In Exile

by Billy O'Callaghan

  And then, in the darkness, lying in the long grass at the edge of a wood, it seemed like a dream. He heard words, or felt them in that odd dreamlike way, Dan whispering instructions to get ready, to aim low, and not to stop until they were all down or until he was told that he had done enough. Other things too, unimportant things, lost in the stuttering flail of automatic rifle fire, and sparks that lit up the night for frozen heartbeats.

  Later on, in the back room of some friendly pub in the small hours of the morning, the older men recounted again and again the details of the ambush, and there was much back slapping for Joe, who put down whiskey after whiskey in the hope that it might burn away some of the numbness. All three soldiers, Dan said confidently, and there was singing until dawn. The Rising Of The Moon and A Nation Once Again; all the usual songs.

  ‘Don’t read the papers or watch the news for a few days, lad,’ Mick had told him in a quiet moment, leaning in like it was good advice. ‘What they say is all just propaganda.’

  Over the next few years, it was more of the same, until the people of the Falls began to look at him as they looked at Dan. He saw first hand the horror stories of the British soldiers’ actions, the women and children shot down like animals in the street. It was war, just like Dan said. And when they asked him to leave a package in a Loyalist pub, he pushed away any doubts and did as he was bid. It was just a warning, Dan had told him, no one would be hurt. And he was right; when the place had gone up in the small hours, nobody was even in the area. But the message was clear, just the same.

  The hours until lunchtime were long. Joe lay on his bed through the night, fully dressed, watching the window and the scattered rain and thinking about his past. He wondered if shame was enough to kill a man and whether or not there could be salvation for someone like him, either in this life or in the next. He had not prayed in many years, or at least not in any meaningful way, not since he was a boy. Now the thought of prayer held a kind of comfort, but even as he tried to find a way back in, the hypocrisy of the act made it feel almost sinful. He was ashamed, but he had done what he had done and he would do it again, not because it was what he wanted but because it was what he had become.

  When morning brought a glossy sheen of daylight, he got up, washed in a basin of tepid soapy water and shaved by the small square rust-speckled mirror that hung on one wall. The kettle slowly boiled for tea as he scraped away the night’s stubble from his face with a throwaway razor. The reflection in the mottled glass was of a broad-faced man with a sallow complexion. The bones of his face were heavy beneath his stretched skin, the strong jaw and prominent cheekbones giving him a fierce look. He raked the fingers of one hand back through his hair. Tawny in colour, it was growing out of a crew-cut now and receding fast.

  He had changed a lot from the boy that he had been back in Belfast. Even more than the two prison sentences he had endured, the running life had made him hard, the things he had done and the places he had been, always alone, existing like some low beast.

  The radio played old songs, none of the stuff he liked, but he listened anyway as he made the tea, to the music and the idle chatter of the disc jockey. He crossed to the window a few times, but the street was quiet, a typical Sunday morning. On the table by his bed, a small cherry red alarm clock pulsed away the seconds and he watched the fast hand chase its way around and around toward half past nine.

  He polished his boots and distractedly read for a while a ragged copy of an old Louis L’Amour novel that had been left behind by a previous tenant. The covers had been torn off so he didn’t know the name of the book, but he supposed it didn’t matter all that much. And he only knew that it was L’Amour because of a short biographical spiel on the first page. He read without absorbing much of the tale, and then, as the time approached eleven, he ate sardines in brine and cold baked beans straight from their tins. Not exactly gourmet, but he had endured worse. He could have heated the beans, could have made tea even, but there was a kind of necessity in feeding this way, everything cold and slick and straight from cans. It all served to hone that edge once more, to sharpen his instincts for whatever lay ahead.

  Coming on for noon he gathered up everything, any clue that might hint at who he was, anything that might hold a print that could be traced at some later time, piling it all into a plastic bag. His own belongings were scant, just a couple of shirts, a spare pair of jeans, some underwear and his shaving things, and he packed them all into his small rucksack, one that had accompanied him on many years of travel. He scanned the empty room, hating suddenly the depressive atmosphere of the place, the hollow gloom like slum disease, and he was glad that he’d be leaving behind the debt of a fortnight’s rent.

