Johnny springs to his feet, the cold stiffness of his locked position on the stone sending lightning forks of pain through his buttocks when he moves. He holds the bottle like a weapon, not waving it because he doesn’t need to.
“You’re a fucking psycho, Pearson,” he had said quietly, and he moved past them and out of the graveyard, the open, glassy eyes of the rabbit locked in his memory …
Johnny opens his eyes and sees Danni watching him. The memory of the graveyard, of Pearson, fades.
He is not listening, Danni thinks with frustration, putting her glass down on the table.
“Did you ever kill a man?” she repeats.
Johnny stares at her without answering for quite some time.
“Yes,” he says, eventually, his eyes never leaving her face. “I did.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
He will not be drawn on who he killed. Not yet, Danni thinks. She thinks she has her man. But she has to be clever. Sure footed. She will not be careless.
“Is the struggle over?” she asks. “Do you have sympathy for the Real IRA, the Continuity IRA?”
“I am not part of it now, Danni.”
“Your views have changed?”
“Everything has changed.”
“Why?”
“I was a young man then, for a start.”
“That makes a difference?”
“Of course it makes a difference! Are you the same as you were in your twenties? Young men are …” He does not finish the sentence. It is too obvious.
“And there is a peace process,” he continues. “There was no peace process when I joined. There was violence and prejudice and victimisation. You can’t judge a moment in history by what’s happening now.”
“Why did you really join?”
The word ‘really’ changes the question, demands a kind of honesty. At first, he resents the implication that he has not so far been completely honest. But maybe she is right. Within a minute, within the same thought even, Johnny alternates between believing no explanation is possible, even desirable, and searching longingly inside his head for a way to make her understand. He wants to see the hardness in her eyes yield, but he will not justify himself. Not to her; not to anyone. He says nothing for a minute, looks at the table, like he’s searching through mental files in his head for explanation.
“You’ve got to understand,” he says finally, softly, “what it was … you know … what it was like to be a teenager here at that time. What we’d seen growing up. When I was a kid, I was watching the civil rights marches going on … people out on the street … ordinary people like my dad and my Uncle Gerry, out marching for the first time in their lives. They weren’t political. They weren’t agitators. They were ordinary, working-class guys who worked hard all their lives and just wanted the best for their families. But they couldn’t get the best for their families in the system that worked here at that time. What jobs you could get. What houses you could get … that depended on your religion.”
“So your dad and your uncle … they were terrorists too?”
“What’s a terrorist?”
“Oh don’t play with words,” she snaps.
“Nelson Mandela was a terrorist. Now he takes tea with the queen.”
“Did they join the IRA?” she says insistently, ignoring him.
“Who, Nelson Mandela and the queen?” he demands.
“Oh fuck off!” she says.
They both stare into their drinks.
She becomes aware of a background noise that is gathering momentum, then the doors of the nearby function suite burst open and a conga line straggles through reception towards the bar. Oh please God, not now, she thinks. A wedding party, all of them singing loudly with the ‘look at me’ exhibitionism of too much booze. Embarrassment grips her, and she takes hold of her glass and sips it. Johnny glances up and away again. The line kicks its way past their table, back out into the foyer, and disappears through the swing doors of the function suite leaving a pregnant, surreal silence.
Then Johnny says quietly, “No, my father and my uncle did not join the IRA.”
“So why did you?”
“Because … because of what I’ve been trying to tell you,” he says exasperatedly. “Things were different for my generation. It wasn’t just Ireland that was changing in the 1960s, everywhere was changing. Britain … America … and who was pushing that change? It was young people. You had student marches and demonstrations … anti-Vietnam protests … and we were part of that change over here too. My dad, my uncle … they had accepted a lot but it all got simply too much to accept. And it was my generation that was really going to challenge it in sufficient numbers. We were young and we were energetic and we wanted change. We wanted a future.”
He’s looking at his hands on the table and her own gaze is drawn to them. They are folded together, long white fingers intertwining.
“I’ve brought a document with me,” he says slowly, deciding to say the words only as they emerge from his mouth. “I brought it in case you really want to know what this is about. But it’s a document that means a lot to me. And if you’re playing at this, don’t bother taking it.”
She looks at him uncertainly, eyes flickering as his hand moves to the inside pocket of his jacket. The pages are folded.
“What is it?”
“My grandmother wrote it. Mary Seonaid O’Connor.”
She starts to unfold the pages.
“No, read it later.”
She hesitates, then reaches for her bag and tucks it inside.
“I can’t tell you any more than that can,” he says. There were three things happened to me one after another when I was a teenager. The first was my mother giving me my grandmother’s words to read at the height of the protest marches. The second was the British army moving onto the streets of Belfast and Derry. When they came, there were plenty in our streets who stood to cheer them in. We thought they had come to protect us. And then we realised they weren’t there to protect us at all. And that’s when things changed for me, Danni. That’s when things changed.”
