Torn Away (2 page)

Sometimes he hid right under their noses at the O'Malley house next door. From there
he watched the police coming and going, and when their backs were turned he was often able to sneak into his own house and sleep in his own bed.

Mr. O'Malley had tried reasoning with him. “You can't run forever, Declan. They're bound to catch you. Where will you go when they discover you here?” Mr. O'Malley wore a black patch. He had lost an eye ten years ago to a British plastic bullet in the riots following the deaths of jailed hunger-strikers. And ten years before that, he had been thrown into the Maze Prison with several hundred other Catholics, where he was kept for three years without a trial. His nerves were wrecked. He couldn't lift a cup of tea without spilling it.

Declan's friend Tim O'Malley, his face pale and worried, said, “Listen to my da, Declan, he's right. Don't I wish it was myself who was getting out of this dung heap and going off to Canada? It's lucky you are that your uncle sends for you. I hear everyone in Canada is rich.”

“I was born and raised in Belfast and here I'll stay,” said Declan, “and no man has the right, uncle or not, to make me go.”

Tim's father said, “Your Uncle Matthew is all you have left, Declan. He has a right to claim you. He wants you. You must go.”

“I won't go.”

Tim's mother was very unhappy. She said, “My cousin Julia lives in New York and she loves it. Canada is close to New York and it sounds like the wonderful country, so it does. The good Lord in all his mercy will take care of you, Declan, and our prayers will go with you.”

Declan said, “The good Lord is it! And prayers is it! Don't be telling me about the mercy of the good Lord, Mrs. O'Malley, haven't I had enough of it!”

Mr. O'Malley said, “Your uncle . . . “

“Uncle! Matthew Doyle ran away from his country and left it to the English. He's no uncle of mine!”

Tim's mother started weeping.

“You can cry all you want, Mrs. O'Malley,” said Declan, “but I'll not run from Ireland and leave the murderers go free who killed my family. If they make me go, then I'll come back.”

“I'll be back,” he whispered to himself now as the plane started its race, gathering
speed down the runway. He pressed his cheek to the window. “I'll be back,” he said again.

The plane lifted off. The boy looked down. Identical rows of livid red rooftops slid underneath the airplane, row after row of them. In the gray gloom, they looked like long angry scars on the blighted landscape.

If the policeman had not been reading his newspaper, and if he had searched the reflection in the tiny window, he might have noticed that the boy was crying.

The policeman, still chewing gum, handed Declan over to an immigration officer at London's Heathrow Airport. He removed the handcuffs. “Good luck, Doyle,” was all he said to the boy before he left to board the next flight back to Belfast.

“Get stuffed!” said Declan.

The immigration man's name pin said “C.D. Sanford.” He was wide and bald. He took the boy to a small room which had a desk and two chairs. “Sit down, Declan,”
he said in a soft voice.

Declan kicked the chair over and pushed his hands into his pockets. The chair was made of metal tubing and it made a loud clatter as it hit the floor.

The immigration man shrugged his shoulders and started to fill out a form, copying down information from the papers given to him by the police. “They have your name spelled two different ways on these papers, Declan. Is it D-E-C or D-E-K?”

The boy did not answer.

“I'll put down D-E-C, the same as your passport.”

“I have no passport.”

Sanford smiled. “You have now, Declan. The Belfast Police rushed one through for you.”

“And my name is pronounced DEK-ln!”

“Sorry, Declan,” said Sanford, pronouncing it properly. He smiled apologetically. “I'm not so good on Irish names.”

Declan went to the door and tried opening it. It was locked.

When Sanford had finished writing on his forms, he said, “Would you sign your name here for me, Declan, please?”

“Why?”

“Just look the information over, and sign that it's correct. It's only a formality.” He pushed the pen and paper over the desk towards the boy.

Declan wrote on the paper:
Tiocfaidh ár lá
.

“Gaelic, Declan? What does it mean?”

“‘Our day will come.' That's what it means, Mister English Immigration Officer. Wouldn't an Irishman be the fool to sign an English paper? If it wasn't for the hundreds of years of English rule there'd never be the troubles in Ireland. You English have a lot to answer for, and that's the truth.”

