Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

Going by a bar with a Harp sign above the door and a security camera and big rocks in the forecourt to prevent cars driving against the outer wall and heavy mesh on the windows.

Jocko said, "It got hit by the Protestants, went in and shot two Provos. The Scenes of Crime guys and the detectives weren't allowed inside. A U.D.R. man was shot in retaliation. They did it their own way. They'll remember for ever that two ol their blokes were killed here, they'd have forgotten the day after that a U.D.R. man was killed .. ."

Going through a crossroads, where the high-hedged lanes met.

"History doesn't go away here. Stories lose nothing by the the telling.

Stories are handed down, father to son, family to fanily, close as frogs in a drain here. Listen… This crossroads, anyone'll tell you, was where the Auxiliaries shot the Catholic postman in 1922.. ."

Going by a farmhouse, three hundred yards further.

"… Two lads, one from the farm, best Sunday clothes, go to check a weapons cache, our boys mashed them, middle 1970s…"

Going by a copse, and the road falling away towards a cemetery, bright with white headstones and fresh-cut flowers.

"… That's the wood where the guns were, that's the graveyard where they are, and there's a prison escaper in there with them, shot in the early 1980s…"

Going away from the graveyard and towards the bridge where the lane joined the main road and where the fast stream tumbled dirty underneath.

"… The Protestants came to burn down the R.C. chapel here, there was a hell of a fight and about a dozen Catholics were beaten to death.

They call it the Battle of Black Bridge. They know it like it was yesterday, but yesterday was 1829…"

Going by the shops at the main road junction.

"… There was a U.D.R. man, drove the school bus, shot here a few years back. Nobody remembers when because nobody cares when, but they'll tell you the day and the hour when the postman was shot, and the boys at the cache, and the lad breaking out from the Kesh, and they'll tell you whether it was wet or fine on the day of the Battle of Black Bridge…"

"You trying to depress the poor bugger?" A sly grin from the cardboard city man.

Jocko said, cheerful, "It's better he knows, safer."

Bren sat huddled in the back of the car. He wondered where was Cathy. They had been gone more than two hours before Herbie accelerated for home base. He wondered why she had not allowed him to be with her. They drove fast away from the low wetland beside the Lough. And he wondered how it was possible to survive, on the ground, alone, out there, and he thought the mountain of Altmore was worse than what they had shown him.

They returned to Mahon Road.

Cathy hadn't shown.

Bren asked if he could wait for her.

They thought it was where she would come back to. He should please himself.

Wilkins stood.

He had thought the man feeble. He was lashed with the Prime Minister's tongue.

Wilkins was the chastised labrador dog and the beating was savage.

He thought he could accept it, it was why he had been sent. He would never, ever, answer back. It was why he had been sent from Curzon Street, to absorb a verbal thrashing.

"… 1 have to tell you, Wilkins, that I had expected your Director General. On a matter of this importance I had not thought it necessary to stipulate the attendance of the Director General. What I most certainly do not require is a potted and imprecise lecture on the work of the Security Service in Northern Ireland, a golden petal. I am not in need of generalities, but of some very clear specifics. The charge brought to my attention against the Security Service operations in the province is of the gravest type. It smacks to me of a total disregard on the part of senior officials for the close supervision of juniors. The charge laid against you, and one that should have been answered by the Director General, is that a young man was set up, the correct vernacular I believe, so that the Provisional I.R.A. might consider that young person to be an informer. He was not an informer, never had been, and was unlikely to be one in the future. The young man was quite directly pitched into a most hideous danger, from which he unhappily did not survive. It is unspeakably revolting behaviour on the part of your juniors. I am informed, and since it is not denied I have to assume the information is reliable, that a junior officer, a woman, is currentlv careering around Northern Ireland making policy on the hoof, taking it upon herself to decide that a young man's life is not important. Do you begin to see, Wilkins, the colossal arrogance of such a posture? I won't have it, that shocking behaviour, and I am minded to order the disengagement of the Security Service from the province…"

"I really think…" The small voice, Ernest Wilkins?, so mild.

"You'll be given your chance to defend the indefensible when I've finished. You will do me the courtesy, Wilkins., of hearing me out. If the Security Service believes that it is not accountable, as are the police and army, then a very rude shock…’’

A schoolboy going home. He had lost his season ticket in the playground. His headmaster had given him the money to buy the necessary train ticket. The boy shouted through the hatch the name of the station where he lived.

A middle-aged secretary travelling to visit her mother, and requiring a return ticket to come back to the capital in the morning. She was weighed down with the gifts that would cement success on the small family birthday party. She stood behind the schoolboy.

A young account executive employed by a major advertising agency of central London. He was heading north for a client dinner and would make his preliminary presentation in the morning. He held his closed lap-top computer in one hand, his mobile telephone in the other and shouted the news to his wife as to where he was. He waited behind the middle-aged secretary.

A retired army officer who had been given a lift into town in the morning and was now making his own way back to the country. He rolled on his heels. Great willpower to have taken himself away from the company of colleagues and a worthy lunch and an open bar at the Cavalry club. He reckoned that if the schoolboy and the middle aged woman and the yuppie didn't shift themselves, if he didn’t get his ticket and decamp soonest to the urinal, then he'd wet his trouser leg.

A West Indian boy, bright in the plumage of his French- manufactured leisure suit, dropped a beefburger's wrapping into the rubbish bin…

An impatient queue. The departure board flickering new departure times.

None of them would see the disintegration of the rubbish bin.

The light flash.

None of them would hear the hammer blow of the explosion.

The thunder roar.

The flash and the roar would be seen, heard, by the masses on the far side of the station and on the middle ground of the concourse, before the pressure blast flattened them against walls and to the ground.

They were the battlefield victims.

They were a schoolboy and a secretary and an account executive and a retired army officer and a young West Indian.

They were the enemy.

They were broken, split, mutilated.

After the light flash and the thunder roar came the monsoon fall of glass shards, and then the pain quiet.

Across the concourse the dust settled on Jon Jo Donnelly's bomb.

"… the Security Service may feel, because of the very vague nature of its terms of reference in Northern Ireland, that it has been given the nod and the wink to involve itself in areas where the police and army, quite rightly, feel inhibited to tread. If the Security Service feels that then it has placed itself on shifting sands, false foundations. My inclination is that the time has been reached for a sharp lesson to be learned…"