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And then I saw my first casualty of war, a few feet away. One arm was sticking out from under a blanket on a stretcher that lay on the ground. A woman’s arm, her nightdress melted onto her flesh. Seánie put a hand over my eyes. I shook him off.

—Let him look, my uncle told him.

I looked. The arm of the woman, her hand with its painted nails, skin hanging from the elbow to the wrist like a torn sleeve. We passed very close to her. The shape of the head underneath the fabric, her chest and then nothing, the blanket sagged from around the level of her waist. No legs left. In the street a newspaper vendor was selling the
Belfast Telegraph
. He was yelling about the hundreds dead, the thousand wounded. As for me, I saw an arm. I didn’t cry. I did the same as everyone else who passed. I touched my index and middle fingers to my forehead, chest, left shoulder, right shoulder. In the name of the Father and all the others. I decided to no longer be a child.

On Jennymount Street there was a man playing the piano, sitting on a wooden chair. The instrument had been rescued from the blaze and pulled outside, with its film of ash and debris. A few children had drawn near, their mothers with them, and some soldiers, too. I knew that song. I’d often heard it on Irish radio. ‘Guilty’, a love song.

If it’s a crime then I’m guilty, guilty of loving you ...

The musician was making faces. Winking. He was imitating Al Bowlly, the Killybegs girls’ favourite singer.

—Pity he isn’t Irish, my mother had said one day.

—Good job he isn’t, my father had responded.

And he would turn the dial on the radio that sat on the counter of Mullin’s. It was a game they played. My father would have challenged Bowlly at singing if he could, him with his gravelly voice, Bowlly with his honey.

—The voice of a eunuch, Padraig Meehan used to say.

He was wrong, and he knew it. But nothing British was allowed to offend our ears. Neither order nor song.

London was bombed two days after Belfast, on 17 April. Al Bowlly died in his home, blown up by a parachute mine. His ballad was aired on the BBC as a funeral hymn.

In front of a gutted house on the Crumlin Road, a crowd was gathered around several firemen. They weren’t wearing firemen shoes and their coats were drenched by the fire hoses.

—Those are Irishmen from Ireland! a man shouted.

Their captain was giving curt orders. I immediately recognized an accent from my country. I saw the Dublin Fire Brigade truck. Irishmen. Thirteen fire brigades had crossed the border in the morning, from Dundalk and Drogheda, too. The residents were offering them coffee and bread. Irishmen. I went closer. I wanted everyone to know that they were from my country. Each time a passer-by joined the crowd I would tell them the good news. The Irish had come to help. I could see the border soldier with his blond moustache and his thin lips. I replayed the scene.

—Have you come to fight the Jerries?

—You bet!

An old woman arrived with her arms in the air like a prisoner. She had mistaken the Dublin accent for a German one. She was removing debris from her house. She was groggy, covered in soot and bits of plaster. When people pointed out the Irish fire engine she sat down on the pavement, shaking her head, convinced now that the blast of the bombs had thrown her to the other end of the country.

The crowd was spilling into the street. A few soldiers broke it up. They pushed a journalist from the
Belfast Telegraph
away and confiscated his camera. Ireland was neutral and its presence here, assisting a combatant country, even just fighting fires, could embarrass the Irish government. Our firemen went back across the border the same day.

Our sadness turned to anger. I listened to the crushed city, the fragmented discourse. ‘I never did like washing the windows. Now I’ve a good reason not to do it any more,’ a shopkeeper had written on his cracked shop window. At the corner of Victoria Street and Ann Street, perched on a breeze block, a man was shouting that Northern Ireland was unprotected. That even the least important English town had shelters, anti-aircraft defences, troops, real fire services.

—Do you know how many anti-aircraft guns we have here, do you? shouted the man.

He was waiting for a response, but most people continued on their way, ashamed to lend him an ear.

—Twenty-odd in the whole of Ulster! And anti-aircraft shelters? Four! Only four, counting the public toilets on Victoria Street! And spotlights? How many? Eh? How many beams for tracking the planes? A dozen! There were over two hundred bombers last night, Fritz’s best, eh? Junkers! Dorniers! And as for us, what did we have?

—Damned papist! a guy passing yelled without turning.

The speaker shook his fist at him.

—Imbecile! I’m a loyal Protestant! British like you! A member of Coleraine’s Orange Order, so spare me your lecture!

And then he got down from his breeze block. He pulled up the collar of his jacket and put his limp hat back on while muttering once more:

—Imbecile!

A Protestant. It was the first time in my life I’d seen one.

