‘I don’t understand why someone of your generation would want any part of this,’ Tony said. ‘I don’t get what the attraction is. I know why we all got involved; we lived through it, but your generation? You’ve a choice.’
‘A choice?’ Barr said, incredulously. ‘There’s no choice. The work that started a hundred years ago isn’t finished yet.’
‘What about the peace process?’
‘Peace and the absence of fighting are two different things,’ Barr said. ‘The war never ended, the rules of engagement just changed. If we stopped now, what would have been the point?’
‘Do you think there was a point? In the end?’
‘My granda was interned,’ Barr said. ‘When I was young, he used to talk about what happened to him in front of me. He wouldn’t tell his family, wouldn’t tell Uncle Sean, but he talked about it to me.’
Tony tried to keep his expression neutral, even as he privately considered the wisdom of a grandparent discussing such a thing with a child.
‘He was kept for weeks,’ Barr said. ‘Before he went in, he was a big man, delivered coal in the city. Afterwards, he was afraid of his shadow, didn’t have any strength left. I remember he couldn’t lift us as grandkids, like we were too heavy for him. Even my cousin’s baby, he couldn’t hold, said his arms were shaking and he didn’t want to drop it. We’d an allotment that he worked in, was the only thing he wanted to do after he got out, and I used to help him pot the flowers. He’d give them out to all the neighbours. Didn’t keep any for himself; I think he just liked the idea of putting something into the earth and watching it grow, making the streets around where he lived brighter, better, knowing no one could stop him from doing it. He used to chat while he worked, almost like he didn’t realize I was there, like he was talking to himself. He had this old radio; a wireless he called it.’
He glanced at Tony to check that he was listening.
‘He used to tune it to between radio stations, so it would just play, what do you call it, white noise?
Tony nodded.
‘The first time I tried to change it to a proper channel, he went ballistic. He tuned it back, turned it up, listening to this fuzz of noise. ‘Listen carefully,’ he said, smiling, ‘and you can start to hear things. I thought it was rain at first; I thought they were playing the sound of rain, but it’s not rain. But if you listen you can hear a pattern to it. That’s how you survive it,’ he said. ‘You let it wash over you and look for the meaning in it. You can give it whatever you want, because it’s just for you.’’
He kicked a rock from the path they were treading between the trees. It skittered off through the ground cover.
‘I thought he was mental. But every day he listened to that noise, as if he was looking to find something in it he’d not been able to the whole time they’d played it into his cell, stopping him sleeping, him with a bag over his head the whole time so he couldn’t tell if it was day or night.’
‘What happened to him?’
Tony felt his own breath shorten, wiped a sheen of sweat from his face as he tried not to register what the youth was saying, tried not to imagine it too deeply lest it brought back his own memories, ones he’d tried hard to forget. But it was too late.
‘They made him confess to all kinds of things.’
‘Everyone confesses in the end,’ Tony remembered.
Chapter Forty-One
‘Everyone confesses in the end,’ the unnamed man said, sitting behind the table in Betty’s back lounge. ‘But if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to worry about. All we’re going to be doing is asking a few questions.’
Tony swallowed dryly and nodded. ‘What do I call you?’
‘Nothing, son,’ the man said. ‘My name doesn’t matter. Let’s talk about your Danny, shall we?’
The topic threw Tony a little. He’d expected them to talk about Hamilton, about Alice. He’d been ready for that.
‘How did you feel about what happened him?’
‘Sad,’ Tony said, aware of the inadequacy of the word.
‘Sad?’ the man asked, skeptically.
‘Angry. Hurt. Sad for my loss,’ he said, keen to appear forthcoming. ‘A little jealous, I guess,’ he added.
‘Jealous?’
Tony didn’t know why he’d said it, why he’d felt compelled to admit something that still shamed him. He had felt a little jealous, not of Danny’s death, but of the outpouring of love for his brother which had followed, for the effect Danny’s passing had on his parents, the void which was left, the displaying of pictures long consigned to drawers and boxes, now revisited, reappraised, as if their value had changed irrevocably. It was not a part of him he wished to acknowledge. ‘Jealous of those who could do something about it,’ he lied.
The man nodded, more in acknowledgment that Tony had answered than in acceptance of his explanation, but did not speak. As a result, Tony felt he needed to keep talking, to fill the silence, to distract the three faces staring at him across the desk, as if his words might stop their unflinching gaze.
‘I wanted someone to pay for it,’ he said.
‘Your father didn’t,’ the man said. Tony glanced at Mullan, clearly the source of this information, but his expression was implacable.
‘My father didn’t want anyone else to suffer.’
‘Why? Does he not support the cause?’
Tony shrugged. ‘He believes in civil rights. He’s a pacifist.’
‘Are you?’
‘A little,’ Tony said.
‘Yet you still got involved?’
‘I was angry. Like I said.’
‘Was angry?’
‘Am?’
‘You sure?’
