Trust her, p.4
Trust Her, page 4
I wake on the carpet next to Finn’s bed. When I sit up, the towel slips, and I can see black bruises down my rib cage. The bruises feel soft to the touch, with blood swelling under the skin. Slowly I turn my head around the empty room.
It’s already dawn. I need to leave, now. I need to drive to Donegal and find Finn, and pay a fishing boat to bring us to Scotland or France. Royce might have someone watching the airport and the ferry terminal, but there are thousands of fishing boats moored along the west coast. One of them will take us away.
I stand up too fast, and my head spins. How quickly can I pack a bag with our passports, spare clothes, some cash. I’m crouching on the floor of my closet, reaching for a holdall, when my hands stop. Even if I warn Aoife, they will find someone else to punish. That wasn’t an empty threat. A few years ago, an informer from Ballymurphy managed to escape abroad. The IRA murdered his older brother, a teacher in Claudy who had no part in the conflict. He was coaching a football practice when the men came to shoot him. The last thing he did was shout at the children to run.
The holdall drops from my hands. I rock back from the closet, with frustration choking my throat. We’re trapped. After searching through my bag for my phone, I open my messages. That man, yesterday, sent mam and Marian the same message from my phone. “Heading home, talk to you tomorrow x.” They must think I sent it. Mam has replied, asking how seeing off Finn went, and I feel unfairly betrayed that neither of them realized the messages weren’t really from me.
My black swimsuit is still stuffed inside my bag, rolled up in a towel. Both of them are clean and dry, but I put them in the wash anyway, like I did actually spend yesterday swimming at Art’s Lough.
In the bathroom, I take pictures of the bruises and the split on my mouth with the Polaroid camera Marian gave me for my last birthday. Without watching them develop, I put the photographs in a box and hide them in the back of my closet. If the police ever find the bungalow, my fingerprints and DNA will be across it, and they might think I went there to meet Royce on my own. These photographs are my insurance. Proof, if I ever need it.
I run a shower, holding my stiff body under the warm water. Afterward, I sit on the edge of the bath in my bra and knickers, rubbing arnica ointment onto the bruises. I want them gone, I don’t want Finn to ever see them. I wrap a compression bandage around my torso, to hold my cracked ribs in place. It hurts to breathe, but I know how lucky I am. Those men could have killed me last night. I kick away from the thought, like I’m trying to surface from the mangle of a wave.
In my bedroom, I put on a white cotton top and a navy wrap skirt long enough to hide the scratches on my legs. I swallow two Nurofen and walk down to the kitchen to make coffee in the filter. While the water boils, I look around at the sky-blue cover of a Dublin Review on the table, the stacks of mismatched china cups, the thick cookbooks stained with grease. All of it mine, all exactly as I’d left it yesterday morning. I don’t know why I feel guilty, why it feels like I committed a crime yesterday. Not reporting something that happened to you is not a crime.
On the fridge is a snap of Marian, holding Finn on her lap at a restaurant. I look at my sister’s laughing mouth, her clever eyes. This is her fault, I think. She brought these men into our lives.
“If I were you, I’d cut her right out,” said Royce. The thing is, I thought I’d forgiven her. Last spring, the two of us were watching a film at my house, and Marian said, “Sometimes I wish you’d do something really bad.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Kill someone in a hit-and-run by accident, not a nice person, obviously, and ask me to help you hide the body.”
“What, to balance things out?”
“Yes.”
Without looking away from the screen, I said, “Just pretend I did. To be honest, it’s probably only a matter of time anyway, given the traffic in Dublin.”
Marian gave a hollow laugh and turned back to the screen. After a few minutes, I said, “It could have been me and not you. If you’d left Belfast and I’d stayed, I might have been the one who joined.”
Anyone who’d met us as teenagers would have expected me to join the IRA before Marian. I was the stubborn one, refusing to go to mass, getting into shouting rows with our uncles over politics. I was almost expelled during the 2002 abortion referendum for showing up to our Catholic school with a repeal shirt on over my uniform. Marian had never seemed interested in politics. She’d always liked painting, she could have gone away to art college in Glasgow or London.
