Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

We were both on three Kingfishers when we walked hand in hand down to the Dobbins on West Street. She wanted a gin and tonic and I got a pint of bass.

Two more drinks and we were getting on famously.

She went off to the toilet and I stood by the fireplace watching the peat bricks crack.

“I thought you might be here,” a voice said.

I turned round. It was Laura.

“I came looking for you,” she said. “I wanted to ask you if you wanted to go to the cinema this week.”

“I thought the IRA had blown up all the cinemas.”

“Not all of them,” she laughed.

“What’s playing?”

“ Chariots of Fire ? Have you heard of it?”

“Some kind of Ben Hur remake?”

“It’s about the olympics.”

Just then Heather came back from the toilet. She saw me talking to Laura and immediately put her arm through mine and kissed me on the cheek.

Laura blinked a couple of times.

“Laura, this is my friend, Heather. Heather, this is Laura,” I said.

The two women looked at one another and said nothing.

Heather put her hand on my cheek, turned my face to hers and kissed me on the lips.

When the kiss was done, Laura, naturally, was gone.

“Let’s finish our drinks and get out of here,” Heather said.

We went outside and called a black taxi.

It took us to her house in the wilds of Greenisland.

It was a surprisingly big house for a young reserve constable.

If I hadn’t seen her in the RUC van with us today, I would have been thinking: oh shit, IRA honey trap.

She stripped off her clothes revealing fishnet stockings and a black basque.

What the fuck is this? I was thinking when she grabbed my cock through my trousers.

“We were nearly killed today,” she said.

“Not really.”

“Doesn’t it turn you on?” she said.

“You turn me on,” I replied and kissed her again.

She tasted of gin and better times.

I kissed her breasts and her belly and laid her down on the bed.

“Fuck me, you bitch!” she moaned.

I didn’t need any more encouragement.

We had hard, rampant animal sex and then she climbed on top of me and we fucked again.

I fell asleep until 1.30 when she shook me hard.

“My husband gets back from the night shift at two,” she said. “Get your clothes on and get the fuck out of here.”

“Are you serious?”

“He’s a sheet welder, he’ll fucking break you in half, wee man, now get out.”

I had to walk five miles home in the rain.

When I got back to #113 Coronation Road I was shattered. I ripped off my wet clothes, lit the upstairs paraffin heater and put on the Velvet Underground and Nico. I slid the stylus across to “Venus in Furs” and clicked the repeat switch. When John Cale’s crazy viola and Lou Reed’s ostrich guitar kicked in, I went to the bookcase found the Britannica Encyclopaedia of Art and skipped through the centuries until I came to the painting of Orpheus in the Underworld by Jan Velvet Brueghel. I lay in front of the heater as the rain came on and the wind rattled the bathroom windows. I looked at Brueghel’s hell: flying demons, fires, tormented souls and in the foreground two ladies in rather nice frocks.

I lay there and let the minutes wash over me. The minutes. The hours. All eternity. I thought of Orpheus searching for his beloved in the realms of Hades. I thought of Laura and Heather. I thought of Tommy and Walter. I looked for meaning. But there was no meaning. It was nonsense. All of it. There was method but no key. They’re all just playing with us, I thought. And then at three o’clock exactly the lights went out again.

If the papers were to be believed there were two things going on in the world: the Royal Wedding and the IRA hunger strikes; one focal point was the baroque dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, the other was the middle of a sour, boggy portion of the Lagan Valley just west of Lisburn — the Maze Prison.

The Maze was built in the aftermath of the disastrous Operation Demetrius in 1971 when hundreds of IRA “suspects” had been arrested in a desperate attempt to stop The Troubles from escalating. Initially they were kept in huts at the former RAF base of Long Kesh, but eventually the Maze prison was built around them with its massive perimeter fence and eight concrete “H Blocks”.

Many of the internees had had no links whatsoever to the IRA but that had certainly changed after six months or a year’s detention by the British. The Brits have always been experts at pouring gasoline on every situation in Ireland: The Easter Rising, Bloody Sunday, Internment — all of them excellent recruiting tools for the radicals.

After Internment ended and the prisoners were released it was decided that IRA volunteers would only get jail time if they were actually convicted of a crime: murder, conspiracy to cause explosions, possession of illegal weapons, etc. Initially, however, IRA prisoners had been granted a Special Category Status because their offences were considered to be political in nature. But then in 1976, on a whim, this status had been revoked by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. The prisoners had protested in various ways, most famously by refusing to wear prison clothes and smearing excrement on their cell walls.

In 1979 the Tories were returned to power but of course Mrs Thatcher had refused to “give in to terrorists” and would not backtrack on the Special Category Status. The hunger strikes had begun. I’d been sympathetic. Bobby Sands, Frankie Hughes and the others were merely attempting to return things to the status quo ante of 1976.

Bobby Sands’s election to parliament and death after sixty-six days on hunger strike had been the media event of the decade in Ireland and IRA recruiters were now having to turn away hundreds of young men and women. It did my heart no good at all to know that I was working for the same people who had been responsible for such utter incompetence.

Matty drove up to the Maze Prison walls, which were grey and thick and topped with coils of razor wire.

I turned off the tape of Led Zeppelin’s Presence album that despite a dozen listens, still sounded crap. Matty breathed a sigh of relief.

It was raining hard and the prison officer did not come out of the guard hut to check the warrant card I was holding up.

That too inspired zero confidence.

“All you need is a hijacked police Land Rover and anybody could get into this joint,” I muttered to Matty who was sitting beside me in the front seat. Neither of us were even in uniform. I was wearing a black polo-neck sweater under my leather jacket and he was wearing some kind of white pirate blouse thing that he must have seen Adam Ant sporting on Top of the Pops .

The thick steel gate slid across on rollers and I drove to a small car park in the lee of a brown concrete watch tower.

“It’s going to be terrible in here, isn’t it?” Matty said.

I nodded grimly. I could only imagine what the hospital wing of the prison looked like with a dozen emaciated men hooked up to drips — dying by heartbreaking degrees while family members wept and priests gave extreme unction.

“Aye, Matty, I think so.”

Fortunately we’d come early. It wasn’t nine so the hacks wouldn’t be out of bed yet and the rain had kept away the demonstrators we’d been told to expect outside the prison gates.

Scowling, a chubby, blue-faced man regarded me through bullet-proof glass.

“Sergeant Duffy of Carrick RUC. I’m here to see Seamus Moore,” I said.

“Sign here,” he replied, passing me a clipboard through a horizontal slit.

I signed and passed the clipboard back.