“I’m sure you did.”
“And it’s fine. I can tell you everything. It’s OK.”
Abruptly, she stopped crying.
“No,” she said, “it’s not OK. I’m wrong. Wrong to have mentioned it. Wrong to have asked you. Just wrong.”
“Why?”
She looked at him again, drying her eyes with the corner of a dish cloth.
“Because I shouldn’t have listened to them.”
“Who?”
“Danny’s friends.”
Connolly gazed at her. Danny had been her husband, a thick-set, broad-shouldered youth with a mop of blond hair and a permanent smile. There were photographs of him around the house, two of them beside Liam’s bed. Mairead had met him at a dance, seventeen years old, and they were married six months later. From what little else she’d said, it had been the happiest of marriages – fond, loyal, perpetually broke – until Danny had been picked up in an Army sweep and interrogated for a week in Castlereagh. He’d emerged with broken ribs and a permanently damaged kidney, his innocence protested until the last, every shred of tolerance gone for ever. As a result, in secret, he’d joined the Provisional IRA.
Four years later, on a wet night in March 1976, he’d been cornered by a patrol of squaddies in an unlit cul-de-sac in Ballymurphy. They’d shot him four times through the head and left his body on the pavement for the ambulance to collect. There was so little left of his face that afterwards, in the hospital mortuary, Mairead had been denied the chance to say goodbye.
She’d protested, of course. She’d phoned the Army PR people at Lisburn and demanded an official inquiry, but the tired, over-polite major on the other end of the line had simply said he was sorry. Her husband had been transporting a weapon. Other lives had been at stake. It was all very regrettable. She hadn’t believed him, knowing it was the usual Brit flannel, and two days later, at his funeral in Milltown Cemetery, she’d watched in disbelief as men in black balaclavas emerged from the crowd of mourners, fired a volley of shots over the coffin, and disappeared again. They gave the lie to her outrage and her anger. They told the world, and the watching Brits in the helicopter overhead, that her husband was indeed a Volunteer. Riding back to Andersonstown in the big black car, and for weeks afterwards, she’d tried to reconcile herself to the life that Danny had led, and to its loss. Her Danny. Her man. The father of her children. Gone.
Now, in the kitchen, she began to sip at the whisky. Connolly watched her carefully.
“These friends of Danny’s …” he said.
She nodded, gazing down at the whisky. “They came round for a wee while. A month back. I hadn’t seen them for years.”
“And what did they say?”
She glanced up at him. “They wanted to know about you.”
“What about me?”
“What you did. Who you are.” She paused. “What it is between us.”
Connolly looked at her. “And what did you tell them?”
“I said you were a teacher. At the University. I said you taught history. I said you were very clever.”
“And?”
She glanced up, blushing. “I said we were good friends.” She hesitated. “That OK with you?”
“Yeah.”
She sniffed, and sipped again at the whisky, closing her eyes as the neat spirit burned her throat.
“They wanted to know about your connections. How well connected you are. Who you know. Back in England.” She paused. “They also told me about Danny. Things he’d said to them. Things I didn’t know.”
“Like what?”
She was silent a moment, tipping the glass slowly sideways until the whisky touched the rim. Her hand began to tremble. “They said that the cause meant more to him than anything else. Come the finish of it.”
“They were lying.”
“Maybe.” She looked up. “They said if I loved him, I’d help the cause too.” She shrugged, hopelessly. “So I did …”
Connolly nodded, understanding at last. He looked at the ceiling, remembering the afternoon on the bench in Batter-sea Park, Leeson thin and cold beside him, and his own visit three days later to a VD Clinic in the Middlesex Hospital. When he’d described Leeson’s symptoms, and the nature of their relationship, they’d looked bemused. They’d blood-tested him for syphilis, and inspected him for herpes, and gonorrhoea, and NSU, and on all four counts they’d drawn a blank. Finally, when he’d mentioned “gay plague”, one of the younger male nurses had nodded wisely and said he’d seen the phrase in Time magazine. Evidently, there was a mystery disease puzzling physicians in San Francisco and New York. Some said a new virus was attacking the immune system. Others said it was a more routine infection. Either way, it appeared to be limited to the gay community. Maybe Connolly should try celibacy for a while. Maybe he should see how things developed.