Tony nodded.
‘So you don’t share your father’s views?’
‘A little,’ Tony said, frustrated at the circular nature of the conversation. ‘But I wanted someone to pay for Danny.’
‘You spoke to Hugh last week about your concerns with the recent mission.’
This was Mullan speaking now, his first time having done so since the questioning had started.
Tony nodded, glanced at Duggan, expecting to see some response, but, like the others, he remained impassive, staring at Tony.
‘What was the content of that conversation?’
‘Hugh’s obviously already told you. Ask him,’ Tony said, beginning to feel a little riled at the manner in which they were treating him. ‘He’s sitting right there.’
‘We’d like to get your version of events.’
‘I realized that the officer we were watching had a child,’ Tony said, being extra careful not to use names, either for the man or Alice, which might suggest more intimate knowledge of them than would have been expected from him.
‘And?’
‘I was worried that, in the event of an attack, the child might be killed, too.’
‘What difference would that have made?’ the unnamed man asked.
‘I didn’t think it fair that a child should be killed,’ Tony said, tamping down the tone of sarcasm in his voice that he should have to explain such a thing. Clearly he’d not tamped it down enough, for the man bridled a little and straightened in his seat.
‘Don’t get smart with me, son,’ he said. ‘What did the child of a cop matter to you?’
‘She didn’t matter,’ Tony said. ‘Beyond I didn’t want to be part of something which resulted in a child’s death. My own brother was just a child, really. I saw what that did to my family. I didn’t want to be part of that.’
‘Badly enough to sabotage the whole mission?’
‘Of course not,’ Tony said, then realized that he’d yet to ask why they were questioning him. His mind raced as he tried to assimilate all that had been said. Would they suspect him because he hadn’t asked why they were there? Would he be expected to know that it hadn’t gone ahead as planned? ‘Why, did the mission not go as planned?’
‘No. The target left his home in the early hours of
the morning, before we could plant the device,’ Duggan said. ‘He’s not been back since. Our sources tell us he’s left the area completely.’
‘Maybe something spooked him,’ Tony offered.
‘Someone is much more likely.’
‘And do you think… it was one of us?’
Mullan nodded. ‘Only a certain number of people knew what was planned,’ he said. ‘That means there are only a certain number of people who could have been responsible. We intend to find out which of them it was.’
‘What’s more interesting,’ the unnamed man said, ‘is that you’ve only just asked what all this is about.’
‘I just assumed it was…’ Tony began, but he could find no suitable excuse. ‘I’ve nothing to hide,’ he added, feeling that a protestation of innocence would be expected in the situation.
‘Everyone has something to hide,’ the man said. ‘And like I said, everyone confesses in the end.’
Chapter Forty-Two
‘In the end, they tried to blame him for a bomb attack in Belfast. He confessed to it, even though he’d been on holidays when it happened,’ Barr said. ‘I mind standing in the shed with him at the allotment, the radio buzzing in the background, and him holding this pot in his hands. He just stood there, the pot in his hands, his arms outstretched, just standing like this.’
He mimicked the position, standing still, arms stretched out in front of them, then began to shudder.
‘He just started going like that, his arms shaking like he’d Parkinson’s or something. “Can I put it down?” he asked. “Can I put it down, sir?” I tried talking to him, but he wasn’t there; he was somewhere inside his head, a different place, talking to different people. I went over to him and shook him, called him “Granda, Granda,” but he just looked at me like I was a stranger. The tears streaming down his face. “I can’t do it no more, sir,” he said. “I can’t hold it no more.” Then he started whimpering, like a baby, his spit bubbling on his lips. “Don’t hit me, sir,” he said. “Please don’t hit me.” Then this smell I can’t forget, the piss running down his leg where he stood. I told my da that evening and he stopped me going to the allotment with him on my own. They sent him to the doctor, I think, and he was put inside for a while. The family didn’t talk about it, like it was a dirty secret, something to be ashamed of.’
‘We were never ashamed of him,’ Sean Mullan said, glancing over his shoulder at them, having been listening to the conversation about his father. ‘He had soldier’s wounds. He died a soldier.’
‘What happened to him in the end?’
‘He took a heart attack,’ Barr said. ‘I went down to the shed one day, about two years later, to leave down lunch for him. My granny had made sandwiches and a flask of tea. He was lying on the floor when I went in.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Tony said, quietly.
‘He was a good man,’ Mullan said. ‘He didn’t deserve what was done to him.’
‘I remember for weeks after the incident with the pot, I couldn’t sleep. I still dream about it, about what I should have done, should have said. I thought I should have offered to hold the pot for him, take over his torture for a while, give him a break. Instead I stood there looking at him, not knowing what to do.’
‘You were a kid,’ Mullan said. ‘No one knew what to do. Nowadays they’d be calling it PTSD but, in those days, it was just nerves. He went to the doctor, got a bottle of valium, the tablets rattling round in his pocket everywhere he went afterwards.’