The immigration officer gave a resigned sigh and wrote something above Declan's slogan. Then he handcuffed Declan, a different pair this time, black ones, and took him to a special detention room in the airport terminal that had in it only a bed, a chair, a small table and, behind a screen, a toilet and washbasin. Except for a tiny glass square in the door, there was no window.

“You will be kept here for the night, Declan, and early tomorrow morning we will be on a flight for Vancouver, Canada. Food will
be brought to you here in your room.” His smile was friendly. “Any questions?”

“We? Will you be coming with me, Seedy?”

Sanford removed the handcuffs. “I'm afraid so, Declan. You're classified as ‘dangerous.' We can't take any chances until we hand you over to your uncle in Vancouver.”

“I'm dangerous all right. That's why they call me Dangerous Declan Doyle.”

Sanford smiled. “Good night, Declan.”

“You can stuff your good night up your snotty English nose.”

He heard the key rattle in the lock and threw himself on the bed and lay on his back, staring at the ceiling.

A man's face, not Sanford's, spied at him through the tiny window every ten minutes.

Some time later, a woman brought food on a tray while Spyface stood by the door. Declan sat on the edge of his bed and took the tray onto his lap. He picked up the soup spoon. He measured the distance to the door out of the corner of his eye. Then he slowly, carefully, took the bowl of thick hot soup in the fingers of his left hand and, with a quick flick of his wrist, sent it flying like a Frisbee
at Spyface at the door. The bowl hit him in the chest. Green pea soup spattered onto his face.

Declan leaped towards the door, hurling the tray with its dinner plate of meat, potatoes and gravy at the guard as he moved. This time his aim was not quite so good, for the tray took Spyface in the knee, toppling him to the floor, but not preventing him from reaching out and getting a grip on Declan's leg as the boy tried to rush by. Declan was half-way out the door, dragging his imprisoned leg and elbowing Spyface to the head to make him let go, but the guard was too big and strong for him. He pulled Declan down to the floor and dealt him a vicious blow to the stomach that made the boy gasp with pain. Then he threw Declan onto the bed and stood over him while the woman picked up the tray and the broken dishes.

The guard was breathing heavily. “You young bastard!” he said.

Then they left. They brought no more food.

Declan had his usual nightmare, the one with the bomb exploding, waking in the early hours of the morning in terror, drenched in
sweat and tears, yelling out, not knowing where he was. The guard, not Spyface, a new one, switched on the light from outside the cell and peered in. He did not go in. He left the light on until he saw the boy pull the covers up over himself, and then he switched it off.

The next morning, two men he had not seen before brought him a breakfast of cereal, poached eggs, toast and orange juice. Declan was sitting bent over on the edge of his bed. He was hungry. His stomach hurt from the blow the night before. One man stood at the door while the other put the tray down on the small table. Declan lashed out with his feet, kicking over the table and sending the tray and its contents crashing to the floor. The first man reached for him, but slipped on the
eggs and juice and tumbled against the bed. Declan tried to duck under the second man's arms, but the man, too quick and strong for him, threw him back into the room. The two men backed carefully out of the room and locked the door.

A short time later, Sanford brought him a bag of clothing. The guard stood behind him at the door. Declan looked in the bag. “I don't need your cold English charity,” he said, throwing the bag back into his face. Sanford caught it quickly. He looked around at the mess of food on the floor. “You're not being sensible, Declan. How do you expect to keep up your strength if you don't eat?”

Sanford walked him aboard the airplane. He obviously knew about Declan's earlier escape, for the steel bracelet was tight on his wrist. Unlike the Irish policeman, however, the immigration officer kept his handcuffed hand hidden under his flowing raincoat.

As soon as they set foot on the 747, Declan began to protest in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear. “Why do you have to have the handcuffs so tight, Seedy? My wrist is bleeding!” And he pulled his hand from Sanford's pocket so all could see the cruelty
done to a mere boy.

