The Girl From the Killing Streets

by David Hough

  “I’m sorry, Martin. I really am.”

  He wanted to ask questions. In particular, he wanted open and honest answers, but he was afraid of what those answers might lead to. So he put down the receiver slowly, silently wondering. There was something about Sorcha he had failed to see. What was it? It wasn’t her previous sex life. He could probably overlook any minor sexual indiscretion. At least, he thought he could. No, what angered him now was the suspicion that she wasn’t just an innocent Catholic girl. She had somehow crossed that grey barrier between innocence and guilt. The man he had seen at the hotel was bad news, he was sure of that. A paramilitary maybe. If he was right, Sorcha had been leading him on this past month. He wanted to know exactly what other dubious characters she was mixed up with. His doubts about her began to multiply, and doubts that multiplied became more than just doubts. They became serious warnings.

  “Was that the phone, Martin?” Emily came back into the house through the kitchen.

  “Something’s cropped up,” he said. “I have to go out again. How are things with Aunt Judy?”

  “Still not saying any more than she has to.” The girl glanced towards the window. Outside, the aunt was sitting in a deck chair, sipping at a cup of tea.

  “I’m sorry I can’t stay to help you.”

  She looked at him with an odd sort of puzzled expression. “Are you in trouble, Martin?”

  “Of course not. Why do you ask?”

  “Just a feeling. You can talk to me if you need to.”

  He tried hard to raise a smile of reassurance. “Stop worrying yourself, Emily. I’m fine.”

  A twinge of guilt hit him as he left the house and hurried away to the city centre. Lying to his aunt was one thing, but lying to Emily was a step too far. He would have to find some way of confiding in her without revealing everything.

  Almost an impossible task.

  There was no other city centre in the UK like Belfast. Huge metal barriers were erected across the road and the pavements. A sign read: Army Control Ahead. Armed soldiers and police manned the gates giving access to the shopping area. On the corner by Burtons Tailoring shop, Martin was stopped and searched by uniformed civilian searchers before being allowed through the access gate. A soldier, standing guard, asked for some sort of ID. Martin showed his driving licence. More soldiers stopped cars nearby and checked the boots for bombs. He knew what they were searching for: fertiliser and fuel oil, bomb-making ingredients found on so many farms in a province that was littered with remote farms. The two ingredients made a cheap but effective explosive device called ANFO. Pack the car boot with the fertiliser, soak it with fuel oil and add a high explosive initiator. You needed to really load up the car, which could be a bit of a giveaway if the boot sagged, but if you got away with it you could make one hell of a bang when it went off. What made the whole thing even more effective was the amount of shrapnel you got from an exploding car. The petrol tank made things even more lethal. The car bomb was the IRA’s weapon of choice.

  Damn them all to hell!

  Once through the barrier, Martin’s thoughts focussed more firmly on Sorcha. Was she tied up with the people who made these bombs? It wasn’t a foregone conclusion; there were many decent Catholics in Northern Ireland who had no truck with the militants, but the incident at the hotel this morning continued to trouble him.

  His mood grew darker as he walked on along a street where people seemed to accept the privations as an everyday part of life. God help them. His acceptance was long gone and now he wanted out. And… dear God… he was no longer certain he wanted Sorcha to leave Belfast with him. He had to get the truth from her.

  She was already waiting outside the library, and something was very wrong; he saw it immediately in her eyes. She ran towards him, wrapped her arms about him and laid her head against his chest. He couldn’t bring himself to reciprocate by putting his arms about her.

  She didn’t seem to notice. “Oh, Martin, thank God youse came!”

  “I said I would.” He still made no attempt to give her a comforting hug.

  “There’s a café just down the road here. Let’s talk, Martin.”

  “No. We can talk here.”

  She took a step back. A frown crossed her face and her voice began to tremble. “Youse’re angry with me.”

  “I want to know what the hell is going on. Who was that man at the hotel?”

  “That man…?”

  “You know who I mean.”

  “He’s just someone I know. He hates Protestants and…”

  “Hates Protestants? Who was he?”

