Authors: Jason Johnson
‘Those ballads you talked about, they work when they tell the truth. You can wrap sentiment around any old bastard, but good luck to you if you think we’ll all sing along.
‘This is a young little nation and, like any youth, it needs a little bit of guidance, a bit of a push onto the next level, to a place where it can know itself better.
‘If you come on board with me, that will be your job, and Martin’s, and mine. If you’re not proud of your country, you can help now by changing it. You can help by making the sort of changes for the future that only a man like you can make.
‘What’s there to lose? A few fucking scumbags? I don’t care about that, do you? Even if we fail, we win. Even if we fail we’ll know ourselves that bit better, and there is nothing more useful than that. Even if we fail, we “fail better”, as Samuel Beckett would say, than we’ve failed before.
‘So what do you think? You’ve done this kind of thing in the past for Jesus knows who. But this time, this special time, it’s your own country calling.’
And we’re stopped, looking at an angled Asian beauty swaying slowly in a window for all who pass by, nodding now at us, urging us to couple and triple and share each other in any pattern, language or currency. And the heated, simple drive of Imelda’s boyish team-talk hangs around my head, the echoes darting chaotically through my mind.
‘A hundred years on,’ I say, ‘and more executions by the state.’ And I look at her.
‘Yes,’ she says, eyeing the model in the window, the external perfection for hire, ‘but don’t be telling anyone.’
Russian Military Training Base
Tajikistan, Central Asia
December 2007
Evaluation Interview #19
‘IT’S TEMPTING to fill in the gaps. That’s how we got God, that’s how we got scared of the dark, that’s why we wonder. But sometimes that’s all you can do – wonder – because you know that no answer is ever going to come.
‘One time this nun told me she’d heard on the grapevine that my dad was a British soldier, worked with the Ulster Defence Regiment, a hard-nosed crew whose job was to take on the IRA.
‘This nun heard he was from Belfast, that he was serving in County Fermanagh in 1975 or ’76. He had a rank one or two above a private soldier and was a difficult man to work with.
‘They sent him to Fermanagh to lead a crackdown on some IRA unit that were having it all their own way, that had attacked and killed police and soldiers, terrorised some farmers out of the area, and were making it known that this was a no-go area for anyone who didn’t back them.
‘This nun said the solider had his men pop up on certain roads all the time, stopping cars all the time, frustrating IRA operations, showing that they were also controlling ground. She said he had his men grilling people about who or what they knew, even if they knew nothing, even if they knew so much they wouldn’t say a word. He wanted word spread around that he was mean and meant business and he very quickly became the IRA’s big target there.
‘He used to drink too much, could be a bit loose with his security, she said. He ended up knocking them back in some pub in Enniskillen one Saturday night, got recognised by this woman, this woman who was the girlfriend of some way up guy in the local IRA. She couldn’t get in touch with her boyfriend at the time, but didn’t want to let this man out of her sight. So she moved in, started chatting, flirted with him, honey-trapped him into coming with her, into telling no one where he was going.
‘He was so horned-up and pissed that he went along with it. She got behind the wheel of his car, with him singing in the passenger seat, and drove to her boyfriend’s house in this village called Tempo, about ten miles away.
‘The pair of them went in and, when he was settling down, she put a call in to some pubs, tried again to round up her fella, to get him home with a few IRA players to interrogate, and finish this man on their own turf.
‘But all the guys she knew were out all over the town, all drinking, and everything just started to take too long. It was getting too uncomfortable having this man she wanted dead sitting around in her house, but she had to go with it, had to interact.
‘She spent some more time with him, chatting and canoodling, doing whatever to kill the time, but she was always still hoping that her boyfriend would just pull into the yard. He was at a level in the IRA where he could call a kill or lead an interrogation any time he wanted, and she needed him to come and claim this big target she had sitting there for him.
‘It was about two hours before she lost it, before she’d had enough. She was getting to the stage where she was making friends with this man she wanted to kill and she didn’t like it, where the division between them was being breached, where he was becoming harder to kill. She knew she had to take action on that, had to just sort this out for herself.
‘So she went and got a hammer, went back into the room, and he was standing there, sober as a judge, camera in his hand, taking pictures of the room around him.
‘He was saying to her, “Now you see honey, that’s how easy it is.”
‘He told her he had turned the trap on her, that she was going to be in big trouble with her husband for letting him into that house, that he wanted word to get out that he was the man who could go and do what he wanted, not her boyfriend.
