by Eoin Dempsey
The specter of Tony still lurked in the shadows of Mick’s mind. Mick hadn’t met him since that night in May but had received dispatches through Sean. The plan was very much in motion, but Tony wasn’t giving any details away. Mick and Sean knew nothing. Tony was playing it the right way, the smart way. The more people knew the details, the more chance of an informant giving it away. Mick and Sean knew that they were on standby for something huge, something that would blow this all open again. That was all. Mick watched as Jason picked up Siobhan, holding her high in the air.
The light of summer deceived them all, and before they realized it, ten o’clock had crept up. The kids wailed as Pamela went out to take them off to bed, Jason smiling as they each waited their turn to hug him goodnight. Mick stood back, let Jason’s mother take him inside to say goodbye to Pamela and Pat, before pointing him in the direction of the car out front. Melissa said goodnight to Pat. He’d accepted her as quickly as he had the first time, and now as they hugged, they seemed like old friends. Melissa made her way out to the car.
“I’ll follow you out,” Mick said and hugged Pamela.
“I’ll leave you two boys to talk, I’ve got to put the little ones to bed.” Pamela made her way up the stairs. The three children were in the bathroom where Siobhan was attempting to bark orders at her brothers, who were busy ignoring her.
Pat broke into a smile as soon as she’d gone. “Come here.” He embraced his brother. “I’m proud of you and everything you’ve done since you got out, and before that. You’ve got a great woman now, and a ready-made family. You’ve just got to go out and claim it. You going to be all right?”
“I think so.” Mick’s skin was cold now, the claw of nerves sunk deep into him. He hadn’t felt like this since he’d turned himself in.
“You’re going to be fabulous. Get out there and lay claim to the rest of your life.”
“Right then, let’s do this.”
“Good luck, little brother.”
Mick strode out of the house to Melissa’s car and got into the front passenger seat with Jason in the back.
“What d’you think of my family?” Mick said to Jason as the car pulled out.
“They’re fantastic. I had a great time.”
“Yeah they’re a good bunch, I lived with them for a while myself.” Melissa looked over at him through the corner of her eyes.
“I think Siobhan wants to start your fan club,” she added.
Jason laughed. “She’s a cute wee thing.”
The words came to Mick but stopped in his throat, teetering on the precipice of a new unknown that would begin as soon as he uttered them. Jason turned his head to look out the window. Mick felt Melissa’s hand on his. The memories of his youth were all around them in the houses and streets of Bogside. The murals held their own stories, but his was the fabric of the city itself. They passed Free Derry corner, now preserved as a stand-alone wall as the original buildings that had made it a corner had been demolished. The mural with the faces of those who’d died on Bloody Sunday loomed a hundred yards away, the spot where his father had been gunned down just across the road. He so wanted to bring Jason to it, to tell him about the grandfather he’d never know, who’d been taken from all of them that day. He longed to tell him about Jimmy and Noel and what they could have become had their brief lives not been wrenched from them. They were only a little older than Jason was now when they’d died. Jason glanced up, catching eyes with Mick in the rearview mirror.
“I’ve enjoyed getting to know you over the last few weeks, Jason.” The answer Mick hoped for didn’t come so he continued, the nerves raw inside him. “As you know, your mother and I knew each other when we were younger, and that’s why we’ve seen so much of each other so quickly.”
Jason turned away from the window, plainly expecting something that he didn’t want to hear.
“I told Jason how we’ve been talking for almost a year now, that we took the decision to get together very seriously,” Melissa interjected. “There was an extra reason that we took so long. We were together before you were born before I ever met John. We were a couple.”
Jason had never heard his mother refer to the only man he’d ever known as a father as John before. The night was darkening, and the windows were mirrors enclosing them now. He looked at his reflection and then at the man sitting in the front seat, a man whom he’d never met a month before, and he knew. The pain spiked inside him and spread down through his entire body, dragging anger in its wake like fire on a string.
They came to a red light as they came from the Craigavon Bridge. Melissa looked over at Mick, tension in her movements, her eyes. They were only a few minutes from the house.
“We never wanted to break up, but times were different back then, even harder than they are now. The fact that I was Catholic made things difficult for us, and when my father died on Bloody Sunday, I thought that leaving your mother was part of my duty to my community.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Jason’s tone was sharp. Melissa’s immediate instinct was to cut him down, but she let Mick continue instead.
“Your mother was a crucial part of my life, someone I could never leave behind, no matter what life and the Troubles threw in our way.”
Mick stepped back from the precipice, fear gripping him. He knew what the next words had to be, and what effect they’d have. They drove on for another thirty seconds or so, Melissa hurtling through the amber light to get to her driveway. The car pulled to a halt, but no one moved to get out. They both turned to him, his arms crossed over his chest, his face cold as stone.
Mick continued. “I was away when you were born. I was away your whole life. But I want to be there for the rest of our lives together.” Jason’s eyes dropped, but Mick kept talking. “Your mother never told me about you, for your sake. She never told me that I was your father. She was trying to protect us both.”
