The Journeyman Tailor (16 page)

Her arms slid from his neck.

‘’The book’s your give away. You take a risk with the book."

Mossie said. "We goes to Belfast four times a year, right? We all go, you and me and the kids; that's known, you tell everyone that’ll listen that we go to Belfast four times a yearfor the big shop, and I get my new brushes . . . Everyone Knows - And I leaves you, because you and the kids don't want to buy paint brushes, right? I buy the brushes and I get the entries marked up into the book

"You's bloody stupid, Mossie, keeping the book here.’’

"I need it."

"That's idiot talk, Mossie. Why's the book not in a bank safe, why's it not in Belfast?"

"It's all I have. It's the future. The bleeper box, that's feckin' present.

It's a future that matters. Yours, mine, the little ones'."

"You carried it all with you, you poor love."

"I thought you'd hate me, if you knew."

"God, why?"

"For turning, for being turned."

She blazed her eyes at him. "You think I'm a Provo? You think they matter to me? Do you know nothing of me?"

"I didn't think you'd want it told you that your man was a tout."

"If we're going out tonight, we'd better be changing," she said.

Through all those days and months and years of marriage, he had lived in fear with his secret. He was still slumped against the door . . .

Just madness, but she could have giggled. For all she had known she might have been living with a child-molester or an adulterer or a rapist.

Could have been worse, her husband was only a traitor against his community. She giggled because she remembered the story of Ann Flaherty, gone with Maeve who was her friend, to see her boy sent down for eight years at the court in Belfast for possession of explosives and kidnapping. Eight years, and not past his nineteenth birthday, and Ann Flaherty coming out of the courthouse and dabbing her eyes, and her friend Maeve who had travelled up on the bus from Dungannon with her had said, "Don't be upsetting yourself, dear, could have been worse, could have got eighteen months for thieving . . ." The whole of Altmore knew what Ann Flaherty had been told by her friend Maeve.

She should have cried, and her eyes were dry.

His mother minded the kids.

They sat in the shadow of the bar, sheltered from the music and the laughter. He wore his suit, and Siobhan wore her best frock. She shared her Mossie’s secret. Sometimes, during the long evening, she put her hand and gently touched his rough hands.

He drank pints of Guinness, fast. She toyed with gins and bitter lemon, slowly.

Men sidled through the noise of the band, came to bend close to her Mossie's ear, ignored her and whispered to him, and moved away.

The secret was now hers, and the weight of it pinioned her. If it were known then Siobhan would be without a husband and Francis and Doloures and Patrick and Mary would be without a father.

The drink going faster and the music louder and the laughter talk fiercer. It was where they were born and where they belonged.

Her secret was that her Mossie was a traitor.

She leaned forward. Her lips were against his ear. The noise was a wall around them.

"We don't need their money."

"They'll never let me go."

"Tell them you want out."

"You tell the bitch."

"Is it just a woman who has you on the end of her string?"

"I tried once . . ."

"What happened?"

"It's not the place to talk . . . What happened? The bitch, she doesn't let go ..."

The band played. It was the "Mountains of Pomeroy", it was the song of Altmore mountain. It was the celebration of a highwayman from far back, who had no teeth. Shane Bearnagh Donnelly's song . . . She tugged his hand and pulled him to his feet and took him to the floor that was clear of tables for dancing.

'Fear not, fear not, sweetheart,' he cried,

Fear not the foe for me,

No chain shall fall, whate'er betide,

On the arm that would be free!

Oh, leave your cruel kin and come

When the lark is in the sky;

And it's with my gun I'll guard you,

On the Mountains of Pomeroy

She sang as she danced. She sang so that he would hear her voice.

'An outlawed man in a land forlorn, He

scorned to turn and fly,But kept the cause

of freedom safe Up on the mountain high.'

