by John Brady
Somewhere near that blinking column that was the RTÉ mast in Donnybrook were the Kennys and their dead daughter, a niagara of grief and pain and unknowing. And he didn’t like those people. The shame pierced him, again.
Her smile became rueful. He took his arm from inside hers.
“Go ahead,” she said, but he believed she wasn’t annoyed. “Spoil it here now.”
Yes, it was his mobile, he knew. He was forgetting to switch it off.
Another Day
Grogan went back to finishing the letter to his daughter. He didn’t like leaving space at the end of the page. Over the years he had become good at the wrap-up paragraph. He avoided weather always. It wasn’t as if the weather in London or outside his daughter’s house there was radically different from Belfast’s, was it.
London, he thought so often lately, where Siobhan had ended up. Of all places.
He only put in reminders about things like anniversaries very occasionally. He usually put in one or two general questions to give Siobhan an idea for beginning a letter in return. He never asked her when she’d be coming home again.
“Who was that?” Maureen asked.
He didn’t look up from the table.
“Something I have to take care of later on.”
Maureen dropped the tea bags in the drainer.
“You’re not going out tonight, are you?”
“A short while,” he said. He finished the sentence asking about how David’s promotion was working out. A banker, for a son-in-law. A nice fella, he could never like.
He put down the Biro and looked over at Maureen running the cold tap slowly into the cups. The air in the kitchen was close in these summer evenings. Global warming? He still wondered the odd time about unscrewing the metal clamps and the security bars that ran down deep into the metal frames. The coating on the glass was stuff they used in Jerusalem they’d told him when they were putting it on. Holy glass. The upstairs windows didn’t let in much of a draft here.
“She told me the other day they’d get a flight for the Bank Holiday weekend,” Maureen said.
“Start buying the nappies then,” he said.
“Well, they were thinking of staying with David’s folks this time so they were.”
He looked up at her.
“They’d be coming around during the day,” she says. “And we’d be hitting the shops there. No way would we miss that, says she. And wee Gavin tagging along.”
Gavin he thought, a television name. Once, watching a documentary about the start of The Troubles, when a seventeen-year-old Liam Grogan had been tossing stones and Molotov cocktails half the length of the Falls Road, he had calculated that David, his son-in-law, had six more years to wait until he was born.
“That’ll be a sight,” he said. “Gavin.”
“David’s folks have a grand local too,” she says.
“Well, good for them then.”
“We’re invited up there for a dinner for sure.”
He determined to finish the letter. He began a sentence that he hadn’t planned, one where he told his daughter about remembering the time she had stood up to her teacher, arguing about Irish history—at the age of eight. He didn’t know what to do with the half-begun sentence.
“I wouldn’t mind being waited on,” Maureen said. “A big dinner.”
“I’m sure they’ll be a good influence on us,” he said.
He went back to rescuing the sentence. He could ask if Gavin was showing signs of that streak of independence—and he could make up something about Gavin, at the age of four, maybe showing him how to use a computer.
“Liam.”
“Yes, love.”
“Liam, how about a bit of a skite?”
He kept going.
“A skite,” he said.
“You know,” she said.
“What do you have in mind, love?”
“I don’t know, do I? But the time of year that’s in it. For God’s sake, the Orangemen tramping around. Loads of people head out, down to the South and that.”
“Before or after Siobhán comes over, is it?”
She didn’t catch the edge in it, he realized.
“Before. I mean, at last we can do it. Joan McStravick told me that she and Paul had the best time in Dublin. Not a bother getting a nice place, and being able to walk around.”
“We can walk around here, love.”
She waited a few moments, and drew in a breath. He finished the sentence about Gavin.
“Joan says the place is full of all kinds of people. Dublin. She says she heard a half-dozen languages spoken, so she did. Can you imagine?”
He tried to smile, but his eyes fell out of focus. Gallagher would be here in a few minutes to pick him up. They had to talk about this Quinn’s sidekick, something else had come up about him. More proof.
“Dublin,” he said. “Didn’t you hear about the shootings there?”
“I saw something on the news. But that’s a crime thing, wait until you see. Or something like that.”
He looked at her.
Dublin, London. Anywhere but Waterbrook Street.
There was more anger in her voice than impatience now.
“Oh come on, Liam. Things change. They do.”
He watched her light her cigarette, fold her arms again.
“They do,” he said. “How right you are.”
“You’re not listening,” she said.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “I know more about London, or England, from Siobhan, that I ever learned in my life before that.”
“Liam, she has to follow David, the career thing. She has to.”
Siobhan’s accent had slipped a few times on their last visit home. He’d pretended not to notice. He suddenly remembered hearing Gavin speak on the phone last year, the English accent. And the boy’s hair wasn’t cut, it was styled.
“David’s solid, he is. We can’t complain.”
“Oh, a good catch,” he said.
“Well, he is. The education, the travel. It makes such a difference.”
“We’d better catch up then, I suppose.”
She made a faint smile.
“We’re not doddering now, are we,” she said, and she came over.
She pushed his stray hair over his crown to cover the bit they used to laugh about. He looked down at the letter, the bit of Irish he always put at the end. Some day he might stop doing that, he realized. Not today.
