Northern Spy

by Flynn Berry

  “Why won’t he sleep through the night?” I ask. It’s lonely, rising from bed in the darkness to feed and change him. Sometimes at night I feel homesick, this huge, inappropriate longing for my own mother, and to be back in my childhood bedroom.

  “The first year is hard,” she says. I rest my cheek on the table, and she strokes my hair. “He’ll sleep through soon enough. You were the same as a baby, so you were. Absolute torture.”

  Hearing that is inordinately comforting, for some reason. My mam looks down. “Are those my socks?”

  “Oh.”

  She sighs. “Give them back next time, Tessa.”

  Before she leaves, I wrap some almond biscuits in foil and tuck them into her bag, next to a black smock. “What is this?”

  “It’s my uniform.”

  “You don’t wear a uniform.”

  “I do now,” she says lightly. “The Dunlops fired me.”

  “Because of Marian?”

  “Yes.”

  She found a new job at a chain hotel in the city center. At the Dunlops’, my mother was often alone in the house, and free to plan her own day, to take their labradors for a long walk in the woods every afternoon. She adored those dogs, she has a picture of them taped to her fridge. Now she’s indoors all day, cleaning one identical room after the other, and the work is more strenuous. The hotel times its maids, forcing them to finish a set number of rooms per hour.

  “It’s just a change,” she says. “I’ll get used to it.”

  “Are you applying to other places?” I ask.

  “Most people don’t like their jobs, Tessa. Not everyone is as lucky as you.”

  “There must be another position like the Dunlops’,” I say stubbornly, though maybe not for her, for the mother of a terrorist. “How are you not angry with her?”

  “Marian asked me to forgive her,” she says.

  “So?”

  My mam gives me a look, less of disappointment than bewilderment. It’s easier for her to forgive Marian than it is for me. She has been prepared for this all her life, her whole religion is based on sin and atonement, expiation, remorse.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, Tom is about to leave after dropping off Finn when my phone sounds. “Sorry, Tom. Could you stay with Finn for a few minutes? I’ve to run an errand.”

  “What errand?”

  “Oh, chemist’s. It’s about to close.”

  On a lane behind Mount Stewart, I stop the car and Marian climbs in. No one comes here. It looks like a private road through the woods, hidden under mature oaks and elms. This forest might have been part of the manor once. Somewhere past the trees are the vast lawns, the ponds, the mansion itself, columned and covered in ivy.

  The season has started to change. The ivy on Mount Stewart has turned red, and color is seeping through these woods. Above the lane, the oaks and elms are russet, and you can smell woodsmoke in the air. From the car, I watch the light slanting through the trees. In a different life, Marian and I might be meeting here to pick blackberries.

  “An estate agent at Fetherston Clements is letting the IRA use their properties as safe houses,” says Marian. She tells me that the IRA members are shown into empty flats, like prospective tenants, and then left alone to hold meetings.

  “Which broker?”

  “Jimmy Kiely.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell Eamonn.” I wait for Marian to climb out of the car.

  “How’s Finn?” she asks.

  “Good.”

  “Can I see a picture of him?”

  I press my temples. Marian stopped asking to visit Finn a few weeks ago, but the last time we met, she brought a set of sippy cups for him, since she’d read that he’s old enough for them now.

  I’m so tired of being angry with her. It’s exhausting, having these endless arguments with her in my head.

  “Do you need to get back to Belfast?” I ask.

  “No,” says Marian, “not yet.”

  “Wait here.”

  When we return, Marian is standing in the exact same place, like she hasn’t moved a muscle in the last fifteen minutes. She must have been nervous that I’d change my mind. I open the back door and Finn turns toward me from the car seat, clutching his plastic toy buffalo, a blanket over his legs.

  I open the snaps and lift him out into the cool air, and he swivels his head to study this new place, the leaves drifting in the wind. When he catches sight of Marian, surprise blooms over his face. His cheeks round and his eyebrows lift.

