Jonathan Lee - High Dive

‘No.’

‘Catch yourself on, Dan. You no longer look like my son.’

He tried not to linger on this.

‘Insurance,’ one of the women said, as if insurance covered families like his in neighbourhoods like this.

Kind Mrs Whelan arrived bearing a teapot and an assortment of mugs. She settled her tray on the table, touched it twice.

His mother spoke again. ‘I didn’t know what was happening, Catty.’ A nickname unused for years. ‘A brick came through the bedroom. I was watching the little TV in the bedroom about the bomb and the brick — a brick, you know? I mean I was expecting something but. The brick came through like this. I looked out the back. A brick like they knew. The garden was having a fire. I took a couple of the half-good cookbooks and went out like this for the door.’

‘It’s OK,’ he said.

‘Why weren’t you here, Dan?’

‘I was with friends.’

‘Friends. You’re never this late.’

‘This time I was.’

‘Where are my cookbooks? The cookbooks are out there. I couldn’t find the golf club. You expect me to believe.’

‘What?’

‘That the timing.’

‘What?’

‘A coincidence,’ she said. She was beginning to weep, to shake.

‘Stop it,’ he said. He told the women to leave the room. They did not leave. ‘Ma, it’s OK.’

‘The news ,’ she said, vicious. ‘Look at it. I had a phone call! Hour before the brick. They said that. And. And Provos boys, those boys with the scarves, they’d been hanging around an hour before and I heard that —’

‘What do you mean? What did you hear?’

She was crying.

‘Stop it,’ he said. ‘Don’t cry on me. You’re not making sense.’

‘The news,’ she said. ‘The news.’

She was weeping and it made him desperate. It crushed all the air inside him. Again he had his hands on his knees. Again he was looking away and trying to breathe. Fidgeting for space, for air, always, endless.

‘Or the Loyalists. Loyalists. They’ve burned houses elsewhere, Dan. Retaliations already begun. Streets back from here, houses burning. They’re always so quick when there’s a mainland attack, it’s like they’ve a list, a list.’

‘Calm down, Ma. Stay calm.’

‘Thatcher survived, Dan.’

‘You think I didn’t catch that?’

‘It’s made her a martyr, Dan.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s nothing to do with us.’

‘Nothing she’ll do from now on will matter. She’ll be the woman who was bombed and didn’t blink.’

‘Why would we care? It’s not relevant to us. Why would you even tell —’ He glanced at the women in their semicircle. Their eyes moved towards the TV.

‘They’re saying she won’t even put back her speech!’

‘Stop.’

‘Not even a delay, Dan! And people have died.’

‘Whoever’s done this to us is going to pay. I’m going to make them know — they’ll know what they’ve done.’

‘Oh, they know! They already know. All the wounded people on the telly, Dan, and they’ve done nothing wrong, have they? They’re like your da, Catty.’

‘I’m talking about here.’

‘There, here. It’s all the same, Dan. They’re pulling them out half alive.’

She was whimpering; he was whispering.

‘Stop it please,’ he said. ‘You’re embarrassing us, Ma.’

Clear snot was running down into her mouth and she was shaking on the sofa, allowing the event to destroy her. Embarrassment was the word and he didn’t know why. How was he not beyond embarrassment?

She said, ‘I should never have let that Dawson McCartland into my garden.’

‘Quiet now. Be quiet.’

‘There might not even be a minister dead, they said. Not one! But there’s dead bodies already on the news — women who weren’t ministers who were staying there, women and wives, and now Belfast’s burning, look.’

‘Stop, Ma. Control yourself. We got the letters.’

‘The letters!’

‘What happened on the mainland — it means fuck all to us. This is just weird timing — this is …’

He thought again of what she had said about Provo boys hanging around the house. He thought, No, they wouldn’t do this. Use me and get rid of me? Dawson? No.

‘My whole life is over,’ she said. ‘Over. My whole life up in flames because of you and your kind and your father dying for nothing. What would he say now, Daniel? What would he say, Daniel, if he saw you —’

No. Couldn’t hear this. Wouldn’t. He wheeled round, deliciously free of thought, deeply impressed by his own disgust, and with the back of his hand he hit her face. Saliva streaked from the corner of her mouth. His knuckles stung. He stood there for a moment, amazed by himself, as the women touched their hair and looked away.

Dawson came the next day with money and a plan. He said Dan would need to spend some time abroad. He said that the army looked after its own. He had pictures of the Loyalists who had set fire to the house. ‘Time to start a new life, Dan,’ he said. He said he had been on leave.

‘Compassionate?’

‘Annual.’

‘Fuck, Dawson —’

‘We all need a break,’ Dawson said.

Dawson talked about Thatcher, her lack of empathy, her inability to imagine herself into other people’s shoes: the miners, the Catholics, those with another view. He talked about the distance she’d created within herself, the distance necessary to do her job.

Dawson did not talk about the victims in the Grand. He did not talk about the dogs that had died in the fire, the charred bodies in Dan’s garage. He did not talk about all the hate he surely felt.

Dawson said he had tickets for the Celtic Rangers game and would gladly give them up.

Moose grabbed at his belt. There was a new exhilaration at the margins of his pain, an old edgy in-the-gym feeling. Whipped the belt right out of the loops, a gesture learned from nowhere. A bit of Harrison Ford juju that wasn’t really him. He got the belt around his bad leg and tightened it, let it be.

In his head now he was one hundred per cent Harrison. The Beatles were playing ‘Hard Day’s Night’. The triangle of electric light was where he was headed. It was the only sharp thing in the swarm of the room. He heard water trickling in an unseen space.

What are you going to do? Best you can, best you think you can, which is everything. He performed an unlikely sit-up. Pain lived between his ribs. The motion bought him momentum for the next few desperate gestures. Licking his split lip, breathing fast and crawling slow, pausing at intervals to say ‘No’.

He saw his own progress as fragment-to-fragment. Get to the broken chair leg. Breathe. Get to the Sellotape hoop. Breathe. Get through the thick fog to the flattened tinfoil castle, dragging the bad leg behind him. He could feel the crinkle of vulnerable foil under his hand. There was fire in his veins, smoke in his flesh. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Ah, ah, ah.’

He couldn’t do this. Couldn’t keep moving. His lungs were full of dust. But he was moving, was he? He was doing this. Trying. Every inch coughing up blackness was a sort-of-almost progress. He felt oddly invested in himself. If he had a flag he’d stick it in the middle of Engelbert’s tinfoil castle. He had no flag. Never mind. Move on. Beyond the castle was a steaming mountain made of wood. The crook of a pipe there. A cistern. And beyond –

Here was the thought that kept forming: Marina had said Engelbert was asleep in the side room. Where was that side room now?

He looked behind him. The potted yucca was there but the doorway wasn’t. All was rubble and dust. Somewhere in his mind he heard the word hero. The idea was irresistible. This agony might have a shape. He wanted to disprove life’s lesson tonight: that it made no sense at all.