The Journeyman Tailor

6

It was the story that the child loved best, the story that had no ending.

"The length and breadth of Ireland, wherever men yearned to be free, they spoke the name of Shane Bearnagh Donnelly. There were few enough priests left living by the English, and they were thrown into filthy prisons and starved, and many were tortured then hanged. There was the walking gallows. A huge man, an Englishman, used to walk Ireland. He wore on his shoulders a harness on which four men at a time could be hanged. But the priests were brave in their faith, and they prayed for the safety of Shane Bearnagh…

"For year after year, Shane roamed on Altmore mountain. The men with him were gradually hunted and killed by the English, but Shane, they could never capture. More soldiers were sent to Altmore barracks that’s now in the bracken and trees where the road runs on to Pomeroy, where we get the blackberries…

"Shane took cattle from the English, and hid them up in the caves on Altmore, and the caves are still called Shane Bearnagh’s stables. Shane used to watch the soldiers searching for him from the high ground, and some old people like your Grannie would call that Shane's chair, and sometimes Shane's Sentry-box. Shane had a wife now and a fine small boy. his wife gave up her home, and she came to live with her man on the mountain, shared his dangers. He was the greatest Patriot that ever came from the mountain, and never forget that he was a Donnelly. He was cheeky with the English dragoons, he played games with them, and all they could do was curse al him from a distance..,

‘’The English farmers complained bitterly to the English soldiers; how could one man for so long outwit all their soldiers? So a new officer was sent from England to hunt Shane. His name was Black Jemmy Hamilton. He was the cruellest of all the officers who ever came to Altmore. He tried to terrorise the native Irish into betraying Shane Bearnagh, but they never knew where he was. One of Shane's tricks was to colour the coat of his horse so that they would not recognise him. One day, when Black Jemmy Hamilton was away searching with his horsemen, Shane came down to the unguarded barracks and he was fed by the wives of the English soldiers. He took everything that he wanted. It was as if the wives of the English soldiers were shamed by the way their own men behaved to the downtrodden Irish folk.

Hamilton and his soldiers came back from another wasted day on the mountain tired and angry and found that their larders were empty. His fury was terrible. All of the wives were beaten, and Hamilton swore that he would not rest until Shane Bearnagh Donnelly was captured and hanged…"

"Did they ever catch him, Ma?"

It was the story that never ended… She told him it was time for them to go to feed the cattle.

Ernest Wilkins had done it before, and he would do it again.

The afternoons of a weekend were a good time to reach the Prime Minister's aide. The Principal Private Secretary could always ensure that a brief message reached his man.

He had travelled into London from his home.

"… The Prime Minister made a quite excellent suggestion at our last meeting. I would like him to know that it is already being acted upon.

We are starting rather a vigorous programme this evening. You'll make quite certain that this is reported to him? I am very grateful

…"

All the way into London at a weekend, into the near-deserted Curzon Street building, to make one secure telephone call. It was the way he had advanced to Desk Head. Within ten minutes of entering the building he was leaving it.

It was a cold, grey day, with a mist hanging in the valley. There was a fleck of sleet in the air. They looked down from the crest of Altmore mountain.

Bren no longer smelt his own clothes, nor could he smell Cathy.

Bitterly cold in the cardboard city man's anorak, no gloves in the pockets. He could see the villages and on down to the Ballygawley road, and at the edge of his vision, before the cloud took over, were the towers and the smokier haze of Dungannon. It was a journey's end, it was where he had been volunteered to work. Beneath them the bracken and heather ran down a long way to the farmland below; the gold brown of the dead bracken and the dull dark green of the heather. There was no sign of life in the upper part of the mountainside. There were trees that were bent and stunted. His gaze shifted to lower down. The farms on the high ground were the smallest, the houses and the fields on a seemingly smaller scale. Bren knew nothing of agriculture, but it didn't take a trained eye to recognise that this was mean land. He saw a man walking with a dog along the edge of a field. He saw a car speeding along a narrow lane. Cathy passed him a pair of binoculars, the sort an ornithologist would have in his pocket on a weekend hike.

His vision roved further down the slope, larger farms, larger houses, larger fields. He found a village, then another with a tall steeple, with a graveyard behind the church, and he could see the black marble of the stones and the colour flicker ol flowers.

