* * *
—
For the rest of the morning, I listen to interviews on the radio with government ministers. I move around the house, cleaning, cooking, folding laundry, while thinking, I need to speak with her, I need to stop her from doing something appalling. The fact that I can’t contact her is unbearable.
On the radio, one of our presenters, Orla, is interviewing the chief constable. “Do you plan to evacuate the city center?” she asks.
“No,” says the chief constable. “Not at this time.”
Orla sounds ready to erupt. “You’re telling us there’s going to be an attack, but not where.”
“We don’t know where.”
“Should we just wait and see?”
The chief constable starts to answer, but Orla cuts him off. “The IRA has announced that they intend to escalate the conflict. How will this campaign be different? Will their targets be different?”
“We’re working with the intelligence services and the army to understand the exact nature of the current threat.”
“Are they going to target a primary school?”
I stop with my hands in the sink. “We aren’t aware of threats against any specific locations,” says the chief constable. “We don’t have cause to shut schools at this time.”
Orla makes a sound of disbelief, and my mouth turns dry. She keeps questioning the chief constable about schools, asking if parents should make the decision themselves to keep their children at home this week.
“That would be up to them,” he says, implacable. Before she can ask another question, he says, “To everyone listening, we need your help. We all know that the IRA relies on its community for protection. I believe there are people listening who have seen the preparations for a large-scale attack. They still have time to stop it.”
Marian, I think. Marian.
* * *
—
I finally switch off the radio and leave to buy aspirin for my headache. On the path into town, a boat idles in the cove below me, water dripping from the blades of its outboard motor. From here, I can’t see the city, or the helicopters above it. Greyabbey remains untouched. Brigadoon, Marian called it. I hadn’t wondered at the time if that was an insult.
I could do this with any of our conversations. None of them are stable anymore, they could all mean something entirely different than what I’d thought at the time. I must have seemed so stupid to her.
Marian went to Serbia in March to buy guns. She also came to my house in March. Finn was in his reflux phase then, only ten weeks old, and barely sleeping. Marian brought me two freezer bags of prepared dishes from an expensive deli on the Malone Road. Wild mushroom risotto, chicken pie, butternut squash lasagna, fish cakes, spanakopita. What was that? A sop to her conscience?
Had she wanted to tell me about Serbia, or was she relieved to find me so easily misdirected? All of my concerns—about colic, bottles, swaddling—must have seemed so trivial after where she had been. I wonder if she found me boring, domestic. Not a gunrunner like her.
I walk past a wooden gate spotted with white moss. It grows quickly here in the humid air from the sea, across roof slates and fences and the branches of apple trees. I look at the moss, the rosehips, the spindly pines. Marian might think I’m a traitor, or a collaborator, for living here, in a mostly Protestant village, but I won’t feel ashamed for deciding to live here, for wanting this more than Rebel Sunday at the Rock bar. She hasn’t taken the more righteous path.
Past the open windows of the dance studio on the main street, a children’s ballet class is rehearsing, their slippers scratching across the floor. I step inside the chemist’s. Down the aisle, a woman holds up two boxes of cough syrup for her son and says, “Which do you fancy, grape or cherry?”
At the back, Martin is ringing up a customer. “Right, Johnny, how are you?”
“Not too bad,” says the old man, and they start talking about a singer on The Graham Norton Show last night. Neither of them can remember his name. Martin says, “He’d be your man in Traviata.”
I consider the different strengths of aspirin. “Oh,” says the old man. “Bocelli?”
“He’s the very one,” says Martin, and then behind me an explosion erupts.
I throw myself toward the floor, catching my forehead on the sharp corner of a shelf. Someone on the road is shouting, and a shape races past the window. Next to me, the other woman is also on the floor, shielding her son with her body. Outside, a voice screams a name. The sunlight on the window makes my eyes water. It might be only a bomb, or a bomb and gunmen.