Dan nodded. ‘Sure.’ People were always heroes in their own telling.
‘Yeah,’ Colum said. ‘It was only once I got back to my district and had my first pint that the whole thing went right up on me. Shaking all over I was. Been shaking mostly ever since.’
He had Dan’s attention now. Night clouds moved across the moon. In a brief breeze an empty can rolled towards them and Colum’s shoulders did a jump. They laughed.
A whining sound. A few thin flickers of light. Colum got up. ‘Here we go,’ he said, newly hard in the face, oddly impressive-looking. He picked up the bags. They ran to the end of the alley.
‘Wait.’
Dan did as he was told. The black Saracens were creeping along the Falls, slow and certain. The walls flanking this section of the road were painted black, a mass redaction of the murals of Bobby Sands and other heroes. The sound of heavy boots. Foot patrols moving behind and alongside the Saracens. Even if Colum had brought his gun with him there was no way you could see the men well enough to snipe them. All of the officers were wearing black. Anything else would have spoiled the decor.
They watched as two RUC men broke down the first door to a Catholic home. The groan of the wood giving in. Dan’s heart going hard. In the first open bag a dozen plastic bottles. Each of them was three-quarters full with white paint and water. ‘Quick now,’ Colum said. They scrambled to unscrew five or six lids. In another bag they had waterproof sheeting tied around chunks of dry ice. They started squeaking fragments of dry ice into the open bottles of paint, screwing the lids back on. Colum slapped Dan’s face. ‘Quick, I said.’ Running.
Out into the open road. They got alongside the Saracens, a taste of smoke in the air, a soulful adrenalin building. A woman dragged out onto the street was saying ‘Don’t you touch the inside of my house!’ Men from the foot patrol were running into her home and another man, lank and stooped in the dim of the moon, had his hand around the woman’s mouth. Colum hurled the first bottle. The lazy grace of it in the air and the little crackle and pop as it hit bodywork and exploded. Better than when they’d rehearsed. Perfect. White paint sprawling out on the Saracen, white paint dripping and pooling. Dan hurled two bottles. His blood was swaying. Hurt to breathe. Neither exploded. He needed to throw them harder, higher. Colum was shouting ‘Pots and pans! Pots and pans!’ without a single tremor in his voice.
Dan went to ground, grit in his elbows, and pressed more fragments of dry ice into bottles. He sprinted, the bags banging on his shoulders, and threw a bottle at an RUC man — missed — but then one of Colum’s bottles looped and the man’s uniform was half white and the man yelled, fell. Another Saracen backing up to the front door of the next Catholic home to be searched and torn apart. Another throw. Dan was screaming ‘Pots! Pots! Pots!’ and like magic windows were opening all down the street. Colum must have lobbed another bottle high — Dan could see it coming down almost at a vertical — and paint exploded over the roof of a Saracen. A precision hit. He’d got Colum all wrong. Loved the man in this moment. Loved him. Catholic women were leaning out of windows banging pots and pans. The whole street waking up and making noise, ensuring others rose and joined. Don’t let these men rip our floorboards up. Don’t let them call our freedom fighters terrorists. Some of the women were throwing glass bottles stuffed with burning hankies towards the blotches of white, tiny bursts of fire near the targets, three and then six and then more. Other women were in the street in nighties. They were standing in the way of the Saracens and banging their pots and pans above their heads, shouting ‘Turn the water cannons on us! Go on then!’ Shouting ‘What’s a taste of water then? Give us a shower!’ All this as Dan ran into another dark alley, the last of his bottles used up, changing into clean clothes and beginning the long jog home.
In training he tried to show that he was hungry for knowledge. There seemed to be an infinite supply. There was more artistry to violence than he’d ever expected, more technique and philosophy. Months rolled by with only paint-bomb operations. Less a war than an apprenticeship; someone finally taking him under their wing. They told him they thought his future was bright.
In a warehouse space that smelt of raw meat they taught him how to open and split a shotgun cartridge. They taught him that candle wax in the tip made it hold together on impact. Mercury in the cartridge made it more deadly. Garlic purée in the cartridge put poison in the blood. They taught him to smear axle grease on a bullet to make it fly through reinforced doors. They taught him to pack cartridges with rice to slow them down. They showed him all the things you could do with the looped brake cable of a pushbike. A knife in a body needs to be twisted upward. Bulletproof glass has a blue-green glint. If a friend’s car is stolen, call Sinn Fein on this number. If a friend’s family is persecuted, call Sinn Fein on that number. Golf courses are for golf and the storage of weapons. Some people relax by emptying magazine after magazine into oil drums, tree stumps, the tyres of abandoned cars; others prefer the cold sophistication of invention, electrics, tricks with cassette-recorder parts. You can hammer away at Semtex with a rolling pin, shifting its shape to fit a suitable space. You can do anything you like, just don’t get any on your hands. On his nineteenth and twentieth and twenty-first birthdays Dawson sent packets of cash.
II
A BOOK CALLED Everyday Baking lay open on the kitchen table. Dan nibbled at his lower lip, pretending to pay it close attention. Every now and then his mother would ask him to call out an amount or instruction and whatever reply he gave would cause her to come up behind him, freckled forearms resting on his shoulders, floury hands made rigid in concern for his clean shirt, as she leaned down and kissed his ear. This whole gesture of affection was, he knew, a way of perusing the recipe page and checking he hadn’t fucked things up. It was expected that her sons, left unsupervised, would fuck things up. All three of his older brothers had moved away. Bobby, deaf, to a special home called St Joseph’s in Stillorgan. Tom to Scotland where he worked on a farm. Connor to America, happy to spill his secrets, each letter alive with new girls’ names. Lisa. Mary. Kimberly. Dawn.
6 oz softened butter, the recipe said. 6 oz granulated sugar / caster sugar. Two large eggs, quarter-pint strong coffee, three tablespoons whiskey. She was making a coffee cake. Halving the relevant amounts, presumably; the two of them would never get through it otherwise. It occurred to him to check this with her but he opted instead for a swig of vodka and water. There was an unspoken agreement that he would not challenge her while the oven was on, and a supplementary understanding that he’d challenge her rarely when it was off.
‘Do you want some of those potato wedges?’ she said. ‘As a starter, tide you over?’ She was moving towards the fridge, the dull thud-thud of his father’s old five iron measuring out her steps. His mother had a hip issue, needed a stick to walk, but in the kitchen there was an unexplained preference for the golf club. ‘Are you hearing, Dan? A potato wedge I said.’
He shook his head. An image came loose. Last night’s dinner was an old sock, a blood clot and some pieces of warped plastic. Main courses were her undoing. She was better off sticking to desserts. His mother’s cupboard of accompanying condiments was a treasure trove of precious clues. If it arrived with mint sauce you knew you were looking at lamb.
‘You’ll get yourself drunk,’ she said.
‘Hopefully.’