She slipped her arm round his waist. He felt the warmth of her, She scratched with her finger at his hip, as if she were teasing him, like tickling under a cat's chin. "Don't panic," she said. "It's only in case we're watched."

He had the Browning automatic pistol in his belt, and she had the Heckler and Koch in her hand, hidden under her anorak. "It's just like home," he said.

"Is that right?" She was grinning at him. Her head was against his shoulder.

"Stupid, but 1 can't feel the threat."

"Concentrate and listen."

She talked, and the binoculars were hard against his eyes. "The village, the top one… There was a U.D.R. man used to do a milk round, didn't think that anyone knew he did soldiering at night One day he had the flu, lucky for him, because that was the day they were going to kill him Another man did the round

He died in the street near the shop. See the bar? The shop's beside the bar. Everything was fine, though. They apologised for murdering the wrong man… Go to the top end of the village, where the bend is. That's where the S.A.S. man crashed his car. They had a guy pounding him with an A.K. sticking out through the sun-roof of their motor, real Wild West stuff. It was very sharp thinking to get his car into a ditch, gave him cover and two free hands. He did really well, he closed them down with his pistol, scared them off, hit at least one of them. We know he hit one of them because there was a stake-out, an ambush, nine months later and one of them who was killed then had scars in his gut… Got the little road, running across us, north to south? Got the bridge? They had a come-on bomb under there, eight dustbin loads of fertiliser mix.

They got the army up there and set off the secondary bomb, the killer, took a whole group of squaddies right out… Go back to the village, far side of the road, near the bar, the flagpole and the heap of rock, that's the memorial to a hunger-striker, dead before they called it off… The village down the hill, tiny place, get the church and the cemetery at the back. The big Celtic cross, that is the Republican plot, there's half a dozen of their best in there… Go on down the road, away from the village, that's where they killed three police, culvert bomb, you can't see the new tarmac from here… The guys who do the heavy stuff over in Europe, they're from here, and on the mainland too. Forget Belfast, this is where the aggravation is. Time we were off. Put the binoculars away.

Been out here too long. Just hold on to me for a moment. Try and look as though you were enjoying it. Lie back and think of England, Bren."

The heat of her body had found him. He felt a spreading fear, a growing excitement. Bren gazed down the mountain slope over her shoulder. He saw the smoke from the chimneys of the lonely and dotted farmhouses. He heard, so faintly, the shout of the man walking his dog, and the dog was two fields away and springing in pursuit of something too small for Bren to see. It was where Jon Jo Donnelly was from, the home of the man whose photograph he had seen briefly on Mr Wilkins' desk. He wondered how a man from here, the raw countryside, could survive in any city.

"Are they watching us?"

"Might be, might not be… the third or fourth time, if we were recognised again, if the vehicle became a habit, then we would be. Does that frighten you?"

"There's nothing to see to be frightened of."

"When you do see something it's probably too late. Come on, you smell revolting."

Her arm was away from his waist. He stood his ground. "Where is he?"

"Who?"

"Where's Song Bird?"

"Down there, somewhere."

She had reached him, spread the fear in him. "In God's name, how does he stand it?"

"I don't know and I don't care. It's only important to me that he keeps singing."

She snatched at his sleeve. She dragged him away.

He let her into the Subaru. "Is this where you come when you're out at night?"

"Come on," she said. "Let's get a cup of tea."

Bren drove.

In the village, on the corner by the bar, near the hunger striker's memorial, a group of youths watched them go by. Past a small and well-built school with a tarmacadam playground, and a gaelic pitch.

Prosperous bungalows on the edges of the villages. And Cathy was alert beside him. He had seen nothing that was different, out of the ordinary. She showed him where a police reservist driving a lorry had been ambushed and shot dead. He turned onto the Dungannon road and she nodded to the low wall, told him they had hidden behind it when they had waited to shoot and kill a police inspector.

She directed him through Dungannon. They crawled in the traffic jam up Irish Street and turned at the big school building, and again at the second church.

Small town anywhere. Crowded pavements loaded. Bright shop lights.

People bent with their shopping bags,

She told him where to turn.