He takes a long drink from his glass. She watches the creamy head settle back on the Guinness, then looks up at him questioningly.
“And the third thing?”
He is silent for so long she begins to wonder if he heard her.
“The kids in the streets where I lived began running battles with the British soldiers,” he says, eventually. “My young brother, Pat, was at it all the time. Pat … och Pat just liked the adventure of it as much as anything, you know? There was this day I saw him and an old school pal of mine called Joe Breslin stoning the army trucks as they passed. They weren’t the only ones. There was a whole crowd of them. It was what happened, just the way things were. But I couldn’t be bothered with the pettiness of it, steered clear. I walked back down the street I had come up and turned down another way to get out of the scheme for a bit. I don’t know how long I was away … twenty minute maybe, half an hour, something like that. When I came back, there was this car parked down the bottom end of the street near my house, with a crowd round it.”
She finds herself drawn to his face in spite of herself. Her eyes scan the angular contours, watching the emotions that flit and dart in the shadows of his face.
“It was Pat,” he says, looking up at her, as if all these years he still can’t believe it. “It was Pat,” he repeats.
What was Pat? Danni thinks uneasily, watching him silently.
“Somebody had opened up their car to lay him on the back seat while they called an ambulance. I was trying to see but at first I couldn’t see for the crowd, and then somebody moved and I caught sight of the sleeve of his jumper. I was pushing my way through then, shouting to let me through and somebody said, ‘That’s his brother, let his brother through.’ And I could see the blood seeping into the car upholstery, spreading out you know, creeping out like it was alive, and I was thinking, they’re never going to get that out. They’re never going to get t
hat blood out.”
“Wait a minute,” Danni says. “How did …? He was shot for throwing stones?” Her voice rises incredulously.
“You know nothing about this place,” he says. He cannot keep the bitterness from his voice. “People like you are why people like me had to join the IRA.”
She should hate him for that, Danni thinks in the silence that follows, and yet in a strange way she understands this better than anything else he has said. A sense of rage for his loved ones.
Johnny exhales deeply.
“Sorry.”
“What happened?”
“I grabbed hold of Pat’s hand but he didn’t open his eyes. There was this siren wailing in the distance. It felt like it was wailing somewhere inside me, inside my head. Someone had called an ambulance.”
She can see he’s remembering it in his head, playing it slowly like a movie reel, the way she replays the bomb blast. She knows what that feels like, the way the scene runs and reruns in your head, and you just can’t switch it off. Marco on his hunkers. The arc of Angelo’s bag in the air.
“It got louder and louder. I heard someone muttering, ‘It’s too late’ and I looked up to see who it was, but everyone had parted to let the ambulance men in. ‘It’s his brother,’ somebody in the crowd said to the ambulance men. One of them came and lifted me by the shoulders and said, ‘Come on then, young fella’ – I always remember the way he said that because it sounded odd – ‘we’ll look after him for you now.’ The next thing my mother came running out of the front door in her slippers. Someone had knocked the door to tell her. Blue floral slippers. She had this wild look on her face, you know. Her eyes were just crazy.
And then she saw Pat on the stretcher as one of the men was covering his face with a sheet and she started to scream. Somebody grabbed hold of her on one side and somebody on another and she just screamed that street down.”
His forehead creases with the memory and he looks down at the table.
“It was like she howled for everything she’d ever lost. Her father. Her son.”
Then he lifts his head to her and says flatly.
“I’ll never forget that sound as long as I live. I’ve spent my whole life trying to wipe it out.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Her own father, she’s thinking, as she watches him. Was he one of them? The soldiers who bludgeoned their way into Northern Ireland? The soldiers the boys threw stones at.
“My father was a British soldier,” she says.
She will never understand, he thinks.
In the silence between them, she sees her own father the way he was. Suddenly and vividly. The stranger in army uniform coming home, upsetting the way things were between her and mummy. She remembers running behind her mother’s legs, gripping hold of her skirt and peering round the side. Her father, kneeling on the floor laughing, holding out his arms to coax her. Her mother pulling her gently round, bringing her over. “Daddy’s home, Danni. Say hello.” Her father smells vaguely of beer and she does not want to hug him. His soldier’s uniform is rough on her skin.
She watches resentfully from the side of the sofa as he kisses her mother on the lips. Her eyes widen as his hand slips onto her mother’s backside and then her mother pulls away and murmurs something but he’s not having it. He’s laughing and pulling her close and Danni runs out suddenly from behind the sofa and kicks him on the shin.
“Oi!” he shouts, and Danni mother’s swoops her up protectively.
“I can see you’ve been spoiling her,” he says. “Just as well I’m back.”
“Don’t be silly, Jimmy,” her mother says, “she’s only a baby still.” And Danni feels the gentle press of her mother’s lips against her head.
