Jonathan Lee - High Dive

They listened to the sea.

‘I know. I’m ready.’

‘Are you, though? There might be extra days, Dan. When it’s planted, we might send Paddy home, and ask you to stay extra days.’

‘No. Pointless.’

‘Info. We’ll keep in touch. You’ve got the pager, haven’t you? If a guy’s got an electrical business, he needs one of those these days.’

‘I’m not sleeping in that room while the thing’s maturing under the bath.’

‘It’ll be meditative.’

‘Dawson.’

‘Like a fine little cheese. But look, there might be no need. Depends on whether we need to keep an eye, find out more about the Iron Vagina’s movements, make adjustments to our Plan B before you get back to Belfast, doesn’t it?’

‘And the Plan B would be …’

Dawson grinned. ‘You’ve got to picture it, Dan. The result. Focus on that. Build a little moat around yourself. Imagine this little city burning.’

‘It’s not a city, it’s a town.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well then,’ Dawson said. ‘Let’s call the whole thing off.’ He looked up at a girl in a short skirt walking by. ‘It’s like Belfast could be, this place is. But with a better class of quim. You’re rehearsed?’

‘I’m prepared.’

‘It’s a long old timer, Danny. Four weeks a-ticking. I’m trusting you and Paddy.’

Dan said again that he was prepared. It was true. He really was. He felt that if a bullet was going to hit him now it was coming from a gun that had already been fired.

But then: there’s always the unexpected. That’s the real juice of life. He wasn’t prepared for the embarrassment and self-reproach he’d feel when, departing from the script, he’d hear himself asking the receptionist which room they’d put Thatcher in. She might remember that. And he wasn’t prepared, either, for the way that, looking at her skin unspoiled by make-up or injury, he’d sense within that receptionist girl not arrogance, not ignorance, not the hoped-for signs that she liked to serve the ruling elite. The way he would see only an openness to life, and a need to be liked. She would blink a lot. She would touch her hair. He liked the weary belligerence that darkened her face each time she put pen to paper. She was an uncertain and determined person, and in that uncertainty and determination he was surprised to find something he recognised. He saw it for an instant and then forgetfulness came, affording him its useful distance.

Who’d be there in the early hours of 12 October when the bomb, on its long delay timer, would explode under the bath? Couple of night porters, probably. That’s all.

Twenty-four days,

Six hours,

Six minutes.

A poem by Daniel in the lions’ den.

WITH PATRICK IN the bathroom of 629. You know the moment will stay. The blood shining in your veins, the room alive. Ready to begin your work.

The lino felt oddly liquid under his hands. The press of it through rubber gloves. Objects arranged around them looked like floating debris. Things that were shipwrecked, lost.

Patrick’s gloves were old, a superstitious thing. One forefinger had split a little at the tip. Patrick had black tape wound around it. In that black tape there was truth. They had planned this, rehearsed. They were not here on impulse.

The 555 timer. The 470K ohm resistor. The 5m ohm resistor. The PNP transistor. You could convince yourself you were making any number of contraptions. The mere fact you were making anything at all helped grant you part of the distance you needed for the job. In the midst of creation you couldn’t envisage the myriad ways in which your work might destroy or be destroyed. The electrolytic. The capacitor breadboard. The jumper wires, the battery.

What sometimes came to mind when he was working on a device was a day in his childhood when he’d built a bookcase. Laying out pieces of paper with his father, screws and spanners and nails, screwdrivers and hammers and cold beers with beads of coolness on the cans. It didn’t matter that the bookcase, once built, held only four or five books and a load of worthless tat: candlesticks, crystal dogs, paperweights; items from his mother’s collection of clutter. The point was to build the thing, to have it there in the room. The bookcase cast a shadow across the mantelpiece most mornings. It pitched photographs and wilted plants into blackness.

The 555 timer. You had to put it in its own bit of space. It had to be free to breathe, the output connection pointing to your right. You had to move it to the dead centre of your breadboard, framed by the rows of tiny holes. The advantage of building your timer device at the operation site was that you were less at risk during travel if a stop and search happened. You were carrying ordinary old wires and video-recorder parts, an electrician on a job. You could show peelers an electrician’s calling card with a phone number on one side. The number would go through to an answerphone and on that answerphone you’d have Martina’s voice, its staggering gravel, saying the lines are all busy, please leave a message, someone from Sunnyside Electrics will return your call. You built a history for yourself and made people a part of it. They felt involved; they started to exist within its architecture. Dawson in his more lyrical moods liked to say the world was full of people who in their daily lives looked without seeing, felt without feeling; people who wanted to be carried away by a wave of false logic more soothing than what they knew.

They’re halfway through their work when Patrick whispers words about the tourists outside the hotel, men and women clutching their shiny travel guides, seeking out the Royal Pavilion, the Regency architecture, the Victorian aquariums, the Pier, the pebbled nudist area beyond Duke’s Mound (had he been reading a guide himself?). Good for them, he said. He envied them and wished them well. The men and women on Britain’s streets were on the winning side of a war, and on the winning side you barely knew there was a war at all. You didn’t spot the cracks in the pavements, the weeds in the joints, the empty ice-cream shops with damp external walls, the blistered paint, the rusted bars on basement windows, the bird shit, the rain stains, the homeless people, loss. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen.

Patrick. Patrick who, during internment, served two years in detention without trial. Patrick who’d spent some of his childhood in Norwich. Patrick who believed British cities and towns were where the war could be won. Patrick who said you don’t get an enemy to listen by shouting loudly from afar; you do it by whispering in their ear. It amazed Dan how simply you could summarise a life. Never felt at home in Norwich. Came back to Belfast to help with civil rights. Got locked up. Became the Provos’ best bomber. An army feeds off injustice. The stories of its soldiers are only strange when stripped of context. Build a moat around yourself.

Wasn’t full-on IRA when the authorities got hold of him. Patrick had existed only at the fringes. But the aim of the arrests wasn’t so much to catch IRA guys as to catch innocent people you couldn’t get a proper court order against. People who, being Catholics, might have information about suspected terrorists. ‘Take these people,’ Patrick said to Dan. ‘Shake them up. Burst an eardrum. Blacken an eye. Terrify them into staying well clear of Republicans. That’s their powerful, simple idea.’ You killed the cause by isolation. Picked a guy up again and again until other innocent people said, ‘Oh, he must be involved with trouble,’ at which point the isolated guy was at the RUC’s mercy. If he got a bullet in his head people would have a narrative to hand that explained why he deserved it.