White Church, Black Mountain

by Thomas Paul Burgess

  “I’m only messin’ with ya.”

  Both men seemed comfortable in each other’s company for the first time.

  “There was this one night.” Eban smiled at the memory. “I was on my way back from last orders. The band in the lounge bar struck up The Soldier’s Song. Well, you know how it works: everybody drew their conversation to a close and rose to their feet; stood to attention, hands over their fucking hearts. The works! Well, it threw me a bit – Ireland’s national anthem for fuck sake, right here in the middle of the great metropolis, the mother of Parliaments, heart of the empire!”

  Ruairí seemed unimpressed. His trademark cynicism returned. “It makes me proud. What did you do?”

  “Well, that’s it… what do you do? I’m balancing three pints and two shorts; to stand still and look at the floor was the wisest option and one I took gladly.”

  “You bottled it. Some Prod you are.”

  “Maybe… anyway, the music ended and a cheer went around the bar. When I was passing the lounge door I looked in. The band were still on stage. The Boys of Erin; I never forgot that… they’d been stoking the punters all night with rousing ballads of uprising and rebellion – well, didn’t they all look lovely in their crushed velvet lounge suits, lace-fronted shirts… and turbans!”

  “Fuck off!”

  “I’m tellin’ ya – every last one to a man… Sikh! Listen, Ruairí: that town has a way of fucking with your certainties.”

  They both laughed.

  Ruairí proffered the joint again. “So why are you back here?”

  Eban stiffened somewhat. His mood changed. “Unfinished business,” he said tetchily. “My business.”

  He took the joint hungrily and pulled hard on it.

  The young man seemed offended. As if a growing familiarity had suddenly been extinguished.

  He lashed back. “Chill… I don’t give a fuck.”

  Eban was immediately disappointed with himself.

  Embarrassed at his careless abandonment of something that he had been building.

  He tried to make amends. “Sorry. Look… maybe… I… you see, I’m… I come from a pretty rough area myself – Loyalist area, I mean – and sometimes—”

  Connolly was having none of it. “Now everybody’s a war baby. How’d you like to be where I’m sittin’ right now?”

  Eban came down with a crash.

  The exhaustion flooded back in.

  The awfulness of the situation they found themselves in had not alleviated one iota.

  He yearned for sleep.

  Instead he was trapped somewhere in a world of half-wakefulness.

  A twilight zone of blurred lines.

  He hadn’t really noticed the radio playing in the background until now.

  It had been cackling away with a playlist for long-distance lorry drivers and nighthawks. But now the room seemed to be filled with some plaintive Irish ballad.

  The uillean pipes swelled in a mournful refrain.

  He felt an overwhelming need to clarify.

  To be understood.

  He tried again.

  “If you would just let me explain… it’s difficult for me to explain. You try to find good things… I mean, sometimes… sometimes there can be beauty; sometimes there can be more, you know? We lived on the peace line, near where the city ended and the countryside began…”

  It was clearly difficult for him. He had to close his eyes.

  To concentrate.

  To force back the memory.

  “There isn’t much good to say about it really, but one winter, after the whitest winter and close to the thaw, four horses clip-clopped by my bedroom window, down from the hills; through fields… they woke me from my sleep.”

  Eban put his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes, the better to focus.

  “They were ponies really… they echoed down the empty tarmac, under the glare of street lamps… all brown. They shimmered… all black… they shone in the neon light.”

  It was as if he were alone in the room.

  As if Ruairí Connolly need not be there to listen.

  He was talking to himself.

  “Indecisive at the junction, I heard them stop… then turn… then wait… then move off far into the distance, out of hearing… out of sight…”

  Eban paused.

  He looked puzzled.

  As if trying to make sense of something.

  Ruairí could see that the older man was close to tears.

  Abhorring such weakness, he pounced.

  “Here.” He reached out for the joint. “Give me that back!”

  Eban flinched.

  “Who pushed your wacko button?” he said disparagingly. “I mean, so what? So-fucking-what?”

  He was merciless.

  “Let me tell you a story – and you can ask Anto if you don’t believe me. When I was a kid, I liked horses too. Oh yes… used to go up and feed the travellers’ nags up on the halting site all the time. Eventually, they moved on, but they left an old donkey – left it to die, I expect. Scrawny oul thing it was – bag o’ bones – but every day, rain or shine, I was up there brushing its coat, bringing it carrots and sugar and that… until I got up there one Sunday morning – morning of my confirmation as it happens – and somebody had put an iron bar through its eye and out through the back of its head – AN IRON BAR THROUGH ITS FUCKING EYE!”

  He stood up and bent low, level with Eban’s gaze.

  Spitting words into his face.

  “Now you tell me: why would anybody want to do that?”

  His anger was withering. “The people… you came back for the people? Cop on – they eat their young round here!”

  The older man cringed.

  There was nowhere to hide.

  Not in this young man’s realm.

  His blowtorch scrutiny of things.

