Safe House

by James Heneghan

  The Grogans seemed okay, but not a bit like he’d imagined an aunt and uncle, serious and stiff instead, but that was to be expected of people whose job it was to run a secret police house where there were so many rules. The man, Fergus, wasn’t a member of the police, but he acted like he was. He was a mixture of bossy and friendly, an older man, balding and stockily built, with a narrow brown mustache. He already knew about Liam’s parents. “Sorry for your trouble,” he muttered as he shook Liam’s hand with a thick paw.

  His wife Moira was ordinary looking: medium build, light brown hair with some gray, a chain-smoker. She nodded at him. “Sorry for your trouble,” she murmured but didn’t shake his hand, flashing him a tight little smile instead.

  The house was twice the size of Liam’s house in Ballymurphy, and it had been updated, with fresh paint and newly sanded and varnished hardwood floors, though Liam noticed none of this.

  Fergus sat Liam down at the kitchen table and went over the rules with him. He was so tired he could hardly keep his eyes open to read the big capital letters on lined yellow foolscap paper. Fergus said, “You cannot go out. That’s number one. You stay inside and you don’t show yourself to anyone. You got it?”

  He nodded.

  “You don’t leave this house under any circumstances. Never ever, okay? You reading me?”

  Liam nodded.

  “There’s a lavatory in the backyard. But it’s not for you, why not?”

  “It’s outside.”

  “Good. You’re listening. Your room is at the back, upstairs. Moira will take you up after dinner. The bathroom is right next-door. That’s the lavatory you use. Next: You leave nothing belonging to you downstairs where someone might see it. As far as everyone in the neighborhood is concerned, the only ones living here are me and the missus.

  “Next: You do whatever me and Moira tells you to do. That includes washing dishes, helping keep the house clean and tidy, looking after your own room and your own stuff and your own laundry—Moira will show you how to work the washing machine. Okay?”

  He nodded once again. All he wanted to do was lay his head down on the table and go to sleep.

  “You eat whatever Moira cooks for you or you go without, understand? This ain’t the Europa International Hotel. Unless there’s something you really hate, which you better tell me about now.”

  He shrugged.

  “Okay, no hates. Now, the telephone. You’re allowed to make one call a day. That’s it, period. One call only. When you make a call you got to tell me or Moira first before you make it and we got to know who you’re calling, you got that? Any incoming calls go through me or Moira. ”

  He stared at the man, trying to keep his eyes open.

  “And you don’t give out any information about this place when you’re on the blower. That means you don’t tell no one where it is or what it looks like. You tell them nothing that could lead anyone here, got it? You tell no one my name or Moira’s name, nothing. You understand? Grogan isn’t our real name anyway. Get it? Your calls will be monitored.

  “Now, the telly. You can use the telly in the living room as much as you want before nine o’clock at night. After that you go to your room and you stay upstairs until six the next morning. Breakfast is at seven. If we look in on you during the evening we’ll always knock. When you use the bathroom you don’t lock the door. Don’t worry, no one’s going to barge in on you, but leave the lock off, okay? We don’t want no accidents. There’s books and magazines in the house. Just help yourself to whatever you need. Take ’em up to your room if you like. If you have problems then you come to me or Moira. Any questions?”

  Liam yawned. “Sounds like a prison.”

  “You better believe it.”

  Dinner was spaghetti and meatballs, but he didn’t really see it, and wasn’t in the slightest bit hungry. With so little sleep last night he was too tired even to pick at the food. There was no dessert, just tea. When they were finished Liam carried his plate out to the kitchen and emptied his uneaten food into the rubbish bag.

  The Grogans saw he was tired and excused him from kitchen duty. He grabbed his backpack. Moira took him upstairs and showed him the bathroom and his bedroom.

  He shut the door and took off his things. He didn’t bother to unpack. There were fresh pajamas on the bed, but he didn’t bother to put them on. He crawled under the covers and in less than a minute he was fast asleep.

  …exhaustion…

  He slept fitfully and dreamed of splintered doors and heavy boots rushing up stairs and crashing gunfire and voices screaming.