  Bríd had loved him once. He was sure of that. They had grown up together from their early teens, and at times she had seemed almost like a sister. Almost, but not quite, because there was a thing between them. An electricity, he supposed it was, the blossoming of some thing like love. At fifteen she had kissed him on a dare, and after that he was hooked. She was everything he wanted, his ideal.

  About 5’6’, a good height for his own, coming on for six foot as he was, she had jet black hair that she wore to the shoulder sometimes but more often pulled up into a loose ponytail. Tied up like that, it better suited her pale complexion and the delicate structure of her face, gave her a sleek, angular appearance. He loved how her cheekbones had such strength, and her eyes were large and a shade of jade that seemed to play sinful illusions with waning light. She smiled best of all for him, and she had a way of understanding who he was, what he was about. She had her mother’s looks, Dan said so and it was true – Maura did boast those same eyes and wonderful bone structure – but there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that she was her father’s daughter.

  After the ambush she had come to him, and though he knew better than to talk about it, even to her, she seemed to sense it in him, and it tightened whatever it was that they had together. She was a woman of the movement, even as a child, and the way she talked seemed to make his acts heroic to both of them. Dan had never encouraged their friendship, but he had never actively opposed it either. When they became lovers, people must have known, or at least suspected; on an overcrowded housing estate, secrets were difficult things to keep. And if people knew, then Dan must have had some inclination too.

  She was two months pregnant – the greatest secret of all and one that they had managed to keep – when a bomb tore apart the local shopping precinct, an act of Loyalist repercussion in answer to who knew what slight, just one more round of an endless circle. Seven people had died on the scene, and Bríd became the eighth victim after fourteen hours of desperate emergency surgery at Belfast General. Joe sat in a cold white waiting-room with Dan and Maura, his world coming slowly and irrevocably apart.

  When the surgeon finally emerged and said how sorry he was, that they had done everything they could but that there was just too much brain trauma, Dan pinched his mouth tight, nodded and squeezed his wife’s hand. Only Joe cried. He was young still, and dealt badly with pain.

  The funeral drew hundreds of mourners. British soldiers skirted the graveyard in an effort to ensure a tenuous peace – they knew who Dan was, where exactly he ranked in the movement, and they built connections with other faces in the crowd – but despite their presence, two young Loyalists managed to secure good vantage and threw stones from a tree, blew an air horn and chanted disrespectful slogans. The soldiers could only watch as the youths were chased and caught, one beaten into a coma, the other into ­paralysis. Joe stood beside Dan, trembling with rage and fear, watched as they laid out the Tricolour over the ­coffin and as the rifles were fired by the men in camouflage uniforms and balaclava masks. He ached inside, felt it as a clenched fist in his chest, the last ounce of his goodness suffocating.

  Later, in the corner snug of their local bar, he told Dan of his situation with Bríd, how close they had been. ‘I loved her,’ he said, and Dan had only nodded, because he already knew. Ca
refully then, Joe broached the subject of the unborn child, and this at least brought some reaction, a hard minute of stare, Dan’s shock pushing up through his own grief, reaching for understanding. Then he gritted his teeth and his face became a snarl. ‘Use that, boy,’ he said. ‘Use it to make those bastards pay.’

  He dropped the rubbish from the bed-sit in a series of litter bins along the streets. Careful as always. It hurt to think back, but sometimes he needed that hurt.

  Memories of the day that Bríd had died – was murdered, his mind would have screamed once, but not now, not any longer – Bríd and his unborn child; such memories were the only thing of any worth that lived inside of him anymore. It was as though that day had been only yesterday; there was that same vivid sense about it.

