Jonathan Lee - High Dive

Dawson said a young girl had been walking home with her older brother when the device went off. It was well known, he said, that Catholic schoolkids used that side alley over there because it snaked down to the Ballymurphy. The first Polaroid of the girl was a profile shot. Nine or ten, Dan guessed. She was a strawberry blonde, smooth-skinned, with faint auburn freckles. Perhaps there was a slight twist of grief in her eye. The second picture was another profile shot, the other side of the girl’s face. The eyelid here was huge, swollen. Her skin was wet and red, pitted, and the cheek seemed to want to slide into the nostril.

‘Blast injuries,’ Dawson said. ‘For the sake of killing off some Catholic jobs, they spoil a little girl.’

A man used his walking stick to prod a piece of meat. The meat leaked thin liquid as it moved. There was corrugated roofing leaning against a ruined wall. A priest arrived with a weeping old woman. They began to mutter Hail Marys.

The third picture was of a man in his twenties laid out on the ground with his eyes completely closed.

‘Your bomb ends the other bombs, Danny.’

What was England, back in the day, before they started killing for land? A tiny offshore island, Dawson said. An island sad and cold.

‘Why show me these?’

‘This girl’s father said to me … he said … he said, is this what we get for …’

Could Dawson really be fighting back tears? Something unconvincing about the swift onset of grief, the glistening eyes, the bony hand that moved from his chin to his knee like an actor’s sure gesture on a stage. It was left to Dan to guess at what the girl’s father had said.

Is this what we get for being good parents?

Is this what we get for not rocking the boat?

Is this what we get for teaching our daughter to turn the other cheek?

Who’d bombed the meat-packing warehouse? Not him. Not Dawson. Not anyone they knew. Blame lay elsewhere, with designated enemies, so why did he feel so guilty? Anger was the emotion Dawson must have hoped to stir, but he felt no anger at all. Nothing dissolves, nothing affrights. There was the rising sense, during this moment and a dozen others like it, that Belfast’s carnage stole not only the victims’ lives but large parts of the witnesses too. You disintegrated into the recriminations, the headlines, the pictures. You scattered yourself into proofs, warnings, suspicions, arrests. You rode out into the dark outrage of others, saw human loss shaped towards political ends, and though you hoped for the occasional gleam of uncontaminated compassion it seemed that the world was dimming. He remembered laughing at his brother and his piss-wet bed sheets. He was struck by his father for laughing.

Second thoughts? Yes. He’d had second thoughts, third thoughts, fourth thoughts. But doubt was a disease, a sentimental curse, and in the long run his actions would save lives. A new prime minister. Politicians seeing they were vulnerable on their own doorstep. Seeing that this war could cut both ways. The beginning of the end of apathy, maybe. The start of an understanding. And if one or two innocent died, if that occurred and couldn’t be helped, it would be no worse than what happened on the Falls every other day.

The truth was that on an operation you felt clean of guilt and will. It was day-to-day Belfast life that made you dirty. The nowness of being undercover, the sprint of adrenalin in your blood. It seemed to have a purifying quality. Everything you did was so silently precise, every step had to link so carefully to the next, that when you finally lay down at the end of the day your mind was a vast empty space. No doubt, no regret. All miseries for a moment receded. They made space for the satisfaction of a job well done. The gloom stayed away provided that, the next day, you got up at five to do the same again. There was something nimble about deceit. He tried and failed to remember a time when he’d felt appalled at the thought of it all. He pictured his mother going to church every Sunday, the glare of stained glass coming alive in summer, loneliness of winter dusk gone. A recent revival of her interest in religion. He wondered if she was ever praying for him. It made him sad to see how much faith she put in Jesus Christ when Christ, for his part, never seemed to have heard of her.

The Grand Hotel. You could hear in the name that a collapse was overdue. Nothing noble stays whole forever. Shakespearean, Dawson would say, though Dan preferred to see it as a simple daily process of decay: metal turns to rust; plant life turns to mulch; fixtures peel from walls and people have to die.

The official plan — documented and shared with those who needed to know — was that it would be Patrick, not Dan, checking in at reception. Patrick was insistent that, if things went wrong, he would take the prison time alone. The Brits would look at the long-delay timer. They’d know someone with experience had built it. They’d look to Paddy. Paddy would say he’d checked in alone, built it alone, planted it alone. Leaked Council papers could back him up. It’s not just the Brits who can leak information. Only one head would fall.

‘Then why doesn’t he check in himself?’ Dan said. ‘Why not do it in reality, instead of just on the record?’

Dawson, hearing this, had laughed. ‘What I described is what happens if it all goes tits up, Dan. If he gets caught. But we don’t want it tits up, do we? We want it all tits down.’

Patrick was a man who’d done time, a man on police files, a man masterminding a dozen other jobs right now. They couldn’t risk losing their Chief Explosives Officer to the H-Blocks — not by having him walk up to the desk and ask for a room; a simple matter of admin. What if the hotel was under surveillance? Dan’s face was unknown to the authorities. He could check the hotel was safe, report back overnight. Patrick could wander into the Grand the next day, straight up the stairs, mute, confident, a colleague coming to discuss a job, and join Dan in the room. If things ever went wrong Patrick would simply say, ‘It was me. I’m Roy Walsh. Done.’ The lie would sprawl out from there. People remember nothing of consequence. Hotels are a world within a world, a million strangers’ names.

If this seemed to Dan like a solid explanation, it still wasn’t the one he’d wanted. He wanted to hear that he’d earned the trust of the Council. The Larne — Stranraer ferry job had come off well, no civilian casualties. Three vehicles rolling in flames. Nine army men dead. A pure act of war to the extent any act of war can be that. One charge failed to do its trick, the only thing marring the op, but he was always telling them about the fucking detonators, never did understand why they didn’t seem to prize precision each time, and it was noted on the relevant files that the defect was not his fault. So: he was doing well. He wanted to hear that they’d selected him purely on merit for the important job of walking in and asking for a room, then assisting Patrick with the engineering upstairs.

‘Tell me,’ Dan said during a cold moment four weeks before, ‘are you sacrificing me? Is that it? No bullshit.’

‘Patrick has other plans,’ Dawson said. ‘Other seaside ops in the pipeline. Think we can use his face every time at every desk? No. Think I came up the Lagan in a bubble? No. He’ll be there when the important stuff’s done, and on the official version you’re clean.’

Ferry and then rail. Fewer security checks than air travel. He and Dawson drank vodka and Coke on the train down from Scotland. They sat on Brighton Beach watching seagulls walk and fly. And why was Dawson accompanying him here? Scared he didn’t have the commitment needed? Other people’s worries found a way towards your own. There was a team spirit in panic. Do I have the commitment needed? Do I really?