by Jonathan Lee
“It’s OK,” he said.
“Why weren’t you here, Dan?”
“I was with friends.”
“Friends. You’re never this late.”
“This time I was.”
“Where are my cookbooks? The cookbooks are out there. I couldn’t find the golf club. You expect me to believe.”
“What?”
“That the timing.”
“What?”
“A coincidence,” she said. She was beginning to weep, to shake.
“Stop it,” he said. He told the women to leave the room. They did not leave. “Ma, it’s OK.”
“The news,” she said, vicious. “Look at it. I had a phone call! Hour before the brick. They said that. And. And Provos boys, those boys with the scarves, they’d been hanging around an hour before and I heard that—”
“What do you mean? What did you hear?”
She was crying.
“Stop it,” he said. “Don’t cry on me. You’re not making sense.”
“The news,” she said. “The news.”
She was weeping and it made him desperate. It crushed all the air inside him. Again he had his hands on his knees. Again he was looking away and trying to breathe. Fidgeting for space, for air, always, endless.
“Or the Loyalists. Loyalists. They’ve burned houses elsewhere, Dan. Retaliations already begun. Streets back from here, houses burning. They’re always so quick when there’s a mainland attack, it’s like they’ve a list, a list.”
“Calm down, Ma. Stay calm.”
“Thatcher survived, Dan.”
“You think I didn’t catch that?”
“It’s made her a martyr, Dan.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“It’s nothing to do with us.”
“Nothing she’ll do from now on will matter. She’ll be the woman who was bombed and didn’t blink.”
“Why would we care? It’s not relevant to us. Why would you even tell—” He glanced at the women in their semicircle. Their eyes moved towards the TV.
“They’re saying she won’t even put back her speech!”
“Stop.”
“Not even a delay, Dan! And people have died.”
“Whoever’s done this to us is going to pay. I’m going to make them know—they’ll know what they’ve done.”
“Oh, they know! They already know. All the wounded people on the telly, Dan, and they’ve done nothing wrong, have they? They’re like your da, Catty.”
“I’m talking about here.”
“There, here. It’s all the same, Dan. They’re pulling them out half alive.”
She was whimpering; he was whispering.
“Stop it please,” he said. “You’re embarrassing us, Ma.”
Clear snot was running down into her mouth and she was shaking on the sofa, allowing the event to destroy her. Embarrassment was the word and he didn’t know why. How was he not yet beyond embarrassment?
She said, “I should never have let that Dawson McCartland into my garden.”
“Quiet now. Be quiet.”
“There might not even be a minister dead, they said. Not one! But there’s dead bodies already on the news—women who weren’t ministers who were staying there, women and wives, and now Belfast’s burning, look.”
“Stop, Ma. Control yourself. We got the letters.”
“The letters!”
“What happened on the mainland—it means fuck all to us. This is just weird timing—this is…”
He thought again of what she had said about Provos boys hanging around the house. He thought, No, they wouldn’t do this. Use me and get rid of me? Dawson? No.
“My whole life is over,” she said. “Over. My whole life up in flames because of you and your kind and your father dying for nothing. What would he say now, Daniel? What would he say, Daniel, if he saw you—”
No. Couldn’t hear this. Wouldn’t. He wheeled around, deliciously free of thought, deeply impressed by his own disgust, and with the back of his hand he hit her face. Saliva streaked from the corner of her mouth. His knuckles stung. He stood there for a moment, amazed by himself, as the women touched their hair and looked away.
—
Dawson came the next day with money and a plan. He said Dan would need to spend some time abroad. He said that the army looked after its own. He had pictures of the Loyalists who had set fire to the house. “Time to start a new life, Dan,” he said. He said he had been on leave.
“Compassionate?”
“Annual.”
“Fuck, Dawson—”
“We all need a break,” Dawson said.
Dawson talked about Thatcher, her lack of empathy, her inability to imagine herself into other people’s shoes: the miners, the Catholics, those with another view. He talked about the distance she’d created within herself, the distance necessary to do her job.