  She lowered her gaze to the ground. He was unable to see her expression but he doubted it would be a friendly one. “His name is Brian Fitzpain.”

  “Fitzpain? Him? I’ve heard that name before. Read it in the paper. Provisional IRA, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he knows you?” It was as he thought, and yet he desperately wanted her to give him some sort of logical excuse, a reason why he should not condemn her. But he knew, deep down, it was a forlorn wish. “You’ve been hiding things from me, haven’t you, Sorcha? You’re tied in with the IRA and you’ve been hiding it from me.”

  “It’s not like that, honestly.” She continued staring at the ground.

  “Really? What is it like?”

  Tears now began to course down her cheeks, and she brushed at them with the flat of a hand. “It wasn’t my fault. What happened at the hotel wasn’t my fault.”

  “Not your fault? Why do I somehow doubt that?” She was trying to wriggle out of something and that made him even angrier.

  “Someone else…”

  “Don’t start that nonsense with me! It’s so easy isn’t it, Sorcha. So easy to blame it all on someone else. I hear it all the time, especially from your lot. It’s all the fault of the English. It’s all the fault of the Prods. It’s all the fault of the British government. That’s all I seem to hear: it’s anyone’s fault except your own.”

  “Youse think we’re to blame? Us… me?”

  Shoppers were beginning to take notice of them, but he carried on anyway. “You’re guilty of something, Sorcha. I don’t know what the hell it is, but it makes me all the more determined to pack up and leave this Godforsaken place.”

  “Pack up and leave? Leave without me? Is that what youse’re sayin’ now? Without me?”

  He paused. Was he ready to make that final split? He wasn’t sure. “We’re born to be enemies, Sorcha. You know that, and nothing we do can ever change that.”

  “Enemies? Is that what we are? Youse and me?”

  “We live on opposite sides of the divide. You can’t deny it. And I want no more of it. I can’t change what Northern Ireland is… what it’s become… but I can change my life. I can get out and be something different. I can do that, and I will do it. What about you, Sorcha? What are you going to do?”

  “What d’youse want me to do?”

  “For a start, you can come clean, tell me what you’ve been up to? Or are you going to carry on protecting your IRA friends?”

  “They’re not my friends.” She was beginning to get angry now; he could see it in her tear-stained eyes and the downward curve of her lips.

  But her anger wasn’t going to distract him. He had to speak his mind. “You’re linked to them in some way. I don’t know how, but I know now that you are.”

  Tears were streaming down her face. Genuine tears. “Oh, Martin. God help me, I just don’t know what to do. Youse’ll have to give me time.”

  He shook his head. “No. There’s no time left, Sorcha. I’m going to leave Belfast as soon as I can. If you can’t make up your mind, you can stay here and carry on suffering here.”

  He turned and began walking away.

  “Martin!” she called after him.

  But he never looked back.

  ***

  November 1980

  The letter ended abruptly, as if Martin had exhausted himself by recalling that acrimonious meet
ing with Sorcha. It left me anxious to discover her side of the story. How did she react to the apparent break-up?

  A week passed before I received another letter from Sorcha. It began with a short scrawl telling me she had asked a friend to put her words onto paper. The following pages were written in a far more legible hand. The sentences were grammatically constructed, a clue that the writer was translating Sorcha’s verbal dialogue from Ulster dialect into a coherent English form. I guessed this was the work of either the chaplain or the prison visitor, more likely the prison visitor. I was ready to give her full credit for her efforts. As a well-educated Irish woman, she had a perfect grasp of English grammar and the English language.

  The letter encapsulated what I had already learned from Martin but, as I hoped, it also told me what Sorcha did after the break-up. I read it twice before I took out my notebook and began to construct the next section of my manuscript. Some of it was easy to describe, but I occasionally had to use my imagination to create a totally convincing picture. It’s called journalistic licence.

