Field of Blood (4 page)

a salary and a pension scheme who didn't give a shit that a front bedroom in Turf

Lodge had water running from the ceiling of the front bedroom.

`Did I wake you?' He spoke gently.

`Me and half the bloody street.'

Ì'm sorry, love ... must have been dreaming.'

`Bloody nightmaring, more likely.'

He took her shoulder and pulled her down onto her back and his hands were warm on the flesh of her thighs and the skin of her small slack breasts.

He hadn't used anything the night before, he'd said the machine down in the Bar's jacks was broken. The bloody priests who said you shouldn't use anything,

they didn't know what it was like to be dropping kids. A bit of labour pain wouldn't be lost on them . . . She laughed out loud. She saw in her mind a flash

picture of Father Mulvaney lying on a bed on his back with his spindle legs up round his ears, groaning in delivery agony.

He'd stopped.

`Not at you, Sean, wasn't laughing at you ...'

She put her hand over his hand, the hand was down at her thighs. She usually guided him. He was always a bit fumbling when he came back from the bloody

caravan, so she knew he hadn't a woman down there ... If he would only cut his

nails ... He loved her, she knew that. What ever he'd done, why ever he'd gone south, when ever he came back, she knew that he loved her. She had other men,

not often, not out of habit, only occasionally when the loneliness was too great to

bear. Just sometimes she needed a man, just needed a body with no strings and

no one beside her when she woke in the morning afterwards. The children were

hers, more than they were his. His kids wouldn't tell their Da that sometimes a man stayed late. She hoped he didn't know.

`What did they want you to do?'

His second day back two men had come to the house. She had been doing the kids' tea, beans and toast and a mug of Bovril. They'd gone upstairs with Sean.

They'd have sat on her bed, and after they'd gone, when she went up to bed there was the smell of cigarettes in her bedroom and ash on the floor. She'd heard the raised voices.

`Something big ... Shit, that's lovely ... I said I wouldn't.'

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**`Because of me, that wasn't why you said you wouldn't?'

She blamed him for nothing. If the house leaked then that was the fault of the Brits who refused to come and repair it. If her man hadn't work then that was the

fault of the Brits who wouldn't provide employment for the work force in the Nationalist housing estates. If Sean Pius McAnally was in the Provos then that was the fault of the Brits for putting their fucking soldiers on the streets of Turf Lodge and the 'Murph and Andy'town, and Whiterock. She would have thought

the less of her man if he had not been in the Organization. She had nagged him

once into going for a job at the De Lorean, and he'd been taken on, just after coming out of the Kesh, and the day he should have started he'd chucked it and

gone with the A.S.U. ‐ that was somebody's fault, not her man's fault.

Ìt wouldn't be because of me that you said you wouldn't?'

She was glowing, she was wet. His hand was strong, good, brilliant. She had never argued when he'd said that he was going south. He'd sat that night, more

than two years before, on the end of the bed and he had said that if he stayed he

was either dead or he was in for àlifer'. He'd said that after a time any man had

the right to quit. He'd said that staying alive and staying free was luck, that a man in an A.S.U. used up his store of luck. The bloody Brits with their army and their

police and terror gangs of SAS murderers would take him. He'd said he wasn't a

coward, he'd said he was just being smart. He'd said that some other bugger should do his turn. She hadn't blamed him.

His chin was on her shoulder, the nipple of her breast was swollen hard between

his fingers, his lips were beside her ear.

`Not because of you. Perhaps it should be, but it's not.'

`Why won't you do what they ask?'

`Shit, I don't mind helping ... What they want isn't helping, it's fucking kamikaze

... Fuck, you're lovely . . .'

The bed sang as he climbed onto her, spread her, wriggled inside her.

Baby Sean had begun to cry, a clear sharp wail through the thin partition wall.

Young Gerard was shouting at Baby Sean to shut his face. Young Gerard was the

son of the night's loving in the hours before the southern SB came to the honeymoon room in Bray. Little Patty and Baby Sean were both conceived after

he had run the risk of standing clear on a street corner to aim the R.P.G. at a Pig

or at an armoured landrover. After that the risk of getting Roisin in family had seemed pathetic, unimportant. Baby Sean crying and Young Gerard shouting at

him.

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She pushed him off her. She swung out of the bed and he saw the gleam of damp

on her legs. He lay on his back. He thought he saw tears in her eyes. She went out

of the bedroom and through the wall he heard her speak to Young Gerard and croon to Baby Sean. She

came back into the bedroom and laid the baby in the crook of her husband's arm.

She started to dress.

`So you've said you won't do it, so what's going to happen?

'I'm to be taken to see a man.'

`What man?

'The Chief.'

Ànd when he asks you to do it, what'll you say?

'I don't know,' he said.

Ì'll make some tea.'

She wore jeans and a sweater and she was shivering in the chilled room as she pulled on her socks. She combed her hair perfunctorily, rich and lovely black hair

that fell to her shoulders. She was tall, as tall as him, and he thought she was beautiful. He was blind to the worry bags under her eyes and the pallor of her cheeks. She kissed him on the forehead and went out of the bedroom and down

the stairs. He heard her stumbling in the darkness of the downstairs front room

for the packet and her first cigarette of the day. Beside him Baby Sean gurgled in

delight and tugged at his Da's hair.

He had had bread and jam for breakfast and more tea, and he had cleared his pockets of Republic currency that his wife would change at the bank in the Andersonstown parade, and he was listening to the radio news, when the knock

came at the door.

