The Ghosts of Belfast (The Twelve) jli-1

by Stuart Neville

  The formality over, McGinty began his speech.

  “Comrades,” he said in his carefully maintained West Belfast accent. “Today would have been a sad day without the news that came to us last night. But it is sadder still for the passing of Vincent Caffola, a tireless community worker and party official. And I have much to say about his passing, but ladies and gentlemen, I must first pay respect to the man who was buried here today.

  “Michael McKenna was a great man.” McGinty paused, his blue eyes taking in the cemetery as applause and isolated cheers rippled through it. “Michael McKenna was a great man because he believed in the fight for justice and equality on this island, and he fought for justice and equality every single day of his life. It is a tragedy for all who knew him that that goal was just within his reach when his life was taken.”

  Pain, bright and fiery, burst in Fegan’s skull. “Christ,” he hissed.

  A few heads turned in his direction. He ignored them.

  The shadows moved in from the edges of his vision. The pain flared again, brighter than before.

  “Christ. Not now.”

  One of the funeral-goers, a stocky man in his mid-twenties, turned to scowl at him. Fegan stared back until the scowler turned away.

  He closed his eyes and breathed deep, willing the pain and shadows to recede. A cry almost escaped him when he opened them and caught a glint of ash-blonde. He turned his head towards it, searching. There, another flash, between the black-clad bodies. He watched as she emerged from them, her face glowing in the spring sunlight. Her hair fluttered in the breeze, and she calmed it with her delicate hand. She caught him staring and froze.

  Fegan’s heart lurched in his chest as his eyes locked with Marie McKenna’s. He wanted to raise his hand to wave, but it hung useless at his side. Time became an abstract notion, a meaningless measurement. Then her eyes slipped away from his, and time moved on. She retreated back to the throng, losing herself among them, sparing him only one glance over her shoulder.

  Only when he’d lost her did Fegan realise the nine followers surrounded him. The pain dissolved, leaving a feathery lightness behind his eyes. The woman rocked her baby and smiled at him.

  “What’s happening to me?” he asked her.

  The scowler turned to face him again. “Shut up and listen to the speech.”

  Scowler’s friend tugged on his elbow and whispered in his ear, “That’s Gerry Fegan.”

  Scowler’s face greyed. “Sorry,” he said, and turned back to the platform.

  Fegan watched the followers move among the living, studying the mourners as if they were creatures in a zoo, sometimes touching them. The woman stayed close to Fegan. Her skin caught none of the sunlight beating down on the cemetery, and the breeze did not disturb her black hair. She smiled up at him again, her fine features showing none of the hate she must have felt.

  Turn away and be quiet

  , Fegan thought. He ignored her and concentrated on McGinty’s speech.

  ‘Vincent Caffola’s murder,” he blustered, “And it can only be described as murder, throws us back to the bad old days. The days when the young people of our community lived in fear of the RUC. The bad old days when sectarianism was the law. When bigotry was the law. When instilling terror into the Nationalist and Republican people was the law.”

  A rumble of agreement rolled through the faithful. McGinty paused, letting it subside.

  The woman turned her black eyes to the politician as the baby writhed in her arms.

  “But I say no more,” McGinty continued. “No more will our community stand by and allow such brutality to go unchallenged. Last night a good man, a tireless worker for his people, was viciously assaulted by the forces of so-called law and order. He was beaten until he passed out, his head split open, his wrist shattered, and left to choke to death on his own vomit. And still they say we should support an institution steeped in the traditions of oppression and fascism.”

  The crowd rumbled again, louder now. McGinty let it pass, his eyes marking the beat.

  “But I say no more. I will not rest, my party will not rest, my community will not rest until those responsible are brought to justice. And that will be the test, comrades. When those witnesses I spoke to this morning, those witnesses who saw Vincent Caffola dragged into an alley by the forces of so-called law and order, when they go to the Police Ombudsman and tell what they saw, will justice be served?”

  The crowd inhaled in expectation, and McGinty held his chin high. The audacity of the lie shouldn’t have surprised Fegan so.

  “And if it isn’t . . .” McGinty’s chest swelled as he sucked in air. “I WILL SAY NO MORE!”

  An angry roar tore through the men and women; fists stabbed the air.

  “I will say no more. The test will have been failed, and I will not hesitate to recommend the party withdraw its endorsement of the PSNI. We know the implications of that action, and believe me comrades, the decision will not be taken lightly. But that is the choice faced by the British Government, by the Ombudsman and by the police service that claims to represent all sections of our society.”

  Fegan wondered at McGinty’s conceit, at his temerity in making such threats. The leadership would never have approved it, Fegan was positive. But then, he had no stomach for politics. Not any more. The cause he once killed for was long gone, swallowed up by the avarice of men like McGinty.

