She was weeping and it made him desperate. It crushed all the air inside him. Again he had his hands on his knees. Again he was looking away and trying to breathe. Fidgeting for space, for air, always, endless.
‘Or the Loyalists. Loyalists. They’ve burned houses elsewhere, Dan. Retaliations already begun. Streets back from here, houses burning. They’re always so quick when there’s a mainland attack, it’s like they’ve a list, a list.’
‘Calm down, Ma. Stay calm.’
‘Thatcher survived, Dan.’
‘You think I didn’t catch that?’
‘It’s made her a martyr, Dan.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s nothing to do with us.’
‘Nothing she’ll do from now on will matter. She’ll be the woman who was bombed and didn’t blink.’
‘Why would we care? It’s not relevant to us. Why would you even tell —’ He glanced at the women in their semicircle. Their eyes moved towards the TV.
‘They’re saying she won’t even put back her speech!’
‘Stop.’
‘Not even a delay, Dan! And people have died.’
‘Whoever’s done this to us is going to pay. I’m going to make them know — they’ll know what they’ve done.’
‘Oh, they know! They already know. All the wounded people on the telly, Dan, and they’ve done nothing wrong, have they? They’re like your da, Catty.’
‘I’m talking about here.’
‘There, here. It’s all the same, Dan. They’re pulling them out half alive.’
She was whimpering; he was whispering.
‘Stop it please,’ he said. ‘You’re embarrassing us, Ma.’
Clear snot was running down into her mouth and she was shaking on the sofa, allowing the event to destroy her. Embarrassment was the word and he didn’t know why. How was he not beyond embarrassment?
She said, ‘I should never have let that Dawson McCartland into my garden.’
‘Quiet now. Be quiet.’
‘There might not even be a minister dead, they said. Not one! But there’s dead bodies already on the news — women who weren’t ministers who were staying there, women and wives, and now Belfast’s burning, look.’
‘Stop, Ma. Control yourself. We got the letters.’
‘The letters!’
‘What happened on the mainland — it means fuck all to us. This is just weird timing — this is …’
He thought again of what she had said about Provo boys hanging around the house. He thought, No, they wouldn’t do this. Use me and get rid of me? Dawson? No.
‘My whole life is over,’ she said. ‘Over. My whole life up in flames because of you and your kind and your father dying for nothing. What would he say now, Daniel? What would he say, Daniel, if he saw you —’
No. Couldn’t hear this. Wouldn’t. He wheeled round, deliciously free of thought, deeply impressed by his own disgust, and with the back of his hand he hit her face. Saliva streaked from the corner of her mouth. His knuckles stung. He stood there for a moment, amazed by himself, as the women touched their hair and looked away.
Dawson came the next day with money and a plan. He said Dan would need to spend some time abroad. He said that the army looked after its own. He had pictures of the Loyalists who had set fire to the house. ‘Time to start a new life, Dan,’ he said. He said he had been on leave.
‘Compassionate?’
‘Annual.’
‘Fuck, Dawson —’
‘We all need a break,’ Dawson said.
Dawson talked about Thatcher, her lack of empathy, her inability to imagine herself into other people’s shoes: the miners, the Catholics, those with another view. He talked about the distance she’d created within herself, the distance necessary to do her job.
Dawson did not talk about the victims in the Grand. He did not talk about the dogs that had died in the fire, the charred bodies in Dan’s garage. He did not talk about all the hate he surely felt.
Dawson said he had tickets for the Celtic Rangers game and would gladly give them up.
Moose grabbed at his belt. There was a new exhilaration at the margins of his pain, an old edgy in-the-gym feeling. Whipped the belt right out of the loops, a gesture learned from nowhere. A bit of Harrison Ford juju that wasn’t really him. He got the belt around his bad leg and tightened it, let it be.
In his head now he was one hundred per cent Harrison. The Beatles were playing ‘Hard Day’s Night’. The triangle of electric light was where he was headed. It was the only sharp thing in the swarm of the room. He heard water trickling in an unseen space.
What are you going to do? Best you can, best you think you can, which is everything. He performed an unlikely sit-up. Pain lived between his ribs. The motion bought him momentum for the next few desperate gestures. Licking his split lip, breathing fast and crawling slow, pausing at intervals to say ‘No’.
He saw his own progress as fragment-to-fragment. Get to the broken chair leg. Breathe. Get to the Sellotape hoop. Breathe. Get through the thick fog to the flattened tinfoil castle, dragging the bad leg behind him. He could feel the crinkle of vulnerable foil under his hand. There was fire in his veins, smoke in his flesh. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Ah, ah, ah.’
He couldn’t do this. Couldn’t keep moving. His lungs were full of dust. But he was moving, was he? He was doing this. Trying. Every inch coughing up blackness was a sort-of-almost progress. He felt oddly invested in himself. If he had a flag he’d stick it in the middle of Engelbert’s tinfoil castle. He had no flag. Never mind. Move on. Beyond the castle was a steaming mountain made of wood. The crook of a pipe there. A cistern. And beyond –
Here was the thought that kept forming: Marina had said Engelbert was asleep in the side room. Where was that side room now?
He looked behind him. The potted yucca was there but the doorway wasn’t. All was rubble and dust. Somewhere in his mind he heard the word hero. The idea was irresistible. This agony might have a shape. He wanted to disprove life’s lesson tonight: that it made no sense at all.
There were voices behind him. Footsteps. Coughing. A muddle of well-meaning human sounds. Cones of light. Torchlight. Warm torchlight on his skin for a faint electric instant and then gone. The torchlight did not illuminate anything. It simply showed you the extent of the darkness all around. He made a shouting sound, noise not language, and brickwork came down and spat dust in his face. Might as well go to the yucca, the disappeared doorway. There was a chance he would find a little boy beyond. He coughed and spat. He groaned and shrieked. He squeezed his leg to hurt the pain.
He crawled towards the plant. Avoid the mountain of rubble to the left. Go right. Oh, oh, oh. Take the road more taken. ‘No.’ The path less troubled. ‘No.’ Back over the tinfoil castle, saying only the word ‘no’. Find the next bit of rubble. Get it in your sights. To get through this! To get through this. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, but he was not sure what for.
He swallowed blood. He crawled into the area where the side door should have been. He got onto his good left knee. He wrapped his arm around concrete. He hauled, fell back. He spat and put weight on his left knee again. He hauled at more stone, thinking of Engelbert beyond, and the fourth or fifth time he did this he rose up to half-height and spat and saw, through burning eyes, an opening and a — a boy, standing beyond, very still.
The boy’s skin and clothes were dark with dirt. His eyelids snapped up like blinds. Those live-wire white eyes. A pink mouth began to blink.
‘Engel?’
The boy began to climb. Over the rubble he came, moving towards Moose on hands and knees, real or not real, something in between. The area in which he moved was no longer a room. It was a space owned by improvised alcoves, heaps of stone and twisted metal. Racy little tears sped down Engel’s cheeks. They left clean paths behind. Time slowed and progress was slow. There was torchlight behind Engel’s head. There was a fireman emerging through a further half-gone wall.