‘Anything?’

  ‘Old car doors.’

  ‘What was the name of the street?’

  ‘Does it matter? I don’t know. Cupar Street. It was Cupar Street.’

  ‘Made of iron and wood and barbed wire?’

  He sighed theatrically. ‘And car doors.’

  ‘I just want to see it.’ And I did.

  ‘No one lived in Cupar Street anyway. The windows were concreted over and the roofs were fallen in. Although Granny and Grandpa lived there when they were young.’

  I put the costume down. I mean, this was fascinating.

  He paused. He’d lost his thread (yes, thread!). ‘Where was I?’

  ‘The Prod.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I’d arranged to meet him there.’

  ‘You mean you’d actually jacked it up with the boy, this Prod? To throw stones at each other?’

  ‘It was a bit of a game,’ he said impatiently. ‘Anyway, that wasn’t the point. The point was, I was tossing stones at the Orangie kid, and we started talking and I told him how I had a picture of my dad. I was bragging, because no one had pictures. I told him all about the photo, my dad coming out of the shop and it was stuck on a card. The Prod called out from over the barricade, that he knew what it was, it was a Wanted card. I said, What’s a Wanted card? and the Prod said, It means your dad’s wanted. I remember thinking, My dad’s wanted! My dad was so great people wanted him! The Prod asked me if I knew what it meant, and I said of course I knew. And he said, Why’d you ask then? He said, So you know it means he’s a dead man, sooner or later? I said yes I did know. But I didn’t.

  ‘I ran all the way home along the row, breathing like crazy, in and out, drying everything out inside my throat, which was good because I didn’t want to cry in the street. When I got home, there was Dad sitting at the table plain as day. Alive. He said, You look like you’ve seen a ghost, son. Well, I had, and I said, You got the Wanted card. Dad laughed. He laughed! It wasn’t funny. I said, Did you get the Wanted card? and he said, I did. This was terrible. We were all dead. But Dad said not to worry. He said, We’re all wanted. Ma had her back to him and she was muttering that he was an idiot. I was beside myself and I was saying, Am I wanted? Are Dana and Sharon wanted? (They’re my sisters.) Is Ma wanted? And Dad said, No, not you. The men. The men.

  ‘Which was true, of course. It was only the men. All the kids gave cheek to the English soldiers. Ma could stand in the doorway giving them a piece of her mind as they passed, all the women did—Anglo bastards! Go back to your mammy. The soldiers would tramp by, all stony-faced.

  ‘It was just the men, the Provs.’

  I asked him what was a Prov when it was at home. Provisional IRA, he said, formed when the regular IRA had gone soft. I remembered this from the news anyway, once upon a time, in the pole house. The news of the world, and the evening cocktails.

  ‘But the women and the kids—you could be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

  ‘Could you?’ I said. I wanted to know, I really did.

  ‘You could.’

  I looked outside. The daisies were just visible, little smudges. Quarter to nine.

  ‘Was your dad a Prov, then?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Yup. He was waiting for the day I’d join. I never did of course. Anyway, Dad said it was nothing, the Wanted card. And that was the end of it. I remember that, in the candlelight. But it wasn’t the end of it.’

  ‘Candlelight?’

  ‘It was a squat.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  Squattocracy.

  ‘No electricity, like this,’ I said, indicating the room. The dusk had settled over it like felt. There were only minutes of light left. I knew the light quite well, its relationship with this room. Soon I wouldn’t be able to see his face. In an hour Art would be home and I’d continue with my Blackout life, my pools of light, my carefully heated water.

  ‘Not like this. You’re almost finished, aren’t you?’

  ‘Almost,’ I said, bundling the costume in my hands as if it were a cat, so he wouldn’t see.

  ‘Because I have to go,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why!’

  I mean he’d just told me about the Wanted card.

  He pulled something from his pocket, a mobile phone, clunky as hell.

  ‘A phone call,’ he murmured. ‘I’m expecting a phone call.’

  ‘Milly?’

  He nodded. ‘But also.’ He looked around the room. The red couch and curtains were wine-coloured. The white floorboards had a moony glow.