Nothing ordinary about the army fortress.

Tall iron sheeting as far as he could see, and high above the iron screens were the watchtowers. The sentries had the car number and Cathy flashed a card. The spiked chain across the road into the barracks was dragged back and they were waved through.

There was a sudden tiredness on her face.

She told him where to park. She led him to the open sand weapons pit, cleared her weapon, waited for him to do the same.

The colonel wrapped his big arms round Cathy and kissed her forehead as if she were his favoured cousin. The adjutant had brought the tea and his eyes had lingered on Cathy, as if she was God, and had left reluctantly. Bren was introduced, perfunctorily, the decent thing and nothing more, and gestured to sit down by the wall furthest from the electric fire.

"You poor old love, how are you?"

Cathy was flopped in an armchair, legs spread, knees wide. "Tell you what, that bloody mountain is arse-bendingly cold at night."

"Hoped you'd call by…"

"Been showing my new man the countryside."

"And the other fellow…?"

"Gone home. The player who was head-jobbed was his. Asking for trouble if he'd stayed. Looking very pretty up there this afternoon

…"

Bren thought she was fighting to keep her eyes open. The colonel sat on the carpet in front of the fire and refilled Cathy's mug and stirred in the sugar.

"How's your mother?"

"Haven't heard, not in the last couple of weeks. She's not riding any more. I suppose she's petrified."

"Yes, well… Your father managing?"

"It's getting him down. I've told him to put in a manager. He’d get a top man there. But he won't hear of it. You know the trouble, I know it. He still thinks that one day I'm going to jack this lot in and take over."

"One day,"

"Never the right day, is it? Can you imagine walking away from here?"

"Not ever out of my mind. I dream of dear old Scotland. No newspapers, lousy television reception, walking and fishing and stalking. You should come up in August."

Cathy smiled sadly, "I'd love to."

"How are they when you go home?"

"They look at me, big spaniel eyes, pleading. You know Rupert, 'course you do, Rupert did the damage. After his prostate last year he went down there to rest up, and spilled the beans. Stupid prat, told them what I did. Still…"

"You could do worse."

Cathy snorted. "Certainly, be a regular at the Bath and West, trot all round the west country with the Charolais bull trying like buggery to win Best of Breed again? It would kill me… You can chase your grouse round Cromarty and do the John MacNab tiling. I could do that for about, well, once, and then I'm bored rigid…"

"Their loss, our gain."

"For Christ's sake, don't go soft."

"OK, OK… when are you back down?"

"He using the hide…" She jerked a thumb behind her. "get the new boy familiarised. Meet the player and so on."

The colonel pushed himself to his feet.

"We’re doing the Donnelly place tonight…"

Her eyes glinted, she seemed to throw off the relaxation "Oh? Why?"

Orders from on high."

She’s done nothing, Attracta."

"Orders."

"Why dosn’t anyone at Curzon Street ever ask me why we are loathed in this goddamn corner. God, I could tell them. She just happens to be married to the man."

‘’And away a long time. So it's harassing women and kids that I’m now paid for .’’There are some right pillocks we have to work for, jonny,,’’

The colonel said, "I had him in here once. A patrol had lifted him on Charlie One. He was here for an hour before the Branch came to run him down to Gough. I rather liked him. It was his attitude that tickled me. I mean, he despised me, he probably had a little plan for me, he'd have been very happy to see me blown away, yet… He seemed to regard himself as my equal. Two officers, two armies. As if. .. well, if we'd met in a bar somewhere a thousand miles away, we'd have had a good chat, beefed over our mutual tactics, broken a bottle open. What I thought at the time, he'd have made a very good company sergeant major in a good regiment. He wasn't frightened of me, and I don't mind saying it, I'm glad he's someone else's headache."

"Great mug of tea. Thanks. Come along, Brennard, I need to be driven home to kip."

She walked to the door. Bren followed. For a short moment the colonel's arm was round her shoulder, ushering her to the door.

Outside the door, she turned back to him. It was the great winning smile.

"You know what they say about you?"

"Who? Curzon Street?"

"No. The kids up on Altmore. We picked it up on one of the bugs.

