all do.’
They took him to a corner room and made him sit on a chair.
‘Don’t look round. Take the bag off.’
For a moment, he breathed the smells of the countryside and heard sounds that might otherwise have cheered him: birdsong and a breeze. He felt a rush of ease and relief from the stifling filth of the bag. There was a table beside him with a cassette tape recorder on it, one of the single-speaker models with a built-in microphone. Ig and Dan sat on chairs behind him. It was a dirty room with bits of straw and filth on the floor and unpainted plastered walls that exuded decrepitude, lack of care. This was a place put together by someone without any feeling at all.
Ig had a small cooking pot with a wooden spoon in it on the floor beside him. Dan had a pistol in his hand, an old Webley. The slicker guns were kept for more urgent work. It hardly mattered if this one jammed occasionally; there would always be time enough to take another shot.
‘Right,’ said Ig. He stood and switched on the cassette recorder and went back to his chair. ‘Just tell us what the cops did that was so clever that you nearly broke. And don’t be giving us the silent treatment; it won’t work here.’
‘They just went on and on about the wee girl.’
‘Not like that. Tell it as a story. Start from the beginning. No details of the operation.’
‘How can I talk about it if I don’t talk about the operation?’
‘No details about the operation.’
Then Terry realised that this could be for the ears of people who weren’t in the movement. It was to be the confession that justified them shooting him. He soon discovered what the pot and wooden spoon were for. Ig used them to signal when he was to start speaking, so that his own voice never appeared on the tape. Then if he didn’t like what Terry said, he would rewind, find the last recorded bong on the pot and start again from there.
Terry hadn’t broken for his Special Branch interrogators, but he told Ig and Dan stuff that endangered him. All IRA members had been ordered simply to sit still and say nothing, not even to ask for the toilet or a cigarette, just to brave out the haranguing and the abuse in the certainty that they would walk free if they provided no evidence against themselves.
‘I told them I was nowhere near Magheraloy. I told them I was drinking all day in Cullyhanna, that I was nowhere near the bomb. Once I asked them for water, just once. Once or twice I asked to go to the toilet. I told them nothing.’
Ig stopped the tape and said, ‘So you broke the rule. Say you broke the rule and you are sorry. Wait.’ He pressed the record and play buttons again then tapped the pot with the spoon.
‘I had been properly trained in how to resist torture and interrogation by state forces. I regret that I did not put my faith in that training. I have let myself down and let my comrades down.’
Ig stopped the tape. ‘That’ll do.’
He was left to sleep on the floor and they went through the whole thing again the next day.
Even years later, no matter how often he replayed the horror in his head, he still didn’t know at what moment they decided not to shoot him. One thing was for sure – his pleading had had nothing to do with it. When, finally exhausted and broken, he had gone down on his knees, weeping and cringing, begging them not to kill him, humiliated like a baby, his trousers soaking and cold against his skin, his pants full of cold shit, he knew even as he crumpled and moaned that they had seen many other men and women in the same state, and had spared some and killed some. And that each decision had been cold and logical. It had not really been in Terry’s power to save himself at all.
Three
It was a frustrating drive home. The traffic on the Lisburn Road moved slower than walking pace at six every evening. The radio news said that the Republican Party president, Dominic McGrath, had called for full disclosure about the dirty tricks the British had used in their war against the Irish people. As well he might, thought Terry. The British had won their war by placing agents all around McGrath, bugging his office and his car and turning people who worked for him. It wasn’t Terry that Dominic should have been worrying about back then; it was Oweny the security man and Dan the driver of the white van – both informers. A year before, Oweny had been whisked out of his home by MI5 and taken on an RAF flight to somewhere in England for his own safety. Even his wife wouldn’t accept calls from him now. And Dan was dead. The poor man had foolishly thought that the peace process enabled him to go on living in Belfast after he had been outed. He couldn’t bear to live anywhere else. Then somebody – probably Ig – had rung his doorbell one night and shot him in the face with a double-barrelled shotgun: the most thorough and least traceable of weapons.
Think how much worse things could have turned out, Terry said to himself. Had he stayed in the IRA and been loyal to McGrath, he would have been surrounded by the same spies. The Brits would have known his every move and they would have kept him in place for as long as they had judged him to be a useful fool. His least unpleasant fate would have been to spend most of the 1990s in jail making Celtic harps out of matchsticks for Irish Americans to raffle in bars – like Boomer, whoever the fuck Boomer was. And that would have been hell.
***
Kathleen was in the shower when the thought came to her: how much do I know? How much do I want to know? She had lived in Belfast through the closing years of the Troubles, when the bombs were bigger than they had been before and the sectarian killings had multiplied and come close. She wasn’t naïve. She was sure she wasn’t naïve.
She had lost a friend to loyalist killers. She had learnt that you keep your sanity if you stop asking questions, stop wondering what impact even your own words might ultimately have. Then she turned up the heat to try to make her skin hurt enough to clear her mind of bad memories and big fears.
What would a bullet do to a skull? She had often thought about that, thought about how a person might feel in the last moments of mental and physical torment before being finished off, usually when fearing for Terry. She had only ever seen people shot dead in films, and she assumed that in the real world it was bloodier. If Terry had shot a soldier from a distance, without seeing his fear, or if he had shot someone in self-defence, she could forgive that more easily, but she knew that IRA men had shot people in the face, had emptied pistols into them as they lay on the ground, that they had shot women. Over the years she had seen the coverage of all their doings on the nightly news and had often blanked it out and turned to something else rather than ask herself: would Terry have done that if they had ordered him to?
But she knew that Terry was a good man. She knew that, like hundreds of others, he had got swept into a war that was not of his making; that he had found his personal, even moral bearings in the depths of that war, and that he had saved himself from death and imprisonment though not from guilt.
As she dressed in the bedroom, she heard him come through the front door. She brushed her hair and studied her face in the mirror, recognising the gravity in her own expression. She would have to ask him.
He had dropped his briefcase on the floor and was planted on the sofa, bent over and rubbing the day’s stress out of his brow. The room was already untidy again.
‘Hi.’ She leaned over and kissed him on the head.
‘Sorry about all this.’
‘We’ll manage – but tell me everything before they get here. Don’t leave me exposed.’