  Sometimes he wondered if he had ever believed in any of it. As a boy, he’d seen the scars left on his community. He remembered the raids, the cops and the Brits breaking down doors. They pulled young men out of their beds to imprison them without trial at Long Kesh, the old RAF base that would later become the Maze, or on the prison ship at Belfast Docks. He remembered the anger, the hate, the poverty and the unemployment. The only way to have anything, to be any - thing, was to fight. Get the Brits out, seize power from the Unionists, take freedom at gunpoint. That’s what they said, and he believed them.

  But there was more than that. Fegan had been a solitary boy, quick with his fists but slow with words. When McKenna befriended him thirty years ago, it seemed to be a path to a bigger world. A world where he mattered. McKenna fought for Fegan to be brought along on the camping trips across the border, to the forests and lakes around Castleblaney, where he and the other boys played soldiers and shot air rifles at paper targets.

  McKenna called it a youth club. Fegan’s mother called it indoctrination.

  Paul McGinty drove them on the first trip, picking them up in an old Volkswagen Camper. McGinty was not yet in his late twenties, but everyone knew his name. He had been interned at Long Kesh a few years before. He went in a snot-nosed thug, and came out six months later quoting Karl Marx and Che Guevara. He sat at the camp fire reading aloud from

  Das Kapital

  while the boys ate beans and passed cigarettes around.

  Now McGinty stood dressed in a designer suit, about as far from the young revolutionary of Fegan’s memory as a man could be.

  Somewhere between Fegan’s sentencing for the murder of three innocents in a Shankill butcher’s shop and his release twelve years later, the world had changed. South of the border, in the Republic of Ireland, the old parochial ways vanished, washed away by money and the country’s new vision of itself. The North had become the poor relation, the bastard child no one had the heart to send away. The struggle for the North’s reunification with the rest of Ireland was rendered pointless.

  The rest of Ireland didn’t want them any more.

  So the longing for freedom, whatever that was, had given way to the lust for money and power. The paramilitaries, Republican and Loyalist alike, maintained the façade of their political ideals, but Fegan knew the truth. Sometimes he wondered if, deep inside, he’d always known the true desires of men like Michael McKenna and Paul McGinty.

  Fegan looked again to the nine followers wandering around him, the three Brits, the two Loyalists, the cop, the butcher, the woman and her baby. What was it for? To line Mc
Ginty’s pockets?

  The woman stared at McGinty, as did the butcher who died with her. Slowly they raised their hands, forming them into pistols. The woman turned to look at Fegan, her soft smiling lips like a knife wound.

  She nodded.

  Fegan shook his head, his mouth open.

  She nodded again. Fegan wanted to turn and run. He closed his eyes and tried to force the followers back to the edge of his consciousness. Lightning arcs flashed between his temples. He gritted his teeth and pushed, but the shadows resisted. Air escaped his lungs in a slow hiss of defeat. He opened his eyes, resigned to the followers’ presence.

  But they had more to tell him.

  Father Coulter approached.

  The three Brits watched him move among the crowd, shaking hands with the mourners. The priest was a squat barrel of a man, with thick grey-black hair. From Sligo originally, Fegan thought. The Brits’ arms stretched and aimed at Father Coulter. But why would they possibly want him?

  Then, one memory finding another, Fegan knew. As the sun seared the back of his neck, he closed his eyes and remembered.

  The family, three girls and their parents, squealed in unison when the blast rattled their windows. They were safely tied to one another upstairs, well away from any glass that might shatter. Fegan and Coyle had made sure of that. As the rumble faded, rolling off across the rooftops, a silence fell. Then moaning came from the street outside. Moaning grew to crying, and crying grew to screaming.

  Fegan peered out through the crack in the door. He looked at Coyle. “You didn’t get them all.”

  “Fuck,” Coyle said. “What do we do?”

  “You tell me. You planted it, you triggered it.”

  “Do we go and finish them?” Coyle’s voice edged on panic.

  Fegan took the pistol from his pocket and held it out butt first.

  “Fuck, no!” Coyle said. “I can’t do that. You do it.”

  “Christ,” Fegan said. “You’re grand when you’re fifty feet away, but you don’t like getting close.”

  “I did my bit.”

  “Not too well.” Fegan nodded to the door. “Listen to them.”

  “They must’ve split up. How am I supposed to know they’d split up?”

  “They do three-and-threes all the time. You should’ve waited till the first three was past and the other was coming up. You would’ve got all of them.”

  “Christ, what do we do?” Coyle pleaded again.

  Fegan sighed and pulled the balaclava down over his face, leaving just his eyes and mouth exposed. Coyle did the same and followed Fegan to the street. They walked quickly towards the drifting smoke at the corner. There the remains of a litter bin were scattered across the road and the window of the shop it belonged to was blown inward. Street lights reflected off the glittering fragments of glass and sweet wrappers.

  Fegan didn’t pay any attention to them. Instead he looked at the six bodies on the ground. Three of the British soldiers were dead, but three still jerked and shivered. Two of them had even escaped with their limbs intact. They might have been called lucky, had it not been for Fegan. The other survivor had lost most of his right arm - he was the screamer - and shock had now reduced him to quivering silence. It was a small bomb, designed for maximum casualties within a localised area, with minimal wider damage to the surrounding property.

