Harry's Game

Chapter 8

Harry spent a long time getting himself ready to go out that Saturday night. He bathed, and put on clean clothes, even changing his socks from the ones he’d been wearing through the rest of the day, took a clean shirt from the wardrobe and brushed down the one suit he’d brought with him. In the time that he’d been in Belfast he had tried to stop thinking in the terms of an army officer, even when he was on his own and relaxed. He attempted to make his first impulses those of the ex-merchant seaman or lorry driver that he hoped to become. As he straightened his tie, though, he allowed himself the luxury of thinking that this was a touch different from a mess night with the rest of the regiment at base camp in Germany.

He’d spent a difficult and nearly unproductive first week. He’d visited a score of firms looking for driver’s work with no success till Friday when he had come across a scrap merchant on the far side of Andersonstown. There they’d said they might be able to use him, but he should come back on Monday morning when he would get a definite answer. He had been in the pub on the corner several times, but though he was now accepted enough for him to stand and take his drink without the whole bar lapsing into a silent stare none of the locals initiated any conversation with him, and the opening remarks he made to them from time to time were generally rebutted with non-committal answers.

It had been both hard and frustrating, and he felt that the one bright spot that stood out was this Saturday night. Taking Josephine out. Like a kid out of school and going down the disco, you silly bugger. At your age, off to a peasant hop. As he dressed himself he began to liven up. One good night out was what he needed before the tedium of next week. Nearly six days gone, and not a thing to hook on to. Davidson said three weeks and something ought to show. Must have been the pep talk chat. He came down a little after seven and sat in the chair by the fire in the front room that was available to guests. He was on his own. All the others scurried away on Friday morning with their bags packed and homes to get to after a half-day’s work at the end of the week. Not hanging about up here, not in the front line.

When the doorbell rang he slipped quickly out into the hall, and opened the door. Josephine stood there, breathing heavily.

‘I’m sorry I’m late. Couldn’t get a bus. They’ve cut them down a bit, I think. I’m not very late, am I?’

‘I think all the buses are on the scrap yards up the road, stacks of them there, doubles and singles. I’d only just come down. I reckon you’re dead on time. Let’s go straight away.’

He shouted back towards the kitchen that he was on his way out, that he had his key, and not to worry if he was a bit late.

‘How do we get there?’ he asked. ‘It’s all a bit strange to me moving about the city still, especially at night.’

‘No problem. We’ll walk down to the hospital, get a cab there into town, and in Castle Street we’ll get another cab up the Crumlin. It’s just a short walk from there. It won’t take long, we’ll be there in forty-five minutes. It’s a bit roundabout, that’s all.’

In Ypres Avenue the man and his wife were making their final preparations to go out. There had been an uneasy understanding between them since their talk in the early hours after his homecoming, and no further word on the subject had been spoken. Both seemed to accept that the wounds of that night could only be healed by time and silence. She had lain in bed the first three mornings waiting for the high whine of the Saracens, expecting the troops to come breaking in to tear her man from their bed. But they didn’t come, and now she began to believe what he had told her. Perhaps there was no clue, perhaps the photokit really did look as little like him as she, his wife, believed. Her mother was busying herself at the back of the house round the stove, where she kept a perpetual pot of freshened tea. All the children were now in bed, the twins complaining that it was too early. To both of them the evening was something to look forward to, a change from the oppressiveness of the atmosphere as the man sat about his house, too small for privacy or for him to absent himself from the rest of the family. It had been laid down by his superiors that he was not to try to make contact with his colleagues in the movement, or in any way expose himself to danger of arrest. It meant long hours of waiting, fiddling time uselessly away. Already he felt restless, but hurrying things was futile. That’s how they all got taken, going off at half-cock when things weren’t ready for them. Not like London. All the planning was there. No impatience, just when it suited and not a day earlier. Boredom was his great enemy, and the need was for discipline, discipline as befits the member of an army.