‘The guy pretty much left it at that, took some more pictures around the house, took a picture of her, walked out, drove away, left her standing there with the hammer in her hand, halfway to killing someone.
‘This nun said the soldier and the woman never spoke again. She said the woman never told her husband what had happened that night, what an error she had made that night, but knew it would come back to haunt her one day.
‘Months later, there was a shooting, bullets flying between the IRA and soldiers. The IRA had been on a night-time mission but were ambushed by the UDR and both sides opened up. All of the IRA unit died, including the boyfriend of the woman who tricked the soldier. And the soldier who tricked the woman was one of the guys who was doing the shooting that night.
‘This nun said that woman always knew in her heart it was the soldier who shot her boyfriend. And that was the end of the world for her. She blamed herself, felt she had somehow weakened everything, had let her people down, had been deceiving everyone for too long.
‘My part in the story is pretty simple, if you want to believe it. My part is that she waited for a few more months, grieved for a few more months until her baby was born, until I was born, two days before I was expected.
‘She had waited to get the thing out of her because it was the thing that started life inside her as she waited for her boyfriend to come home, as she waited for that soldier to die.
‘Now I don’t know what the story is with that and I don’t know if anyone does. This nun told me that the woman believed I was the soldier’s child but that I could have been her boyfriend’s child too, and that no one really knew.
‘This nun said no one knew for sure if she really did sleep with the soldier that night or if the soldier took it on himself to sleep with her whether she liked it or not. No one ever knew what it was that happened in the heat of the mad war situation.
‘But this nun reckoned I should know I may have been conceived, somehow, some way, in the middle of some bluffing game, in the middle of two lies being told by two opposites.
‘My mother, this nun said, gave birth to me all alone in that house. She said my mother wrapped me up in a blanket and put me in this wee plastic crate they used to carry bottles of milk in.
‘That same March evening she took me to this really beautiful part of the road on the way out of wee Tempo, just where the strong trees rise up on both sides and lean over and meet in a canopy at the top. It’s this shaded place, some woods on one side, and she took me there in my wee basket and left me. She left me close enough to the little stream so I could hear it flurrying along.
‘I went there once, just the once, just as I was leaving Ireland when I was seventeen. It’s a place where nature is just doing its amazing thing, where if you stop to take it in you realise that there is struggle and beauty everywhere, in everything.
‘You breathe the air under those trees, and it’s like the most natural place you could be. The story is that my mother did the most unnatural thing in the world in the most natural place. The story is that I was like some little unloved lump of tot left out under the branches for the next person to find. And I was found, right there, by accident, a few hours later, all bundled up and gurning and crying in that milk crate.
‘They found her a couple of miles away. She had wandered through the trees, into the fields, traced the path of the river for a while in her bare feet. Then she just walked into it, let the water go over her head, and never had a plan to come out again.
‘I tried to look it all up once, just the once. And there had been a shooting, there had been people killed. There was a story that a certain soldier had been the IRA’s main target on the night, that he had left the UDR a few years later and moved to Portugal. But I don’t know. Maybe one day I’ll check it all out.
‘I don’t think it’s good to go back, to be honest. I think it’s good to keep moving, not to stop. I mean, if I ever was to track down that soldier, I’d be tracking down someone who is either my father or the man who killed my father, and I don’t know how to feel about a man like that.
‘You have to look forward, don’t you? Not backward, forward. The mind’s eye must point forward or you will not get your journey done.
‘I’ve been training here for six months now for this job in Israel, for “Operation Dante”, and I don’t think I’ll live through it.
‘I know now that nothing will get in my way to get it done, but I don’t believe the extraction will work. Being here has taught me that I know for sure there is no challenge I will face when I get there that can stop me trying.
‘I’m not saying I won’t feel fear when I go to do this, it’s just that I know what to do with fear, I know not to let it disable me. It’s not that I won’t cry or worry or feel the world closing in on me because of what I have done in the past, because of what I will do again.
‘It’s just that when I feel fear, I know I can take it, roll it up in a ball and carry it with me, not as part of me but with me. I can bring it on the journey, feel it like it’s a little living thing, a little puppy, and I can take it to the precise place that makes it kick out and snap the most.
‘I have learned that I will not bet against myself. I will never bet against myself.
