The 555 timer. You had to put it in its own bit of space. It had to be free to breathe, the output connection pointing to your right. You had to move it to the dead centre of your breadboard, framed by the rows of tiny holes. The advantage of building your timer device at the operation site was that you were less at risk during travel if a stop and search happened. You were carrying ordinary old wires and video-recorder parts, an electrician on a job. You could show peelers an electrician’s calling card with a phone number on one side. The number would go through to an answerphone and on that answerphone you’d have Martina’s voice, its staggering gravel, saying the lines are all busy, please leave a message, someone from Sunnyside Electrics will return your call. You built a history for yourself and made people a part of it. They felt involved; they started to exist within its architecture. Dawson in his more lyrical moods liked to say the world was full of people who in their daily lives looked without seeing, felt without feeling; people who wanted to be carried away by a wave of false logic more soothing than what they knew.
They’re halfway through their work when Patrick whispers words about the tourists outside the hotel, men and women clutching their shiny travel guides, seeking out the Royal Pavilion, the Regency architecture, the Victorian aquariums, the Pier, the pebbled nudist area beyond Duke’s Mound (had he been reading a guide himself?). Good for them, he said. He envied them and wished them well. The men and women on Britain’s streets were on the winning side of a war, and on the winning side you barely knew there was a war at all. You didn’t spot the cracks in the pavements, the weeds in the joints, the empty ice-cream shops with damp external walls, the blistered paint, the rusted bars on basement windows, the bird shit, the rain stains, the homeless people, loss. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen.
Patrick. Patrick who, during internment, served two years in detention without trial. Patrick who’d spent some of his childhood in Norwich. Patrick who believed British cities and towns were where the war could be won. Patrick who said you don’t get an enemy to listen by shouting loudly from afar; you do it by whispering in their ear. It amazed Dan how simply you could summarise a life. Never felt at home in Norwich. Came back to Belfast to help with civil rights. Got locked up. Became the Provos’ best bomber. An army feeds off injustice. The stories of its soldiers are only strange when stripped of context. Build a moat around yourself.
Wasn’t full-on IRA when the authorities got hold of him. Patrick had existed only at the fringes. But the aim of the arrests wasn’t so much to catch IRA guys as to catch innocent people you couldn’t get a proper court order against. People who, being Catholics, might have information about suspected terrorists. ‘Take these people,’ Patrick said to Dan. ‘Shake them up. Burst an eardrum. Blacken an eye. Terrify them into staying well clear of Republicans. That’s their powerful, simple idea.’ You killed the cause by isolation. Picked a guy up again and again until other innocent people said, ‘Oh, he must be involved with trouble,’ at which point the isolated guy was at the RUC’s mercy. If he got a bullet in his head people would have a narrative to hand that explained why he deserved it.
Patrick asks what happened with your father. What happened, what are the facts? The fact your father worked eighteen hours a day in the tobacco factory. The fact he made the move into odd-jobbing around town in pursuit of greater freedom. Plumbing, wiring, checking timber for defects. Shakes, knots, resins. The hole in a brick is called a frog. Preparing the installation of lighting systems; testing equipment; balancing on scaffolding; pushing wheelbarrows along planks; swearing like he was supposed to swear, a manufactured vulgarity that cost him a little of who he was. He was doing whatever he could to get by and to purchase that shabby family home. Someone decided to toss a brick at his head. His eyes became mere things, marbles. A son sees that and what does he do? Tidies his talents into a different channel. There’s more to say but what’s the point in saying it, in going on and on when life itself can be so brutally abbreviated? A random act. Can’t even pick a culprit. System itself is bad. Take apart the system. Dan imagined the tourists outside the hotel coming into this bathroom and gathering around, cameras suspended from treated strings around their necks, special shapeless walking shoes in creative shades of beige, watching him make the timer for this bomb. He imagined them saying, Ah, he wouldn’t have done it if his daddy hadn’t died like he did. Might as well say he wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been born. All of us love a single motivation. Saves us from thinking too hard.
Moving pieces around. Keeping the gloves pulled high around the wrists. Fingertips feeling no slackness.
You had to attach your input leads to the left flank of the board. The intention wasn’t to connect them, just to keep the lead wires in place. You had to thread the lead wires into a chosen hole near the input. You needed to connect the wire lead from the RST of your 555 to the board, nice and slow, and then you had to use your jumper leads to connect up the two holes that you’d used to attach the RST and input. You were creating a circuit path with these basic tools, something that connected the pieces, the world shrinking around you to the size of a smoke ring, forgetting that this floor was a bathroom floor, a bathroom floor in an expensive hotel on the south coast of England, a hotel where the Tories would stay for their party conference in three and a half weeks’ time. Form a bridge. Form a link. Get the body of the resistor aiming upward, a needle on a compass pointing north.
PART THREE. DEPARTMENT OF HEARTS, 1984
I
PEOPLE SAY DRUGS cause dreams, but during his first twenty-four hours in hospital it was mostly memories that came. People and scenes washed in and washed out, a structure stolen from the sea, and a doctor playing with a twenty-pence piece began offering high-speed advice. Monitoring, lifestyle, myocardial. Nurse, perhaps a cappuccino please? A myocardial infarction, the doctor said, using his two fists to demonstrate the difference between myocardial and some other cardial, saying ‘pop’, saying a heart really looks like a fist covered in blood, saying smoking and fatty foods, saying any recent uncommon exertion, saying physical or mental stresses or family problems, saying in forty-five minutes we’re going to clear that artery of yours, don’t try and say too much in the meantime.
There would be a little screen.
Like a TV screen?
Yes, Mr Finch, black-and-white screen in the theatre.
Call me Moose.
Mousse? As in the dessert?
As in the animal. Animal.
Are you amenable to students being present to observe? Three, four. Picture of a little bonsai tree, really. One little twig shape lengthening, that’s all. But they’ll learn so much from you, they will. Young. Doing their degrees. Going to be fine. Futures ahead of them. Simple procedure. Done it a hundred times. Futures. That and a few days in bed and you’ll be out of here. The rest is really up to you.
His mother telling him at the wedding, and before the wedding, that he was making a mistake. Didn’t listen. Didn’t worry. There was something reassuring about marrying a woman your mother wasn’t convinced by. It underlined to you the fact that you weren’t marrying your mother.