by Finn Óg
“I’ve called the Guards,” I said, imagining that he would assume I was a neighbour.
“Good, good,” he replied, which was not really what I had hoped for, to be honest. “Then they can take yer one away for harassment.”
I noted how well he had assimilated Dublin parlance, his Eastern European tone was mixed with more than just a little of the vernacular. He ducked and turned his head to peer under his colossal arm, and I followed his gaze to find a woman in black crawling towards a sofa, gripping its arm. He curled in further to shout at her, and as he did, his right hand dropped off the steel doorframe.
He began to tell her not to bleed on his furniture, so I stepped left and used my entire body weight and both arms to take his hand and give his wrist a full turn anti-clockwise, breaking it immediately and dislocating his elbow in the process. It’s a simple enough move, but one rarely gets the opportunity to perform it, as human strength is all focused on beating counter-intuitive movements. It is also excruciatingly painful. Some wounds are so severe that they cut through the messages being sent to the brain, and this often leaves a combatant able to go on. The trick is to do just enough damage to ensure that the pain endures. I needed him to remain conscious, but disabled, and I needed to be able to inflict more pain to get the answers I had come for.
A heavy blow to the side of his throat forced him back inside the apartment, and I got a chance to close the door. I stared at the woman, who was gradually recovering. It’s always a worry to intervene in a domestic. I understand why it happens, but it’s curious that in such situations a person being saved from a savage beating can turn violently against a Samaritan. I kept an eye on the woman to see what way she might go, as the thug laboured for breath at my feet. There was a certain comfort, however, in her next comment.
“Thank you,” was all she managed, but it was clear that she was Irish, and something about her made me think that she was not a sex worker, or a domestic slave. Perhaps it was because she was well enough dressed, understated, practical. Someone under duress would be forced to dress provocatively, or have no choice but to wear clothing provided to them, from a discount store like Lidl or Aldi.
Her facial wounds were limited to a cut across the temple, which was bleeding hard, and a rapidly blossoming black eye. I could tell by the way she attempted to cradle herself that the bastard on the floor had gone to work on her torso. Perhaps he was a boxer or a martial artist. They tend to wear down the trunk, varying and concealing their punishment.
I was confident that the thug was sufficiently incapacitated, so I stepped on his face as I walked over him to help her up. She was sore, but I needed to know more about what was going on. “Anyone else in this flat?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I only got here a bit before you did.”
“Any weapons?”
“I’d be amazed if there weren’t,” she wheezed.
“Does he live alone?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“So, who are you?” I asked, becoming slightly annoyed that she appeared to know so little.
“I’ll tell you in a minute. Can you get me out of here?” It was her turn to be exasperated. She made a fair point.
“Yes, sorry, I will, but you’ll need to give me some time with him.”
I cleared the rest of the flat, all three rooms of it, and returned to the woman. “This isn’t gonna be pretty. Can you wait in the jacks?” I held the door to the bathroom open.
“I will in me bollocks,” she said, and nodded to the bloke on the floor. “Do whatever you have to do.”
This was not ideal. I didn’t want anyone else to hear what it was that I needed to know. That would lead to identification, which would lead to the factory owner, which would lead to Portlaoise Prison, which would leave Isla alone again. “Get in the fucking bogs, or I leave you here with him.”
My tone was deliberately harsh, but she was fit for it, and shrugged, painfully. I got the impression that there was a long history between the pair, and that she wanted to watch.
Dear knows how much she heard as I went to work on him. It seemed to take forever, and I was deeply worried that the noise would rouse a neighbour and bring the police. He was both physically and mentally tough, but he had no ideological commitment to a cause. Taliban fighters might be inept and weak, but their minds are strong. Their information is tough to tap, because they believe that what they’re doing is right. This big bastard had no such emotional attachment to his work, and once he realised that my demands were deeply personal, he understood that I wouldn’t be leaving him alive unless he choked out the details. We got there in the end.
Then I had a decision to make. Disable, or decommission. I couldn’t pull my little factory-owner stunt on him; that would link the two incidents. I couldn’t kill him either, unless I killed the witness too, and I had no intention of murdering the woman. So I went for two simple enough fixes. The first was disgusting, but took the sex out of him forever. The second ensured that he would never raise his fists in anger again. I then took the woman from the bathroom, and tried to debrief her. That proved tricky, as she juked around my head to try to get a view of the now-sobbing mound on the floor.
“We’re leaving now, and we need to do so quietly.”
“What did you do to him?”
“He’s alive,” I said, and watched her shoulders sag a little. “We need to go. How did you get here?”
“I drove.”
“Can you drive now?”
“What do you think?” she said.
I didn’t think that was a good idea. She could barely raise her arms. “If I leave you outside, will you call the cops?”
“For what reason would I call the Guards? What would I say to them? That I came to get a girl from a pimp and he beat the shit out of me, and then some fella from the North came and cut his bollocks off?” She was incredulous.
“I didn’t cut his bollocks off,” I said, but turning to match her gaze, I did notice how his shorts were absorbing blood, as a tea towel might a drink spill. It was definitely time to go. “Look, I’ll drive you to a hospital, I hope you’ve a car with a big boot.”
