Northern Spy(17)

“I don’t know.”

“Because they only happen to women?” Marian suggested.

At some point, the doctor fitted an oxygen mask over my face. I could feel the baby moving downward. I haven’t tried to describe to anyone the moment when he was handed up onto my torso. My eyes were closed and I felt a warm, wet shape on my stomach, larger than I expected, slippery limbs moving, and gasped before lifting him to my chest.



* * *



—

When my mother returns, I’m still on the floor beside the hair dryer, with Finn asleep in my arms. She looks down at us. “What’s happening here?”

“He wouldn’t stop crying.”

“Did you try feeding him?”

“Of course I tried feeding him.”

“Formula?”

“No, I nursed him.”

“Your stress isn’t good for him,” she says. “He’s getting your cortisol in his milk.”

“So it’s my fault?”

She sighs. “Do you want me to put him in his crib? Or are you planning to sit there all night?”

I let her lift the baby from my arms. While she sets him in the crib, I take one of the plastic containers of pumped breast milk from the freezer. She might have a point about the cortisol. I’m not entirely sure how it works, but I wouldn’t drink a pint of vodka or espresso and then nurse him, and this fear is stronger than alcohol or caffeine. It might be clouding my milk, agitating him.

I hold the container under the hot tap, and the frozen milk starts to melt. I pour the milk into a bottle and set it in the fridge, feeling for a moment normal, suburban.

“I’m going to make tea. Do you want one before you head home?” I ask, and my mam nods. I let myself believe that the day is over, that I’ll make our tea, switch off the lights, and go to bed, leaving the dishwasher to churn in the darkness. Instead, we slump onto chairs at the table. My mother takes off her glasses and rubs the raw indents on the bridge of her nose.

“Were you nervous to see him?” I ask.

“Eoin?” she says, sounding baffled by the idea. She might be remembering the little boy in the paddling pool, who closed his eyes while she rubbed sun cream onto his face. I want to tell her that doesn’t mean anything, he’s thirty-four years old now and in prison on a life sentence for conspiracy to murder.

“Eoin told me the IRA has done this before,” she says. “He said it’s a new tactic, forcing ordinary people to do their robberies for them. They don’t want their own lads lifted.”

“Why didn’t Fenton tell me that?”

“The police don’t know. The ones Eoin heard about were home invasions, and no one was caught.”

“What happened to those people afterward?”

“They went home.”

“Why can’t Marian come home then?”

“He thinks it’s because hers went wrong, with the surveillance camera. He reckons she’s in a safe house now. He said he’d ask around.”

“Do you trust him?”

“Yes,” she says, folding her glasses. “Well, I trust that he wants to help.”

“Did you ever see Marian with a second phone?” I ask, and my mam shakes her head. “Fenton said she had a burner phone.”

“No, she didn’t.”

“The police found it in her flat, inside the fireplace.”

“They must have planted it,” she says firmly.

“I don’t think Fenton’s bent.”

“Then someone working for him must be,” she says.

“Do you think Marian might have been buying drugs?”

“Catch yourself on,” says my mam, but, then, she never took MDMA with Marian at a concert. It’s been years and years, but still.

I stand to rinse our mugs, leaving the sodden bags of chamomile in the sink. “Did you go somewhere afterward?” I ask, trying to keep my voice light. We both know the prison closed for visitors hours ago.

“I had to drive over to Bangor,” she says. “I had to tell the Dunlops about Marian, before they heard it somewhere else.”

“Oh, god.”

“They said they don’t want to have to let me go, but they can’t be involved in this sort of thing.”

My mother has worked for the Dunlops for fourteen years. They’ve met Marian.

“They were having a party,” she says. I picture her standing alone at their front door, feeling nervous, with their guests’ glossy cars pulled up on the gravel behind her, and this image hurts as much as anything else has over the past two days.

The Dunlops made her wait in the front hall while they excused themselves from their party. She overheard Miranda telling the guests that it was her cleaner, and the surprised, amused noises they made in response.

My mother had prepared for the party. They’d hired someone to cook on the day itself, but she had done everything else, all the shopping and cleaning and arranging. She had swept the floor, chosen the ingredients, polished the silver, bought the ice that was chilling their champagne.

While my mother told her employers that her daughter was missing, their guests carried on talking and eating in the dining room. A slab of salmon was on the table, with bowls of sea salt, double cream, and crushed juniper set out alongside it. Occasionally the sound of laughter came from the other room. Miranda asked my mam if she’d known her daughter was a terrorist.