The Journeyman Tailor (14 page)

The colonel pushed himself to his feet.

"We’re doing the Donnelly place tonight ..."

Her eyes glinted, she seemed to throw off the relaxation "Oh? Why?"

Orders from on high."

She’s done nothing, Attracta."

"Orders."

"Why dosn’t anyone at Curzon Street
ever
ask me why we are loathed in this goddamn corner. God, I could tell them. She just happens to be married to the man."

‘’And away a long time. So it's harassing women and kids that I’m now paid for

.’’There are some right pillocks we have to work for, jonny , ,’’

The colonel said, "I had him in here once. A patrol had lifted him on Charlie One. He was here for an hour before the Branch came to run him down to Gough. I rather liked him. It was his attitude that tickled me. I mean, he despised me, he probably had a little plan for me, he'd have been very happy to see me blown away, yet . . . He seemed to regard himself as my equal. Two officers, two armies. As if. . . well, if we'd met in a bar somewhere a thousand miles away, we'd have had a good chat, beefed over our mutual tactics, broken a bottle open. What I thought at the time, he'd have made a very good company sergeant major in a good regiment. He wasn't frightened of me, and I don't mind saying it, I'm glad he's someone else's headache."

"Great mug of tea. Thanks. Come along, Brennard, I need to be driven home to kip."

She walked to the door. Bren followed. For a short moment the colonel's arm was round her shoulder, ushering her to the door.

Outside the door, she turned back to him. It was the great winning smile.

"You know what they say about you?"

"Who? Curzon Street?"

"No. The kids up on Altmore. We picked it up on one of the bugs.

They say, 'What's the last thing that'll go through Colonel Johnny’s mind?' It's their crack."

"What's the last thing that'll go through my mind?"

" They say it’s an A.K. bullet. Bye, sunshine."

"Cow."

Thought you'd get it."

She didn’t look back. There was just her muffled laugh into the anorak collar that she held tight across her face. The colonel, Jonny, caught Bren’s jacket as he made to follow her.

‘’Look after that lady. Don’t ever think of taking a liberty with her safety. If anything you did, or didn't do, endangered her, then I'll break your back,"

The officer commanding East Tyrone brigade knew,
so did his intelligence officer. But by that
Saturday afternoon, the word of danger had shimmered down the mountain and through the bungalows and farmsteads and Housing Executive homes. Word too travelled fast, whispered mouth to straining ear, of new risks to the men who had sworn the oath, Every man and woman on Altmore would have been able to recite the Constitution of
Oglaigh na hEireann,
would have known General Order 5, Part 5 . . . "No Volunteer should succumb to approaches or overtures, blackmail or bribery attempts . . . Volunteers found guilty of treason face the death penalty."

There were few amongst the bungalows and farmsteads and Housing Executive homes who could have denied involvement, strong or tenuous, with the Organisation. There were sons, nephews, cousins, the children of neighbours, who were dead or imprisoned or 'away' or active. It was the life of the mountain, in the twenty-second year of the present war, that no man and no woman knew whom they could trust.

Fear ruled. See nothing, hear nothing, know nothing, was the order of survival. The men took comfort in the village bars, their women more often sought the help of Valium and librium. But drink and sedatives gave only noisy or drugged solace. Willing or dragged screaming, the community was involved. There was a family on Altmore . . . the son shot dead by the covert Special Forces, father interned in the fifties, grandfather active in the twenties and thirties, great-grandfather shooting until the barrel of his rifle was red-hot in Dublin in 1916, great-great-grandfather a part of the closed group seeking Home Rule a full century before the young man was buried under the grey cloud and the gold green slopes of the mountain. Where was escape? Escape was not possible.

Behind closed doors and closed windows and closed minds, the community of Altmore braced itself against the menace of an informer.

The O.C had begun, and she told him that it was about feckin' time, to put the new units into his wife's kitchen.

