“You never told me.”
Marian shrugs. “You were in Dublin.”
I remember when Marian visited me at Trinity, how quiet she was while trailing after me around the galleries in Cabra, the canal where students sat drinking tins, the restaurant on Clanbrassil Street, the party at the Bernard Shaw. She barely said a word.
I’d noticed that my sister dressed differently than my friends, that she looked out of place, and then felt ashamed of myself for having noticed. I’d thought, stupidly, that Marian was intimidated by the larger, wealthier city, or by my friends, who spoke faster than her, wore different clothes, had seen and read different things, when really she’d just been preoccupied. She was already being recruited.
“We talked about Adam,” says Marian. “Seamus would come round to ask how I was doing, if I wanted to go for a coffee.”
Adam had been one of the students in Marian’s upper sixth form. They were both twenty when he took an overdose. I knew they had friends in common, but they hadn’t been especially close. I should have been the one to understand how much his death would affect her anyway, not Seamus.
“He was the only person who would talk about Adam with me. Everyone else pretended the problems didn’t exist.”
I don’t need to ask which problems. Third-generation unemployment, segregated schools, class discrimination, crumbling state housing. All of this money coming into the city from film shoots and tourism, cruise ships, construction, and none of it making its way to west or east Belfast. The game was rigged, the money only going to people who already had it.
“Seamus made me actually think about what it means to still be a colony,” she says. He gave her books about England’s other colonies, and what the empire did in Cyprus, Kenya, India, all the reasons the British flag is called the butcher’s apron. He gave her Simone de Beauvoir, Jane Jacobs, Edward Said. She says, “He’d ask me, what do you think of that? Do you agree?”
I close my eyes. Marian hadn’t been particularly good at school. Too dreamy, too inefficient. She’s bright, but she never understood when to rush during an exam or assignment. She was too meticulous. Teachers never pressed for her opinions or acted as if she had anything interesting to say, not like they had with me. The recruiters had known exactly what Marian longed for, the way they knew that certain teenage boys would want fast food and new trainers.
Seamus invited her to join a political discussion group, she tells me. During the day, Marian worked at a dry cleaner’s, and at night, she met with the group to drink Turkish coffee and argue political theory. “He opened my mind,” says Marian.
“You should have known what was happening.”
Marian doesn’t answer. She might have been completely aware, I realize, that she was being groomed, prepared for something. The idea might have excited her.
“That lasted a year,” she says. Then one day Seamus asked if he could borrow her flat for an hour. He needed someplace private to speak with a friend. Marian spent the hour in a kebab shop, eating a merguez roll.
From then on, every week or so, Seamus would say, “Do you mind giving us an hour?” And Marian would leave her flat and go to a café, or to the cinema, or to walk in circles around the city. Eventually Seamus asked if he could store a box at her house, then if she could deliver an envelope to an address in the New Lodge, and eight months later she was driving a car loaded with Semtex explosive from Dundalk to Belfast.
She swore the oath. I, Marian Daly, am a volunteer to the Irish Republican Army. She was sent to a training camp in Donegal, an isolated compound near the Glengesh Pass, where the new recruits spent three weeks learning close-quarters combat, counter surveillance, night maneuvers. Marian tells me that she sat at a table for hours learning how to chamber and fieldstrip a rifle.
“Was that fun? Did you enjoy yourself?”
“Yes,” she says.
“You’re like children.”
“We were,” she says, though in a different tone than mine.
While Marian was at the training camp, I’d thought she was on a hiking trip in the Cairngorms in Scotland. “Did you ever come close to telling me the truth?” I ask.
“No,” she says, and I’m surprised at how much this stings. I’d already come up with three or four occasions, like our holiday in France, when she must have nearly told me everything.
“Why did they choose you?”
“They wanted to recruit women,” she says. “We’re less likely to be searched.”