Northern Spy

by Berry, Flynn

  On the roundabout, I drive past a mural of masked gunmen pointing their rifles toward the road. I look out at the dripping lines of black paint, then the light changes and I roll forward. The murals continue. Brits out. Resistance is not terrorism. Join the IRA.

  Above the Falls Road, green, white, and orange bunting twists in the rain. Larger flags drip over the street from the Rock bar. I was there a few weeks ago for my uncle’s birthday. The Rock smells like piss everywhere except, somehow, in the toilets themselves.

  I continue onto the Andersonstown Road. This isn’t a safe area at the moment, but my body still relaxes. I know every inch of this street. The leisure center, the Chinese takeaway, the fish van, the corner shop where my granny sent me to buy her twenty unfiltered Regals.

  I judge all other places against here, and often find them lacking by comparison. Too anemic, too shallow, without our humor and liveliness. But it’s not where I want Finn to grow up, even without the conflict. It’s too close knit for me, too watchful, with its grudges, feuds, and gossip. If you held hands with a boy at school, within an hour someone would have told your mam you had a new boyfriend.

  Despite the rain, there are kids in the park this afternoon. Boys in tight tracksuits, their hands in their pockets, girls in jeans and cropped shirts with contoured eyebrows. They look so much more sophisticated than we did at their age. Still doing the same things, though. Shoving each other off the paths, drinking bottles of cider, pairing up. Will you see my mate?

  I pull onto our road, on the lower slopes of the Black Mountain, and stop the car. I don’t know why I’m here. It’s not as if Marian is inside, at our mother’s table, having a cup of tea.

  A single telephone pole stands halfway down the road. Wires radiate out from the pole to each of the houses, connecting them in a web. Rain mists the windscreen. From inside the car, I stare at the telephone wires. I don’t really need to make a decision about what to do next. Someone will see me. It’s only a matter of time before someone raps on the window and says, Tessa, I thought it was yourself. How are you?

  Already one of our neighbors is coming down the road, squinting at me from under an umbrella. Before he draws level with my window, my phone rings. “I need to speak with you,” says Fenton. “Can you come to the station?”

  7

  The view from the interview room is charcoal today. Plumes of steam rise from the smokestacks at the edge of the harbor, and traffic slides down the wet roads. Fenton brings me tea, finds a pen, starts the tape recorder. He has been outside recently, his suit trousers are speckled with water.

  “How long has Marian been a paramedic?” he asks.

  “Six years.”

  “What was her state of mind after being called to the Lyric?”

  “She was beside herself.”

  Last year, a loyalist paramilitary group attacked the Lyric theater. Marian’s ambulance was the first to arrive. Inside the theater lobby, six of the victims were bleeding out. Marian wouldn’t be able to reach all of them in time, and didn’t know when the other ambulances would arrive. The police hadn’t yet stopped the gunmen, they were continuing the attack on Stranmillis Road, and some of the first responders were being sent there. She had to decide who to treat first, knowing that whomever she chose would have the best chance of surviving. Some of the staff from the restaurant next door ran in to help, and Marian shouted instructions at them. I had her show me exactly what she’d told them to do, so I’ll know if I’m ever in their position.

  “More than on other occasions?” asks the detective.

  “Sorry?”

  “Marian had responded to other incidents with multiple casualties,” he says. “Was she more distraught after the Lyric?”

  “She has been distraught after every one of them.”

  “Why hasn’t she quit?” he asks.

  “Because they keep happening.”

  “Did Marian know any of the victims in the Lyric attack personally?” he asks.

  “No.”

  The detective keeps looking at me, and my stomach drops. “What, did she?”

  He says, “When you talked about that day, did she describe any of the victims in particular?”

  “No. She would have told me if she’d known one of them.”

  “Who rode in her ambulance?” he asks.

  “A man. She told me he survived, but nothing else about him.”

  Fenton pauses to write this in his notepad. That it was a man might be unusual in itself, the medics might normally start with women. I drink my tea while he writes. Below us, cars on the Westlink have their headlights on against the rain. Our conversation seems uninterrupted from last night, giving me the sense that I haven’t actually left the police station yet, that I haven’t been home to see Finn.

  I miss the detective’s next question. My mind is busy with this awful sensation of having neglected Finn, or been away from him for a long time. This morning, with the baby eating a bite of pancake from my fingers, doesn’t seem real.

  “Can you repeat that?”

  He says, “Has Marian seemed more tired lately? Or had any loss of appetite?”

  “No.” I remember our most recent dinner, at Sakura, and Marian bolting down a giant bowl of ramen with an extra portion of noodles.

  “So she hasn’t shown any symptoms, then?”

  “Of being radicalized?”

  “Of being pregnant,” he says slowly.

  I feel my face flush. “No.”

  “Is she having a boy or a girl?” he asks.

  “She won’t know until the twenty-week scan.” I force myself to hold the detective’s eyes, while he raps his fingers on the table. He can’t prove that my sister isn’t pregnant, not without her here.

  Outside, the rain slows to a stop. Fog blows over Cave Hill. Fenton clasps his hands and frowns, deepening the lines across his forehead. He seems limitlessly patient. I like him, which is an odd sensation, liking someone who so clearly considers you a liar.

