It was almost eleven in the morning and she decided it wasn’t too early for a glass of wine. The unopened bottle was in the fridge, lovely and cold and positively inviting her to let it help her ease the pain. It had a screw top. She loved screw tops on wine. It was so much easier than battling with a stupid bloody corkscrew. Screw tops represented something modern and forward looking. They were about the future. Her thoughts led on to the memories she had of her dear brother Padraig. She would never forget what he told her the night she’d agreed to escape Belfast and the likely arrest that would soon catch up with her. He said she was to ‘look ahead now sis, don’t look back, keep your head held high and don’t turn around’. She started to cry. Standing here in her family kitchen on the other side of the world she started to weep for her lost brother. He was lost to her many years before his death. And now it seemed he’d been murdered. All these years later blood had been spilt but for whose gain? She thought of all those hundreds and thousands of nights he’d spent in his lonely prison cell whilst she was down here living the happy family life in the lucky country of Australia. It didn’t seem right. She’d agreed to it all those years ago because the alternative would’ve been to spend the best part of her life in prison just like Padraig had done. And that made her weep even more. She’d always been close to Padraig even when they were growing up. They’d been partners in crime. Their Mammy would shout ‘Oh sweet Jesus what badness would those two be bringing into this house now?’ But she’d let him down. And yet after that he’d rescued her and shown her the love of a true and good brother.
Dennis walked into the room and couldn’t remain so indisposed towards her when she was weeping so much. He sat down beside her and put his arms around her. He held her tight.
‘Come on, Patty’ said Dennis. ‘Unless you tell me what this is all about one of us is going to go crazy’.
‘I’m so afraid you’re going to hate me, Dennis’ she sobbed. Her face was pressed against his shoulder and she couldn’t stop her body from shaking.
‘Patty, I can’t imagine any kind of circumstances that would make me hate you’ said Dennis. ‘But just at the moment I don’t know because you haven’t talked to me. Look, let’s try and kick start this. I mean, were you close to your brother?’
‘Yes’ Patricia answered. ‘We were very close. When we were kids I was closer to him than I was to my sister and he was closer to me than to any of our brothers. There was a special bond between Padraig and me alright. Then as we got older and the troubles back home began we both wanted to do something to help our side. Our Catholic community had been under attack from unionism for centuries and because we’d dared to demand our equal rights and been prepared to take to the streets to demand our equal rights, that attack was made official. The British sent in the Army. I will never be convinced by anyone that the Army weren’t there simply to kill the sound of our voices in whatever way they saw fit. They were there to put down our protests with their bullets. It was a war, Dennis. The IRA were on our side. They were the only ones prepared to fight back on our behalf and they wanted to unite us with the Republic down south. Padraig and I joined on the same day. We had to keep it quiet from everyone including our Mammy but she knew, she always knew. She knew because Padraig and I were always out when there was something going on in the neighbourhood involving the IRA and then we’d be home after it was all done’.
‘Keep going’.
Patricia paused and then shook her head. ‘I can’t! I just can’t!’
Dennis held Patricia firmly by the upper arms and said ‘Patty, you have got to tell me all of the truth’.
Patricia saw the look of hurt in Dennis’s eyes and it broke her heart. Dennis took his hands away from her and she sat back in her chair. This was the day of reckoning and it felt uncomfortable in the extreme.
‘I’m sorry I held you that tight’ said Dennis.
‘It’s alright’.
‘No it isn’t’ said Dennis. ‘I just need to know’.
‘I had a friend called Deirdre Murphy’ she began. ‘She lived in the same street as us but she was older than me and I looked upon her as a kind of big sister. She was a whole lot wiser than me. Dear God, she was a whole lot wiser than me. She’d lost her husband years before. He’d tried to organize a trade union at one of the few factories that employed Catholics in Belfast at that time. But he ended up getting sacked for it and never worked again. She blamed his early death from a heart attack on his loss of pride at not being able to provide properly for his family. There were five kids and I got to know Deirdre when I baby sat for her. It really put the nose out of joint of her eldest, Barry, who thought of himself as the big man of the family even though he was only eleven at the time. Deirdre joined the IRA because of what had happened to her husband. She took to … ‘
‘ … ah now just a minute, Patricia’.
‘Patricia? You called me Patricia? It must be serious’.
Dennis poured himself a glass of water and gulped it all down in one go. Then he filled up his glass again before coming back and sitting back down at the table. He felt sick. He dreaded to think where all of these revelations from the woman he formerly thought he knew as his wife were going to go but he imagined it wouldn’t be very pretty. How could she have kept it all inside herself for so damn long? He used to have a friend who stayed married for way longer than he should’ve done. His wife was cheating on him left, right and centre and yet he carried on making everything mean something it didn’t. He made it mean what he wanted it to mean. He made everything look like he was part of a perfect marriage but he was deluded. He wanted it to mean something it really didn’t. Then one day he just woke up and finally saw sense. After that he decided on a complete change of scene and moved up to the gold coast in Queensland. Dennis was wondering if he might be following his friend sooner or later. Patricia hadn’t cheated on him like his friend’s wife had. She’d done something far worse. She’d pretended she was something she quite clearly wasn’t. And she’d kept up the façade for nearly forty years.
‘Please just … just carry on’ said Dennis.
‘Are you alright, Dennis?’ asked Patricia in a voice much shakier than before.
‘Ask me that when you’ve finished talking’.
Patricia took a deep breath. She’d been doing a lot of that since those two police constables brought so much trouble to her door. But she shouldn’t shoot the messenger. The tangle of deceit she’d caught herself up in all those years ago in the days when life held such promise was bound to come undone and catch her out one day. Though she’d still like to know how they’d found her and just who’d asked them to let her know.
