Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

"Work clothes, red anorak, or your white overalls. Nothing else."

He sat on the bed with his head bowed. He would do as she told him .. .

"Yeah, right, but how does I give you the signal, whatever?"

"Where is it?"

He felt the blush. He pointed. There was the cheerful grin of her.

"Got an itch, haven't you? Got a bloody awful itch, right? Got to scratch your balls, yes?"

He stood. She watched him. It was as if he amused her. He put his hand down into his pocket and his fingers went through his handkerchief and the loose change and the car keys and he pressed down through the pocket's material. He felt the cold outline against his skin and then the raised button.

Mossie said, "What's the money?"

It was his last throw. It was what he had wound himself up to demand of her. Couldn't go back, not to Siobhan, couldn't go back and tell her that he didn't know what the money would be. Alright for her, rich bitch. He'd done a house once, in Birmingham's Edgbaston, he'd been on the team of decorators, subcontract, and the house had had a hall that was bigger in the floor space than all the bungalow where he lived now with Siobhan and his mother and the four little ones, and there had been the daughter of the house who spoke the same as the bitch.

She seemed to laugh at him.

"You get plenty."

Braver, because he'd have Siobhan up his arse. "How much?"

"You get ten thousand," she said, and it was as if that wasn't a figure that was big to her.

"And I get out, right?"

"Who knows, Mossie, who knows."

He heard the door behind him click open. He turned. The man behind him had leaned out of the door and was checking the corridor. He heard the drone of a vacuum cleaner.

The man said, "On your way, Song Bird."

The bitch said, "Scratch them hard, scratch them often."

He went out into the corridor, empty. The bitch, she hadn't even wished him luck.

She said she was going shopping. His Ma had been shopping the day before. She said she was going shopping again to Dungannon. He knew the secret. He had held the secret all that day at school as to why his Ma had to go again to buy more food. He liked it that his Ma trusted him with the secret. She said that he was a grand boy and that he should, again, take the fodder up to the Mahoneys' field to the bullocks.

He had lain in his bed all of the previous night, with the blanket high over his head, and still he had heard the muffled footfall on the stair.

But he had been asleep if his Da had come to him… He said he would take a bale of hay fodder to the bullocks in the Mahoneys' field, and he had felt the distracted kiss of his Ma on his forehead.

He saw Mossie Nugent come through the swing doors. He would have driven out after him if it had not been for the way his Intelligence Officer glanced twice to the right, and then to the left, like he was checking, then scurried for his car.

He sat low in the seat. He wore a cap on his forehead. He could see through the grime of the bottom of the windscreen. He was careful. He watched Mossie drive away, and turn on the road for Dungannon.

It was the hair on a woman's head. It was red gold. She came fast out of the doors of the hotel, and a young man half ran to keep up with her.

Red gold hair. He saw her and he knew her. He saw her in the shadow light ol the bar’s car park where they'd held her, where he'd punched her, kicked her. His eye line was over the bonnet of his car. She ran to her car and the wind and the spitting rain plucked at the red gold hair and she never looked around her. He saw her as she had flung herself at him. As she had pitched him over, as he had fell the pain exploded in his wrist, as he had rolled over and seen the gun in her hand. Their car went fast out of the car park. A van moved Sudden, quick, a van driving out, and he had noticed no one go to the van, Mossie gone, and the young woman with the red gold hair gone, and a van gone behind them, had to have been the backup. There were two more coming out of the hotel. They had the fresh faces and the cut hair and the trimmed moustaches, they were the pigs and they could never hide themselves.

He had seen the break-up of a meeting.

The O.C. sagged back in his scat.

The enormity of it belted him.

A meeting, a player and a handler, a tout and a Brit with back-up.

Holy shit…

He waited a full ten minutes. He drove away and went through Dungannon and passed the Housing Executive renovation site and saw the car, and knew Mossie Nugent was back at his work.

Jimmy came to the shoulder of the woman who monitored the racks of television screens.

"What on earth…?"

"It's the cattle. They're all round it. Focus is all wrong, that's not tree trunks, that's their legs. Lovely looking beasts they were when they were further away, it's the Limousin cross with Herefords.’’

The light had just been switched on.

The greyness was falling outside the windows distorted by the anti-blast covering.

Cathy slept in the corner of Colonel Johnny's office. Bren watched the telephone. Herbie was squatted on the floor with his back against the wall and he said nothing and had a seed catalogue to read, and every few minutes, as if that was the big decision in his life, he took his pencil and licked it and entered another order on the sale sheet. Jocko had a small sketch pad on his knee, sat on a straight-backed chair, drew Cathy. Bren couldn't see the work, only the delicate short stabs of his crayons, and there was the bored look on his face that said it might just as well have been a bowl of apples. The cardboard city man, clothes older and more torn and more filthy than Bren had seen them before, had his right boot and his right sock off and carefully, rapt in the work, he darned the heel of the sock.

Shortly they would move off.

He sat and he watched the telephone. He thought that he was incomplete. He couldn't sleep, he couldn't grow vegetables, he couldn't draw nor paint to save himself, he couldn't darn because he had never been taught. Sometimes he paced, sometimes he gazed out of the window at the perimeter arc lights of the barracks over towards the pad where the helicopters came and went, always he watched the telephone and waited on it.

There was a new item for the check-list. Their equipment was in the corner, against Cathy's shoulder, and with the equipment was now a box of flares and the pistol to shoot them.

He wondered if they were frightened, any of the rest of them…

The dog circled him, and snarled. He lashed a kick at it. He saw the hatred of the little savage, but it wouldn't come closer, not while it had a sight of his boot.

The O.C. hammered on the door. There were no lights in the farmhouse. He hammered and he waited. He heard no voice and he heard no footstep, only the barking of the dog.

He shouted her name, and he shouted the boy's name. He hit the door again with his good fist, and then because it had crept closer he kicked again at the dog.

Attracta would surely have told him where he might find her man.

The darkness was gathering on the mountain above him. He turned away. He swore at the dog and backed towards the front gate and when he shut it after him then the dog launched itself at the gate. He drove back down the lane and saw that Mossie's car was not yet in the drive in front of the bungalow

The cattle were gathered at the top hedge where the field gave way to the mountain slope. He stopped. He put down the bale and waited to catch his breath. He shouted, a piping reedy voice, for the bullocks to come to him. His Ma always said that he was not just to dump the bale and cut the twine and spread the hay, he was to get the animals to it, so that they ate it before the rain was into it. He felt the cold. The darkness was closing. He yelled into the wind for the animals. He could see them at the top of the field. He gritted his teeth. He wondered where his Da was, if his Da watched him. He heaved the bale up again, onto his thin shoulder, and the taut twine cut at the palms of his hands.