Northern Spy(36)
We drive past farms, meadows, quiet ponds. All of this is in a conflict zone, behind security checkpoints, inside a military cordon. In Marian’s mind, this phase will be the end of hundreds of years of war, the last ever surge. Even then, I wish it weren’t happening.
“Do you have any information for Eamonn?” I ask.
“I’m doing an arms drop in Armagh tonight.”
A pit lodges in my stomach. If anyone sees her, she could be shot. “Are you going alone?”
“No, with Damian and Niall.”
I can’t tell whether that’s better or worse. The shoveling will go faster with three of them, but they will be more conspicuous. Marian tells me the location of the arms drop, in an apple orchard on the Monaghan Road.
“What if someone sees you?” I ask.
“No one will be out at that time of night.”
“If someone sees you, will you shoot him?”
“No.”
“Would Damian or Niall?”
She doesn’t answer, and I press myself away from her against the bus window, staring out at the knots of roofs and church steeples. “What’s wrong with this place? What happened to it?”
“They’re not monsters,” she says. “They’re fighting the British the way you’d fight Nazis. They think they’re doing the right thing.”
“Was Elgin Street right?”
“That wasn’t us, that was loyalists.”
“I don’t care which side it was. How could you have kept going after that?”
“You don’t understand. Once you’ve done something terrible, you have to keep going, you have to win, or else the terrible thing was for nothing.”
“So in a united Ireland you won’t feel guilty?”
“I’ll feel guilty for the rest of my life.”
We pass Mount Stewart, and soon the roofs of Greyabbey appear ahead.
“Can I see Finn?” she asks.
“Stop asking.”
* * *
—
While carrying Finn home from his day care, I find myself breathless with pity and guilt. I feel sorry for my sister, the way I would if she’d spent the last seven years ill, or an addict. Her life has been so much more difficult than mine.
Though I can’t only pity her. This wasn’t a car crash. It wasn’t alcoholism. She didn’t have a genetic predisposition for it, she decided to become a terrorist of her own free will. She swore a vow. I, Marian Daly, am a volunteer to the Irish Republican Army.
* * *
—
We’ll put surveillance on the arms drop,” says Eamonn when we meet at Ardglass, “and see who comes for it, and where they take it.”
“Don’t endanger her.”
“They’ll never know we’re there.”
After every meeting with Eamonn, I thrash through the water. My feet churn the surface and my arms plunge through it. At the headland, the current turns stronger, you can feel the cold drag of the tide, pulling you toward the North Sea.
In the water, I consider the information I’ve told Eamonn about her unit’s plans or routes or targets, and the ways his agency might act on it, and how that might be traced back to Marian or, somehow, to me.
I was never a fast swimmer before, but now it’s like sprinting. By the time I come out, my legs are limp. Saltwater courses down my body as I walk back through the dunes. In the car park, I pull on a t-shirt and untie my bikini underneath it, relieved to tug off its clammy weight. I squeeze the water from my hair, push my sandy feet into shoes, and then drop to my hands and knees to look under the car for a bomb. Even after checking, I’m scared before turning the key. I sit there, thinking about Finn.
At home, the muscles behind my shoulder blades ache when I lift the baby, when I raise my arms in the shower, when I climb into bed at night.
* * *
—
Sometimes I stop far past where the waves break, treading water, and watch the fishing trawlers. “The IRA is bringing in a shipment,” Marian said. “That’s why I was in Ballycastle. They sent me to the north coast to look for a landing site.”
The shipment will be coming from Croatia on a private yacht owned by an arms dealer. Sometime this autumn, the yacht will be met in the Mediterranean by an Irish fishing trawler, which will load its cargo, return home, and land at night somewhere on the north coast.
“They need someplace isolated,” Marian said. “I found a beach west of Ballycastle, but they’re considering others.”
Neck-deep in the water, I watch the trawlers, and think about the yacht, a large vessel with a full crew, and wonder if any of them know what’s on board.
“Forty-five tons of gelignite,” said Marian.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It’s enough for thirty large bombs.”
22
I COLLAPSE INTO A CHAIR next to my mother, tearful with fatigue. Finn is in his crib, but he’ll be up again in a few hours. He has never been a good sleeper. In his first weeks, I’d think he’d finally drifted off, then look in the bassinet and see his pacifier moving furiously up and down.
“Why won’t he sleep through the night?” I ask. It’s lonely, rising from bed in the darkness to feed and change him. Sometimes at night I feel homesick, this huge, inappropriate longing for my own mother, and to be back in my childhood bedroom.