The Whore-Mother (4 page)

McManus felt the warning in his silence. He was being taken to a court, he was certain. His sister would get his letter in the morning if the postman didn't lose it throwing away all that paper in the postbox, and in the evening she would read in the
Telegraph
that a man had been found in a ditch, a black hood over his head. Another IRA execution, the
Telegraph
would explain. Sickly, he walked to the car. If he ran, they would wound him from behind and have to shoot him more than once. If it was a court, it would all be over in one shot. He would probably be crying as he turned his back to wait for it. He wanted to cry now and fought it away. Everything was pointless—fear, grief, tears, regret, contempt. He tried to suffocate thought and scarcely felt the granite sidewalk under his feet and did not see the car when they came to it.

“I'll drive,” Powers said. “Up wi me, Danny. In the back, McManus.”

McManus was not aware of Powers' self-consciously searching stare. He was not aware of anything till they were passing through Castle Junction in the center of the city. It came to him slowly that if he was on his way to meet a court, they would not be here. He paid attention.

Royal Avenue, York Street, Duncairn Gardens, the Antrim Road. The whole trip was one of those malignant acts of gleeful Irish sadism. They'd already had their court and he was destined for a ditch beyond the edge of the city. Why else was Callaghan sitting sideways, watching him like a cat? They were going to drive him to the execution ground past his own home. They liked sadistic symbolism. Symbology, one of those glass-eyed American specialists in Irish affairs called it in a book in his last course at Queens.

But they turned into Cliftonville Road, into Manor Street, down Crumlin to Agnes Street, and out of Agnes onto Shankill. They went up the length of Shankill, turned on Woodvale, and came back.

“Under your seat, McManus,” Powers said. “Put your hand down.”

When his hand touched the gun in its sacking, he knew what it was all about and slid his hand between his thighs to hide its shaking. He heard Powers mutter something to Callaghan but couldn't tell what it was. He hadn't been listening anyway.

When he straightened up, Callaghan'S jacket bulged towards him like a tent peak. The man was grinning.

“Pick yourself two Shankill Protestants, McManus. At the corner of Northumberland,” Powers said, and there was gloating challenge in his voice.

It didn't take brains to work it out. He hadn't covered his thoughts well enough. They were like animals tasting the moving air, fearful always of treachery, dissent, doubt, and they dealt with them or with what they suspected with the paranoid ruthlessness of gnawing insecurity. Sidelong he watched the tent peak in Callaghan's jacket and lifted the gun to his knees.

The street was crowded. Some idle walker was about to die because men who killed with ease and without conscience wanted to examine the state of his mind. He put his hand through the hole in the canvas bag around the gun, released the safety, and curled his finger on the trigger. His back was tight in the corner of the back seat. There was no finesse in this sort of thing. The window was down. He had to press hard against the door behind him, use the gun as an extension of a pointing left arm, and squeeze for one quick burst. That, or sit under Callaghan's gun till they got him to the edge of town. Then they would kill him. They would tell him they were sorry, but it was for “Ireland One Nation, and this is no time for treachery.” They were haunted by treachery.

He wanted to live. The yearning to live burned in his chest like oncoming indigestion.

“The Boyne Water,” he said. His throat was rough and tight. The pub was three hundred yards ahead, on their left, and only a quick jump from the right turn that gave them a short run along Northumberland and back into the Falls. There were always lounging corner-boys on the corner of Agnes Street. There was nothing in his head.

He could see The Boyne Water a hundred yards ahead. There were half a dozen young men leaning against the building on the corner. If it had to be them or him, it would be them.

“Go,” he said, and Powers whipped the car out of its line of traffic and back again, ahead of three obstructing cars. In his corner-eyed vision, McManus saw a scruffy shambling figure step out of the front door of the pub. There was a clear line of fire to the wino and the men on the corner were covered by women walkers. He lifted the gun, put his burst into the blocked doorway where the drunk stood looking foolishly about him, his limp hands dangling chest high. The gun dropped to the floor, the car seemed to lift its front end off the ground, and McManus, facing across the seat, was heaved forward on his face as Powers took it into the right-hand turn, weaving and roaring in second through the traffic into the Falls. There wasn't time for the sounds of the street to be rearranged by a scream. All McManus saw was the drunk lurching backwards into the doorway as if he had been pushed. That was all. There wasn't time to see him fall. Killing was so easy.