She had dragged it from him. She must live with his secret. In her arms she felt his fear and his weakness. The secret pounded in the mind of Siobhan Nugent. She thought that she knew every man and woman and youth and girl in the bar. She had been brought up with them, she had lived with them for every year of her life excepting the six that she had spent with Mossie across the water. She knew the tightness of the society that was her home. And her Mossie was a tout . . .

It was not anything that he said, but it was the look of the man. It was in the middle of the Sunday afternoon, and they were alone in an underground carriage on the Circle line. It was where they could talk and know that they were not overheard, and where they had the best chance of seeing if there was a tail on either of them. The courier didn't think that the big man had slept, not for two nights at least, He was haggard and unshaven and bowed at the shoulder, It was the first time that the Limerick boy had been in England. He was shocked from the time that he had first seen the big man shambling down the platform towards him. He had travelled by train through the night from the ferry.

His only fear, before, had been when he had to pass the Special Branch officers at Hollyhead. And he had walked straight past them and gone to the waiting train. It was the appearance of the man that unnerved the courier. It was like the man was hunted, like the pressure had weighed on him. He had not, of course, been told the man's name, only where he should meet him.

When the courier had arrived at Euston mainline railway Station,he had telephoned to Dublin from a pay phone. He had been told what else he should tell the man when he met him He put off as long as possible what lie had been told to tell the man.

The courier handed him four envelopes. The courier watched the man, dirty hands shaking, open the envelopes and skim with red-rimmed eyes from the first a wad of bank notes, in the second a newly-made birth certificate, in the third a long list of names and addresses and from the last a handwritten letter.

It was what he had been sent to do. Later the courier would stay overnight with his married sister in Wandsworth to solidify his cover, and then travel back to the ferry.

The courier gulped, breathed deep.

"What I was told to tell you . . . was that your home was done again last night, searched by the army. Your woman's alright, and your boy's alright, they said, but there was powerful damage to your home. They said you wasn't to call home."

He was too young to say that he was sorry for what had happened.

He watched the anger in the man's eyes, burning through the tiredness.

And then they were coming into a station and the man stood and said,

"Thanks for the letters. Safe journey home, son."

And then the big man was gone, lost on the platform as the train carried the courier on.

Howard Rennie thought that Cathy must have been shopping around She’d have preferred her escorts from what he called the Hereford Gun club, If she could have had them. Must have been turned down or she wouldn't have come to him.

She was frank enough with him, what he'd have expected of her. He was right. Special Air Service had a full programme of stake out and surveillance, couldn't deliver . . . Sunday afternoon they were standing on the doorstep of Rennie's home, his wife was in inside buttering the bread for the tea. He was in his carpet slippers and the out -of-shape cardigan, and his pipe nestled in the palm of his hand. He towered over the girl. He'd fix the back-up, of course he would, but only because it was for her. A hell of a way for her to be spending her Sunday. She'd have traipsed round the Hereford crowd, and then she'd have been up to I.isburn to the headquarters and tried to gel a car load or two of the "Dets" the army’s mob, those Detached In Special Duties and they would have found a dozen more excuses. Nobody liked Five.

Five was a pain in the arse in the Province. Five was the intruder who didn't share, too bloody high and mighty. Hobbes was Five, and Hobbes typified them. But if Cathy asked Rennie, then she'd get her back-up.

She looked bloody awful. She needed a bath and needed a rest and needed half a day in a hairdresser's chair. The pair of them stood on his front doorstep.

There wasn't any point in asking her in to take tea with his wife and daughters. He asked her anyway and she said no, for both of them. Of course she shouldn't have come to his home. She'd just said she was arriving and rung off, and he'd taken his pistol out of the drawer in the living room, slipped it under his coat and walked to the top of the cul-de-sac, and back and quartered the road. She wouldn't come into the hall, hadn't been inside the house since Christmas morning, and then for half an hour and one glass of sherry. She'd declined a place at the lunch table. He didn't know where she had eaten her Christmas lunch.

She was folding the map. It was a great smile she had with her.