3

Killybegs, Sunday, 24 December 2006

I have often come back to Killybegs, to my father’s house. Even now there is still no electricity or running water. I left the cottage as it was. In memory of my mother, crouched before the fireplace, rekindling the embers, hands cupped around her lips, and of my father, sitting at the table, fists under his chin, waiting for the rain to stop.

My wife Sheila never liked coming here with me. She used to say that the house was a tomb. That Padraig Meehan’s evil shadow flickered across my face when I was under his roof. My brothers and sisters never came back. United States, England, Australia, New Zealand. Apart from baby Sara, they all opted for exile. So I kept the key. I alone. I kept it as though protecting some scrap of memory. Since the Sixties it’s here I have always come to take refuge. To escape Belfast, the city, the fear, the British. To cross the border, find the Ireland that still belongs to our flag. I come from time to time, for a few days or a few weeks, to draw the water from the well, to shiver in front of the black hearth. To walk in the forest and gather the armful of wood for the night. To be startled by nothing but the crackling of the fire. I put a new coat of whitewash on the thick walls. I repaired the slate roof. I chopped down the old diseased elm tree, but kept the huge fir. Over all these years, with nothing to hurry me, fearing nobody, I came here on retreat. A hermit, a monk from our monasteries, a recluse.

I have often come back to my father’s house, but when I arrived here four days ago, I came to die. Without my wife, without my son. Alone, off a bus from Dublin. Sheila joined me two days later, for an hour. She brought me supplies, beer, vodka, Seánie’s hurley, and then she left again to go back to Belfast. I didn’t want her to stay. Too dangerous. Jack should be coming to see me in early January.

On the kitchen wall I drew a rough calendar in black pencil, similar to the ones we used to make in prison so as not to lose track of time: 24 December 2006. One stroke per day and a cross through each week. For the first three days I managed to stay inside. The cottage had become my den. I barricaded the door from the inside, blocking the handle with a plank. Sheila had sewn me some dark curtains. At night, I drew them carefully before lighting my candles.

My wife and son had begged me to avoid Mullin’s. They feared for my life. They were right, no doubt. After three days shut away in my father’s house, though, I gave up hiding.

That morning, I walked into the village to buy a notebook and some pens. I have the urge to write. Not to confess, and certainly not to offer explanations, but to recount, to leave a trace. Then I walked along the harbour, the bog, along the edge of the wintery forest. I was just an old man, cap down over my eyes and wearing a jacket that has seen better days. Nobody would recognize me as Meehan the traitor. Not even that bastard Timmy Gormley, who had never budged from the street he grew up on, and who would surely die one day crossing it with shuffling footsteps.

I called Sheila on my mobile phone.

—Someone will recognize you. Go back to the cottage, my wife begged.

She wanted to live with me here, in spite of everything. But I refused. Too risky. Belfast had become stifling for her, so she had gone to Strabane to stay with a friend.

—They’ll come, she whispered.

Of course, they will come. They had already come, for that matter. When I arrived here, I cleaned off the word ‘Traitor!’ that was smeared in black tar over the whitewashed wall. But what am I meant to do? Wait in Belfast, or here, behind the curtains of the house or in front of my pint in the pub, what difference will it make? They will come, I know that.

I had decided. Every evening, I’ll walk through the door of Mullin’s, drink the Guinness my father drank, sit at his round table against the wall, between the dartboard and the jacks. My father’s window, his doorway, his drunken front steps. Today, even my first pint was for him. I drank it with my eyes closed. And then I looked around the pub. Everything had changed; nothing had changed. It was smaller than in my schoolboy’s memory. The smells had lost their intensity. Posters had replaced the framed drawings on the walls. The voices were softer, the laughter absent. But on the floor, close to the table, you could see the mark from the old stove that used to be crammed with turf. The wooden floor still bore the scuffs of old footfalls, spilled drinks, cigarette burns. Shards of our past were everywhere.

I felt good. I took the
sliotar
out of my pocket, the hurling ball Tom Williams had given me sixty years previously. When he threw it to me one night in the middle of the street it was white, almost new. He had used it once, in a friendly match against an Armagh team. The captain from the opposing team was fifteen years old. He and his lads had hammered Belfast. As a tribute to the losing team they had signed the
sliotar
and given it to Tom as a gift. Today the names were worn away. The ball was the colour of slate after rain. The leather was flaking and the seams were split, like the wrinkled skin of an old man. Inside, the cork was black and hard as a peat briquette. It wasn’t even round any more, or smooth, or even a ball at that. A burst prune. The talisman of a condemned man.