For two hours each week, Michael Farrell answers questions about Ireland. It is the autumn of 1993. The students in the Modern Irish Politics class pitch the questions eagerly, their bright college scarves and wool turtleneck sweaters showcasing soft, intelligent faces. Michael feels like he is standing in the middle of the rugby field, trying to catch a series of quickly approaching punts. He cannot possibly catch them all, so the key is simply to move the action forward; but when he does respond, the truth said out loud sounds skinny and strange. Regardless of how awkward the answers feel leaving his mouth, they generate lively conversation among the students—their snappy voices overlap and interrupt one another. Michael participates in these conversations as a specimen only, like a patient who is diagnosed while he is asleep.
The questions: about his hometown (West Belfast), and how much active battle he’s seen (Enough). Is it appropriate to ask his age? (Yes, twenty-one). And does he consider himself a freedom fighter or a terrorist? (Neither. He is Irish). Each week the questions become increasingly complex. How does he feel about Ian Paisley’s inflammatory rhetorical style? Does he think Gerry Adams adequately represents the consciousness of Republicans in the North? He opens and shuts his mouth, the dips and crests of his accent echoing in the windowless room.
When the discussion has ended and readings for the next week are assigned, Michael walks with his classmates to the Buttery Bar at the east end of College Green. Students ride by on bikes that rattle across the courtyard, blur as they move through the front arch of Trinity College and lurch into the quick stream of Dublin traffic.
Once inside the red-lit pub, students light cigarettes, lean back in wooden chairs, let the talk of politics and history fade to a low murmur. Now they discuss weekend rugby matches, plan to meet at this disco or that pub. Michael watches their bodies go slack and calm. He admires the droop of a hand off the back of a chair, the loll of a head over a pint, a belly laugh. He watches, learning this practice—of living in a present that is not defined by the past.
After class, Michael is exhausted; he feels hollow, squeezed of words. Memories churn inside him. Although he cannot remember the names of his classmates from minute to minute, he recalls other details with painful clarity: entire sentences from written orders he once received and the cadence of battalion commands come to him in dreams.
*
The feeling of emptiness finally takes him back to his first year in the Fifth Battalion of the Third Northern Division of the Irish Republican Army. Michael stands in a vacant lot outside West Belfast, a continuous drizzle soaking him through his thin jacket. His brother Sean is small and shivering beside him, his dark hair dripping water down his neck and into his ears.
"Button your bleedin’ jacket, Sean." Sean tugs the flaps closer, but the jacket is Michael’s old one and will not accommodate Sean’s broad shoulders. "Ah, for Christ’s sake." Michael takes off his jacket and twists it like a towel around Sean’s neck, Michael’s own shirt slowly sticking to his belly. "No worries, Sean," he whispers as they move closer to the edge of the lot. "They’re meant to scare us."
"It’s bloody working," says Sean, falling behind Michael in the marching line. Michael is ashamed that the smell of damp garbage makes saliva slick his mouth and his stomach twist with hunger. Before his death, Michael’s father, Declan, spent nearly five years in a Liverpool prison, since 1977. Arrested and charged with conspiracy against the Crown, he was never given a fair trial. During this time, the family’s contact with Declan was reduced to letters that carried the thick black marks of prison editors and read like nonsense: "—miss you—I wish—remember to—food—there’s a man—I need—I love you." Michael tries to remember them, but they are words thrown out from a distance, making no contact with anyone or anything, except damp walls that absorb all light and sound.
Michael’s mother, Norah, finds it difficult to feed herself and three boys on the dole and the small amount of money that comes monthly from IRA headquarters. On the east wall of the Sacred Heart School on Lower Falls Road there is a mural dedicated to Michael’s father, NEVER SUBMIT written in white block letters beneath a likeness of his face. But local martyrdom will not feed and clothe a family. The IRA will, at least for the two boys old enough to join, which Michael and Sean do after Sean’s thirteenth birthday.
The two boys already have years of experience delivering notes, maps, money, and crumpled envelopes full of ammunition to gruff men in dance halls and pubs who slap them on the back and tug their ears and say "good lad" and "There’s your man, Michael, doing his bit for Ireland." Michael’s speed and intelligence make him a valuable messenger and Sean’s tiny hands make him useful for small weapon drops. Once Sean put a small loaded pistol in the kneeling bench inside the confessional booth at a church near Shankhill Road—the gun was used later in a successful shooting.
*
"Get your dirty arses into the bins." The battalion chief gestures a bulky thumb over his shoulder where enormous heavy-lidded rubbish bins stand in a row. The boys look around at each other, shifting nervously. "You eejits scared of a little dirt, are yeh?" He paces in dirty boots that come up to his knees. He is barely eighteen and does not tell them his name. He looks directly at Michael as he speaks. "This is only practice for the kinds of places you’ll have to sleep when you’re on the run—with the pigs, in the shite, in the absolute feckin’ rubbish. This isn’t beauty school. Now go!" He shakes his finger and one by one the boys hoist themselves into the stinking bins.
