by James Adams
Of course, in any other household the coincidence of a stranger’s arrival and a news item might have led simply to a harmless excursion for the girl and a flattering diversion for the older man. But Sean could afford none of that. He did not want the emotional entanglement and he especially did not want this girl to learn anything about him. So he had been careful to keep the contact to a minimum.
Life since puberty had been an endless string of frustrations for Sally. The fumbling and groping that passed for seduction in her circle were unsatisfying. Her parents seemed to have no understanding of her problems or her dreams: her father was so boring she could hardly bring herself to speak to him and Mum, well, she liked to talk but her world just seemed so far away from all the new things Sally had experienced. Sean’s arrival had brought some excitement into Sally’s life. At first she had fantasized about him, his hard body against hers, those strong hands on her skin. Then when she thought she had discovered his secret, he became not just a sexual fantasy but a man who was actually living life. With the innocence of youth, she sublimated the killings and concentrated on the romance. This was someone who was fighting for what he believed, who had kept the best of the British police at bay, who needed help. This was a real man.
There was a knock at the door and before Sean had a chance to get out of bed it had opened and Sally came in, a tray perched on one arm.
“I brought you some breakfast,” she said. He almost laughed at the banality of it but restrained himself, afraid that her attraction would turn to offence and then betrayal.
“Sure. That’s kind of you. If you put it down over there, I’ll get to it when I get up.”
Instead of doing what he said, she came towards him and placed the tray on the bedside table. She sat on the bed and he noticed idly that this morning she had shucked off her teenage clothes and was wearing a skirt and blouse. There was even eye shadow, so the plot was obvious, but he was determined to avoid its execution.
“I know who you really are, Sean,” she began.
“Oh, really, and just who is that?” he asked.
“You’re the terrorist who killed those people at Winchester station. You’re here because you’re hiding out.” She stopped, almost breathless with her own effrontery.
“You have a fine imagination, Sally,” Sean replied. “I’m a simple steeplejack in town looking for work. I was nowhere near Winchester that day and I’m certainly no terrorist. Why not ask your mum, she’ll tell you.”
“I have asked her and she says you’re her cousin from Bath. Well, I’ve never heard of a cousin in Bath and I don’t believe either of you.”
Casually, she reached her hand out to touch his thigh. Startled at the overt nature of the act, he tried to move away. But Sally moved closer, her bottom sliding along the bed until his length was against the wall and she was established beside him.
“It must be horrible for you being on the run all the time. All that violence and then nowhere to go. I want to help.”
“I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong man, Sally. And even if you hadn’t, do you think a terrorist could afford to take up with someone like you? Christ, you’re just a child.”
“Is that so?” she replied. “Do children you know do this?” She moved her hand up his thigh to grip the bulge in the sheet that was his penis. “Or this?” She leaned forward, her other hand sliding around his neck, and brought her lips down on his, her tongue searching, probing.
The movement was so sudden, the action so brazen that he was taken by surprise. He was unused to women taking the initiative in sex and had no experience of girls so young acting so aggressively.
He wanted to push her away but her tongue was darting between his teeth; her right hand was squeezing through the bedclothes, arousing him. Their tongues met and passed, each searching for the heart of the other. Her tongue flicked along his teeth, first the top and then the bottom and then was inside, darting, caressing, touching the roof of his mouth. God, he could feel himself being swept along, losing his will to struggle.
She felt his penis start to harden under her hand and knew that she had won. Her tongue moved from his mouth, her lips dabbing short, urgent kisses on his face before sliding to his ear and once again her tongue was darting inside, her mouth breathing fire into him. Her mouth left his face and started questing down his chest, her left hand pushing back the bedclothes to give her access to his body. He was lying back now, head against the pillows, caution gone in the face of her attack. Eyes closed, he felt her fingers and then her mouth exploring his penis and balls. Her right hand cupped him and seemed to push him forward into her mouth. He imagined those wonderful lips circling the crown and then he drowned in the hot, smooth sensation as her mouth inhaled his length.
Her left hand fluttered across his stomach, pausing at each nipple to caress it. He was surprised to feel that those, too, were getting hard with the stimulation. They felt intensely sensitive and he pulled back, but already her hand had moved on to slide down his ribcage and then to his buttocks to squeeze and push as he slid back and forth inside her mouth.
A groan escaped his lips, his need as urgent as hers. But he wanted to give as well as take and reached out to draw her head back from him. He brought her up alongside him. They were both panting, urgent and frustrated by the confinement of her clothes. His hands moved under her skirt and found nothing. As her blouse fell apart he saw she had not troubled to put on a bra either. He found her brazen role of seductress intensely erotic.
Her breasts were tiny, but the nipples were huge, extending fully half an inch in their aroused state. He put first one and then the other between his teeth, sucking them deep inside his mouth, tongue flicking over the tip and then circling around the aureolae. She sighed, her head hanging back, her throat stretched tight.
“Yes, like that. Take them, bite them. They’re for you. My breasts, my body. Take it. It’s yours.”
