21
MARIAN IS WAITING ALONE at the bus stop in Newtownards in a shift dress and high-heeled ankle boots. She walks easily in the boots, which is odd, since she never wears heels. I remember her saying medics should only wear shoes they can run in.
“Are those new?” I ask as the bus swerves back onto the road.
“No.”
My sister knows how to chamber a gun, how to transport explosives, how to perform unarmed combat. Who’s to say she doesn’t also know how to run in heels. These clothes must be camouflage for the Malone Road, so she can follow Charles Cavil into the expensive restaurants and shops around his house, while her unit performs surveillance on him. He lives in a modern glass mansion on Osborne Place.
“Have you found any kompromat yet?” I ask.
“Some tax dodges,” she says.
“So what happens now?”
“One of our lads will approach him,” she says. “MI5 will have told Cavil how to respond. I’m sure they’ve already briefed him.”
I think of Marian’s unit parked outside his house, and Cavil inside uncorking a bottle of wine or cooking dinner, knowing that he’s being watched. It all seems like a farce.
The bus slows to a crawl in the Friday evening traffic. “How well do you know Eamonn?” I ask.
“Not very.” She says they only had short meetings, rolling-car meetings. She’d offer him information, and then she’d be back on the road, continuing her walk, with barely an interruption.
“He told me he’s from Strabane, but I can’t tell if his accent is real.”
“Probably not,” she says. “Does it matter?”
“I want to know if he’s lying to me.”
“Don’t think of it as lying,” she says. “Think of it as another layer of protection.”
We drive past farms, meadows, quiet ponds. All of this is in a conflict zone, behind security checkpoints, inside a military cordon. In Marian’s mind, this phase will be the end of hundreds of years of war, the last ever surge. Even then, I wish it weren’t happening.
“Do you have any information for Eamonn?” I ask.
“I’m doing an arms drop in Armagh tonight.”
A pit lodges in my stomach. If anyone sees her, she could be shot. “Are you going alone?”
“No, with Damian and Niall.”
I can’t tell whether that’s better or worse. The shoveling will go faster with three of them, but they will be more conspicuous. Marian tells me the location of the arms drop, in an apple orchard on the Monaghan Road.
“What if someone sees you?” I ask.
“No one will be out at that time of night.”
“If someone sees you, will you shoot him?”
“No.”
“Would Damian or Niall?”
She doesn’t answer, and I press myself away from her against the bus window, staring out at the knots of roofs and church steeples. “What’s wrong with this place? What happened to it?”
“They’re not monsters,” she says. “They’re fighting the British the way you’d fight Nazis. They think they’re doing the right thing.”
“Was Elgin Street right?”
“That wasn’t us, that was loyalists.”
“I don’t care which side it was. How could you have kept going after that?”
“You don’t understand. Once you’ve done something terrible, you have to keep going, you have to win, or else the terrible thing was for nothing.”
“So in a united Ireland you won’t feel guilty?”
“I’ll feel guilty for the rest of my life.”
We pass Mount Stewart, and soon the roofs of Greyabbey appear ahead.
“Can I see Finn?” she asks.
“Stop asking.”
* * *
—
While carrying Finn home from his day care, I find myself breathless with pity and guilt. I feel sorry for my sister, the way I would if she’d spent the last seven years ill, or an addict. Her life has been so much more difficult than mine.
Though I can’t only pity her. This wasn’t a car crash. It wasn’t alcoholism. She didn’t have a genetic predisposition for it, she decided to become a terrorist of her own free will. She swore a vow. I, Marian Daly, am a volunteer to the Irish Republican Army.
* * *
—
We’ll put surveillance on the arms drop,” says Eamonn when we meet at Ardglass, “and see who comes for it, and where they take it.”
“Don’t endanger her.”