They say, 'What's the last thing that'll go through Colonel Johnny’s mind?' It's their crack."

"What's the last thing that'll go through my mind?"

" They say it’s an A.K. bullet. Bye, sunshine."

"Cow."

Thought you'd get it."

She didn’t look back. There was just her muffled laugh into the anorak collar that she held tight across her face. The colonel, Jonny, caught Bren’s jacket as he made to follow her.

‘’Look after that lady. Don’t ever think of taking a liberty with her safety. If anything you did, or didn't do, endangered her, then I'll break your back,"

The officer commanding East Tyrone brigade knew, so did his intelligence officer. But by that Saturday afternoon, the word of danger had shimmered down the mountain and through the bungalows and farmsteads and Housing Executive homes. Word too travelled fast, whispered mouth to straining ear, of new risks to the men who had sworn the oath, Every man and woman on Altmore would have been able to recite the Constitution of Oglaigh na hEireann, would have known General Order 5, Part 5… "No Volunteer should succumb to approaches or overtures, blackmail or bribery attempts… Volunteers found guilty of treason face the death penalty."

There were few amongst the bungalows and farmsteads and Housing Executive homes who could have denied involvement, strong or tenuous, with the Organisation. There were sons, nephews, cousins, the children of neighbours, who were dead or imprisoned or 'away' or active. It was the life of the mountain, in the twenty-second year of the present war, that no man and no woman knew whom they could trust.

Fear ruled. See nothing, hear nothing, know nothing, was the order of survival. The men took comfort in the village bars, their women more often sought the help of Valium and librium. But drink and sedatives gave only noisy or drugged solace. Willing or dragged screaming, the community was involved. There was a family on Altmore. .. the son shot dead by the covert Special Forces, father interned in the fifties, grandfather active in the twenties and thirties, great-grandfather shooting until the barrel of his rifle was red-hot in Dublin in 1916, great-great-grandfather a part of the closed group seeking Home Rule a full century before the young man was buried under the grey cloud and the gold green slopes of the mountain. Where was escape? Escape was not possible.

Behind closed doors and closed windows and closed minds, the community of Altmore braced itself against the menace of an informer.

The O. C had begun, and she told him that it was about feckin' time, to put the new units into his wife's kitchen.

She watched him She was beside him on the kitchen linoleum and she marked by pencil the places for his power-drill to make Room for the screws and she passed the doors and frames from The packaging to his hand She knew the anxiety that hit at him, and that brought him cold and violent to her bed. She knew that he commanded the Brigade, and she knew also that the man before him was shot in an army ambush and finished with a bullet to the forehead; she had seen the pallor of the face in the coffin and the small, neatly cosmeticised hole. And the man before that was now in his twelfth year in the Kesh with more, many more, years to endure; she knew that each Sunday morning that man's wife and his child took the bus from Dungannon to the prison to make small talk with the caged bird.

She made the marks and passed the materials.

She could do nothing.

His daughter knew when the strain was at him. The Quartermaster had come in through the door, with the mud on his feet. Straight to the cupboard beside the fireplace, straight for the whiskey.

Her mother was in Dungannon, down on the bus for the weekend shop. Her mother had to go by bus because her father had been away with the car. The girl went outside and took the keys from the ignition and switched off the sidelights, and locked the car. He was pouring again when she came back into the sitting room.

She was seventeen. She did waitressing in a hotel in Dungannon. If her father were arrested again, charged again, sent to gaol again, then she might lose her job. The job was her lifeline, vital to her. Her father had been in the Kesh for four years. Between the ages of eight and twelve she had seen him only on those weekends when her mother had pushed and forced, and once punched her, onto the prison visitors' bus.

They were brilliant kids that she met working at the hotel, and the management sent her home to the mountain by taxi at night. She could not know he was the Brigade's Quartermaster, but she knew that he was again involved.

He had no work, her mother had no work. She was the oldest of four, and the only breadwinner of the family. She gave?30 each week to her mother… If she lost her job..

The glass shook from the tremble of his hand He challenged her to criticise him She couldn't know whether he had been out to move weapons, whether it had been reconnaissance, whether it had been on a hit. He was home. He felt safe in his home. The strain was from being out and abroad on the Organisation's business. She did not know whether it was the fear of being shot or the fear of being lifted that drove him to take drink as soon as he returned to that safety.