  Art would be home any moment. So what? I was seeing a client. I was earning a living. And anyway, we weren’t like that, controlling with each other.

  ‘But what were you going to say? Tell me quickly: what next?

  Please.’

  Please? GoGo, stop.

  ‘You’re sewing?’

  Of course I wasn’t blinking sewing. I held the costume in my hands. Like a cat.

  ‘I’m sewing.’

  He was talking. He was getting up from the table and reaching for his jacket, and going on.

  ‘Another photo came in the mail.’

  I stood up too. ‘Another one? Was it in the drawer?’

  ‘It came in the mail. Dad was out.’

  ‘Work?’

  ‘There was no work. Slight exaggeration—a day here, a day there, from the Brew, the Labour Exchange. He wasn’t idle though. Always on the move, wound up like a spring.’

  The client was putting on his jacket.

  ‘Are you going?’ I asked. Slight panic.

  ‘No, it’s cold,’ he said.

  Ah, late summer, and a chill outside now. You needed a jacket.

  ‘The mail came and it was another photo of Dad, a worse one.’

  ‘Worse! Oh no!’

  He laughed. ‘Oh no!’

  I repeated seriously, ‘Oh no.’

  He took his briefcase.

  ‘Ma opened the letter in the passage, dropping the envelope as she walked into the kitchen. I remember that, like a husk.’

  A husk, he said. A husk.

  ‘She flew into a panic. She’d never panicked before. In fact, her motto was, No need to panic. It was probably the Valium, but ah well. Now there was a definite need to panic.’

  ‘And she’d lost her marbles, remember,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. Or gained them.’

  ‘What was it? The card?’

  He transferred the briefcase to the other hand. ‘It was a Mass card, for a requiem. As if he was already dead. Ma went into a whirl. We’re going to Liverpool, we’re going, we’re going! She had a cardboard box and was tossing things into it. I went and got my Superman and put it in the box. I’d outgrown it but it was the only thing I had that was from a toy shop. In fact it was from the tip, but it had once been in a toy shop. Ma flung it out of the box. Necessities. We needed necessities.’

  I nodded. Necessities. The sky to the west had a violent streak of pink. The client didn’t see it. He had his back to the window.

  ‘Later that night, Dad came in and he’d had a few drinks. I couldn’t refuse a drink when it was Jacky Quinn’s leg, now could I? Ma threw the Mass card at him, and it fluttered away. He looked at it on the floor, but wouldn’t pick it up. I was watching all this through the crack in the bedroom door. Ma screamed at him, Pick it up! He said, I know what it is. He said he’d faced execution every day for a long time. But Ma was yelling, You’ve done something, Kevin, what’ve you done! Over and over. And he was raving on about Bobby Sands and the other martyrs and how we were getting somewhere after eight hundred years. They were going at it, yelling into each other’s faces, and they stood really close and I thought they might grab each other. But they didn’t. When they’d stopped, Ma said, We don’t need the Housing Executive to stove our roof in, we’ll do it for ourselves thank you very much, with our yelling and screaming.

  ‘She wrenched out the kitchen drawer and tipped it into the box we were packing for Liverpool—the pink and blue rosary beads, the birth certificates, what-have-you came tumbling out. She went into the bedroom and came back with her old dancing costume.’

  My neck twitched in surprise. I could feel my cartoonishness. ‘What—this?’

  He looked at the costume bundled in my arms, which was done, done like a dinner. It was finished. Finis. Finito. The End. He didn’t look. It was too dark to see anyway, the blackness. You could just make out the shine of the knotwork. He looked at me. ‘Yeah. That.’ He smiled. I hadn’t seen his teeth before this close, and now I could just see them like the white floorboards. They were pleasantly crowded, they got along well together.

