The Traveller and Other Stories

by Stuart Neville

  Fegan raised the empty glass to get Tom’s attention. “Haven’t you had enough, Gerry?” asked Tom. “Is it not home time yet? Everyone’s gone.”

  “One more,” said Fegan, trying not to slur. He knew Tom would not refuse. Fegan was still a respected man in West Belfast, despite the drink.

  Sure enough, Tom sighed and raised a glass to the optic. He brought the whiskey over and counted change from the table.

  Fegan held the glass up and made a toast to his twelve companions. One of the five soldiers among them smiled and nodded in return. The rest just stared.

  “Fuck you,” said Fegan. “Fuck the lot of you.”

  None of the twelve reacted, but Tom looked back over his shoulder. He shook his head and continued walking to the bar.

  Fegan looked at each of his companions in turn. Of the five soldiers three were Brits and two were Ulster Defence Regiment. Another of the followers was a cop, his Royal Ulster Constabulary uniform neat and stiff, and two more were loyalists, both Ulster Freedom Fighters. The remaining four were civilians who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He remembered doing all of them, but he’d met only three face-to-face.

  The woman and her baby in the doorway to the butcher’s shop where he’d left the package. He’d held the door for her as she wheeled the pram in. They’d smiled at each other. He’d felt the heat of the blast as he jumped into the already moving car.

  The other was the boy. Fegan could still remember the look in his eyes when he saw the pistol. Now the boy sat across the table from him, those same eyes boring into him as they had done for nearly seven years. When Fegan saw the tears pooling on the tabletop he brought his fingers to the hollows of his face and realised he’d been weeping.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  A hand on his shoulder startled him, and he cried out.

  “Time you were going, Gerry,” said Michael McGinty. Tom must have called him. He was smartly dressed in a jacket and trousers, a far cry from the teenager Fegan had known thirty years ago. Wealth looked good on him.

  “I’m just finishing,” said Fegan.

  “Well, drink up and I’ll run you home.” McGinty smiled down at him, his teeth white and even. He’d had them fixed before winning his seat at Westminster two elections ago. He’d never taken the seat; that was against party policy. He did take his seat at Stormont, though, and his place on Northern Ireland’s Executive. That had also been against party policy at one time. But times change, even if people don’t.

  The boy was behind McGinty now, and Fegan watched as he made a gun with his fingers and pointed at the politician’s head. He mimed firing it, his hand thrown upwards by the recoil. His mouth made a plosive movement, but no sound came.

  “Do you remember that kid, Michael?” asked Fegan.

  “Don’t, Gerry.” McGinty’s voice carried a warning.

  “He hadn’t done anything. Not really. He didn’t tell the cops anything they didn’t know already. He didn’t deserve that. Jesus, he was fifteen.”

  One hard hand gripped Fegan’s face, the other his thinning hair, and the animal inside McGinty showed itself. “Shut your fucking mouth,” he hissed. “Remember who you’re talking to.”

  Fegan remembered only too well. As he looked into those fierce eyes he remembered every detail. This was the face he knew, not the one on television, but the face that twisted in white-hot pleasure as McGinty set about the boy with a claw hammer, the face that was dotted with red when he handed Fegan the .22 pistol to finish it.

  The smile returned to McGinty’s mouth as he released his grip, but not to his eyes. “Come on,” he said. “My car’s outside. I’ll run you home.”

  The twelve followed them out to the street, the boy staying close to McGinty. The Mercedes gleamed in the orange streetlights. It was empty and no other cars were parked nearby. McGinty had come out with no escort to guard him. Fegan knew the Merc was armoured, bullet- and bomb-proof, and McGinty probably felt safe as he unlocked it, unaware of the followers.

  They spent the journey in silence. McGinty never spoke as he drove, knowing his car was almost certainly bugged by the Brits. Fegan closed his eyes and savoured the few minutes away from the followers, knowing they’d be waiting at his house.