He folded the letter and slid it into the envelope. There were a few stamps left in the drawer. He heard the theme for one of Maureen’s favourites, and then the ads as he wrote in Siobhan’s address.
He took a twenty from the press and made sure he had his keys. The metal walker he’d used in rehab was behind the door still. Gallagher couldn’t drive down the street to pick him up at the door, and make it easy for them to track how they moved.
He paused as he pulled the hall door behind him and set the second lock. The street lamps were always fixed promptly, bright enough for the young fellas to kick ball all night if they wanted to. There were a few hall doors open even, a pram out near the end of the street. Everyone watched, he knew, in one way or another. The last time he counted—that was before the Dohertys moved out, of course—there were fourteen families on the road who’d had fathers or sons involved. The McAndrews of course had their daughter Sheila killed eight years ago in an ambush.
He got a how-do from Paddy Smyth sitting by the window in number 15. Paddy was as grey as a badger now but he still went to the clubs and got taken in by the RUC for questioning. He said it was almost a hobby now, and he enjoyed meeting the new crop of detectives every few years. The Brits had pulled back completely, and the RUC patrols hardly came by more than twice a day during the daylight hours. You’d only see them normally near the peace walls or if something had happened earlier on.
Three streets, Grogan thought. His life had been contained in three streets from the day he was born. That was except the time
in the South, the time on remand, and then in maximum in Portlaoise.
He thought of Quinn, the times they spent talking about being parents, what they’d go back to on release, what the future would be in twenty years. Quinn had told him he wouldn’t have had kids if he had known, or at least waited. It was his missus had wanted one. A daughter, and Quinn had hinted she was happy with that.
That was a different Bobby Quinn from this afternoon in Drogheda. Well, what if he hadn’t been rattled by the operation there the other day, with the shooting, and then having to deal with the other fella? No, he couldn’t fault him for that. The others could, and they would, that Quinn wasn’t like the others. You could still have a conscience, of course you could. He remembered the time he’d told Quinn, after a long talk in the yard, that he must have good parents, whatever else. Quinn had laughed. It was unusual for him to laugh outright like that. His ma, okay, he told Grogan, maybe. But his oul fella was a write-off. He was living in England somewhere for the last twenty years, somewhere in the Midlands he believed.
He didn’t want to be standing on the corner watching traffic. Gallagher would no doubt go the Antrim Road from the Ardoyne, down into Millfield and onto Divis Street. He crossed at the corner of Lismore Street and looked for Gallagher’s red Vauxhall in the cars approaching, the glasses Kelly only wore driving. An RUC Land Rover went by, the antenna waving lazily on the turn, a face turned to his through the mesh on the passenger side. Smile for the camera, they used to shout at them.
They could go anywhere, Siobhán had told him once. Canada, the US—but Australia was too far. David was useless with money she’d told him a long time ago—working with the bank! It was computers he was hired for, of course, yes. He’d brought one of those laptops with him the last time. Grogan had been puzzled why he was angry to see wee Gavin sitting with the dad playing on the stupid machine. He hadn’t let on. The games were so different now. With Ciaran it had been the racing games, in the arcades. He had never taken to the shooting ones.
Grogan moved down the footpath, his leg already beginning to nag at the side of his mind. Soon it’d be: sit down, lie down, wait. He looked at the Peace Through Justice mural that had gone up just after Christmas. Now there was an artist. Surely to God a talent like that shouldn’t just be taken up with these murals. He stopped and did the exercises with his toes pressed down against the cement. Ciaran, he thought, he’d tried with murals, but he had no eye for it. That night he came running in, the smell of tear gas off him, and petrol, excited and scared. He was supposed to be out with his mates, down at one of those arcades. The row he’d had with Maureen afterwards; slapping her hard, twice. The shame later, the letters he’d written her every second day from Portlaoise.
He’d walk up a bit of the road so’s not to be standing there like an iijit. Maybe Kelly had been pulled over, the usual effort keeping him there waiting in his car while it took a quarter of an hour to check his licence.
Not good. He took out his mobile and turned away from the traffic. The memory hadn’t gone at all on him; it was getting better, in fact. The more you couldn’t leave on paper or in your phone directory, the more exercise your brain got.
Gallagher answered on the second ring.
“I can’t talk,” he said. “They’re giving me the treatment here going through the car.”
“RUC?”
“That’s it. Another day.”
Gallagher hung up. Grogan switched off the phone and headed back.
The driver of the sporty Japanese thing that squealed to a stop at the curb wasn’t making any effort to be sneaky. Grogan knew it the moment he heard the light, lasting squeak of the brakes, even before the tires began to howl. He knew this was for him too, or, about him, and he began to run. His arms clawed at the air and the pain he expected from across his hip as he landed on his bad leg twice, three times, was somehow far off, happening to someone else that he needn’t concern himself with. How strange, he thought, almost amused, to be able to run like this at last.
