“We’re filling a gap in the Newry brigade.”
“Why?”
“The police shot all of them.”
I don’t know what to say to this, so we sit in silence for a few moments. “I brought you something.”
“Did you?” she asks, and I wince at how pleased she sounds over such a small kindness.
When she sees the bag from the natural foods shop, her eyes widen. She reaches into the footwell to pull it onto her lap, then opens it and stares down at the apothecary jars.
Marian is silent. For a terrible moment, I think that she’s about to admit that she never believed in any of this, that it was part of her cover. Instead, she lets out a long sigh. She moves slowly through the bag, her face rapt, like she’s opening a Christmas stocking.
Watching her, I understand how much she misses her independence, her routines. She doesn’t have any respite anymore. She is fully conscripted now, between the IRA and MI5.
“Are you homesick?” I ask.
“It was never going to last,” she says. “I’m surprised it did for that long.”
Over the past seven years, Marian tells me, she knew that every weekend she spent visiting a gallery, or watching a film, or shopping, was time she’d stolen. The British government might have arrested her at any moment. They might have come close, on any number of occasions. She was an enemy of the state. Sometimes she added up her prospective prison time. Membership of a banned organization, firearms offenses, explosives offenses. It would depend on the judge, but she could be given multiple life sentences.
“Not anymore,” I say. “If you’re arrested, Eamonn will get you out.”
“Maybe,” she says. “Or maybe that would raise too much suspicion. There are plenty of informers in prison right now so their cover won’t be blown.”
“Are you serious?”
Marian nods. During the Troubles, she says, some informers served ten years in prison, were released, rejoined the IRA, and kept informing. I can’t believe it. I can’t think of any political cause that would make me wait out a decade in prison.
“Would you?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “If it would help bring peace. But I’m used to the idea of prison, I’ve thought about it for years.”
“You should be in prison,” I say, but without heat, like I’m trying to talk her out of it and into another solution. Marian understands this and doesn’t respond. Of course she can’t serve a life sentence.
“What are you going to do about the flat? Do you want me to empty it?” I ask.
“Not yet,” she says. For now, she will keep paying the rent, the gas and electric.
“Do you want to go back?”
“Yes, if I can.”
“Do you want your old job back?”
“I don’t know.”
Marian says that her work as a paramedic blurred into her work with the IRA. She doesn’t know if she could separate the two. It often seemed like part of the same project, whether she was patrolling the city in her ambulance or with her unit. She treated enough gunshot and beating victims from the conflict that even others, with strokes or sports injuries, began to seem like victims of the war.
She tells me that once while treating a stroke victim, she became convinced that some figures in her peripheral vision were SAS officers about to shoot her. She’d startled, dropping the oxygen mask, scaring her patient.
“You could collect your pension,” I say. “You could let the IRA set you up with a villa in Bulgaria.”
“Most people stay,” says Marian, ignoring my sarcasm. She says most former members, given the option, choose a room in Divis tower over a villa abroad. It makes sense. How could you leave a country after fighting a war for it? They’ve been in the thick of things for years, they don’t want to miss whatever happens next. What would they even do in Bulgaria?
I hate to say it, but we have that in common. When I travel, even to someplace more beautiful, more civilized, a part of me is always aware of my distance from the center, the source of life. When the plane lands back in Belfast, even in spitting rain, even when the city is at its most bleak and littered, I think, Right, we’re back, let’s get into it.
On one holiday, Tom got annoyed with me for reading the news from home, and it did seem like a failing that I couldn’t pick up a local paper and transfer my interest. I couldn’t explain how it felt like a moral duty to follow our news, like my responsibility to listen and understand. Maybe it wouldn’t in a region where the news wasn’t so volatile, where if you looked away for a minute the whole place wouldn’t slide into an abyss.