This Human Season Read online

  O’Malley moved his head from side to side as if this was fair comment. He indicated Dunn, ‘Is e an fear nua – nil aon fadhb bheith ag caint mar ni thuigeann se.’

  ‘Nil me in ann gaeilge maith a labhairt.’

  ‘Spend some time in here, you’ll learn it.’

  ‘I’m no use to you in here.’

  A young woman was crying as she was led away. A prisoner was standing, watching her go, his hands in his hair.

  Jaws was up at the box, laughing with the officer there. Dunn could hear the odd word, ‘holiday’, ‘postcard’. There were explosive, incredulous laughs from the other fellow.

  Dunn could see Jaws on holiday. A beach, somewhere like Spain, sitting up with his head burnt, his shirt over his feet, a warm can of beer, then seeing someone a little bit familiar, gathering up his plastic bag, making a runner, feet hurting on the hot sand, the beer can on its side where he’d been, froth melting.

  In the corner of his eye he saw a small white pellet come shooting out of O’Malley’s nose and Coogan put a finger on it and slipped it into his mouth. O’Malley was rubbing the side of his nose and saying he had a cold coming. Thanks to moving between that powerful heating on the inside and the cold air on the outside.

  He didn’t know what to do; what was it they’d exchanged? Was it a pill? He cleared his throat, took his cap off for a minute and put it back on, square. The pair went on, speaking in low monotonous voices, partially in Irish.

  His mind went to thinking about Angie and whether the boy coming would change things. He would have to do the numbers on the Datsun, too. It would be good to have it when the boy was there. They needed to get some money down for a mortgage, couldn’t keep renting. Wouldn’t they have to be married, though?

  ‘It’s no good talking about concessions, Nails, about half of this and some of that. The lads won’t give in for anything less than the five demands.’ O’Malley had raised his voice and Coogan was trying to placate him, but O’Malley slapped his hands down on the table.

  ‘Yous do your part on the outside and we’ll play our part in here. We’re prepared to take it all the way. All the way. We’re not fucking about.’

  Coogan was at first conciliatory, murmuring, his head down then he said in a harder voice, ‘Just sit tight.’

  ‘Listen. On my wing, we’ve had four men come off the protest; Mickey’s got an arm badly burnt; Seamus was off the block after he got a beating, so as they could hide him away till the bruises faded; Sean Moran’s on punishment more than he’s on the block; McIlvenny’s in the hospital. We’ve all got worms. We’re on bread and water half the time and fuck-all of that. The good news is it’s too fucking cold for maggots. And I’ll tell you something, there’s total commitment. One hundred per cent. But we need to bring this thing to a head now.’

  ‘. . . What’s going on . . . getting the word out,’ was all that Dunn could make out from Coogan. He had his fingers out to start to count off his points but O’Malley looked resolutely indifferent. He spoke out in a louder voice, running a fingertip around his ear, glancing towards Dunn as if he wanted him to hear.

  ‘Don’t yous sit on your laurels with Warrenpoint and Mountbatten and one or two screws picked off. Yous’d better keep it coming till the message hits home. I’ll bet you something though; they don’t give a fuck about the screws. They’ll sit and watch them take the bullets.’

  O’Malley looked Dunn straight in the eyes, then leant back in his chair and looked over the room, raising a hand of greeting to one cubicle and turning it into a thumbs up.

  In the couple of hours sleep he’d got that night, after a repertoire of visions that were absurd and pointless, Dunn had woken abruptly out of a dream; the growing apprehension of a ring of mountains all around him, moving inwards, on a dark march, and the feeling that whichever way he turned he was facing the wrong way, attending to the wrong things.

  Jaws was coming forwards noisily from the back of the room to get O’Malley out; he was bottle-faced, calling out over and over again that time was up.

  ‘That’s your lot. Come on Dunn let’s get things moving.’

  He put his hands on O’Malley’s shoulders; O’Malley baulked with a shudder of anger and barged into the table.

  Coogan sprang up, fingers at his watch face. ‘That was thirteen minutes, you thick bastard.’

  ‘This man is threatening me!’