“One bloody drunk,” Powers said.

They got off the Falls Road into the little streets at a discreet speed and stopped at their front door. “Clean the gun,” Powers said, and took the car away to be dumped. Clean the gun. First things first. He
was
a wino, McManus assured himself. He
looked
like a wino, he said. I
think
he looked like a wino, he told himself, and cleaned the gun while Callaghan watched him curiously.

“The fuckin street was packed and you pick one bloody drunk,” Callaghan said, and spat into the range.

Killing a wino in the street—if he was a wino—wasn't a small thing, but then, neither was a shot in the back of the head. And he had after all picked the wino, if he was a wino. His line of fire was blocked to the men on the corner of Agnes Street by women and families walking. Killing them would have been better political provocation than a miserable wino, but his own life had to be lived after it was saved. He couldn't shoot them. But the drunk wasn't enough. They'd both made that clear. A kind of throw-away? A lame evasion? “One bloody drunk.” Powers was away reporting. He knew that. They sent men on operations to test a suspected failure of nerve or loyalty. If it was only nerve, they sent him south to rest. If it was loyalty, they sent him to the ditch. “One bloody drunk,” Powers' report would say. He was for the ditch and Callaghan was watching him like a hungry cat.

When Powers took two hours to come back and brought with him two men McManus had never seen, he knew the wino wasn't enough.

“You're movin,” Powers said. “They'll take you.”

In the past, after any operation in which he had been involved, he had always moved on his own. Now he was moving under what was in effect an escort, and his escort didn't speak to him. When he got to his new hiding place in the Markets, there were two other men in the house. They didn't speak to him. They didn't look at him. He felt his own stuffing turn to lard and didn't try to speak to them. They pointed to his bed.

He didn't sleep. The signs spun in his head. These four men in the Markets treated him as if they could shoot him a lot more readily than give him the time of day. That made nine people who knew he was a question mark. If nine people knew, it wouldn't be long before a lot more people knew, and who would trust him? They'd refuse to work with him or be known to him. That's what the rank and file did when they wanted a man put away. If he was distrusted he couldn't survive. A question mark who was picked up by the army or the Royal Ulster Constabulary would name names and places to save his own skin. Even though he didn't know much, it would be too much. In this violent machine there was neither time nor room nor inclination to make fine distinctions: questions were dangers; stop the questioners and remove the dangers. The rules of evidence were for bloody Englishmen trying bloody Englishmen. If you can't be certain, make certain: that was the rule here. His mind ran hopelessly over his blunders.

He was moved again on the second day, from the Markets to a house in Ardoyne. These new men talked no more than the others. There was about all of them something he hadn't noticed about his countrymen when he knew only his middle-class Catholic and Protestant neighbors and friends outside the ghettos. Even in repose, even when they were bubbling with the charm and humor that wore thin on sustained acquaintance, there was about them a disturbing atmosphere of impending eruption. He learned quickly that words and looks and attitudes which were part of the daily commerce of middle-class life could provoke in these men in the midst of laughter the most violent offense. It was as if there was in them a lurking watchful hysteria. Even the withdrawn coldness of his guards in the Markets and here in Ardoyne was like a fuse waiting for a match.

The match came the night he arrived at the house in Ardoyne. He was taken to a back room. The window was boarded up. There were two palliasses on the floor, and two kitchen chairs; nothing else. The door was locked behind him. He had not spoken a word, or been spoken to, for twenty-four hours, except to say, in the Markets, “I need to go to the water closet.” In this house he would be able to say bathroom. He had seen the bathroom on his way upstairs.

