“They’ll never know we’re there.”
After every meeting with Eamonn, I thrash through the water. My feet churn the surface and my arms plunge through it. At the headland, the current turns stronger, you can feel the cold drag of the tide, pulling you toward the North Sea.
In the water, I consider the information I’ve told Eamonn about her unit’s plans or routes or targets, and the ways his agency might act on it, and how that might be traced back to Marian or, somehow, to me.
I was never a fast swimmer before, but now it’s like sprinting. By the time I come out, my legs are limp. Saltwater courses down my body as I walk back through the dunes. In the car park, I pull on a t-shirt and untie my bikini underneath it, relieved to tug off its clammy weight. I squeeze the water from my hair, push my sandy feet into shoes, and then drop to my hands and knees to look under the car for a bomb. Even after checking, I’m scared before turning the key. I sit there, thinking about Finn.
At home, the muscles behind my shoulder blades ache when I lift the baby, when I raise my arms in the shower, when I climb into bed at night.
* * *
—
Sometimes I stop far past where the waves break, treading water, and watch the fishing trawlers. “The IRA is bringing in a shipment,” Marian said. “That’s why I was in Ballycastle. They sent me to the north coast to look for a landing site.”
The shipment will be coming from Croatia on a private yacht owned by an arms dealer. Sometime this autumn, the yacht will be met in the Mediterranean by an Irish fishing trawler, which will load its cargo, return home, and land at night somewhere on the north coast.
“They need someplace isolated,” Marian said. “I found a beach west of Ballycastle, but they’re considering others.”
Neck-deep in the water, I watch the trawlers, and think about the yacht, a large vessel with a full crew, and wonder if any of them know what’s on board.
“Forty-five tons of gelignite,” said Marian.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It’s enough for thirty large bombs.”
22
I COLLAPSE INTO A CHAIR next to my mother, tearful with fatigue. Finn is in his crib, but he’ll be up again in a few hours. He has never been a good sleeper. In his first weeks, I’d think he’d finally drifted off, then look in the bassinet and see his pacifier moving furiously up and down.
“Why won’t he sleep through the night?” I ask. It’s lonely, rising from bed in the darkness to feed and change him. Sometimes at night I feel homesick, this huge, inappropriate longing for my own mother, and to be back in my childhood bedroom.
“The first year is hard,” she says. I rest my cheek on the table, and she strokes my hair. “He’ll sleep through soon enough. You were the same as a baby, so you were. Absolute torture.”
Hearing that is inordinately comforting, for some reason. My mam looks down. “Are those my socks?”
“Oh.”
She sighs. “Give them back next time, Tessa.”
Before she leaves, I wrap some almond biscuits in foil and tuck them into her bag, next to a black smock. “What is this?”
“It’s my uniform.”
“You don’t wear a uniform.”
“I do now,” she says lightly. “The Dunlops fired me.”
“Because of Marian?”
“Yes.”
She found a new job at a chain hotel in the city center. At the Dunlops’， my mother was often alone in the house, and free to plan her own day, to take their labradors for a long walk in the woods every afternoon. She adored those dogs, she has a picture of them taped to her fridge. Now she’s indoors all day, cleaning one identical room after the other, and the work is more strenuous. The hotel times its maids, forcing them to finish a set number of rooms per hour.
“It’s just a change,” she says. “I’ll get used to it.”
“Are you applying to other places?” I ask.
“Most people don’t like their jobs, Tessa. Not everyone is as lucky as you.”
“There must be another position like the Dunlops’，” I say stubbornly, though maybe not for her, for the mother of a terrorist. “How are you not angry with her?”
“Marian asked me to forgive her,” she says.
“So?”
My mam gives me a look, less of disappointment than bewilderment. It’s easier for her to forgive Marian than it is for me. She has been prepared for this all her life, her whole religion is based on sin and atonement, expiation, remorse.