  “Here we are,” I say, and she takes him in her arms. He beams at her with the tip of his finger in his mouth.

  Marian is smiling and crying. I remember her in the waiting room at the maternity ward, holding her hand to her heart as she leaned toward him.

  I watch my son lower his chin and mouth the tweed shoulder of her coat. I watch my sister close her eyes. She walks him in a slow circle, like they’re dancing.

  23

  The weeks pass. Marian tells me about robberies, arms drops, call houses, and I give the information to Eamonn. I meet with him on the beach for about five minutes, two or three times a week, ten or fifteen minutes in total. It’s nothing. I spend more time every week folding baby clothes.

  Finn is nine months old. Everything about him is more emphatic now. His preferences, his stubbornness, his humor. He likes to play peek-a-boo with me, his small head popping up above the mattress on the far side of the bed. I’m woken every morning by a firm voice saying baba in the other room. When I carry Finn into the kitchen, he points at the fridge and says baba again, looking back to be sure I’ve understood.

  The light behind his eyes is growing brighter every day. He can walk now, unsteadily. When he sees his teddy bear, he crows with delight and tackles it to the floor. He shakes his head to say no. He doesn’t enjoy all foods anymore. In his high chair, he will lift a piece of pasta and give it a good shake to dislodge any spinach stuck to it.

  I understand now how agents can live in deep cover for years and years. You can get used to anything. You can turn your attention elsewhere.

  As the autumn swell rolls in, the waves have grown stronger, and the sea has turned baltic. Eamonn comes to our meetings in a fleece jacket zipped to his chin, and I bring a wetsuit. Afterward, I stand in the car park, rolling the wetsuit down my body an inch at a time, and wonder if this is when I’ll be shot. Underneath the thick neoprene, my stomach is pale and softened from the water, making me feel doubly vulnerable.

  Except for those moments in the car park, though, I’m less scared now than I was before becoming an informer. My position in relation to the IRA has shifted. I’m studying them now, working against them, not waiting to become one of their victims.

  At work, too, my perspective has changed. I understand more of the landscape behind the news now. We’ve been reporting on a series of ATM robberies around Downpatrick, for example. Marian’s unit performed those robberies. She told me the location of each cashpoint, and I told Eamonn, and the security service had the bills marked for tracking.

  During the course of my work day, I research and write about certain politicians, and sometimes it’s disorienting. I’m nothing to them. If I were to arrive at one of their townhouses in London and introduce myself, they wouldn’t invite me inside, they wouldn’t pour me a glass of wine. They’d call their security details, they’d be annoyed at the intrusion. Despite what I’m doing, despite what it might cost me, I don’t have any claim to them.

  * * *

  —

  When Marian and I meet in the lane behind Mount Stewart, sometimes she is in a rush, and other times we stay together for an hour or so. Usually I bring Finn, and we walk through the woods and onto the manor lawn, falling in with the other visitors touring the grounds. Finn likes the fountain, and the hedges trimmed into the shapes of animals.
One Saturday in October, while we’re sitting together on the mansion steps, I say, “What’s it like to steal an ATM?”

  Marian shrugs. I know the basics: they steal a digger from a building site, use it to smash the ATM from the wall, load it into a van, and drive away, all in minutes.

  “Is it exciting?” I ask, and she nods. “What do you do afterward?”

  “We get trolleyed.”

  They go to a safe house, she says, and they turn up music and dance. They neck bottles of vodka and shout in each other’s faces and dance with their arms around each other.

  “Do you have to fake that now?”

  “Being happy?” she says. “No, that part’s real.”

  “Do you still love them?”

  “Yes.”

  I know Seamus, Damian, and Niall now from her stories. Marian told me which of them grew up in a family with money and which of them had none and which of them was put in foster care at the age of seven. I know the arguments they have in the van about music and in the safe house about tidiness.