“But I don’t have to anymore,” Melissa began. “Mick is a wonderful man, Jason, and I love him with all my heart, almost as much as I love you.
“What about my real dad?”
“If you’re referring to John, then the answer is that nothing changes. If you want to see him, you can.” She resisted the temptation to twist the knife into John, to remind Jason of what an awful father he’d been. Mick would have to prove himself. Nothing was going to be solved tonight.
Mick didn’t speak, was still turned around to look at his son. He wanted to tell him he loved him, but the truth was they were almost strangers. He felt some innate warmth toward him but love? It was too soon to say.
“Is that it? Can I go inside now?”
Mick saw the irritation in Melissa’s eyes but held out a hand to calm her, letting it fall into her lap. She turned back around to face front and let her seatbelt out.
“Yes, you can go inside. You have your key?”
“Aye,” he said and got out of the car.
Neither adult moved. The sound of the door slamming behind Jason reverberated in the confined space of the car after he left. Mick undid his seat belt and turned to her.
“On the scale of great to awful, it was somewhere in the middle. It’s a start.”
“Give him time. It took us nine months to get our heads around this, and he hasn’t even asked why you were away his whole life.”
“We’ll move one mountain at a time.”
“It’s probably best off you don’t come inside. I need some time alone with the boy. You want me to call you a cab?”
“No, it’s a great night. I think I’ll walk. It’s only twenty minutes. It’ll be just like the old times when I used to throw stones up at your window, running home afterward.” The excitement he’d felt came as a memory, the waves of joy.
She felt the smile appear on her lips despite herself. “We did the right thing, didn’t we?”
“Telling him? Of course.”
“And everything else, getting back together?”
He reached over and kissed her. “I�
�ve never been so sure of anything in my entire life. And in a few weeks or a few months, Jason will be right there with us, and then there’ll be nothing in our way, nothing to hold us back.”
She reached forward and kissed him, the grin full on her face. “You’re right. Best not get too carried away right now with your kisses. Jason might not appreciate you taking advantage of his mother in the car outside the house.”
“I wouldn’t if I were him,” Mick said and got out of the car. Melissa got out to give him one last kiss, but he was already walking away, and she let him go, making her way inside to deal with Jason instead.
Mick ambled down to the river and made his way along the bank. He tried not to pay any particular attention to the place where he’d found Melissa back in summer 1972, attempted to consign the past to memory, to focus on the shining future almost within reach. It was too much to resist analyzing how breaking the news to Jason had gone, and he went over each sentence in his head, wondering how he could have played it better. But the truth was that he’d done all he could. The rest would happen in time. It would be up to him to prove himself to Jason now. The commitment to Sean gnawed at him. The one thing he and Sean both agreed on was the date that Tony was likely to hit. The 300th anniversary of the siege of Derry, when the Protestants under King William withstood the barrage of the Catholic King James, and one of the biggest loyalist parades of the year, was coming on August 12th. Violence during the same parade in 1969 had marked the beginning of the Troubles. Tony had an eye for history and knew the level of outrage any attack during the parade would cause. How he intended to do it, and on the grand scale he’d mentioned, was the question, a question he and Sean still had no answer to. But there was more than just his pledge to Sean to consider now. Could he leave Sean to do this alone? He’d been the one who’d convinced Sean to do it, and what if Tony was the harbinger of war and death that he aspired to be? Could he live with himself knowing that he could have prevented it? Would Melissa live with him if he carried through with it? She knew nothing of his personal crusade. It had been easier to hope it would never happen, that they could leave together without having to foil Tony, or be tortured to death by him. He knew that if it did come to happen that he’d tell her. He couldn’t die and be a mystery to her. He couldn’t bear the thought of her never knowing what his intentions were. She might think he’d conned her and that he might have been a regular IRA volunteer and a dissident madman at that. And what of Jason? What would he think? He wasn’t a child and had his opinion on the Troubles, even if he hadn’t mentioned them out loud yet. Everyone did. Choosing Melissa and Jason was the easy option, the sensible option, but he knew he couldn’t do it, couldn’t desert Sean or the people of the city whether they were his people or not. The burning dark in Tony’s eyes was real.
The night seemed to close in around him like a great black cloak. He walked out onto the Craigavon Bridge. The wind off the river was cool, even in July and he rolled up his sleeves to feel it on his wrists, to let it filter into him through his veins. His movements were slow, mechanical as he approached the checkpoint in the middle of the bridge. He didn’t look at the soldiers as they questioned him, their words as inconsequential as a sneeze or a cough. His mind faded into memory as he tried to remember his father, the smell, the feel of him as he held him as a child or shook his hand in Bishop’s Field the day he died. He wanted to remember him as the man he was, not as the name on a memorial visited by tourists and exalted by Republicans as a martyr to a cause he never wanted to be a part of. His mother, his father, he and Pat. He tried to remember the times before any of this when his father was alive and his mother was here. Before all of this had destroyed them. Back when their lives had been attached, inseparable, like paper cutouts torn apart by the British soldiers, the IRA, UVF, UFF, INLA, Orange Order, the Apprentice Boys. What was the difference in the end? They were different versions of the same polarizing force that had been tearing this province apart for generations.