It was a hairdresser’s car. I lowered her into the passenger seat, and got my bike. I released the front wheel, and had to leave the back one sticking out the rear. “Where’s the hospital?”
She began to give me directions, but when we passed the Mater Emergency Department, I began to wonder where she was taking us. Ordinarily I would have invested some server time in keeping track of our direction, speed and where the sun would rise. But the woman was blethering away and because Google makes us lazy, I knew I could rely on a backup. What I didn’t have was much darkness left, so I was keen to get this sorted, and to start moving towards the boat.
“I could use someone like you,” she began. “You obviously know what that bastard was up to.”
“All I know is he brings in foreign workers, and skims them.”
“Illegals too, mostly women,” she said. “He brings them over, promises cleaning or office work, and within an hour of being picked up at Dublin airport, they’ve been raped at least twice.”
I stayed silent, but felt fairly satisfied that he’d been neutered.
“They’re in houses just like these,” she winced as she raised her arm to gesture at the Georgian terraces sweeping past. “And the gregarious men of Ireland enjoy them every day, whether they’re drugged of half dead. They don’t give a rat’s ass.”
None of this surprised me. I’d seen it all before, in Helmand, in Poole, in Palestine. Flashes of my wife appeared before me. I swiped them away as if an advert had popped up on my phone, but the image kept bouncing back. I knew then that I wouldn’t make the tide.
We coasted into the North inner city, along yet another beautiful street. I detest towns. I cannot abide the claustrophobia and proximity to people that city life insists upon, but Dublin is different. There is space in Dublin. The streets are broad, the houses
simple but statuesque, and the architecture is untouched by bombing missions or terrorism. I have always felt at ease in the Pale. It always felt to me that there was mischief around every corner.
This woman, though, was rapidly destroying that image for me. She was talking about the “shitheads” who spent their wages on exploited women. She insisted the Johns must know that the victims had been trafficked. She talked about drugs, and crime gangs, and how useless the Gardaí was. Then suddenly she yelled at me to turn right, as if I had made a stupid mistake. There followed a hard left and a long lane, a set of plush gates and eventually an austere old convent.
This was a scary-looking place, and I immediately pitied the children who had been educated – or incarcerated – in such an imposing place. We walked up a stone staircase, and it was plain to me that this woman had no intention of going to hospital. She was reinforcing every point, like she was pitching to me. Along a corridor we reached a small, barren office. She flicked on a fan heater and muttered that the nuns would not be happy if they knew she had it. Organised religion and misery in Ireland once went hand in glove.
Over three hours we talked, or rather I listened, and I dressed her wounds. In the Marines, a body is a body, a machine of sorts, and where there is damage we get in there and try to fix it. I had forgotten the niceties of civilian life, and when I checked her over, she seemed to panic slightly as I examined her ribcage and her spine. I stopped when I realised, a little too late, that she was alarmed. After a moment, she relented, but I was suddenly conscious that her crusade against abuse might have been borne of personal experience. I decided that if anything was broken, it couldn’t be too serious, given the rate she was rattling on. I became less aware of what she was saying, as of the spark in her eyes, and through it I followed the shake and nod of every heartfelt gesticulation. Her commitment inevitably made me think of my dead wife, and I knew that whatever this woman was working up to, I would help her achieve.
And that’s where Charlie started; my secret company, my means of income, my pathway from perdition. But I had to get to Lithuania first, and make another withdrawal before I could start depositing in any absolution account.
Nine
Shannon is the only person to have seen inside my mind, and understood. Shannon was the only person, I mean. That became fully apparent following a shameful incident in Belfast, while I was home on leave. She consoled me afterwards, and looking back now, I do wonder if she thought it was, perhaps in part, her fault.
Against all odds, my R&R had fallen over Christmas. It was the first time I’d had the chance to spend it with Isla since she was born, and only the second Christmas I had spent with Shannon. I received a tap on my shoulder one morning as we prepared to patrol from a forward operating post. It was the dustiest, dirtiest, most dangerous compound we’d occupied all tour. I was filling in my hole, the one I’d slept in for two weeks, dug by my own giant paw. The sand bag walls of our makeshift fort were all we had to protect us; well, that and some pretty heavy general-purpose machine guns, a truckload of artillery and a mortar team.
Anyway, I was told that a keen Lieutenant had arrived, was being flown to the outpost, and could take over from me. With hindsight, I wondered whether someone, somewhere had realized how much time I’d spent on the ground, and how many of my men had been sent home without legs. We’d had a hell of a tour, and although we had taken out a dozen Taliban positions, their land mines had literally crippled us.
My troop was blisteringly brutal, probably among the best few sections of Royal Marines I’d ever served with. The young ones were brave and smart, the Corporals and Sergeants across the board were experienced and committed. During larger Ops, we’d managed to trim the Taliban right back without losing a single Bootneck. But it was the bloody IEDs that took the toll. I had applied tourniquet after tourniquet, on one occasion three to the same man. It was horrific. I lost count of the number of times I’d knelt by one of my men as they growled to suppress the shock of seeing their limbs in sinew beside them. When it happened, I couldn’t stop my mind springing to that song by Shane MacGowan. I used to love that song, “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” but I don’t know why it came to me as the arms and legs of other men lay scattered all around. I looked to the sky and wondered how the hell the juke-box of my drinking days had become the theme track to my career.
