This Human Season Read online

  ‘Right,’ she said, taking the incline with determination. ‘Right,’ she said, changing gear at last when the car had almost reared up on its haunches with too many revs.

  * * *

  The barracks had wire fencing that went from three yards in front and swooped over the top of the building to prevent bombs from landing inside. There was a central desk in a small front room and an old policeman sitting behind it, a pen behind his ear, intent on his newspaper.

  ‘I’m looking for my son. We’ve rung round the hospitals.’

  ‘He’s not here. ‘

  ‘You haven’t asked me anything about him so how do you know?’

  A young constable, who had just emerged from a door behind the desk, came round. He had sandy hair and a kind face. He could have been anyone. ‘What was your son wearing?’

  ‘A red football shirt, I think, but I don’t know for sure. Manchester

  United. Running shoes. He’s fair. He’s thirteen. His name is Liam Moran.’

  ‘I told her,’ said the policeman at the desk, putting the end of the biro cap inside his ear and turning it. ‘We’ve not got him.’

  The constable pointed them towards the row of plastic seats by the door. ‘One minute,’ he said. ‘Sergeant, that was the quiet wee lad that was in here earlier.’

  ‘I said to you, Constable, we haven’t got him here.’ The constable came over to them. ‘You’ll have to go.’

  Mrs O’Sullivan went red in the face. ‘If yous think you can treat us like . . .’

  ‘Outside,’ he whispered.

  Standing on the steps, he closed the station door gently behind him and, holding onto the door handle, said, ‘They took him down to Castlereagh.’

  The women ran to the car. Mrs O’Sullivan caused the car to flood and cut out. They sat in the dark, silent. Kathleen put her hand on Mrs O’Sullivan’s.

  ‘Wait a second and it’ll be right again.’

  ‘Aye.’

  She tried again and the car started up and they were away towards the centre of Belfast, then swooping away from Divis flats and moving along the roads to Castlereagh.

  ‘It’s the name, Kathleen. “Castlereagh”, it makes me sick to the stomach.’

  They arrived at Castlereagh just after one. Yes, they had a Liam Moran. They told the women to sit and wait, they couldn’t tell them anything else.

  The pair of them sat, scanning the little printed leaflets and letters affixed to the wall by the door. There were three ‘Tufty’ road safety posters stuck to the front of the desk with a ferrety sort of a creature pointing out how not to get run down by a car.

  Across the chequered flooring, towards the far side of the room, there was another family group.

  ‘Is that not the McGahern’s as used to live behind St Peter’s?’ whispered Mrs O’Sullivan. ‘Her old mother used to have a lovely little Scottie dog with a wee red bow in his fringe. The boys are always dressed so badly, God love them. Look like tinkers.’

  After a while a police officer came over, red haired and reasonable, and they stood up, the pair of them.

  ‘Where’s my son? What are you keeping him in for?’

  ‘We’ve got a lawyer coming down here.’

  ‘Calm down missus. We’re going to let him go. He’ll end up in the borstal, though, I’ll tell you that.’

  ‘Good on him.’

  Kathleen hushed her. ‘I want my boy back, Patricia.’

  ‘Listen to your friend, missus.’

  ‘Or you’ll have me in here is it, an old woman, aye that’d be nothing for the likes of you, torturing old women.’ Mrs O’Sullivan’s voice rung out.

  The man looked sour. ‘Do you want me to tell you to get lost? Right, young Moran would have been out before now apart from the fact that he’s refused to sign for his personal possessions. Keeps saying he refuses to recognize us. Wants to play the big man. Aye, well we’ve had enough of the little hoodlum, best you take him home and tell him to play nicely.’

  The women sat again.

  ‘I just want to get him home.’ They held hands. ‘Patricia, I’d never got you down for the Cumann. They’re missing a trick not getting you a gun, so they are.’

  Mrs O’Sullivan laughed self-consciously, assumed a penitent expression and looked over at the other group.

  Liam came out the back room, big kid’s eyes, a man’s expression playing about his mouth. Kathleen took him in her arms.

  ‘I love you Liam. Are you all right?’