“Do you really believe that?” asked Marian. “That it could have been you?”
“Yes.”
But Marian stayed in Belfast, while I was the one who left for Trinity. Often I stayed working at the library in the Arts Block until late at night. When Marian called me, I’d text back, “In the library, want me to go outside?” She always wrote back, “No, you’re grand,” and then when I called her on my walk home, she often didn’t pick up.
While I was in my fourth year at Trinity, Marian met Seamus Malone. He was a familiar figure around Andersonstown, a tall, thin man in a corduroy jacket, with red hair. I’d seen him before, browsing in the record store, drinking in the crowd at the Rock bar, standing at the edge of the hurling field.
He started calling round to Marian’s flat, asking her out for coffee, helping her paint her walls. He gave Marian books to read and invited her to join a political discussion group. We were reading some of the exact same books that year, ones about colonialism, power, class, except I was reading them in a library carrel, and Marian was reading them with terrorists.
She still fights me on that word. Marian won’t call the IRA terrorists, which makes me lose the absolute run of myself. I agree with her that the Irish Republican Army weren’t always terrorists, but we’re not in 1916 anymore. We’re not even in 1971. Since Brexit, the IRA has only become more brutal. Something inside the organization has warped and hardened.
That doesn’t make me a colonialist, whatever Royce thinks. I’m outraged that the British still control the six counties of Northern Ireland. That I was born in the world’s oldest British colony, with all the problems of a colony. The partition of Ireland is as unnatural as the Berlin Wall, but this version of the IRA won’t be bringing it down.
We had years of peace after the Good Friday Agreement, but it never felt stable. By the time the conflict reignited in 2019, I’d graduated and moved back to Belfast. I remember standing in my flat one night when the kitchen suddenly filled with smoke. I grabbed the pan off the cooker, thinking I’d burned something, before realizing the smoke was coming from outside. I stood at the open window watching ash drift across the city, stinging my nose and eyes.
A riot had begun. Some lads had hijacked a bus and set it on fire, and the cloud of smoke was spreading over Belfast. I checked the news on my phone and thought I’d be fine, the riot was miles away, those lads would need to burn down half of Belfast to reach my building. I turned away from the window and finished cooking my dinner.
I kept a journal during those first weeks of the conflict. I thought what was happening around me was interesting, historic. I wrote down what people bought out of the supermarkets, and what the helicopter searchlights looked like over the city, like a Blitz diary. I described watching a Molotov cocktail burst on the road, the flames leaping from the petrol as soon as the glass broke, like a magic trick.
When a curfew was announced, it was exciting at first, like a holiday. Everyone was let off work early to get home in time, and the roads were empty, with police helicopters hovering overhead. In fairness, I wasn’t the only person who felt restless, energized by the disruption. Most of us did.
I stopped keeping the journal after three weeks. I didn’t write down the first death in the conflict, or the second, or the third, or any of the ones afterward, and the thought of that journal now makes me sick with myself. I shouldn’t have been looking out at the helicopter searchlights anyway, I should have been looking at my sister. I remember watching the news with her and mam, when the unrest still seemed likely to blow over. I said, “The Troubles are over.”
“Ours aren’t,” said mam.
Five
The walk to my sister’s house will take twenty minutes. Marian lives in the Liberties, in a row of old maltworkers’ cottages behind Bride Street. Heading up Clanbrassil Street, I try to walk normally, but the bruises make my legs feel constricted, like the front and back of my thighs are being pinched together.
Storm clouds are banked over Dublin, pale at the top and darker on the bottom, like bands of dripping watercolor, as I turn onto her road. Guidebooks tell tourists to avoid this area after dark, which helps Marian more than them. No one wants a group of trolleyed tourists shouting outside their house late at night. The worst crime Marian has ever seen in the neighborhood, she says, is when one father accidentally took another’s empty pram outside the Fumbally, then returned it a few minutes later.
