Jonathan Lee - High Dive

An incident like that happened and you called Mick Cunningham. You imagined him at the other end of the line, pressing the receiver to his ruined ear, light pooling on the lunar landscape of his head. Cunningham called Dawson McCartland. Dawson McCartland called Mad Dog Magee, Chief Explosives Officer, your main reporting line. Magee circled back with you and the chain of command was a figure of eight, overcomplicated, tiring. There was a rule that you didn’t deal with personal matters personally, and another rule — linked — that authorisation for operations had to go through central command. It was a way of sanifying a plan, sweeping away elements of emotion. Useful in more than one respect.

His mother hobbling towards the stove, golf club clutched in her little blue fist. She positioned herself in the tight right angle where the cupboards met the drawers, freeing up all her fingers for chopping and peeling, the breaking of eggs.

It had been on TV, the RUC man’s death. The guy’s face in a box in the top right corner of the screen. A mole there, three here, telltale acne scars. A car bomb, the newscaster said, and later Mick would say to Dan that it had comprised three RDG5 grenades with five-second fuses, four ounces of TNT a piece. Someone had filled a ginger-beer bottle with sugar and oil and taped it onto the grenades. Someone else had added a juice carton of petrol. Someone. Someone. The contraption was attached to the steering column of the RUC man’s personal car and it sent him sky-high. The Belfast Telegraph ran the headline ‘PROVOS TAKE CREDIT FOR NEW FIREBALL’. At the weekend the Guardian picked up on the story. Someone sent Dan a clipping. Underneath the main piece was a box headed ‘WHO ARE THE RUC?’.

Since 1922 the Royal Ulster Constabulary has had a dual role, unique among British police forces, of providing a normal law enforcement police service while, at the same time, having a remit to protect Northern Ireland from the activities of proscribed groups.

Did Guardian readers need to be told what the RUC was? It was shocking, if they did. His mother had yawned and put the newspaper to one side.

He’d spent a long dreamless night thinking about the RUC man with the moles, wondering if there hadn’t been a better solution, wondering if he was wrong to have taken his mother at her word. A beating — that’s all he’d been after when he made the call. But to get a beating arranged he’d had to share her account of what had happened, and what sort of man hits an old woman? A pathetic man, a dead man. Move on.

Pans hanging down from hooks above the stove. These were a biding presence. His mother’s concentration, while cooking, was quite something to behold. The way her face coloured and her small blue eyes became unblinking. Her whole body seemed to coil as she creamed the butter and sugar and her shoulders remained rolled, her back bent, until the bowl contained a cloud. She cracked eggs with one hand as the other hand continued beating and then there was the expert sieving of flour and salt, the three quick taps on the rim of the sieve, the slow circles made by her wrist when it was time, the precise time, to fold the dry ingredients into the moister part of the mix. When she said the word ‘syrup’ to herself, a reminder of some future stage in the process, her tongue seemed to lick real love into the word, the language a sugary treat.

‘One to two chopped hazelnuts,’ he said. ‘For decoration, apparently.’

She moved behind him and leaned her forearms on his shoulders. ‘Later,’ she said. ‘They’ll be for later.’

Stirring darkness in. The process of adding the coffee to the batter brought a new alertness to her features. With all her weight on the five iron she stretched up to retrieve something from the cupboard — a cake rack — and he was on his feet but she had it now, refusing help, whispering, ‘Pan, whiskey, springform, syrup.’ He could sense within her movements an excitement and anticipation that other parts of her life could not provide.

The phone rang. He moved into the hall. At the other end of the line a man exhaled in an even rhythm. Dan put the phone down and then took it off the hook. He returned to the kitchen table and drank.

‘Who was that?’ his mother asked. She had a way of flaring her nostrils when suspicious.

‘Electrical job for the club. Lighting.’

She smiled. Grateful for the lie? From the garage came the barking of dogs.

‘Almost forgot myself,’ she said. ‘Jan Henry? From the Donegall? She told me my fortune this morning.’

Jan was a Protestant, one of maybe two or three his mother was happy to talk to. She got all over town, didn’t mind crossing the line to read a palm.

‘She said, first of all, that I’m soft and spongy these days. That I’ll be picking up vibrations from the universe. Positive vibrations, she confirmed. She said I’d be continuing to receive the benefits of wisdom.’

‘That was first of all.’

‘Yes. You think she’s loony?’

‘I think she’s loaded.’

‘Loaded?’

‘Her life’s a dander in the park.’

‘But do you believe it, Dan? That there’s good news ahead?’

‘I do,’ he said. ‘But I wonder how much of that news it’s in her gift to predict.’

‘She’s gifted.’

‘I don’t deny it.’

‘Well then.’

‘I’ve seen her car.’

‘She said we were our own worst enemies, Dan.’

‘That’s a stretch,’ he said.

‘It’s what she claimed.’

‘She exaggerates.’

‘No no.’

‘She’s a storyteller. Accept her for what she is.’

‘No, Dan, no. A cleverer woman there isn’t around.’

It was frightening and frustrating how easily she was deceived — by fortune-tellers, by door-to-door hacks, by her own son. The first big lies he’d told her came when he was an adolescent. Hidden magazines and skipped classes, little untruths that left him guilty and weary. But at some point the effort of remembering and repeating each fiction had taken on the shape of a game. Fatigue gave way to a determination to succeed. He began to realise he was good at lying and with each operation now he became more and more set on protecting her from the truth. That’s how he thought of it: protecting her from the truth. It was as if within the walls of his own life there was another person being born, an alternate Dan growing strong in secret. You had to work for what you believed in. It was the only thing a decent person could do. His father had said it was one of life’s few lessons. That and don’t mix your drinks.

‘You’ll be on the right side of history.’ These words had seemed absurd when Dawson had first said them. But these days Dan felt, with increasing confidence, the rightness of what he was doing. Volunteering offered him a purpose. He nurtured it. He was reluctant to see the bulk and heft of his own opinions whittled down into something more subtle. He’d seen, among many other volunteers, that subtlety tended to sit side by side with doubt.

‘We need types like you,’ Dawson had said. ‘Idealists with a brain.’ But being an idealist, if that’s what he was, didn’t obligate him to tell the truth, did it? It meant adhering to the truth, probably. A bigger truth, a conviction and a faith, which was something different. And why would he tell his mother that they had received another threatening call? Why would he let her lie awake at night thinking Prods wanted them dead? Why would he make clear to her that specific people, actual individuals who had their actual phone number, wanted to see the end of him and the end of her because — despite believing in a similar God — their ancestors disagreed over the sufficiency of Scripture, the completeness of certain words in a book, the authority and office of the Pope? He was determined to keep her in the dark. She knew there were risks in living round here. (There were risks living anywhere, she said; there are risks in every town around the world, and why should I be forced out of my home?) A man breathing hard down the line would add nothing to her armory.