The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher(35)

When the telephone rang, it made us both jump. I broke off what I was saying. “Answer that,” he said. “It will be for me.”

* * *

IT WAS HARD for me to imagine the busy network of activity that lay behind the day’s plans. “Wait,” I’d said to him, as I asked him, “Tea or coffee?” as I switched the kettle on. “You know I was expecting the boiler man? I’m sure he’ll be here soon.”

“Duggan?” he said. “Nah.”

“You know Duggan?”

“I know he won’t be here.”

“What have you done to him?”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” He snorted. “Why would we do anything? No need. He got the nod. We have pals all over the place.”

Pals. A pleasing word. Almost archaic. Dear God, I thought, Duggan an IRA man. Not that my visitor had named his affiliation, but I had spoken it loudly in my mind. The word, the initials, didn’t cause me the shock or upset it would cause, perhaps, to you. I told him this, as I reached in the fridge for milk and waited for the kettle to boil: saying, I would deter you if I could, but it would only be out of fear for myself and what’s going to happen to me after you’ve done it: which by the way is what? I am no friend of this woman, though I don’t (I felt compelled to add) believe violence solves anything. But I would not betray you, because …

“Yeah,” he said. “Everybody’s got an Irish granny. It’s no guarantee of anything at all. I’m here for your sightlines. I don’t care about your affinities. Keep away from the front window and don’t touch the phone, or I’ll knock you dead. I don’t care about the songs your bloody great-uncles used to sing on a Saturday night.”

I nodded. It was only what I’d thought myself. It was sentiment and no substance.

The minstrel boy to the war is gone,

In the ranks of death you’ll find him.

His father’s sword he has girded on,

And his wild harp slung behind him.

My great-uncles (and he was right about them) wouldn’t have known a wild harp if it had sprung up and bitten their bottoms. Patriotism was only an excuse to get what they called pie-eyed, while their wives had tea and ginger nuts then recited the rosary in the back kitchen. The whole thing was an excuse: why we are oppressed. Why we are sat here being oppressed, while people from other tribes are hauling themselves up by their own ungodly efforts and buying three-piece suites. While we are rooted here going la-la-la auld Ireland (because at this distance in time the words escape us) our neighbors are patching their quarrels, losing their origins and moving on, to modern, nonsectarian forms of stigma, expressed in modern songs: you are a scouser, a dirty scouser. I’m not, personally. But the north is all the same to southerners. And in Berkshire and the Home Counties, all causes are the same, all ideas for which a person might care to die: they are nuisances, a breach of the peace, and likely to hold up the traffic or delay the trains.

“You seem to know about me,” I said. I sounded resentful.

“As much as anybody would need to know. That’s to say, not that you’re anything special. You can be a help if you want, and if you don’t want, we can do accordingly.”

He spoke as if he had companions. He was only one man. But a bulky one, even without the jacket. Suppose I had been a true-blue Tory, or one of those devout souls who won’t so much as crush an insect: I still wouldn’t have tried anything tricky. As it was, he counted on me to be docile, or perhaps, despite his sneering, he trusted me to some small extent. Anyway, he let me follow him into the bedroom with my mug of tea. He carried his own tea in his left hand and his gun in his right. He left the roll of sticky tape and the handcuffs on the kitchen table, where he’d put them when they came out of his bag.

And now he let me pick up the phone extension from the bedside table, and hand it to him. I heard a woman’s voice, young, timid and far away. You would not have thought she was in the hospital round the corner. “Brendan?” she said. I did not imagine that was his real name.

* * *

HE PUT DOWN the receiver so hard it clattered. “There’s some friggin’ hold-up. It’ll be twenty minutes, she reckons. Or thirty, it could even be thirty.” He let his breath out, as if he’d been holding it since he stomped upstairs. “Bugger this. Where’s the lav?”

You can surprise a person with affinity, I thought, and then say, “Where’s the lav?” Not a Windsor expression. It wasn’t really a question, either. The flat was so small that its layout was obvious. He took his weapon with him. I listened to him urinate. Run a tap. I heard splashing. I heard him come out, zipping his trousers. His face was red where he’d been toweling it. He sat down hard on the folding chair. There was a bleat from the fragile canework. He said, “You’ve got a number written on your arm.”

“Yes.”

“What’s it a number of?”

“A woman.” I dabbed my forefinger with my tongue and slicked it across the ink.

“You won’t get it off that way. You need to get some soap and give it a good scrub.”

“How kind of you to take an interest.”

“Have you wrote it down? Her number?”

“No.”

“Don’t you want it?”

Only if I have a future, I thought. I wondered when it would be appropriate to ask.