Harry's Game (14 page)

67

There was no question of using the lights. Any illumination through the sparse curtains would alert the army to the fact that someone in the house was on the move unusually late, coming home or going out. A little enough thing, but sufficient to go down into the files and card system that the intelligence men pored over, and which gave them their results. In the blackness the man inched his way up the stairs, conscious that no one would have told his wife he was coming home this particular night, and anxious not to frighten her.

He moved slowly on the landing, pushed open the door of the back room where he and his wife slept, and came inside. His eyes were now accustomed to the dark. He made out her hair on the pillow, and beside it the two small shapes, huddled close together for warmth and comfort.

He watched them a long time. One of the children wriggled and then subsided with the cough.

It had just been coming on when he had left home. He felt no emotion, only inhibit ion over how to break in and intrude on their sleep. Gradually his wife became aware of his presence. At first she was frightened, moving quickly and jerking the head of one of the sleeping children.

She was defensive in her movement, the mother hen protecting her nest. The aggression went when she saw it was him. With a half strangled sob she reached out for her man and pulled him down on to the bed.

Beneath him he felt the children slide away to continue their sleep uninterrupted.

'Hullo, my love, I'm back. I'm okay. Safe now. I've come back to you.'

He mouthed the words pressed hard into the pit of her neck, his voice sandwiched between her shoulder and ear. She held him very tightly, pulling at him as if some force were working to get him away from her again.

'It's all right, love. I'm home. It's over.'

He rose to his knees and kicked off his shoes, wrenched at his socks and pulled away the trousers, jacket and shirt. She passed one of the sleeping children over her body and pulled back the clothes of the bed for him to come into the empty space.

Desperately she clung to him there, squeezing the hardness and bitterness and strength out of him, demolishing the barriers of coldness and callousness with which he had surrounded himself, working at the emotions that had been so suppressed in the last month.

'Where've you been?'

'Don't... don't... I've missed you, I've wanted you.'

'No, where've you been?" she persisted. "We thought you were gone‐‐were dead. There was no word, not anything. Where? There's always been a word before when you've gone.'

68

He clung to her, holding on to the one person that he loved and whom he needed as his lifeline, particularly over the last weeks of tension and fear. He felt the tautness draining out of him as he pressed down on to her body. It was some moments before he realized that she was lying quite still, rigid and yielding nothing. His grip on her slackened and he rose a little from the bedclothes to see her face, but when he was high enough to look down at her eyes, she turned them away from him towards her sleeping children.

'What's the matter? What's this for?'

'It's where you've been. Why you've been away. That's the matter. I know now, don't I?'

'Know what...?" He hesitated. Stupid bitch, what was she blathering for? He was here. Flesh and blood. But what did she know? He was uncertain. How much had she realized through the frenzy in which he had held her? What had that crude and desperate weight of worry communicated to her?

'Are you going to tell me about it?" she said.

'About what?" His anger was rising.

'Where you've been...'

'I've told you. Once more. Then the end of it. I was in the South. Finish, that's it.'

'You won't tell me, then?'

'I've said it's finished. There's no more. Leave it. I'm home‐‐that should be enough. Don't you want me here?'

'It said in the papers that his children were there. And his wife. They saw it all. That the man went on shooting long after he'd gone down. That the children were screaming, so was his wife. It said she

covered him from the bullets. Put herself right over him.'

She was sitting right up now with her hands splayed behind her, back straight, and her breasts, deep from the children she had suckled, bulging forward under the intricate patternwork of her nightdress. Downs's longing for her had gone, sapped from him by her accusation. The moment he had waited for, which had become his goal over the last few days on the run, was destroyed.

She went on, looking not at him but straight in front of her into the darkness. "They said that if it took them five years they'd get the man who did it. They said he must have been an animal 69

to shoot like that across the street. They said they'd hunt for him till they found him, then lock him up for the rest of his natural. You stupid, daft bastard.'

Her point of focus was in the middle distance way beyond the walls and confines of their back bedroom. In his churning mind the icplies and counter‐attacks flooded through him. But there was no voice. When he spoke it was without fight.

'Someone had to do it. It happened it was me. Danby had it < oming. Little bastard he was.

There's not a tear shed for him; they haven't a clue to bring them to me. There's no line on me.

The picture's no good. The kids wouldn't recognize me on that. They didn't, did they?'

'Don't be so stupid. Do you think I'd hold up two four‐year‐olds and show them a picture and say "Do you recognize your Dad? He's a killer, shot a man in front of his kids." That what you want me to do?'

'Shut your face. Finish it. I told you there'll be no more. You shouldn't have known. You didn't need to know.'

'It'll be bloody marvellous. The return of the great and famous hero, with half the sodding army after him. What a future! "We weren't supposed to know." What sort of statement is that? If they shoot you when they get you there'll be a bloody song about you. fust right for Saturday nights when they're all pissed, so keep the verses short and the words not too long. What a hero. You'll want me to teach the kids the words, and all. Is that the future for us?'

She sank back on to the pillow, and holding the nearest of the two children, began to weep, in slight convulsive shudders, noiselessly.

He rose from the bed and put on his underclothes, shirt and trousers, before moving in his bare feet across the room to the door, tie went down the stairs and into the front room. Checking an in siinctive movement towards the light switch, he groped his way to his

armchair by the grate and lowered himself gingerly down on to it. There were newspapers there, and he pushed them down on to the floor. He sat there very still, exhausted by the emotion of the last few minutes. She'd clobbered him, kicked him in the crutch, and when the pain had sped all over him come back and kicked him again. Since Danby all he had wanted was to get back here, to her, to the kids, the totalness of the family. To be safe with them. The bitch had destroyed it.