Now, looking at Mairead, he smiled.
“I love you,” he said softly, marvelling at how easy it was to say, after nine long months. He reached out for her, turning her in towards him. She kept the glass between their bodies, self-defence. He looked down at her.
“So what do they say? These friends of Danny’s?”
She closed her eyes for a moment. She took a deep breath.
“They want to see you,” she said at last.
“When?”
“Soon,” she sniffed again, “Tuesday night. They told me to tell you.”
“Ask me?”
“Tell you.” She looked at him, and began to sob again, shaking her head, hands cupping the glass, tears running down her face.
“What’s the matter?” Connolly said softly. “What can’t you say?” She gazed up at him, suddenly limp.
“Losing one was bad enough …” she said, “I don’t want it to happen again.”
Leeson called the mini-cab company midmorning. The cab arrived within minutes, driving him the six miles to Whitehall. In Great George Street, beneath the imposing Palladian façade of the Foreign Office, Leeson paid the £4 fare, added a large festive tip, and paused for a moment as the cab disappeared in a cloud of blue exhaust.
For Christmas Day, the weather was unseasonably mild. Only yesterday, the Met Office had been warning of snow falls in the north, and rain elsewhere, but now it was sunny and almost warm, tiny bubbles of white cloud in an otherwise perfect sky. Across Parliament Square, worshippers were streaming out of Westminster Abbey, the men sombre in black or grey, the women splashed with brighter colours. Even at a distance, Leeson could recognize the odd face, top politicians, a couple of Law Lords, a senior Treasury figure, men who counted the Abbey as their parish church, and Westminster as their personal fiefdom.
Leeson hesitated a moment longer, then rounded the corner to King Charles Street, and pushed into the Foreign Office through the big double doors. He hadn’t been in the office for nearly two weeks, phoning in to the Personnel Department to offer his regrets and the assurance of a doctor’s note on his return. The response, as ever, had been politely guarded. Expressions of concern that he’d been under the weather. Hopes that he’d be back in harness this side of Christmas. And a gentle reminder that his PV was pending, and shouldn’t be unduly postponed.
Leeson stood for a moment in the marbled silence of the Foreign Office lobby, pulling his coat around him. The place felt cold. He began to cough again, his hand to his mouth, thinking vaguely about his American friend. The news from the States had been more than a little alarming, but Leeson was an optimist by nature and saw no point in getting unduly worried. His GP, he vaguely supposed, had it about right. A passing virus. One of life’s little hazards. He walked across the lobby and took the lift to the third floor. His office was at the south-eastern corner of the building, behind a large panelled door marked “South American Department, F3”. He shared it with three colleagues and an assortment of filing cabinets, but today it was empty. He took off his coat and folded it over the back of a chair. The tray beside his blotter was full, nearly two weeks’ work, but he gave it onl
y a cursory glance before unlocking his desk and removing a blue manila file.
Much of the conversations with Connolly, the last two days before he’d left, had returned to the subject of Argentina. It was a country that had preoccupied Leeson for years, ever since he’d cut his diplomatic teeth in the large, tree-fronted embassy off the Plaza Augusta. It was a fascinating place, awash with traditional money, fine sportsmen, beautiful women, and a dark appetite for military dictatorship, and the more he got to know it, the more subtle and addictive the experience became. With his fluent Spanish, and a growing series of excellent contacts, he’d begun to understand the way the place ticked, what mattered and what didn’t. It was a country, above all, where face and machismo counted for a great deal, and from eight and a half thousand miles, he knew that was imperfectly understood.