  He slept through breakfast the next morning and did not hear the knocking on his door, did not see his door pushed open a few inches while Moira Grogan peeped in on him, and then close the door and let him sleep.

  He slept the day away, such was his exhaustion, and did not wake until the evening. He had trouble remembering where he was. Then his first thought was that his mum and his da were dead and he was alone.

  They were not so very old; his da was thirty-seven or eight, and his mum was about the same, or maybe a year or two younger. Most people these days lived into their seventies or eighties. But not Dan and Fiona Fogarty: They were dead before forty. Their lives were over. It was impossible to grasp. He felt numb just thinking about it.

  It was still early morning. What time? He looked over at the digital clock with its glowing red figures: six-thirteen. He looked closer, saw the PM. sign, and puzzled over it for a few seconds. Either the clock was wrong or he had slept a full night and day, almost twenty-four hours.

  He got up, showered, and was sitting at the dinner table by seven. Fergus was reading his newspaper at the table. He nodded at Liam and went back to his paper. Moira was in the kitchen. “I wondered if you would be down,” she said. “You’ve been asleep all day.”

  Asleep all day? Then he should be feeling rested; instead he felt weak, heavy, numb. Stunned.

  The phone rang. Fergus answered. “It’s for you.” He held the receiver out to Liam.

  “Liam? It’s Inspector Osborne. How are you settling in?”

  “Fine.”

  It wasn’t private. They could hear him talk to Inspector Osborne through the doorless arch to the living room. He knew they were listening; hadn’t Fergus said they would monitor the calls?

  “The funeral is set for tomorrow, Thursday.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I thought you should know.”

  “Yes.”

  “Father Monaghan will be saying a requiem mass. The burial is in the morning at Milltown Cemetery.”

  “Right.”

  “If you want I could send a car and a bodyguard to take you to the funeral and then take you back again. But I don’t think you should go. It could be dangerous. That’s my advice. You would be better off staying right where you are and not showing yourself. The killer might be expecting you to show up.”

  “Yes.”

  He must have stopped listening after that because he remembered no more of the conversation, didn’t even remember hanging up.

  Dinner was a blur. He ate very little. The funeral was all he could think about. The Grogans had very little to say at the table. They asked him no questions. There was no more said about his day in bed. Liam noticed nothing of Fergus reading the Irish News—the Nationalist, Catholic newspaper—its pages spread out over most of the table, nor Moira chewing her food and staring unseeingly over Fergus’ head at a picture of Pope John Paul II hanging over the mantel. They were Catholics, he thought. He sat in a trance, seeing two coffins carried to Milltown Cemetery in the pouring rain.

  Moira helped clear the table. She showed Liam where everything was. Then she left him to wash and dry the dishes and put them away in the cupboards, which he did like a robot, automatically, unthinkingly, and didn’t notice the Grogans moving to the living room, Fergus to continue reading his newspaper, Moira to watch the telly.

  After clean up, Liam grabbed a couple of books from the living room, sai
d goodnight and climbed the stairs to his room.

  He had been too tired last night to take much notice of his room, but now he saw that it was quite bare: a single bed with sheets, blanket and a yellow cover—now rumpled from his long sleep—a night table with the digital clock, no chest of drawers. There was nothing else in the room, no pictures, no plants, no ornaments, nothing. The only light was a bare bulb hanging from the center of the room.

  The air in the room smelled stale from his long sleep; he noticed that the window was closed. He tried to open it by gripping the two metal handles at the bottom and lifting the frame, but it would not budge no matter how hard he tried. Then he noticed that the window glass was painted over with a dark brown paint. No one could look in or out. Then he noticed a small clear square where paint had been scratched off, in the bottom left-hand corner. He kneeled and peeped out but there wasn’t much to see, only the rain.

  It would soon be time for bed again, but how could he sleep after sleeping away a whole day? He lay on his bed, back against the headboard, and looked at the title of one his books: Space Monsters. Why go all the way out to space when there was an abundance of monsters right here in Belfast? He opened the book to the first story and started reading.

