He finished his vodka and excused himself for a few minutes. ‘Got to feed the dogs,’ he said. He let them chase each other around the small garden in tighter and tighter circles, until one rolled over and they fought. When you scratched behind the brown one’s ears his eyes went dreamy and slow.
III
DAN FOUND OUT about the Grand Hotel operation in March of ’84, the week of his twenty-fourth birthday, a quiet celebration at the Harp. Many of the volunteers in the pub that night were people he didn’t know. At times, talking to them, he couldn’t shake the sense that they were soft. There was a langour about them. A blurriness to their beliefs. It seemed rare these days for recruits to be put through the kind of initiation he’d experienced six years ago in the field with the dogs, or to be put through any initiation at all. There were worries about retention. Bobby Sands’s body had been cold too long. An army needs its poster boys.
For the fifth time in his life, drink in hand, the lights in the bar he was in went off and he heard the whine of the Saracens. The door broken down. The Brits charging in over splintered wood. Paras puffed up by flak jackets worn under their tunics. Ireland at night was a repeating dream.
‘Could have knocked,’ said a drinker, staring down at the ruined door. There was laughter. The Paras said sit on the floor. Everyone groaned and sat on the floor. They wanted information about someone called Micky McGee. No one knew a Micky McGee, or else knew so many Micky McGees that it was impossible to pick among them, and the added complication was that there were people in that bar who would rather have died or lost a hand than told the truth to a Para. Dan sat with his arms on his knees.
One of the Paras started pouring pints of ale. He asked what was on the table next to Dan. Bottle-shaped. Wrapped in silver paper. No one said a thing. It didn’t take a genius to work out what it was. The Para wasn’t a genius. He took a sip of beer and asked again. After a certain amount of asking his face had the coarse blush of a good bolognese and he allowed the beer to run on from the tap. It began to flood the floor.
This was above all a waste of beer so Dan stood up to explain. ‘It’s my twenty-fourth,’ he said. ‘Five of us at our table. One of them brought me a present. The others are certified cheapskates.’
More laughter. Mick Cunningham shouting ‘I’m no fucken cheapskate!’ The beer tap was still running. The landlord looked broken. Beer pooled on the ground and broke out in thin streams that carried sawdust and dirt to the walls.
One of the Paras asked for the bottle. People for some reason were looking to Dan. He nodded. No point battling these guys on every single thing. Hand to hand the bottle was passed to the Para. The Para unwrapped it and made a show of being impressed. ‘Good Scotch,’ he said, and helped himself to a slug of Scotch. ‘Not bad at all. Really.’
A second Para took an interest in Dan. Said: ‘On your birthday it’s customary to do a dance.’
‘What?’
‘Do us a jig, if you please.’
‘Fuck off.’
A third Para fiddled with the radio behind the bar, found an Irish tune. Da di di, da da, da da. Sweaty brow. Greasy eyes. All the sticky charm of a congealed school meal.
‘Do a little Taig dance. A little Irish jig.’
‘Get lost,’ he told them.
The Para who’d been pulling pints now pulled the bolt of a Sterling down. ‘Have a go,’ he said. ‘It would be lovely.’ Two of the younger Paras looked to the floor in shame, guys whose sense of fairness hadn’t yet been pressed, and one tried and failed to intervene.
Dan standing. The room silent. He told the Para he wasn’t in the mood to entertain.
‘I think you should.’
‘No.’
‘How sure are you?’
‘Fuck you.’
‘Doing a little jig for a minute, that’s all I’m asking. Save your friends some trouble.’
He didn’t even know a jig.
The Para with the Sterling pointed it at Martina’s bare legs. This extracted a groan from the crowd.
Martina looked up at the Para. ‘I dare you,’ she said. Her defiance made Dan twitchy and proud. The anger she’d managed to salvage from a short cruel youth, all the shit she’d sucked up her nose while her father watched, all the poison pinned into her veins.
‘Dare him,’ the Para said, and pointed at Dan. Seemed to be under the misapprehension that he’d said something terribly clever. ‘Go on, boy, just a little dance for this girl here. Do that and maybe I won’t take her out back for a prize. Time to teach her some tricks.’
There was the exchange of swear words. There was Martina’s hair being pulled and her face being slapped. There was another of the Paras saying, ‘This has got to stop, Rob.’ There was Jim Callaghan getting a baton in the ribs for intervening. And finally there was Dan standing there, in the middle of the floor, shifting his weight from foot to foot, the Paras clapping, cheering. One or two of the drinkers clapping too. Most staring down into their drinks.
Afterwards Martina drew her legs into her chest and sat by the window, saying nothing.
At the end of the week, waiting for the shame of the dance to cool, telling himself his life would contain no more moments like that, thinking of things he should have said and done, he came home early from an electrical job and decided to work on the garden. Quiet was what he wanted, the quiet only your own private land can provide. His mother was over at the club playing cards. She was a fierce cheat. Twice he’d had to beg them to restore her membership, and last week he’d promised a council of intimidating old women, frowning behind slow blooms of cigarette smoke — Mafia lords in a fucking film — that he’d be happy to provide transportation to other members of the club should they see fit to exercise the Christian principle of forgiveness. He’d nailed it with that form of words. The Christian bit was of limited interest to these old girls, but the offer of free transportation was a tangible earthly perk. Heads turned. Words were whispered. If he could promise a touch of assistance to those who struggled for lifts, who were less mobile or lived alone, well then, yes, they might see fit to overlook the unfortunate incident, which they were sure had involved no malice. It would be a nice gesture, altogether.
The sun today was low in a cold sky. Made his teeth hurt to look at it. He closed the kitchen window and went searching for some gardening gear.
On his knees in the cupboard under the stairs he tried on his father’s gloves. Too large. His father had been sausage-fingered. Big angry hands on a quiet determined man. A miracle, really, that he could do the fiddly work he did. After leaving the tobacco factory he’d retrained as an electrician and odd-job man. Said that the freedom inherent in self-employment more than compensated for the lack of security. By working nights and weekends — a peculiar kind of freedom, it seemed to Dan then — he’d earned just enough money to buy the family this narrow terraced house on what was then a safe, mostly Catholic street, and to pay down the mortgage each month. The back garden was a source of pride and worry. Every week weeds would sprout between paving stones. Every Tuesday morning, for fifteen minutes, his father would pull them up.
Growing up in this house Dan had seen riots break out in ’69. He’d seen the British Army mobilised to restore order. He’d looked on, with mounting excitement, as the barricades went up between Catholic and Protestant communities. By climbing trees you could swing yourself over to the other side, hide-and-seek, play You’re the Brits and We’re the IRA, chanting warnings, your voices charged with drama, bright with it, giving off imagined glory. He’d stood side by side with Jackson, a crayon-eating kid from the Ballymurphy, as authorities pulled the trees down in August ’69. In July of 1970, during a gun battle around the Falls, he was forced to stay indoors with his mother. The safety was as smothering as this cupboard. Gunshots cracking through the dark. To be a ten-year-old boy prevented from fighting — it had struck him as bitterly unfair.