Northern Spy(23)

Marian, I think. Marian.



* * *



—

I finally switch off the radio and leave to buy aspirin for my headache. On the path into town, a boat idles in the cove below me, water dripping from the blades of its outboard motor. From here, I can’t see the city, or the helicopters above it. Greyabbey remains untouched. Brigadoon, Marian called it. I hadn’t wondered at the time if that was an insult.

I could do this with any of our conversations. None of them are stable anymore, they could all mean something entirely different than what I’d thought at the time. I must have seemed so stupid to her.

Marian went to Serbia in March to buy guns. She also came to my house in March. Finn was in his reflux phase then, only ten weeks old, and barely sleeping. Marian brought me two freezer bags of prepared dishes from an expensive deli on the Malone Road. Wild mushroom risotto, chicken pie, butternut squash lasagna, fish cakes, spanakopita. What was that? A sop to her conscience?

Had she wanted to tell me about Serbia, or was she relieved to find me so easily misdirected? All of my concerns—about colic, bottles, swaddling—must have seemed so trivial after where she had been. I wonder if she found me boring, domestic. Not a gunrunner like her.

I walk past a wooden gate spotted with white moss. It grows quickly here in the humid air from the sea, across roof slates and fences and the branches of apple trees. I look at the moss, the rosehips, the spindly pines. Marian might think I’m a traitor, or a collaborator, for living here, in a mostly Protestant village, but I won’t feel ashamed for deciding to live here, for wanting this more than Rebel Sunday at the Rock bar. She hasn’t taken the more righteous path.

Past the open windows of the dance studio on the main street, a children’s ballet class is rehearsing, their slippers scratching across the floor. I step inside the chemist’s. Down the aisle, a woman holds up two boxes of cough syrup for her son and says, “Which do you fancy, grape or cherry?”

At the back, Martin is ringing up a customer. “Right, Johnny, how are you?”

“Not too bad,” says the old man, and they start talking about a singer on The Graham Norton Show last night. Neither of them can remember his name. Martin says, “He’d be your man in Traviata.”

I consider the different strengths of aspirin. “Oh,” says the old man. “Bocelli?”

“He’s the very one,” says Martin, and then behind me an explosion erupts.

I throw myself toward the floor, catching my forehead on the sharp corner of a shelf. Someone on the road is shouting, and a shape races past the window. Next to me, the other woman is also on the floor, shielding her son with her body. Outside, a voice screams a name. The sunlight on the window makes my eyes water. It might be only a bomb, or a bomb and gunmen.

The boy is whining now, and his mother wraps her arms around him, trying to keep him still. We need to get away from the window. I move in a crouch down the aisle, and the woman follows me, crawling with her son clasped to her chest. We shelter behind the till with Martin and the old man.

“Is there a back exit?” I ask, and Martin shakes his head, wheezing too hard to speak. The bell over the door chimes. Someone is coming inside. I stare down at the carpet with my mouth hanging open, then close my eyes. Footsteps move toward us, and I hold Finn’s face in my mind.

“You can come out,” says a man, in a tired voice. I have to force myself to look at him. No ski mask, no gun. He says, “There was an accident.”

Slowly, holding on to the counter, I pull myself to stand and follow the man outside. Down the road, more people are emerging from the shops. A flatbed lorry is stopped in the street. From its back posts, blue ties twist in the breeze. A stack of broken pallets lies on the ground behind it. The ties must have broken and the pallets crashed to the ground, with a sound like a detonation.

Sawdust rises from the debris. A few people have started to laugh. Others are standing in the road with shocked faces. The driver sets himself in front of the pallets, like someone might try to take them. He says, to no one in particular, “I didn’t tie them on myself, they did that at the yard.”

I stumble into the Wildfowler. After the dazzle of the road, spots float across my vision. Everyone has run outside, their chairs knocked to the ground. Plates of half-eaten food have been abandoned on the tables, burgers and chips, a dish of melting ice cream.

My sandals crackle on the broken glass. In the toilets, I look in the mirror at the blood dripping down my forehead, then take a fistful of tissues and hold them against the cut.

A woman with silver hair comes inside. I recognize her, she works at the village library a few mornings a week. “That was the last thing any of us needed,” she says, resting her hand on my arm.

I lower my fist, and the tissues are bright red with blood. “Will you need stitches?” she asks. “I can give you a lift.”

“No, it’s nothing. Thank you.”

We squeeze hands and I walk back across the restaurant, past the broken glass, the plate of chips softening in the sun.

I stagger down the lough road toward home, covered in sweat and dust. It’s still a beautiful day. Sunlight glows on the pines, the rosehips, the water. I can hear sirens now, the emergency services coming to check for injuries and clear the road.

At home, I take off my dress and drop it in the hamper, then pull on an old pair of Tom’s rugby bottoms, tightening the cord until they fit around my waist. Once the dress is washed, maybe it won’t seem tainted by today, though I already know I’ll never wear it again, like the jumper I had on that day on Elgin Street, and the necklace I took off my throat while walking away from the collapsed building, like having it on was disrespectful, frivolous.