sending me where I want to go now – where I have to go. It was my responsibility to look after him. It’s my responsibility to find out what happened to him.
Macken slowly gathered his kit and possessions for his transfer. His limbs were leaden. His heart heavy with guilt. His memories of family were at once more real and more remote than the room around him.
Family can only hurt you if you let them, Macken had learnt. He tried not to think of them much. The memory of his mother was where he turned in times of danger. He supposed he must love her, but he had never properly known her. Not her fault. She had died when he was young. That was the first mark on his conscience. Her premature death was somehow connected to his own arrival in the world, so he’d later understood. He imagined he remembered her alive and holding him.
After a decent interval his father had married again. And more children had followed. Half-sisters and a half-brother. A new family into which Macken never fitted.
He couldn’t blame his father. It had been the sensible thing to do. But he and his stepmother had never warmed to each other. Looking back, Macken knew now that he’d probably never given her a chance. What living person could ever live up to the imagined memory of his martyred mother?
When his father passed on, his stepmother had also married again. A man called McMahon. It had been the sensible thing to do. She and her children had naturally taken her new husband’s name.
But not Macken.
There had been no sudden rupture, but Macken had drifted away, and they had been happy to let him. Less awkward for them. Or so Macken told himself. Less painful.
Except for Danny. That had always been Macken’s job – to look after Danny. Watch out for your wee brother. Where Macken went, Danny would always follow. Even after Macken left. Even after all these years.
Macken doubled over with pain, new and remembered. Never mind excuses, he thought. His brother had kept on following him, even into the police. Into danger. And now he was dead.
But surely he would never have killed himself, reasoned Macken. He wasn’t much of a believer, but he knew that taking your own life closed the door on any chance of going to heaven. The Danny that Macken knew would never have considered it.
But what about the Danny he didn’t know? Even if his death had really been an accident, it was still Macken’s failure. Macken’s responsibility. The brother no one knew he had. What else could he do now but take his place and find out the truth?
*
As Macken left Kilmurray, he knew it wouldn’t miss him. Nor he it. The village seemed hollowed out – fishing boats gone out from the quay, children corralled from the sunshine into rote learning. Only shrieking seagulls bickering over territory.
Macken preferred the nearby mountains. He escaped there when he could – a tramp through the Silent Valley and up Slieve Binnian, Muck, Beeragh, curving round by old smuggling paths to Commedagh and the top of Donard.
He was never lost, even if the trail was just a slew of rocking stones or a stream bed. Eyes down, feet up and down. Pause for breath, hands on hips, head up and there it would be – a new vista, a lake shining silver through a gap in the interlocking slopes. Or standing on a mountain shoulder gazing down into the broad bottom of a glacier-cut valley, slopes lined with heather and furze, one side a carpet of embers glowing purple, red, orange and yellow in the evening sun.
No need to move at all. You could lie back in the heather and let the sky do the work. Earth mountains at your back, cloud mountains evolving above – one moment letting the sun through to bathe you in warmth, the next closing to draw the ground’s chill up through your bones instead. The quick changing light and shade up there made it feel as if the earth’s revolutions had speeded up, squeezing the passage of day and night into minutes not hours. During those moments, Macken felt as if his life was racing by, trying to keep up with the clouds passing faster and faster overhead. He’d stagger to his feet, dizzy, surprised he hadn’t been carried away.
Those same clouds could swell quickly to black and dirty yellow. He had often been caught out when the heavens opened, taking shelter by the Mourne Wall. The dry-stone boundary marked the watershed for the reservoir. The flat slabs on top were an elevated pavement above boggy ground, linking the peaks. Hadrian had his wall. The Chinese have theirs. We’ve our own, thought Macken.
The difference was that you were more likely to meet sheep than people in the Mournes. That’s the real benefit of the rain, thought Macken. Not the greenery, but that it keeps people down by the coast. If only the sea would lap closer to the mountains, he thought, submerging the narrow ground below and the people who fight over it.
The road from Kilmurray ran along the sunny north shore of Carlingford Lough. The south shore, in the Irish Republic, was dark under the silhouetted hills of the Cooley Peninsula. Macken wondered if the people there resented living in the shadows, with the bright greens and yellows of the north laid out before them. Perhaps Unionists would concede that the southerners at least had the better view.
Macken finally got off the bus in Armagh, with its two cathedrals. One for Catholics and one for Protestants. Each on their own hill. Both named after St Patrick. Who says we can’t agree on anything? thought Macken. On the rare occasions he attended Mass, he was strictly back of the chapel, or down on one knee outside if it was full.
Macken had an eight-mile walk to Blackwatertown ahead of him, but spots of rain sent him inside a café, seeking refuge from the weather and the dark pit of being alone with his thoughts.
A woman in an apron smiled a welcome. She raised her eyebrows to let him know she’d be with him immediately if it wasn’t for these other customers, but what can you do?
*
Macken hunched over his tea. No one paid him any attention. Not the women with bags of shopping. Nor the elderly gent, smartly dressed – still making an effort – squinting at a newspaper, nodding with approval. Only one section could give such obvious satisfaction – the obituaries. Each entry a victory for the reader still living.
Or perhaps an indictment of the living, thought Macken. He winced at the thought that his own guilty secret could be on the page being held in shaking hands two tables away. The old man felt his gaze and looked up. He smiled to indicate that Macken could have the paper when he was done. Macken nodded back. No, too soon. The story won’t have made the local weekly yet. His sense of relief disgusted him.
Outside, the roofs became shiny and the rain-wet road darkened. Macken let the heat from his cup curl round his face. Other refugees drifted in, their heavy coats dripping and steaming.
His mind drifted back to the county inspector’s references to his father. Macken was always hearing about him. The unstoppable stormer of the Kaiser’s own Hohenzollern Redoubt. A hard man. No belittling nicknames for him.
Macken’s father had once explained to him the standard routine for infiltrating German positions. Plug the first man you see. Then the next one who moves. If the rest don’t surrender immediately, finish them all. He’d brought the unbending rigour of army life back to Ireland. When partition split the country and meant the end of the old police, Macken senior had stayed north and become part of the new Royal Ulster Constabulary. His impeccable war record and ramrod posture took him to the position of head of drill for the whole force, despite his religion. He was the frontman any time there was a visiting royal to be ceremonially
