As always when Thatcher came up in conversation, anecdotes led back to Clinkie’s year in the Blocks. Clinkie was a man who liked to stay groomed and he claimed now, for the hundredth time, that he’d bangled a little comb to keep his hair tidy inside. Like many of the guys who’d done time, he revelled in prison language. It marked him out as a martyred man. Nothing in the Blocks went by its real name. ‘Bangle’ meant sticking something up your arse to prevent confiscation. A penis was a Fagin. Sinister and droopy-looking, a supposed receiver of stolen goods. If a guy was really good at utilising the spaces in his body — Bobby Sands’s right-hand man being the obvious example — people called him the Suitcase, or the Holdall, or some other variation on luggage.
Sprinkling salt on a bowl of wet-looking chips Clinkie said, ‘They make sure to give you yer statutory requirements. You’re entitled every month to one ounce of the salt and one of sugar. But if a screw was a real shit he’d give it you all at once, so he would. Pour it over your food, the salt and sugar and all, and when he went for his own dinner was when you’d start your secret Irish classes with the lads. You’d take a few bites of your shit-awful meal and come up with all the ways you could call the fella a cunt.’
Marty yawned into his lager. ‘Major bastard, the prison warden. Type a’ guy who belongs behind bars.’
Marty and Clinkie, after laughing a while, slowly eased out of their performances. Their voices softened. They started talking about their kids. Clinkie was divorced. Marty was having marital problems. They sat there, comforting each other, drinking and talking. Smoking.
Down where the bar became the wall, Jim Murray worked his jaw from side to side. It was a nervous thing he’d been doing since June of 1979. ‘I’ll quote you that you said that, Marty. Your kid’s going to be just fine, you’ll see.’
A man Dan didn’t know took a pretend toke on a pretend spliff and pretended to be happy about it. Billy Fitzgerald caught the man’s eye and said, ‘Oh please.’ They disappeared out back and Clinkie chose that moment to start another story. Prison tales weren’t what Dan wanted to hear. They brought thoughts about windowless rooms and all the various routes by which he might end up in one. Did he even want to be in the company of these men? Did he even belong? He wanted to belong. He liked most of these men. He took his drink and his much-mocked book on knotweed and sat at an unoccupied table by the fruit machine.
In six hours he’d find out if his timer device had been properly wired. In twenty-four he’d have full information about who was inside when it exploded. In forty-eight, a sense of whether he needed to go into hiding, of whether he was heading to the H-Blocks, of whether he’d spend a lifetime scrawling words on the wall with a finger dipped in shit, getting knocked about by guards. An idea of what new senselessness his actions might unleash.
Guys who got fatally knifed in the Blocks were described as going off air. The bar’s radio was being retuned. It began to tell tales about the weather.
A tidy girl in a denim skirt walked in. Someone said, ‘Uh, the arse on that.’
‘Steady,’ the landlord said.
‘Walks like —’
‘Steady now.’
The girl sat down and yawned. ‘Drink it in, lads, this is the closest you’re getting.’ The men began to blush.
Dan looked towards the door and saw the scarred bald head of Mick Cunningham, your basic functional shit-eating grin and a body still stupidly bulky. He resolved to ask his advice. He needed the comfort of a dumb man’s Don’t Worry. Mick had been there from the beginning. Mick was all right.
‘Remember that day,’ he said to Mick. ‘The trip home after the stuff in the field with the dogs. The beers. Do you remember? You had to swerve for that cyclist.’
‘Oh the fucker,’ Mick said. ‘Oh the fucky luck he had.’ Things like that could keep Mick furious for years.
He bought Mick another pint. It went down in twenty seconds. After shaking his glass to loosen a lingering swirl of stout Mick said, ‘If you told them everything in the debrief, Dan, I can’t see why you’d be sweating. It’s sounds stickin’ out, far as I can see. Sounds sound all round.’ Gently he touched his injured ear. ‘What was the operation, anyway? I haven’t heard much on the wires.’
‘Just a job. Nothing big.’
‘So you did a pedestrian number, it went off OK, and you told them the full works?’ He grinned, gummy. ‘Celebration is more the sound of it, Dan. If I were you I’d find myself a friend and have myself a big little party. McCartland’s busy, is all. Always a view on the next op, the next vol coming up. He’s probably taking a lad to Parkhead. Celtic versus the Rangers, am I right? Times are changing. They cosy up to these kids.’
‘The recruits.’
Mick nodded. ‘We’ve got Gerry as a member, haven’t we? People couldn’t believe that. Now you’ve got to go for more diplomacy, I suppose. We need more people in the Department of Health, they say. In your bigger high street banks, the Post Office. The Brit Telecom. That’s where it’s at, isn’t it? Clever kids in suits. Get them into your universities, into the licensing centre in Coleraine. Change minds bit by bit is the idea.’ He laughed.
‘I suppose.’
‘I thought you were in favour of all that, Dan.’
‘I am.’
‘Well, why do you look like I just slipped one in your mammy? More and more I get it, Dan. I get there’s a something precious in the shite.’ He stopped and nodded to the landlord, said a hello to Marty too. ‘You’ve got to ask yourself, at some point, if we’re just a bunch of fuckers addicted to failure, haven’t you? Whether we’ve gotta be more imaginative than that. Whether we really want to wake tomorrow and find all our mates dead, or abroad.’
‘You make it sound worse than it is.’
‘Yeah? More imaginative than just pressing on with the same old patterns, I’m saying. Dead bodies here, dead bodies there, big fucken funerals and kids growing up without parents, lads getting jail time when they turn eighteen. Know what I’m sayin’?’
‘There’s a balance, Mick.’
‘That’s what I’m telling you. A balance.’
‘If we don’t fight, the future gets smaller.’
‘Ha. Good one. It’s pretty fucken small either way.’
Dan tried to think of a response to this. ‘I need to talk to Dawson,’ he said.
‘I know. I understand you.’ Mick scratched his head. ‘If the Brits wouldn’t pull out in ’72, when we took a chunk out of five hundred of their soldiers, why would the fuckers do it now? I ask myself that these days. That’s all I’m saying.’
‘What’s the point then?’
‘Come again, Dan?’
‘If it’s not going anywhere, explain the point.’
Mick shrugged. ‘You’d be hard-pressed to find a point in anything any fucker does. There’s less and less of a role for what you and me do, Dan. Admit it. We’re like the hard men of old. I mean — look at us.’ He grinned. ‘We’re damaged people, aren’t we, Dan? There’s no place for us in the world we’re trying to make.’
Dan stared. It was the ‘us’ that had made the army attractive at the start, and the ‘us’ that in this moment really left him lost. ‘You know his wife, Mick?’
‘Whose? McCartland’s?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Not intimately, if that’s what you mean. It’s been said before and I don’t appreciate it.’
‘She’s got one eye, has she? Was he lying when he said that to me?’
‘No, wasn’t lying on that one. She’s a woman who deserves more.’
With that, Mick turned away. Dan watched him feed coins into the fruit machine. The smell of sweat and stale ale was stifling, ashtrays overfull.