Northern Spy(49)

But I’ve only had Finn for eleven months. For years, Marian had to work nights both as a paramedic and with her unit. She once had to explain to Seamus that she couldn’t stay awake for three nights in a row. “Seamus doesn’t get tired,” Marian said. “He sleeps for four hours a night, like Margaret Thatcher.” Which could kill him, if his heart doesn’t.

From the corner, I look at the front of her flat, the painted door, the curtains in the windows. I want to go inside to check on the pipes, the boiler, the mail, but the police might still have it under surveillance.

I stop into the natural foods shop a few doors down on the Lisburn Road. Marian loves this place. She has a shelf in her kitchen of bee pollen, royal jelly, ginseng, echinacea, evening primrose. I make fun of her for it, but, then, she never gets sick, while I catch colds every winter. I fill a shopping basket with jars and vials, adding the mushroom powder, lion’s mane and ashwagandha, which she stirs into green tea every morning, and then a sealed packet of the tea itself. I’m not sure how much of this is done out of competition. I’m furious with her, but I still want her to love me best.



* * *



—

Marian is late to meet me. I sit rigid in the car. There is a chance that she won’t come. That I will drive home alone, and never know what happened to her.

I want to run through the woods to Mount Stewart, shout for someone to help me. Another twenty minutes pass, and her absence takes on the aura of an emergency. If Marian’s not here in ten minutes, I’ll contact Eamonn, and the security service will find her.

A movement makes me look in the side mirror, and my sister is walking up the lane. It feels like crawling ashore after being caught in a riptide. I want to pat myself down, to check that my body is intact.

“Sorry,” says Marian. “I had to drop a passport in Rostrevor.”

“Why is your unit working so much in South Down?”

“We’re filling a gap in the Newry brigade.”

“Why?”

“The police shot all of them.”

I don’t know what to say to this, so we sit in silence for a few moments. “I brought you something.”

“Did you?” she asks, and I wince at how pleased she sounds over such a small kindness.

When she sees the bag from the natural foods shop, her eyes widen. She reaches into the footwell to pull it onto her lap, then opens it and stares down at the apothecary jars.

Marian is silent. For a terrible moment, I think that she’s about to admit that she never believed in any of this, that it was part of her cover. Instead, she lets out a long sigh. She moves slowly through the bag, her face rapt, like she’s opening a Christmas stocking.

Watching her, I understand how much she misses her independence, her routines. She doesn’t have any respite anymore. She is fully conscripted now, between the IRA and MI5.

“Are you homesick?” I ask.

“It was never going to last,” she says. “I’m surprised it did for that long.”

Over the past seven years, Marian tells me, she knew that every weekend she spent visiting a gallery, or watching a film, or shopping, was time she’d stolen. The British government might have arrested her at any moment. They might have come close, on any number of occasions. She was an enemy of the state. Sometimes she added up her prospective prison time. Membership of a banned organization, firearms offenses, explosives offenses. It would depend on the judge, but she could be given multiple life sentences.

“Not anymore,” I say. “If you’re arrested, Eamonn will get you out.”

“Maybe,” she says. “Or maybe that would raise too much suspicion. There are plenty of informers in prison right now so their cover won’t be blown.”

“Are you serious?”

Marian nods. During the Troubles, she says, some informers served ten years in prison, were released, rejoined the IRA, and kept informing. I can’t believe it. I can’t think of any political cause that would make me wait out a decade in prison.

“Would you?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says. “If it would help bring peace. But I’m used to the idea of prison, I’ve thought about it for years.”

“You should be in prison,” I say, but without heat, like I’m trying to talk her out of it and into another solution. Marian understands this and doesn’t respond. Of course she can’t serve a life sentence.

“What are you going to do about the flat? Do you want me to empty it?” I ask.

“Not yet,” she says. For now, she will keep paying the rent, the gas and electric.

“Do you want to go back?”

“Yes, if I can.”

“Do you want your old job back?”

“I don’t know.”

Marian says that her work as a paramedic blurred into her work with the IRA. She doesn’t know if she could separate the two. It often seemed like part of the same project, whether she was patrolling the city in her ambulance or with her unit. She treated enough gunshot and beating victims from the conflict that even others, with strokes or sports injuries, began to seem like victims of the war.

She tells me that once while treating a stroke victim, she became convinced that some figures in her peripheral vision were SAS officers about to shoot her. She’d startled, dropping the oxygen mask, scaring her patient.