  He remembered the first time he saw them. It was in the Maze prison and he’d just been given his release date. They were there when he looked up from the letter.

  He told one of the prison psychologists about it. Dr. Brady said it was guilt (a manifestation, he called it) and he should try apologising to them. Out loud. Then they might go away. Later that day, when it was just him and them in his cell, Fegan tried it. He decided to start with the woman and her baby. He picked his words carefully before he spoke. He inhaled, ready to tell her face-to-face how sorry he was. Even now, years later, he could still feel the burning sting of her palm on his cheek, the one time any of them touched him.

  McGinty pulled the Mercedes into the kerb outside Fegan’s small terraced house. The followers stood on the pavement, waiting.

  “Can I come in for a second?” McGinty’s smile sparkled in the car’s interior lighting. “Just for a quick chat.”

  Fegan shrugged and climbed out.

  The twelve parted to let him approach his door. He unlocked it and went inside, McGinty following, the twelve slipping in between. Fegan headed straight for the sideboard where a bottle of Jameson’s and a jug of water waited for him. He showed McGinty the bottle.

  “No thanks,” said McGinty. “Maybe you shouldn’t, either.”

  Fegan ignored him, pouring two fingers of whiskey into a glass and the same of water. He took a deep swallow, then pointed to a chair.

  “No, I’m all right,” said McGinty.

  The twelve milled around the room, studying each man intently. The boy lingered by McGinty’s side.

  “What’d you want to chat about?” Fegan lowered himself into a chair.

  McGinty pointed to the drink in Fegan’s hand. “About that. It’s got to stop, Gerry.”

  Fegan held the politician’s eyes as he drained the glass.

  “People round here look up to you. You’re a republican hero. The young fellas need a role model, someone they can respect.”

  “Respect? What are you talking about?” Fegan put the glass on the coffee table and held his hands up. “I can’t get the blood off. I never will, no matter how much I scrub them. There’s no respecting what I did.”

  McGinty’s face flushed with anger. “You did your time. You were a political prisoner for twelve years. A dozen years of your life given up for the cause. Any republican should respect that.” His expression softened. “But you’re pissing it away, Gerry. People are starting to notice. Every night you’re at the bar, drunk off your face, talking to yourself.”

  “I’m not talking to myself.” Fegan pointed to the followers. “I’m talking to them.”

  “Who?” McGinty made a show of casting his eyes around the room.

  “The ones I killed. The ones we killed.”

  “Watch your mouth, Gerry. I never killed anybody.”

  “No, you were always too smart to do it yourself. You used mugs like me instead.” Fegan stood up. “I need a piss.”

  “Don’t be long,” said McGinty.

  Fegan made his way up the stairs and into the bathroom. He closed and bolted the door, but as always, the followers found their way in. Except the boy. Fegan paid it little mind, instead concentrating on keeping upright while he emptied his bladder. He had long since gotten used to the twelve witnessing his most undignified moments.

  He flushed, rinsed his hands under the tap, and opened the door. The boy was there, on the landing, Fegan’s gun in his hand. He had taken the Walther P99 from under the bed and brought it out here. Fegan knew it was loaded.

  The boy held it out to him, grip first. Fegan didn’t understand.
He shook his head. The boy stepped closer, lifted Fegan’s right hand, and placed the pistol in it. He mimed the act of pulling back the slide assembly to chamber the first round.

  Fegan looked from the boy to the pistol and back again. The boy nodded. Fegan drew back the slide, released it, hearing the snick-snick of oiled parts moving together.

  The boy smiled and descended the stairs. He stopped, looked back over his shoulder, and indicated that Fegan should follow.

  Feeling an adrenaline rush that stirred dark memories, his legs shaking, Fegan began the slow climb downward. The others came behind, sharing glances with one another. As he reached the bottom, he saw McGinty’s back. The politician was leafing through the pile of unopened bills and letters on the sideboard.

