by White, Gwynn
Vivienne did not feel the explosion or hear it. The world was simply ripped apart.
1
Val
Thirty-three years later. August 12th, 1979. Belfast
Valery Sullivan’s grandmother said, “Are you going down the town? Don’t. There’s going to be trouble today.”
“I’ll be back before dark.”
“You’re looking for Alyx O’Braonain, are you? Then you’ve got the right idea. Where there’s trouble, there she’ll be, like a crow following the dustmen.”
Val couldn’t think of a clever response to that. He kissed his grandmother on the cheek and set out through the summer afternoon.
The marchers had set off from the Aching Head estate while Val was still sleeping off last night’s hangover. He hurried to catch up. The route of the march had been devised to avoid loyalist areas: it wound past pockets of terraced housing, abandoned buildings, and forty-year-old bombsites. Cops in the forest-green livery of House Sauvage guarded the mouths of side streets. “What about you, boys,” Val called out in high spirits, teasing them. They looked nervous, as well they might. This was the zenith of the marching season, the anniversary of the Uprising of 1956.
He caught up with the parade on the Shankill Road. Drums thundered. Tricked-out jeeps towed flatbed trailers, each bearing a freshly painted plaster statue of a saint. As well as that, people had brought out their household saints: they were marching with them on their shoulders in feretory chests daubed with hagiographic pictures. Holy dust swirled in the air, flung by the priests standing in the open backs of the jeeps. The men riding the float conducted a sort of rough triage, beckoning to the sickest supplicants and hauling them up so they could touch the bases of the statues, which had actual miraculous relics inside. Getting rare, those were, and the chance to touch them for free was rarer yet.
Not that they would do Val any good, even if he could touch them.
He was an incurable.
Where was Alyx?
Behind the parade, the street looked like a battlefield. Exhaust fumes belching from the jeeps, bodies everywhere. Miracle cures were always followed by a period of deep sleep. Proper medical facilities had rooms where you could sleep off your cure.
“Glory, glory, glory to Ireland!” sang the marchers. “Glory, glory to the heroes of the Uprising! For they fell on them in fury at Belfast Castle, and there they made the craven English sing!”
“Up Eire!” Val shouted, and a dozen voices echoed the slogan.
Val could see the vanguard now, a clump of men with long wooden staves—the only weapon permitted to the lowborn.
“Glory, glory, glory to Ireland! Glory, glory to the heroes of the Uprising! What’s a land without defenses, what’s a man without a blade? Give us the right to bear arms now, so we sing!”
The parade spilled into Donegall Square. A line of khaki-clad British soldiers stood at attention in the middle of the square, several ranks deep. Muddy LongHOGs—armored jeeps with extended wheelbases—were drawn up at both ends of the line. Sauvage-green fire engines stood in reserve, their high-powered hoses snaking from the trucks to the hydrants at the edges of the square. Here the IRA parade overlapped with the route of the other parade scheduled today.
The loyalists claimed this as their own holy day. After all, on that day thirty-three years ago, they had won.
If the dueling parades were to meet, the saints would end the day working overtime to mend cracked heads.
The British army was here to stop that from happening.
Children screeched and pointed at people on the other side of the square. The tail end of the loyalist parade.
A lone IRA man ran into the square, whirling his stave around his head in a challenge.
“Independence for Ireland!”
“Up Eire!”
“I, R, motherfecking A!”
Sandwiched between the two sides, an English officer stood on the roof of one of the LongHOGs, shouting into a loudhailer.
The IRA vanguard levelled their staves and charged. The soldiers lowered their rifles. The charge faltered and broke up.
And abruptly the excitement went out of Val. He buttoned his leather jacket and sank his chin into his scarf, muttering to no one, “Ah, this is shite, this is.”
Stones and bricks arced over the heads of the soldiers, who had obviously been ordered to hold their position for now. The firetrucks’ engines rumbled. Sooner or later they’d turn their hoses on the combatants. And so it would end. Everyone would get wet and crawl off home to plot their next protest march.
“Fecking pathetic,” Val mumbled. This was no way to win their struggle for independence.