Tony thought of Hamilton and the Land Rover driver who had killed Danny, too. Both of them would have been diagnosed with the same, if then was now, he reflected. Then and now.
‘I still dream of what happened to him,’ Barr said. ‘Since I was a kid, I dream I’m standing there, holding on to whatever they made him hold, whatever stress position they put him into. I wake and my muscles are numb with it.’
Tony nodded. He didn’t admit that he sometimes dreamt of Danny, dreamt that he’d gone down to meet him and had stopped him at the corner, before he’d stepped out into the path of the car. Or that he dreamt more often of Alice. In those dreams she was still a child, standing in an empty building. Tony released that the building was crumbling around her and he needed to find his way inside, to reach her, to save her. Sometimes he did and woke with a sense of warmth, as if his sleep had refreshed him. Other times, just as he reached her, the building would collapse around them and he’d wake, frequently with a migraine aura flickering around the edges of his field of vision, and find it impossible to easily dispel his grief at her imagined passing.
‘So, yeah, I think there is a point. I think on some level what happened to him was passed to me, like it hadn’t been resolved, hadn’t been dealt with. I don’t think he’ll ever be a rest until the job’s done. It’s like that O’Donovan Rossa line; he’ll never be at peace.’
Tony walked alongside the youth, but did not speak. If he was honest, Barr’s conviction frightened him. He’d assumed that most people had moved on with the relative peace, had acclimatized to the changed circumstances. He knew some communities still relied on the paramilitaries as a police force, often used them to help discipline their own children, but he’d always thought such people were the exception.
He’d taught one such child, a year or two before Ann’s illness drove him to early retirement. The boy’s name was Brandon. He’d been involved in anti-social behaviour, breaking windows, a little joyriding. When he’d progressed onto dealing drugs in school, the principal had called in his mother. She’d sat in the office and decried her powerlessness to deal with the boy. When the principal had suggested getting the police involved, she’d launched into a diatribe about traitors and instead promised that she would deal with it once and for all. That evening, the boy got a message to present himself the following day at 3pm to an alleyway in the city, to be shot. If he came peacefully, they’d only do one leg; if they had to come looking for him, he’d be shot in both.
At the appointed time the next day, his mother drove him up to the entrance to the alley and sat waiting in the car while he made his way along to where the man stood, masked, gun in hand. The boy’s mother had made him wear shorts, to keep both the bullet wound and his clothes clean and save the expense of buying a new pair of tracksuit bottoms. She’d sat in the car, waiting for the punishment to be done, fingering a pair of rosary beads as she convinced herself that she’d done the right thing. When she heard the crack of the shot, she got out. The masked man passed her, pulling off his balaclava. ‘Tell him it’ll be in the head the next time, if he doesn’t clean up his act,’ she’d been told.
She went up to where he lay writhing on the ground. They’d shot him through the calf muscle, the bullet exiting the other side so that the wound was clean. She helped him to his feet and drove him to the hospital. A month later, he was back in school, hobbling along the corridors, on his way to the toilets at breaktime, business as usual.
Tony had reflected on the discussion in the staffroom after the events, the scornful manner in which his colleagues had spoken about the mother, about her choices. In doing so, he’d assumed that everyone felt the same way, that everyone considered this abnormal, could see that such behaviour was aberrant, and was destined to dwindle and die. Recent events had forced him to reconsider, though. The rise in populism in the community had strengthened feelings in favour of such rough justice. As such groups tightened their hold on the local estates, their rejection of the uneasy peace inculcated itself among the generations growing up. It was children such as those whom Tony had assumed would want to see a return to violence, not those like Barr whose family had suffered through it.
‘I’m sorry to hear that, about your grandfather,’ he managed, finally.
They’d moved deeper into the forest now. Across to their left, a huge elm had fallen, its broken bough resting against the limbs of an oak next to it, supporting its weight. For a moment, he wondered if it was the trunk they had used as a makeshift bridg
e, but this tree fall was too recent, the leaves still fresh on the branches. Besides, there was no stream nearby that he could hear.
At the sound of their arrival, a squirrel scampered up the bough, bounding up through the branches of the oak, frightened by their appearance. Tony stopped, gazing up. The woods were still, the road far enough away that the sounds of traffic had silenced, the soundtrack to their journey the whistling of birds, the raucousness of crows. After a moment, he heard again the familiar building of a jet engine’s roar as a plane took off from the nearby airport.
‘Do you recognize any of it?’ Duggan asked, drawing alongside him. His breath wheezed in his throat, a sheen of sweat shining on his forehead.
‘Nothing,’ Tony admitted. ‘Apart from the sounds of the planes. It could be anywhere.’
‘I suppose you were far enough gone the last time we were here,’ Duggan admitted, with a brief nod. ‘After our chat and everything.’
‘Our chat?’ Tony repeated incredulous at the euphemism.
The Last Crossing Page 20