  ‘Ma tossed it into the box and Dad said, What the fuck d’you want that for? You only had it on five minutes. She said she loved dancing, or had before she’d ever laid eyes on Dad. Dad was saying, No you didn’t, you did not love the dancing. And Ma was saying, Yes I did, I loved dancing and you’re not to tell the story of what you know nothing about. They went back and forth like this. I hated this, my parents fighting. They didn’t usually fight. Ma was saying she belonged to some club and people thought it was a good sign that there was dancing again and things were getting back to normal, after 1969. And Dad was roaring, A good sign! A good fucking sign! Your ma couldn’t even rustle up a few pennies to finish the thing. And Dad tugged at the sleeve of the dress, and Ma tugged it back, and I thought it might tear. Dad was saying, Oh yeah, great times. Back to normal! Then he said, Your own da used to say, what’s normal after eight hundred years? Ma said, My da was a bitter old soul, that’s why I ended up with you: I was used to bitterness and griping and bile, it seemed normal. I was listening to all this. Dad was saying—a bit slurred—But he was right, wasn’t he, your da? Because then there was 1972.’

  The client moved to the front room doorway. He stood against the jamb. ‘Now I’d better go.’

  ‘1972?’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘Bloody Sunday. I suppose no one was thinking about dancing then.’

  He was fishing for his car keys and moving into the dim passage. Everything was fuzzy, half formed in the dusk. I followed him and we picked our way to the front door.

  ‘Did you go then, that night?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. We probably never would’ve gone, even if Dad had, you know, if they’d got him. We never would’ve left Belfast.’

  ‘But what about Liverpool? And Dreadful and Frightful?’

  ‘Talk is cheap,’ he said. ‘We never would’ve gone. But do you want to hear this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He turned his head. No. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see a thing. Only his teeth. We were standing in the doorway by the front door but I didn’t open it. There was a shred of pink light through the stained-glass window above the door. These villas, they’re beautiful. I could see him looking at the costume which was wrapped around my hands. I’d give him the costume. When he’d finished, I’d give him the costume. But what I thought was: he wants to tell.

  ‘A few days later I was going for my lesson. I’d forgotten it, what with everything going on, and then I remembered it, and I got my music and went along the row and I remember thinking how you can forget things, like birds, pianos, even people, and then they’re there again. And there was Mr O’Connell, standing on the doorstep looking out, as he often did, having a fag. He was looking over the roofs at the sky, which was still smoking a few days after the parade. When he saw me he waved and I broke into a run. As I ran I noticed that a car was cruising behind me, going along at the same speed as me. I thought someone was trying to park and I looked back and I saw a big dark car. As I reached Mr O’Connell’s house he said, How’s ‘The Happy Farmer’ and I said he was grand, and then I saw this look on his face and there was a huge, thunderous bang. It was like the whole world had blown up, it was the end of the world. Mr O’Connell crashed from his doorway out onto the lane like a tree being felled. Blood was pouring from the side of his head. I felt like I was in space, or I was like some sort of ghost hovering over Mr O’Connell. I might’ve been yelling but I couldn’t tell. I remember I didn’t know what to do, I was paralysed, and I was petrified the sniper might get me as well. But the car had gone. I stood in the middle of the lane, the blood pounding in my ears, and music, ‘The Happy Farmer’, plastering itself against the houses. Then neighbours came rushing. I remember Mr McKinley dropping to his knees next to Mr O’Connell, and you know what I thought? I thought his knees must hurt, the way he dropped like that. And Mrs Touhy taking his pulse, and Mrs O’Connell running out of the house and sinking next to Mr O’Connell and wailing. Then I looked at Mr O’Connell, who was undressed in the worst possible way. Exposed. From then on I knew the meaning of undressed, the side of a head taken clean off, showing these glistening ropes and wads that make us go, up to a certain point.’

  20

  The costume was like a thing alive, the way it jumped in my hands. Half alive, then dead again, in and out of consciousness. The client swivelled his head quickly to look at it.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. I meant the costume. I was shaking my head. I didn’t know what to do, whether to fawn over him or to be cool. I was never good at this sort of thing. But I found, while I was looking at him, that I had tears in my eyes.

  Because he had told me. He had told me. He said, Thank you. I said, You’re welcome. As they say in America. I opened the front door and we stepped out onto the veranda. I went very sensible.

  ‘Go on,’ I said.

  ‘Me go on?’ He looked pointedly at the costume but I didn’t say anything. I could see his face now. The sky had a last bit of pink.