  ‘Aye, I’m fine. Mummy, I really thought they was going to kill the wee lad.’

  She held him to her, kissed his smoky, greasy hair then relinquished him.

  ‘Before I go, I was wondering if I could speak to your man in charge here.’

  ‘I’m in charge as far as you’re concerned,’ said the red-haired policeman, looking up from his desk, placing more of his weight on his forearms.

  ‘Well then. Don’t think we don’t know what yous get up to in here. You with the guns and sticks and buckets and hoods. Torturing people, ordinary decent people. You’re a shower of bloody hypocrites! Talking about law and order and then pretending to drop people from helicopters. How can you live with yourselves?’

  Mrs O’Sullivan started to clap and the other family waiting there joined in as well and one of them said, ‘You tell ’em, love,’ and then three police officers came forward and took the two women and Liam to the doorway, with Mrs O’Sullivan upbraiding them all the way out and calling out, ‘Cowards! Hypocrites! The lot of you! I hope you rot in hell.’

  Together in the car outside, Kathleen turned to look at Liam in the back seat and gave him a smile.

  ‘Right. Well, we’d best get going, Pat.’

  Mrs O’Sullivan failed to start the engine four times.

  ‘I think it’s maybe out of petrol.’

  The two women looked around, past Liam, through the semi-circle of the back windscreen to the light of the police station.

  Liam closed his eyes. ‘Right. Will I go back in and ask where we can get some petrol just the now?’

  ‘Jesus. Best if I go,’ said Kathleen.

  Chapter 32

  ‘We’ve got a washing machine you know,’ said Angie, throwing her bags on to the kitchen table. She had been over to her sister’s for the morning and brought back her share of the food they’d ordered together from the Christmas catalogue. She took a quick look about.

  The floor was clean and the cupboards looked like they’d been given a wipe. There was not a cup or a plate out although she’d left the dish rack full that morning. The boy had his sleeves rolled up, was pushing back his hair with his fingers. He was wearing a t-shirt and corduroy trousers, bare feet.

  There was a short row of round wet parcels folded on the draining board. ‘I didn’t think you’d be home till later. I’ve just got to rinse these and I’m done.’

  ‘You don’t have to do your own washing,’ she said, taking off her coat. ‘Aren’t 19-year-old boys supposed to be out chasing girls? Your mother got you well trained, so she did.’

  He emptied the plastic bowl and ran cold water around it, sluiced it out. She saw his reflection in the dark of the window over the sink. He was a lot like his father, physically, but where his father was tense, he was languid.

  ‘Did you clean this kitchen?’ She stood with her hands on her hips. Her fringe was flat to her head from the rain.

  He turned round with a grin.

  She took out her cigarettes. ‘You cleaned my kitchen and you’re a man, you couldn’t credit it. So you’ve been at this all the day, have you?’

  ‘No I got a bus into the city centre, had a walk round then I went out down the Falls Road in one of those black taxis.’

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ she sat down. ‘Now you really are having a laugh with me.’ He was squeezing out the white underpants and laying them flat on the draining board. She noticed his socks were on the radiator by the back door.

  ‘Do you have anything needs washing?’

>   ‘I will do if you go telling me stories like that.’

  ‘It was very interesting, Angie.’

  ‘Mark,’ she said, putting her cigarette into the ashtray. ‘I should have had a word with you the day you got here. But we’re sick to the teeth with it and we don’t talk about it much, especially your father and I. But I’ve got to give you a wee welcome speech, so I have.’

  He wiped his wet hands on his trousers.

  ‘Where do I start? Look, when I was a wee girl we played with Catholics. My parents taught me everyone was the same, Catholic or Protestant, but that didn’t stop them sending us out to kick the Pope on the 12th of July. We went to different schools. You never really knew them, like you knew your own.’

  ‘Different schools?’ He looked doubtful, slipped a cigarette out of his pack on the table, nodded at her lighter. ‘May I?’

  She nodded and closed her eyes. He saw in the wrinkles of her eyelids the remnants of pearlized eye shadow, the mascara made five or six points out of her lashes.