  ***

  Friday 21st July 1972

  1110 BST

  Sorcha sniffled and wiped the tears from her cheeks. Within the past twenty-four hours she’d done things she sorely regretted and the guilt sat heavily with her. Each step along that evil path took her further into a state of depression. But she’d been forced to do what she did. She just had to do it. It was a matter of them or her. Life or death. Brian Fitzpain would hold back from killing her, but others might not. Self-preservation existed on a level she had never before imagined.

  And now she had lost Martin because of it.

  She shivered. Oh, God, what a mess! She had queered her pitch with him, upset him of all people. And she could think of no obvious way of putting things right. An apology? She hated apologies. No one ever apologised to her for all the harm they had done to her over the years, so why should she be the one to say sorry? What would it achieve anyway? And yet she could think of no other way out of her guilt.

  She walked back towards the Royal Avenue security checkpoint with a dull pain throbbing above her brow. So many people had come out on this bright, warm morning. God help them, they didn’t know what was about to happen. At the far end of the street the grand edifice of Belfast City Hall looked down benignly upon a war zone; a place of violence that had no logic and no conceivable end. The city centre was neither Protestant nor Catholic but that didn’t stop terrorist gangs from delivering bombs to shops and businesses. Innocent people died as a result, but the bombs continued.

  A sudden loud noise startled Sorcha. She looked back to see a mob rampaging down the middle of the street. A Tartan gang. A Loyalist mob of fifty or more young hooligans screaming foul anti-Catholic abuse.

  “Taigs out! Taigs out!”

  The shoppers shrank back from them in terror.

  “Shite!” Sorcha let out a sudden cry of anger. It would not have been heard by those fifty or more thugs with hardly a working brain cell between them. Their vulgar cries obliterated everything.

  The Tartan Gangs came from a violent Loyalist sub-culture within Northern Ireland, a reaction to increasing Republican violence. It had come into prominence in that hot summer of 1972, modelling itself on the gang violence already endemic in Glasgow. Look at us, it said to the world, we know how to hit back at those Fenian murderers. And the world looked on with growing horror.

  You never knew what those hooligans would do, so Sorcha hurriedly squeezed herself into a shop doorway, along with a group of equally frightened shoppers. She glanced around at them and saw nothing, but abject fear reflected in their faces. Were they Catholics or Protestants? It was impossible to tell. A lawless Tartan mob had no respect for anyone who dared face up to them. If any of the shoppers spoke, their words went unheard.

  The obscene chants continued. “Taigs out! Fuck the Pope! No surrender!” They might as well have been Nazi brutes invading a pre-war Jewish ghetto. Blind hatred, it seemed, knew no national or religious boundaries.

  The gang swaggered on down the street until armed soldiers on both sides of the road moved in to funnel them through a huge metal security gate and out of the shopping area. The noise slowly abated, the chanting faded into the distance. Then the shoppers began to disperse. A sense of relief began to filter through the air. Within minutes the incident was apparently forgotten, just another spot of bother in a city that had far more to worry about. A city that had grown used to mindless bigotry. Grown used to it? They almost accepted it as normal! Just another wee spot of bother.

  Sorcha walked on, but her own problems returned to haunt her.

  Another fifty yards along, a British soldier stood in the middle of the pavement. Was she expected to walk around him? He looked young, too young to be caught up in a war he could not be expected to understand. Remove his uniform and you’d probably find a kid not long out of school. A Protestant probably, an English churchgoer who had sat in the same class as his Catholic mates at his non-sectarian English school. They probably played together with no thought of religion or segregation. How could he possibly understand this place?

  She stopped just an arm’s length from him.

  “You’d be better employed locking up those Loyalist thugs,” she said. “They frighten me.”

  “Me too, Miss.” His smooth voice enhanced the truth in his words.

  “What are you doing here, Soldier?” she asked. She hadn’t intended to confront him; the words came from somewhere deep inside her mind, too deep to merit thought and reason.

  “Looking for signs of trouble, Miss,” he replied in a muted Southern English accent.

  “Like the trouble those Tartan boys cause?”

  “Yeah. Like them wild Protestants. That’s why I’m standing here in the middle of Belfast, an obvious target for an IRA bullet. Ironic, isn’t it? Can’t win, can we?”

