Northern Spy

by Berry, Flynn

  “No.”

  She tells me about the IRA’s internal security team, which reviews every failed operation to determine if a mole was involved. “They investigated St. George’s,” she says.

  “You need to leave. We can drive to Ardglass.” The lobster boats will be leaving soon, I can pay one of the men to bring her over to Scotland.

  “I’m not leaving,” she says.

  “They’re going to kill you.”

  “I’ve already had my interview,” she says. The internal security team gave her a polygraph test. She assumes that she passed, since they wouldn’t have let her leave otherwise. “It was fine. I practiced polygraphs with Eamonn.”

  “Eamonn?”

  “My handler.”

  His name is Eamonn Byrne. She knows that he works for MI5 in counter-terrorism, that his last assignment was in Hong Kong, that he has been in Belfast for two years, that his cover is working as a restaurant investor. Marian hasn’t spoken to him since sabotaging the attack on St. George’s. It’s too dangerous while the IRA has her under review. She has to assume they’re always watching her.

  “I can’t meet with him anymore,” she says. “But you can.”

  I laugh, and she says, “You won’t need to do anything yourself. I’ll tell you information and you’ll pass it along to Eamonn. No one’s watching you, you’ll be safe meeting with him.”

  “Safe?”

  Marian starts to describe how Eamonn will find secure meeting places for us, and my body turns numb. I can’t believe the conversation anymore, it has become too fantastical, and while she talks I watch the pines brushing across the white sky. After a while, I realize that she is waiting for a response, and I lower my face, slowly dragging down my line of vision.

  “No, Marian. I’m not doing it.”

  “It wouldn’t—”

  “No. I have a baby.”

  She pauses, then says, “There are other children.”

  My breath catches. Other children, she means, will die if the peace talks fail. “How dare you?”

  “I’m not trying to scare you,” she says. “But at least think about it before deciding.”

  “You don’t get to tell me what to do. You’re the murderers.”

  “I’m trying to fix it,” she says.

  “No, you want me to fix it for you. You’re asking me for my life.”

  Marian crosses her arms and leans forward over her knees. The wind sends the dry tips of her hair flying forward. “Tessa—”

  “What do you think? Does Finn still need a mother? Or do you think he’d be fine?”

  “They won’t find out.”

  “They always find out.”

  She says, “Eamonn will be waiting for you on the beach in Ardglass at seven on Wednesday morning.”

  “And he can fuck right off, too,” I say, and walk away.

  15

  Iturn the pillow to the other side and watch the curtains float into the room on the wind. Sometimes the thin fabric lifts enough to show the windowsill and the darkness beyond it. I can’t sleep. Marian has traveled back to south Belfast, where Seamus, Damian, and Niall are waiting for her in the safe house.

  During the year I spent studying for my MA in politics, Marian was a new recruit. While I was in the library at Trinity, Marian was lying in a ditch watching a police station. I was sitting in a lecture theater, and buying books at Hodges Figgis, and bicycling along the canal, and dancing in a bar on Camden Street, while my sister learned to build bombs.

  When she visited me at Trinity, Marian looked at the tennis courts in the square below my window. “Are they free?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “For everyone?”

  “They’re free for Trinity students,” I said, and she stared at me for a moment, then turned away.

  She used to say, “I’m not really interested in politics.” Marian bought the Financial Times but rarely read it, and I teased her that she just liked the look of it lying around her flat, the salmon-pink pages folded on her kitchen counter. Of course she was actually reading it, of course she studied the news.

  I give up trying to sleep, find a Frantz Fanon book online, and read the first chapter. He makes good points about imperialism, production, resources. It’s good, but is it good enough to change your life? Is it good enough to turn you into a terrorist? “I want a free Ireland,” said Marian, as though I don’t, too, as though I’m on the side of the colonialists.

  Before returning to bed, I notice the jar of cold cream in the bathroom cabinet and wish I could give some to Marian for her dry face. The old instincts still apply. My sister has been a terrorist for the past seven years, but I still don’t want her skin to itch.

  Is she a terrorist now? Can you be a terrorist and an informer at the same time, or are you only ever one or the other?

  She hasn’t really defected. The leaders of her organization are in peace talks with the government, Marian is trying to safeguard those talks. Except what she’s doing hasn’t been sanctioned by anyone in the IRA. If they find out, the internal security team won’t spend time parsing her loyalty. She’s a tout. They kill informers execution-style, with a bullet at the back of the head.

  Her life has been in danger, in one way or another, for seven years. I don’t understand how she never told me, in all the time we’ve spent together.

  We went to France together last year. We flew into Bordeaux, rented a car, and drove south into the Languedoc. During the hottest hours of the day, we sat under the shade of the arbor with cups of coffee, newspapers, paperbacks, and bowls of Castelvetrano olives. We swam in the pool and lay on the slates to dry. It had been cold and damp for months at home, and I felt like the sun was scouring me clean. At night we sat outside in the dark, the stone fortifications of the town floodlit on the hill above us, talking.

  I want to know what she was thinking then, and as we drove back to the airport, passed through security, waited at the gate. She could have turned to me at any moment and said, There’s something I need to tell you.