  He takes a sip of tea. “Why does Marian have a burner phone?”

  “She doesn’t, she has a smartphone.”

  “In January, Marian bought an unregistered mobile from a newsagent’s in Castle Street,” he says. I shake my head, and he passes me a photograph of a scratched Nokia. “Have you seen her with this before? Or seen it in her house?”

  “No.” I consider the dented plastic. “It must have been for her job.”

  “None of the other paramedics have burner phones.”

  “Who did she call on it?”

  “Other unregistered numbers,” he says. “The lines have all been disconnected.”

  “It must not be hers.”

  “We found it taped inside her fireplace.”

  I flinch. I picture her fireplace, its tin surround, the laurel wreath embossed in the metal. Marian burns pillar candles in the grate. On my last visit, I watched her strike a match and kneel to light them. A burner phone couldn’t possibly have been taped inside the chimney then, out of sight.

  “We believe she used it to contact the other members of an IRA active service unit,” he says.

  “You don’t know that.” Most newsagents sell burner phones. Customers buy them for all sorts of reasons, work, travel, affairs, drugs.

  I remember walking Marian down to the bus stop in Greyabbey a few weeks ago, after she’d stayed with me for the weekend. She said she wasn’t ready to go back to the city yet, and was dreading working five shifts in a row. I hadn’t known how to help, except to weigh her bag down with food, leftover roast chicken, risotto, and lemon tart wrapped in tin foil. I waved her off from the stop, holding the baby’s hand so he seemed to wave, too. I remember my sister’s face behind the bus window, energetically waving back at us.

  Maybe she’d started taking something to help her through a shift, or to relax afterward. She often ha
s trouble sleeping. She’d tried melatonin and valerian root, maybe she used the phone to buy something stronger.

  The detective waits. He wants me to agree with him that she’s a completely different person than she is.

  “Has Marian mentioned anything to you about Yorkgate station recently?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “Are you aware of her making any trips there?”

  “No.”

  Fenton starts to ask me about different places around the city. The hospital, the courthouse, the stadium. If Marian has visited any of them, if I’ve seen her looking at images of them online. They’re potential targets, I realize. He thinks she’s involved in planning the next attack.

  “What about St. George’s market?” he asks.

  “Is that a target?” I ask sharply.

  “Why?”

  “It’s always full of children.”

  He nods. The sounds drain from the room. “Has Marian spoken to you about St. George’s?”

  “We were there recently.”

  His face tightens. “When?”

  “At the end of May. The twenty-eighth.”

  He asks me about the details of our visit, and I have to think carefully before answering. I can see the green-striped awnings and the different stalls, but not our exact movements around them. It’s pointless anyway. Marian wasn’t performing surveillance that day. We were there to buy the ingredients for linguine alle vongole.

  “Were you with your sister the whole time?”

  “Yes. Except when she went to the toilets.” The detective leans away from the table. I say, “She went to change Finn. She was only being nice.”

  “Did Marian warn you to avoid the market over the coming days?”

  “No. Why?”

  “We found a pipe bomb in St. George’s market the next day.”

  8

  Iclose my eyes in the lift while it lowers me through the building. On the next floor, two uniformed constables step inside. They nod at me, then turn their backs to face the doors. I peel the yellow visitor sticker from my jumper and fold it into a small square.

  St. George’s is only a short walk away from the police station. Inside, thin light slants between the high rafters of the market roof. People are milling between the stalls, and sitting on the mezzanine drinking pints or cups of coffee. At one of the tables, a group of men breaks into laughter. Next to me, a woman lifts her wrist to read her watch. A man disappears behind a plastic tarp, its frayed edges moving in his wake.

  I look across the crowd. The police have undercover officers posted at train stations in case of an attack, they might be here, too. And someone in this crowd might be a terrorist. The IRA’s first attempt failed, they might be planning to try again.

  Two rows of wrought-iron columns reach to the ceiling, which is made of hundreds of small panes of glass. If a bomb were to go off, all of that glass would shatter and rain down. The shards would be traveling as fast as bullets by the time they reached the crowd.

  Across the hall, an espresso machine hisses. I don’t know why I’m here, but I can’t bring myself to leave. I move through the crowd. What would a counter-terrorism officer be looking for? How could they possibly know in time? I watch a vendor stirring a cauldron of paella, another rearranging her display of cakes. Most of the vendors seem cheerful and brisk, though they’ve already been on their feet for hours.

  They deserve to know about the risk. I want to tell them, except I have no real information. A bomb might rip through here in seconds, or tomorrow, or next year, or never. The same could be said of any crowded place in Belfast.

  The fish stalls where we bought the clams for our linguine are at the north end of the hall. Here the air is colder from all the crushed ice. Customers are buying oysters, asking about the monkfish, tasting samples of dried seaweed. Water drips from a hose in the corner. I find the vendor selling mussels, clams, and scallops. This same man took our order, placing it on the same scale. I remember watching as one side of it dropped under the weight.

