Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

No word said in the car, and there was the clatter of the cardboard city man and Jocko arming their weapons.

Herbie had slowed. The windows were down, the weapons jutted out into the night air. There was the battering roar of the helicopter's engine splashing the interior of the car.

The road wound. A rabbit ducked to safety in front of their wheels.

Bren saw her.

She was on the forward edge of the light that shone down in a narrow cone from the hovering helicopter.

She was walking in the centre of the road. The white light was behind her. The light caught the road and the hedges and petered away in the fields. A crowd walked in step with her seemingly held back by the furthest edge of the light. It was as if the crowd shepherded her away from their homes and their mountain. The voice, staccato, amplified, beat at Bren's ears. "… Keep back. Do not go closer. If you go closer I will open fire. Keep back…" Behind her was the helicopter's light and behind the light was the crowd. Bren understood.

The light would dazzle the crowd, burn out their eyes, she would be only a vague shape to the crowd that followed her. "… Keep back. You have been warned. I shall open fire. Keep back…", the metallic resonance of the voice above. None of them in the car spoke as they closed on her. Once her knees seemed to sink under her and she half pitched forward and then had to push herself up. Her face was shadow but the light caught at her hair. The car stopped. Herbie reversed hard into a gateway and the wheels spun on mud as he powered the three-point turn. She was thirty yards from them. There was the grunt from Jocko, and then he was speaking, hushed, into the radio microphone.

The cardboard city man out, and Bren scrambling to follow.

He ran to her.

There was blood at her mouth. Her right eye was almost closed. Her mouth was bruised, a scraped graze on her temple. He took the pistol from her. The cardboard city man on one side and Bren on the other, and tugging her away, running with her back towards the waiting car.

Bren had his arm round her waist to take the weight of her, and it was nothing.

She fell into the back of the car. Bren on one side and the cardboard city man on the other. She was sandwiched between them, head down.

Bren looked back once. He could see the shape of the crowd, held against the light barrier. They went away fast, and before he wound up the window he heard the helicopter's engine gaining power for altitude. He felt the shiver of her body against his. Dear God… he had thought lie might have found her dead.

The cardboard city man said, "Nothing serious r'"

She shook her head.

"You're a bit of a mess…"

The grin cracked her face. "Some of them are worse."

Bren held her hand, as if he hoped that would give her comfort.

Herbie drove, like there was no tomorrow, for the military hospital at Musgrave Park on the outskirts of Belfast.

Word spread in the night of an incident on the mountain.

Hobbes was told. "Right, thank you. Tell her that I'll speak to her in the morning…"

Colonel Johnny was told. "The Good Lord smiles on her. Tell her we're so pleased."

Rennie was told. "Getting too old, starting to be sentimental. Tell her not to be so bloody stupid again."

Word spread in the night of an escape from the mountain.

The Quartermaster dabbed antiseptic on his bitten hand. "Wasn’t me to blame… but credit to the wee cow, credit the hardness of her."

The O.C. felt the rivers of the pain as the doctor from Omagh bound the broken wrist. "Was our fault because we bloody played with her, like she was just a bloody woman."

The young man lay in Casualty in Monaghan town and the words whistled from deep in his bruised throat. "Why didn't they bring the gun faster? You's has to shoot a woman like that.’’

Mossie sat with Siobhan in front ol the guttering fire. ‘’It was like they were all frightened ol her. Even before the helicopter came, it was like they didn't dare go close to her. She'd have shot them down, right to the last bullet…"

She slept on her back.

Bren was beside the bed on the hard-backed chair and all the time, through the night, he held the small hand in his.

He held her hand even when the nurses and the doctor came into the small room to check her. He ignored the disapproval of their glances, and their hostility when their eyes lighted on the pistol that he had placed on the low table beside him.

The first grey light smeared through the window blinds. He heard the coughing spit of the Military Policeman on the door. He looked down at her face, cleaned and calm. Her hand rested in his, unresponding.

He had thought he had lost her.

The afternoon paper said that anti-terrorist squad detectives were swooping on known haunts of Irishmen. More than twenty Irishmen had been taken into custody for questioning. All over the country, it said, landladies and the owners of boarding and guest houses were being quizzed about Irish lodgers. According to police sources, the identity of a prime suspect was known and the biggest manhunt ever mounted in the present terrorist campaign was under way. The newspaper said that a school soccer match had been cancelled in respect for a pupil, dead. A secretary on her way to her elderly mother's birthday party was dead; a man, his wife seven months pregnant, was dead. The flag at London's Cavalry Club hung at half-mast in tribute to a one-time Desert Rat, a many times decorated veteran, dead; a 22 year-old West Indian social worker, in intensive care, fought for his life.

Jon Jo turned the pages of the newspaper.

Photographs of the wrecked concourse. Condemnation of th e killings from political and religious leaders in Britain and in the Republic.

He always read the newspapers after an attack. He heard the slap of her feet on the pavement. There was the grate of her key in the door.

The whine voice of her neighbour.

"The police were here. I said you were at your basket class."

Jon Jo moving on stockinged feet to the window.

"What for?"

"It was on the radio yesterday, they want to know where all the Irish are. I rang them about your lodger…?’’

"You'd no call to do that '

"But you wern’t here when they came. I told them he was| here, gone, here again. They waited an hour in my kitchen.

They said I was to tell you to ring them as soon as you were in’’

‘’I’m ringing no one.’’

‘They’ll be back,"

He heard the front door slammed.

He peeled back the carpet and lifted the loose plank in the flooring and took everything out, his lists, his passports, the weopon, the ammunition. He emptied each drawer, and the wardrobe. He worked as silently as he could because he listened for the brake of a car and the ringing of the bell. He filled his suitcase and his tool bag. She would have been too lightly built for him to hear her coming up her thick-carpeted stairs. They were all oiled, all the door fittings in the house. When the door opened behind him, he was aware of the light from the landing, he was on his knees in front of the chest of drawers and the gloves were on his hands and he was wiping every inch of wood with the cloth that he kept in his tool bag to clean his hands, he turned.

"Time I was gone, missus."

"Going without telling me?"

The wide and bright smile that she loved, that she spoke of. Thinking fast. "Heard from a mate, over on the Continent, says it’s all played out in London. The plan for work is Germany or Holland."

The police called, they're checking everywhere there are Irish lodgers. What do I tell them?"

"Just doing their job, you tell them what you know.’’

She looked at him, and at the packed bags, and then at the newspaper on the bed, the photograph of a happy schoolboy.