  A woman scampered out of the house next to the shop, pointing to her living-room window. “Look what you did! I’ll be hoovering up glass for a month.” She noticed the men on the ground and crossed herself. “Oh, Jesus, them poor boys. God love them.”

  Fegan aimed the pistol at her forehead. “Go back inside,” he said. The woman did as she was told without another word. Fegan readied himself to finish the job, but he and Coyle both spun on their heels when they heard the rapid slap-slap of shoe leather from behind them.

  “Oh, no,” Father Coulter said as he slowed to a stop, breathless. “Oh, no, no, no. Oh, God.”

  “We’re not finished here, Father,” Fegan said. He moved from body to body, kicking the soldiers’ weapons away.

  “Let me give them their Last Rites, for God’s sake,” the priest said.

  “When we’re finished.”

  Father Coulter stepped closer to the nearest three, his eyes widening as he looked from soldier to soldier. “These men are alive,” he said.

  “You’d better go, now, Father,” Fegan said. “Come back in a few minutes.”

  “No,” Father Coulter said. “These men can be saved. I can’t let them die, no matter who they are.”

  “Come on, Father,” Coyle said, ‘you hate the Brits as much as anyone. All those times you took the boys in, hid them, gave them alibis.”

  Father Coulter’s mouth opened and closed for a few seconds. “No,” he said, ‘that’s not true.”

  Fegan shot Coyle a warning look. He turned back to the priest. “All right, Father, they haven’t seen our faces. We’ll let them live if that’s what you want. But you’ll have to explain why you stopped it when you’re asked.”

  Fegan stepped in close to Father Coulter and whispered, “You’ll have to tell McGinty when he comes calling, and believe me, he

  will

  call. You’re a brave man, Father Coulter, but are you that brave?”

  “I . . . I . . . I . . .” Father Coulter stammered. Something forced his stare to the ground. “Oh, Christ.”

  “Please,” one of the Brits hissed, tugging at the priest’s trouser leg, blood trickling from his ears, his helmet gone. “Help me,” he whispered through blackened lips.

  Father Coulter jerked his leg away and took a step back. Fegan chambered a round and pressed the pistol to the back of the soldier’s skull. “Your choice, Father.”

  “Jesus, Gerry, quit it,” Coyle said.

  “Shut your fucking mouth,” Fegan said. “If he wants to judge me he better be ready to go all the way.”

  He turned back to the priest. “You hear that, Father? You stand there in chapel every Saturday night, every Sunday morning, telling us to turn from sin. All the time you’re taking handouts from McGinty to keep your mouth shut, to see nothing, to hear nothing, to turn away and be quiet. And the next Saturday, the next Sunday, you’re telling us to take the other way. There’s always another way, right? Now’s your chance to prove it. Tell me to take the other way and I’ll do it. But you better be ready to stand over it. You better be ready to answer to the boys who run these streets.”

  Father Coulter blinked at him. “Please, this isn’t . . . it’s not . . .”

  Fegan pressed his pistol’s muzzle harder against the back of the soldier’s head. “What’s it to be, Father? Have you the guts to practise what you preach? Or will you shut your eyes and say nothing like you always do?”

  As the Brit held out his hands, as he whimpered on the ground, the priest’s face went slack. He looked to Fegan once, and then looked to the ground. He turned and started walking.

  “No!” The soldier tried to crawl after him. “No! No, no, please! Help!”

  Father Coulter’s stride was broken only slightly by the booming discharge as it resonated through the street.

  Fegan kept his eyes closed until McGinty’s speech was finished. When he opened them, she was there, facing him.

  “Hello,” Marie McKenna said.

  Fegan blinked, unable to respond. The followers lost themselves amongst the thinning crowd.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said.

  “It’s okay.” He scrambled for something else to say but could find nothing.

  “Are you going to the house?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Just for a while.”

  “Do you need a lift?”

  “No, I’m all right,” he lied.

  “Oh. Well, I’ll maybe see you there.” Marie smiled and left him among the gravestones.

  Fegan stood in the May heat, waiting for the crowd to dissolve. When he was sure she had left, he began walking to the ce
metery gates.

  In his younger days Fegan had been glad of women, and the ease with which he could work his way into their beds. Some of the lads, like McKenna, had the words to charm them. But Fegan had never needed that; his reputation was enough. He knew they relished the danger of it, and he was happy to use them. Since leaving the Maze he’d had only a few encounters, moments here and there to scratch the itch, but that was all.

  Marie McKenna troubled him. She was clearly not to be toyed with, but he didn’t know how else to deal with women.

  “What’s happening to me?” Fegan asked himself. The isolation of his voice sounded strange among the gravestones. He swallowed his questions, put his head down, and kept walking. He stopped at the gates. A long silver car waited there, its engine running.