Northern Spy(27)

“Eamonn?”

“My handler.”

His name is Eamonn Byrne. She knows that he works for MI5 in counter-terrorism, that his last assignment was in Hong Kong, that he has been in Belfast for two years, that his cover is working as a restaurant investor. Marian hasn’t spoken to him since sabotaging the attack on St. George’s. It’s too dangerous while the IRA has her under review. She has to assume they’re always watching her.

“I can’t meet with him anymore,” she says. “But you can.”

I laugh, and she says, “You won’t need to do anything yourself. I’ll tell you information and you’ll pass it along to Eamonn. No one’s watching you, you’ll be safe meeting with him.”

“Safe?”

Marian starts to describe how Eamonn will find secure meeting places for us, and my body turns numb. I can’t believe the conversation anymore, it has become too fantastical, and while she talks I watch the pines brushing across the white sky. After a while, I realize that she is waiting for a response, and I lower my face, slowly dragging down my line of vision.

“No, Marian. I’m not doing it.”

“It wouldn’t—”

“No. I have a baby.”

She pauses, then says, “There are other children.”

My breath catches. Other children, she means, will die if the peace talks fail. “How dare you?”

“I’m not trying to scare you,” she says. “But at least think about it before deciding.”

“You don’t get to tell me what to do. You’re the murderers.”

“I’m trying to fix it,” she says.

“No, you want me to fix it for you. You’re asking me for my life.”

Marian crosses her arms and leans forward over her knees. The wind sends the dry tips of her hair flying forward. “Tessa—”

“What do you think? Does Finn still need a mother? Or do you think he’d be fine?”

“They won’t find out.”

“They always find out.”

She says, “Eamonn will be waiting for you on the beach in Ardglass at seven on Wednesday morning.”

“And he can fuck right off, too,” I say, and walk away.





15


ITURN THE PILLOW TO the other side and watch the curtains float into the room on the wind. Sometimes the thin fabric lifts enough to show the windowsill and the darkness beyond it. I can’t sleep. Marian has traveled back to south Belfast, where Seamus, Damian, and Niall are waiting for her in the safe house.

During the year I spent studying for my MA in politics, Marian was a new recruit. While I was in the library at Trinity, Marian was lying in a ditch watching a police station. I was sitting in a lecture theater, and buying books at Hodges Figgis, and bicycling along the canal, and dancing in a bar on Camden Street, while my sister learned to build bombs.

When she visited me at Trinity, Marian looked at the tennis courts in the square below my window. “Are they free?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“For everyone?”

“They’re free for Trinity students,” I said, and she stared at me for a moment, then turned away.

She used to say, “I’m not really interested in politics.” Marian bought the Financial Times but rarely read it, and I teased her that she just liked the look of it lying around her flat, the salmon-pink pages folded on her kitchen counter. Of course she was actually reading it, of course she studied the news.

I give up trying to sleep, find a Frantz Fanon book online, and read the first chapter. He makes good points about imperialism, production, resources. It’s good, but is it good enough to change your life? Is it good enough to turn you into a terrorist? “I want a free Ireland,” said Marian, as though I don’t, too, as though I’m on the side of the colonialists.

Before returning to bed, I notice the jar of cold cream in the bathroom cabinet and wish I could give some to Marian for her dry face. The old instincts still apply. My sister has been a terrorist for the past seven years, but I still don’t want her skin to itch.

Is she a terrorist now? Can you be a terrorist and an informer at the same time, or are you only ever one or the other?

She hasn’t really defected. The leaders of her organization are in peace talks with the government, Marian is trying to safeguard those talks. Except what she’s doing hasn’t been sanctioned by anyone in the IRA. If they find out, the internal security team won’t spend time parsing her loyalty. She’s a tout. They kill informers execution-style, with a bullet at the back of the head.

Her life has been in danger, in one way or another, for seven years. I don’t understand how she never told me, in all the time we’ve spent together.

We went to France together last year. We flew into Bordeaux, rented a car, and drove south into the Languedoc. During the hottest hours of the day, we sat under the shade of the arbor with cups of coffee, newspapers, paperbacks, and bowls of Castelvetrano olives. We swam in the pool and lay on the slates to dry. It had been cold and damp for months at home, and I felt like the sun was scouring me clean. At night we sat outside in the dark, the stone fortifications of the town floodlit on the hill above us, talking.

I want to know what she was thinking then, and as we drove back to the airport, passed through security, waited at the gate. She could have turned to me at any moment and said, There’s something I need to tell you.