Jonathan Lee - High Dive

In six hours he’d find out if his timer device had been properly wired. In twenty-four he’d have full information about who was inside when it exploded. In forty-eight, a sense of whether he needed to go into hiding, of whether he was heading to the H-Blocks, of whether he’d spend a lifetime scrawling words on the wall with a finger dipped in shit, getting knocked about by guards. An idea of what new senselessness his actions might unleash.

Guys who got fatally knifed in the Blocks were described as going off air. The bar’s radio was being retuned. It began to tell tales about the weather.

A tidy girl in a denim skirt walked in. Someone said, ‘Uh, the arse on that.’

‘Steady,’ the landlord said.

‘Walks like —’

‘Steady now.’

The girl sat down and yawned. ‘Drink it in, lads, this is the closest you’re getting.’ The men began to blush.

Dan looked towards the door and saw the scarred bald head of Mick Cunningham, your basic functional shit-eating grin and a body still stupidly bulky. He resolved to ask his advice. He needed the comfort of a dumb man’s Don’t Worry. Mick had been there from the beginning. Mick was all right.

‘Remember that day,’ he said to Mick. ‘The trip home after the stuff in the field with the dogs. The beers. Do you remember? You had to swerve for that cyclist.’

‘Oh the fucker,’ Mick said. ‘Oh the fucky luck he had.’ Things like that could keep Mick furious for years.

He bought Mick another pint. It went down in twenty seconds. After shaking his glass to loosen a lingering swirl of stout Mick said, ‘If you told them everything in the debrief, Dan, I can’t see why you’d be sweating. It’s sounds stickin’ out, far as I can see. Sounds sound all round.’ Gently he touched his injured ear. ‘What was the operation, anyway? I haven’t heard much on the wires.’

‘Just a job. Nothing big.’

‘So you did a pedestrian number, it went off OK, and you told them the full works?’ He grinned, gummy. ‘Celebration is more the sound of it, Dan. If I were you I’d find myself a friend and have myself a big little party. McCartland’s busy, is all. Always a view on the next op, the next vol coming up. He’s probably taking a lad to Parkhead. Celtic versus the Rangers, am I right? Times are changing. They cosy up to these kids.’

‘The recruits.’

Mick nodded. ‘We’ve got Gerry as a member, haven’t we? People couldn’t believe that. Now you’ve got to go for more diplomacy, I suppose. We need more people in the Department of Health, they say. In your bigger high street banks, the Post Office. The Brit Telecom. That’s where it’s at, isn’t it? Clever kids in suits. Get them into your universities, into the licensing centre in Coleraine. Change minds bit by bit is the idea.’ He laughed.

‘I suppose.’

‘I thought you were in favour of all that, Dan.’

‘I am.’

‘Well, why do you look like I just slipped one in your mammy? More and more I get it, Dan. I get there’s a something precious in the shite.’ He stopped and nodded to the landlord, said a hello to Marty too. ‘You’ve got to ask yourself, at some point, if we’re just a bunch of fuckers addicted to failure, haven’t you? Whether we’ve gotta be more imaginative than that. Whether we really want to wake tomorrow and find all our mates dead, or abroad.’

‘You make it sound worse than it is.’

‘Yeah? More imaginative than just pressing on with the same old patterns, I’m saying. Dead bodies here, dead bodies there, big fucken funerals and kids growing up without parents, lads getting jail time when they turn eighteen. Know what I’m sayin’?’

‘There’s a balance, Mick.’

‘That’s what I’m telling you. A balance.’

‘If we don’t fight, the future gets smaller.’

‘Ha. Good one. It’s pretty fucken small either way.’

Dan tried to think of a response to this. ‘I need to talk to Dawson,’ he said.

‘I know. I understand you.’ Mick scratched his head. ‘If the Brits wouldn’t pull out in ’72, when we took a chunk out of five hundred of their soldiers, why would the fuckers do it now? I ask myself that these days. That’s all I’m saying.’

‘What’s the point then?’

‘Come again, Dan?’

‘If it’s not going anywhere, explain the point.’

Mick shrugged. ‘You’d be hard-pressed to find a point in anything any fucker does. There’s less and less of a role for what you and me do, Dan. Admit it. We’re like the hard men of old. I mean — look at us.’ He grinned. ‘We’re damaged people, aren’t we, Dan? There’s no place for us in the world we’re trying to make.’

Dan stared. It was the ‘us’ that had made the army attractive at the start, and the ‘us’ that in this moment really left him lost. ‘You know his wife, Mick?’

‘Whose? McCartland’s?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Not intimately, if that’s what you mean. It’s been said before and I don’t appreciate it.’

‘She’s got one eye, has she? Was he lying when he said that to me?’

‘No, wasn’t lying on that one. She’s a woman who deserves more.’

With that, Mick turned away. Dan watched him feed coins into the fruit machine. The smell of sweat and stale ale was stifling, ashtrays overfull.

Somewhere clean: that’s where he needed to be. Celebration. Distraction. Strangers. No talk of plots. And then it came to him: the hotel. A hotel he’d been to months ago, a night when Dawson had been keen to flash his cash.

Got to Cathedral Corner. Walked beyond the Sugarhouse Entry. Saw the Commercial Building. In a buried decade, thatched cottages had stood here. One of the cottages had been a draper’s shop. An ancestor was supposed to have worked there. He passed the Ulster Bank headquarters. The building made him think of the Grand. High Victorian. One of those tall, intimidating facades that boys like to aim at with air rifles. From the apex, statues stared down in the dark. Sculptures depicting Commerce, Justice, Britannia. Masks and reliefs. Universals. In their little niches mythical figures lingered, their noses and chins worn away by the weather.

He walked towards St Anne’s, a church that was grey with old-world love, the air at once hazed and measured by cones of light from street lamps. He thought of the church in Brighton he’d passed on the last day of his stay, his route to the station, to freedom.

The hotel had taxis outside tonight. Eyes slid his way as he went through the doors. He was going to the bar, and no one would stop him going to the bar, and he wanted a drink at the bar. He was full of beer and dreams of nights when he’d probably felt less alone.

A man in a dark suit and tie approached. His face was full of gathers and tucks, the skin of his neck was pitted, the mouth was tight but twisted too. In his eyes were signs of a long adolescence spent bitterly battling acne. ‘What’s your business?’

‘Electrician,’ Dan said.

The man shook his head. ‘Catch yourself on, son. Your business here.’

‘Drink.’

‘Selling?’

‘Drinking.’

The man said ‘up’. Dan lifted his arms like the little boy he was. The guy patted at Dan’s armpits and ribs, his hands travelling down to the ankles. With a look of reluctance the man let him pass.

Sitting at the bar plucking nuts from a bowl he ordered a whiskey straight up. Not the Glenmorangie, he said.

The bar girl didn’t think she had the Tullamore. Then she said, ‘Ah, I tell a lie.’

No rubber beer mats here. Surfaces wiped and swept. Lights that hung down on metal strings along the bar, gold droplets waiting to drop. Everything induced your eyes to linger on wealth and its advantages. Dawson wasn’t here.