Vigilante attacks. The contagious spread of surveillance. Dan could see ways for it to fail. ‘To take out the Prime Minister, though. Come on.’
‘With her in place there’ll be no peace, Dan. You’re acting like this hasn’t been talked about before.’
‘There’s a difference between talk and action.’
‘Not when one follows the other, same sentence, same breath. With her in place … She thinks she’s the queen of us, Dan. Queen of our land, governing from a distance, quoting fucking Victoria. Even my mammy wouldn’t quote from a queen, Dan, and she named me from a book called Mosquito. Thatcher might govern in her own tight circle but she’s no right to power here, none at all. She’s queen of nothing, and we’ll treat her with the same respect she’s granted us. Let her taste a little bit of equality. Let us take our freedom back. If you were in on this operation, Dan, you’d be the luckiest man alive. Go down in history. The guy who made sure no more civil rights men got finished — with a bullet, with a stone. It’d be the last job you’d ever do.’
‘Because I’d be locked up in the fucking Maze, that’s why.’
‘Possibly. Though you seem to be one of those buoyant little jobbies who resists the flush. If anyone’s getting scooped it’s probably Patrick. He knows he’s owed the prestige. Men get tired. He’ll take his dog to the far side of the fair, same as you want to do.’
He took his asthma inhaler out again and inhaled. Held the air in his mouth for a good few seconds and then opened his lips, relaxed.
‘Explore it.’
‘What was that, Danny? Did the individualist speak? I was sucking at my can.’
‘Explore whether he needs a second man.’
Dawson smiled. Ancient Jones’s TV blared. ‘Certain toothed whales,’ Attenborough’s voice said, ‘can generate 20,000 watts of melodic song. It’s a song that can be heard for many miles.’
‘Been reading a book about Leonardo,’ Dawson said. ‘Your scythe got me thinking on it. You know how he sold some of his more obscure sculptures?’
‘I’m sure you’ll tell me.’
‘He sold them by telling people they couldn’t have them. By saying they were already sold.’ He shook the asthma inhaler and took another puff. ‘We’ve all a lot to learn from artists.’
IV
YOU CHOOSE THE parts of the story to tell. It’s the only way you can make it yours. Eight days before Brighton there was news. Loyalists had bombed a meat-packing warehouse on the Springfield Road, a building that had stood in the shade of Greater Shankill. Dawson said they should go and inspect the damage. ‘See what we can do.’
Dust and a scorched plastic bag. Flies buzzing and alighting on the ribs of pigs. There was a thick smell of iron in the air and people were rummaging through debris, side glances from gaunt faces; some meat already packaged was able to be saved. After a point you had to look away, turn inward, but inwardness had its problems too. His thoughts went to the call he’d received from his brother Connor last night. One of those conversations that consists of a single question approached from different angles: What have you got yourself mixed up in, Dan? It was dark how far information could spread, its liquid capacity to escape you. There was a night as a boy when Connor had pissed himself. Dan remembered laughing.
They were sitting on large metal storage cylinders. Dawson today wore jeans and a T-shirt, his arms and neck thin, the neckline too baggy, a portion of his hairless chest revealed. The change of costume made him a child. He played with a bottle cap as he talked. He pulled three Polaroids from an envelope.
Dawson said a young girl had been walking home with her older brother when the device went off. It was well known, he said, that Catholic schoolkids used that side alley over there because it snaked down to the Ballymurphy. The first Polaroid of the girl was a profile shot. Nine or ten, Dan guessed. She was a strawberry blonde, smooth-skinned, with faint auburn freckles. Perhaps there was a slight twist of grief in her eye. The second picture was another profile shot, the other side of the girl’s face. The eyelid here was huge, swollen. Her skin was wet and red, pitted, and the cheek seemed to want to slide into the nostril.
‘Blast injuries,’ Dawson said. ‘For the sake of killing off some Catholic jobs, they spoil a little girl.’
A man used his walking stick to prod a piece of meat. The meat leaked thin liquid as it moved. There was corrugated roofing leaning against a ruined wall. A priest arrived with a weeping old woman. They began to mutter Hail Marys.
The third picture was of a man in his twenties laid out on the ground with his eyes completely closed.
‘Your bomb ends the other bombs, Danny.’
What was England, back in the day, before they started killing for land? A tiny offshore island, Dawson said. An island sad and cold.
‘Why show me these?’
‘This girl’s father said to me … he said … he said, is this what we get for …’
Could Dawson really be fighting back tears? Something unconvincing about the swift onset of grief, the glistening eyes, the bony hand that moved from his chin to his knee like an actor’s sure gesture on a stage. It was left to Dan to guess at what the girl’s father had said.
Is this what we get for being good parents?
Is this what we get for not rocking the boat?
Is this what we get for teaching our daughter to turn the other cheek?
Who’d bombed the meat-packing warehouse? Not him. Not Dawson. Not anyone they knew. Blame lay elsewhere, with designated enemies, so why did he feel so guilty? Anger was the emotion Dawson must have hoped to stir, but he felt no anger at all. Nothing dissolves, nothing affrights. There was the rising sense, during this moment and a dozen others like it, that Belfast’s carnage stole not only the victims’ lives but large parts of the witnesses too. You disintegrated into the recriminations, the headlines, the pictures. You scattered yourself into proofs, warnings, suspicions, arrests. You rode out into the dark outrage of others, saw human loss shaped towards political ends, and though you hoped for the occasional gleam of uncontaminated compassion it seemed that the world was dimming. He remembered laughing at his brother and his piss-wet bed sheets. He was struck by his father for laughing.
Second thoughts? Yes. He’d had second thoughts, third thoughts, fourth thoughts. But doubt was a disease, a sentimental curse, and in the long run his actions would save lives. A new prime minister. Politicians seeing they were vulnerable on their own doorstep. Seeing that this war could cut both ways. The beginning of the end of apathy, maybe. The start of an understanding. And if one or two innocent died, if that occurred and couldn’t be helped, it would be no worse than what happened on the Falls every other day.
The truth was that on an operation you felt clean of guilt and will. It was day-to-day Belfast life that made you dirty. The nowness of being undercover, the sprint of adrenalin in your blood. It seemed to have a purifying quality. Everything you did was so silently precise, every step had to link so carefully to the next, that when you finally lay down at the end of the day your mind was a vast empty space. No doubt, no regret. All miseries for a moment receded. They made space for the satisfaction of a job well done. The gloom stayed away provided that, the next day, you got up at five to do the same again. There was something nimble about deceit. He tried and failed to remember a time when he’d felt appalled at the thought of it all. He pictured his mother going to church every Sunday, the glare of stained glass coming alive in summer, loneliness of winter dusk gone. A recent revival of her interest in religion. He wondered if she was ever praying for him. It made him sad to see how much faith she put in Jesus Christ when Christ, for his part, never seemed to have heard of her.