  In bed, I try to calm myself by picturing Finn asleep in his travel crib at his grandparents’ house in Ardara. My sunny baby. I miss his sounds, his expressions, his warm hand resting on top of mine while I give him a bottle.

  It’s almost four in the morning. I’d expected three full nights of sleep while Finn was away. I’d expected the sleep to act like a blood transfusion, for my body to work properly again afterward. I hate Marian for keeping me awake, for letting me think she’d been abducted, for lying to me.

  At St. George’s market, Marian carried Finn away from me into a service corridor, opened her backpack, and set a bomb down, inches away from him. All of my fury with her keeps returning to this one point, like a lightning rod under a massive storm.

  16

  Nicholas buys me a coffee in the canteen on Monday morning. We should be making notes for our program this week, but neither of us has written a word. I look around at the reporters and staff sprawled at the other tables, talking and gesturing with their paper cups, and envy their ease. A part of me was relieved my badge still worked at the entrance this morning. My sister is in the IRA, I shouldn’t be allowed in here.

  My face was burning when I walked into the news meeting this morning. I’d thought more than usual about my outfit, choosing a striped shirtdress, ironing it, trying not to look like a terrorist’s sister.

  “You don’t need to tell me anything,” says Nicholas, “but are you all right?”

  “Yes.” His face creases with concern, and I resist the urge to tell him everything. Someday, maybe. “Has everyone been talking about me?”

  “Oh,” he says, “don’t worry about that. The gossip has already moved on.”

  I don’t believe him. Everyone in the building knows that my sister performed an armed robbery on Thursday. They might think tha
t I’d already known she was in the IRA, that I’d been covering for her for years.

  “I had no idea Marian had joined,” I say. “I would have tried to stop her.”

  “I know you would have,” says Nicholas.

  “Am I going to be fired?”

  “No, Tessa. Of course not.”

  “How can anyone trust me?”

  “Well,” he says, “to start, you’re not your sister.” He says this simply, and I nod while thinking, Yes I am.

  * * *

  —

  On the bus home, late sunlight pours through the windows. I rest my face against the warm glass as we drive through the fields, yellow wheat sweeping away in all directions. We pass two men working in the field, with long hoods of sweat down their shirts. The sunlight turns the backs of my eyes a warm red, and I start to drift. I feel crumpled by the day, my dress wrinkled, my feet swollen from the heat, my head heavy from trying to focus.

  My mother rings me as I’m unlocking my front door, dropping my bag, levering off my shoes. “Listen to this,” she says.

  When she was at work earlier, she went out to the road to bring the bins in, and Marian was standing there.

  They fell into each other’s arms, then my mam said, “Wait here.” The Dunlops were inside, they couldn’t catch sight of Marian, so my mother went back to the house, returning with the labradors, and they walked into the woods. My mam already knew about our conversation in Greyabbey yesterday, but Marian still told her everything. Afterward, my mam brought the dogs inside. She took the dinner she’d made for the Dunlops, macaroni and cheese with crispy breadcrumbs and parsley, from the oven and smuggled a large portion outside to Marian.

  “Are you not angry?”

  “With Marian?”

  “Yes, mam. With Marian.”

  “You don’t understand. She could have been dead.”

  “If it were me,” I say, “you’d be angry.”

  “Oh for god’s sake.”

  “You would. You were always tougher on me.”

  “I had to be, Tessa. Do you mind yourself as a teenager?”

  “Because I wouldn’t go to Mass? I never built bombs, mam.”

  My mother makes a clucking sound, like it was inappropriate of me to mention the bombs. It is one small consolation to consider how furious the Dunlops would be if they knew that Marian had been to their house, that a member of the IRA had held their dogs’ leashes, had been given part of their dinner.

  “Do you forgive her?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  A silence falls between us. I know she is thinking that her forgiveness is beside the point, it is for god to forgive. She won’t say it aloud, though.

  “She’s a terrorist,” I say.

  “Not anymore. She wants peace.”

  “She lied to us for seven years, mam. We don’t even know who she is.”

  “Oh, I know exactly who she is,” she says. “And who you are.”

  * * *

  —

  The funny thing, I think later, is that our mother sounded clear-eyed and proud, even though one of her daughters is a terrorist and the other is a bystander.

  17

  After work the next day, I sit on my front step, my chin propped in my hand, waiting for Tom and Finn. When they arrive, I skip forward, elated to see Finn, but he refuses to meet my eyes.

  “He’s punishing you,” says Tom, “for leaving him.”

  “I didn’t leave you,” I tell Finn. “Your da took you to visit your grandparents. I missed you so much.”

  “He’ll never trust you again,” says Tom, and I burst into tears. “Jesus, Tessa, I’m joking. He’ll be over it in an hour.”

  While Tom carries in the bags, I split blueberries in half and feed them to the baby. “What are you doing?” asks Tom.

  “Rebuilding our bond.”

  “By bribing him?” he asks, and I shrug. Finn opens his mouth and I feed him another blueberry half.

  Tom’s parents gave him a train set, and the three of us sit together on the living-room carpet assembling the wooden tracks.