About an hour after he lay down on his straw mattress they brought a boy to the room and pushed him inside. His right eyebrow was split and bleeding. His nose was bent and bleeding. He was, McManus thought, about fifteen. His crossed wrists were tied very tightly behind his back. He was sobbing.

The man who brought him stood in the doorway and looked at them both. He was rigid with cold fury. “Coupla dirty cunts,” he said, and slammed and locked the door.

The boy sat down heavily in one of the chairs. The impact hurt his beating head and he cried without restraint. “I niver done it, mister,” he said pathetically.

“You never did what?”

“I niver spied for the sojers.”

“What did you do?”

“I ony talk t'them, y'know? They give me a few fags. M'da was a sojer. I jist like the army, y'know? But I wudn't tell on these boys.”

“I know.”

“They didn't bate you yet?”

“Not yet.”

“What'd you do?”

“I thought.”

“My hans are awful sore.”

They were purple. The cords were cutting the boy's wrists. McManus worked at them patiently in the darkened room till they were untied. “Lie down,” he said, and lay down himself.

The boy's voice had a peculiar nasal tone. “I think they broke my nose,” he said, and cried again. “My ma'll be outa her head. They come and got me outa the house.”

“Did they beat you in front of her?”

“Aye. She was on her knees t'them and her legs is bad. When she gets down she can't get up. Y'know?”

“I know.”

“Holy God.” It gathered up all his terrors, for himself and his mother. “M'da's dead,” he said desolately. “O, Christ Jasus, da, da, da,” he wailed in lonely misery and fear.

McManus sat up and braced himself into the angle of the wall. The light went out on the landing and the room was in total darkness. The night chill settled and he folded his arms and shrank into himself for a little warmth. There was no sound in the house except an occasional shudder and a deep sob from the boy on the straw mattress. There was no blanket to cover him. The night settled. The sounds of the street died. The boy was still. McManus dozed and woke, stirred and settled and dozed.

He woke suddenly, angry from a dream of his father being beaten by Powers. His father's nose was broken. His mother was kicked when she tried to help him. His sister was thrown deep into water that was ill-defined in the dream but as dreams are, he knew it was Belfast Lough. He woke to her cries and couldn't help her.

The black was pitch. He was deeply chilled. His anger transferred itself from the abusers in his dream to his own pathetic and passive attempts at self-preservation. In the dark chill his fury grew and warmed him. He fought for his school, he fought for his university. Last year he fought for his country when they smashed America's golden gloves team and put them in order to the canvas. But he kept a self-preserving stillness and silence among these psychotic scum. His anger boiled till he sweated. He went to sleep without knowing it, still packed into the angle of the corner walls.

When the door slammed back against the wall behind it, he threw up his arms defensively. The boy did not wake. A man was standing in the light of the door, fitting a light bulb into the empty socket in the ceiling. He switched on the light. Neither light nor sound woke the boy. Two men stood on the landing, looking in.

The man in the room kicked the boy in the leg. He woke suddenly, confused, half-blind, cowering. “Sit in the chair,” the man said.

“Yes, mister.” The boy put his hands to the mattress for support, and made little sounds of pain. “Oh, m'wrists,” he said.

“Who took the cord off?” the man said without looking at McManus.

McManus said, “I did. They were cutting him. Look at his wrists.”

“Where's the cord?”

“In my pocket.”

“Throw it t'me.”

“No.”

The man grinned, spreading it across his face like an infection. “That's the way of it, is it?”

The boy was sitting in a chair, his head hanging.

The man said to him, “What'd you tell the sojers and when you talk to me look at me.”

The boy raised his head to speak and the man shot a vicious right into his mouth. The chair tilted backwards, the boy gave out a choked and terrified sound, and boy and chair-back went over onto McManus.

“Shove him back,” the man said. “Come on, shove the lyin wee cunt up here.”

McManus tilted the boy gently from the chair to the mattress and pushed the chair aside. He got up slowly, picked up the other mattress, and covered the boy.

“What the fuckin hell d'y think you're doin?”