‘I’ve been thinking a lot lately about that priest we talked about before, about Father Barry. I’ve been thinking how I was the first person to show him how fear could be turned around. If I learned anything from him it was that I had courage somewhere inside, the kind of courage that could take hold of me, could take over a room.
‘I got off the floor in his study that last time he hit me and reached for his hand, and he let me take it. I took his little finger and folded it back, pressed on the nail as hard as I could and brought him all the way to the ground.
‘He felt it when my cold, bare toes hit him in the face. He felt it when I smashed his brains out and across that floor with a golden Jesus. I was eleven years old.
‘The last thing he ever saw was me not being afraid, me taking on the power of his authority, of his strength. The last thing he ever heard was me saying a little Latin phrase I picked up.
‘I bashed that bastard and said, “
Nihil
timendum
est
”.
‘I told that bastard, “Fear nothing”. ’
November 2016
I WAKE up feeling like one of those people who wakes up with a new accent, or with a stranger in their bed, or in a place they can’t remember going to.
The beep of the horns outside interrupts my thinking and I’m not going to suffer it. I pack a bag – the bag – and clean what I need to clean from the flat. A farewell double beep sounds my departure as I walk out of the door, down the stairs and into the city.
I call Tall Marianne as I walk, tell her I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch, tell her I have some news and hope to meet. She’s on Damrak, she says, and we can rendezvous for coffee.
I see her – pouting, a red beret, two inch nails – sitting with a short, wiry guy when I walk into the café. She introduces him as ‘Karson with a “K”,’ and says it’s good to hear from me.
‘We’ve been together for a while,’ she tells me.
‘That’s right,’ says Karson, beaming, turning a little spoon around in his fingers.
‘He’s an all-American boy,’ she says, ‘doing some big work with the university.’
Karson drops his head, his foot tapping and that spoon spinning, looks up and winks at her.
I tell him I’ve heard the university is great, but what I’m thinking is that his being here is slowing me down and I need to get a move on.
I say to Tall Marianne, ‘Things have been crazy this last wee while. Basically I’m leaving town.’
What I’m telling her – and we never speak directly about it – is that I don’t need her to hide SIM cards, to leave a vase in the window, to get in touch if she ever feels suspicious about anyone, anything. But I need to ask her something, something I need to ask her alone.
She stands, nodding and unmoved at my words, tells me to sit tight, that she’s going to the bathroom.
I fix Karson with a look, a face that tells him I’m wondering who the hell he is. I know, whether on behalf of the Irish or not, there’s American eyes and ears all over me. And I feel like some kind of racist, suspicious about him and his American eyes and ears. I am suddenly somehow sitting at a table with an unknown American and, at this moment, it instinctively feels wrong.
Doing some big work with the university.
What the hell does that mean?
I have no idea how to ask someone if they’re in the CIA and, even if Karson did have that honour, he would never answer it. So I fix him with that look, let him make what he wants of it. I figure if he is some kind of spy he will be thinking about it right now, and I watch his body language carefully, look for leaks, for signs that he is drawing on training.
And he’s busy but confident enough, fairly smiley, a hard-built bijou man, a little tree stump of a man inside all those sinews. I outrank him in age, he’s thirty-seven. I outrank him in strength, probably in experience. Yet he has a determination about the way he spends himself.
He doesn’t fix me back with any kind of look, just ticks over, moving limbs and fingers and turning his head here and there, getting rid of that nervous energy crackling inside.
I say, ‘Not like Tall Marianne to keep a partner for any length of time.’
‘No? Oh, that makes me feel good, man,’ he says, and he laughs, somehow relieved at the silence breaking.
‘How did you meet?’
‘Through my work. I was introduced to her at some crazy Amsterdam party. You know the kind of thing.’
I nod, smile, look around, look back. ‘What is it you do at the university, Karson?’
‘Comms,’ he says, ‘communications. I help analyse signals, basically. It’s kind of high-tech stuff. It’s part of an exchange programme between Washington and the Dutch. What do you do?’
I go, ‘I travel a bit, do some photography. From what you’re saying, it sounds like you’re a spy.’
He nods, ‘Yeah, I guess it does. Not a good one though. A real spy wouldn’t be so open.’
He’s rich, or from a rich family. Maybe has been in some hard-to-enter college fraternity, maybe spun a little too far off the rings from time to time.
And I can’t get shot of the idea that he knows everything about me. I’m thinking how the Americans did get close to Marianne, in the end. I’m thinking how Imelda knew her most intimate details before they chased me around the city that day.