I’ve a key to Marian’s house, but this morning I press the bell. I wait, listening to the traffic on Bride Street, looking at the arch of red bricks above her doorway. Down the terrace, one of her neighbors comes outside with a terrier, stepping over the lead to stop it tangling around his ankles.
Marian opens her front door in a saffron-yellow corduroy dress, with Saoirse at her shoulder. She says, “Have you taken the day off work? Want to come to a baby music group?”
I shake my head. “Of course you don’t,” says Marian, “but what if I take you to brunch afterward?”
“Marian,” I say, but she is already turning away.
“I left the kettle on,” she says, and I follow her down the hall, stepping over loose shoes and heaps of laundry. I thought Marian would know something was wrong from my face, but instead she’s switching off the hob, chatting about hiring a pub in Bray for mam’s birthday. I won’t tell Marian, not yet. I’ll give her a few more minutes before destroying her peace.
“How’s the bairn?” I ask, and she swivels to show me Saoirse, asleep, her mouth gaping open. Saoirse has on a striped cotton suit and a pair of white socks rolled down twice to fit over her feet. She looks so small, which I know better than to tell Marian. I reach out to touch her socked foot, my chest aching.
I look at the piles of post, the dirty dishes and sticky pools of jam on the kitchen surfaces. “This place is a tip.”
“Isn’t it disgusting?” says Marian cheerfully. “Seb left on Saturday night.”
Her husband works as a cameraman on film sets. He will be away for the next three weeks filming on Inishmore, in the Aran Islands. “How’s the shoot?”
“Grand. Apparently they’re doing quite a lot of karaoke over there.”
“Ah, no, Seb.” I reach into the open bag of Hula Hoops on the counter, suddenly ravenous. “And this is what you’ve been eating?” I ask, crunching them between my teeth.
“Mostly,” says Marian. “And ready meals.”
Seb does the cooking in their house. During holidays, Seb and I are insufferable about the food, inordinately ambitious, working on lobster thermidor, homemade linguine, parmesan soufflés, while mam and Marian drink white wine and mind the children and shout at us to hurry up. Seb is like Marian, calm about most things and then absolutely nuts about others. He hates going to IKEA, not for the normal reasons, but because he loves it so much that he can’t bear for the trip to end.
They met through a work friend of hers two years ago. At first, Marian wouldn’t tell me anything about Seb except that I’d meet him soon. I could picture him—everyone she has ever fancied looks the same—but when we met, Seb was nothing like the others, warm where they were cold, silly where they were aloof, cheerful where they were moody. His large, lovely north Dublin family has welcomed Marian as one of their own. You’d think she has known them all her life.
Marian takes two chipped mugs down from the shelf. “Are you still coming over for dinner tonight?” she asks, and before I can answer, she says, “Mam’s not coming anymore, she has a date.”
“With Joe?”
“No, the other one, the one from her ballroom group.”
“Martin?”
“No, she’s seeing him on Tuesday.”
“Gerry?”
“That’s the one.”
“Jesus, what is she like?” I say, and Marian shakes her head. I have to tell her, but I need a few more minutes of talking with her like this first, of knowing what we’re about to lose.
“What about yourself? How was your date on Thursday?” she asks, and I shrug.
“It was fine,” I say. Once a month, I download a dating app and arrange to meet someone for a drink after work. Afterward, I delete the app on the bus ride home, relieved to not have to look at it for another month. A one-hour drink, and home in time to do Finn’s bedtime. I’ve not yet met anyone worth missing a bedtime. “He’s an actor. He’s in a show at the Abbey, and now he thinks he’s going to be the next James Bond, do you know the way?”
“God loves a trier,” she says. “Did you shift him?”
“Jesus, are we fifteen?”
We did kiss, actually. I do sometimes kiss on these dates and, less often, have sex, mostly because I don’t want to have forgotten how when it counts, whenever that might be.