  He hadn’t read ten words before his eyes wandered from the page. He was alone. The house was quiet.

  He had never been alone before, not like this. No da or mum to talk to. Not even a friend, like Rory or Sean. Or Nicole, his new friend at Youth Circus.

  He was completely alone.

  He became aware of the beat of his heart and the sound of his breathing. He could hear the tiny creaks and clicks of the house, caused by temperature changes in the walls and pipes.

  He put down his book and changed into the pajamas provided by the Grogans. Might as well. He wasn’t going anywhere. He wished he had his own red-striped flannel ones, bought by his mum.

  He sat on the floor and explored the Band-Aid on his foot with his fingers: still stuck firmly; hadn’t peeled off in the shower; no pain, just a little tenderness. He stayed seated on the floor staring at the wall. He stared at the wall for so long he lost track of time. He became aware that he was cold. He climbed under the bed covers and tried reading again, but his eyes were too tired to focus on the small print and, besides, reading seemed to be something he used to do, once, when he’d had a family, when the world made some sense. How could he relax enough to read when his mother and father were so suddenly gone from him and he was alone in a strange house?

  He put the book down and closed his eyes.

  He knew what the funeral would be like tomorrow morning. There would be a masked IRA guard around the coffins. They would be carrying guns. It was normal. There would be soldiers in their armored vehicles and police in their “meat wagons”—armor-plated Land Rovers. There would be crowds of people.

  He wouldn’t be there.

  After the funeral, they would all go away.

  A lump came to his throat. He tried to think of something else instead, like school, or gymnastics, or the circus, anything to stop thinking of his mum and his da lying dead in coffins, shot to death, or their funeral tomorrow.

  …Youth Circus…

  Normally on a Wednesday evening he would be at the local Ballymurphy Gymnastics Club with Rory and Sean where they trained two evenings a week. It was boys mainly, though sometimes there might be a girl or two. Then on Saturdays, Liam and Rory trained at the Belfast Community Youth Circus as first-year students, taking the bus to the new “purpose-built” circus building in the city center. The circus “ring” was actually a rectangular gymnasium with adjacent stretch and exercise rooms and offices.

  There were girls at the Youth Circus. Two of them were friends: Nicole Easterbrook and Grace Newton, from a middle-class Protestant area of Belfast where there were no bombs or shootings. Both girls, close to Liam and Rory’s age but already with a year of circus experience, were fearless performers with amazing moves. Liam had never realized that girls could be so powerful, could own so much fire. Local Ballymurphy girls played football, and were good, strong players, but were slow and timid in comparison to Nicole and Grace. Who would have guessed there were girls in Belfast who didn’t whisper and giggle, who were fast and fearless, who were wirewalkers, tumblers, gymnasts, beginning trapeze artists, who made your mouth drop open in astonishment and admiration as you watched them?

  Madame Dubois, the director, was very strict. Catholic and Protestant kids worked and trained together. They had to get along; otherwise, they were kicked out. One of the kids, a boy named William, was from the Protestant Shankill area, the section separated from Liam’s Falls Road section by the Peace Line Wall. William always wore long-sleeved shirts because his arms, Liam recently discovered, were tattooed “Kill all Taigs,” a message seen on walls and doors all over west Belfast as “KAT.” The opposing message was also well represented: “KAP.”

  When it came to all-round gymnastics at the local club—floor exercises and apparatus—parallel bars, horizontal bar, pommel horse, balance beam—Rory Cassidy was the superior athlete. Coach Cannon was preparing him for the Belfast Junior Finals in the spring.

  Liam didn’t mind being second best, or third best for that matter. His da had put him straight when Liam had come home from gymnastics one evening a bit depressed because things hadn’t gone so well. He had been clumsy and slow. “You’re not focusing, Fogarty,” the gymnastics coach had yelled at him.

  “I’ll never be as good as Rory,” he told his da. “Or as good as Nicole and Grace at Youth Circus.”