A new float had arrived. Its statue depicted a modern saint in guerrilla dress, moulded black hair flowing over his shoulders. The script on the float’s skirt read: St. Domnall MacConn, Rightful King of Great Britain & Ireland.
Val stopped.
Men clustered around the float, working frantically. Val edged closer and saw that they were filling milk bottles with gasoline.
Ah, Alyx, you eejit. In full sight of the fecking British Army?
But Alyx was not here herself, or at any rate, he couldn’t see her.
As each bottle was filled, a rag was stuffed into its neck and one of the balaclava-heads ran off with it.
Val scanned the non-balaclava-wearers nearby. His gaze snagged on a knight’s knot of blond hair. Whereas commoners were legally required to wear their hair short, the nobility flaunted long hair. This fellow wore his blond locks bunned at the nape of his neck, German style. A knight, here? The man was grinning indulgently, thumbs thrust through a belt that bore a sword in a rugged plastic scabbard. Looking as if he were not a part of the action, but wanted to be. Looking as if he were half in and half out of the streetfighting mentality, like Val himself.
Looking familiar.
“Val! Valery Sullivan!”
Too late to escape.
“Val!”
Heinrich Ende covered the distance between them in three strides and hugged Val.
“Bloody hell!” Val said, striving to play it casual. “Heinrich! What are you doing here?”
Ende felt as solidly muscular as ever. Must’ve kept up the bodybuilding. But he now carried a sword and wore a hairknot. Who had made Ende a knight? He was a hit-man. Murder on legs, that was all he’d been when they worked together in the Middle East and sure as shite that was all he was now.
Ende gestured at the men around the float. “Wanna introduce me to your friends?”
“They’re not my friends,” Val said automatically.
A bottle-bomb carved a flaming arc across the sky. Screams drowned out the smash of its impact on the far side of the square.
“Any minute now,” Ende said, looking in the direction of the British soldiers. “The fire hoses.”
Val grimaced. “This shite is so fecking predictable.” He pulled himself together. “Hey, Ende, I thought I was seeing a ghost! Let me buy you a drink.”
* * *
Heinrich Ende was amiable. “So what’re you doing these days?”
Val dodged the question by taking Ende to the Imperial Hotel on Lothally Road. This was where the journos hung out. Lots of Germans, of course: as de facto ruler of continental Europe, Germany sent people everywhere. A sweating Spaniard hunched over the payphone, filing copy. There were even a couple of Egyptians sitting at the end of the bar. By themselves, of course. No one wanted to drink with them. Necklace tattoos proclaimed their loyalty to the Great Pharaoh. Funny to think that they were probably journalists, too—they had a fancy camera and a tape recorder sitting on the floor under their stools. What could the troubles of Belfast mean to the average Egyptian, far away in that brutal, magic-ridden empire?
Val and Ende settled in a corner of the lounge. The afternoon sun lit up the smoky air. Above Ende’s head hung a portrait of King Tristan II with his children and grandchildren. Val raised his glass to the portrait: “Devil take the lot of you.”
Ende laughed. “So what’re you up to these days?”
Val couldn’t dodge the question again. “I work for the IMF. I know, I know…”
“You’ve gone straight! Never thought I’d see the day.”
“I never did, either. But I’m not getting any younger.”
Ende’s pale blue eyes narrowed. He was muscle but not only muscle. People who assumed he was as stupid as he looked had often lived to regret it.
“Shit, man. You used to be able to weave curses that worked. You could crack a safe just by spitting on the lock. Crash a car with string and chalk. You were the best magician old Flambeault ever hired. You going straight, Sullivan, is a tragedy.”
Val held tightly to his beer so his hands wouldn’t shake. Ende could destroy his life by denouncing him as a magician. They both knew it. The only question was whether Ende wanted to.
The tension tightened his throat so much that he started coughing. He wheezed and hacked and scrubbed his lips with a napkin. It came away red.
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Ende said, “but you look like death warmed over. You’re what, thirty?”
“Twenty-nine.” Val was still coughing. Once he started it was often difficult to stop. He lit a cigarette. That helped.