  “I need to talk to you,” I say. “I want to move.”

  Tom places a bridge over the tracks. “You want to take him away from me?”

  “No, of course not. We can pick somewhere together. You used to talk about London all the time.” His architecture firm has an office in London, he could ask to be relocated.

  “Briony can’t leave. Her father has MS, she’s the one looking after him.”

  “Her father can come, too,” I say. “We can all talk about it together.”

  Tom reaches for another length of track. “Is this about Marian?”

  “No.”

  He sets a red station house along the tracks. “Were there any signs?”

  “Are you asking me if I knew?”

  “Don’t get defensive. I mean now, looking back. Did she ever act strange?”

  “No. There was nothing.”

  “And this is your solution?” he asks. “For all of us to move abroad?”

  “It’s not because of Marian. There was a bomb scare in Belfast on Sunday. Why are you not worried for Finn?”

  “How often do you bring Finn into Belfast?”

  “It could happen here,” I say, as Finn lifts the station house and begins to chew on it. “What about a trial run? We could go for six months.”

  “Do you think the conflict will be over in six months?”

  “It has to end at some point, doesn’t it? Then we can come back.”

  Tom fits the carriages together and begins to push them around the track, over the bridge, past the stand of painted trees. Finn watches, transfixed, rising onto his knee and raising one arm.

  “This is my home,” I say. “I don’t want to leave either, but I don’t think Finn’s safe here.”

  “If we moved, you’d find something else to worry about.”

  “That’s not fair.” I rub my forehead. “What if just me and Finn go? You can visit.”

  Tom looks down at Finn before answering. “If it were you,” he says, “how would you feel about visiting?”

  * * *

  —

  After Tom leaves, I strap the baby into his carrier and we walk down the lane. Finn doesn’t seem to be giving me the cold shoulder anymore. I snap off a wheat chaff and offer it to him, and he grips it in his fist while we walk.

  The soles of my shoes lift eddies of dust from the lane. I have on an old pair of denim overalls from my pregnancy and my hair is up in a knot, the sun warm on the back of my neck. I look at the beach roses, the potato fields, the row of tilting telephone poles, the lighter wash of sky to the east, above the sea.

  I want Tom to be right about Greyabbey, that we’re safe here, that this village is different from the city. It is different. We have a microclimate, to start. The air feels warmer here in the summer and colder in the winter. We have thicker fogs and heavier snow. Our nights are darker, pitch-black. Our shops sell different things, you can buy mismatched silver at our antique shops, or a set of enamel coffee spoons, or a vintage steamer trunk, and across the street, you can buy turf bricks at the farm shop.

  Our storms are worse, blowing straight in from the sea, and sometimes the roads flood. Sometimes the wind rips branches from the trees. Last winter, an ice storm knocked down a power line. The storm came fast, I remember worrying about the fishing boats that had been caught at sea. One of them had to be rescued by the coast guard. Those are the kinds of problems we have here. We’re closer to a coast guard post than to a police station.

  We don’t have crime. We have tense council meetings about building extensions and roadworks, we have feuds between rival antique-shop dealers. This village is safe, relatively speaking. Maybe Tom is right, maybe if we move to London, I’ll start worrying about knife crim
e, or international terrorism, or air pollution. If we stay here, Finn can have a canoe, and a dog, he can swim in the sea even on schooldays, he can grow up near his extended family.

  Though even places like this have been targeted in the past. No one really knows of our village now, but it could be notorious one day.

  Marian said they’re close to a cease-fire. She said dozens of people are working in secret to end the conflict. A twinge pinches my side, which I ignore. The sun is behind us now, sending our shadows ahead of us on the dirt lane. I wave my hands and Finn laughs at the jumping shadow.

  I walked on these lanes all through my pregnancy, which from here seems like such an easier time. I feel nostalgic for it, for my concerns then, their simplicity. All I had to do to be a good mother then was, what, take a prenatal vitamin. Not smoke. Maybe buy some nappies.

  Now, I wonder, would a good mother take Finn away from this place, or keep him close to his father? Would a good mother work for peace, or stay away from the conflict? Would a good mother be preoccupied with terrorism during every minute she has spent with her son this week?

  I don’t want my son to have to forgive me for anything, but I can’t even tell what that might be, so how can I avoid it?

  Before Tom left, I said, “Do you ever worry you’re a bad father?”

  “No,” he said.

  “No as in you’ve considered it and decided you’re not, or no as in you’ve never thought about it?”

  “Um,” he said. “The second.”

  “Christ. What must that be like?”

  “Why, do you worry about being a bad father?” he asked.

  It’s impossible. I want someone to tell me what to do. If we can stay or if we need to leave tonight, right away, the sooner the better.

  * * *

  —

  At home, I open a jar of vegetable purée while Finn grizzles and bounces in the high chair. “No need for alarm, it’s coming, here we are.”

  His mouth clamps down on the spoon. I hope he always loves food this much. The first time he tried pears, his eyes widened and he patted my arm to ask for more. Once he’s done, I finish the jar, scraping out the last swirls of squash with a spoon.