With his wife on his arm, and in her best trouser suit, he walked up his street towards the hut with the corrugated-iron roof that was the social club. He could relax here, among his own. Drain his pints. Talk to people. It was back to the ordinary. To living again.

By the time Harry and Josephine arrived at the club, it was nearly full, with most of the tables taken. The girl said she’d find somewhere to sit, and he pushed his way towards the long trestle tables at the far end from the door where three men were hard at it in their shirt sleeves taking the tops off bottles and pouring drinks. Harry forced his way through the shoulders of the men standing close to the makeshift bar, made it to the front and called for a pint of Guinness and a gin and orange.

As he was struggling back to the table where Josephine was sitting he saw a man come up to her and gesture towards him. After they’d spoken a few words he’d nodded his head, smiled at the girl and moved back towards the door.

‘Someone you know?’ he said when he sat down, shifting her coat onto the back of the seat.

‘It’s just they like to know who’s who round here. Can’t blame them. He wanted to know who you were, that’s all.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘Just who you were, that’s all.’

Everything was subdued at this stage of the evening, but the effects of the drink and the belting of the four-piece band and their electrically-amplified instruments began to have a gradual livening effect. By nine some of the younger couples were ignoring the protests of the older people and had begun to pile up the tables and chairs at the far end of the room to the bar, exposing a crude, unpolished set of nail-ridden boards. That was the dance floor. The band quickened the tempo, intensified the beat. When he felt that the small talk they were making was next to impossible, Harry asked the girl if she’d like to dance.

She led the way through the jungle of tables and chairs. Near the floor Harry paused as Josephine slowed and squeezed by a girl in a bright-yellow trouser suit. It was striking enough in its colour for Harry to notice it. Then, as his eyes moved to the table where she was sitting, he saw the young man at her side.

There was intuitive, deep-based recognition for a moment, and Harry couldn’t place it. He looked at the man, who stared straight back at him, challenging. Josephine was out on the floor now waiting for him to come by the girl in yellow. He looked away from the face that was still staring back at him, holding and returning his glance, mouthed an apology and was away to the floor. Once more he looked at the man, who still watched him, cold and expressionless — then Harry rejected the suspicion of the likeness. Hair wrong. Face too full. Eyes too close. Mouth was right. That was all. The mouth, and nothing else.

The floor pounded with the motion of a cattle stampede — as it seemed to Harry, who was used to more ordered dances at the base. At first he was nearly swamped, but survived after throwing off what decorum he had ever learned as he and Josephine were buffeted and shoved from one set of shoulders to another. Sweat and scent were already taking over from the beer and smoke. When the band switched to an Irish ballad he gasped his relief, and round them the frenetic movements slowed in pace. He could concentrate now on the girl close against him.

She danced with her head back, looking up at him and talking. Looking the whole time, not burying herself away from him. She was wearing a black skirt, full and flared, so that she had the freedom to swing her hips to the music. Above that a tight polka dot blouse. The top four buttons were unfastened. There were no Josephines in Aden, no Josephines taking an interest in married transport captains in Germany.

They talked dance-floor small talk, Harry launched into a series of concocted anecdotes about the ports he’d visited when he was at sea, and she laughed a lot. Twice a nagging uncertainty took his attention away from her to where the man was sitting quietly at the table with the girl in the yellow trouser suit, glasses in front of them, eyes roving, but not talking. The second time he decided the likeness was superficial. It didn’t hold up. Face, eyes, hair — all wrong. Before he turned back to Josephine he saw the mouth again. That was right. It amused him. Coincidence. And his attention was diverted to the girl, her prettiness and inevitable promise.

