‘You’ll want a biscuit the Gallaghers brought round.’
‘What biscuits?’
‘After you got Cal to reinforce their door.’
‘On the house.’
‘What’s that, Dan?’
‘Cal put it on their house on the house. He didn’t charge.’
‘Well, that’s grand. If you hold this a second I’ll get your biscuits down.’
He smiled. ‘Really, Ma, I’ll save myself for dinner.’
A short, thin woman who lived to fatten others up. Fuzzed-peach cheeks. Skin potato-sallow. Her arms of late looking empty, sausage casing squeezed of cheap meat. He knew it shamed her how little he ate. The slow-motion movements of his fork. The non-committal way he moved the food around his plate, picking, toying, never taking a second helping, never mopping up excess sauce with the bread. Hating the idea, in truth, that you’d want to take a clean hunk of bread and make it soggy. Toast was the thing he loved. Slice after slice in the morning, crispy at the edges and butter-supple in the middle. Bread was sufficient to keep him broad and strong if he added tinned fish during the day. Also those protein-dense snacks Mick’s brother procured for free from … He didn’t know where they were from.
A pip from the lemon in the bottom of his glass. Touch of citrus made vodka and tap water into a proper drink. The window bleary with steam and last night’s grease.
Many things about his mother remained a mystery to him, but he felt sure she was at her happiest when preparing food. There were still times when she went out to gather ingredients, but increasingly he tried to limit these excursions. The problem wasn’t so much her lack of mobility as her recklessness in the open air. If she saw an RUC man on the street she wasn’t beyond spitting at him or striking him, a frail woman swinging her stick and slinging abuse and bringing herself to ground in the process. In a fighting mood she was a nightmare to protect. Immune to reason. Deaf to it. Twice the RUC had retaliated, one officer with his truncheon and the other with the back of his hand. The second blow, administered a few months ago, had drawn one of the only real teeth from her mouth. Dan had come around the corner from the post office. He saw his mother on the pavement, legs spread, thick brown wrinkled tights. The RUC man was standing over her. The tooth was in his mother’s hand, extraordinarily long at the root, the slightest speck of blood on enamel the colour of mustard diluted and stirred. She looked down at it like a child with a new toy. The RUC man grimaced, tried to help her up, said she’d gone crazy and fallen. Possibly this was true. She said she’d been hit. The RUC guy seemed lost in a loop of wondering what he’d done or wondering how she got so good at lying. Dan found himself memorising the pattern of moles on the man’s face: one upper right on the hairline, three on the left line of the jaw. ‘That’s my mother,’ Dan told him. ‘Be careful, that’s my mother.’ And whether surprised by the evenness of Dan’s response or slow-plotting his next move, the RUC man simply stood there, arms at his sides, until Dan had got his mother halfway home.
An incident like that happened and you called Mick Cunningham. You imagined him at the other end of the line, pressing the receiver to his ruined ear, light pooling on the lunar landscape of his head. Cunningham called Dawson McCartland. Dawson McCartland called Mad Dog Magee, Chief Explosives Officer, your main reporting line. Magee circled back with you and the chain of command was a figure of eight, overcomplicated, tiring. There was a rule that you didn’t deal with personal matters personally, and another rule — linked — that authorisation for operations had to go through central command. It was a way of sanifying a plan, sweeping away elements of emotion. Useful in more than one respect.
His mother hobbling towards the stove, golf club clutched in her little blue fist. She positioned herself in the tight right angle where the cupboards met the drawers, freeing up all her fingers for chopping and peeling, the breaking of eggs.
It had been on TV, the RUC man’s death. The guy’s face in a box in the top right corner of the screen. A mole there, three here, telltale acne scars. A car bomb, the newscaster said, and later Mick would say to Dan that it had comprised three RDG5 grenades with five-second fuses, four ounces of TNT a piece. Someone had filled a ginger-beer bottle with sugar and oil and taped it onto the grenades. Someone else had added a juice carton of petrol. Someone. Someone. The contraption was attached to the steering column of the RUC man’s personal car and it sent him sky-high. The Belfast Telegraph ran the headline ‘PROVOS TAKE CREDIT FOR NEW FIREBALL’. At the weekend the Guardian picked up on the story. Someone sent Dan a clipping. Underneath the main piece was a box headed ‘WHO ARE THE RUC?’.
Since 1922 the Royal Ulster Constabulary has had a dual role, unique among British police forces, of providing a normal law enforcement police service while, at the same time, having a remit to protect Northern Ireland from the activities of proscribed groups.
Did Guardian readers need to be told what the RUC was? It was shocking, if they did. His mother had yawned and put the newspaper to one side.
He’d spent a long dreamless night thinking about the RUC man with the moles, wondering if there hadn’t been a better solution, wondering if he was wrong to have taken his mother at her word. A beating — that’s all he’d been after when he made the call. But to get a beating arranged he’d had to share her account of what had happened, and what sort of man hits an old woman? A pathetic man, a dead man. Move on.
Pans hanging down from hooks above the stove. These were a biding presence. His mother’s concentration, while cooking, was quite something to behold. The way her face coloured and her small blue eyes became unblinking. Her whole body seemed to coil as she creamed the butter and sugar and her shoulders remained rolled, her back bent, until the bowl contained a cloud. She cracked eggs with one hand as the other hand continued beating and then there was the expert sieving of flour and salt, the three quick taps on the rim of the sieve, the slow circles made by her wrist when it was time, the precise time, to fold the dry ingredients into the moister part of the mix. When she said the word ‘syrup’ to herself, a reminder of some future stage in the process, her tongue seemed to lick real love into the word, the language a sugary treat.
‘One to two chopped hazelnuts,’ he said. ‘For decoration, apparently.’
She moved behind him and leaned her forearms on his shoulders. ‘Later,’ she said. ‘They’ll be for later.’
Stirring darkness in. The process of adding the coffee to the batter brought a new alertness to her features. With all her weight on the five iron she stretched up to retrieve something from the cupboard — a cake rack — and he was on his feet but she had it now, refusing help, whispering, ‘Pan, whiskey, springform, syrup.’ He could sense within her movements an excitement and anticipation that other parts of her life could not provide.
The phone rang. He moved into the hall. At the other end of the line a man exhaled in an even rhythm. Dan put the phone down and then took it off the hook. He returned to the kitchen table and drank.
‘Who was that?’ his mother asked. She had a way of flaring her nostrils when suspicious.
‘Electrical job for the club. Lighting.’
She smiled. Grateful for the lie? From the garage came the barking of dogs.
‘Almost forgot myself,’ she said. ‘Jan Henry? From the Donegall? She told me my fortune this morning.’
Jan was a Protestant, one of maybe two or three his mother was happy to talk to. She got all over town, didn’t mind crossing the line to read a palm.
‘She said, first of all, that I’m soft and spongy these days. That I’ll be picking up vibrations from the universe. Positive vibrations, she confirmed. She said I’d be continuing to receive the benefits of wisdom.’