  His unforgiving edifice of suffering and pain.

  Eban was diminished by his unrelenting cynicism.

  He broke his gaze and looked at the ground.

  A whistle blew somewhere.

  The relentless tattoo outside started up once again.

  The walls closed in a little tighter.

  Eban Barnard felt like he might scream.

  37

  As she stood in the supermarket checkout queue, Emily Atkins’ mind wandered.

  Since parting acrimoniously with Eban, she’d hoped for an opportunity to speak with him again. To revisit some of the things he’d said.

  The more cryptic he had become, the more she had poked fun at him.

  But it was unlike him to put so much out there.

  Cryptic or not.

  Clearly he had been brooding on something.

  Trying to push her away.

  Keep her at arm’s length.

  That was not unusual.

  But all these enigmatic references to some ‘secret’ Eban.

  One, he said, not worthy of knowing.

  Of trusting.

  Of loving.

  Had he been asking for her help?

  For her intervention?

  In the only way he knew how?

  It troubled her.

  The class lesson earlier had got away from her.

  She’d somehow allowed herself to be rattled.

  It annoyed her.

  It was something that she’d prided herself on.

  That she’d become acclimatised to.

  The sometimes naked sectarianism of Belfast.

  She’d lived and worked here long enough now to know how to roll with the punches.

  Were her feelings changing?

  Was she coming to the end of something?

  And perhaps the beginning of something else… somewhere else?

  Emily had phoned home earlier, ostensibly to check as to whether Rosemary needed anything from the supermarket.

  But really in the hope that Eban might pick up.

  When Rosemary did, she had to feign indifference through generalities.

 
“All alone today?” she asked the older woman.

  “Yes… Pascal came in around lunchtime, then he left again.”

  Rosemary made no mention of Eban.

  Deliberately so, thought Emily.

  If she wanted information regarding him, she’d have to come straight out and ask for it. And that would invite Rosemary Payne’s disapproval and perhaps another lecture.

  “Any mail for me?”

  “None.”

  “Would Eban have perhaps picked it up early and put it under my door?”

  It was an adroit manoeuvre. Rosemary Payne paused. As if she was considering. “No, I shouldn’t think so… he’s been gone since early this morning.”

  “Oh.” At least Emily had established that he was not at home.

  And then, unexpectedly, she was given more.

  “That thing he calls a briefcase is still in the hall, so wherever he’s gone, it’s not work.”

  Rosemary said this in a manner that was designed to make mischief and incite mistrust in Emily.

  Instead, it just worried her.

  *

  In the light of his manner recently – and the clandestine nature of his behaviour regarding the correspondence from the Historical Enquiries Team and the hospital – Emily felt an unreasonable dread that Eban had involved himself in something that he could not control.

  But she had not an inkling what that might be.

  She looked down at the wire basket looped over her wrist and forearm.

  A sorry selection of items sent her spirits dipping further.

  One half-pint of semi-skimmed milk; one yoghurt; two bananas; the latest issue of Marie Claire; one small tub of cottage cheese; one packet of Jaffa Cakes and one packet of fig rolls.

  A life, she thought lamentably.

  The queue shuffled up one.

  Across from her, the parallel checkout became free.

  She saw this and moved over to take advantage.

  Suddenly, from nowhere, she bumped forcibly into a young mother berating two small children.

  The woman lost her grip on a large bottle of ketchup, which tumbled to the floor before exploding with a pop and showering her lower body and her children in red gunge.

  She glared at Emily in what seemed an endless impasse. “Oh my God – can’t you watch where you’re going?”

  Emily blushed, contrite due to her daydreaming, but felt that the woman was at least as much to blame as she was.

  “I’m sorry, but you bumped into me. I’ll pay for it though.”

  The woman seemed to bristle further on hearing Emily’s English accent. The children were beginning to cry.

  “Oh, I bumped into you did I? I suppose you’ve got some God-given right to jump the queue ahead of us all. We only live here after all!”

  Emily was stung by this.

  The children were wailing loudly now.

  Other shoppers had begun to look over.

  “I live here too,” she said, somewhat weakly.

  The woman seemed to be warming to the confrontation in proportion to Emily shrinking from it.

  “Oh, do you now? Youse people make me sick: comin’ over here, taking jobs… God knows there are few enough of them as it is. Take yourself away off to where you came from.”

  Emily dissolved.

  It was so unexpected, the woman so abrupt, the children wailing and the shoppers craning their necks. The last thing she needed was a public confrontation.

  Without a word, she simply set down her basket and began to walk tearfully toward the exit.

  The woman was shouting after her, “You come over here; you think you know everything… you think you own the place… you just make matters worse.”

  The checkout girl and another woman in the queue came to Emily’s defence.

  “Here, that’s enough, you.”

  “It was your fault as much as that wee girl’s.”

  “There’s no need for talk like that.”

  But Emily was already outside the store.

  Leaning against the wall.

  Gasping in air.

  Fighting back tears.

