Northern Spy(16)

“Did Marian have a bag with her?” the detective asked.

I described her leather backpack. Fenton asked its dimensions, and I set my hands apart on the table. He looked down at them for a few moments, then back up at me, and the expression on his face made my heart knock. “That would be big enough,” he said. “The device we found was eight inches long.”

I didn’t tell him that the trip had been Marian’s idea. We were sitting around our mother’s house that Saturday, and Marian said, “What do you fancy doing today? Want to cook something?”

It doesn’t matter that she suggested the trip. I’ve never watched a terrorist planting a bomb, but that can’t possibly be how they act. Marian didn’t show any sort of strain. She had a long chat with the vendor at the crêpe stall, she can’t have considered him a target.

The detective thinks that Marian was using Finn as a sort of cover, that with him in her arms, she could open a fire door, walk into a disused corridor, and hide the bomb, without drawing any suspicion.

Standing in the middle of the market, I pass my hand over my eyes. I didn’t tell Fenton about the conversation we had with our mother before we left her house.

“I can mind the baby,” she said.

“Oh,” said Marian, “no, let’s bring him, he’ll love it.”





9


FINN ARCHES HIS BACK and twists his head, his face blanched from crying. “It’s all right, sweetheart, it’s all right,” I tell him as we pace the length of the house. On the third lap, I call my friend Francesca, a doctor at the Royal Victoria in Dublin. “Finn won’t stop crying,” I say. He began crying soon after my return from St. George’s. It had already seemed like a long stretch before my mam left for the prison, and that was hours ago now.

“Yes, I can hear that. For how long?”

“Five hours.”

“Hmm,” says Francesca. “He’s not hungry? Cold? Wet?”

“No. He had some vaccinations last week, though, could this be a reaction?”

“Does he have a fever?”

“No.”

She yawns. “Then probably not.”

“Do you think he’s teething?”

“Could be. You can try massaging his gums. Or give him some Calpol if he really won’t settle.”

I rub the baby’s gums while he stares up at me, bewildered. It doesn’t seem to help. I position him on my forearm in a colic hold, and he lies there, his limbs dangling, his head in my palm, with an expression of weary forbearance.

He starts to arch his back. I rock and shush him, but already he’s howling. My hair hurts. Every time I move my head, the elastic pinches its strands.

This house is too hot. And too small. I don’t know how the size of it has never bothered me before. The ceiling barely seems to clear the top of my head. I pace the miniature living room, bouncing Finn while he wails.

When I bought it, the house was crumbling. It needed a new boiler, new wiring, new pipes. I tore clumps of rotted pink insulation from the ceiling, ripped up the carpet, sanded the wood floor. I had the kitchen torn out and rebuilt, and the bathroom tiled and grouted, and I coated the walls and the ceiling in creamy new paint. It was finished days before Finn was born.

I’d been proud to bring him home to this house. I hadn’t realized it would shrink in direct proportion to his crying.

Francesca rings me back after another half hour. “Has he stopped?”

“No.”

“Have you tried the hair dryer?”

The moment the hair dryer turns on, Finn stops crying. He swivels his head, blinking. I sink down to the floor with the hair dryer running beside us. After a few moments, his body softens in the crook of my arm. His eyes start to drift, and slowly the lids come down. The red splotches fade from his skin. In his sleep, he looks impeccably peaceful, like the last five hours never happened.

I can’t say the same for myself. My nerves feel sandpapered. I remember this sensation from his first few months, when he had reflux. During one crying spell, my mam came to take him out of the house. I watched her carry him away, his small, worried face poking over her shoulder. He was wearing his white safari hat, like he was setting off on a much longer expedition. Come back, I thought.

That seems like years ago, but it was only in March, he was born in December. When I arrived at the hospital, my legs wouldn’t stop shaking, from the pain or the adrenaline. I remember kneeling over the triage bed, wanting to bite through the metal. When she arrived, the anesthesiologist told me to round my back, like a scared cat. I remember her wiping down my skin, placing an antiseptic dressing, and then the calm from the epidural drip, the sulfurous light in the delivery room, the drifting of my thoughts. An IV line was taped to the back of my hand, and a nurse gave me a pink jug of ice water with a straw.

For hours, we heard the monitor on the baby’s heart. Afterward, Tom and I thought it was still playing in the recovery room, a phantom sound still revolving. Sometimes, during the labor, the monitor slipped and the line on the screen broke into dashes.

“You don’t actually want to hear all of this,” I said to Marian after coming home from hospital.

“Of course I do,” she said.

“Aren’t labor stories boring to other people?”

“No. Why would you think that?” she said.