Field of Blood (3 page)

had joined the other teenage boys and the teenage girls of the Drive as they chanted at the tops of their voices Ìf you see a Brit soldier die, clap your hands,

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clap your hands, if you see a Brit soldier die . . .', and he had hated the boy whose blood was spilling in the road's gutter, and he had loathed the bitter‐faced troops

who bent over the boy and who trained their rifles on the crowd. And he had worshipped the unknown man who had fired the single shot.

When things in Turf Lodge were hot then Sean Pius McAnally, the teenager, was

on the streets. When they were cold he was lounging on the street corner, or flopped in the chair by the fire at home, always bored when it was cold, always

restless.

Two days after his twentieth birthday, ten long years ago now, when he was combing his hair in the bedroom that he shared with two of his sisters, when he

was thinking about his supper, when he was wondering how far he would get with Roisin O'Rourke behind the garages when it was dark, two men came to offer Sean Pius McAnally membership of the Organization and the rank of

Volunteer in the movement. The oath on the upstairs landing. A binding oath, an

oath of a lifetime. Onto an A.S.U., a member of the new cell system. Into action

against the Brits and the pig police. Quick learner, wasn't he? No bloody exams at

school, but good with the American M16 rifle. His eyes were quality,

and his hands were steady, and he was told that if he kept going well they'd give

him a job with the sniper gun, with the Remington Woodmaster M742. He had money now from rolled banks and held‐up Post Offices and a twenty‐first

birthday wedding to Roisin O'Rourke, and a week's screwing, and back to Belfast

and her Ma's small bedroom, and the first time out with the Remington

Woodmaster. She was a great girl, his Roisin, a great kid, and the crack in the Drive was that he was one hell of a lucky bugger to have had her.

Crystal‐clear memories now. Memories of a road block manned by the fucking Fusiliers with the fairy pom‐poms on their berets, of the driver spinning the wheel, of the rifle shots impacting into the driver, of the North of England voices

yelling commands, of crawling out of the car with his hands held high. Memories

of the Castlereagh Interrogation Centre, and of the beatings. Memories of not touting, of enduring the pain. Memories of the trial at the Crumlin Road Court House, and of a judge in red robes who looked down on him as if he were a bad

smell. Memories of the H blocks, and of the stink of the shit protest, and of the

weapons classes in Long Kesh. Memories of mastering the theory of the R.P.G.‐7

rocket launcher that was armour‐piercing and death to the Pigs and the Saracens

and the reinforced landrovers. Memories of crying his frustration at the cell walls

because he would have to wait to use the rocket against the bastards.

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Memories that were fresh as yesterday, of release, of handling the R.P.G.‐7, of firing it three times in fourteen months, of seeing the devastation on the telly news of watching a funeral on the evening round‐up. Two more kids conceived in

the trembling aftermath of a firing. Targets getting harder, police Intelligence getting better. The R. P. G. wasn't fired from behind a wall, the R.P.G. had to be

lined up, aimed, held firm. The risk getting worse, the chance of success getting

poorer.

Memories of the day that was a sledgehammer, the day that a Volunteer in the

Turf Lodge was turned, became a grass, touted on the rest of his A.S.U. Shit, that

day was sharp in his memories. Not Sean Pius McAnally's A.S.U.... If it had been

his A.S.U. then he would have been away to the Kesh as a lifer. No fucking way,

not him doing a life stretch. He hadn't asked their permission, he had told them

he was going. He didn't reckon a man who was expert in the use of an R.P.G.

needed to get bloody permission.

Memories of the first week in the caravan. Memories of lying in the narrow bunk

bed and knowing that he was safe, knowing that the life sentence in the Kesh was another bugger's and not his own, and of the day when he had first coaxed

the bird onto the grass beside the caravan door, and it had plucked at the bacon

strip.

All the memories of the times before he quit.

*

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**They had come across country to join the main road north of Drogheda, then

through Dundalk and over the border where the Customs men of both the

Republic and the North were warm in their huts, and up the fast drag to Belfast.

Off the motorway at Stockman's Lane, up Kennedy Way, over the roundabout

and onto the Glen Road. He felt pleasure coursing in him as the car took him closer to Roisin, and to Young Gerard and Little Patty and Baby Sean. He sat hunched forward with his arms tight across his chest, and he was smiling. The sight of a soldier crouched with his rifle at his shoulder in a garden gateway was

momentary.

They were past the church, towering in the darkness, short of the Andersonstown

R.U.C. station, almost onto their turn‐off left into Turf Lodge, when they came to

the road block.

McAnally shivered. He always shivered and sweated at a road block, and would

do to his dying day after what had happened at the block eight years before. The

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soldier he had seen in the gateway was positioned to pick up those who spun to

make an escape. The taller man, the driver, would have heard the spurts of McAnally's breathing, he gave McAnally a single sharp glance, then was changing

down through his gears, feeling the brake pedal.

Èasy, Gingy, nothing to fret on, the plates are clean,' the shorter man said quietly.

They had stopped. They waited their turn in the short queue of cars. The soldiers

were as young as the one spitting towards death while McAnally had sung his triumph thirteen years before, as young as the constable who had been killed in

the flame‐flash of the R.P.G. missile three years before, as young as the soldier

blinded by a missile's shrapnel two years before. The soldiers were young and cold and bored.

He watched their faces. He saw the roving of their eyes. He saw the rainwater dribbling on their cheeks. He knew the wicked hitting power of their rifles.