He switched on the small desktop photocopier in the corner of the office, and returned to the file. Before Connolly had returned to Belfast, he’d promised him a look at some of the key documents that underpinned their interminable discussions, memorandums and letters and intelligence digests that – in Leeson’s view – flagged the path to disaster. What the politicians – and soon the world – couldn’t grasp was the potential of the crisis that would shortly overtake them. Something so abrupt, so sudden, and yet so predictable, that the Government would have no choice but to react in kind.
It was a scenario that had so far formed the merest footnote to the deliberations of various Whitehall committees. The Argies might want the islands back, went the accepted wisdom, but they’d never invade. And even if they did, there’d be weeks and weeks of warning. And even if that was somehow circumvented, then world opinion, or the UN, or President Reagan, or a couple of nuclear submarines, would rapidly restore the status quo.
Knowing a lot about Argentina, and a little about geography, Leeson – in common with a handful of colleagues – had other ideas. The Argentinians would take the islands because the British left them no other option. And they left them no other option because – as ever – they refused to see the smoke in the wind.
Leeson pulled his in-tray towards him, sifting quickly through the waiting pile of memorandums and letters, looking for the latest digest from Buenos Aires. Beside the telephone, a fresh delivery from the Registry messenger, he found it. He opened the buff envelope and shook two sheets of cream paper onto the desk. He scanned them quickly and then read them again. In essence, the overnights from Buenos Aires added very little to the reports he’d already picked up in Thursday’s Times.
Power had changed hands in Argentina. President Viola had been succeeded by the Commander-in-Chief of the Army. The new President was to retain his Army command, and the incoming Junta had been considerably strengthened by the support of Admiral Anaya, the most extreme of the hard-liners on the Falklands issue.
Leeson read the digest a third time, interpreting the new power structure for what it was: macho, super-patriotic, intensely proud of the recent rapprochement with the big players in Washington. With the backing of the Reagan administration, fellow crusaders against communism, the new boys in the Casa Rosada would soon be bold enough to embark on a few adventures of their own. He reached for the blue file, extracting a number of documents, the new President’s name on his lips. He and Connolly had been discussing him only the previous evening: tall, handsome, vain, hard-drinking, with a larger-than-life helping of South American machismo. General Leopold Galtieri.
There was a footfall in the corridor outside. The door opened. One of the security staff peered inside. He looked surprised.
“Sir?”
Leeson glanced up at him. “Merry Christmas,” he said, heading for the photocopier, “and a happy New Year.”
FIVE
Buddy Little’s search for a cure began at the public library.
By now, Jude had been at the Regional Unit for over a week. It was Christmas, the ward festooned with streamers, bottles of sherry for the nurses, gifts from grateful patients. Buddy had spent Christmas Day itself at Jude’s bedside, a glum time, both of them preoccupied behind the brittle smiles and Buddy’s faltering attempts at festive small talk.
Jude was still on a special diet while her digestive system recovered from the trauma of the accident. That meant bowls of powdered eggs and potatoes, spoon fed. The stuff tasted like cotton wool, she said, and it was all the worse because she could smell the turkey and the bacon and the steaming Christmas pudding on the catering trolley. She’d asked the doctor for a special dispensation, just the odd forkful or two, but Bishop had shaken his head, and given her a brisk lecture on the risks of irritating the membranes of the lower gut. She’d thought about it afterwards, what he’d said, and when Buddy arrived with his paper hats, and his box of crackers, she told him she’d reached rock bottom.
“Pathetic,” she’d said, her eyes flicking down at her body. “It won’t even fart any more.”
Now, bent over a pile of textbooks, Buddy tried to understand the biology of it all. With some kind of map, some kind of reference, perhaps he could find a path out of this hideous jungle, back to a place of safety.
In essence, it seemed simple enough. The spinal cord carried messages from the brain to the rest of the body. Without these messages, the muscles under conscious control wouldn’t work. Buddy poured over the pages of illustration. Wiring diagrams, he thought, the nerves radiating out from the big transformer in the brain, out down the spinal cord, out to the farthest reaches of the body.