“The saints still hate your ass, huh?”
“Like girls hate a cheapskate.” Val gulped beer. It was a shite life, being an incurable. No miracles for him; every illness had to be weathered until time did its healing work. All for the dubious privilege of working magic.
He wished he knew some magic that could make Heinrich Ende vanish.
“So what brings you to Belfast, big man?”
Ende fingered his beard, smiling. “Have you heard the rumors about this MacConn chick?”
Ah, feck. Val kept it casual. “MacConn? Sure that’s not her real name. She was born plain Alyx O’Braonain.”
“So that story about her being the rightful queen, the daughter of the fallen hero Domnall MacConn … it’s just a story?”
You tell me, Val thought. Alyx herself believed the story, or pretended to. But it might be a fairy story she’d made up. She’d been abandoned as a baby, and that was all he knew of her heritage.
“There’s a lot of wild stories go around in the movement,” he shrugged.
“That’s for sure. I heard some folks say the MacConn chick is a witch. She’s invulnerable to bullets. Can’t be killed.”
Val laughed for real. “There’s no magic can make you invulnerable. I should know.”
“Yeah. I figure it’s just a rumor. But what can you do? The knotheads believe what they want to believe.”
“You’re a knothead now yourself, Heinrich.”
Ende brushed his meager hairknot. “Ha! Yeah. It’s just a formality, makes it easier to get visas. I travel a lot these days for work.”
“Who did you say you were working for”
“I didn’t. But I’ll do this for you, Val. You help me out, I’ll split my fee with you.”
“And what would I be helping you out with?”
“The … person I’m working for … wants the MacConn chick. Dead or alive. Preferably alive. Point me in the right direction, and it’ll be a nice chunk of change for you.”
A nice chunk of change that Val would be too dead to enjoy, if he even thought about betraying Alyx. Which he had no intention of doing.
The trouble was that he’d already been seen with Ende. It would get back to Alyx, and then he’d really have problems. So, he couldn’t just walk away, appealing as that thought was.
“I’d need to talk to some boys in the old neighborhood,” he said, thinking frantically.
“Why don’t I,” Ende started to say, and then an explosion planted itself like the palm of a giant hand against the windows of the lounge.
The journalists rushed to the windows.
A greasy cloud of smoke shimmied from behind the rooftops into the sky.
Inside the lounge, plaster dust sprinkled the tables and banquettes. The explosion had not broken any windows in here but it had shaken cracks into the antique ceiling.
“Get back from the windows,” Ende said, grabbing Val.
Ende was agitated and the journos were panicking, but the boys at the bar were still drinking, their shoulders dusted with bits of ceiling. One of them held out his pint. The barman pulled a refill, not even flinching when the second explosion went off, slightly further away this time.
“It never used to be this bad, I swear to you,” Val said.
“I believe you.”
“There’s more to Ireland than this. You need to get out into the countryside. Go down south, it’s fecking beautiful. That’s where I want to end my days. A cottage, a garden, a wee dog. No sound but the sea. Peace.”
“That sounds sweet, man.”
“Ferghal!” Val yelled to one of the boys at the bar. “Will you drop us up the Falls?”
“I’m not going up the Falls tonight, you can forget about it.”
“They won’t stop us.” Val swayed on his feet. “Argent! Hey, Argent! Would you be needing a lift?”
Colin Argent—Sir Colin, ponytailed and bespectacled—was a reporter for the Irish Broadcasting Corporation, headquartered in Dublin. His expense account persuaded Ferghal the taxi driver to change his mind. They all trooped downstairs and out to a cherry-red Vauxhall parked on the double yellow lines. Argent had a camera-man and a sound fella in tow, so it was a right old squash. The Vauxhall slalomed through the now-deserted streets. The noise of sirens receded. Then they came to a checkpoint.
On any given day, you could expect to be stopped two or three times on your way across Belfast. This checkpoint was a British Army job, a LongHOG parked across the street. One soldier at a time approached the queued drivers. He bent them over their steering wheels and roughly pulled their shirts open to check their ID.
