Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

"Would you like me to make you a pot of tea?"

"It'd be good."

"I's with you, Mossie. It'll be easier now."

He held her tight, crushed her against him. For six years he had lived that lie.

His voice was quiet in her hair. "Last year I tried to break with her.

Lasted three months. I cut the meetings. When I was down in Portadown last year, working on the new council place, she caught up with me. I never saw her, but she watched me. Letters were left for me, no beggar ever seemed to remember seeing them left, but they had my name on them. There was a photograph, Joey Fenton who was shot for touting, that was first. Next month, alter I'd broken the second meeting, there was a bullet. Third month, after I'd broken the third meeting, she sent me the note, her writing, addressed to the O.C., it named me as a tout… If they thought you knew, they'd kill you too. .."

He felt her lips brush his forehead. She said she'd go and make the tea.

He had never been so cold. The damp seeped through the sides of the hide and puddled on the flooring of plastic. The cold numbed his feet, it ached in his buttocks and his shoulders shook with it The only part of his face that was exposed, between the woollen cap pulled down over his forehead and the scarf wrapped across his mouth and throat, was raw with cold. It was as if she tested him. They had come to the hide as the dusk settled. They had hugged the hedgerows and crawled in the gorse, light enough for him always to be able to see Cathy as she had led the way. He was ice cold and he did not complain. His teeth chattered, a distraction beside the suppressed hum of the electronics.

He felt the dig of her elbow in his ribs. She pulled his head round and she fed him a stick of chewing gum. There was her chuckle, very quiet, beside him. His teeth pounded on the chewing gum and the chatter was gone.

The light at the back of the bungalow came on.

The white brilliance flared the television screen.

There was barely room for the two of them in the hide. Bren's body below, and Cathy's half on top of him. Her leg was over his thigh.

So much that he wanted to know about her…

"Bren…" Her voice was abrupt.

"Yes."

"I ate too many sausages."

"Yes."

"You silly bugger, I want to crap."Fine by me, Miss Parker."

He had seen her the day before, treated as equal by the men of the Special Air Service, taken as a friend by the man who could kill and then eat a plate of sausages and beans and chips with her before they made their dry statements to the sympathetic detectives and the supercilious bastards of the army's Special Investigation Branch'. He had been with her the day before, in the watchtower, and seen that she had never flinched through a shooting that left three men dead… and the head shot off the one whose legs were still jumping.

She wriggled away from him.

She was crouched half over his legs, bent double.

She cursed and he thought that her fingers were too chilled to work the buttons of her trousers.

She swore again as she tried to unfold the tinfoil.

Bren stared ahead of him. He saw the light go out in the kitchen of the bungalow. The only street lights were away to the left, the village lights. The mountain was black cloaked,. The darkness was around him.

She wriggled, struggled, in the confined space.

She would have closed the tinfoil over, sealed it.

She would have pulled her trousers back to her waist, fastened them.

She lay beside him, and her leg crossed over his and he could feel the sweet heat of her breath on the nape of his neck.

"Sorry about that," she said.

They left half an hour before the first smear of the dawn, and she took her wrapped tinfoil with her. She didn't tell him that he had passed any test. He thought she would have told him if he had failed.

Late, always late, the story of his whole damned life.

The big Mustang, left-hand drive, swung off the Killyman Road and into the estate. He was late, very late, a whole twenty-four hours late, but that was because he had been on assignment up on the north coast all through the last day and it was now two weeks since the radio in the Mustang had been screw drivered out in the Belfast centre car park and he had heard not a damn thing of the business before the late night news.

With a pounding heart he saw the woman with the bucket advancing on the pavement.

And he would have been there at dawn, first light, if the overnight rain hadn't seeped into the electricals under the bonnet, and certainly would have been there by mid-morning if the garage, scoundrels there, had accepted his cheque for petrol.

Eighteen stone and dieting, trying to, he pitched his legs out. "Hold it, Madam. Give me time."

She stopped. She was a tiny woman, and she carried a plastic bucket in one hand and a kitchen mop in the other.

"Hold your good work, Madam, two minutes will satisfy."

She stared at him.

'The blood, Madam, give me two minutes for the blood."

He had the driver's seat tipped forward. The harness had snagged the seatbelt. He swore, he pulled the harness out.

"Have to have the blood, Madam, can't have a killing story without the blood."

He used two cameras, and that was the beauty of the harness. The harness was a frame across his chest, supported over his shoulders. A camera to the right of the frame and a camera to the left, and a mutual microphone held between them that recorded sound for both. The sound, as was pointed out with increasing frequency by his clients, was often little more than the billow of his breathing when he exerted himself.

She watched. Silly little woman, didn't have to stare.

"Who's news is you's?"

He tugged at the hair on his lower chin, where the whitened sideburns curved towards his upper lip. It was his familiar gesture.

There were children emerging from gardens and houses, horrible-looking urchins.

"Peregrine Forster is the name, Madam, camera correspondent of the N.H.K. network of Japan and the Globo channel of Brazil, known to the trade as 'Perry', well known… Now, if you would be so kind as to stand back from the blood…"

It was a rich English accent, cultivated over six years as a Flying Officer in the Royal Air Force, first with Accounts and then transferred to Kitchens. Always had trouble getting the cable leads into the right sockets under pressure, being watched. The urchins were gathering, sharks coming from the deep at the scent of cattle offal; he had done time in Singapore and knew about sharks, more about sharks than cameras.

"Is they interested, in those places…?"

To lie or not to lie, always better to lie… "Interested? Tonight they'll be holding open the lead position in their newscasts. .. But there has to be blood."

His head tilted to the left. His left eye closed on the viewfinder of the N.H.K. network of Japan. The blood was all but dried onto the pavement and into the gutter. There was one good dribble that he could follow. His head tilted to the right and his right eye locked to the viewfinder of the Globo channel of Brazil. The pictures would be air freighted to London and would be lucky, damn lucky, to get further.

Pity there weren't any flowers. Pity all his cash had gone on the petrol and he couldn't run to a couple of tear-jerking bouquets. The children were all around him.

"Very quiet, please, and stay back from the blood…"

He filmed. Patch of blood, Madam with bucket and mop, dribble of blood, wide-eyed and dirty faces of children.

Very professional. Peregrine Forster, late of selling insurance and more late of greetings cards and very late of the Royal Air Force, had based himself in Northern Ireland three years back… it was a living.

He stood back. Again the cameras were switched on. The pulse lights flashed in his right eye and his left eye. He ran forward. He came ahead at a good trot. He jerked to a halt and he peered from one viewfinder to another, into the patch of blood and the blood dribble.