The different versions of his father came to him, the young man with muddy knees and grey-white shorts who’d taught him to play football. The man who’d walked through dew coated country meadows with him as he ran his hand through the long grass looking for fat stalks to pull and pick and blow on between his thumbs. He was so many men at so many different times. So why was it that the only one he ever thought of was the one lying on his back on Rossville Street, the NICRA flag an impromptu shroud, stained with his blood? The man who’d taken him to work when he was fourteen, who’d let him sweep up straggly hair as it fell on the floor at the weekend for a few extra coins, came to him. The father who’d caught him stealing beer from the cabinet and clipped him across the back of the head without telling his mother. Mick remembered the man who’d come home from work at night with a smile on his face and a kiss on the mouth for his wife. Every dinner they’d had together, every time he’d played with Pat on the floor as Dad read the paper, as Mam did the knitting or made the tea, all seemed wasted now. Those moments were like gold dust slipping through his fingers. It didn’t seem possible that anything might be more precious than that. She was gone now too, without him to keep her here. He’d lost both parents that day, even if he still wrote to her and saw her at Christmas. Losing him was losing her both. The soldier who’d fired that the bullet had done more than just kill his father. He killed everything he’d built too.
The river sang to him in a low hum as he passed through the checkpoint. The sensation that he was one with the city, and that it wasn’t whole without him or he without it came to him, but he immediately shrugged it off as the yoke it was. He was leaving – with Melissa. He was leaving with his son and Jason would never see him gunned down in the street, holding a white handkerchief, trying to be the last comfort to a dying man. Life beyond this did exist. Mick stopped at the end of the bridge, pausing to look back across and then at the gray spread of the Foyle stretching out both sides in front of him. How could this city be wonderful and full of love yet callous and unforgiving? So much had happened here, so much that could never now be undone. Was there no one else who could stop Tony? Mick wished for a cigarette though it had been many months since he’d touched one.
He’d loved Melissa all his adult life, but had written his feelings off as a burden. They were something to be disregarded as he set out on his personal crusade for atonement that almost no one else would ever know of, let alone recognize. Sean had come to him a corrupted youth, a polluted stream, choking to death on the hatred he’d been filled with his whole life. It had taken Mick years to reveal himself to Sean inside; the walls of the cocoon he’d built around himself were too thick to break through any quicker than that. The fire of hatred within Sean had taken even longer to suffocate. But by the time Sean got out, a year before Mick, he was unshakeable in his new conviction that peace was the only victory and that the way of his family would ultimately destroy them.
Mick turned away to continue home, the confusion reigning in his mind undiminished. Scenarios ran through his head like tiny movies where he got out free after foiling Tony’s plan, where he left without doing anything and nothing happened, or he left and failed to prevent a massacre. And, of course, the scenario whereby Tony caught him and tortured him was the main attraction in the movie theater of his mind. Would any of this be worthwhile if Melissa found out and left him again? Was any of this worth it without her? Was his own personal happiness more important than the lives of other people he’d never know, would never meet and who’d likely despise him if they met him anyway? Would he even be able to prevent the mission Tony had planned? He’d told no one. No one seemed to know a thing. Mick had dropped hints as subtly as one could when inquiring about the possible movements of a rogue dissident to other IRA men, but they were completely oblivious, or magnificent in their efforts to appear so. Sean had invited him, and Tony was the brains, but, apart from that, Mick didn’t even know who else, if anyone, was connected with it. Tony was smarter than he’d given him credit for, per
haps too much so for them to stop him. But only he and Sean would have the chance. A light rain began to fall, warm against his face. He walked on.
Melissa trudged back into the house, knowing that Jason was already in his room. The idea to leave him, to speak to him the next day came to her, but she swatted it away like a mosquito. The time to talk was now. She couldn’t bear the thought of the pain and confusion he must have been in. He’d left the door on the latch. She pushed it open. Silence reigned inside. No TV, no stereo blasting music, no movement or noise of any kind. She went to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water, readying herself. She drank it back in two gulps and turned to go up the stairs to Jason’s room. Golden light spilled out from underneath his door. She knocked with the knuckle of her middle finger; three short taps. No answer came, so she rapped on the door again.
“What do you want?” His words bled through the wooden door, low and distant.
“We need to talk, let me in.” She tried the handle, but he’d locked it. She heard the sound of the key turning, and she pushed the door open.
Jason was sitting on his bed, still fully clothed, the lamp in the corner spraying yellow light all over. The stereo on the desk was silent for once. He looked like a child again. She sat down beside him, putting her arm around his shoulders and venturing to kiss him on the cheek. He only flinched a little as she kissed him. She had to wait for him to begin, had to let him direct the conversation. This couldn’t be a case of her trying to appease him.
He began about fifteen excruciating seconds later.
“So are you in love now? Just like you two were when you were kids?”
“What do you think of him?”
“I can’t believe you’d do this to me. I can’t believe you’d bring this person into our lives, just as we’re about to leave.”