The man too had noticed Harry’s attention. It had been pronounced enough to make him fidget a little in his chair, and for him to feel the hot perspiration surge over his legs inside the thick cloth of his best suit. He had seen the doorminder talk to the girl who brought him in, and presumably clear the stranger. But his nerves had calmed when he had seen Harry on the dance floor, no longer interested, but totally involved in the girl he was with. The man could not dance, had never been taught. He and his wife would sit at the table all evening as a succession of friends and neighbours came to join them to talk for a few minutes and then move on. Along the wall to the right of the door and near the bar were a group of youths, some of them volunteers in the Provisionals, some couriers and some lookouts. These were the expendables of the movement. The teenage girls were gathered round them, attracted by the glamour of the profession of terrorism, hanging on the boys’ sneers and cracks and boasts. None of the boys would rise high in the upper echelons but each was necessary as part of the supply chain that kept the planners and marksmen in the field. None knew the man except by name. None knew of his involvement.

First through the door was the big sergeant, a Stirling sub-machine-gun in his right hand. He’d hit the door with all the impetus of his two hundred pounds gathered in a six-foot run. Behind him came a lieutenant, clutching his Browning automatic pistol, and then eight soldiers. They came in fast and fanned out in a protective screen round the officer. Some of the soldiers carried rifles, others the large-barrelled, rubber-bullet guns.

The officer shouted in the general direction of the band.

‘Cut that din. Wrap it up. I want all the men against the far wall. Facing the wall. Hands right up. Ladies, where you are please.’

From the middle of the dance floor a glass curved its way through the crowd and towards the troops. It hit high on the bridge of a nose creeping under the protective rim of a helmet. Blood was forming from the wound by the time the glass hit the floor. A rubber bullet, solid, unbending, six inches long, was fired into the crowd, and amid the screams there was a stampede away from the troops as tables and chairs were thrown aside to make way.

‘Come on. No games, please. Let’s get it over with. Now, the men line up at that wall — and now.’

More soldiers had come through the door. There were perhaps twenty of them in the hall by the time the line of men had formed up, legs wide apart and fingers and palms on the wall high above their heads. Harry and the man were close to each other, separated by three others. At her table the girl in the yellow trouser suit sat very still. She was one of the few who wasn’t barracking the army with a medley of obscenities and insults. Her fingers were tight round the stem of her glass, her eyes flicking continuously from the troops to her husband.

Josephine’s table had been knocked aside in the scramble to get clear from the firing of the rubber bullet, and she stood on the dance floor interested to see what the army made of her merchant-seaman escort.

Six of the soldiers, working in pairs, split up the line of men against the wall and started to quiz each man on his name, age and address. One soldier asked the questions, the other wrote down the answers. The lieutenant moved between the three groups, checking the procedure, while his sergeant marshalled his other men in the room to prevent any sudden break for the exits.

Private David Jones, number 278649, eighteen months of his nine-year signing served, and Lance-Corporal James Llewellyn, 512387, were working over the group of men nearest the dance floor. The man and Harry were there. The way the line had formed itself they would come to the man first. It was very slow. Conscientious, plodding. The wife was in agony. Charade, that’s all. A game of cat and mouse. They had come for him, and these were the preliminaries, the way they dressed it up. But they’d come for him. They had to know.

The lance-corporal tapped the man’s shoulder.

‘Come on, let’s have you.’ Not unkindly. It was quiet in the Ardoyne now, and the soldiers acknowledged it.

The man swung round, bringing his hands down to his side, fists clenched tight, avoiding the pleading face of his wife a few feet away. Llewellyn was asking the questions, Jones writing the answers down.

‘Name?’

‘Billy Downs.’

‘Age?’

‘Twenty-three.’

‘Address?’

‘Forty-one, Ypres Avenue.’

Llewellyn paused as Jones struggled in his notebook with the blunted pencil he had brought with him. The lieutenant walked towards them. He looked hard at the man, then down into Jones’s notebook, deciphering the smudged writing.

‘Billy Downs?’

‘That’s it.’

‘We were calling for you the other morning. Expected to find you home, but you weren’t there.’