The whole of the village knew that it had been a bad summer and a worse autumn for the "boys".

Mrs Devitt bottled up inside her the shock of discovering her boy's involvement. No one of her family had ever before been in the clutches, as she would have put it, of the Organisation. Coming back on the bus from Dungannon, early in an afternoon, after doing dinner-lady duty at St Patrick's Academy, she had found him in the bath. A steaming hot bath, on a Tuesday afternoon, and the boiler going like oil was free.

There had been pictures of the bomb debris on the Ulster telly's news, a haberdashery store in Cookstown. She hadn't told her own mother, nor her sister and they had never had a secret between them, nor Vinnny's father, nor even the priest.

He lay on his bed. A Saturday afternoon, and he was a fine big fellow, and there might have been work for him on one of the farms if he cared to shift his backside and look for it She tidied around the bed.

Her son stared at the ceiling. He had nothing more to say to her now.

Men came at night, called for him. She knew some of them, didn't know most of them. He was paler than he had been before. She would not have known what to say to him, she never asked him.

The last Saturday she had heard him go out, before it was light She had heard the squeal of her front door, while her husband snored his Friday-night drink away. Since the last Saturday he had been tighter than before, as though the pressure was increasing. Each Sunday she took flowers to her brother's grave, a coronary attack, and she passed the Republican plot where the men were buried. Clear fine photographs of all of them, in then best suits, sealed into the stone. Her Vinny had a best suit, and there was on the front-room mantelpiece a clear fine photograph of him at his cousin's wedding, with a white carnation on his lapel.

She had an armful of his shirts and socks. His face was a heartbreak to her. Gerry Brannigan's wife was what they called on the mountain "a holy decent woman". Gerry Brannigan was what they called in Dungannon police barracks "the armchair Republican". She had tried to keep their youngest out of the Organisation, he had given the boy the chat and the talk that had pushed him forward.

Gerry Brannigan would have liked to have been admitted to the secrecy of the Provisionals' army, but had been rejected because he took drink. His three elder sons were away in England, on the building, his daughter was in Glasgow working as secretary to a solicitor's business. For three years Gerry Brannigan had basked in a sort of pride because his youngest son was involved. The boy's mother wanted him to "break the stick", as they said on Altmore, cut his links, but he paid her no heed.

Gerald Seymour

The Journeyman Tailor

They kept fowls in the back garden. There was a chicken coop they had made themselves, knocked up out of spare wood, and a good fence round it to keep the fox out. They were both there, Gerry and his wife, hunting for eggs in the last light of a Saturday afternoon, so that there would be scrambled egg for Sunday morning breakfast after early Mass. He saw his wife look up. She was a good woman, neat and tidy and careful with their money. He saw the sadness on her face. He followed the line of her eye. There was the face of their boy at the kitchen window. He looked haunted. He had encouraged the boy, taught him the songs and told him the folklore. And now that he saw the face of the boy, Gerry Brannigan cringed. He could see the pressure building on his awkward, snapping, bloody-minded youngest son. He felt a great guilt; Gerry Brannigan felt the danger that was alive on Altmore.

The priest called for Palsy Riordan.

He came each Saturday in the winter, when the boy was usually in the lean to garage When Patsy was cleaning the plugs or polishing the chrome of his motorcycle, the priest stood at the door and talked to his mother, and he could hear their voices.

The priest came each Saturday to ask whether the next afternoon, Patsy would rejoin the gaelic team, Under 19s. He would talk to Patsy's mother, get her encouragement and then he would go to the garage, and with his best smile he would tell the boy that there was still the need for a good defender in his team, and that the position was held open for the boy. The priest saw the way that young Patsy gazed back at him, as if he wanted to catch the line that was thrown to him, as if he was just helpless. The boy had great potential, with commitment and fitness it was the priest's belief that the boy could play for the County Tyrone team, Under-19s. This Saturday, like last Saturday, and Saturdays before, the boy just shook his head, mumbled words that Were indistinct, turned his shoulders away from the priest and hunched over his motorcycle. In the priest's eyes, young Patsy was just a silly boy.