A corporal bent down to shine his torch on the number plate of the car, and then

he straightened and spoke into his radio. He was feeding the computer at headquarters. McAnally sat very still. He peered at the corporal who walked a slow circle with the radio held against his ear, waiting on the computer.

From the corner of his eye, McAnally saw the face that was now close against the

rear door window. A different face, firmer and stronger than the faces of the young soldiers. He saw the embroidered pips of a first lieutenant on the shoulder

flaps. He saw a quick brittle smile that the lieutenant aimed at him. He responded

without thinking. Meaningless, short smiles. The lieutenant's face was daubed in

dark cream. McAnally saw the flash of ordered white teeth, he saw the dark hair

that lay underneath the beret, he saw the eyes that beaded on him and stripped

him.

`Clear, Mr Ferris ...' the shout from the corporal.

The lieutenant stepped back from the car. He nodded to the driver.

`Have a good evening, gentlemen.'

The car surged forward, then went left into Norfolk Parade. McAn

ally was twisted round, staring through the back window of the car. `Smug shits .

. .'

The shorter man laughed. `You'll get your chance, Gingy. That's

what we brought you back for, so you'll have the chance to damage the smug shits.'

The taller man spoke softly. `You'll hear when you're wanted.'

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The car had stopped. He had come home. The lights were on upstairs at Number

63. He could hear a baby crying. He walked towards the front door and did not look back as the car drove away.

Z

He was on his back and he was asleep and again he screamed his protest.

Ì won't do it ... you can't tell me ... I'm outside, you can't make me...' '

Roisin lay awake on her side, her back to him. After the first and the second time

she had cuddled him and tried to comfort his torture and had lulled him back to a

calmer sleep. She could see the clock beside her head and knew that she had another hour before she must get up and begin preparing Young Gerard for school.

`You've no fucking right to tell me what I have to do ... I'm not having my fucking

arse shot off just on your say‐so ...'

The bed heaved as he bellowed his dreaming fear around the small front

bedroom. She could smell the sweat scent that his stomach had spread on her belly when he had loved her earlier in the night; when he had loved her before sleeping, before dreaming, before screaming.

`Find some other bugger, I've done my time, let another bugger share what I've

done . . .'

To Roisin her marriage to Sean Pius McAnally was a miracle of survival. When he

was over her, covering her, pounding her, then she could play at a fantasy that her life was a kingdom, that she was a queen. To her Ma the fantasy was a lie, to

his Ma the marriage was catastrophe. Her husband, the king in her realm, had never worked in his life and now lived in a dirty caravan box away from her. He

was a stranger who came back in a guilty blurt of excuses to share her bed in the

leaking house provided by the Housing Executive. He could be no

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**support to her, not now that he had run, nor before when he had been active,

nor before that when he had been locked away in the Kesh. The support for her

existence and the life of her children came from the Green Cross donations for prisoners' dependents, from the occasional charity of the Organization if she showed a favour to a big man, from the Social Security and the Supplementary

Benefit and the Children's Allowances. Only a dribble of Republic bank notes came in the post from the letters marked Monasterevan. From the start the marriage had been a disaster to her Ma and his Ma ... A week on the seafront at

Bray in the south's County Wicklow in a guest house where they reckoned they

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were doing you a favour if they made the room up before lunch, and where it had

rained on each and every one of the six days, and where he had humped her so

frequently that he had run out of the Johnnies by the fourth night and not known

how to replace his stock in good old Catholic Twenty‐six County Ireland, and got

her in the family way on the fifth or the sixth night. And on the seventh morning

in the hotel, the morning they were leaving, the dawn they were going back to

Belfast, that morning and that dawn the bastard Special Branch had paid a call. In

the first early morning light, three SB men had crowded into the tiny bedroom that was a double and a wardrobe and two chairs and hardly more room for a cat

to stand upright. The SB men had taught her that they were of the same breed as

the Northern peelers, that a fighter for the unity of Ireland was as much a piece of dirt to a Republic policeman as he was to a Six County policeman. There had been a brusque, thorough, intimidating search of their two bags, the spilling out

of her new underwear, and her in tears and him never opening his mouth. A marriage that started with the stamp of disaster, and gone on as a disaster when

he was lifted at the road block one week after their return, and yet she loved him.

She had loved him through the months of taking the prison bus through the morning sickness, and through the bulging pregnancy ...

`You can't fucking order me to do it, that's fucking suicide what you're saying . . .'

She had loved him through five years of taking the prison bus with a pram, with a

push chair, with a toddler, with a growing boy who did not understand why his father was always on the far side of a heavy wood table, why a man in uniform

and a shined peak cap stood at the side with his arms folded and contempt smirking his lips. A small boy going to his first Infant school, and coming home and chorusing in a tinkling parrot voice, Ìs my Da a Provo? The priest says the Provos have spat on Jesus, has my Da done that?' To Roisin McAnally, de O'Rourke, there was no disaster, only a strengthening love, and his Ma told her

she was bloody mad.

She did not turn her head. She hissed into the pillow. `Don't bloody tell me you're

not going to do it, tell whoever's bloody asking you. If

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you're outside, then you're outside, don't tell me, tell them. If you didn't want to do it then why did you bloody come back?'

She felt him heave, and the bed shook, as if he convulsed in waking. She heard

the new panting speed of his breath. He would be lying on his back, he would be

staring up at the dark ceiling. Perhaps the bugger could make out the damp 16

patch in the right‐hand far corner. The day he had come home she had spent four

hours with her children in tow trying to interest the Housing Executive in the damp patch in the ceiling. Some bastard manager with a house in Dunmurry and