Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

"How's your mother?"

"Haven't heard, not in the last couple of weeks. She's not riding any more. I suppose she's petrified."

"Yes, well… Your father managing?"

"It's getting him down. I've told him to put in a manager. He’d get a top man there. But he won't hear of it. You know the trouble, I know it. He still thinks that one day I'm going to jack this lot in and take over."

"One day,"

"Never the right day, is it? Can you imagine walking away from here?"

"Not ever out of my mind. I dream of dear old Scotland. No newspapers, lousy television reception, walking and fishing and stalking. You should come up in August."

Cathy smiled sadly, "I'd love to."

"How are they when you go home?"

"They look at me, big spaniel eyes, pleading. You know Rupert, 'course you do, Rupert did the damage. After his prostate last year he went down there to rest up, and spilled the beans. Stupid prat, told them what I did. Still…"

"You could do worse."

Cathy snorted. "Certainly, be a regular at the Bath and West, trot all round the west country with the Charolais bull trying like buggery to win Best of Breed again? It would kill me… You can chase your grouse round Cromarty and do the John MacNab tiling. I could do that for about, well, once, and then I'm bored rigid…"

"Their loss, our gain."

"For Christ's sake, don't go soft."

"OK, OK… when are you back down?"

"He using the hide…" She jerked a thumb behind her. "get the new boy familiarised. Meet the player and so on."

The colonel pushed himself to his feet.

"We’re doing the Donnelly place tonight…"

Her eyes glinted, she seemed to throw off the relaxation "Oh? Why?"

Orders from on high."

She’s done nothing, Attracta."

"Orders."

"Why dosn’t anyone at Curzon Street ever ask me why we are loathed in this goddamn corner. God, I could tell them. She just happens to be married to the man."

‘’And away a long time. So it's harassing women and kids that I’m now paid for .’’There are some right pillocks we have to work for, jonny,,’’

The colonel said, "I had him in here once. A patrol had lifted him on Charlie One. He was here for an hour before the Branch came to run him down to Gough. I rather liked him. It was his attitude that tickled me. I mean, he despised me, he probably had a little plan for me, he'd have been very happy to see me blown away, yet… He seemed to regard himself as my equal. Two officers, two armies. As if. .. well, if we'd met in a bar somewhere a thousand miles away, we'd have had a good chat, beefed over our mutual tactics, broken a bottle open. What I thought at the time, he'd have made a very good company sergeant major in a good regiment. He wasn't frightened of me, and I don't mind saying it, I'm glad he's someone else's headache."

"Great mug of tea. Thanks. Come along, Brennard, I need to be driven home to kip."

She walked to the door. Bren followed. For a short moment the colonel's arm was round her shoulder, ushering her to the door.

Outside the door, she turned back to him. It was the great winning smile.

"You know what they say about you?"

"Who? Curzon Street?"

"No. The kids up on Altmore. We picked it up on one of the bugs.

They say, 'What's the last thing that'll go through Colonel Johnny’s mind?' It's their crack."

"What's the last thing that'll go through my mind?"

" They say it’s an A.K. bullet. Bye, sunshine."

"Cow."

Thought you'd get it."

She didn’t look back. There was just her muffled laugh into the anorak collar that she held tight across her face. The colonel, Jonny, caught Bren’s jacket as he made to follow her.

‘’Look after that lady. Don’t ever think of taking a liberty with her safety. If anything you did, or didn't do, endangered her, then I'll break your back,"

The officer commanding East Tyrone brigade knew, so did his intelligence officer. But by that Saturday afternoon, the word of danger had shimmered down the mountain and through the bungalows and farmsteads and Housing Executive homes. Word too travelled fast, whispered mouth to straining ear, of new risks to the men who had sworn the oath, Every man and woman on Altmore would have been able to recite the Constitution of Oglaigh na hEireann, would have known General Order 5, Part 5… "No Volunteer should succumb to approaches or overtures, blackmail or bribery attempts… Volunteers found guilty of treason face the death penalty."

There were few amongst the bungalows and farmsteads and Housing Executive homes who could have denied involvement, strong or tenuous, with the Organisation. There were sons, nephews, cousins, the children of neighbours, who were dead or imprisoned or 'away' or active. It was the life of the mountain, in the twenty-second year of the present war, that no man and no woman knew whom they could trust.

Fear ruled. See nothing, hear nothing, know nothing, was the order of survival. The men took comfort in the village bars, their women more often sought the help of Valium and librium. But drink and sedatives gave only noisy or drugged solace. Willing or dragged screaming, the community was involved. There was a family on Altmore. .. the son shot dead by the covert Special Forces, father interned in the fifties, grandfather active in the twenties and thirties, great-grandfather shooting until the barrel of his rifle was red-hot in Dublin in 1916, great-great-grandfather a part of the closed group seeking Home Rule a full century before the young man was buried under the grey cloud and the gold green slopes of the mountain. Where was escape? Escape was not possible.

Behind closed doors and closed windows and closed minds, the community of Altmore braced itself against the menace of an informer.

The O. C had begun, and she told him that it was about feckin' time, to put the new units into his wife's kitchen.

She watched him She was beside him on the kitchen linoleum and she marked by pencil the places for his power-drill to make Room for the screws and she passed the doors and frames from The packaging to his hand She knew the anxiety that hit at him, and that brought him cold and violent to her bed. She knew that he commanded the Brigade, and she knew also that the man before him was shot in an army ambush and finished with a bullet to the forehead; she had seen the pallor of the face in the coffin and the small, neatly cosmeticised hole. And the man before that was now in his twelfth year in the Kesh with more, many more, years to endure; she knew that each Sunday morning that man's wife and his child took the bus from Dungannon to the prison to make small talk with the caged bird.

She made the marks and passed the materials.

She could do nothing.

His daughter knew when the strain was at him. The Quartermaster had come in through the door, with the mud on his feet. Straight to the cupboard beside the fireplace, straight for the whiskey.

Her mother was in Dungannon, down on the bus for the weekend shop. Her mother had to go by bus because her father had been away with the car. The girl went outside and took the keys from the ignition and switched off the sidelights, and locked the car. He was pouring again when she came back into the sitting room.

She was seventeen. She did waitressing in a hotel in Dungannon. If her father were arrested again, charged again, sent to gaol again, then she might lose her job. The job was her lifeline, vital to her. Her father had been in the Kesh for four years. Between the ages of eight and twelve she had seen him only on those weekends when her mother had pushed and forced, and once punched her, onto the prison visitors' bus.

They were brilliant kids that she met working at the hotel, and the management sent her home to the mountain by taxi at night. She could not know he was the Brigade's Quartermaster, but she knew that he was again involved.