Return to Killybegs (37 page)

For Sheila Meehan, who will have need of it
, Mother had written.

The neighbour had found her like that. The doctor said that she hadn’t died of anything. She was dead, and that was all.

—To die, all you have to do is ask, my mother often said.

When I opened our front door to leave, Sheila didn’t move.

Don’t turn around, Tyrone. Don’t look at another thing. Close your life without any noise. The night. My street. My neighbourhood. The first drunks making a racket in the distance. The litter being plastered against my legs by the wind and rain. The smell of Belfast, that delicious nausea of rain, earth, coal, darkness and misery. All that silence won back in the absence of weapons. All that peace returned. I passed my local pubs, my tracks, my footsteps. I pushed open the gate to the square where the memorial to the 2nd Battalion of the Belfast Brigade had been erected. The flag took the wind as though flying from a ship mast. On the black marble was the list of our martyrs.

Vol. Jim O’Leary

1937–1981

Killed in action

I said his name aloud. And the others as well.

Engraved silhouettes stood either side: two IRA soldiers, heads high, hands resting on their rifle butts, a canon at their feet. With a finger, I stroked the stone to hear it. When I was a child I would listen, palm against the bark, to my father’s old elm tree and huge fir tree. I used to question the warm, blackened bricks of the fireplace, and the greasy pine that covered Mullin’s. I believed I was a sorcerer.

I rang. Mike O’Doyle opened the door. He saw my bag. He nodded.

—I’m coming, he told me.

He didn’t ask me in.

Through the open living-room door, I could hear him making a phone call. Abbie, my wee goddaughter, half-opened the curtain. She must have been kneeling on the couch. She saw me, recognized me, gave me a little wave, smiling.

—It’s Tyrone!

I could read my name on her lips.

Mike was facing the wall, telephone at his ear. He was pulling on his jacket with one hand. The wee one tapped the windowpane with her finger. She signalled me to come in, beckoning with her fingers. I shook my head. No, sweetheart. It’s late. I can’t. I pulled her favourite funny face, hand miming a telescope at my eye and a pirate’s grin filled with my ruined teeth. She laughed, turned around to tell her father. He raised a hand impatiently. Then she opened the curtain more. With a sweeping gesture, she showed me the Christmas tree that was set up in the corner of the room. It was twinkling slowly. I smiled, held back a sob. What a beautiful Christmas tree, wee Abbie. I stuck my thumb up. She clapped. Mike put away his mobile phone. He came over to his daughter, looked at me. Him in that warmth, that happiness so violent. And me in my frozen night, my winter. A pane separated us. A white lace curtain, held back by a child’s hand. Mike the darkness, Abbie radiant. He who knows, and she who doesn’t.

—Our revenge will be the lives of our children.

I had said that at Danny’s graveside. And it was done, Abbie.

When Mike pulled the curtain across, over his daughter’s eyes, I closed mine. I would keep that moment. That carefreeness, that innocence, and that love for me.

The first car had parked on the pavement, lights cut, between the O’Doyles’ front door and the street, the same way the British armoured vehicles used to do when concealing an arrest. I recognized Rory, a guy from the Short Strand area. He was behind the wheel. He had left the engine running. Beside him was Cormac Malone, a member of Sinn Féin’s Ard Chomhairle and a friend from way back when. His presence reassured me. I was in the hands of the party, I hadn’t been handed over to the army. Neither of them turned around. They were looking straight ahead, as concentrated as if they were driving on a motorway in the pouring rain. Peter Bradley was sitting in the back: Pete ‘the Killer’, who had spent more time in English prison cells than in his living room.

Pete didn’t just fight the English, he hated them. For him, there was no difference between a soldier and a child. They were killing our kids? We should kill theirs. Blow for blow, grief for grief. He confused Loyalists and Protestants. Like the racists on the other side, for whom every Catholic is a potential IRA man, he’d say that no Presbyterian was innocent. Bradley was terrified by the idea of peace. War was his life. After the ceasefire, some of the other Bradleys took the dissident route, joining the handful who refused to lay down arms. He was tempted. He hadn’t done so. Even disbanded, the IRA was still his army and we were his OCs. So he just made a lot of noise in the pubs, invoking Bobby Sands and swearing that ‘those guys’ would have continued to fight.