She watched him She was beside him on the kitchen linoleum and she marked by pencil the places for his power-drill to make Room for the screws and she passed the doors and frames from The packaging to his hand She knew the anxiety that hit at him, and that brought him cold and violent to her bed. She knew that he commanded the Brigade, and she knew also that the man before him was shot in an army ambush and finished with a bullet to the forehead; she had seen the pallor of the face in the coffin and the small, neatly cosmeticised hole. And the man before that was now in his twelfth year in the Kesh with more, many more, years to endure; she knew that each Sunday morning that man's wife and his child took the bus from Dungannon to the prison to make small talk with the caged bird.

She made the marks and passed the materials.

She could do nothing.

His daughter knew when the strain was at him. The Quartermaster had come in through the door, with the mud on his feet. Straight to the cupboard beside the fireplace, straight for the whiskey.

Her mother was in Dungannon, down on the bus for the weekend shop. Her mother had to go by bus because her father had been away with the car. The girl went outside and took the keys from the ignition and switched off the sidelights, and locked the car. He was pouring again when she came back into the sitting room.

She was seventeen. She did waitressing in a hotel in Dungannon. If her father were arrested again, charged again, sent to gaol again, then she might lose her job. The job was her lifeline, vital to her. Her father had been in the Kesh for four years. Between the ages of eight and twelve she had seen him only on those weekends when her mother had pushed and forced, and once punched her, onto the prison visitors' bus.

They were brilliant kids that she met working at the hotel, and the management sent her home to the mountain by taxi at night. She could not know he was the Brigade's Quartermaster, but she knew that he was again involved.

He had no work, her mother had no work. She was the oldest of four, and the only breadwinner of the family. She gave £30 each week to her mother ... If she lost her job . .

The glass shook from the tremble of his hand He challenged her to criticise him She couldn't know whether he had been out to move weapons, whether it had been reconnaissance, whether it had been on a hit. He was home. He felt safe in his home. The strain was from being out and abroad on the Organisation's business. She did not know whether it was the fear of being shot or the fear of being lifted that drove him to take drink as soon as he returned to that safety.

The whole of the village knew that it had been a bad summer and a worse autumn for the "boys".

Mrs Devitt bottled up inside her the shock of discovering her boy's involvement. No one of her family had ever before been in the clutches, as she would have put it, of the Organisation. Coming back on the bus from Dungannon, early in an afternoon, after doing dinner-lady duty at St Patrick's Academy, she had found him in the bath. A steaming hot bath, on a Tuesday afternoon, and the boiler going like oil was free.

There had been pictures of the bomb debris on the Ulster telly's news, a haberdashery store in Cookstown. She hadn't told her own mother, nor her sister and they had never had a secret between them, nor Vinnny's father, nor even the priest.

He lay on his bed. A Saturday afternoon, and he was a fine big fellow, and there might have been work for him on one of the farms if he cared to shift his backside and look for it She tidied around the bed.

Her son stared at the ceiling. He had nothing more to say to her now.

Men came at night, called for him. She knew some of them, didn't know most of them. He was paler than he had been before. She would not have known what to say to him, she never asked him.

The last Saturday she had heard him go out, before it was light She had heard the squeal of her front door, while her husband snored his Friday-night drink away. Since the last Saturday he had been tighter than before, as though the pressure was increasing. Each Sunday she took flowers to her brother's grave, a coronary attack, and she passed the Republican plot where the men were buried. Clear fine photographs of all of them, in then best suits, sealed into the stone. Her Vinny had a best suit, and there was on the front-room mantelpiece a clear fine photograph of him at his cousin's wedding, with a white carnation on his lapel.

She had an armful of his shirts and socks. His face was a heartbreak to her.Gerry Brannigan's wife was what they called on the mountain "a holy decent woman". Gerry Brannigan was what they called in Dungannon police barracks "the armchair Republican". She had tried to keep their youngest out of the Organisation, he had given the boy the chat and the talk that had pushed him forward.

Gerry Brannigan would have liked to have been admitted to the secrecy of the Provisionals' army, but had been rejected because he took drink. His three elder sons were away in England, on the building, his daughter was in Glasgow working as secretary to a solicitor's business. For three years Gerry Brannigan had basked in a sort of pride because his youngest son was involved. The boy's mother wanted him to "break the stick", as they said on Altmore, cut his links, but he paid her no heed.