‘The situation was like this’ said Patricia, her voice now solemn. ‘Someone in our local IRA cell was leaking information to the British. Some of our operations had gone wrong and our people had been captured. It was obvious what was happening to lead to all that’.
‘When you talk about operations, Patricia, what the hell do you mean?’
‘I mean the protection we gave to local businesses and the ones from the other side who we targeted’.
‘You say it so bloody calmly … targeted? You mean people you picked off to murder?’
‘Before you look at me like that, Dennis, you have to remember that the other side were doing the same’.
‘And so did that make it right?’ Dennis demanded, angrily. ‘You were involved in the killing of innocent people just because they were Protestants. Am I wrong?’
‘No, you’re not wrong’.
‘Sorry, say that again?’
‘I said that you’re not wrong!’ snapped Patricia, furiously. ‘But if you’re intending to put me on trial for what I did to defend my people then you’re wasting your time because I’m not sorry, Dennis. I’m not sorry one little bit for matching the devious murdering bastards in the British Army and the British security services in their attempts to put my people down with their bullets and their intimidation. So don’t you dare, don’t you dare ask me to be sorry for any of it!’
Dennis had never felt more like slapping his wife’s face than he did right at that moment. But he’d never raised a hand to either Patricia or his children, even when his children were young and could try the patience of a saint, he never touched them. And he’d always seen men who hit women as being weak and feeble excuses for men. But now he did feel like hitting Patricia for her lack of remorse at what she’d done.
‘I said down in Geelong that I could never understand the kind of pressure you must’ve been under to live during those times back in Belfast’ said Dennis. ‘And I meant it. But you keep going deeper and deeper into stuff I just can’t fathom. It’s hard, Patricia. It’s bloody hard for me’.
‘I know’ said Patricia, almost capitulating but not quite. There was still some of her defiance left although it was a place she hadn’t been to for a long time.
‘What was your specific role in these so-called operations?’
‘I was a pretty girl’ said Patricia. ‘I lured men away from a place of safety to a place where we could get them’.
‘Dear God almighty’ said Dennis. ‘So cool, calm and bloody collected. The woman I’ve slept beside nearly all my adult life and with whom I’ve raised three kids … she’s nothing more than a gangster’s moll’.
‘We were not gangsters!’
‘You were criminals and gangsters who hooked yourselves up to some arguably worthwhile cause just like all terrorists do and you killed, you murdered innocent people who were just getting on with their lives as best they could’.
‘We weren’t allowed to get on with our lives because we were Catholics!’
‘So you say’.
‘Yes I say because it was true and don’t you dare be so bloody sanctimonious when you know nothing!’
‘I know that you’ve lied your way through our marriage’.
‘I didn’t lie, I just didn’t tell you about my past’.
‘Oh you can fiddle about with the words if you like. It doesn’t alter the fact that you’re not the woman I thought you were’.
‘Well are you going to let me finish?’ said Patricia, believing that there wasn’t much point in holding anything back now.
‘Yes, you were telling me that your murdering ways had been interrupted by someone who knew what you were doing was wrong’.
Patricia swallowed that one and carried on. ‘Word got back to me that the IRA thought that I was the traitor who was passing on our secrets to the British. My brother Padraig let me know that they were planning to mount an investigation into what they called my activities. I knew what that meant’.
‘Is that when you came to Australia?’
Patricia threw her head back and laughed. ‘Oh Dennis if only it were that simple. If only I could’ve just run away’.
‘So what did you do?’
‘You’re assuming I was guilty?’
‘Well were you?’
‘I’ll come to that’.
‘I thought that would be your answer’.
‘Please Dennis this is so painful for me’.
‘Alright, I’ll give you that’.
‘I was thick as thieves with Deirdre as you know’ Patricia explained. ‘Because I was so close to her I was able to make the kind of moves that took the attention away from me and put it firmly on her. I used my relationship with my boyfriend Fergal who at that time was still well thought of by the IRA leadership and the knowledge that my brother Padraig was also well thought of to buy me the kind of influence that would make them believe it was Deirdre and not me who was the traitor’.
‘What happened to her?’
‘They took her from her house one evening’ Patricia recalled. ‘Apparently she was screaming her innocence in front of her children who were all sat at the table having their tea. Nobody except her IRA interrogators ever saw her again’.
‘You turned on your best friend like that? You let her be dragged away from her children? What kind of bloody piece of work are you?’
‘I had to for my own survival’.
Dennis slammed the table with the palm of his hand with such force it made Patricia almost jump out of her skin. ‘And I suppose they just had a cozy little chat with her before killing her?
‘It won’t have been very pleasant for her’.
‘You sit there so bloody calmly whilst you descend further and further into Hell!’ Dennis raged. ‘You let your best friend take the rap for your treachery and you deprived her children of their mother. You made them watch her being dragged away from them. Words fail me. Words bloody fail me’.
Patricia reached out for her husband but he pushed her hand away.
‘Don’t touch me’ he hissed. ‘Don’t you bloody ever touch me again you poisonous little bitch’.
‘So what do you want me to do?’
‘Tell me the rest’ said Dennis. ‘Like why you turned into a traitor against the cause you professed to believe in so much’.
‘I was having an affair with an RUC man’.
Dennis turned his head and stared at his wife. ‘Say that again?’
‘His name was James Carson’ said Patricia. ‘Look, life was complicated. We all did what we could to survive’.
‘Including betraying both your best friend and your boyfriend?’
‘It wasn’t as cut and dried as that’.
‘Then how cut and dried was it opening your legs for both your own side and the other one?’