Northern Spy(38)

The light behind his eyes is growing brighter every day. He can walk now, unsteadily. When he sees his teddy bear, he crows with delight and tackles it to the floor. He shakes his head to say no. He doesn’t enjoy all foods anymore. In his high chair, he will lift a piece of pasta and give it a good shake to dislodge any spinach stuck to it.

I understand now how agents can live in deep cover for years and years. You can get used to anything. You can turn your attention elsewhere.

As the autumn swell rolls in, the waves have grown stronger, and the sea has turned baltic. Eamonn comes to our meetings in a fleece jacket zipped to his chin, and I bring a wetsuit. Afterward, I stand in the car park, rolling the wetsuit down my body an inch at a time, and wonder if this is when I’ll be shot. Underneath the thick neoprene, my stomach is pale and softened from the water, making me feel doubly vulnerable.

Except for those moments in the car park, though, I’m less scared now than I was before becoming an informer. My position in relation to the IRA has shifted. I’m studying them now, working against them, not waiting to become one of their victims.

At work, too, my perspective has changed. I understand more of the landscape behind the news now. We’ve been reporting on a series of ATM robberies around Downpatrick, for example. Marian’s unit performed those robberies. She told me the location of each cashpoint, and I told Eamonn, and the security service had the bills marked for tracking.

During the course of my work day, I research and write about certain politicians, and sometimes it’s disorienting. I’m nothing to them. If I were to arrive at one of their townhouses in London and introduce myself, they wouldn’t invite me inside, they wouldn’t pour me a glass of wine. They’d call their security details, they’d be annoyed at the intrusion. Despite what I’m doing, despite what it might cost me, I don’t have any claim to them.



* * *



—



When Marian and I meet in the lane behind Mount Stewart, sometimes she is in a rush, and other times we stay together for an hour or so. Usually I bring Finn, and we walk through the woods and onto the manor lawn, falling in with the other visitors touring the grounds. Finn likes the fountain, and the hedges trimmed into the shapes of animals. One Saturday in October, while we’re sitting together on the mansion steps, I say, “What’s it like to steal an ATM?”

Marian shrugs. I know the basics: they steal a digger from a building site, use it to smash the ATM from the wall, load it into a van, and drive away, all in minutes.

“Is it exciting?” I ask, and she nods. “What do you do afterward?”

“We get trolleyed.”

They go to a safe house, she says, and they turn up music and dance. They neck bottles of vodka and shout in each other’s faces and dance with their arms around each other.

“Do you have to fake that now?”

“Being happy?” she says. “No, that part’s real.”

“Do you still love them?”

“Yes.”

I know Seamus, Damian, and Niall now from her stories. Marian told me which of them grew up in a family with money and which of them had none and which of them was put in foster care at the age of seven. I know the arguments they have in the van about music and in the safe house about tidiness.

Niall is the driver, because he grew up joyriding around west Belfast; Damian’s the cook, because he loves food, and once asked one of their couriers to bring a bag of tapioca flour to the safe house so he could make fried chicken; Seamus is the professor, because he has read everything, politics and theory but also fiction, Mavis Gallant and Albert Camus and Jean Rhys.

I know that Niall, the youngest, often wears a pink polo shirt and gray tracksuit bottoms, that the sides of his head are shaved but not the top, that he’s a good dancer. I know that Seamus, the eldest, the most serious, has a tattoo of the hammer and sickle. I know that Damian recently broke up with his girlfriend.

I know that for Marian’s last birthday, the three of them took her surfing in Mullaghmore. When they returned to the cottage, it was dark except for a cake with lit candles.

“How can you do this to them?”

“I’m doing this for them, too,” she says. “They need a peace deal, or they’re going to get themselves killed.”





24


WHAT’S IT LIKE FOR you to live in Ardglass?” I ask Eamonn, when we next meet. He frowns, considering his answer, and I reach over for a clam shell, brush the sand from it, and put it in my pocket to bring home for Finn.

“Quiet,” says Eamonn finally, which is an understatement. At night, Ardglass feels deserted, with shuttered roads of stucco terraces, and fog drifting around the sodium streetlamps.

“Where were you before?”

“Hong Kong.” He lived on the fortieth floor of a high-rise in the Wan Chai district. He won’t tell me the specifics of his work there, only that he was investigating the funding network of a terror group in Britain.

He leans back to rest on his elbows in the sand. I consider his profile, the sharp nose, the groove in his bottom lip. It must help, being this attractive, in his line of work.

“How are you doing with all this? How is it with your sister?”

“I haven’t forgiven her. I’m waiting to deal with that later.”