“For peace.”
“What makes you think we’re going to win?” he asks.
“Colonialism never wins. Not in the end.”
“You work for the colonialists, though. You’ve spent these seven years at the BBC.”
“It has half a million listeners a week. Do you not think people like us should have a say in what it broadcasts?”
Sometimes Seamus looks from me to Marian, like he’s comparing us. I know that Marian seems softer than me, gentler, especially in her fisherman’s jumper. I have on my work clothes, a long-sleeved tartan dress, stockings, and ankle boots. But we’re also similar, in our expressions, our mannerisms. What luck for him, to find someone so like Marian. He’d prefer a clone of her, probably. He knows that I’m not Marian, but, then, she’s one in a million.
“Why have you not volunteered before?” he asks.
“I was scared of going to prison. I still am, to be honest. I’m not like Marian. But I had a baby a year ago, and one day he’s going to ask me what I did to stop this.”
“And you want to tell him you were a terrorist?” asks Seamus.
“The state uses political violence every day, they only call it terrorism when the poor use it.”
We keep talking, and something settles in me, like silt falling to the bottom of a river. I feel more calm than I have in weeks. This isn’t so difficult. I’m a woman, after all, so I’ve had a lifetime of practice guessing what a man wants me to say, or be. Seamus wants me to be brisk and capable, and he wants me to be angry, which I am, only not in the direction he thinks.
Seamus asks me questions, and as I answer them, directly and mostly honestly, I think, I’m going to destroy you.
“We need a scout,” says Damian. “Are you likely to be stopped by the police?”
“No.”
“But you were interviewed at Musgrave after Marian’s robbery.”
“If the police were worried about me, I wouldn’t be allowed into work, not with the sort of politicians who come into Broadcasting House.”
“Have you ever been arrested?”
“No.”
“Have you ever been stopped and searched by the Crown forces?”
“I’ve had my car searched at roadblocks.” But, then, so has everyone.
“Have you attended any republican marches, events, or funerals?”
“No.”
“Do you drink in republican pubs?”
“I’ve been to the Rock a fair amount with our mother’s family.”
“You need to not go back there,” says Damian, and that’s when I know that I’m in.
28
FINN RAISES HIS ARM and makes a sound. “What is it?” I ask, and he repeats the sound with more urgency. I open the door to his room, and he pads over to his blanket, tugs it between the bars of his crib, and walks past me through the doorway, with the blanket trailing over his shoulder down his back.
“That’s new,” I say aloud.
The baby’s needs fill the rooms like water. He needs to be fed, changed, brought a cup of water, a particular ball. Because it’s early in the morning, each of these needs is fresh, and I can’t imagine finding them wearying, I can’t fathom ever not being limitlessly patient. He toddles over to me and I hoist him in my arms so he can watch me make coffee. Each action is rushed, done at speed, but taken together their effect is placid.
The kettle whistles, and from my hip Finn watches me pour the hot water over the coffee grounds. We’re alone in the house, with autumn sun blazing on the window frames. From here, it seems possible that the day could continue like this, absorbing everything into itself while remaining whole. It doesn’t need to fracture, the way all my days recently have done, into separate pieces, with no relation to one another.
It’s not exactly, or not entirely, that I want to stay at home with Finn all day. It’s more that I want to feel, with him, as acute and competent as I do at work, and at work, as receptive and absorbed as I do with him. I want things to start to blend together. I want to feel like being myself and being his mother are the same thing.
Maybe they already are. But then we lock the door, leaving the house, with a drift of muslin blankets and toys, a filter of wet coffee grounds, a tube of calendula lotion on the table, and as always, I’m surprised to be leaving, that the morning has ended, with all its busyness and warmth. We won’t be back for hours, and with that realization, the day does start to fracture.
By the time I’m in Belfast, I don’t have a single item on my person related to caring for a baby, except for one small sock at the bottom of my bag. My hands are free. I’m oddly sleek and unfettered, and the air in Belfast seems thinner, like I’ve changed elevation.