When it was dark he'd be in front of his television, probably asleep and perhaps snoring, his wife would be knitting, and Cathy Parker would be out in the bloody jungle, off to meet her tout. His daughters might have stayed in and they might have gone to friends, and Cathy Parker would be chatting up that lump of pig shit they called Song Bird.

"You need a damn good holiday, get the hell out. Go on, get away for a bit. Give yourself a break."

"Oh yes, Mr Rennie, and where?"

"Anywhere a long way away. Anywhere you can forget all about us.

"Never seems the right time," she said.

He played the older man. "You can't win it on your own . . ."

She'd told him a bit ago, she didn't hold back from him, what it had been like when she had last gone home, and her mother had had a few of the local
better
families round for sherry. Cathy had told him it had been just a super-scale disaster. He doubted she talked with many others, not the way she talked with him, confidences. She’d told him about Sunday morning drinks in the English countryside across the water. All quiet, parked in the corner and watching every new fool and his wife come in and wondering why they had to shout so loud and laugh so much. She had stood away from the window and facing the door, her training. Her mother had dragged her to meet the guests. How was she? Where was she working? Going alright for her, was it?

Nothing she could answer . . . and nothing said by her mother and father after the guests had gone, just their unhappiness and anxiety paraded in front of her.

"Leave it to you buggers and we'll never win," she said.

He laughed with her and closed the door. In the drawer in the hall was the secure phone. He arranged for two back-up cars.

He didn't really think that this was women's work, but then he was only an old-fashioned copper. He settled himself at the end of his table and ate his tea.

She had followed him round the bungalow. All he had told her was that he was going to be out in the evening. She followed him round like she knew he was going to see the handler. He could have counted the words she had said to him that day on the fingers of one hand, and his mother had never stopped her bleating, and Francis had kicked Doloures on the knee, as if to show that he was affected by the strain between his father and mother.

If he went into the bedroom then she followed him. If he went into the sittin room to sit down in his chair then she was hovering behind him. If he went out into the back garden to fill the basket with wood for the fire then she was waiting halfway down the path for him.

It was as if she didn’t believe him, was waiting for him to say that it hadn't been real, just a feckin' nightmare.

Mossie had just gone into the bedroom to change his shoes, put on a clean shirt, when the doorbell rang. He heard the voices, and his name called.

Patsy Riordan was in the doorway.

The boy was always used for messages.

It was how it would end, he knew that . . It would end with a call to a meeting It was what they always did.. They called the tout to a meeting, and they kicked him inside and they had the hood over his head, the tout's head, and the twine round his wrists, the tout's wrists, and the beating would start . . . That was how it would end.

"Yeah, no problem, tell him I'll be right down."

A few minutes later he was gone out into the night and Siobhan had followed him right to the car.

Her father was down with his drill to get the shelves back on the walls.

Her mother, with a needle and strong thread, worked to repair the ripped fabric of the chairs. Melvin had been and gone, satisfied himself that the wiring in the roof had not been damaged. Mrs Rea, from the far end of the village, had brought new plates and new mugs, her own spares. Gerry Brannigan had hammered the floorboards down hard where they had been lifted, and muttered all the time that, so help him, the 'boys' would make the bastards pay for this. Help poured through her door, comfort was Attracta's company, and the priest after Mass had held her hand longer than usual and then put the same hand on Kevin's shoulder and called him a fine young fellow, and smiled on mother and son.

Now Attracta laughed.

Il was the first time she had laughed, smiled even, since the soldiers had been.

The whole of Altmore laughed with old Sean Hegarty.

Two plastic hip joints, and a waddling walk, Hegarty had breezed into the farmhouse half hidden by the television set he carried. Up in his barn over the crest of the mountain Hegarty stored enough appliances to fit out half of a new housing estate.

"Is the cooker working, missus, did the feckers break the cooker?"

"cooker's fine, Sean."

" 'Cos I've cookers when you need one."

"Not this time, Sean."

If she'd wanted a tumble drier, she had only to ask. If the refrigerator was damaged, she had only to say. Hegarty would have it She laughed out loud.