“You should give it one more go,” says Marian, and I nod absently. She says, “Will you really?”
“No.”
“Of course not,” she says. “Stubborn cow.”
I can feel an ache against my skull, the start of a pressure headache. Marian spoons honey into her mug. She pours the tea, and we carry our mugs into her front room. Before sitting down, I shift the usual mess of baby clothes and board books and mallow lotion from the end of the sofa.
“Marian,” I say, but she is distracted, fixing her pillow, settling the baby against her. “Marian,” I say again, and she turns toward me. Aside from Finn, Marian has my favorite face in the world, the one I know best. I find her face calming, the way a forest is calming.
“Two men stopped me while I was driving in Wicklow yesterday,” I say. Marian nods, like I’ve asked her a question, and she is still nodding as her face collapses.
“Did they hurt you?” she asks.
“No.”
“What happened to your mouth, Tessa?”
“It’s nothing. They didn’t hurt me,” I say, out of pride, or stubbornness. Royce will be expecting me to fall apart today, and even though he can’t see us, I don’t want to give him the satisfaction.
“They brought me to a house,” I say, and my voice is level, but Marian closes her eyes anyway. I don’t have to describe the zip tie, the shackle around my ankle, she already knows, the knowledge is ripping through her. “Eoin Royce was there.”
“Is he not in prison?”
“Early release,” I say, and Marian says, “Whose brilliant idea was that?”
“They want me to start meeting with Eamonn again. They want me to convince him to give them information about MI5.”
Marian’s forehead creases. “How? Do they already have something on Eamonn to blackmail him?”
“No.”
“Then how do they expect you to bring Eamonn under control?” she asks, and I shake my head. “I’ll do it,” she says. “Not you.”
“He won’t take you for it, Marian. He thinks Eamonn will be more likely to trust me than you.”
“Too bad,” she says. “Royce can take me instead, or we’ll run.”
“If we run, they’ll kill Aoife. He knows her address,” I say. “And if she runs, too, they’ll find someone else from our family to punish.”
Marian lifts her head, staring at the ceiling, and I watch her struggling to breathe. “Are you going to tell Seb?” I ask, and the question seems to make Marian exhausted. “Of course I’m going to tell Seb,” she says.
“We’re going to need help, Marian. We should tell the police,” I say. “The IRA won’t find out.”
“They always find out,” she says, and something echoes, something chimes down the years. “How do you think they found us? They might already have someone inside the police.”
For a while we sit in silence. Marian’s right. The IRA might be blackmailing an officer, here or in Belfast. I should have thought of that earlier, but all these rules feel unfamiliar, and my mind isn’t working properly.
Finn had croup earlier this week. I woke in the middle of the night, hearing him cough, and crouched with him on the floor of the shower, hugging him while he inhaled the steam. Those are our problems now, mine and Marian’s. Croup, strep throat, drop-offs and pickups. Not this, nothing like this. I understand our mistake now. It was a child’s logic. The IRA haven’t gone away, after all. We’d only stopped thinking about them.
“Mam might have let something slip,” I say. “Or Tom.”
Aside from the police, the only people who know the whole story are mam and her siblings, Tom, and Seb. Seb is quite possibly the least discreet person I’ve ever met. He’s the middle brother in a family of five, and an absolute gossip. He’s terrible at keeping secrets, but he would lay down his life for Marian. There’s not a chance he told anyone about her past.
“Has anyone from the North tried to contact you?” I ask.
“No,” says Marian, then her voice falters.
“What? What is it?”
“I’ve been sending money to Niall in prison.”
“Sorry?” I search Marian’s face, confused. Niall O’Faolain was in Marian’s active-service unit, and he’s still a member of the IRA.
“Just small amounts, so he can order books and things,” she says quietly. “He has no one else.” Niall joined the IRA when he was seventeen. He’d grown up in care, he’d no family.
“Come here to me, Marian. What were you thinking?”
“I grew up with him.”
