I did up my fly. The black Saab was blocking the alley. When it didn’t move off I went to walk round it.
‘Conway!’
The passenger door swung towards me.
‘Conway.’ It was Isaac Hepburn. ‘Get in the car.’
There was a rip in the cream leather seat; someone had patched it with black masking tape. The car stunk of stale baccy.
‘Where we going?’
‘You’ll see. Somewhere quiet. Don’t worry.’
Seat belts confuse me after three or four pints. When I finally got it to click we were speeding through the streets and I grabbed for the hand-grip. A lot of booze was sunk in my gut, and a slew of tight corners had slopped it around. I belched softly. I clutched the folder in both hands.
‘Jesus, you smell like a pot still. I thought you stuck to the fizzy water.’
‘Yeah, well, I had kind of a lapse.’
‘Well, these boys can put it away.’
He glanced in the rear-view and changed lanes.
‘What boys?’
‘Your newshound buddies. Mutt and Jeff. Jeez, I wish I could draw a wage like theirs for sitting in the pub. Hey, did they tell you who used to work there?’
‘They mentioned it.’
We stopped at a red. A young mum stepped out,
pushing
a buggy. Her hair was up in a scrunchie; she wore a white bra-top and sweat pants. The pants rode low and the scarlet ‘T’ of her G-string blazed wickedly over her waistband.
‘Can it even be comfy? That cheesewire riding your crack all day. Never mind the hygiene angle.’
On the far pavement she stopped and bent over the buggy. Her buttocks glimmered brown through the
tautened
weave.
‘That’s just what I was thinking. The hygiene angle.’
He looked at me.
The mum straightened up and the lights changed. The car lurched forward.
‘Did you miss it?’
He moved up through the gears.
‘You mean inside? Not really. There’s ways and means. Conjugal visits and all that. They let me out for
forty-eight
hours when my daughter was getting married. Plus it’s like anything else. You get used to doing without. There’s not many things you truly need, when it comes right down to it. That’s one thing you learn. Some things are indispensable, but that’s not really one of them. What you got there?’
‘This?’ I looked at the folder. ‘Nothing. Old
newspapers
.
Sunday Citizens
. Macpherson seemed keen for me to read them.’ I lifted the folder’s flap to let him see the masthead.
We were on the motorway now, heading for the river.
‘Look. I wanted to help you, Gerry. But that wasn’t the place.’
The flyover hoisted us over the water. The city was like a city seen from the air: tight streets, toy houses, low hills. Everything intricate and small-scale.
‘You can’t talk in your own club?’
‘The club? The club’s the last place I can talk. This whole city, Gerry. You can’t be too careful.’
He peered in the rear-view then as if someone might be tailing us.
‘Tell you a story, son. A while back, not long after I got out, I was having a meal in the city. Nice restaurant. Next table but one, who’s sitting there but the Peeler who put me away? He sends over a glass of wine. Then he stops to say hello on his way out. “No hard feelings,” says he. “You had a job to do and I had mine. I’m glad the war’s over.” And, fuck, he’s right. I’m glad it’s over too and I shake the Peeler’s hand. But that’s what happens here. Take a shit on the Shankill and the Falls holds its nose.’
We were driving past the shipyards, the looming yellow cranes. George Best International Airport. It felt like an outing. There was something in Hepburn’s solicitude – he asked at one point if I wasn’t too hot, did I want the cold air on – that reminded me of weekend trips with my dad. My father left home when I was ten. Every weekend he took us on trips: Calderpark Zoo, the Magnum Centre, Culzean Castle. He was always checking that you were comfortable, that the car wasn’t too stuffy. He kept little bags of Edinburgh rock in the glove compartment. I half expected Hepburn to produce one now but he turned off the bypass and parked in a residential street. I lodged the folder under my arm.
‘Leave it in the car,’ Hepburn said.
‘No, it’s OK.’
‘Suit yourself. There’s a park just down here, we can find a bench.’
There were playing fields at the park’s far end. A game was underway and we walked in dappled sunlight down to shouts and cheering, the smattering handclaps.
‘You do remember him, though?’ I said. ‘Peter Lyons.’
‘Course I remember him. He was a good guy. He helped us out. We don’t have a lot of friends, son. Maybe you’ve noticed that. Peter Lyons was a friend.’
‘And then it all went wrong. How did that happen?’
‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t say it all went wrong. People got tired of him pretty quick. He was an ideas man. What did we need ideas for? We knew what we wanted. We wanted things to stay the same. It’s the Taigs want to change everything, let them have ideas.’ He laughed and shook his head. ‘That’s how we saw it at the time. Fucking stupid, but there you go.’
‘But what did he do? What was his function?’
‘Function?’ Hepburn snorted. ‘He just hung about. He kind of annoyed folk, tell you the truth. This attitude. Bit of a know-all. The Jocks are like that sometimes, no offence. They think they know the score but they’ve no idea. Here’s this guy from Glasgow telling us what’s what and the most action he’s seen is a fight at the football. It jerked people’s chain. So some of the guys, they took him on a job one night. Low-level stuff. A disciplinary. A fella was out of line, or late with his payments: who knows, at this distance? But they took your buddy along. They thought they’d get a laugh when, fuck knows, he would break down or something. Watch through his fingers and beg them to stop. But the laugh was on them.’ Hepburn nodded, leaned towards me. ‘He lapped it up, from what I hear. Took a real pride in his work. They had to rein him in at the finish up.’
We reached the touchline. A team in red and white were playing a team in green and gold.
‘But what happened?’
‘I’m telling you what happened.’
‘No. I mean why did Lyons leave? Did you fall out or what?’
A skinny winger came toe-tapping up the line and
fisted
it into the centre where his team-mate caught it and hooked it over the bar. A thin cheer rose on the far
touchline
.
‘I don’t know, son. He drifted away. It’s different for you guys. Over the water. You can take it or leave it. You can walk away. We don’t have that option. We have to see it through.’
‘You mean jail?’
‘Yeah, but the thing folk don’t realise is the Kesh was the start. The Kesh was the
start
for us. Folk think it was the end. You took a decision, you made a choice – to get active, get involved – and somewhere down the line it brought you to the jail. Thirty guys in a Nissen hut. But that’s shite. We never chose anything. We did what
everyone
else was doing, guys from our backgrounds. You went with the flow. When you got
inside
, that’s when the thinking started. When the big hydraulic gates crushed shut? That’s the first time I thought: the fuck’s this all about? Twenty years? Run that by me again?’
The greens were surging forward. A big upfield punt was caught at full stretch by a red defender, but the
forward
was quick enough to block his clearance. The blocker’s momentum took him skidding into touch. Hepburn helped him to his feet.
‘But did you not fall out?’ I said. ‘You and Peter Lyons? I heard something happened, there was some sort of row. He came back from Belfast in a hurry. He was pretty shook up.’
‘This was when?’
‘Nineteen eighty-three … November: round Guy Fawkes.’
‘Eighty-three? I was inside by then. I was already out of the picture.’
‘Yeah but, what happened? I’ve looked into this. There was a beating around that time, another punishment thing, and it went too far. The guy died. Duncan Gillies, his name was.’
‘Yeah, like I say, I was inside by then.’
‘But you must remember; you must have known what was happening.’
‘How must I have known? In broad terms, maybe. But not the day-to-day minutiae.’
‘Minutiae? A guy got killed.’
‘A lot of guys got killed, son. That’s why they called it a war.’
A player trotted over to the touchline and lifted a squeezy water bottle, his throat pulsing as the stream hissed into his mouth. I wished I’d had time for a piss.
‘You’re saying you don’t remember it? Duncan Gillies?’
He didn’t answer. The reds were coming into the game a bit now and for several minutes we watched in silence.
‘I know the thing you’re talking about,’ Hepburn said finally. ‘You’re asking if your man was involved?’
‘Yeah.’
He was looking off downfield, watching the reds take a free. ‘I couldn’t say.’ He turned to face me. ‘I mean that, Gerry. I honestly don’t know.’
I folded my arms and spat on the grass.
‘It’s true.’ He touched my elbow. ‘It’s true, OK? I was still in charge at the time. Or supposed to be. Truthfully, though? I wasn’t that interested. It changes you, the jail. We were born again. I’m not talking about religion. Some guys got religion, right enough. They read the Bible from skin to skin. But even the rest of us, every man in those huts. You werenae the same man when they opened the gates. I didn’t really care what was happening outside, who was running what, who was shooting who. That shite doesn’t mean much inside.’
