They deserve to know about the risk. I want to tell them, except I have no real information. A bomb might rip through here in seconds, or tomorrow, or next year, or never. The same could be said of any crowded place in Belfast.
The fish stalls where we bought the clams for our linguine are at the north end of the hall. Here the air is colder from all the crushed ice. Customers are buying oysters, asking about the monkfish, tasting samples of dried seaweed. Water drips from a hose in the corner. I find the vendor selling mussels, clams, and scallops. This same man took our order, placing it on the same scale. I remember watching as one side of it dropped under the weight.
The market was even more crowded then. I felt relaxed, with the baby in his carrier on my chest. He was wearing the cardigan Marian had given him, with buttons shaped like Peter Rabbit. Marian had bought some rose-flavored Turkish delight. She let Finn hold the bag, and he sat in his carrier, levered forward a little, gripping the pouch of dusty-pink marzipan cubes.
Marian had on a Fair Isle jumper, with her raincoat tied around her waist and her brown hair twisted up in a knot. She was there with us, laughing and talking as we moved between the stalls.
“Did Marian have a bag with her?” the detective asked.
I described her leather backpack. Fenton asked its dimensions, and I set my hands apart on the table. He looked down at them for a few moments, then back up at me, and the expression on his face made my heart knock. “That would be big enough,” he said. “The device we found was eight inches long.”
I didn’t tell him that the trip had been Marian’s idea. We were sitting around our mother’s house that Saturday, and Marian said, “What do you fancy doing today? Want to cook something?”
It doesn’t matter that she suggested the trip. I’ve never watched a terrorist planting a bomb, but that can’t possibly be how they act. Marian didn’t show any sort of strain. She had a long chat with the vendor at the crêpe stall, she can’t have considered him a target.
The detective thinks that Marian was using Finn as a sort of cover, that with him in her arms, she could open a fire door, walk into a disused corridor, and hide the bomb, without drawing any suspicion.
Standing in the middle of the market, I pass my hand over my eyes. I didn’t tell Fenton about the conversation we had with our mother before we left her house.
“I can mind the baby,” she said.
“Oh,” said Marian, “no, let’s bring him, he’ll love it.”
9
FINN ARCHES HIS BACK and twists his head, his face blanched from crying. “It’s all right, sweetheart, it’s all right,” I tell him as we pace the length of the house. On the third lap, I call my friend Francesca, a doctor at the Royal Victoria in Dublin. “Finn won’t stop crying,” I say. He began crying soon after my return from St. George’s. It had already seemed like a long stretch before my mam left for the prison, and that was hours ago now.
“Yes, I can hear that. For how long?”
“Five hours.”
“Hmm,” says Francesca. “He’s not hungry? Cold? Wet?”
“No. He had some vaccinations last week, though, could this be a reaction?”
“Does he have a fever?”
“No.”
She yawns. “Then probably not.”
“Do you think he’s teething?”
“Could be. You can try massaging his gums. Or give him some Calpol if he really won’t settle.”
I rub the baby’s gums while he stares up at me, bewildered. It doesn’t seem to help. I position him on my forearm in a colic hold, and he lies there, his limbs dangling, his head in my palm, with an expression of weary forbearance.
He starts to arch his back. I rock and shush him, but already he’s howling. My hair hurts. Every time I move my head, the elastic pinches its strands.
This house is too hot. And too small. I don’t know how the size of it has never bothered me before. The ceiling barely seems to clear the top of my head. I pace the miniature living room, bouncing Finn while he wails.
When I bought it, the house was crumbling. It needed a new boiler, new wiring, new pipes. I tore clumps of rotted pink insulation from the ceiling, ripped up the carpet, sanded the wood floor. I had the kitchen torn out and rebuilt, and the bathroom tiled and grouted, and I coated the walls and the ceiling in creamy new paint. It was finished days before Finn was born.
I’d been proud to bring him home to this house. I hadn’t realized it would shrink in direct proportion to his crying.