Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

"How can I help her?"

"I doubt you can," Colonel Johnny said. "I doubt any of us can. It's what makes her special to us, all of us, that she's not looking for bloody help, and it's her strength that she's not frightened of making mistakes."

Bren stood, "Thank you for your time."

It was the dawn.

The start of another day.

The dawn was the start of the 342nd day since Jon Jo Donnelly had taken the Aer Lingus to Paris and ban in transit two hours and then been carried on a Lufthansa flight to Munich and then caught the British Airways aircraft to London's Heathrow.

The rain came with the dawn.

It fell hard against the upper branches of the forest.

The rain careered down onto the roofing of the ground-sheet. There was the spatter of the rain above his head.

Jon Jo sat under his cover.

He was cross-legged and his arms were folded over his stomach.

Beside him was the torn wrapping paper of a biscuit packet. He had eaten the whole of the packet of shortbreads.

Perhaps it was because of the rain but there were few birds calling the dawn's arrival, only the robin to which he threw the last of the biscuit crumbs. The robin was without fear of him and strutted close to the hide and challenged him for more of the shortbread biscuits. He watched the robin. He saw the proud in advancing on him. He wondered, if he had not wolfed down the biscuits, if he had filled his hand with crumbs and stretched his hand out whether the bird would have had the courage to come to take crumbs from the palm of his hand.

It was as if he sought to find a peace for himself.

He was. still. He sat quite motionless. The robin danced in front of him.

For 250 of those days since he had come to London he had prepared himself for the campaign that was his own. He had found the safe houses, he had bought the cars that were paid for in cash. He had accumulated the documentation that came from the forgers in Dublin.

He had received the dribble of weapons, and the timing devices, and the detonators, and the explosives that were sometimes hand-carried on the cross-Channel ferry and sometimes landed from a fishing boat on the remote stretch of the north Cornish coast in a cove near Gurnard's Head. For 90 of those days he had fought his war. He sat without movement to find again the strength that was needed of a soldier. He took his strength, bled it, from the home that was his, and the woman that was his, and the boy child that was his. He took strength, leached it, from the mountain that was his. They would none of them know, the mass that would flow through a main-line railway station, of his home and his woman and his child and his mountain.

Only the fall of the rain around him and the cheerful strut of the robin.

He thought of the bar in the village, where there was singing and where there were his friends. He thought of the land around the small farm, where the bracken and gorse had been driven back first by his grandfather and then by his father and then by himself. He thought of the church in the village where he had made his first Communion, and where he had stood awkward in his suit and tight in his collar and held little Kevin for baptism. He thought of the neighbours that he had known, who had never left him to feel alone, good men and good women, Mrs Riordan and Mrs Devitt and Mrs Nugent, and Pius Blaney who drove the milk cart and never cursed not even when there was snow on the mountain slope, and the difficult old bugger who was old Hegarty. He thought of the good times, when the Armalite had pounded against his shoulder, when he had watched through binoculars as the road to Aghnagar had lifted under the unmarked police car, when they had taken over the road from Coalisland to Stewartstown and there had been more than twenty of them and they had blasted the barracks at Stewartstown with machine guns and the R.P.G. 7 rocket launcher and sprayed the roof with diesel oil and petrol to get the big fire going… good times. It was his place, they were his people. It was Jon Jo's place, the place of his family's graves. It was Jon Jo's home, the home of the war.

The Strength grew in his body The peace nettled on his mind.

For the first time since the dawn light had come he shifted from where he had sat. He crouched over the flattened ground beneath the cover of his hide. Among the dead squashed leaves, among the grass stems, he found more crumbs, and he tossed them out to the robin and he willed the bird to find them where they had scattered.

He moved away from the hide.

Three times, between the hide and the cache, he stopped and froze against a tree trunk and listened to the rain laning in the forest. He listened for voices and for footsteps, and for the sound of a command whistle to a dog. There was only the clatter of the rain dropping from the upper branches.

He lined up the position of the cache. The uprooted base of a tree and away from it the dead elm disfigured with ivy. That was how he always found the holly tree where the dustbin was buried. He dug with his hands, pushed aside the mulch and then the soil. The lightweight kitchen gloves were on his hands, he look the Semtex explosive and the detonator and the wiring and the timer from the dustbin, and the ice cream box and the adhesive tape. It was difficult to work at the assembly wearing the gloves. He was too careful ever to take off the gloves; Jon Jo could have reeled them off, the names ol the men who had made bombs and who had not worn gloves, and who rotted in the mainland gaols.

It took him half the morning to make the bomb.

He scraped the earth and the mulch back over the dustbin. He used a dead twig to scour his footsteps and the indents of his body weight from the ground close to the cache.

The rain had eased.

She hadn't telephoned him, and he wouldn't ring her.

She had the number of the flat and the number of his office at the back of the Department of Environment building, and she hadn't used cither.

If she didn't want to ring him, her problem. If she though he was not up to the job, so be it.

All the while Bren had dressed, and all the while he had eaten his breakfast, he had looked at the telephone in the flat, willed it to ring, cursed it for its silence.

All the while he had sat in his office, turned file papers, made coffee, tried for the hell of it to master the intricacy of the dual carriage projects and the salary restructuring programme for clerical workers, he waited for any of his telephones to ring. The quiet burgeoned round him. Nothing on the receiver that was linked to the building switchboard, nothing on the telephone that Song Bird would have used, nothing on the line that was Cathy's alone. Always talk and always movement in the Curzon Street complex of desks where the Irish unit was housed. This was bloody. Being stuck in a room at the back of a building, where no one came and where the telephone didn't ring, that was a sort of hell to him. He had cracked by the middle of the day. He had rung Hobbes. He'd marked Hobbes down, supercilious bastard, and he was most certainly not going to be spilling to Hobbes that Miss Cathy Parker had cut him out. Trying to be casual. Had time on his hands. Any suggestions as to where he might go, what might be useful?

Hobbes hadn't sounded as if he cared and hadn't sounded as if he was surprised. Just curt. He should try Mahon Road. He should get himself to Portadown. He'd be expected. He was given a name. Hobbes sounded like there was a crisis that he wasn't prepared to share, and Portadown was the sort of place to dump a bored kid. he did as he was told. He drove to Portadown, and the barracks in Mahon Road, and all the way down the motorway he sought to obliterate Cathy Parker from his mind, and the failure hurt him.

High fencing of rusting steel. Black painted watchtowers. Screens of chicken-wire netting that would prematurely detonate an armour-piercing missile. A call on ahead from the taciturn police at the gate check.