Perhaps if he had sat down on the oil stained floor of the garage, spent an hour, two hours, talking with the boy then the priest might have melted his hostility, but he had the sick to visit and his team to collect.

The priest knew that it was said there was an informer on Altmore

…

He could only wonder how long it would be before the troops and the police swooped on the Riordan.' house and look the silly boy away.

She had lost an earring.

It was not an expensive earring, but it was gold and it held a single pearl that was real, and her mother had given it to her. The earring was important to Siobhan Nugent.

He was down at Attracta Donnelly's, where he always was at the weekend, where he said he was painting and wallpapering She could not remember when she had last had the earring Ridiculous, but it was two full days since she could last remember noting the earring. She was irritable as she searched for it, because it would have been noted in the shop that she had come out with "only one earring, gossiped over and not pointed out to her. And his mother hadn't told her, but then she saw nothing. His mother was out for the afternoon, otherwise she would have been fussing in Siobhan's way, and criticising her for her carelessness. She stripped the bed. She flapped the sheets and nothing fell clear. After she had remade the bed she went into the small bathroom and turned out the wicker basket that held the family's dirty clothes. Francis helped her, Doloures and Patrick and Mary watched the television across the hall. Back to the bedroom. She started on all of the clothes, dresses and coats that she had worn in the last two days.

There was a raised false floor to the wardrobe.

"Could have gone down here, Ma."

There was a crack at the edge of the false floor. It was the type of wardrobe that had to be assembled from a kit, and those kits were never properly satisfactory. Her Francis found it. A clever wee boy her Francis. She looked down. She saw his fingers drop into the crack, the gap. The false floor moved as the boy tugged it up.

Her Francis held up what he had found under the false floor of the wardrobe.

"What's this, Ma?"

He never talked to her about the part he played in the Organisation. She thought it was minor. She knew he had been in prison before they had met, long before they were married, because his mother had told her. His mother told her most things about her husband, she could wheedle answers to her queries from the old goat. His mother thought that it was Siobhan's fault that Mossie, her golden boy, was diving ever more inside himself, as if the weight of Altmore's granite increasingly pressured the spirit from him. His mother thought it was Siobhan's fault that rare laughter, occasional fun, was now drained from her darling.

He was away down at the 'widow' Donnelly's…

Little Francis passed her the Building Society account book.

The scream was silent in her throat. She turned the pages.

"And there's this, Ma."

Little Francis passed her the plain steel box, the size of a cigarette packet, with a red plastic button recessed into the face.

Jon Jo walked the headland. It was where he came when he could no longer abide to remain inside the small room in his landlady's house.

Hard, impossibly hard, to believe what he read in the papers, that the target was alive and was already classified as "stable".

On the headland he was closest to his Attracta and to his Kevin.

Dusk on the headland, grey light merging grey cloud with grey sea.

It was good to look out over the seascape. He thought that it brought them together. They were across the water from him, away to the west. He watched the gulls wheeling, the cormorants diving, the guillemots perching on the sprayed rocks.

He would have wanted his hand to hold Kevin's, and his arm to be round Attracta. He would have tried to give them his love. He wanted for them to be here too.

His enemies, policemen and soldiers in their thousands, those who had studied the file, would not have short-changed his intelligence. He assumed that long ago they had access to the school records at St Patrick's Academy that would have designated him as bright, good potential. There had been a question of University, something the Headmaster had once told his mother. Not to be, he had been diverted.

Jon Jo knew that to come to the headland and to gaze over the sea and to think of his Attracta and his Kevin was just indulgence…

He was a creature of the mountain, born and reared there. But then so too was his brother. The mountain was not his brother's war. He had chosen to be the man who would move the rock up the mountain, to push forward the progress of the war. He believed in a future for his people, and the future was to be earned by the war, by sacrifices too. He came to the cliff edge to dream of his loved ones, and to think of the future. In the peace and beauty and relative safety of the headland he could begin to come to terms with the truth that in other places, in the greater loneliness of the big city, was close to overwhelming him: that only at the very end of the war would he be at peace with Attracta on the mountain.

How long…?

Christ, how long…?