  “There’s an old Irish saying,” his da consoled him. “‘The forest would be terrible silent if no birds sang except those that sang the best.’”

  The time spent circus training was what Liam loved most. Last summer he was accepted for a ten-day circus camp, funded by the Community Youth Circus. Brilliant it was. Ten days of heaven. Though his main skill was acrobatics, he wore a safety harness to train with trapeze artists. Then there were clown workshops and instruction in stilt walking and juggling as well as unicycling and walking on the hands. Students at the workshops, those who were serious about circus as a profession, knew that one day they would have to choose a specialty of their own, but circus performers were expected to acquire as many performance skills as possible. Liam’s choice of specialty, he decided, would be either trapeze artist or clown.

  Toward the end of the summer camp everyone had to put on an individual clown act. The goal was to make the others in the class laugh. “Wear something funny,” the director told them. Liam chose to wear his favorite red-striped pajamas, plastic red nose and red-striped face, and clown it up on a unicycle. He acted the part of an incompetent learner, mounting and riding the unicycle with great difficulty, doing his best to look like he was made of rubber as he slid and collapsed and bounced athletically but hopelessly to everyone’s loud laughter.

  It was the best summer of his whole life.

  And a couple of months before the summer camp, he took part in Belfast’s annual Festival of Fools, a Saturday street exhibition of tumblers, stilt-walkers and clowns. Dressed in clothes too small, tight trousers that came only to his shins, a tight jacket that revealed his skinny forearms, and a painted clown face, he had romped along on a rusty old bicycle, falling off and tumbling, and generally making a fool of himself. It had been a fantastic day.

  To work in a circus was his dream. He would be a clown or an aerialist, an artist of some kind one day, and he would travel around the world. He would make his home in Dublin, or some other place in the Irish Republic where there were no bombs or bullets, perhaps somewhere away out in the countryside, away from the North of Ireland and the deadly cities of Belfast and Derry—called Londonderry by Protestants. One day he would do these things, he was certain of it.

  And he would work in a circus.

  He might even decide to become the most famous trapeze artist in the whole world. Like Mike Ribble in Trapeze.

  …the spit
of a snake…

  Thoughts of Nicole and the Youth Circus had managed to push the funeral to the back of his mind for a few minutes, and then, amazingly, after already sleeping most of the day, he slept again.

  The room was dark when he woke, but then it would be dark, because of the painted window. It was hard to know whether it was night or day. According to his bedside clock, it was a few minutes before six AM. Breakfast was at seven. He closed his eyes. How long would he have to stay in this place? It could be a long time before the Mole was caught and sent to jail. He might be stuck here with the less-than-cheerful Grogans for weeks—months maybe. All the police had to go on was his description of the killer. Many people had moles. They couldn’t round up all the mole-faced people and parade them for him to identify; it was impossible.

  He felt low.

  Today was Thursday, the day of the funeral.

  Then there was the question: Why should he trust the police? Inspector Osborne might have no intention of catching the Mole. Why should the police try to help him, a Catholic kid—a Taig? The police worked closely with the British army soldiers to send Catholics to prison. Police and soldiers constantly stopped Catholic kids in the street to search them, insult them, beat them. “Hey! You! Yes, you dirty little Taig, get over here and stand at attention.” They even searched their schoolbags. The police searched a boy from Liam’s school and found him to have a knife, marker pens and glue for sniffing. They drove him up into the hills, miles from home, and dropped him off in the middle of nowhere, and he had to walk home in the rain. Everyone in the poor areas of west Belfast, Catholics and Protestants alike, despised the police. Small children, growing up under their constant contempt, name-calling and abuse, were terrified of uniforms.

  Why the Prods and police called them Taigs Liam did not know, didn’t even know what the word meant. Rory the scholar said he thought the word came from an Irish word, “tadhg,” an insulting nickname meaning “Irishman” or “two-faced person.” All Liam knew was that if you were Catholic in west Belfast you were a Taig. He hated the word and the way it sounded in Prod mouths, like the spit of a snake.