  ‘The soldiers, well it was the Catholics that brought them over; it was them that wanted them. Of course they turned against each other and changed their minds then. Then there’s been a lot of things happen in these past ten years so’s most normal people’s lost their patience. See the thing with the IRA is that they would kill a hundred of their own to get one Protestant, they’ve no conscience, be it a teacher, a postman, a policeman. And the people round here said, well every time you kill a Protestant or plant a bomb we’re going to come out and shoot you and it doesn’t matter if it’s someone walking down the street or some fella going to his work we’ll get him.’

  Mark had never heard an accent like hers. Her mouth moved, scarcely open, across the fabric of her world like a sewing machine, jolting and juddering at speed, with the needle going in and out, up and down, no time to spare and then suddenly she had it all sewn up. ‘But that’s stupid, Angie. I mean, you must think so, right?’

  ‘Aye. Welcome to hell.’

  ‘But people are people, I mean has no one ever sat the two sides down together to thrash it out?’

  She burst out laughing. ‘I wonder sometimes if I was ever young! I’m sorry, I don’t want to sound patronizing like but you haven’t got a clue. There’s a lot of fear amongst the Loyalist people that the Catholics will overrun the place. They have six or seven kids, whereas we have the one or two. They don’t want to be British but they’re not above taking the welfare. They’re good at giving to their own, I’ll grant them that, better than we are, everyone round here is for himself. But we don’t want to live their way, and why should we? People don’t want nuns and priests running their lives, teaching their children. Just because a person wants a united Ireland doesn’t make him more Irish than me. You see the difference is we’re happy with our lot. We’ve got our own ways here in Ulster. What we have here, and it’s not very much, we’ve worked for, so we have. Why should we give it away? Let them go down south if that’s what they’re after.’

  ‘And what about you,’ he leant forwards, ‘couldn’t you go to England?’

  ‘And why should I? This is my home. England’s different. I couldn’t live there. Look, I’m just trying to tell you how it is and why it’s dangerous to go walking about on the Falls Road, you with your British accent and all, they’ll be after thinking you’re a soldier and you’ll be dead and it’s not a nice way to die. They’ll talk about the Shankill Butchers but when you hear what the IRA does, even to its own, it makes your blood curdle. In the news last week there’s a man killed because he’s the wrong sort of IRA. They kill each other all the time. In West Belfast, where you were today they bomb their own bars! There was this fella last year, they gave him drugs while they tortured him, to stop him from passing out, to keep him conscious. They took out his fingernails, they pulled his arm out of the socket, they cut off his genitals – for three days they kept the poor man alive and did that to him. And all you hear is the Shankill Butchers.’

  What was it in her eyes? For a second, she looked proud. Excited. She had to hide her face, so she took out another cigarette and lit it, her face to the side. He had seen though. He had seen and she had to stop her mouth from smiling at the corners.

  ‘Why do you think we all smoke like chimneys? You see, Mark, they’ll take you for a soldier under cover. They’re always dragging off British soldiers. One they took not long ago, they went to shoot him in the head and he’s pleading with them no and the gun misfires three times and the IRA fella says he’s only shooting blanks and you know the poor man must have shit himself because when you think you’re being shot dead that’s what happens and then he must have been relieved that he was alive and then they went and fired again into his head and killed him. He was just a soldier lad who went drinking in one of their bars and he was clever, they say he had picked up a Belfast accent but they still picked him for a soldier because it’s a small place, Mark, everyone knows who you are. You keep your mouth shut and you stay among your own.’

  ‘I’ve never had my own. My grandfather believed in God but I don’t even remember whether he was Catholic or Protestant.’

  ‘Well now, he sounds like a wonderful man, love. Thank God he never had to come here, he’d have left his way of thinking before dinnertime.’

  ‘But you were all born here, you all breathe the same air. You need to sit down and talk about it. A big party, free beer.’

  ‘Och Jesus. That’ll never happen. Our lot’d get drunk and the Catholics would be moaning how they’d got less beer than the rest. Anyway I’ll get the tea on. Your dad will try and get home early tonight but who knows when it will be. He’s got the day off on Tuesday and we’ll have a nice wee run out. The poor man. He’s got a desperate awful job, Mark, so he has.’