They climb out a few hours later, covered with soot-soaked receipts and bits of stale bread and soggy newspaper. The rain is coming down heavier now and the boys’ foul stench fills the humid air. The battalion chief and the unit commander, a much older man, are crouched near the ground, rain streaming off the tarp held over their heads, a pile of dirty guns and sticks of dynamite at their feet.
"It’s a good lot, then," says the commander, his breath coming in quick cloudy bursts. He reaches out and touches a pistol carefully.
"Jesus, Mary and Joseph will you look at that, Michael," says Sean.
"There’s a feckin’ lot of guns there," Michael says.
"We’re in business, boys," says Sean, slapping Michael and another stinky boy on the back.
The battalion chief picks up a long rifle, gingerly turning it over in his hands. "Jesus, do they not have a feckin’ clue how to use one?" Sean laughs. He is like this before drops, too. Loud, jittery.
"Shut it, Sean."
But the battalion chief is already at Sean’s back. "So." He taps Sean’s shoulders with the rifle. "We’ve got a joker, have we then?"
Sean looks at him, at Michael, at his own filthy clothes.
"You want to talk shite?" He prods Sean in the back and Sean lurches forward. "You can get back in there, you eejit. . . ."
Just moments before, Sean was clenching Michael’s hand like the thirteen-year-old child he is, sitting in piles of trash with the other boys, trying to decipher the muffled phrases from behind rotten milk containers or secrets whispered through bloody butcher paper. Michael watches Sean’s boyish jaw clench. Michael sees the hard man he will become, and a jab of fear punches him like a fist in his belly.
*
"Michael, you want a smoke?" The young woman sitting next to Michael offers him a cigarette. He nods and she lights it for him, her smooth white hand lingering in front of his face. It was pride I felt, he thinks, as he inhales and leans back. I was proud of Sean’s meanness—the way he could turn it on, be a man.
Michael concentrates on what is being said at the table, trying to stay in the moment. He empties packet after packet of white sugar into his coffee. His classmates begin to disperse, slinging their book bags over their shoulders, tightening their scarves against the cool Dublin air and striding peacefully away into the world of their evening—to catch a bus, to meet a friend, to study. Michael buys a chocolate bar and sits on College Green. He watches the workmen move inside the scaffolding on the other side of the quadrant. Every ten years or so the university buildings must be cleaned.
The wind blowing across Dublin absorbs the pollution of the Liffey River and eventually the soot finds the buildings, where it sinks deep into the limestone. It will take a crew of many and almost nine months to remove the charcoal-colored stains. The workmen reach up from inside the prism of metal beams, peeling away the black layers—a slow, tedious process. There is not much natural light left, so the men move quickly, scraping and lifting. Michael eats the chocolate bar so slowly that the heat from his hand melts it in dark streaks between his thick fingers before it reaches his lips.
*
Norah Farrell looks out over the Falls Road while she has her tea: a few biscuits, a slice of cheese, and two, three, four glasses of gin with a splash of tonic. She wears her pink and gray drinking robe and a tarnished crucifix that she is never without around her neck. The cheap chain sinks into the sweaty folds of skin and needs to be adjusted constantly. Although she rarely goes out except to the market or the liquor store, she still colors her hair a deep, rich black and winds it into a tight bun at the base of her neck.
She does the back-page crossword puzzle quickly before the drink begins to make the words swim. Between words, she thinks about the article she read in the newspaper this morning. It appears that, out of all Gerry Adams’ possible worries about West Belfast at the moment, so-called hoodlums are high on the list. He takes issue with local kids graduating to petty crime and vandalizing the peace line between the Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods. Hoodlums! So, Norah grumbles to herself—filling in ‘stout’ as a five-letter simile for ‘solid’—the fight has deteriorated to this: worrying over kids taking neighbors’ cars for joy rides in the streets, stealing empty baby prams from the sidewalks and tossing eggs at the chipping, fading murals along the peace line under cover of night. And the peace line? In her mind it’s not a symbol of anything at all—just a long corridor between Shankhill Road and Falls Road where the army lookout stations cast strange shadows on the deserted pedestrian footpath below.
She watches a new television show to which she is mildly attached, meaning she only watches every other day. Norah saves the word addiction for those things she does habitually, namely, dreaming and drinking, the one habit taking her back inside the other. In the show, contestants speed down the aisles of the supermarket trying to collect the items on their grocery lists in the shortest amount of time; Norah likes it because after three glasses of gin, the moments become a series of blurred action, one never more distinct than another. Years of hard drinking make this kind of action familiar to her.
Norah thinks she hears the scrape of a key in a latch and she perks up. Ah, yes. The boys must be on their way. Yes, yes, she thinks, as she moves to the window, her gin-soaked nightgown cool against her sagging breasts, finally they are here—of course they are, they know who she is. She will invite them in, hand them a bowl of soup, a glass of port; she will lay out fresh sheets on her bed and pour them a hot bath, and only then will she call the men who give the orders. She will explain the next move to the young anxious faces of the boys who stand before her. Teach them how to shoot if they have not yet learned properly, careful to use the silencer when they practice in the room beneath the kitchen. With me, she thinks, they will move through Belfast corridors that nobody else knows.