The words came out in short pants, each one punctuated by a moan of excitement as his mouth or hands found another sensitive spot.
He slid down the bed, wanting to taste her, to savour again that intense flavour. Her legs parted and he saw for the first time her thick, dark bush of pubic hair. He kissed the insides of her thighs, running his tongue from knee to groin. He could feel the flutter of her muscles just below the surface of the skin, each one quivering as his lips touched. Then he was parting her lips, his tongue moving through the jungle of her hair.
Suddenly he felt less driven. Unwanted, an image — more a sensation — came over him of the exact moment before he had begun shooting two days earlier. That brief hiatus between preparation and action. His mouth moved slower, his lips gathering Sally’s hair between his lips and tugging gently, his pursed lips kissing softly on the top of the pubic bone and working down to the small mount surrounding the clitoris. He circled it gently, pecking, caressing until she was groaning with frustration. Then he moved his head slowly back and forth, drawing it in and out of his mouth. Her thighs had locked around his head, drowning out sound and all sensation other than what he could feel and smell. His senses felt overwhelmed by her, by the powerful smell of her.
Impatient again, he moved up her body, his penis thrusting the air, questing for more. Her hands circled him, her legs opened and he slid in one smooth motion deep inside her.
At the bottom of the stroke he could feel her cervix and she cried out at the shock of it. But there was no holding back, no time for thought, conscious or subconscious. They were both riding on instinct now, touching each other, hands running down back, gripping thigh and buttocks. Sensing that he might be about to come she pushed against him, panting out her request. “Let me turn over. Come in from behind and then we’ll both come together.”
He slid out and back on to his haunches as she turned around and pulled a pillow under her stomach. She pushed her buttocks at him and he moved back in to her, laying his body along her back, elbows on either side of her neck. He saw that one of her hands had slid unde
rneath and then he felt the vibration as she began to stimulate her clitoris.
He was moving deep inside her now, each thrust met by one of hers as they both raced towards a climax.
“Talk to me,” she ordered. Tell me how it feels.”
Cry echoed cry and obscenity, obscenity until they both went to that separate place where all lovers go just before orgasm. With a final thrust and a cry that was half pure agony and half ultimate pleasure he came, spurting passion, pain and months of frustration inside her. His orgasm triggered hers and as he began to come down, she cried out, pushing herself against him, opening herself so that by some miracle he seemed to go even further inside her.
He fell forward against her neck, kissing the beads of sweat that had gathered from them both.
The aftermath of passion, which is supposed to bring two lovers close together, was a luxury he could never afford. That brief moment of depression that some lovers experience was magnified for him. He knew that he had just made a terrible mistake. He should kill her now and then kill her parents and leave.
But there was an unwritten rule that you never did anything to harm the keepers of the houses for fear of closing the door at the next one. He knew they should die, but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t just snuff out the lives of these people. Unlike the others, they really were innocents in his war. Even as his hands reached under her body to feel her breasts again, his training and his experience told him he was being a fool.
The battered green minibus pulled up outside the Sinn Fein Advice Centre at 51, Falls Road. A depressing building with wire shutters on the windows and an air of decay, the building was the headquarters of Sinn Fein in the city. Rita had just spent twenty minutes with Adams receiving the message he wanted passed on to Morrison.
She boarded the bus, paid her fifty pence and made her way to the back to find a bench seat where she perched for the eight-mile journey to the jail. She loathed these trips. They seemed to symbolize the depressing futility of the struggle.
The bus was packed with relatives of the men and women in the jail: wives visiting husbands; husbands seeing wives; children on their monthly trip to see one or perhaps both of their parents. The bus always smelled of vomit. Today another child, excited by the trip and overfed on Smarties and Mars Bars, brought up the half-digested mess on to the floor of the bus. Across the aisle from Rita, one young girl who couldn’t have been more than sixteen was breast-feeding her child. Both mother and child looked unkempt and dirty, their spirits drained by the dehumanizing business of eking out a life on welfare while the breadwinner was in jail.
The bus joined the Ml motorway heading south and then after a few minutes took the Hillsborough exit and then the Baliris Cemetery Road. It had always struck Rita as ironic that a monument to Protestant dead should lie in the shadow of the prison that housed the most violent of Catholic terrorists.
The bus turned on to Halftown Road and for a short distance drove alongside the forbidding wire fence that was the first line of defence around the jail. A left turn and the bus parked. There was an immediate rush for the door as the visitors struggled to be first in the queue for the security checks.
Rita walked across the asphalt to a turnstile in the close-meshed wire fence and pushed her way through. She walked a few steps to a small complex of Portakabins. Inside, she was confronted with the first step in a bureaucracy filled with petty refinements, designed both to demean and discourage any attempt at smuggling weapons, drugs or other contraband into the jail. The trouble was, many of the prison warders had actually worked at the jail for longer than most of the inmates had been sentenced. The identity of all the warders was well known on the outside and each one knew that their continued wellbeing depended on the goodwill of the terrorists. They were as much prisoners of the system they were enforcing as the terrorists themselves.