There were occasions when it was simply too dangerous to let the medics close to the maimed. One man down is bad, two explosions ought to be preventable. It went against general orders, but in my mind, it was sensible; better to lose the boss than the medic. So, insisting that the doc retrace his steps with the rest of the section, I tended the armless, the legless, the blind and insane, as Shane would say. My reasoning was that they could make it back without me, but that without the expertise of the morphine man, they might not make it back at all. It was a way of alleviating the guilt associated with leading men to their deaths. The responsibility was mine. I was in my 30s, and in Bootneck terms, I’d been around the block. No matter how brave they were, the men in my unit were scared at times. People often confuse the two. Bravery is not fearlessness. Bravery is the suppression of fear to accomplish what you think needs to be done. My men had loads of it, but they trusted me to make the right decisions. No detector can trace every mine though; no section can sweep ahead of every footstep. Those crippled were on my conscience, while my hands and feet, remarkably, remained with me.
As forty loomed closer than thirty, I began to feel my back stiffen. The Bergen never got any lighter, and my kit seemed to be permanently saturated in the blood of others. Countless times I’d hauled the heads and torsos of brave little Marines to heli-vacs, in the full knowledge that if the catastrophic bleed didn’t take them, the PTSD might. I knew too that I would get it, but I didn’t have time to contract anything back then. Contrary to what the press might say, Post Traumatic Stress is treated pretty seriously in the Corps. I always looked upon it as a kind of virus, or a cold, that would inevitably spread throughout my troop. My view was that I couldn’t catch it until that dreadful tour was finished, but I never doubted that it would come.
It wasn’t until that Christmas that the cracks began to appear, and let the darkness in. It started with fear, which was hard to take, frankly. It came at night, was triggered in sleep, and was dreadful. Some talk of flashbacks, others of re-living the hell. For me, closing my eyes was like going to the movies. Everything was so vivid, so real, and yet so embarrassingly ordinary, once the sun rose. Darkness, for a period, became my enemy, and I can’t fully explain why. Perhaps it was because, for the most part, death had visited at night; when an allied army unit got their range wrong, and blew the shit out of our position, then denied it. Or when we were too fresh to the field to understand how the Taliban was working in any given area.
Anyway, panic was unusual to me. I’d wake hard, eyes wide open, ready to burst out, and realise that sleep had taken me to hell again. But the anxiety didn’t end there. It endured for hours, as I lay awake and listened and jerked; I was frightened, and I am virtually never frightened. Even under extreme fire, even with bits of Bootneck hanging from rocks or plastered over walls, I was not frightened. But there is no adrenaline to protect you at night, in bed, beside your wife. There is no rifle or General Purpose Machine Gun with which to appease your fear and shoot up the enemy. There is just silence, and darkness, and cowardice. And it crept through me like the dawn over sea, enveloping and exposing me, and, according to my wife, making me human again.
Isla and I were happy, hand in hand, on an elevator in Belfast’s Victoria Square shopping centre. The plan was to buy her mother a Christmas present, and Isla was full of chat. I always scan, I can’t help it. I’m not saying I’m ultra-alert or anything, but I take in my surroundings, probably seeking out threat, and making sure I have the capacity to react. Ahead of me was a man who was turned astern, looking past me, at my little girl. His mouth was open like a hyena, his tongue wide and flat, his head nodding sligh
tly. There was no doubt in my mind, he was a slobbering, salivating pervert who had forgotten himself, and was ogling my child. This guy’s leery desire immediately took me back to the Middle East, and a cacophony of rage rose in me, like he’d tossed a grenade into a bunker.
The moving stairs reached his feet as I reached for him, plucking him from the ground and throttling him back against a glass wall.
“Fuck are you looking at?” was all I could manage to growl, my teeth ground shut in anger, his body giving way to shock and fear. Then there was screaming and slapping and Isla was crying and the man was in a mess on the ground. Somebody called for security and two women arrived and were right in my face calling me for every name they could muster. I lifted Isla up and drew her in and turned to walk away, and it was only then that I realised what I had done.
“He’s got a learning disability you bloody animal!” I heard a woman shout.
Somehow, I knew it was the man’s sister. I turned back again and looked at the scene, people gathered around him. All I could see were his feet. The other woman could have been his mum. She was distraught and wailing beside him. My eyes closed as my heart sank, and a swollen ball of nausea travelled up my chest. I had the overwhelming urge to return and plead an apology, but I could see the sister would wear none of it.
“What’s wrong with you?” she screamed, incredulous.
And then I prioritised. I chose Isla over my conscience, and I turned and left, holding her tight and saying over and over again that everything would be all right, ignoring her questions about why I had hit that man. I don’t even remember hitting him, I don’t know if I did. If she was right, I knew he could be in real difficulty. I took her away.