Dawson did not talk about the victims in the Grand. He did not talk about the dogs that had died in the fire, the charred bodies in Dan’s garage. He did not talk about all the hate he surely felt.
Dawson said he had tickets for the Celtic Rangers game and would gladly give them up.
—
Moose grabbed at his belt. There was a new exhilaration at the margins of his pain, an old edgy in-the-gym feeling. Whipped the belt right out of the loops, a gesture learned from nowhere. A bit of Harrison Ford juju that wasn’t really him. He got the belt around his bad leg and tightened it, let it be.
In his head now he was one hundred per cent Harrison. The Beatles were playing “Hard Day’s Night.” The triangle of electric light was where he was headed. It was the only sharp thing in the swarm of the room. He heard water trickling in an unseen space.
What are you going to do? Best you can, best you think you can, which is everything. He performed an unlikely sit-up. Pain lived between his ribs. The motion bought him momentum for the next few desperate gestures. Licking his split lip, breathing fast and crawling slow, pausing at intervals to say “No.”
He saw his own progress as fragment-to-fragment. Get to the broken chair leg. Breathe. Get to the Sellotape hoop. Breathe. Get through the thick fog to the flattened tinfoil castle, dragging the bad leg behind him. He could feel the crinkle of vulnerable foil under his hand. There was fire in his veins, smoke in his flesh. “Ah,” he said. “Ah, ah, ah.”
He couldn’t do this. Couldn’t keep moving. His lungs were full of dust. But he was moving, was he? He was doing this. Trying. Every inch coughing up blackness was a sort-of-almost progress. He felt oddly invested in himself. If he had a flag he’d stick it in the middle of Engelbert’s tinfoil castle. He had no flag. Never mind. Move on. Beyond the castle was a steaming mountain made of wood. The crook of a pipe there. A cistern. And beyond—
Here was the thought that kept forming: Marina had said Engelbert was asleep in the side room. Where was that side room now?
He looked behind him. The potted yucca was there but the doorway wasn’t. All was rubble and dust. Somewhere in his mind he heard the word hero. The idea was irresistible. This agony might have a shape. He wanted to disprove life’s lesson tonight: that it made no sense at all.
There were voices behind him. Footsteps. Coughing. A muddle of well-meaning human sounds. Cones of light. Torchlight. Warm torchlight on his skin for a faint electric instant and then gone. The torchlight did not illuminate anything. It simply showed you the extent of the darkness all around. He made a shouting sound, noise not language, and brickwork came down and spat dust in his face. Might as well go to the yucca, the disappeared doorway. There was a chance he would find a little boy beyond. He coughed and spat. He groaned and shrieked. He squeezed his leg to hurt the pain.
He crawled towards the plant. Avoid the mountain of rubble to the left. Go right. Oh, oh, oh. Take the road more taken. “No.” The path less troubled. “No.” Back over the tinfoil castle, saying only the word “no.” Find the next bit of rubble. Get it in your sights. To get through this! To
get through this. “I’m sorry,” he said, but he was not sure what for.
He swallowed blood. He crawled into the area where the side door should have been. He got onto his good left knee. He wrapped his arm around concrete. He hauled, fell back. He spat and put weight on his left knee again. He hauled at more stone, thinking of Engelbert beyond, and the fourth or fifth time he did this he rose up to half-height and spat and saw, through burning eyes, an opening and a—a boy, standing beyond, very still.
The boy’s skin and clothes were dark with dirt. His eyelids snapped up like blinds. Those live-wire white eyes. A pink mouth began to blink.
“Engel?”
The boy began to climb. Over the rubble he came, moving towards Moose on hands and knees, real or not real, something in between. The area in which he moved was no longer a room. It was a space owned by improvised alcoves, heaps of stone and twisted metal. Racy little tears sped down Engel’s cheeks. They left clean paths behind. Time slowed and progress was slow. There was torchlight behind Engel’s head. There was a fireman emerging through a further half-gone wall.