And now I’m retelling myself that even if Karson were a spy, he would be friendly, he would have only been spying for the Irish as a favour. That’s the story I’ve been told, and I’ve no reason to doubt it, do I?
Now I’m telling myself I’m jumping the gun about him, I’m telling myself I’m just too damn jumpy today because I’ve started a process of opening up and my instincts are scolding me.
I say, ‘Excuse me,’ and catch Tall Marianne as she’s exiting the bogs, fixing her hair, saying ‘prune’ to herself in a mirror and watching what it does to her face.
She’s been my best pal in this city, a girl-about-town hedonist who shuns all codes but loyalty to friends. She’s old money Amsterdam, has links to the royal family, is a generous contact and unpaid fixer to half-shadowed figures she meets at parties or gets introduced to at orgies, protests against any authority of any kind.
Ask me who I trust most in the world, even right now, and I’ll tell you it’s this crazy woman in front of me.
‘Listen,’ I say, the sum of the security of her friendship at the front of mind now. ‘You don’t have to do any shit for me ever again, and I thank you for all you have done.’
She shrugs. ‘It’s nothing. You’re a cloak-and-dagger guy. I know the type. I like the type. What I don’t know can’t hurt me, right? Maybe you’ll do me a favour one day.’
I nod, ‘I’d be happy to. But the thing is I’m leaving town, okay? As in leaving. You probably won’t see me again.’
She’s stunned. ‘Jeez, aren’t you all drama today?’
I look over at Karson as Karson looks over at us, looks like he’s trying not to bite his nails.
I go, ‘You sure about that guy? He’s into you? Not just trying to use you to … ?’
‘Hey Aloysius,’ she goes, ‘go fuck yourself. You think a chick with a dick can’t have a serious boyfriend?’
‘No,’ I say, ‘wise up. I’m just wary. Cloak-and-dagger mentality. I’d like to know you’re safe, that you’re not going to get hurt.’
‘Karson’s a good guy. And I can look after myself.’
‘I know that. I know … ’
‘Go,’ she says, ‘leave Amsterdam. Go to wherever it is you go. Go hide your SIM cards somewhere else, find some other safe house, some other secret messenger. We’ll meet again sometime.’
‘One thing,’ I say. ‘One last bit of help.’
‘What?’
‘Your mum,’ I say. ‘When she died, she left you the barge. You said there was a car too, a wee car somewhere.’
‘Yeah, I’ve never seen it. Never will see it.’
I push some cash into her hand. She looks down, surprised. ‘What?’ she says, ‘you want the car?’
‘Yep. Where is it?’
She pushes the money back. ‘Take it. Keep it. It’s underground, Oud-Zuid Apartments. Don’t ask me where the keys are.’
‘I’ll find it. What type is it?’
She shrugs. ‘A dusty one.’
*
I walk a mile to the address, go into the lobby, drop down a floor to the car park.
Ten motors in here, one of them sad and lonely, a Renault Clio with low tyres, a dusty screen and an out-of-date parking disc.
I check for cameras, check the car’s security, smash open the back off-side window, flip open the front door, get on board. I pull the wires, confident I can hotwire this thing in seconds but, naturally enough, the battery is dead as Hector.
‘Balls.’
I sit back, close my eyes, run the details of what I’m doing around my mind, try to find another way through this. And I try to find out, from myself, if I’m sure I know what the fuck I’m doing.
Am I too paranoid about that Karson guy? Did I freak him out, freak Tall Marianne out? What are the rules of engagement for a guy on his own, trying to make sure the coast is clear to move when he’s sucking drones in above him?
A man in a baseball cap walks into the garage, unsure of his surroundings. Jeans, black sweater. He runs his eyes over the cars, looking for someone, looking for me. I see his face as it swoops past my Clio, the face with the head I busted. He’s the bald guy with the boot on my face, the English guy working for Imelda’s office. That’s Wayne.
He walks a little deeper inside, dipping now, starting to look under the cars, wondering where the hell I went.
This fucker has been following me for I don’t know how long – days, weeks, months. It’s hard not to take it personally, although fair play to him for doing a good job.
Ex-special forces? Ex-undercover police? He looks the type. But the poor, big bastard has just walked his big boots into my plan and he’s not going to walk out of it.
It’s funny because Wayne hates me already, hates me with all his heart. That feeling of his is going to go off the scale.