  The boy crossed the room and again made the shape of a pistol with his fingers, again mimed the execution of the man who had taken him apart with a claw hammer almost twenty years ago.

  Fegan’s breath was ragged, his heartbeat thunderous. Surely McGinty would hear.

  The boy looked to him and smiled.

  Fegan asked, “If I do it, will you leave me alone?”

  The boy nodded.

  “What?” McGinty turned to the voice and froze when he saw the gun aimed at his forehead.

  “I promised myself I’d never do this again,” said Fegan, his vision blurred by tears. “But I have to.”

  “Jesus, Gerry.” McGinty gave a short, nervous laugh as he held his hands up. “What’re you at?”

  “I’m sorry, Michael. I have to.”

  McGinty’s smile fell away. “Christ, think about what you’re doing, Gerry. The boys won’t let it go, ceasefire or not. They’ll come after you.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Thirty years, Gerry. We’ve known each other thirty—”

  The Walther barked once, throwing red and grey against the wall. McGinty fell back against the sideboard, then slid to the floor. Fegan walked over and put one in his heart, just to be sure.

  He wiped the tears from his eyes and looked around the room. The followers jostled for position, looking from Fegan to the body, from the body to Fegan.

  The boy wasn’t among them.

  One down.

  Eleven to go.

  Faith

  The day I lost my belief was the same day Mrs. Garrick asked me to help kill her husband.

  Not the same moment, mind. The moment God left me was during my Sunday morning sermon. I’d prepared it two days before, read it through a dozen times, like I always did. I recall looking up from the handwritten notes—the church didn’t have a computer back then, let alone a printer—and took in the scattering of faces.

  The sad, grey, slack faces. Farmers, most of them, scrubbed-up for their weekly duty. Broad-backed wives, thick-fingered children. Boys who could drive tractors before the age of five; girls who longed for the monthly socials and the chance to spin around in the arms of some pimply lad.

  I’d been dreading this service. The first since I’d done the shameful thing. I’d felt certain they would see the sin on my face, know where my hands had been. And they would point and hiss, and call me hypocrite, how dare I preach to them after I’d taken her into my bed, after my weakness had betrayed them all.

  But as I spoke, my voice riding the swells of the sermon, I realised something startling.

  I didn’t care.

  I didn’t care because there is no sin. There is no sin because there is no God. There is no God because there is only us and our impulses, our sordid little desires that drive us through our days until we are too old to desire anything anymore.

  The realisation hit me so hard and so clear that I froze there in the pulpit, my mouth open, staring at the people before me. The only words my mind could form were: It’s all a lie. But I couldn’t let those words find my tongue, or all would be lost. I don’t know how long I stood there amid the sound of weight shifting on pews, the clearing of throats.

  Mrs. Garrick knew.

  From the end of the second to last row, she gave me that half smile, the one that she gave me four days earlier, the one that said: I know you, I know what lives inside you.

  Mrs. Garrick got to her feet and went to the door, sly and silent as a cat. She gave me one look as she exited, and moments later I felt the wash of cold air that had travelled all the way from her to me.

  As I found my place once more, as the sermon recommenced, I knew where I would see Mrs. Garrick next.

  But I was wrong. When I returned to the small house across the churchyard, I expected to find her in the drawing room, waiting for me on the couch where she had first taken my hands and brought them to her body. The want and the terror left me as I stood on the threshold, looking at the empty room, replaced by a painful disappointment.

  For a man whose purpose had evaporated half an hour earlier, I was strangely at ease. I knew what I desired at that moment, felt no guilt or shame in the yearning, and my mind had no room for questions of eternity.

  It was shortly after her husband, a sergeant of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, survived the bomb attack that Mrs. Garrick began calling on me. The device had been attached by a magnet to the underside of his car, beneath the driver’s seat. He lost one leg in its entirety, the other below the knee, and the damage to his lower body was such that he would never lie with his wife again.

