trailblazers took strength from all the occasions when kids his own age, and a healthy few dozen from the years above, chanted his name from the sidelines at football games. It took strength from the huddle of parents who often invited him around for tea after he’d hit a hundred runs or taken five quick wickets. It took strength from the local newspapermen—doughy, tired, deprived of light—who vied to steal from him some quick remark or meaningful reflection on the nature of Talent every time he won (aged 14, 15, 16 and 17) the 200 metres and 400 and 800 metres in the South-East of England Regional Schools’ Junior Athletics Championships. And it took strength (how could it not?) from seeing his own face in the Argus under the unforgettable headline “BEST YOUNG SPORTSMAN BRIGHTON’S EVER SEEN.”
There was a song certain girls sang while watching him take his shabby grammar school to the National Championships Finals in three different sports. It was a simple song, not much imagination to it, and it followed the tune of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame.” “Ain’t That The Finch” they’d cry after the ball had left his boot and crashed past the keeper; “Ain’t That The Finch.” Sometimes he’d hear a depthless, muzak version of the same anthem in the playground, walking between buildings, crossing the concrete, pausing to pull up his socks. He’d look up and see girls from the school opposite, fingers clawed into the fence. They were singing to him, serenading him, fighting off impending fits of giggles. Once they recovered from these giggles one of them would generally ask if he was going to be at the Electric House come Friday. Demonstrating the unflustered ease that only the most adored of boys could afford, untouched by the super-abundance of love which met his every move, he looked at them and unleashed one of his trademark Shrugging Smiles. A good-natured smile. An excellent shrug. “Maybe,” he’d say.