“Engel,” he said. “Not to me. Back there.”
The boy did not obey. He had his goal and with the blind stupidity of youth he was climbing like a little motherfucker. Climbed, he climbed, over the mountain he climbed. And then he stopped, maybe confused by all the light now shining near him. Maybe understanding.
“Torch,” Moose said. “Behind you, torch.” His voice was a rough whisper now, too small and thick to be his own; he knew that he was losing himself.
The fireman behind Engel was drifting towards them. Debris crunched under his boots. Engel waited. There were jabby shadows overhead. Another fog breathing out its ghosts. We are unseen, he thought. The fireman doesn’t know we’re here.
His fingers did not want to clutch at stone. His grip was relaxing, opening to the world. He had to force himself to claw one final time. He grabbed a piece of stone and threw it. He did not see where it landed. He heard only the noise and the absence of noise. The fireman turned. Torchlight flooded Engel. No one said a word.
Moose watched the fireman lifting Engel. Felt such a pure rush of happiness, sugar on an exhausted tongue. The fireman would now be discovering how warm the boy was. Amazing the warmth a child’s body gives off. Heat monsters, the lot of them, a lifetime of potential packed in. He imagined Freya so small again and he was holding her, kissing her forehead.
He opened his mouth to shout to the fireman—the formality of saying I am here, me too, help me out?—but all he had left was a croak. He was croaking like he had as a boy in bed, woken in the night by a bump in the dark, fear taking his voice and hiding it. He threw another stone and nothing happened.
Engelbert was carried away over the fireman’s shoulder, arms hanging down like he’d been caught mid-dive. But he’d look up at him soon, wouldn’t he? And then the fireman would turn and see that he, Moose, was lying here: a battered Deputy General Manager. But the fireman continued to walk away with Engelbert, everything quiet and slow.
—
Survivors fanned out around the wounded hotel. Some were in the cordoned-off section of the King’s Road. Others were further back against the railings. Freya was sitting in a huddle of strangers, waiting, legs crossed like school assembly. Her sense of time was slipping. She’d been out here in the dark for weeks. She was as close to the Grand’s entrance as allowed. Some of those rescued were lifted out on firemen’s shoulders. Others were carried on stretchers. One was a minister with a long sad face, limp and alien in his bedclothes. Was her father still inside? Had he been carried out? Had she missed him? Was he lost? Was it over? Everybody cared but no one knew.
The uniforms and walkie-talkies, the police tape making spaces smaller. It screamed as it came off the roll. And how do these things end? Where basically do they stop? The shadows cast by events like this. For all she knew they could ripple on forever.
She sat and tried to make her thoughts cohere. The adrenalin had gone and she was sick with slow despair. There was a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the ground. She wanted the power of the night to die down into the mundane. She wanted the extraordinary to go back to being ordinary, please. She vomited. People moved. Please do not disturb.
The first trickle of dawn was a breaking egg yolk in the sky. She blinked and it resembled something else. The light came slow and wide across rooftops, warming long sections of crumbled stone, and she felt her youth being packed away, a piece of paper folded over and over, half-thoughts and quarter-thoughts, gone.
She told herself stay positive. She told herself Brighton was built on the wreckage of itself. It said so in “The Brighton Fact Pack,” kept behind the desk for curious customers. You burn Brighton down and it rises from the flames like that fire bird, arched neck, pinkish feathers—from the flames. Brighton was burnt down by the French in fifteen hundred and something. Survived. It was hit by the great storm of 1703. Survived. Windmills thrown. Houses flattened. Boats sunk. Survived. Survived Hitler. Survived each twist of history. Booming in the twentieth century. Thriving. Surviving. You thought it was finished but you were wrong. Brightonians were survivors. Many of them were lame and old and hampered by terrible dress sense, but they were survivors. The English were survivors. The Irish. The Scottish. The Welsh. Think of Lowri “The Look” Morgan. Make a sheep-shagging joke in class and she’d nuke you. She didn’t need words. A mascara-thick glance was all it took. The glance said you were lucky to be alive.