The spinal cord itself ran through a canal in the middle of the backbone. The backbone was composed of a column of small vertebrae. Buddy had seen them in Jude’s X-rays. The doctor had shown him, off-hand as ever, dark irregular shapes, interlocking, one on top of another. Jude’s fifth bone down was clearly displaced, pushed forwards and upwards by the accident. The bone had pressed in on the spinal cord, damaging it. The cord had swollen, not able to work any more, blocking the messages from the brain.
Traction, the books told Buddy, released the pressure on the spinal cord. In time, the displaced bone would re-align itself. But the damage to the bundles of nervous tissue was permanent. Because the brain and the spinal cord, unlike the nerves of the rest of the body, can’t repair themselves. Thus the diagnosis. Thus the paralysis. Thus Jude, lying on her back, washed, fed, and emptied, twice a day.
Buddy paused, looking up from the books. Already, at the hospital, they were telling him about the care she’d need back home, constant nursing, her body turned in the bed every two hours, the perpetual watch for bedsores, the need for nappies, and laxatives, and suppositories, another pair of hands taking over from a body which simply wouldn’t work any more. Buddy made sure that these conversations were conducted away from the bed, out of Jude’s earshot. Once she found out the degree of her helplessness, how long it would last, she’d simply quit. He knew it. Which was why he was here, in the library, looking for another answer.
He closed his eyes a moment, fighting off the tiredness, knowing he could do it. He’d spent his working life in appalling conditions, hundreds of feet below the surface, zero visibility. He’d built an entire career on never giving up, on finding underwater solutions to problems the guys on the beach had despaired about. Part navvy, part engineer, he’d pioneered new techniques for patching up derelict structures, freeing corroded valves, remaking dodgy welds. The impossible was his stock-in-trade. He knew there was always a better way.
And so he read on, day after day, an hour or so every morning, a table of his own in the reference department of the town’s public library. And as the pile of textbooks slowly diminished, he began to borrow magazines from a friendly social worker at the hospital, publications for the handicapped, each with its monthly digest of news – new feeding aids, new makes of wheelchair, discounts on special creams for nappy rash, the latest adjustments in disability benefit. One of the publications, an import from America, had a regular section on medical research, and it was these precious pages that began to preoccupy Buddy.
>
He understood now that the problems were enormous. The stuff in the backbone wouldn’t regenerate. Once it was dead, it was dead. Therefore you had to take risks.
One answer was to operate. In America, it seemed, there were surgeons prepared to do just that, to open up the backbone and insert metal rods to realign the broken vertebra. Done quickly enough, within hours of the injury, it sometimes worked. The spinal cord was allowed to swell. It wasn’t caged by the broken bone. Damage was minimal. Movement was restored.
But Jude’s injury was already ten days old. The damage had been done. It was far too late to operate. And so, once again, there had to be another way.
He read on. In New York, they were using steroids to reduce swelling. In the American Mid-West, they were trying ice. In Australia, they locked injured patients in a diving compression chamber and kept them there for hours, feeding hyberbaric oxygen to the injured tissues.
But again, it was all acute care. Treatments to be administered at once, in the accident room, the injury still young. What Buddy needed was something more fundamental. Not treatment. Not first aid. But a cure.
On the last day of the year, he found it. He’d been reading about a research programme at a university in Ohio. The programme involved encasing cripples in metal calipers – arms and legs for a C5 break – and then motorizing the joints. An elaborate computer program would control the calipers, acting as a brain, effectively duplicating the movements of the body. There was a photo alongside the article. It showed a young girl, festooned with wires, her arms and legs braced. She looked like Frankenstein. She looked monstrous.
Buddy was about to close the magazine when another article, much shorter, caught his eye. A South American neurosurgeon, working in Massachusetts, was pioneering a brand-new technique. He was grafting nerve cells from unborn rats onto the injury site, bridging the dead tissue. The preliminary results were encouraging. Messages from the brain were evidently getting through. A little sensation, a little control, had been restored. It was described as a nerve by-pass. It sounded immensely hopeful.
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