  She drew back her shoulders and squared up to him. She could think of sharp replies as well as him. “I didn’t mean what are you doing here in the street. I meant what are you doing here in my country?”

  “Keeping the peace, Miss.”

  “Really?”

  “Well… trying to. Trouble is, we’re piggy-in-the-middle, aren’t we? Both sides hate us. Both sides are willing to shoot at us.”

  “So, go home.”

  “Wish I could, Miss. Wish I could. But someone has to try to keep the peace… keep the warring tribes from each other’s throats.”

  “Warring tribes?” Was that how the British saw them? Warring tribes?

  “Figure of speech, Miss,” the soldier said easily.

  Anger welled up inside her because he was calmly arguing back, and she didn’t like that. He should be looking ashamed of what he and his fellow soldiers were doing here, but he wasn’t. He was unnervingly self-confident.

  She replied indignantly. “You talk of peace. What peace? You think we have peace here? You call this peace? You’re only making things worse here, so why don’t you go back home to your own country? Go back home to England.”

  “Just doing my job here, Miss.” He smiled and winked at her. Not a flirting wink, but an I-know-what-I’m-doing wink. “Besides, the way I see it, Northern Ireland is a part of my country. Part of the United Kingdom. Don’t like to see it torn apart like this.”

  She was surprised he could reply in such positive terms. “So you’ve come here to put us in our place by shooting us?”

  “Not you, Miss. Wouldn’t shoot at you. Only the terrorists.”

  “But you shot at us on Bloody Sunday, didn’t you?”

  “Were you there, Miss?”

  “No.”

  “Neither was I. So I didn’t shoot at you. Wouldn’t dream of shooting at a nice young girl like you.”

  “Don’t be so facetious! Bloody Sunday was a massacre. A British massacre.”

  “You’re right, Miss. It was a mistake, something that got well out of control. And a sad day, it was too. The Paras ran amok. They were out of control.
The rest of us would never have wanted anything like that to happen.”

  “Why? Why did it happen?”

  He looked at her with a calm expression that unnerved her. “It happened because that sort of mistake happens in every conflict, Miss. My father was a soldier in the Second World War, and he saw some of the appalling atrocities committed by the German and Japanese armies. He was in Palestine in 1948 and he saw the bodies of hundreds of civilians slaughtered by Moshe Dayan’s Israeli army. In 1962 there was a massacre in Paris when the police shot dead hundreds of Algerian protestors. Same thing, Miss. In any violent conflict innocents get killed.”

  “But it’s all wrong!” Anger infested her voice.

  “Of course it’s wrong, Miss, but it happens. Bloody Sunday wasn’t meant to happen and we’re sorry it did happen. It was Amritsar all over again.”

  “Amritsar. What the hell is Amritsar?”

  “Where, not what, Miss. It’s a place in India. In 1919 British troops opened fire on a peaceful gathering of unarmed Indians. Many died. We should have learned from that, but it seems we didn’t.” He looked up and down the street, as if checking that he was not acting out of turn. No army officers were about to reprimand him for chatting to a local girl. His voice remained irritatingly calm. “Interesting though, isn’t it? Bloody Sunday wasn’t meant to happen and people like me sincerely regret it. And yet, back in February the IRA bombed Aldershot Barracks in England, and that was meant to happen. People were meant to die that day. And the IRA show no regret. There are some who are glad they killed English people.”

  “Army people,” she said, hoping she was right. “The ones who died. They were all British soldiers.”

  “Not true, Miss. They were mostly civilians; female cleaners just earning a living. Innocent civilians massacred by the IRA. Blown to bits. And there was a Catholic priest amongst the dead. Are you a Catholic, Miss?”

  She nodded silently.

  “Are you saddened by what the IRA’s done, here and in England?” he asked. He stared at her now, silently demanding an answer.

  She struggled to find a response that would satisfy her own feelings. Of course she was saddened by the bombing and shooting, deeply saddened, and she was equally saddened by her part in it. But how could she put that into words without giving in to this pip-squeak of a British soldier? The longer she was left without a convincing argument, the more she hated him.