  But Mark looked puzzled and annoyed, as if he was being hood-winked. ‘Angie, the people on the Falls Road were all right. I mean I’ve got an English accent. I went into a petrol station and bought a chocolate bar and they were nice enough.’

  ‘Well you were lucky. Don’t do it again or I’ll, well I don’t know what I’ll do,’ she said with mock severity, standing behind him and squeezing his shoulders. ‘Your dad will do his crunch. He won’t have you come to Northern Ireland to get shot at, you daft sod. Sausage, beans and chips. Will that do you? So now, stick your undercrackers in the airing cupboard, will you love, at the top of the stairs.’

  He looked troubled, still trying to work it out.

  ‘I’ve seen men’s underpants before, Mark,’ she said, ‘but I’ve not seen many men who wash their own.’

  Chapter 33

  Father Pearse looked for Kathleen after the novena but she was already gone. He’d seen her up the front. He’d seen the look on her face while she was praying; he’d seen it a thousand times before. It was the women that suffered worst, he always said.

  ‘Such good people. On the bus every week, off to the Kesh,’ he told

  Father Fitzgerald as they took a cup of tea together after the service.

  ‘Dragging one wee child or another. All dolled up. Half-an-hour’s worth of hope.’

  ‘I know where you’re going Brian, I know what comes next.’ The elderly man slipped the purple advent chasuble over his head, leaving just the white surplice. ‘It’s becoming your daily rant.’

  ‘You’ve a lot of faith, Michael, you’re lucky,’ said Father Pearse, dipping a pink wafer sandwich into his cup. The older man went out and came back with a letter.

  ‘See this. This is what we’re proposing to send up to the Northern Ireland Office. Read it, if you please.’

  Father Pearse skipped the niceties and read out loud from where he deemed it important. ‘Anyone who has his ear to the ground and who knows how tensions are building up will be aware that the danger of a hunger strike is real. And that there will be consequences outside of the prison. Well,’ he said, looking up. ‘They won’t appreciate that.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘. . . must take i
nto account the mental and physical strain under which the prisoners have been living. After up to three years for some, the situation has deteriorated into a deadlock. Aye so it has, that’s right. A priest who is close to the situation and can see which way the wind is blowing . . . prison uniform is the crunch issue as it symbolizes “the status of the criminal”. Now, now what does it go on with, aye. ‘With greater freedom of dress, a door to a solution would be open . . . after all female prisoners are not obliged to wear uniforms.’ He lay it down. ‘Prisoners of war one day, criminals the next. Criminals that need an army of soldiers to catch them; seven thousand is it now? Well, it’s a very nice letter, it is,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t recognize the nature of the beast.’

  ‘It makes the case for talks,’ said Father Fitzgerald.

  ‘But no one’s looking for talks, for a middle ground, they’re all looking for a clear win.’

  ‘Well, no,’ said the older priest, rolling a cigarette. ‘There’s us and those women of whom you spoke looking to save lives, not lose lives. That’s something. The women can be awfully powerful, so they can.’

  ‘What about the church? They can be awful passive, so they can,’ said

  Father Pearse. ‘Awful preachifying, awful safe.’

  Father Fitzgerald sighed. ‘It’s no sin to err on the side of caution. My guiding principle, Brian,’ he said, licking down the side of the roll-up and sitting back into the steel-framed chair one vertebrae at a time, ‘will be to safeguard life, one life at a time, by doing nothing. Precipitously. I shall do all I can against the hunger strike.’

  ‘And the women, they’ll be with you, you think?’

  ‘They’re mothers, Brian, they’ll put their boys first.’

  ‘Aren’t we told to love God with all our hearts, mind and souls? These women, there’s many of them are very religious in themselves. They’ve trained temptation out of themselves over the years; they’ve had a lifetime of suffering, of hardship, of loss. Like Abraham with Isaac, they’ll make that sacrifice, Father. They love their God and where they think He is, that’s where they’ll be.’