So, there was a routine to the process but it was a well-practised one where both sides knew the limits and rarely stepped beyond them.
After handing over her chit, known as a “visit out”, which showed that Morrison had asked her to come, Rita passed through to the search area. She entered a small cubicle which had a mirror on the floor so that the searcher could look up her skirt and make sure there was nothing concealed. A woman warder entered and Rita began emptying her pockets. As the woman approached, Rita raised her hands to adopt the search position so that she looked rather like a penguin about to take off. The hands pressed and kneaded, feeling the underwire of her bra, pushing deep up inside her thighs, checking between her buttocks.
She moved towards the next Portakabin and into the waiting room. Uncomfortable grey plastic chairs and plain camouflage grey walls reinforced the institutional flavour. In some ways this was the part she loathed the most. Here Protestant and Catholic sat side by side, both factions of the sectarian divide usually present because someone from their immediate family was inside Long Kesh as a terrorist. It was common for verbal abuse, even fights, to punctuate the coughing, hawking and snuffling that are the hallmarks of waiting rooms everywhere.
This time, Rita waited only four minutes before her name was called with half a dozen others and she went out of a door in the far wall into another minibus. Now she was about to enter the heart of the complex and the van with its hard benches, its blackened windows and the bullet-proof glass between passenger and driver reflected that. They drove for some minutes over a series of ramps and then high-pitched warning bleeps told her they were approaching the first set of fifteen-foot-high iron gates. Although she couldn’t see it, she knew that the gates opened outwards, allowing the van to pass into a holding pen. The back door of the van opened and two prison officers came out of the Tally Lodge to the left. Rita could see two prison officers entering the Lodge, handing over their outside passes and receiving the special coded pass that allowed them access to the jail itself.
The two warders counted the passengers, compared the numbers to a list and then the door was closed and locked again. The warning beeps started as the inner gates opened and the van moved forward again along a Tarmac road, past well-kept lawns and flower beds, to pull up by yet another turnstile in another wire fence. Rita stepped out, stretched and looked around, her eyes taking in the fence topped with lethal razor wire. Behind her was the twenty-foot-high wall of the main prison, topped by a three-foot circular tube which she had read somewhere was coated with a substance that prevented grappling irons or fingers getting a grip.
She passed through the turnstile and into yet another Portakabin. Beyond it was the infamous H-Block which housed the most dangerous terrorists. There was discrimination now between wives and other visitors. She moved to the left to the cabin with small booths where spouses could have some private conversation away from the other visiting area where one large room accommodated everyone.
Another short wait and she heard a van draw up. Then a warder entered, followed by Danny Morrison. The warder carried the red book which showed that Morrison was a high category prisoner. The book travelled everywhere with him and was always carried by a warder.
For years, the IRA terrorists in the jail had kept in touch through Comms, their shorthand for a unique brand of communication. Terrorists inside or IRA people outside would write messages on paper from the inside of cigarette packets. These would be rolled to the size of a small fingernail and then wrapped in cling film and stored in the cheek. In the family room some kissing was allowed and so messages could be passed back and forth.
The system was known but nothing was done because of the unspoken deal that existed between the warders and the inmates. Then a planned breakout was discovered in 1992. Inside one of the IRA terrorists’ cell a cache of messages was found that spelled out how the terrorists were going to be met outside the wire and where the safe houses were in case the cars were caught. The result was a spate of searches which uncovered a series of messages. At the same time, the rules were tightened so that only wives and husbands were allowed to kiss and the screws began
random searches of people’s mouths.
A new Comms had to be devised which had involved Rita going to the dentist. There one of her back teeth had been drilled out and a false crown fitted. Without any cement to bind it to the stump, Rita could flick it off with her tongue. Inside the hollowed-out centre was hidden the message, which she had not had time or opportunity to read since it was inserted in the Falls Road.
Now Morrison moved towards her, hands outstretched. “Rita, me darlin’, a chara.”
Danny had flourished in prison. He had lost the unhealthy jowls of too much booze and homemade spaghetti. Unlike some terrorists who exist on tranquillizers, Morrison had elected to join the prison fitness club. Now he was well muscled, his shirt filled by his expanded chest. Rita found it repulsive. Outside she knew him as a smart-assed and ruthless killer who relished violence. Whenever she had visited his home he was either drunk or listening to Bruce Springsteen or both. But he was no buffoon. He was a cold and calculating strategist who was not afraid of dirtying his hands in the bloody end of the terrorist business.
He hated the Brits with an almost mindless passion, which had made for some odd family gatherings, as his two sisters are married to British soldiers. Inside jail he had changed, channelling the violence into clever stratagems and body-building. Jail had hardened him both mentally and physically. Before, he was prepared to accept the compromises that Adams often suggested. Now, he was impatient with the lack of success. He spent his time dreaming of ways he could cause the British more pain. Thomas’s recent successes on the mainland had convinced him that with a little more pressure they could be on the brink of a significant victory. He was the undisputed flag-bearer of the militants, the group who now were squeezing Adams, forcing him to commit more men to the armed struggle at the expense of the political movement.