Sorj Chalandon - Return to Killybegs

I had pains in my stomach, my joints, my head. Every morning, I limped when I got out of bed before being able to walk normally. I shook. Beer was my water, vodka my alcohol. I had bought myself a green leather and metal flask, calculating how much it could hold.

Twice, the owner of the Thomas Ashe had discreetly asked me to leave. On the third time, I called the bar to witness. This bastard was throwing out Danny Finley’s friend. I tore off the tablecloth covering the big sandwich table. I threw it over my shoulders like a prison blanket. I shouted from the middle of broken saucers and scattered bread. Didn’t that remind them of anything? Really? Would they like me to shit on the ground to jog their memories? Some IRA guys intervened. Everyone was going to calm down. It was in the street we were waging war, not in our pubs. I left the bar. And I came back the following day to apologize.

The IRA had advised me to do so. Waldner had ordered me to.

Even before I became a traitor, I was becoming troublesome. The MI5 agent wondered whether I might not be doing that just to be rejected by my community. To render myself out of order, useless. He reminded me that nothing had changed. I had killed Danny, Jack was in prison and Sheila was still vulnerable. I had to quit the rowdiness. It was an order. So I made myself drink less, and less again. Then to drink like before, when I felt like it.

But I knew that I was no longer in control.

Bobby Sands died on 5 May 1981, after sixty-six days of hunger strike. As he lay there dying slowly, he was elected an MP in Westminster, but that wasn’t enough. Francis Hughes died on 12 May, aged twenty-five, after fifty-nine days’ hunger strike. Patsy O’Hara and Ray McCreesh both died on 21 May, at twenty-three and twenty-four years of age, after sixty-one days’ hunger strike.

On 22 June, when the IRA Belfast Brigade decided to shoot down a Long Kesh warder, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee and Michael Devine were about to die.

There was a black shroud over the whole city. The IRA had a duty to react.

Frank ‘Mickey’ Devlin had joined us upstairs in a brick house in the Divis Flats area. There were three of us sitting on the floor in the small bedroom.

Mickey tapped me on the back, pleased to see me again. He nearly got out a pen to tease me, but didn’t bother in the end. Catching sight of the crucifix, he crossed himself. And then he gave the pope a wink.

On coming in, he had asked our hostess for some tea. She knocked on the door and Jim O’Leary opened it to take the tray.

— The street is quiet, she said.

Then she left again without a sound.

— Tea, Tyrone? Jim asked.

— Tea, I replied.

Mickey took a few photos from under his shirt. Five snapshots taken from a distance. He lined them up on the carpet like a game of cards.

I went to pull the curtains and turn on the light.

The others were bent over the documents.

— Weird-looking guy, Jim said.

— His name’s Ray Gleeson. He lives close to Cliftonville, in a mixed estate.

— A Catholic? Jim asked.

— Yeah. He’s fifty-three. He’s been working for the prison service since 1962 and in the Kesh for the past four.

Jim handed me a photo.

— A friend of yours, Tyrone?

Popeye.

My screw. In civilian clothes. An oversized suit, a shapeless shirt, his bald head, his cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.

I went over to the bedside lamp, using the darkness as a pretext, turning my back to them. Popeye. My heart was pounding, my head, an anxious drumming that everyone must surely hear.

— Do you know him?

— No, I replied.

I bent down. I looked at the other images. Popeye inspecting the underside of his car as a precaution, Popeye walking in the city centre, Popeye stopped at a red light.

— Why him? I asked.

The question slipped out. A crazy question. I stopped breathing.

Mickey looked at me strangely. Without knowing it, he helped me bail myself out.

— Why a Catholic, you mean?

— Yeah. Why a Catholic.

Jim shrugged vaguely. He answered that the mixed neighbourhood would make the getaway easier.

The younger guy spoke. I barely knew him. He had a know-it-all air I didn’t like. He told me that hunger strikes were our priority and that the IRA should respond on this terrain.

I looked at him. I smiled coldly.

— Terry? It’s Terry, isn’t it? You’re not by any chance in the process of explaining the situation in prison to me, are you?

He froze, surprised by my aggression.

— You want to teach us military tactics? Is that it?

— Calm down, Tyrone, murmured Mickey.

He put away the photos, his eyes on me.

— A screw is a screw. Who gives a fuck what religion he is?

I nodded. I needed to calm down. He was right.

— If your friends are looking at you strangely, it’s fucked, Meehan. That means you’ve said too much, or maybe not enough. If you get pissed off instead of laughing or laugh instead of getting pissed off, they’re going to have doubts. And doubts are lethal, Waldner had warned.

So I put on my Tyrone manner again, cursing the lukewarm tea.

— On Thursday, he starts work at eleven. It’s quiet in his area. He’s always done the same thing. He pulls off, arrives at the Clifton crossroads, and puts his seatbelt on while waiting for the light to turn green. We can get him there, Terry said.

— He doesn’t take any precautions, doesn’t change his route?

Terry smiled at me.

— Other than looking under his car, no. He does nothing.

— You’ll do it next Thursday? Jim asked.

— The sooner the better, I replied.

I’d taken control of my emotions once more. Mickey looked at me, nodding. Jim glanced at him from the corner of his eye. I could sense their relief. The old Tyrone Meehan had come back to them.

— Who’ll be on the job?

— Me, Terry, three guys from Divis, and a girl on a bike to collect the guns, Mickey replied.

— Jim?

O’Leary shook his head.

— You know me, Tyrone. I handle the powder better than the gun.

— Explain your presence here, so.

I was using my commanding tone of voice again.

— Procedure hadn’t been finalized. We had thought at first of booby-trapping his car, but as he checks it every morning…

I cut Jim off, my hand raised. I imagined the red-haired cop and the MI5 agent witnessing the scene. It was the first time my imagination had summoned them.

Curt tone.

— Mickey? Next time, you settle that in advance. This is a military briefing, not a public debate.

Mickey nodded. He got the point loud and clear. Jim stood up.

— The less you know…, he said as he left the room.

Jim O’Leary was a bomb-maker. ‘Mallory’, as he was called in the movement. He was a soldier, uninterested in politics. He considered that in every circumstance, the gun should command the party. He was against secret negotiation, dialogue, compromise. ‘Brits out!’ Like my father, those two words were the sum total of his agenda. He didn’t dream of peace in Ireland but of routing the British. He wanted to fight them, send them packing, humiliate them and, only then, negotiate the terms of their defeat.

Jim was a technician. Secretive, patient, hard-working, he spent his days and weeks developing increasingly efficient explosives. His creations were tailored to the job, booby-trapping cars, doormats, letters. A mine intended to blow up armoured vehicles while they were driving through the countryside was not designed in the same way as a bomb planted in a town, along the route of a foot patrol. The milk bottles sitting peacefully outside houses were a threat to the enemy, as were Belfast’s electricity poles, gas meters at leg height, even the smallest crack in a wall. The British were tearing down our flags? He would booby-trap the flag poles.