He stared into the young man’s face. That was the question he posed. There was no reply.

‘Where were you, Mr Downs? Your good wife whom I see sitting over there didn’t seem too sure.’

‘I went down to see my mother in the South. It’s on your files. You can check that.’

‘But you’ve been away a fair few days, Downs boy. Fond of her, are you?’

‘She’s not been well, and you know that. She’s a heart condition. That’s in your files and all. It wasn’t made any better when there weren’t any of you lot around when the Prods came and burned her out… and that’s in your files too.’

‘Steady, boy. What’s her address?’

‘Forty, Dublin Road, Cork.’ He said it loud enough for his wife to hear the address given. His voice was raised now, and she listened to the message that was in it. ‘She’ll tell you I’ve been there for a month. That I was with her till four days ago.’

The lieutenant still gazed into Downs’s face, searching for weakness, evasion, inconsistency. If there was fear there he betrayed none of it to the soldier a bare year older than himself.

‘Put him in the truck,’ the lieutenant said. Jones and Llewellyn hustled Downs across the room and towards the door. His wife rose up out of her chair and rushed across to him.

‘Don’t worry, girl, once the Garda have checked with Mam I’ll be home. I’ll see you later.’ And he was out into the night to where the Saracen was parked.

The two soldiers came back to the line, and the lieutenant moved away to the other end where the youths, resigned to a ride back to barracks and an interrogation session at the end of it, snapped back sullen replies to the questions.

Llewellyn touched Harry’s shoulder.

‘Name?’

‘Harry McEvoy.’

‘Age?’

‘Thirty-three.’

‘Address?’

Jones had had his eyes down on his notebook till that moment. He glanced up to hear the answer. Harry saw an expression of astonishment take hold of him, then change to suspicion, then back to bewilderment.

‘Bloody hell, what are you doing—?’

Harry’s right foot moved the seven inches into Jones’s left ankle. As the private ducked forward, caught off balance by the sudden pain, Harry lurched into him.

‘Shut your face,’ he hissed into the soldier’s ear.

Jones’s face came up and met Harry’s stare. Imperceptibly he saw the head move. A quick shake, left to right and twice.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Harry. ‘Forget it. I hope you’ll forget it.’

The last words were very quiet and straight into Jones’s ear. The men in the line, waiting to be questioned, still faced the wall; the women, sitting at their tables, were out of earshot. The exchange between Harry and Jones seemed to have passed unnoticed.

Llewellyn had been diverted by a commotion down at the far end of the hall, where four youths were half carried and half dragged towards the doorway. He was concentrating again now.

‘Come on — what’s the address?’

‘Delrosa Guest House, in the Broadway. Just up from Beachmount.’

Harry’s eyes were fixed, snake-like, on Jones.

‘Bit off course, aren’t you?’ said Llewellyn.

‘My girl’s local.’

‘Which one?’

‘In the polka dot, the dark-haired girl.’ Harry gazed past Llewellyn, his eyes never leaving Jones. Twice the younger soldier’s eyes came up from his notebook, met Harry’s, and dived back to the writing.

‘Lucky bastard,’ said Llewellyn, and moved on.

Apart from Downs, the army had taken nine youths when the officer shouted for his men to leave the club. They went out in single file, the last going out backwards with his rifle covering the crowd. As the door swung to after him a hail of empty bottles and glasses cannoned into the woodwork.

A tall man at the far end from Harry shouted a protest.

‘Now come on, folks, we can do better than that. Lob things at the bastards, yes, but not so we cover our floor with our bottles and our glasses and our beer. Now, we’re not going to let those swine spoil the evening for us. Let’s move it all back and tidy up, and see if we can’t get something out of the evening.’

It was a good effort on the part of the community leader, but doomed to failure.

Harry noticed that the girl in yellow was gone before the floor was half cleared. He shifted in his seat.

