Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

"Does it frighten you?"

‘’Half out of my skin."

Jon Jo Donnelly had been the big man on the mountain. He had been the man the kids whispered of and the man the girls eyed. He had been the man that the soldiers hunted. When Jon Jo had been on the mountain then no policeman and no soldier had felt himself safe.

Mossie knew all the tales. Donnelly with the heavy-calibre, and with the culvert bomb, and with the long-barrel sniping rifle. There had been a big man in South Derry, and another down in Fermanagh, and another from Cullyhanna near the border in Armagh, all shot down, and there had been Jon Jo Donnelly. It was the stuff of stories.

"How much’ll they give you?"

"Don't know."

"It'd be thousands?"

"Sure to be."

As if the walls had ears, they sat against each other on the settee, they whispered to each other. The guilt bled him further with each of her questions, and she held his arm in both her hands.

"If he's so important to them…"

"He's all they talk about."

"To make it worth losing one of their own, has to be thousands."

"Be decent money."

"When does we get out of this feckin' place?"

"There's never a way out for a tout…"

He told her what the life was. He knew what had happened to others.

It always started fast. The flash of the bleeper. The interception of a hit car. Troops and police round the house, and sweet precious nothing of time to pack and get the kids together or drag them out from class, and the stampede out of the area. Eventually to England, chased through the military section of Aldergrove and onto an R.A.F. transporter. A pair of semidetached houses in some nowhere town in England. The minders sleeping next door, and spending their waking hours, their duty shifts, always with the family, always answering the telephone when it rang, always reading any mail, always with their guns. Go shopping and the minders drive. Go drinking and the minders buy. God knows how the children got schooled. Can't work because the minders don't allow it. Can't row because the minders'll break it up. Living on top of each other, suffocated. They all wanted to come back, he told her. They all ended the same way, scribbling letters to the priest pleading to be allowed back. And, sooner or later, they all came back, and they all ended in the ditch with the dustbin bag over the head…

"So what's the money for?"

"It's so's she can own me better."

It had been his decision, and she had gone with it, that the car should be minimum four miles further back from when they had last been to the hide. The car was off the road in forestry halfway to Pomeroy. It had taken them two hours and twenty minutes to reach the hide, fast going in rough country, in darkness.

She talked softly in his ear, but she rambled, not the Cathy of before.

"… if it hadn't been Browne it would have been someone else. They have the targets all drawn up. If we'd blocked Browne there'd only have been another target. They're never short of targets… They're so bloody clever. He'd have looked for the bomb under the car, and he'd have looked for a strange vehicle in his road, and he'd have stayed off using the back lanes. He'd have done everything right…"

He didn't want to hear. He could see all too clearly the white face of the dead policeman. He wanted her quiet.

"… So bloody good at the unexpected. They hit him where he just couldn't anticipate, and there's no defence for one man driving a car against two men on a motorcycle. That's where we lose, can't you see it? We're the procedure people. We have the duty rosters and the computers and we have the set-out way of doing things. They don't.

The Provos don't have a software system, they don't have banks of library folders, they make it up as they go along. We've never found anything approaching an archive system, yet there are people out there who know as much about how Colonel Johnny's battalion operates as he does himself. They don't have Operations Rooms and telexes and faxes, they hardly ever use the telephone. They don't have manuals. It's stone age stuff, and they're running us ragged."

"Let it go, Cathy."

The cattle were on the move in the field below the hedgerow where they were dug in. He thought she was talking because the strength was cracking.

‘’You have to understand that, because then you know the way to fight them. Company formations, battalion units, brigade groups, all with the back up, the civilian clerical workers and the Personnel section and the electronics, that's not the way. That's the structure that ties down half your force guarding installations, putting up fences and watchtowers and cutting yourself off from the war. God knows what the percentage is of people over here who are just indexing the war.

You can't index war and keep up with it, any more than you can index fog. I don't suppose Clause- witz said that but if he'd been in Northern bloody Ireland, he'd have said it alright."

"Cathy, will you shut up."

"We have to learn, and learn sharp. We have to fight body to body, at close quarters…"

"I want you to shut up so that I can concentrate."

He felt her stiffen away from him, but there was nowhere for her to go. They lay together in the hide. The cattle were drifting in convoy up the field towards their camera's position. They were dark shapes, ships in the night, in the grey haze wash of the screen. He zoomed the lens back so that he could see the advancing cattle. He panned off the cattle.

He searched the hedgerows down near the farm house. He focused as tight as possible on the outbuildings. He wondered how she would be, if the legend was taken from her. He wondered if she would last an hour, a day, a week, if her strength cracked. The cattle were coming forward. He raked the hedgerows and the outbuildings again. He looked for the shadow figure on the move. A light rain was falling. The hood of his anorak was up, but the water had started to dribble on his face. It was what he was paid to do, it was his bloody job of work. The picture was lost, then found again. There was the faint squelching of the hooves across the field, there was the bulk shape of a bullock on the screen. There were the big eyes, and then the snort of the nostrils. He saw the tongue stretch to envelop the picture image. He stared at the screen, at the misted blur. "Shit…"

The picture was gone again. He could break cover, he could get out into the field and chase the animals away from the camera…

"That is the goddam limit…"

In a stinking hide, in the pissing rain, wanting to use the plastic bottle and urinate, out in God's own death country, and the bloody tongue of a bloody bullock had licked the Night Observations Device lens, smeared it…

"That is beyond belief…"

Her lip brushed his cheek. "Try not to be pompous, Bren, it doesn't suit you."

She snuggled back against him.

"It's the hum that attracts them. Nothing you can do about it. Sheep are worse. Cattle'll move on, sheep'll stand round your camera all day.

Ask any of the farmers on Altmore to find a hide, and they'll put sheep in the field, three hours and they'll know where it is. Cattle get bored."

He turned his body. They were entangled. He smelled the clean and natural breath of her. No toothpaste, no garlic, no tobacco, because they were in the hide.

"What'll happen to us, Cathy?"

"That's not for now."

"What's our future?"

"That's for after Donnelly. Until then there isn't a future."

She wriggled out of the hide. He heard the faint sounds as she moved away up the hedgerow. They wouldn't understand, the Curzon Street crowd, not even Mr Wilkins, none of them would understand what it was to lie up in a hide and watch for a man to come home to his wife, and to know the man was for killing or capturing. That was Cathy's world, and she didn't bloody share.