Heads turned. Men scowled; women's eyes and lips rounded in horror. Declan grinned at Sanford's discomfort.

They sat at the back near the washroom, the boy on the inside window seat. Sanford keyed his own cuff open and the ratchet stuttered as he locked it on the armrest so that Declan now had his left hand locked to the seat; his right was free.

“I need to go to the bathroom.”

Sanford unlocked the wrist cuff and stood to let him out, blocking the escape aisle, and then followed Declan along to the washroom. “Don't lock the door.”

But he did lock the door. He ran the water in the sink until it overflowed; then he blocked the toilet with paper towels, and flushed and flushed until the water ran over the floor and out under the door.

Sanford forced the catch off the door, but as he crashed in and fell up against the sink, Declan squeezed past him out the door and up the aisle, only to slither and slip in the river of water coursing along the floor. He almost made it out the emergency exit, but Sanford dropped him in a swift tackle
and dragged him back and handcuffed him to his seat. Declan's bruised stomach ached more than ever.

The Boeing and its 465 passengers were delayed for twenty minutes while the maintenance crew came aboard and cleaned up.

Declan watched out the window as the airplane arrowed up into the English sky. By the time they were flying over the northwest coast of Scotland and leaving the British Isles, they were six miles high.

The flight attendant came around with drinks. He took an orange juice.

He found it hard to believe he was leaving his native land. Ripped away from his roots. Kidnapped.

If only he could somehow turn the airplane around and go home. Impossible. Hijack the plane. Also impossible. He was helpless.

So that he could cause no trouble during the flight, the wily immigration officer had arranged for Declan's orange juice to be doctored with thioridizine, a tasteless, odourless tranquilizer often used on unwilling deportees. Declan had spilled the breakfast juice, and the drug was wasted. But now the
juice given him by the flight attendant was beginning to take effect.

A deep depression settled on the drugged boy; his limbs felt heavy; he slumped in his seat and closed his eyes with leaden hopelessness. He was tired. He could fight no more. He was an animal caught in a trap.

Twelve hours and thirteen minutes later, the giant 747 touched down at the Vancouver International Airport in Canada where the time was only a little past noon the same day, Saturday, September 12th. He had flown backwards in time. A light rain was falling.

Sanford took him straight into the immigration office, where his uncle was waiting for him. Sanford asked the Canadian immigration officer, a dark, stocky man named Raghavji, to lock the door before he removed the handcuffs. Raghavji locked the door and introduced Sanford: “This is Mr. Matthew Doyle.”

Matthew Doyle stood up and nodded at the English immigration officer without looking at him. His eyes had not left his nephew since the boy had walked into the room.

Declan, still bleary from the thioridizine,
rubbed his swollen wrist where the handcuff had left blue welts and looked coldly up at his father's brother. The man he saw before him looked nothing like the young man he had seen in photographs taken in Ireland before he left for Canada. His uncle had the same brown hair and dark eyes of Declan's da, but there the resemblance ended.

Matthew Doyle was a big man, lean and spare and tall, with wide shoulders and long arms that dangled almost to his knees. The first thing Declan noticed about him, however, was not his bigness, but his sadness. Matthew Doyle had the longest, saddest face he had ever seen. He reminded him of one of those ugly, sorrowful dogs—he couldn't remember the kind—with the suffering eyes and woeful expression. His hands were big and gnarled, with spatulate, half-moon nails, and he wore brown cords, brown boots, a green cotton shirt and a stained carcoat that might once have been beige. He looked like an odd-job man, which is what he was.

He stared at Declan with his big sad face, not saying anything.

Declan stared back at him.

When the silence became so long that
the two immigration officers had decided that neither the boy nor his uncle was about to speak, Sanford pushed a sheaf of papers across the desk and said, “Declan is now in your custody, Mr. Doyle. Please sign at the places I've marked with an X.”

Matthew Doyle bent to sign the papers. Declan watched him. His uncle wrote his name and Sanford tore off a copy and gave it to him along with Declan's passport. Raghavji unlocked the door.

“Goodbye, Declan,” said Sanford, “and good luck.”