And he would come, wouldn’t he, out of the dreaming hotel? Her hands were dirty. She wiped her eyes. She wanted her dad back now.
—
Tomorrow there would be water creeping onto Brighton Beach. He could relax now, stop struggling. He could let the hotel take his weight.
In his wrecked office Moose saw lime greens and yellows. Time slowed and an image came from colour. He rolled onto his back and looked at the peeled-away ceiling and he saw it, an image of himself. He was on a three-metre springboard, thunking his weight down to get going. The air was clear and bright. The board did what it was asked to do. It flicked him high, his body suspended in nothing, revolving with perfect grace.
He waited to see himself fall into the water. Here the image flickered out. He tried to reimagine it, but the dive would not take hold. He blinked. He was not in the air. He was in the rubble of this hotel on the surface of the earth. Earth was the proper place for grace. This was the last thing he knew. His humanity was tangled up with the humanity of those trapped in other rooms. They were more real than him. He existed for them. He had never been so afraid. All the people he couldn’t be, all the stories he couldn’t hear, this is what life was. He held on to the last few weeks as he stretched out and died. Held on to the daily battles with his daughter, to the factless beauty of a broadloom rug, to the private moments history so rarely records but which make up the minutes in the hours. “Please,” he said, but it did not help. Someone had considered this fair.
—
On the day Roy Walsh checked out of the Grand she had stood by the desk to say goodbye. She had thought she would get to know him. The distance hadn’t closed. Whatever held people together had gone or was missing all along. He waved at her. He said “take care.” The revolving door ushered quarters of salty air into the lobby. The glass wings of the door kept moving long after he had left. She felt the slightest sadness. An absence more vivid than a presence. She sat behind the desk and finished her book. There was never true silence here. Sometimes she was grateful for that. Silence and peace were not the same thing. She heard fragments of conversations from the street, laughter and shouting, voices crossing borders, seagulls bickering on the shoreline, the outside coming in. In the dark bar area a stranger stood up and bumped into a table, then a chair.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Five people lost their lives in the bombing of the Grand Hotel. Many more suffered serious injuries. Several survivors were permanently disabled by the blast.
In June of 19
86, Patrick Magee was found guilty of planting an explosive device in room 629, and of murdering the five people who died as a result of his actions. He received eight life sentences. In 1999, he was released from prison under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.
Evidence was presented during Patrick Magee’s trial that a second bomber may have assisted him in the room during his stay. This evidence included room-service records and the eye-witness testimony of a member of the hotel’s staff. Speculation about a second bomber has also been fuelled by suggestions made by Magee and his counsel that fingerprints found on the hotel registration card—evidence used to identify him as “Roy Walsh,” the man who checked in—could not in fact have been his. Several IRA members have faced convictions in relation to elements of the Grand Hotel plot, but the second bomber in room 629, if there was one, appears never to have been found.
This book is a work of fiction. The three principal characters—Dan, Freya and Moose—are inventions. Many of the incidents in the book are entirely imagined too. There are large gaps in what is known about the bombing of the Grand Hotel and I have tried, over the last few years, to imagine myself into those gaps. For those seeking reliable guides to the situation in Northern Ireland, past and present, there are many good non-fiction books available. One of the most extraordinary is Lost Lives, a work by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea. It aims to record every death suffered during more than thirty years of conflict.
In 2009, Jo Berry, whose father was among those killed in the explosion at the Grand Hotel, founded an organisation named Building Bridges for Peace. In fulfilment of the organisation’s mission she now works side by side with Patrick Magee to promote peaceful conflict resolution throughout the world. www.buildingbridgesforpeace.org
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks go to:
Diana Miller, Jason Arthur, Oliver Munday, Iris Weinstein, Erinn McGrath, Katie Burns, Kathleen Fridella, Betsy Sallee, Jordan Rodman, and everyone who worked on this novel at Knopf and William Heinemann;