  The market was even more crowded then. I felt relaxed, with the baby in his carrier on my chest. He was wearing the cardigan Marian had given him, with buttons shaped like Peter Rabbit. Marian had bought some rose-flavored Turkish delight. She let Finn hold the bag, and he sat in his carrier, levered forward a little, gripping the pouch of dusty-pink marzipan cubes.

  Marian had on a Fair Isle jumper, with her raincoat tied around her waist and her brown hair twisted up in a knot. She was there with us, laughing and talking as we moved between the stalls.

  “Did Marian have a bag with her?” the detective asked.

  I described her leather backpack. Fenton asked its dimensions, and I set my hands apart on the table. He looked down at them for a few moments, then back up at me, and the expression on his face made my heart knock. “That would be big enough,” he said. “The device we found was eight inches long.”

  I didn’t tell him that the trip had been Marian’s idea. We were sitting around our mother’s house that Saturday, and Marian said, “What do you fancy doing today? Want to cook something?”

  It doesn’t matter that she suggested the trip. I’ve never watched a terrorist planting a bomb, but that can’t possibly be how they act. Marian didn’t show any sort of strain. She had a long chat with the vendor at the crêpe stall, she can’t have considered him a target.

  The detective thinks that Marian was using Finn as a sort of cover, that with him in her arms, she could open a fire door, walk into a disused corridor, and hide the bomb, without drawing any suspicion.

  Standing in the middle of the market, I pass my hand over my eyes. I didn’t tell Fenton about the conversation we had with our mother before we left her house.

  “I can mind the baby,” she said.

  “Oh,” said Marian, “no, let’s bring him, he’ll love it.”

  9

  Finn arches his back and twists his head, his face blanched from crying. “It’s all right, sweetheart, it’s all right,” I tell him as we pace the length of the house. On the third lap, I call my friend Francesca, a doctor at the Royal Victoria in Dublin. “Finn won’t stop crying,” I say. He began crying soon after my return from St. George’s. It had already seemed like a long stretch before my mam left for the prison, and that was hours ago now.

  “Yes, I can hear that. For how long?”

  “Five hours.”

  “Hmm,” says Francesca. “He’s not hungry? Cold? Wet?”

  “No. He had some vaccinations last week, though, could this be a reaction?”

  “Does he have a fever?”

  “No.”

  She yawns. “Then probably not.”

  “Do you think he’s teething?”

  “Could be. You can try massaging his gums. Or give him some Calpol if he really won’t settle.”

  I rub the baby’s gums while he stares up at me, bewildered. It doesn’t seem to help. I position him on my forearm in a colic hold, and he lies there, his limbs dangling, his head in my palm, with an expression of weary forbearance.

  He starts to arch his back. I rock and shush him, but already he’s howling. My hair hurts. Every time I move my head, the elastic pinches its strands.

  This house is too hot. And too small. I don’t know how the size of it has never bothered me before. The ceiling barely seems to clear the top of my head. I pace the miniature living room, bouncing Finn while he wails.

  When I bought it, the house was crumbling. It needed a new boiler, new wiring, new pipes. I tore clumps of rotted pink insulation from the ceiling, ripped up the carpet, sanded the wood floor. I had the kitchen torn out and rebuilt, and the bathroom tiled and grouted, and I coated the walls and the ceiling in creamy new paint. It was finished days before Finn was born.

  I’d been proud to bring him home to this house. I hadn’t realized it would sh
rink in direct proportion to his crying.

  Francesca rings me back after another half hour. “Has he stopped?”

  “No.”

  “Have you tried the hair dryer?”

  The moment the hair dryer turns on, Finn stops crying. He swivels his head, blinking. I sink down to the floor with the hair dryer running beside us. After a few moments, his body softens in the crook of my arm. His eyes start to drift, and slowly the lids come down. The red splotches fade from his skin. In his sleep, he looks impeccably peaceful, like the last five hours never happened.

  I can’t say the same for myself. My nerves feel sandpapered. I remember this sensation from his first few months, when he had reflux. During one crying spell, my mam came to take him out of the house. I watched her carry him away, his small, worried face poking over her shoulder. He was wearing his white safari hat, like he was setting off on a much longer expedition. Come back, I thought.

  That seems like years ago, but it was only in March, he was born in December. When I arrived at the hospital, my legs wouldn’t stop shaking, from the pain or the adrenaline. I remember kneeling over the triage bed, wanting to bite through the metal. When she arrived, the anesthesiologist told me to round my back, like a scared cat. I remember her wiping down my skin, placing an antiseptic dressing, and then the calm from the epidural drip, the sulfurous light in the delivery room, the drifting of my thoughts. An IV line was taped to the back of my hand, and a nurse gave me a pink jug of ice water with a straw.

  For hours, we heard the monitor on the baby’s heart. Afterward, Tom and I thought it was still playing in the recovery room, a phantom sound still revolving. Sometimes, during the labor, the monitor slipped and the line on the screen broke into dashes.

  “You don’t actually want to hear all of this,” I said to Marian after coming home from hospital.

  “Of course I do,” she said.

  “Aren’t labor stories boring to other people?”

  “No. Why would you think that?” she said.

  “I don’t know.”