  An ambulance rushed by, its siren screaming like a banshee.

  It seemed to momentarily open up a vortex to the past.

  Of TV footage of death and carnage.

  Syria… the Ukraine… Belfast?

  And all Emily could think about was how the woman and the children appeared to be splattered all over with blood and gore.

  38

  Interview Room 1,

  The Historical Enquiries Offices,

  Police Service of Northern Ireland, Belfast

  Detective Inspector Dan Watson continued to note down anything he felt was relevant.

  But looking now at the page of foolscap in front of him, he could see that he’d filled barely half of it.

  This agitated man across the desk just seemed to drone on and on.

  He had begun by listening carefully, attentively, genuinely, for anything that might shed some light as to why he was here.

  Maybe some mention of his brother – and Dan’s former colleague – Chief Superintendent Alex Barnard.

  Perhaps some reference to this man who had been assaulted in 1970, and who he seemed so animated about.

  Instead Eban Barnard seemed fixated on conveying every last detail of his period ‘babysitting’ a couple of reprobates in Newry Cathedral in 1991.

  But why?

  He still could not make any sense of it.

  His back was hurting.

  It was inevitable that his mind would begin to wander.

  His mobile phone, on vibrate and pressed against his thigh, didn’t help the situation.

  He knew it was her.

  The first time it had buzzed, he had cannily slipped it out for a look under his desk, unnoticed as Eban Barnard carried on with his ramblings from the past.

  She had sent him a photograph of herself, topless.

  Her police cap pulled across at a jaunty angle.

  He recognised it as one he had himself taken and previously emailed to her.

  On one of their nights spent in the Belfast Hilton.

  Now, as he sat here listening, every time the phone buzzed in his pocket he knew it was her and his cock tingled and grew hard.

  He was aware of the risks he was taking.

  Aware of how completely and utterly insane this whole affair was.

  Aware of all that he might lose if things got out of hand.

  Came to light.

  He knew all of this but it did not help at all.

  In fact it made it worse.

  Much, much worse.

  The higher the stakes…

  The thrill… the sheer abandonment to lust and to wanton risk-taking.

  The reckless, needless, unjustifiable self-destruction.

  The excitement of being desired and of desiring again.

  The greedy, animal sex.

  It was like a drug.

  Like a death wish.

  And he couldn’t get enough of it, or of Officer Helen Totton.

  He’d had four texts from her during the interview.

  All of them wanting to meet him in the records hall.

  Between the long corridors of racks and sliding shelves. Between sections U through Z. Where the room was in shadow and passing footfall was rare.

  Where they had groped and tongued hungrily at each other on a number of occasions.

  More thrilling for the fear of interruption.

  Of discovery.

  He would put his hands on her hips and draw her to him, as she looked up, wet lips parted.

  “Supposing I was to tell you you’re in breach of about ten professional behaviour guidelines…”

  “Supposing I was to cry and put my head on your shoulder…”

  “Supposing I was to let you…”

  “Then supposing I did… this?”

  In her texts she wanted to know what he was doing in there.

  What they
were talking about?

  He could see her at the door. Bringing tea and biscuits.

  Turned away by Sam Coulter.

  Did he know something? Were people beginning to talk?

  Fuck them!

  Let them do their worst.

  *

  Eban Barnard was still talking though.

  He would allow him to finish.

  Treat the whole thing professionally and let the man talk himself out.

  Maybe that’s all he had come for.

  But why the whole sorry story of the Newry Cathedral siege?

  It had been well covered by the press, but that was years ago.

  And why say he’d killed his brother?

  Why request an investigation of some incident in 1970?

  Why, why, why?

  Maybe there was no answer.

  Maybe he was a nutter.

  Whatever.

  Let him have his tuppence-ha’penny’ worth.

  And when he’d exhausted himself, toss him a scrap to send him on his way.

  Based on the little information that Eban Barnard had provided, he’d had some of the team look into any serious assaults round Shankill Road, May 1970.

  Given the level of activity on the streets then, he’d expected a deluge of incidents.

  In fact there were relatively few.

  Records were sparse from those chaotic, insane early days of the conflict.

  And Barnard’s ‘McGrew’s Pub’ angle checked out.

  There were incident records and hospital reports from the Belfast Mater.

  A young nineteen-year-old Roman Catholic man – Joseph Patrick Breslin – had been seriously assaulted during rioting activities and left for dead.

  Found in the ruins of the disused, burnt-out pub.

  Watson had asked Coulter to track him down if still alive and inquire as to whether he –based on an appeal from a non-family member – would be interested in reopening the case for investigation.

  Coulter checked addresses, found him residing at the same abode and duly wrote with the request.

  If Eban Barnard could legitimately explain why he was interested in this case, and would agree to drop all this nonsense regarding his brother, then maybe Watson might throw him a bone on the survival and identity of the individual he seemed so interested in.

  If nothing else it would be a mercy.

  The poor bugger sounded in pain.

  About what, he didn’t know, much less care.