He is home from a long tour of duty and she cries for the first week. She can no longer climb into bed in the early hours of the morning when she wakes, seek her mother’s warm body and drift back to sleep with her damp head resting against her mother’s back. She does it so automatically she is barely awake any more. Until she feels her father lifting her and returning her to her room and then her eyes are open suddenly with the cold harshness of morning and a world that does not cradle her gently as it once did.
“I’ll see to her,” her mother is saying and her father snaps back,
“For God’s sake Marie, just leave her or she’ll never learn.”
Danni howls until her mother creeps in and slides into bed beside her.
“Hush, honey,” she murmurs and Danni sniffs back tears and gulps for air before she grabs a fistful of her mother’s nightgown and her eyes droop again into sleep. Her mother chose her. Her mother always chooses her.
Danni’s father believes in discipline. It’s just his way, her mother tells her as she gets older. But Danni never gets to understand his ways. He wanted a boy. She always knew he wanted a boy. Her mother chose the name Daniella because she thought it pretty, but her father was the first to call her Danni and sometimes Dan.
He and Danni eye one another with a kind of watchful resentment. They move home often and she blames him for that. New schools, new friends, new houses. A sequence of drab army properties with radiators that give out more noise than heat, and damp patches on the walls, and flecks of fungus on the bathroom walls. Kitchen wallpaper than has peeled back above the spot where the kettle has steamed for years. At first she cries each time they leave. “Why do we always have to go?” she frets. And her father says she must be a good girl and not a baby now; she’s far too old for tears. She must help her mum. Eventually she no longer cries when she hears they are to move. She becomes adept at making acquaintances and avoids making friends.
She is ten when the knock on the door comes. Two army men with uniforms that do not look like her father’s. Her mother sends her to her room to play. Just for a few minutes Danni, she murmurs. Her mother’s face has blanched with fear. Much later, when Danni hears the door close, she listens for her mother’s voice calling her but it does not come. She tiptoes to the sitting room, looks round the open door to where her mother sits shivering, pulling her cardigan round her body like she will never be warm again.
He did not die in action, that was the irony. Her dad, the soldier. Not in the posting to Northern Ireland. He had a heart attack, they said, fell straight and stiff and heavy like chopped timber. He simply never opened his eyes again.
They shake hands perfunctorily, neither of them concentrating. Each of them has their own secrets, their own preoccupations. Danni does not flinch at the touch of his hand now; she barely registers it. Somewhere inside her, she is aware that should she stop to examine what she feels; he has stirred some kind of emotion in her. Not pity, nor compassion. Not empathy nor sympathy. Not understanding. Confusion perhaps comes closest but she has not the will to work it out tonight. There are other thoughts to occupy her.
They will meet again, they both know it. So sure are they, that they make no formal arrangement, each eager to retreat back into their own world, alone, to examine memories that have been dug up and left like bones in an open grave. She stands behind the glass door of the foyer, watching Johnny walk into the grey smirr, turning his collar up against the damp. When he disappears, she watches the space where he was, then turns back into the light.
A father who was a British soldier, Johnny thinks. She will never understand. An IRA man, Danni thinks. He will never understand.
It is hopeless.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“On the floor! Now!”
On the long walk back across the city from Danni’s hotel, Johnny can hear the words in his head like they’re being shouted now. See the place it all began. The office door of the old disused warehouse banging open so violently it bounced off the wall behind.
“What the …?”
“Get down on the fucking floor! Move!”
Johnny had wriggled face down against the concrete floor, feeling the cold stone and grit against his cheek. Three men stood above him, each with a gun, their faces hidden bene
ath black balaclavas. Where was Pearson? He tried to turn slightly and caught Pearson’s jacket out of the corner of his eyes. He must be on the floor on the other side of him. A foot roughly pushed Johnny’s face back to the floor and a small flurry of dust rose up and caught in the back of his throat making him cough.
“Shut up!”
“What are you doing?” Johnny yelled. “What the fuck is happening?”
“Tie him!”
A thin blindfold was yanked over Johnny’s eyes, tied so tightly at the back of his head that he saw shooting stars in the blackness. It felt like his eyes were going to be pressed so far into his skull that if they were released, they would ricochet like a pinball machine.
He couldn’t hear Pearson’s voice. What were they doing to Pearson?
Cold metal pressed into the side of his head and he heard a click. Christ! This was it. He screwed his eyes tight and realised he’d never felt any emotion as primitive as this in his life before. Fear and adrenalin surged in explosive bursts, unstoppable, like water from a burst mains pipe, and in those seconds he looked for escape possibilities, even where reason told him there were none. He’d have crawled on his belly, slithering like a snake and licking dust from the concrete floor to survive. Grab the gun at his temple and turn it on the man who held it if he could. Blast his brains out. He always wondered if he could kill a man and now he knew. He could kill three if it meant he lived. His eyes stayed screwed shut, waiting for the blast. He was going to die.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph …” he prayed mechanically inside his head. “I give you my heart and my soul …”
A hand grabbed at his leg, another at his belt. They were trying to remove his jeans and a sudden surge of anger overpowered his fear.
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