  Six months ago, she wept as she told me, as if the shame of her husband’s unmanning was hers alone to bear. When they brought him home, I went to his bedside, held what remained of his hand in mine while we prayed.

  Just words, I know now, meaningless noises that never left that room to drift heavenward.

  I called often at the Garricks’ home and said many prayers. Sometimes Mrs. Garrick would come to the church, sometimes to my house. Always proper. Always polite.

  Then once, when she doubled over with tears, I took her in my arms. I had no sense of crossing a border, passing from a place of sanity and reason to one of lust and folly. It only seemed a human thing to do, a Christian thing, even as her red hair twined in my fingers.

  My own wife had died five years earlier. I used to say the Lord took her to his kingdom, back when I believed such things. The truth is she had a brain haemorrhage, a random malfunction of her body. God had no part in it.

  I hadn’t looked at another woman in that way until Mrs. Garrick fell into my embrace, when I felt her body lean into mine. And I prayed to the Lord for strength, fully believing He was there to listen, that I wasn’t talking to myself in my cold and empty bed.

  I backed out of my living room, into the hall. I stopped at the foot of the staircase, saw something from the corner of my eye. There, resting on the bottom steps, her coat. My gaze followed the flow of the stairs, and halfway up, a blouse. At the top of the first flight, a pair of shoes. I swallowed and climbed, the trail of clothes leading me to my bedroom, the door open like an eager mouth.

  She said nothing as I entered the room and walked to the bed where she lay. For a moment, I considered at least attempting to convince her to get dressed and go, to stop this madness. Instead, I pulled the white collar from my black shirt and claimed the madness for my own.

  When we were done, my heart still hammering, the sweat still warm where our skin met, she asked, “Will you help me kill him?”

  I said, “Yes, I will.”

  She had no need to convince me. I had seen enough of her and her husband’s lives to understand the logic of it. And without God in my heart, with no soul at risk, then why not?

  I went to their house after the evening service. A fifteen-minute stroll from the village, out into the dark of the countryside. I didn’t see a single car as I walked, keeping to the grass verge, feeling branches of hedgerow touch my arm as I passed.

  The lights of their home came into view. A short gravel driveway. A wall to one side still bearing the
scars of the blast. Mr. Garrick had been reversing his Ford Granada when the mercury tilted and the device exploded. He should have checked beneath the car as he was trained to do, but it had been a dark snowy January morning, and he didn’t feel like kneeling in the slush with a torch.

  I heard it go off. It was not the rolling thunderous rumble of the kind of bomb they’d use to destroy a town centre or a government building, but rather a percussive thump that rattled my windows. In my mind, as I went to my front door, I made a list of parishioners who were possible targets. Mr. Garrick was the first in line.

  Mrs. Garrick answered the door, and we exchanged the polite greetings one would expect between a man of the cloth and a member of his congregation. The Garricks hadn’t a neighbour to hear within half a mile, but still.

  She brought me to her kitchen where we had prayed countless times over countless mugs of tea and trays of biscuits. Pots and pans sat on the hob, plates and cutlery in the sink, the detritus of her husband’s last meal.

  “Shepherd’s pie,” she said. “His favourite.”

  We both stood in silence for a time, me still in my coat, Mrs. Garrick still in her apron. Eventually, she said, “It’s the right thing to do.”

  I suppose I should have argued, made some plea for her husband’s life, but all day my mind had been focused on the place beyond. The place where she and I would be together, the widow and the widower, made as one by their tragic losses.

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.”

  “And he has his faith,” she said. “Even if he knew what was going to happen, he’d be at peace with it. He’d be sure of where he’s going. After, I mean. To heaven.”

  ‘‘There is no heaven,” I said.

  She looked at me as a child looks at a father revealed in his weakness. “What?”

  “I don’t believe,” I said. “Not anymore.”

  “Will you leave the church?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, truthfully.

  “Either way,” she said, “what we’re doing is a merciful thing. Why make him suffer like that? We’re kinder to dogs, for God’s sake.”