‘We can’t go yet. It’s the principle of the thing,’ said Josephine. ‘You cannot let the bastards wreck everything. What did you say to that soldier?’

‘I just tripped against him, that’s all.’

‘You’re lucky. You might have got a rifle butt across your face. There’s men taken to the barracks for less.’

The band had started up again, attempting to capitalize on the angry mood of those left behind.

Armoured cars and tanks and guns,

Came to take away our sons…

‘Will it wake up again, or is this the lot for the evening?’ asked Harry.

… Through the little streets so narrow…

‘I doubt it,’ she said, ‘but it’s best to give it a few minutes. Let’s see, anyway.’

… Cromwell’s men are here again…

‘It’s not that bad, is it?’ said Harry. ‘I heard it in the Baltic when we were working out of a Swedish port. They used to play it about every third disc. Got to quite like it. We had a mate on board who said his son was in the army here. He used to get right steamed up just listening to it.’

… The men behind the wire…

People were edging towards the door. Harry sensed there would be little more of a night out for any of them.

‘Come on, let’s quit. We don’t want to stay here for the funeral.’

‘I’m going to powder my nose, then,’ Josephine said.

‘Looks all right to me. Don’t hang about.’

She smiled, got up from the table and went out through a side door where a gaggle of girls younger than Josephine had gathered. The band was still trying, but was competing with a wave of talk particularly from a large group that had gathered round a local primary schoolteacher who was taking down the names of all those lifted by the military. He was promising to go round to the barracks to see what had happened to them.

It was a cold clear night as Harry, with Josephine on his arm, walked out of the hall and off towards the all-night taxi rank for the drive down to Castle Street. Then there would be another taxi, and a walk up the last part of the Falls to Mrs Duncan’s.

Harry and Josephine were naked, entwined and asleep, when 275 miles to the south the Garda squad car drew up outside the stone terraced house in the Dublin Road in Cork. There was the sharp mustiness of the docks in the pre-dawn air, as the two policemen fumbled their way from the car to the front doorstep.

‘It’s a sod of a time, God help us, to be getting this poor dear out of her bed.’

The sergeant rang the door bell, twice and firmly, and waited. A light came on upstairs, not fast, then in the hall, and after that the noise of the bolts in the door grating open.

‘From the sound of it you’d think she’d got the Bank of England in there,’ muttered the sergeant into his gloves.

‘Good morning, my love. I’m sorry to be coming at such a time as this to wake you. But a message has come down over the telephone from Dublin and I’m to ask you some questions. Won’t take a moment now. Shall we come on in, out of that wind?’

‘We’ll do what business you have here. You should be ashamed of yerselves coming at this time…’

‘That’s not our affair, my love. Now, are you ready? We want to ask you when was your boy last here.’

‘Billy, you mean?’

‘That’s the lad, love. That’s the one they want to know about.’

‘He was down till the middle of the week. Been here a month, and just gone back. Why do you need to come at this time of night to ask that?’

‘You’re sure of that now, my dear? No mistakes?’

‘Of course I’m sure. Billy was here for a month. And those are bloody silly questions to be asking at this time of night.’

She closed the door on them. The two Garda men knocked at the next-door house and again waited for the door to open. They took away the same message. Billy Downs had been there for a month.

The alibi had been passed on to the old lady and her four immediate neighbours some forty-five minutes before the police car had arrived. The wife’s phone call to a friend of her man in Belfast had started the chain. Another call had been made to Dublin, another one from there to Cork, and a young man who had left his car two streets away from the Dublin Road had completed the process. The Provisionals’ lines of communication were somewhat faster than the complicated and official process of liaison between North and South.

Downs had been interrogated twice, maintaining quietly and without fuss that he had been at his mother’s in the South. He was kept apart from the other prisoners with the officers who had questioned him unsure whether they ought to have pulled him in or not. They heard at 5.30 the results of the checks in Cork, gave him back his coat and his tie and his shoes and told him to get away home.