Jonathan Lee - High Dive

Dan went to ground, grit in his elbows, and pressed more fragments of dry ice into bottles. He sprinted, the bags banging on his shoulders, and threw a bottle at an RUC man — missed — but then one of Colum’s bottles looped and the man’s uniform was half white and the man yelled, fell. Another Saracen backing up to the front door of the next Catholic home to be searched and torn apart. Another throw. Dan was screaming ‘Pots! Pots! Pots!’ and like magic windows were opening all down the street. Colum must have lobbed another bottle high — Dan could see it coming down almost at a vertical — and paint exploded over the roof of a Saracen. A precision hit. He’d got Colum all wrong. Loved the man in this moment. Loved him. Catholic women were leaning out of windows banging pots and pans. The whole street waking up and making noise, ensuring others rose and joined. Don’t let these men rip our floorboards up. Don’t let them call our freedom fighters terrorists. Some of the women were throwing glass bottles stuffed with burning hankies towards the blotches of white, tiny bursts of fire near the targets, three and then six and then more. Other women were in the street in nighties. They were standing in the way of the Saracens and banging their pots and pans above their heads, shouting ‘Turn the water cannons on us! Go on then!’ Shouting ‘What’s a taste of water then? Give us a shower!’ All this as Dan ran into another dark alley, the last of his bottles used up, changing into clean clothes and beginning the long jog home.

In training he tried to show that he was hungry for knowledge. There seemed to be an infinite supply. There was more artistry to violence than he’d ever expected, more technique and philosophy. Months rolled by with only paint-bomb operations. Less a war than an apprenticeship; someone finally taking him under their wing. They told him they thought his future was bright.

In a warehouse space that smelt of raw meat they taught him how to open and split a shotgun cartridge. They taught him that candle wax in the tip made it hold together on impact. Mercury in the cartridge made it more deadly. Garlic purée in the cartridge put poison in the blood. They taught him to smear axle grease on a bullet to make it fly through reinforced doors. They taught him to pack cartridges with rice to slow them down. They showed him all the things you could do with the looped brake cable of a pushbike. A knife in a body needs to be twisted upward. Bulletproof glass has a blue-green glint. If a friend’s car is stolen, call Sinn Fein on this number. If a friend’s family is persecuted, call Sinn Fein on that number. Golf courses are for golf and the storage of weapons. Some people relax by emptying magazine after magazine into oil drums, tree stumps, the tyres of abandoned cars; others prefer the cold sophistication of invention, electrics, tricks with cassette-recorder parts. You can hammer away at Semtex with a rolling pin, shifting its shape to fit a suitable space. You can do anything you like, just don’t get any on your hands. On his nineteenth and twentieth and twenty-first birthdays Dawson sent packets of cash.

A BOOK CALLED Everyday Baking lay open on the kitchen table. Dan nibbled at his lower lip, pretending to pay it close attention. Every now and then his mother would ask him to call out an amount or instruction and whatever reply he gave would cause her to come up behind him, freckled forearms resting on his shoulders, floury hands made rigid in concern for his clean shirt, as she leaned down and kissed his ear. This whole gesture of affection was, he knew, a way of perusing the recipe page and checking he hadn’t fucked things up. It was expected that her sons, left unsupervised, would fuck things up. All three of his older brothers had moved away. Bobby, deaf, to a special home called St Joseph’s in Stillorgan. Tom to Scotland where he worked on a farm. Connor to America, happy to spill his secrets, each letter alive with new girls’ names. Lisa. Mary. Kimberly. Dawn.

6 oz softened butter, the recipe said. 6 oz granulated sugar / caster sugar. Two large eggs, quarter-pint strong coffee, three tablespoons whiskey. She was making a coffee cake. Halving the relevant amounts, presumably; the two of them would never get through it otherwise. It occurred to him to check this with her but he opted instead for a swig of vodka and water. There was an unspoken agreement that he would not challenge her while the oven was on, and a supplementary understanding that he’d challenge her rarely when it was off.

‘Do you want some of those potato wedges?’ she said. ‘As a starter, tide you over?’ She was moving towards the fridge, the dull thud-thud of his father’s old five iron measuring out her steps. His mother had a hip issue, needed a stick to walk, but in the kitchen there was an unexplained preference for the golf club. ‘Are you hearing, Dan? A potato wedge I said.’

He shook his head. An image came loose. Last night’s dinner was an old sock, a blood clot and some pieces of warped plastic. Main courses were her undoing. She was better off sticking to desserts. His mother’s cupboard of accompanying condiments was a treasure trove of precious clues. If it arrived with mint sauce you knew you were looking at lamb.

‘You’ll get yourself drunk,’ she said.

‘Hopefully.’

‘You’ll want a biscuit the Gallaghers brought round.’

‘What biscuits?’

‘After you got Cal to reinforce their door.’

‘On the house.’

‘What’s that, Dan?’

‘Cal put it on their house on the house. He didn’t charge.’

‘Well, that’s grand. If you hold this a second I’ll get your biscuits down.’

He smiled. ‘Really, Ma, I’ll save myself for dinner.’

A short, thin woman who lived to fatten others up. Fuzzed-peach cheeks. Skin potato-sallow. Her arms of late looking empty, sausage casing squeezed of cheap meat. He knew it shamed her how little he ate. The slow-motion movements of his fork. The non-committal way he moved the food around his plate, picking, toying, never taking a second helping, never mopping up excess sauce with the bread. Hating the idea, in truth, that you’d want to take a clean hunk of bread and make it soggy. Toast was the thing he loved. Slice after slice in the morning, crispy at the edges and butter-supple in the middle. Bread was sufficient to keep him broad and strong if he added tinned fish during the day. Also those protein-dense snacks Mick’s brother procured for free from … He didn’t know where they were from.

A pip from the lemon in the bottom of his glass. Touch of citrus made vodka and tap water into a proper drink. The window bleary with steam and last night’s grease.

Many things about his mother remained a mystery to him, but he felt sure she was at her happiest when preparing food. There were still times when she went out to gather ingredients, but increasingly he tried to limit these excursions. The problem wasn’t so much her lack of mobility as her recklessness in the open air. If she saw an RUC man on the street she wasn’t beyond spitting at him or striking him, a frail woman swinging her stick and slinging abuse and bringing herself to ground in the process. In a fighting mood she was a nightmare to protect. Immune to reason. Deaf to it. Twice the RUC had retaliated, one officer with his truncheon and the other with the back of his hand. The second blow, administered a few months ago, had drawn one of the only real teeth from her mouth. Dan had come around the corner from the post office. He saw his mother on the pavement, legs spread, thick brown wrinkled tights. The RUC man was standing over her. The tooth was in his mother’s hand, extraordinarily long at the root, the slightest speck of blood on enamel the colour of mustard diluted and stirred. She looked down at it like a child with a new toy. The RUC man grimaced, tried to help her up, said she’d gone crazy and fallen. Possibly this was true. She said she’d been hit. The RUC guy seemed lost in a loop of wondering what he’d done or wondering how she got so good at lying. Dan found himself memorising the pattern of moles on the man’s face: one upper right on the hairline, three on the left line of the jaw. ‘That’s my mother,’ Dan told him. ‘Be careful, that’s my mother.’ And whether surprised by the evenness of Dan’s response or slow-plotting his next move, the RUC man simply stood there, arms at his sides, until Dan had got his mother halfway home.