In the dark he could relive the moments of the shooting. He found the actual happenings hard to be exact about. They had faded, and he was uncertain whether the picture he put together was from his memory or his imagination. The immediate sensations were still clear. The kicking of the Klashnikov, the force driving into his shoulder‐‐that was as vivid as the day and 70

the time itself, the impact feeling. So, too, was the frozen tableau of the woman on her husband. The children. That enormous, useless dog. That was all still there. He saw the incident as a series of still frames, separate episodes. Some of the pictures were in panorama, as when Danby came down the steps and was looking right for the car and waving left at the children. Others were in close up‐‐the face of the woman he had run past. Fear, disbelief, shock and horror. He could see every wrinkle and line on the silly cow's face down to the brown mole above her right cheek. He remembered the blood, but with detachment. Inevitable.

Unimportant.

He wanted congratulations for a job well done. He'd thought that out and decided he was justified in some plaudits. It had been professionally done. The movement would be proud of the effort. He knew that himself, but yearned to be told so out loud. She should have bestowed the accolade. Of course she would guess, no way she wouldn't. Dates were right, the picture.

She should have been the one with a nod, and an innuendo. She had guessed. She had to. But she called him a "stupid, daft bastard'. He was hurt and numbed by that.

They had never talked about the Provos. Right from the start that had been laid down. She didn't want to know. Wasn't interested. No word on the nights he was going out. Went and buried herself in the kitchen, played with the children, got out of his way. She accepted, though, that he needed her strength and support when he came home. That was the concession she gave him. But that was not exceptional in Ardoyne.

The women would hear the shots out in the streets where the battlefield was just beyond the front‐room curtains. There would be

e high crack of the Armalite, fired once, twice or perhaps three times. Within seconds would come the hard thump of the answering array rifles, a quite different and heavier noise. If the man was not home by dawn the women would listen to the first news broadcast of i he day, and hear what had happened. Sometimes there would be an agony of time between hearing

that the army returned fire and claimed hits and the savoured moment when the man came in untouched.

Then there would be no words, only warmth and comfort and the attempts to calm the trembling hands.

His wife had once shown him an article in a London women's magazine which told of the effect on the morale of the army wives stationed in Germany that those same early broadcasts had.

He had read how fast word spread around the married quarters that the unit had been in action, and how the women then waited at their windows to see if the officer came round and which house he went to. They would know if one of the men had been killed because the chaplain or the doctor would be with the officer, and they would go to a neighbour's house first, have a quick word on the doorstep, then move next door and knock, and when the door 71

opened go inside. The news would be round the houses and maisonettes and flats within minutes.

The man had been responsible for two of those visits. On the first occasion he had watched the funeral on television, seen the forty‐five second clip that showed the coffin with the flag on it, and a young widow clutching the arm of a relative as she walked surrounded by officers and local dignitaries. Then the staccato crack of rifle fire from the honour party. That was all, The other soldier he'd killed last week had been buried without a news team there to record the event. Interest had been lost. Whether he saw it or not was of no importance to him. He extracted no satisfaction either way.

It left him unmoved. He could imagine no soldier weeping if it were he who were shot dead. He had long accepted that it could happen and, apart from the tension of the actual moments of combat and the bow‐string excitement afterwards, he had learned a fatalism about the risks he took.

He had started like most others as a teenager throwing rocks and abuse in the early days at those wonderful heaven‐sent targets ... the British army, with their yellow cards forbidding them to shoot in

almost every situation, their heavy Macron shields, which ruled out

Ieffective pursuit, and their lack of knowledge of the geography of theside streets. All the boys in Ypres Avenue threw stones at the soldiers, and it would have been almost impossible to have been uninvolved. The mood had changed when a youth from the other end of the street and the opposite side of the road was shot dead in the act of lighting a petrol bomb. He had been one form above the man in secondary school. Later that night four men had arrived at the far end of Ypres Avenue to the rioting, and the word had spread fast that the kids should get off the streets. Then the shooting had started. In all, fifteen shots had been fired, echoing up the deserted street. He was eighteen then, and with other teenagers had lain in an open doorway and cheered at the urgent shouts of the soldiers who had taken cover behind the pigs.

Abruptly a hurrying, shadowy figure had crawled to the doorway, pushed towards him the long shape of a Springfield rifle, and whispered an address and street number.

S

He had made his way through the back of the houses, part way down the entry, and through another row of houses where a family I

had stared at the television, ignoring him as he

padded across their " living space before closing the door on to the street behind him. When he reached the address he had handed the rifle to the woman who answered his knock. She had said nothing and he had made his way back to Ypres Avenue. That had been the start.

72

Many of his contemporaries in the street had thrust themselves forward into the IRA. They would meet together on Saturday nights at the clubs, standing apart from the other young men to discuss in secretive voices their experiences over the previous days. Some were now dead, some in remand homes or prison, a very few had made it

to junior officer rank in the IRA and after their capture had been served with the indefinite detention orders to Long Kesh. The man had kept apart from them, and been noticed by those older, shadowy figures who ran the movement. He had been marked down as someone out of

the ordinary, who didn't need to run with the herd. He