  He had been at work – he laboured with a local builder, the usual kind of thing, and he had heard the blast even from the building site more than a mile away, and everybody knew instantly what had happened and also that it would be bad, late morning as it was, and a Thursday. The only question was whose bomb it had been, which Loyalist faction would lay claim to the job. Not that it mattered, of course; ­differences and similarities were only for the politicians. They knew that it wouldn’t have been a Republican bomb, because they would have heard about it beforehand but also because it was in their locality, right there in the Falls. A shopping centre. Christ. It didn’t matter which ­finger of the same hand had pushed the button, because what they had to do to end this was break the hand itself.

  Not long after, Dan arrived at the site. Looking pale and frightened, a way that nobody could ever remember having seen him. Joe thought that he was coming to talk over some plan of reprisal. Some of the other men must have assumed the same because work was stopped as they gathered around to hear what he had to say. The men who had chosen not to involve themselves in such things remained on their scaffoldings, but they didn’t work, just watched from a distance, afraid.

  Dan seemed to see nobody but Joe.

  ‘Joe,’ he said, ‘I need you.’

  The other men understood and began to step back, but they didn’t move far because there was nothing kept quiet inside the walls of the movement.

  ‘What is it? The explosion?’

  A sharp nod. ‘Bríd was there. They got her out, but she’s at the hospital. We have to go.’

  Dan’s hand was on his arm, gripping, forcing him into movement. Like a dream again. So much of his life had been lived in dreams. Vaguely, he remembered that he was holding a spade – he had been mixing concrete – and he carried it right to the gate of the site before one of the other men ran after them and took it from him. He gave it up from his stupor.

  Beyond that, only fragments lingered, barely connected snippets such as the taste of hospital tea from a Styrofoam cup, sour and nauseous even with the splashed addition of Dan’s whiskey sweetener, and the rustle of magazine pages to vie with the pulsing of a small analogue clock just above the door. People passed along the corridors and sometimes there was even laughter, as though this place was not a hospital at all, not a place of sickness and coming death. The shuffle of feet, snatches of conversation, but in the waiting-room there was nothing more than the numbing white light and the low sound of worried breath.

  Dan had said lunchtime on the phone, and for a Sunday, noon would do just fine. He’d have had the place well watched, would know of its friendly bent to men of their kind.

  It had been a long time since they had met face to face. Dan’s was a face that Joe never wanted to have to see again, this man who once had been like a father to him, or a father-in-law. Joe hated him now, hated him for all that he had always represented and represented even still. A user, playing people like pawns in a game. And not just Joe but his own family too, offering them up as sacrificial lambs to the slaughter.

  Time was, Joe blamed the world for Bríd’s death, or blamed himself. With the passing of years he tried to persuade himself that it had all been mere circumstance, born into the wrong place and at the wrong time. Such beauty, it could still make his breath catch in his throat to remember her and how she would smile for him, but beneath that beauty was the fatal and deadly flaw of genetic bias. She had always been her father’s daughter. Which was how, finally, Joe had come to lay the burden of death squarely on the shoulders of Dan Keogh. He had made her, cultivated the hatred in her heart, gave all that precious outer substance such a poisonous sting.

  After all the rain, the surface of the streets shone with a kind of gloom. This part of the city was rundown, litter clogged the gutters and windows were boarded up on many of the buildings. There was a strong air of menace, but it was a good enough place for the damned to walk. Joe tried not to think of the past or of what lay ahead, but there was nothing else, it seemed. This middle ground, this present, was a limbo. A living death.

  The call could only mean one thing, of course. They had a job for him. It had been a while since the last time, two years nearly, and the police had brought him in for that one but hadn’t been able to make it stick. So he had walked, and kept on walking. He could remember that a part of him had wanted to go down; he had planted a bomb that had killed two people. Both security guards, but they had just been doing a job. Trying to make a living. He tried to imagine what it must have been like for them, that instant when the device was triggered. Had they even known about it, or in that instant did they understand everything there was to know?