On Friday, 17 May 1974, Peter Bradley and his fiancée Niamh were visiting Dublin. For the first time in their lives, they had crossed the border. He was twenty-one, she was nineteen. Their wedding was set for 14 September. They had visited the GPO on O’Connell Street, where Connolly and his men had proclaimed the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic at Easter 1916. They had kissed on the Ha’penny Bridge, the footbridge of lovers that straddles the Liffey. They had wandered up Grafton Street and dreamed they were rich and students. Pete had bought a pair of shoes and Niamh a white blouse. At half past five they were walking down Parnell Street when the first bomb exploded. The second blew up on Talbot Street. The third destroyed South Leinster Street. Niamh was blown to pieces, projected head first against a wall by the violence of the blast. When the firemen and the Garda Síochána arrived, Peter was comforting the dead body by trying to stick its arm back on.

One hour later, a bomb exploded in Monaghan, a town on the border. Twenty-seven dead in Dublin, seven in Monaghan. Amongst them were a pregnant woman, an Italian woman and a Jewish French woman, the daughter of camp survivors.

The Loyalist militia from the Ulster Volunteer Force had decided to bring the war to the Republic of Ireland. They had done so in their own way, without warning. They wanted to kill papists, and the British security forces were accused of having assisted them.

That day, sitting amongst blood and scraps of flesh, Peter Bradley became Pete ‘the Killer’. It would no longer be for Ireland’s liberty that he’d fight, but to avenge Niamh, his own youth and his mangled life.

Beside him in the car was Eugene Finnegan, the Bear Cub. He opened the door and stepped aside so that I could sit between them on the back seat. The warmth was stifling, but the smell of Cormac Malone’s aftershave welcomed me. It was an eau de toilette that I’d brought him back from Paris. I was clinging to the tiny details. To miniscule hopes. Why wear the aftershave I’d given him as a gift? What did he want to tell me? That I needn’t fear anything? That he was my friend? I searched out his eyes in the windscreen reflection. He had the absent gaze of someone you pass in the street.

A second car parked across the way. They exchanged a brief flash of headlights. Mike ran over and sat up front. The Bear Cub got in beside me. He jostled me, pressing me against Pete. The Killer placed a hand on my knee. He took hold of it with an animal grip. I was his prisoner and he was letting me know.

We drove through the heart of our enclaves, heading along the familiar streets. I knew them as well as you know a man. Each house had its history, every door its secret. They were giving me a sign. I was saying goodbye to them.

One evening in 1972, at this crossroads, Cormac Malone should have died. Since then, he’d close his eyes whenever he went through it. On this night, too, he turned away. The Loyalists had arrived from Shankill. They had fired at him through their open car window, driving at full speed, not concerning themselves with the old man talking to him. Cormac saw them coming. He threw himself on the old man, pushed him to the ground with his walking stick and his vegetables and covered him with his body, but it was too late. Three bullets in the back, two thousand people at the funeral. Cormac hated the survivor he had become.

In October 1974, under this streetlight on the Springfield Road, Cathy and Jim’s son Denis had been killed by a plastic bullet, shot through the embrasure of an armoured vehicle. He was going to get some milk from the shop. He died at the age of thirteen, on the pavement, a £5 note clutched in his hand.

At the end of February 1942, in that little garden, against that red Beechmount door, an IRA man had handed me my first gun.

We crossed the border at six in the morning on Saturday, 16 December 2006. Pete’s hand was tight on my knee. Cormac had slept, the Bear Cub, too – snoring lightly, his forehead against the pane. We were in the Republic of Ireland. I was returning home. The party had reserved the lounge of a Dublin hotel and booked a press conference. Sinn Féin wanted to demonstrate that the British were continuing their dirty war. After having tried to crush our resistance, they had infiltrated it and corrupted some of its members.