Northern Spy(47)
“Are you sure?” asks Seamus. “You’d bet someone else’s life on it?”
Niall’s skin reddens, and he waves a hand in front of his face. I begin to have trouble following the conversation. A sense of urgency has made them start speaking to one another in shorthand, with terms and incidents that mean nothing to me.
Watching them, they seem no different from a unit in the Special Forces or the Royal Irish Rangers, and the decision to join them no more dramatic than the decision to enlist in any army. I try to locate the moral difference between them and, say, the Royal Air Force. The RAF has maimed and killed civilians, too. It all seems equally vacant.
“I’ll not go down the road of Letterkenny again,” says Seamus.
“Your man Patrick—” starts Damian.
“If this were in March, that’d be different altogether,” says Marian.
The four of them have spent years fitting themselves around one another. If a loyalist gunman were to burst into this bar, they would each fall into position instantly. They anticipate one another’s responses with a precision that seems from my viewpoint like clairvoyance. Niall has barely started to open his palm when, without pausing, Damian passes him the cigarettes and lighter.
It reminds me of watching other mothers at the playground, how their babies’ cues are unintelligible to me but plain to them. Yesterday, out of the blue, a baby wailed and turned his back on his mother, and she said, “No, I’m sorry, you can’t have the whole pancake.”
Marian will need to translate this conversation for me later, to report it to Eamonn. Then without any sign, the impasse breaks. An agreement has been reached.
“And what about this horse place?” asks Seamus.
“The pony club?” I say, startled at being addressed. “I have a tour on the seventh of December.”
“Good, that’s good. Well done.”
* * *
—
At home, after paying Olivia, I sit in the rocking chair by Finn’s crib. I was here when he fell asleep earlier this evening, I’ll be here when he wakes up, and he won’t know that in between I left the house and drove into west Belfast, which feels like lying to him.
This isn’t what I should be doing. At least the gift card Eamonn gave me for signaling him only had two hundred pounds on it. Maybe that’s a sign the peace talks are progressing, that he doesn’t expect this to go on for very long.
* * *
—
Can you do me a favor?” asks Damian later that week. They need kerosene. Two gallons, delivered to their safe house in west Belfast. I wonder what he would say if I answered no, that I’m at work.
“Nicholas, is it all right if I work from home for the rest of the day?”
He nods with a phone at his ear, on hold with the deputy first minister’s office. “Not feeling well?”
I start to answer, but then the deputy first minister is on the line, and Nicholas is greeting her, waving goodbye at me. I feel disappointed that nothing will force me to stay in the office this afternoon.
I’d expected informing to occur in discrete, planned segments, which I could attend to around childcare and work. I don’t know who gave me this impression, if it was Eamonn, or Marian, or myself. I’d just need to manage it, I thought, like I’d managed pumping, by doing more on either side to make up for the lost time. This had seemed challenging but not impossible.
I understand now that is not how informing will be. Of course informing will really be like this, like going over a waterfall. I can’t pick it up and put it down. The IRA won’t wait until after I’ve finished work or fed Finn dinner to resume their activities.
I take a bus from the office across the Westlink, the six lanes of traffic cutting west Belfast off from the rest of the city. I remember the shock, as a child, of learning that the Westlink hadn’t always been there, that people were responsible for it, for making my bus journeys to almost any point in the city so long. Which must have been partly the point, a bit of social engineering. Keep the millionaires’ houses and restaurants on one side, and us on the other.
Once, as a teenager, I walked from our estate over the Westlink footbridge and all the way to the Malone Road. It was a damp Sunday morning in spring, and the huge houses were covered in thick wisteria, the blossoms dripping above their front doors. The houses on my estate all had gravel in their front gardens. I walked past the mansions with my headphones on, smoking a roll-up. If someone like Seamus had approached me that afternoon and said, “Do you want things to change?” I would have said yes.
At a supermarket on the Falls Road, I lift down two jugs of kerosene, feeling the weight of the liquid sloshing against the plastic. Tonight this kerosene will be used to set a stolen car on fire. It will be splashed onto the seats and in the boot, and touched with a lighter. The windows will burst from the heat and flames will tear out of their empty spaces, enveloping the wreck.
Niall answers the door of the safe house in a polo shirt and tracksuit bottoms. “Grand, thanks very much,” he says, like I’m dropping the kerosene off for a barbeque.
He and Damian are robbing a taxi office in Banbridge tonight, and need the kerosene to destroy any traces of themselves. By the time the fire is put out, the car will have melted and curled in on itself. The kerosene is about the size of a jug of laundry detergent. It doesn’t look like much, like something with the power to melt an entire car. Neither does Niall, for that matter.