  A part of him had longed to confess; it would be his third time going down, and this time they would see to it that he was put away for good. But he was in too deep, even if it felt septic in his blood by then, the movement rotting him away from within, making him a time bomb, his innards all SEMTEX and nitro-glycerine. And because he was in so deep he had kept silent, even when the going got heavy, when they tried beating a confession out of him, three detectives with their hands wrapped in towels, focusing their brutality on his kidneys and his groin, or pulling his hair until his eyes watered and his scalp bled. They did their worst, but he was used to such by then. When they released him finally, he had run, staying nowhere very much longer than a month or two.

  That was it for him. He had said so from time to time, but after the last job he meant it, told people in a position to matter. They had nodded, said all right, if that was how he felt, he had certainly earned his retirement. Maybe they could find work for him in a less active field, planning maybe, or casing. Of course, he was highly skilled at what he did, and they’d miss him, so perhaps he’d consider a sort of semi-retirement, where they were still able to call on him for work that nobody else could be trusted to undertake. Not risky stuff, but jobs that required his finesse. Nobody got out clean, he understood.

  The bar was quiet for a Sunday, a dimly lit place that smelled of stale beer and the underlying tang of urine. There was sawdust on the linoleum-covered floor, soakage for spilled drink and friction against the slippery surface.

  Joe stood a moment in the doorway, trying to let his eyes adjust to the gloom. He couldn’t see Dan but he was certain that Dan would be watching him. He approached the bar, called for a pint of Guinness and let his fingers drum idle patter on the oak counter while the elderly bartender began to draw stout from the tap, angling the glass just so. Then he dug in his pocket, pulled the last note from the loose coins. A five pound note, all the money he had left in the world except for an emergency two hundred at the Ulster Savings Bank. He held it out but the barman just shook his head.

  ‘Your money’s no good here.’

  Joe stared at the note in his hand, then nodded and put it back in his pocket.

  ‘You can pour me a whiskey then, if that’s the case. Just a drop of water.’

  The man behind the counter had an English accent, but the set of his mouth indicated a different heritage. Joe watched him drag two tots into a water glass from the inverted bottle of Jameson above the cash register.

  ‘Here, add the water yourself,’ he said, filling a second glass from the sink.
‘Men can be peculiar about their whiskey.’

  Joe took the water glass and splashed just a drop into the whiskey. Then he swirled the spirit around to encourage the slight dilution. ‘Just to take the purity out of it,’ he explained, as the other man watched. Then he tasted it, sipping, and sighed his satisfaction.

  Over by the large fogged glass window, three men sat over pints, their rough general appearance indicating that they made their living as builder’s labourers. They had the soft brogue of Irishmen, and when one of them, a heavy-set man with a thick red beard, abruptly broke into song he had a gentle baritone, leading the way on a wistful rendition of Galway Bay for the others to follow. Even the barman leaned on the counter and joined in. And it was only as they drew the ballad to its natural end that Joe noticed the figure hunched into the thickest shadows of the bar’s corner. He drained the whiskey in a long swallow and followed it down with a mouthful of stout, the fire of one lacing threads into the cold cream of the other, steadied himself with a breath, and moved across the floor to that corner table.

  ‘Joe.’ A smile but a surface thing, hardly worth the ­trouble. ‘It’s been a while.’

  Joe stood, waited until the invitation was made to sit, and nodded. ‘Aye, it has at that.’

  ‘How’ve you been?’

  He shrugged, because there was little point in ­answering. They were both far beyond such things, knowing each ­other as they did.

  ‘You’ve a job for me, is that it?’

  ‘We do. The lads felt that you’d be the only one able for it. The tube. We want to take out a line, hit the infrastructure, you know?’

  ‘What is it, a warning?’

  Dan smiled. ‘If you like.’ He had the smile of an animal on the prowl, something canine and likely rabid. ‘We’ll open up the place, use enough of the stuff to close it down for good and all. Piccadilly line.’