Not much on the radio, a quiet night it had been in the war. Three aimed shots at

an army patrol in the Derry Bogside, all missed. An R.U.C. constable cops on that

there's a bomb under his car when he does his morning check, defused. Waste of

fucking effort ... The boy at the door was straight out of school. Roisin stood at

the bottom of the stairs and watched.

Ìn thirty minutes, Mister, you're to be on the corner of Westrock Gardens and the Parade. You'll be told then where to go.'

The boy didn't wait for an answer.

.

Ìs you going out, Da? Can I come?' Young Gerard stood behind his mother, and

two stair steps higher.

Ìt's a school day, 'course you can't go with your Da.'

McAnally took his anorak from the hook behind the door.

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`You won't be knowing when you'll be back?' his wife asked.

`No.'

McAnally went out through the door, pulled it noisily shut behind him. The wind

caught his face and he felt the light rain on his cheeks. He should never have come back, but he had not known how to refuse. His hands were buried deep in

his anorak pockets, chin down on his chest.

His home might be a caravan in a soddin' field down south, but it was better than

Turf Lodge. He saw the decay of the pavement and the roadway of the Drive; he

saw damp rotted windowframes of the houses,

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**he saw the neglect in the overgrown front gardens. The house in the Drive in

Turf Lodge was a prison when set against the freedom of his caravan in a field beside the canal at Vicarstown. There were no trees here for his companion the

kestrel. At the far end of the Drive he saw the foot patrol approaching, four on each pavement, moving warily. He saw the hackles on their berets, and thought

it an act of insolence by the soldiers to wear the red and white feathers that would make a splash of colour for a sniper to aim at. He had never wondered where the soldiers hailed from, whether they had been kids in another faraway rotting estate that was no different to Turf Lodge. He had never imagined the soldiers as being anything other than cold bastards in uniform with a Self Loading

Rifle tight in their khaki‐gloved fists. He knew that sometimes the soldiers were

frightened, that sometimes they were arrogant; he knew that always the soldiers

were his enemy. A woman came out of Number 11, and was pushing a pram and

had three more kids with her. She set off towards the patrol and when she came

to the lead soldier she walked straight on as if he didn't exist. The soldier hesitated and made room for her. The woman didn't see the soldier, nor the other three behind him, and she walked straight ahead, and the last soldier in the

stick gave her a sign that wasn't for victory, but he stepped out of her way.

As McAnally walked down the slope of the Drive, he closed on the approaching

patrol. The soldiers had a stuttering movement. Jogging, crouching, lying flat and

splayed in the aim position, up again and sprinting. Trying to create an absence

of a pattern. Sniping wasn't McAnally's job, never had been, so he reckoned it wouldn't have been easy to take one of them out, difficult to bead on the ducking, bobbing, weaving figures. He took his cue from the woman with the pram. He passed the first soldier without a glance. He stared straight in front of

him. He smelled the stale damp sweat of the soldier play at his nose.

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`You, here . . .'

McAnally heard the officer's command. Bastard Brit officers always had the same

voice, always bloody shouted. He thrust his hands deeper into his pockets and walked on. The second soldier in the line was bent low against a lamp post. His

face never turned to McAnally as he covered the roof‐tops and the upper

windows of the street. The soldier spoke from the side of his mouth. North country England, and a snarl from the side of his mouth.

`You. Fart face. My officer's calling you.'

McAnally stopped, looked around him. The officer was on the other side of the Drive, standing with his arms folded, waiting for him. The soldiers in the patrol had scattered and taken cover. The officer carried a rifle. He was distantly familiar to McAnally.

`Here, please . . .' A voice of authority. McAnally bit at his lip, and started across the roadway.

The officer looked at him. Not hostile, just careful. Examined him.

`My name's Ferris, Bravo Company 2 R.R.F. My platoon works Turf Lodge ... I don't know you.'

`Sean McAnally.'

`Roisin McAnally, of 63 . . .'

`That's my wife.'

Ànd where are you when you're not at home, Mr McAnally?

'Down south.'

He remembered the name and he remembered the face. The road block of two

nights before. McAnally shivered, his breath was spewing in front of his face.

Under his tunic and his flak jacket Ferris wore a heavy knit sweater. Bastard would be warm enough. Bastard wouldn't be hurrying.

`Work down south?

'Kind of.'

Ì hope you'll be able to stay with us till Christmas, be nice for the lady and the

children.'

`Suppose it would.'

Ìt's a cold morning, Mr McAnally. You should have wrapped up better. Nice to have met you . . .'

The officer, Ferris, walked on. The patrol materialized from their hiding places.

McAnally set off again for the end of the Drive. He loathed himself for his fear, and the bastard officer had seen it and had cracked his little private joke about a

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cold morning. When he turned round the patrol had almost reached the bend in

the Drive.

On his way to his rendezvous he went past the barricade at the Andersonstown

R.U.C. station. Shit, the place had been well drubbed since he had been active.

Smashed up and patched. Dirty, shitty place behind the screens and the wire netting and the concrete sentry boxes and the high tin gates. The wire netting was for him: The wire netting was to explode the armour‐piercing charge of a rocket propelled grenade.

But he had said no to the men who had come to his house to get him back into

the Organization. And because he had said no, he was on his way to meet with

the Chief, with the Commander of the Belfast Brigade.

He walked past the sentry box. He wondered if it was a rifle or a stub‐barrelled

carbine that covered him from behind the aiming slits. It was one thing to turn down a messenger. It was a different thing to spit in the face of the Chief.

The gates of the Milton cemetery on his right were open wide. Inside were the stones, and far away on the reverse slope and hidden by the stones of crosses and Jesuses and Marys was the Republican plot. That's where they all were, in that plot, all the Volunteers and the Company Officers and the Battalion Officers