*
We check in at the Port of Roscoff for the overnight sailing. The ignition wire is slack around Wayne’s throat, ready for tugging and tying around the headrest if he fucks this up.
I stay low as he opens his passport for the woman in the security box. She waves him through, his black four-by-four slipping into the queue for the ferry to Rosslare.
He eyes me in the mirror and I sit up a little.
He says, ‘The Dublin office will definitely be looking for me by now.’
I say, ‘I know.’
The line moves onto the ship and I pull up into the front passenger seat, pulling the wire fast from around his throat, making him jump.
I tell him, ‘Nothing personal in any of this, Wayne. We’re not enemies, not on different sides. I just have to get this shit done my way and can’t give you a say, you understand?’
He doesn’t answer, just pulls neatly into the few square feet of space we have on this ship they call
Oscar Wilde
.
‘It’s been long drive,’ I say. ‘We’ve eighteen hours ahead of us on this bus. Let’s just get some sleep and, I promise you, you’re a free man when we get to Ireland.’
He turns to me, a look that gives nothing away.
I go, ‘I’ll be sure to tell them your neck was on the line the whole way. That’s why you didn’t contact. That do it?’
His lip curls, his head shakes and his heart pumps with hatred for me.
‘Yes,’ he says.
We leave it at that.
His mobile is already gone, fucked onto the roof of a parked plumber’s van in Amsterdam. He could always make a phone call from the ship, but what for? To what end?
I reckon he’ll do fuck all beyond grumble, sink a pint, lie down. And if things go the wrong way for me, I’ll dump him overboard, or he’ll dump me overboard for trying. One way or another, that would fix it.
We climb the stairs among excited children and overwrought folks, get to the bar deck and split. I go to the back, see him heading off to the front.
Twenty minutes later I take a walk, see him sitting, looking at a golden whiskey, contemplating something, managing his emotions. He watches me stroll in and over to him and looks away.
Light shining on his bald head, I see the scars I’ve left him, the smashes I rained down on him with the edge of a mobile phone. A man in his line of work finds shame easily, and it hurts.
‘Fancy another?’ I ask, and he doesn’t look back.
‘Two of whatever he’s on,’ I say to the barman.
‘What do you reckon to Imelda?’ I ask, taking the stool beside him. ‘She’s trying to bring me in to her agency but I don’t know a whole lot about it. How’s it working out for you?’
‘She’s just a boss,’ he says, puts his eyes front, watches his next whiskey being poured.
‘You think she’s on the level?’
‘I think you’re a fucking prick,’ he says, turning to me. ‘And if she didn’t value you so much for whatever the fuck it is she wants you to do, I’d smash your head off this bar right now. Are we clear, Aloysius?’
I go, ‘Wow. Jesus. Well then Wayne, why don’t you just break a rule then, give it a go? See how far you get?’
He goes, ‘Wow. Jesus. Well, I don’t know, Aloysius.’
And two Grouse on ice arrive, two baby bottles of lemonade. I can tell he’s not going to refuse it and I’m glad.
I say, ‘What are you? Ex-special forces, ex-cop?’
He says, ‘Let me answer that this way – go fuck yourself.’
I say, ‘You too.
Sláinte
.’
And we drink.
I go, ‘How’s your one-eyed friend?’
‘Taken early retirement,’ he says. ‘How’s your Dutch girlfriend’s cock?’
‘The same.’
And we drink again.
‘It’s just circumstances,’ I say. ‘Following me around Amsterdam like a bad smell, what did you expect?’
He turns to me, takes a deep look at my face, goes, ‘How would I know? I don’t know who the fuck you are. In fact, who the fuck are you?’
I say, ‘Let me answer that this way – go fuck yourself.’
He says, ‘Christ, you’re an annoying bastard.’
And I say, ‘I’ve been called worse.’
He goes, ‘That outfit you’re still wearing, the one Imelda bought you. It’s the only half decent set of clothes you have, isn’t it?’
I go, ‘Don’t worry Wayne, it’s all been washed.’
‘I picked all that out for you,’ he says. ‘She sent me into ’Dam to get you some fresh gear, said you had the dress sense of a doughnut.’
I go, ‘Jesus, you’re my stylist? Wow.’
He goes, ‘Fuck off.’
I say, ‘So, Wayne, you think I should carry my phone in my top pocket or just leave it stuck in your head?’