As the Vauxhall crawled along in line, Val saw a poster on a lamppost. ‘VOLUNTARY EMIGRATION SUPPORT’, it said, ‘Start Your New Life With the Wessex Far East Corporation.’ Half his lifetime ago, Val’s parents had fallen for that promise. They’d emigrated to Khmeria, taking him with them, away from Belfast, away from Alyx. But he had come back. He kept coming back. Why, he had not the slightest fecking idea.
They reached the checkpoint. Sir Colin rolled down the front passenger side window. “ID, if you don’t mind,” a young soldier droned.
“Certainly,” Sir Colin smiled. He held his right hand up. The soldier apologized and scuttled back. Val glimpsed the ring tattoos on Sir Colin’s third finger, the grey-blue of Argent stacked with the forest green of Sauvage. The reporter was nobly born, which took care of these servile king’s boys.
On the far side of the checkpoint, they left Sir Colin doing a piece-to-camera in front of a smashed shop window. Ferghal drove back up the hill Val had walked down this morning. A gable-end mural, depicting a mighty-thewed warrior with a machine-gun, overlooked a three-way crossroads. The narrowest fork led up to the Aching Head Estate, the notorious hard area where Val had been born.
“I’m not going in,” Ferghal said, braking. “I’ve a wife and kids, Val. I’m not going in tonight and that’s all.”
“If you care that much about your wife and kids, you shouldn’t be a taxi driver,” Val said. “Drop us here, then, that’ll be fine.”
They walked up the Shankill Road. Night was falling. The streetlights had come on, those of them that weren’t broken. Sirens whooped and burbled through the city below.
“Gonna take me home to meet the family?” Ende said.
“Just my granny.” Val gasped for breath, the climb challenging him. “You’ll like her. She’s a grand old girl.”
They hung a left into a warren of sooty brick tenements. Sour cabbage, the stink of uncollected trash, and coal smoke combined into a vile stew of odors. Children pelted through the gathering dark, screeching. Val plodded around the familiar turnings.
Ende was getting wary, fingers brushin
g his jacket over his waist area. He definitely had a gun as well as his sword.
A red glow wavered out of a street mouth. They stopped in the shelter of a derelict cargo container that served as a corner shop.
A gang of children scurried past, hauling a wheelie bin full of stones and half-bricks.
“They’re preparing a traditional Irish welcome for the king’s boys,” Val said. Even he himself might not be safe here tonight. It depended whose crew was out on the barricades.
He peered around the corner. Men were pushing wrecked cars into the middle of the street and piling mattresses and junk on top. They sang as they worked. The fire was on the asphalt in front of the barricade-in-progress, truck tyres burning, pouring streams of black smoke across the scene.
Behind the barricade stood the giant statue of Domnall MacConn. Relief washed over Val.
Ende hissed, “Do we go back?”
“Feck, no. My granny’s house is on the far side of this lot, near the park. I’ll just have a word with these boys.”
Before Ende could stop him, he trudged out into the firelit street and plodded around the barricade.
The first person he saw was Jed Ragherty bringing out an entire bed frame on his shoulders. There was the ugly mug of Black Donnchla, who knew just enough black magic to be a danger to everyone around him. There was little Ferdy loading an old Great War trench-sweeper right out in the open air.
And there, standing with hands in pockets, the only person doing nothing at all, was Alyx O’Braonain, a.k.a. Alyx MacConn.
“It’s herself,” Val hailed her.
“Val! I was looking everywhere for you today.”
“There’s a German down the end of the street. He’s a hitter come for you … You’ve got to kill him.”
.
2
Leonie
A month later. September 14th, 1979. Armagh
Chimera’s mobile to Blue One Two,” Leonie Grant said into the radio. She let out the clutch and pulled onto the street. They’d been parked on the edge of the allotments on the hill above Armagh, a wasteland where hobbled cows and donkeys wandered, not a blade of grass in sight. As soon as she got through the lights at the T-junction, she changed up to third gear. Gav sat beside her, singing ‘Lily, My Love’ by the Selfish Seven, his current pop obsession.