They kept fowls in the back garden. There was a chicken coop they had made themselves, knocked up out of spare wood, and a good fence round it to keep the fox out. They were both there, Gerry and his wife, hunting for eggs in the last light of a Saturday afternoon, so that there would be scrambled egg for Sunday morning breakfast after early Mass. He saw his wife look up. She was a good woman, neat and tidy and careful with their money. He saw the sadness on her face. He followed the line of her eye. There was the face of their boy at the kitchen window. He looked haunted. He had encouraged the boy, taught him the songs and told him the folklore. And now that he saw the face of the boy, Gerry Brannigan cringed. He could see the pressure building on his awkward, snapping, bloody-minded youngest son. He felt a great guilt; Gerry Brannigan felt the danger that was alive on Altmore.

The priest called for Palsy Riordan.

He came each Saturday in the winter, when the boy was usually in the lean to garage When Patsy was cleaning the plugs or polishing the chrome of his motorcycle, the priest stood at the door and talked to his mother, and he could hear their voices.

The priest came each Saturday to ask whether the next afternoon, Patsy would rejoin the gaelic team, Under 19s. He would talk to Patsy's mother, get her encouragement and then he would go to the garage, and with his best smile he would tell the boy that there was still the need for a good defender in his team, and that the position was held open for the boy. The priest saw the way that young Patsy gazed back at him, as if he wanted to catch the line that was thrown to him, as if he was just helpless. The boy had great potential, with commitment and fitness it was the priest's belief that the boy could play for the County Tyrone team, Under-19s. This Saturday, like last Saturday, and Saturdays before, the boy just shook his head, mumbled words that Were indistinct, turned his shoulders away from the priest and hunched over his motorcycle. In the priest's eyes, young Patsy was just a silly boy.

Perhaps if he had sat down on the oil stained floor of the garage, spent an hour, two hours, talking with the boy then the priest might have melted his hostility, but he had the sick to visit and his team to collect.

The priest knew that it was said there was an informer on Altmore ...

He could only wonder how long it would be before the troops and the police swooped on the Riordan.' house and look the silly boy away.

She had lost an earring.

It was not an expensive earring, but it was gold and it held a single pearl that was real, and her mother had given it to her. The earring was important to Siobhan Nugent.

He was down at Attracta Donnelly's, where he always was at the weekend, where he said he was painting and wallpapering She could not remember when she had last had the earring Ridiculous, but it was two full days since she could last remember noting the earring. She was irritable as she searched for it, because it would have been noted in the shop that she had come out with "only one earring, gossiped over and not pointed out to her. And his mother hadn't told her, but then she saw nothing. His mother was out for the afternoon, otherwise she would have been fussing in Siobhan's way, and criticising her for her carelessness. She stripped the bed. She flapped the sheets and nothing fell clear. After she had remade the bed she went into the small bathroom and turned out the wicker basket that held the family's dirty clothes. Francis helped her, Doloures and Patrick and Mary watched the television across the hall. Back to the bedroom. She started on all of the clothes, dresses and coats that she had worn in the last two days.

There was a raised false floor to the wardrobe.

"Could have gone down here, Ma."

There was a crack at the edge of the false floor. It was the type of wardrobe that had to be assembled from a kit, and those kits were never properly satisfactory. Her Francis found it. A clever wee boy her Francis. She looked down. She saw his fingers drop into the crack, the gap. The false floor moved as the boy tugged it up.

Her Francis held up what he had found under the false floor of the wardrobe.

"What's this, Ma?"

He never talked to her about the part he played in the Organisation. She thought it was minor. She knew he had been in prison before they had met, long before they were married, because his mother had told her. His mother told her most things about her husband, she could wheedle answers to her queries from the old goat. His mother thought that it was Siobhan's fault that Mossie, her golden boy, was diving ever more inside himself, as if the weight of Altmore's granite increasingly pressured the spirit from him. His mother thought it was Siobhan's fault that rare laughter, occasional fun, was now drained from her darling.