  Other officers came running forwards and O’Malley was wrestled into the corridor.

  During the altercation, a small white pellet had fallen in front of

  Dunn’s shoes. He bent down and picked it up.

  Chapter 25

  Owen McCann had a red sports bag. He swung it up behind his back, one hand at the shoulder. He walked like a tough guy. He’d grown about a foot in six months. Liam was now shorter than him.

  ‘There’s fuck-all in that bag,’ said Liam, a step or two behind.

  His tie was loose, the hood of his jacket on his head and the rest of it behind him like a cape. He had his hands in his pockets, his satchel across his chest. Liam walked home with Owen, and his sister walked back from her school with Una. The McCanns lived a few houses down across the way but it always seemed sunnier where they were and they had orange flowers in a small strip of front garden in the summer. In the long hot summer of ’76 the two families had had a barbecue together in the McCanns’ back garden. Liam had never tasted anything as good as charred meat, ketchup, fried onions, inside a bap. Sammy McCann had got the hose out and soaked everyone until their clothes were seethrough. His older brother, Sean, had been flirting with Mrs McCann, saying, ‘What’s that,’ with his fingertip on her chest bone and when she looked he flicked at her nose. No one had minded on account of the beer they were all drinking. Liam had had a can of Tennants to himself and gone to sleep in a small tent.

  Mrs McCann was a socialist. She did a lot for the community. His dad said he wished she’d do more. His mummy was joining in with her and getting involved in the H block protests. Owen’s uncle, Sammy, was standing for election on the anti-H block ticket.

  ‘Your uncle’s a politician then,’ said Liam.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Does he not get to drive a big car?’

  ‘Fuck away.’

  ‘How will he do his politics then?’

  ‘He walks from door to door. Are you going to come in for some toast?’

  ‘And your mum does the marching, like mine’s going to. Have you got peanut butter?’

  ‘They all follow my mum. “What do we want – political status! When do we want it – now!’

  ‘I’d bloody love to go on them marches. I might get to go on the next one. Your uncle’s going to be the one with the loud-hailer up the front. You might get a turn. You lucky bastard.’

  ‘Your brother’s on the blanket, Liam, you can’t get better than that, that trumps everything. You’d be up the front, you and your mum.’

  ‘Thank Jesus for him or we’d be nothing us lot.’

  As they crossed the road into the Ballymurphy estate, a British soldier came towards them, gun slung across, a hand on the barrel like it was a handbag. Owen unhitched his sports bag. They always stopped boys with sports bags. Liam’s mum wouldn’t get him a sports bag.

  Owen opened it and the soldier put the nose of the rifle inside pushing the few books apart, plunging it into the dirty games kit. Neither of the boys spoke to him.

  ‘No need to be like that,’ said the soldier.

  Liam contrived a bright smile. ‘He’s right. We ought to be polite, Owen. Please, soldier, would you be a good man and leave our country and go back to your own?’

  ‘All right clever clogs. There’s nothing I’d like better than to leave you lot to sort out your own quarrels. On your way.’

  Owen swung his bag up behind his back again and held the straps with two hands. ‘That’s what they think about us, that we’re all stupid micks.’

  Liam looked back over his shoulder, saw the soldier was wat
ching them go.

  ‘Uncle Sammy says the Brits are always doing jokes with an Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman, and it always turns out that your man, Paddy, is as thick as shite. There’s one about three men in the desert come across a convent and want a drink of water but the ugly old nun with a beard and all says you’ve got to fuck me first.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘When she closes her eyes your man Paddy fucks her with one sausage after another and then he chucks them out the window and he gets for himself a drink of water and the Brit and the Scot are sitting outside and they say, aye you had your drink but we had two lovely sausages.’

  ‘But it was Paddy who was the smart one.’

  ‘Aye, well they have us down for either thick or cunning.’

  They ran around the corner, past a mural depicting a beaming sandy-haired young man, Volunteer Collins who’d been shot in Easter 1970. Over the top of it had been daubed ‘We Are Not Criminals’ in big black letters.