  Niall is the driver, because he grew up joyriding around west Belfast; Damian’s the cook, because he loves food, and once asked one of their couriers to bring a bag of tapioca flour to the safe house so he could make fried chicken; Seamus is the professor, because he has read everything, politics and theory but also fiction, Mavis Gallant and Albert Camus and Jean Rhys.

  I know that Niall, the youngest, often wears a pink polo shirt and gray tracksuit bottoms, that the sides of his head are shaved but not the top, that he’s a good dancer. I know that Seamus, the eldest, the most serious, has a tattoo of the hammer and sickle. I know that Damian recently broke up with his girlfriend.

  I know that for Marian’s last birthday, the three of them took her surfing in Mullaghmore. When they returned to the cottage, it was dark except for a cake with lit candles.

  “How can you do this to them?”

  “I’m doing this for them, too,” she says. “They need a peace deal, or they’re going to get themselves killed.”

  24

  What’s it like for you to live in Ardglass?” I ask Eamonn, when we next meet. He frowns, considering his answer, and I reach over for a clam shell, brush the sand from it, and put it in my pocket to bring home for Finn.

  “Quiet,” says Eamonn finally, which is an understatement. At night, Ardglass feels deserted, with shuttered roads of stucco terraces, and fog drifting around the sodium streetlamps.

  “Where were you before?”

  “Hong Kong.” He lived on the fortieth floor of a high-rise in the Wan Chai district. He won’t tell me the specifics of his work there, only that he was investigating the funding network of a terror group in Britain.

  He leans back to rest on his elbows in the sand. I consider his profile, the sharp nose, the groove in his bottom lip. It must help, being this attractive, in his line of work.

  “How are you doing with all this? How is it with your sister?”

  “I haven’t forgiven her. I’m waiting to deal with that later.”

  “When you have the space,” he says, and I nod, squinting at the water, wondering if that time will ever come. Though this can’t go on much longer. It’s like walking on a broken foot and hoping the bone will somehow heal properly.

  Ahead of us, the sea pitches, rough and disorganized. Ropes of black seaweed tangle in the waves.

  “Was coming here a demotion or a promotion?” I ask.

  He smiles. “Neither. It was a new posting. I’d been in Hong Kong for six years, it was time for a handover.”

  “Was your work there more difficult?”

  “The pace was different,” he says. “Most of my sources didn’t actually live in Hong Kong. I had to fly to meet them wherever they were.”

  He tells me that the sources didn’t usually lead him to glamorous or notable places. Except for one time, when a meeting was arranged at a luxury resort, in a straw bungalow at the end of a jetty.

  I stop myself from asking whether the source was a woman. I grab a fistful of sand and let it stream between my fingers, surprised by the flush of jealousy.

  Eamonn wipes sand from his palms. We carry on talking, though all I can think about is if he’s ever slept with a source. I’m aware of myself, in a bikini top, the wetsuit rolled down to my waist. We’re alone on the beach. He could reach over and untie the knot at my back, push the thin fabric off my breasts, press me against the sand. Not him, I tell myself, for god’s sake.

  Eamonn tugs his jacket closer to his chin. “It’s hard to believe that never freezes,” he says, nodding at the sea.

  The sea doesn’t freeze, but the texture of the water does feel different now, thicker and slower, the way vodka turns viscous in a cold bottle.

  I thread my arms through the sleeves of the wetsuit, and he helps me with the zipper. With one hand he moves my hair aside, and with the other he raises the zip. I can feel his knuckles against my bare back, and my throat catches. I’m no longer breathing normally. When he pauses for a second, I think he’s about to unzip the wetsuit again, and slide it off me with his warm hands. He’s behind me, I can’t see his expression.

  Then he is fastening the wetsuit’s velcro tab, and I’m saying, “Thanks,” relieved at how casual my voice sounds, and standing up from the sand too quickly.

  My feet burn with cold when a wave slips over them. Eamonn shakes his head, waving at me, then turns back toward the village.