And his thoughts had suddenly cleared. They thought it all went back to him—Canning was bent, Quinn must be, then surely Liam Grogan must be too. Gallagher’s way—cover every angle. He wondered if Gallagher had planned this all along, if it was just another chess move for him. Words flew through his head, the tone he should have recognized when Gallagher asked about his health, the leg. Yes, maybe those had been hints he missed.
Someone was shouting. Soft shoes, he heard, a grunt or a sigh and heavy breath out of someone’s nose behind him. A car skidded to a stop across the road and he glimpsed the open mouth. Ireland, he thought, I’ve lived and fought for Ireland, and done my time for it, and I would do it all again. Maureen’s face when he got out that day, raining in Portlaoise, the enormous muzzle flashes the M50 gave off that he’d fired it in the ambushes in Fermanagh. A shadow collided with his in front. He put his arms up around his head as he turned. So this is what it feels like, was all he could think.
He had a moment to notice the running shoes - and almost time to say something to Roe too - before the shotgun lit up and he was thrown to the wall.
Fluffy
Tommy Malone was in a pub somewhere.
“Yeah,” he said to Minogue. “I meant to phone you earlier on. I was heading out and I saw them sticking it on the board here. His ma’s looking for him, and says she’s worried.”
“Doyle would be of interest to your crowd, is that it?”
“That’s it. We have the rogue’s gallery here. We look it over all the time so we can make them on the street.”
“If his mother wants the Guards’ help finding him, well what is that saying?”
“Not much, so far as I know. I went back in and talked with a fella knows Doyle a bit, a uniform out in Clondalkin. He says the mother’s all right, it’s just Doyle went over the wall with a bad crowd years back. Matter of fact she phoned him personally, she knew him from before ’because he nailed Doyle a few years back. Fluffy, he goes by.”
“Fluffy,” Minogue repeated. “Fluffy Doyle.”
Minogue looked out at the surface of the sea, the yellow halogen lights he hated flickering gold on the water before the darkness took over beyond.
“So that’s how it goes,” Malone said. “If you’re interested, that’s all.”
For a moment, Minogue wondered. Guilt did strange things. Malone, a twin, would surely go to the wall for his brother.
“Tommy,” he said. “Is there something else you’re forgetting?”
“What? What do you mean?”
“I mean, what have you not told me.”
Minogue heard some guffaws somewhere in the pub, the clinking of glasses.
“With Doyle? No. Actually, I’m not sure why I phoned you. I just thought, you know.”
“Doyle was nothing to you?”
“He was a fu—. Wait a minute. What’re you saying?”
“I think you know.”
Minogue turned to the railings, away from Kathleen.
“Are you there, Tommy.”
“Yeah, I’m bleeding-well here.”
“Well?
“Well, yourself. What are you thinking boss? Have you lost the run of yourself here? It sounds like it to me.”
“Am I the bloke on the razzale in some pub right now?”
“So I’m in a pub. Hw’s that any of your business?”
Minogue waited. It didn’t take long. Malone’s voice had fallen to a whisper now.
“You can’t be serious, boss. You can’t.”
“I’m too long in the business not to wonder, Tommy.”
“You think I’d try to fit you up too, going around looking for Doyle or Quinn the other day, to make it look like . . .? Ah for the love of Jaysus, you’re mental. Mental, is what you are. And I’m being charitable.”
“He’s on your mind.”
“You’d never say what you’re saying face to face with me. Never.”
“I might have to. And there wouldn’t be just the two
of us.”
Malone spoke slowly.
“If you weren’t who you are, if I hadn’t a worked with you . . . I just can’t believe you’d say something like that. Even think it.”
Bah-lee-av, Minogue repeated several times in his head while he waited. Tink.
“Answer me, Tommy. Doyle keeps cropping up.”
“Well so what? So yeah, he was on my mind. Okay? Along with a hell of a lot of other stuff. This was a courtesy call, how’s-it-going, and thanks very much for the other day. I didn’t expect to be talking to the bleeding FBI here. Here, are you knocking back bottles of Paddy or something?”
Minogue wasn’t ready for conciliation yet.
“Jamesons, if I was.”
“Same difference, the way you’re talking, in anyhow. I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”
“Tommy, he knew the buttons to press, didn’t he though. Your brother.”
“Don’t,” said Malone. “Don’t start again. I’m warning you.”
He wanted to get you going.
“I told you, don’t start that.”
“You lost it in the chipper, that’s a fact. Was there more to it, later on?”
“You’re lost in the head. I can’t believe it. Here I am, phoning you, keeping in touch, like Kath—. Look. Just forget it. I’m going to hang up now.”
“Wait.”
“—Wait for what? This is madness—”
“—What about Kathleen? Who said what to you?”
“I’m going to phone you tomorrow okay. You can dry out by then, okay?”
“What did Kathleen say to you?”
“Forget it. I shouldn’t have said what I said. Good luck.”
Minogue redialled. Malone’s phone rang once before the robot came on.
Kathleen was halfway down the path looking up at the lighted windows in the new block of apartments.
“You’re right,” she said. “The phone’s a curse.”
She read something of his mood and looked away. He was ready to say something but he didn’t know how to start. The anger raced through him and he tried to keep his breathing quieter.