  One of their younger friends from the estate was playing Evil Knievel in the road between the Morans’ and the McCanns’ houses; he’d set up a ramp on some bricks and was pedalling towards it with a serious expression. He flunked it and Liam and Owen cried out. An old man out walking his dog started hollering.

  ‘Do it yourself then, piss pants,’ said the boy, picking himself and his bike up. He called over to Liam to go and get his bike.

  ‘After I’ve said hello to Mrs McCann. You use the time to practise.’ Mrs McCann was standing looking ill by the window, holding a cigarette to her lips.

  ‘I told Una not to pick up the phone.’

  ‘What happened?’ said Owen as soon as he came into the room.

  ‘You’re never to answer the phone, you know that, right?’ she said, pointing her cigarette at him.

  Owen went off into the kitchen followed by Liam. He slung his sports bag on the floor; it landed like a flat tyre.

  ‘We get some loopy phone calls, “Hello, Belfast City morgue here, we’ve got your name down on the list,” that kind of thing. Jesus, look at my uncle in there, he’s still wearing flares he’s got his head that full of politics.’

  ‘Go easy on that toast, we’ve got to get sandwiches out of it tomorrow,’ Mrs McCann called out from the front room.

  They had a slice each, listened to Mrs McCann and Sammy talking for a while, until Owen mouthed ‘boring’ at Liam and got his schoolbook out to do his homework on his lap.

  Liam got up to go.

  ‘Bye, Mrs McCann.’

  ‘Bye bye, love. Tell your mother I’ll come over so we can do some work on the posters. And tell her I’m going down to the Kesh next week so I can take in a wee note for Sean.’

  Liam went in the house with the intention of charging upstairs, changing out of school uniform and racing out the back to get his bike.

  His mother and Aine were cuddling on the settee together, talking. His mother’s hand was running through Aine’s long red hair, undoing it where it had been in plaits. His mother had been crying, he could see from her swollen nose and ringed eyes.

  ‘I saw Sean today, Liam, did you forget?’

  ‘Oh, aye, how was he?’

  ‘All right, he sends you his love. We were just talking about

  Christmas. No Mary, no Sean. Still we’ll make the best of it won’t we.’

  ‘Can I have six pence for a bag of crisps?’

  ‘Aye. I’ve nothing in for tea. In my bag, love. In the green purse.’

  He went to the kitchen to get it and came back saying, ‘Mrs McCann is going to come by for the posters and she’ll take a note into the Kesh for you.’

  ‘She’s going down there is she? I’ll play that Christy Moore record of his tonight and get down the words of some of the songs for him. I was saying, Liam, I was sitting in this very same place, two years ago at Christmastime, when Sean was on the run, I was having a wee cry when Una comes in and says, why are you crying missus and I says I miss my son, so I do, I’d do anything to have him come through the front door . . .’

  Liam stood in front of her and moved from foot to foot, he needed to have a pee.

  ‘And she says, well I’ve seen him up at the shops and he says he’s coming to see you for Christmas, so you stop your crying. Bossy like her mother. Then he walks right through the door—’ His mother was smiling but her eyes were weeping. Liam couldn’t understand the way that women laughed and cried at the same time. Thick or cunning.

  ‘That was good, then, Mummy.’ He ran upstairs for a pee.

  ‘I’m listening,’ said Aine.

  ‘Well that was the last Christmas we had with your brother here. I’d better think of something for your tea,’ said Kathleen, treading down the backs of her slippers as she went to the kitchen.

  Aine followed her. ‘Did we have the tin of Quality Street that year?’

  ‘He came in dressed like a priest your brother did,’ she said, raising a potato peeler and looking out the window over the back yard, the litter bouncing across in the wind. ‘He’d borrowed the clothes off Father Pearse.’

  Kathleen looked at the orange marks on a bald potato and then at the rust in the lines of her palm. She put the peeler and her hand under the cold tap. She started to weep, using the backs of her hands to spread her tears.

  Aine pressed the side of her face hard against her mother’s back.

  ‘Don’t cry Mummy, don’t cry.’

  Chapter 26

  ‘Where am I off to then, Stew-pot?’