  I hold my breath while wading in, and only exhale after surfacing past the breakers. Around me, the gray water lifts and lowers. I drop under the surface again, blinking at the particles churning around me. My heart hasn’t steadied yet. When I come up, I force myself not to look back toward the shore, not to check if Eamonn is watching me, if he has stopped walking. Treading water, I lift both hands to smooth my wet hair.

  A fishing trawler is far out to sea, its shape almost invisible in the glare along the horizon. It could be loaded with gelignite, and coming in to land. Marian hasn’t heard anything more about the transfer, and Eamonn said they still haven’t identified a boat carrying explosives. “How hard can it be?” I asked.

  “Seven thousand active trawlers,” he said. “And that’s if it’s licensed here. They might be using one registered in Europe.”

  I stare at the trawler through the glare, like I might be able to tell from here, while cold water slips under the collar of my wetsuit.

  Later, while Finn naps, I press dough into a pie pan, then turn back to the cookbook for the filling ingredients. The recipe calls for six sweet, firm apples, like Honeycrisp, Pippin, or Northern Spy. I stop short, suddenly self-conscious, like someone is at the window, watching my reaction to those two words.

  25

  Smoke rises from the chimneys of Mount Stewart. Cold gray clouds roil above the manor house and the black hemlocks on its lawn. Marian and I are alone on a bench by the fountain, watching Finn try to climb over its edge. She is telling me about their early safe houses. The first was a priest’s house in the glens. He insisted on blessing them with holy water when they returned from a robbery. “I didn’t like him,” says Marian. She remembers him cooking thin chops, the meat burning in the pan.

  “He’d been at a murder that week,” she says. “An IRA unit brought him in to say the last rites before they killed a man.”

  “And he didn’t stop them? Or tell the police?”

  “No.”

  I shake my head. “Do you go to confession?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Want to hear something absurd? I went to confession last spring. I was feeling guilty about the divorce, for Finn’s sake, and thought it might help. I said, ‘I want to confess my divorce,’ and the priest said, ‘Oh, no, you can’t. You can’t receive the sacrament of confession as a divorced woman.’ I said, ‘But I’m trying to confess my divorce.’ He said, ‘If you want
to avail yourself of the sacrament of confession, you will need an annulment or to pledge yourself to a life of celibacy.’”

  “Oh,” says Marian. “That’s awful.”

  “It’s fine. It was a good reminder.”

  “So you’ll be asking Tom for an annulment, then?” asks Marian, and I laugh.

  Finn stamps his feet, frustrated at not being able to throw himself into the cold fountain, and Marian swings him into the air. “Has your granny christened you yet?” she asks him. During my pregnancy, my mam said, “It doesn’t have to be a priest, you know. Anyone can christen a baby.”

  “Don’t you dare,” I said, and she gave a little shrug.

  “Your granny’s very stubborn, so she is,” Marian tells Finn. We wander the garden, past the rusty dahlias and chrysanthemums, while she tells me Seamus, Damian, and Niall’s views on the Church, which are atheist, social attendee, and believer, respectively.

  “Marian, do you remember when I brought Finn to your flat last winter?”

  “Which time?”

  “Soon after he was born. You’d had people over the night before.”

  “Right. What about it?”

  “Who’d been at your house?”

  “Oh. Seamus, Damian, and Niall.”

  “Is that why you were acting strange?”

  “Was I?” she says.

  I ate baklava with her that morning, which Damian had brought her the night before. I don’t know why the thought is so upsetting, but decide not to consider it too deeply, not yet.

  We show Finn the topiary animals, then return through the woods to the car. “See you tomorrow,” says Marian.

  “What’s tomorrow?”

  “Aoife’s wedding.”

  “Oh, god. I forgot.”

  Our cousin will be married tomorrow at St. Agnes’s in west Belfast, with a reception at the Balfour hotel, which the IRA owns. Marian tells me that her unit will be at the wedding, herself, Seamus, Damian, and Niall.