The ball bounced into touch just beside us and Hepburn went after it. He moved with unlooked-for grace, his shoulders working in the blue checked jacket, and he trapped the ball before it stopped, trapped it
neatly
and punted it onto the pitch. He walked back,
unbuttoning
his jacket. Would he be taken for a grandfather, I wondered, or maybe the father of one of these lads?
‘You find things out,’ Hepburn was saying. ‘You find out what matters. I’ll tell you what matters to me.’ He was nodding, as if I’d contradicted him. ‘Trees.’ He grinned madly. ‘Trees! The way they move, the leaves and branches. Don’t laugh, son. It came to me inside the Kesh. What did I really miss? I missed lots of things. My family. I missed my rum and pep at the Rex. But the thing I remembered, the thing I missed most, was the tree out the back garden. How it moved in the wind. Coming down for a glass of water in the middle of the night, there it would be, through the frosted glass. It wasn’t even the tree, it was the tree’s silhouette, just its shadow on the glass. The waggle of the branches, the little flitter of the leaves. Before I put the light on I’d stand for a minute and watch the tree. And inside, when things got bad, when I’d lie awake in that tin hut with the smells of thirty men, that’s what came back to me. The tree out the back.’
He looked at me.
‘This was my great breakthrough, son. Brilliant, eh? I’m doing twenty years for defending Ulster and what do you know? It’s not Ulster I care about; it’s a fucking tree. What do I with that?’
‘What did you do with that?’
‘Nothing. I did my time. I did my duties. Muster parade. I cleaned the hut. I played footie. Later on I did the OU. And Good Friday came and they let us out. But that was it. That was me finished. I was out the
organisation
. I’m bye with it now.’
‘Just like that.’
‘Just like that. It’s not like the movies, son. You’re free to leave. They don’t shoot deserters.’
I nodded.
‘What they gonnae say? You havenae done enough? I did sixteen years.’ He snorted. ‘You think I need to impress somebody, flash my medals? Fuck that.’
He picked some grass from his trousers and wiped his fingers with a hankie.
‘Sixteen years.’
The whistle blew; a long trilling blast. The teams
straggled
off and the managers started their team-talk. The one on our touchline pointed and waved, sometimes
gripping
a player by the bicep. The players said nothing. They sucked their orange quarters and watched him, their eyes suspicious above the busy mouths. When he finished they nodded and lined up to drop their orange skins into a bucket. Then they trotted out to the goalmouth to warm up.
A man in a club tracksuit approached us waving a book of raffle tickets. His comb-over flapped in the breeze like Bobby Charlton’s.
‘Pound a go, gents,’ he said. ‘Never know your luck. Pound a go.’
Hepburn took five.
‘Just write your details on the stubs,’ the man said. ‘Or even just the name of your boy.’
He turned to me.
‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘I’m just over on holiday. But here …’ I fumbled in my pocket for a fiver. ‘Here’s a donation.’
‘Dead on.’ He moved on down the touchline.
The whistle blew for the second half.
‘What did you put?’
‘On the tickets?’ He spat demurely on the grass. ‘“Aidan”.’
‘“Aidan”?’
‘It’s a safe bet.’
We left before the end. The guy in the tracksuit nodded as we passed.
We were walking down the hill to Hepburn’s car. As we got closer to the car, Hepburn slowed, as if he’d forgotten where he’d parked.
‘Anyway,’ Hepburn was saying. ‘Anyway anyway.’ He raised his eyebrows. He clapped his hands together and rubbed them briskly.
‘What?’
‘What do you think, Gerry? The fuckin’ money.’
‘Whoa, whoa. Hang fire here. Who said anything about money?’
‘I did. I said something about fucking money.’
‘OK, and why is that?’
He blew out some air and shook his head. ‘That’s a good one, Gerry. That’s fucking priceless.’ He took his hand from his pocket and pointed his finger. ‘Don’t fuck me about, son. You get the gen, you pay for it. That’s how it works.’
I could still hear the game, the players’ shouts, their comical urgency. I looked in the direction of the park and then back at Hepburn’s expectant face. His finger was still pointing.
‘Aye, if that’s what you’ve agreed, that’s how it works.’ I wished he would put his finger down. The thumb was cocked, pistol-style, and the finger was aimed at my head. ‘But we agreed fuck all. You wait till now to bring money into it?’