  It was cold there, waiting outside by the main gate. Things were going slower than ever in the queue outside the Tally Lodge with Stuttering Stu the duty officer.

  ‘Wer, wer, wer, wer, wer . . .’

  Three other officers put their heads alongside Dunn’s; they were like a barbershop quartet, urging him on.

  ‘Workshops?’

  ‘Wer, wer, wer . . .’

  ‘Visits? Hospital?’

  ‘Wer, wer, – gate duty.’

  Again. For twelve hours a day – bar the break for lunch and tea – Dunn was in a ten-by-ten space between two gates out in front of Bolton’s block, a cold and lonely vigil.

  He set himself up a golf course. He dug five small holes in a circle formation in the ground, and he kicked a stone around the course to see if he could get round on par.

  Every half hour or so, a wagon would come and he’d admit it, lock the gate once more, and open the next, then lock it again behind the departing wagon. He envied the officers coming out in gangs at lunchtime and teatime. He took his alone when the reluctant replacement arrived, warning him not to be late back.

  The fellas from the block came back from the canteen full of liquid humour. It was Saturday afternoon.

  ‘Good night, John-boy.’

  ‘G’night Pa.’

  ‘G’night Mr Godsey. Mr Godsey, what the hell are you doin’ in there with Elizabeth?’

  This was the ‘craic’ of the day. Dunn had taken a nap in the stores on his hour off the day before, and Frig had poked his head in and quipped,

  ‘Good night John-boy.’

  Rabbit was being just about carried by Skids and Shandy. His glasses were off. Frig stopped.

  ‘Ma, Grandma’s left her teeth in my underpants . . .’

  ‘You take a good joke too far. She’d know to take her teeth out before she gave a blow job, at her age.’

  They staggered across to the block, Rabbit’s feet dragging. As he locked the block gate after them, Dunn glanced at either wing. You couldn’t see any faces at the windows. He wondered what they made of it.

  He perfected his game of kick-golf that afternoon. The boy would be there this time next week. He had been thinking through where to take the boy on his day off. It would have been better if Dunn could have been the one to make the first visit. He could have taken him out somewhere to eat maybe, then got away scot-free.

  A prison officer. A rented house in East Belfast. The fridge smelt funny, the handset over the bath was cracked
and leaking.

  If he’d have gone to him, he’d have chucked in this job, said he was between things, nice to have some time off, that sort of thing.

  Angie had got a warning in the corner shop the day before. The woman at the till told her people there didn’t like their own going against them. Angie’d asked her what she meant and she’d said, your fella’s no more than a mercenary, love, aye he’s getting nicely paid for banging away folk, but it’s not right, people don’t like it. She’d called him at work but with him not being on a block she hadn’t been able to get hold of him. Out on the wall in front of their house that morning was spray-painted ‘Maze Screws – their crime is disloyalty.’

  He paced up and down, counting in German: dreizehn, vierzehn, fünfzehn.

  He’d got that bloody smuggled note at home, in the spare room, in the old soap dish on the chest of drawers. He ought to turn it in. Before the boy got there. Not his business.

  It was chilly so he kept on the move. He was swinging the keys on the end of the chain that fell from his leather belt. This was another of his meagre diversions. The keys were on a steel circle; they made a good noise and quite a swoosh as he swung them like a lasso. The chain was long enough to feel the kinetic force build momentum once he’d got a perfect circle going at his side.

  Suddenly he heard the noise of metal against metal, and saw the keys pass through the wire mesh of the fence out into the yard beyond.

  ‘Balls.’

  He was standing between two gates with no keys.

  ‘I’m the fucking clown now.’

  A second or two before he heard his footsteps on the dirt, he saw the suited figure of one of the governor’s staff. For all he knew it might be the governor himself.

  ‘Marvellous.’

  ‘Afternoon, Officer.’ It was Lingard. His suit was buttoned against the cold, collar turned up so you could see the felt underneath. He was rubbing his hands together, affable, hair swept over and Brylcreemed.

  ‘Afternoon.’

  Lingard clapped his hands as if to prompt Dunn to take action.

  ‘Have you got your pass on you, Sir?’