  ‘The whole street was at the O’Connells’, adults and kids packing in, and Old Mrs O’Connell (that was his mother) was being held up under the arms by two women because she’d collapsed like a puppet. She was whimpering and Aunty Theresa and a couple of other women were trying to get her to drink tea out of a saucer but it kept spilling down her front and Young Mrs O’Connell (his wife), who was shaking like a leaf, was saying, Leave off with the tea, will you, can’t you see she doesn’t want it? But the other women kept trying to give her the tea and saying, It’ll do her good. Ma was saying, Leave her in peace, won’t you. But still the other women kept trying to give her tea, until after a while everyone seemed to have forgotten about Mr O’Connell being dead. We were there to debate the issue of whether Old Mrs O’Connell should have tea or not.

  ‘I remember at home we had soup.’

  Soup. A gas ring because it was a squat.

  He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t swallow, even the soup. I had some kind of trapdoor in my throat. Ma was smoking in the candlelight and swinging her foot and saying, It’s alright, son, he had a good innings, he was getting on. It’s a tragedy when someone young dies, but he had a good life. She went on thinking up more good ways of looking at Mr O’Connell’s death. At peace now, gone to a better place.’

  He was motoring. I wouldn’t interrupt him again.

  ‘Dad wasn’t there,’ he said. ‘Probably down the Working Men’s Club.’

  ‘Working Men’s Club? But I thought they didn’t—’

  ‘They didn’t. There was no work. But there was a Working Men’s Club.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said. Shut up, GoGo! ‘And?’

  ‘And, nothing. Except I could sense something coming to a head during the evening. When Dad came in, us kids were in bed. I heard Ma say, It’s in the pot. Then, They mistook him for you, you know that, don’t you? And Dad saying, That’s rubbish. They were silent for a while. Dad was eating. I could hear his spoon. Then Ma said, You’re a stupid fool for hanging round here, and Dad was saying, Stop it, will you, you know nothing about it. Ma said she knew something happened on the twelfth, and she asked him what it was. Dad told her to keep out of what she knew nothing about. Ma said, I know this—you have Jack O’Connell’s blood on your hands.

  ‘I got out of bed and looked through the crack in the door and saw in the light of the candle that they were leaning forward in their chairs, clinging to each other. I wondered how they could be slagging each other off, and the next thing be hugging. Ma said we’d all go to Liverpool now. We’d stay with Deirdre and Finoula. Dad stiffened and leaned back. Ma was staring at him, her eyes looking crazy in the candlelight. She said, Well you don’t think we’re going stay now, do you? Dad got up and slammed out the door. Ma called after him, Hope you die out there, you bastard! Ma sat there and you could tell she was thinking away like anything. You could see the thinking coming off her.

  ‘I must’ve been a bit slow, because it was only after lying there for a while that I put two and two together. If the sniper was meant for Dad, then I had led him to Mr O’Connell.

  ‘In the morning Dad wasn’t there, but that was nothing unusual. Ma was like the head of Sinn Féin, she was like a little general. She marched next door to Aunty Theresa’s.’

  ‘This was your aunt?’

  ‘No, everyone called her aunty because her two sons had been shot joy-riding through a checkpoint and now she had no children. She had the only phone in the street. Her husband had got compo for his arm, but he’d been on the blanket in the Maze and the only way he was coming home was in a box. She was in the money.’

  ‘The blanket?’

  He shrugged. ‘They didn’t wear clothes or wash. Well, they were political prisoners, treated like criminals. Thatcher said, “Crime is crime is crime.” Apparently. I was only—’

  ‘Twelve, yes. Very poetic. Very Gertrude Stein.’

  ‘You’ve finished it, haven’t you?’

  ‘Just get on with it, get on with the story.’

  ‘It’s not a story.’

  ‘Okay. Get on with it anyway.’

  He nodded as if he could read the fabric, which was just a blob in the dark, and which I knew he wouldn’t be able to see anyway, even if they got the stop-gap cable going. But he was scrutinising it, his face twisted as if he were illiterate and trying to figure out his letters. ‘So the phone, anyway, Ma came back after using the phone and said matter-of-factly, We’re booked on the ferry on Friday.’