He turned, he wiped the wet smear on his face. He would spend the evening with his plans, maps, that were under the floorboard of his room. It was never done, it was never finished. Not till the bastards had packed up, gone with their foreign soldiers and their prisons, would it be done and finished.

"What did he mean…?"

They were almost back in to Belfast.

"… Your Colonel Johnny, what did he mean…?"

The oncoming lights were into his eyes. She had shifted in her seat, shown him she had woken.

"… What did he mean by 'being paid to harass women and kids'?"

"Does it matter?"

He had thought of it all the way back from Dungannon. He had waited for her to wake. "It just seemed a pretty peculiar thing to say."

"He’s a good man," Cathy said.

"Which means…?’’

"It means the lucky bugger, that he has still retained a stroke of decency, in this pig sty. It means that he can see a difference between a bad boy and a bad boy’s family. He's still a human bring "

‘’Keep going.’’ The sleep was out of her voice. Her face was close to his. On his face was the warm whisper of her breath.

‘’ Everything who comes here, they all think it won't touch them, but it does. It touches everyone except good old Colonel Johnny, and at the end of the day he too does what he 's told to do,, Bren asked, "Does it touch you?"

"Don't be tiresome, Bren,"

He drove on. He came down the Malone Road.

Cathy said, "Tomorrow evening you'll meet Song Bird."The boy didn't cry and Attracta didn't scream at them.

They held Mossie upstairs, in Kevin's bedroom, with his dust sheets and his paint pots. He sat on the floor beside the ladder and all the time he was watched by the barrel of a rifle. From his own home Mossie had seen the two previous times that the army and police had come to the Donnelly farm.

He thought this was different. It was like it was cold. They seemed to him to be just clinical. No swearing, no fast talk. Like they were programmed. His Siobhan would have raised the roof, his kids would have been bawling and little Francis might have been trying to kick the skin off a soldier's shins.

Did the beggars have no charity?

Like it was just a job, like what they were breaking was not the home of a woman and a child.

Mossie sat on the floor and he asked the soldier if he could smoke, and each movement that he made, taking out the packet, taking out the cigarette, striking the match, putting the match into the ashtray, putting away the cigarette packet, was followed by the rifle barrel.

The noise of the breaking of the house would have been easier to stomach if he could have heard their protests, Attracta's and Kevin's, or their swearing, the soldiers' and the policemen's. Only the sounds of splintering furniture and the screech of lifting floorboards.

After they had gone, with their guns and the jemmy and the sledgehammer, after the shattering thunder of the helicopter powering away from the field beside the cattle shed, Mossie helped Attracta to clear the damage. They collected everything that was broken from the front room and the kitchen and the dining room and she threw them out through the back door into the rain. Small tables, chairs, the television with the back off it, the electric fire with the front off it, plates from the kitchen, the vinyl roll from the floor of the dining room that had been torn to get at the floorboards, all of it out into the rain. Mossie brought a blanket down from upstairs, from where it had been pitched out of the airing cupboard, shook off the feathers from a ripped bed bolster, and used it to cover over the cuts in the upholstery of the settee. The boy was on his knees, sweeping glass into a dustpan. She hadn't spoken, nothing, and the kid hadn't cried. Mossie would have gone to his grave for the both of them. She had the framed photograph in her hand. She carefully picked the shards from the frame, and put it back onto the mantelpiece, He watched. Her lips brushed the torn soft-focus face of her man. He saw the pride on her face and the way that her son came to her and hugged her. Only the idiot Brits would have believed they could break her.

She said that she would make tea for him, but he had no more business in the house.

He would never be loved, not as Jon Jo was loved by Attracta Donnelly. He thought she leaned on him more now than before. She seemed always to have another small job he could do about her house.

But Jon Jo was never spoken of. She was sharp, she could put the numbers together and come to the answer. Jon Jo was the hunted man.

They never let up in the hunt for a killer, he would be hunted for ever.

Siobhan called her the "widow Donnelly". Siobhan had it right. Attracta and the face in the photograph had nothing ahead of them.

He made his excuses.

He hadn't his key in the door before Siobhan had it open.

She had him by the collar and she marched him through to her bedroom.

He saw the wild anger in her face.

"You bastard, what's you at?"