She imagines pulling the boys to her chest as she never did with her own boys, all lost to her now in one way or another: Sean to Heaven, God rest him, and Michael to Dublin, where he is busy betraying all that she holds dear. Only Liam, her youngest, will do justice to the family name and avenge his father. She has sent him to live with an old buddy of Declan’s who is active in the real IRA, a purist splinter group. She tries to straighten with pride, but the drink has already made her too loose. Norah grips the gin bottle, and in her mind before she can stop the image, she grips a thigh and pulls a boy, any boy, to the ground, touching him gently at first and then more forcefully as she tells him all about the sacrifices she’s made. Her memories move in and out like colors, brightening and fading, carried on the wave of gin and stale desire.
The buzzer sounds as the contestants rush to collect their final items and the winner crosses the finish line. Outside, searchlights probe the streets of this West Belfast neighborhood, thick beams that reach through windows and curtains and fall across Norah’s sweaty face.
*
You know how it will be when you step into the Crane pub on a small street off Eyre Square in Galway and you are recognized as Declan Farrell’s son, Liam. Your father’s reputation runs like a sort of magic in your blood—other people can see it too and are mindful to pay their respects. Lads who knew your Da in his glory years as an army commander treat you as if they rocked you in the cradle themselves: they pat you on the back, give you a slap, and give you a gun. "Hey Liam," they say, "we’re glad you’re here, there’s work to do." And you are desperate for work. The kind of work Da talked about in the prison letters Michael used to read aloud at the kitchen table. You remember the angry song of his breath and Ma sitting with her hands folded, her limp hair falling into her eyes.
You believe, from the time of your first memory, that violence is the pivot point around which the family unit turns. You wake up one night as a young child to a bright moon hanging in your window. You look out and see your brother Michael walking straight and serious, taking long drags off a cigarette. Suddenly he leaps into a shadow and reappears in the moonlight holding Colin Sullivan by the collar of his shirt in one hand. You watch Michael twist the boy’s arm all the way around his back until you feel it snap, even though you can’t hear it.
You want a chance to get your hands dirty with the smell of battle and sweat-slicked metal. Solid. That’s what you feel here, solid and part of a human mass that is moving toward something, anything but the tenement blocks in West Belfast where there is no job waiting and even less pride. You decide on this day, as the men greet you, that you will never again waste your time sitting in school and learning about Irish history from English Protestant wankers, all fresh from their rich-boy educations at Cambridge and talking like they have sticks up their noses. Michael has gone complete shite on you and the Army has become more complicated, true, but you have a debt to pay—to your name. To your family’s honor. To your own.
*
At four o’clock, the Dublin sky is already black and deep. Michael leaves the iron gates of Trinity College, walks first to Kennedy’s Pub for a pint and then to the DART station, where he catches a halting green train to the suburb of Blackrock. There is a dark-haired woman on his train who reads standing up; she holds her book over the seated commuters like a broken fan. The spine says "Lecky Library." He’s seen this stamped on her books before, so he knows she doesn’t buy her books either. He sees her sometimes in the history department—they have the same advisor—but Michael is on a hardship scholarship reserved for "disadvantaged students with exceptional academic promise," another nice way of saying he’s managed to be smart while also being poor and therefore deserves university funding. And so he must endure frequent lectures from Professor Walsh, who smokes a pipe as he talks, staring out his large picture window, never once looking at Michael. Afterwards, Michael must write an essay on a contemporary political issue of the professor’s last minute choosing, usually unrelated to the lecture. Although he accepts these afternoons as part of his penance, the little tests still make him feel stupid and primitive.
So when Michael sees the dark-haired woman sitting on the floor outside the office, scribbling in a notebook, her tiny glasses perched at the end of her nose, he can say nothing. He walks to the end of the hallway without looking back, sweating in his leather jacket.
*
Although the Ballymurphy Boxing Gym in Derry has welcomed both Protestant and Catholic boys for years, tensions are rising in the late 1960s, together with talk of running the Protestant boys out. Norah hears the rumors one summer while she is working as the gym’s mat-girl. She is young and round and her hair hangs to her shoulders in light brown waves.
Norah cleans the dirty bags and mats with disinfectant and organizes the heavy boxing equipment while the boys practice. Late one night she is pulling clean towels from the clothes washer in back when she hears voices coming from just outside the supply closet door. She moves into the closet and begins stacking the dusty gear quietly, stifling a cough. Her curiosity tries to catch exact words, but she hears only muffled, unfamiliar male voices and the loud voice of Coach Malloy, who must think she has already gone. She opens the door slowly, just a crack, and peeks out, where she sees men in sleeveless undershirts playing cards and smoking, their belts loosened to free their round bellies.
From their hushed conversations over the next few weeks, she learns that the IRA is recruiting again and old battalions are reorganizing. The men talk about the Unionist bastards they hold responsible for the growing number of Catholics losing their jobs each week at the refineries, packing plants, and distilleries. Some of the men want the Protestant kids ousted to avoid any potential conflict—let them find another gym that is not in the Catholic neighborhood of the Bogside. Others hope the act will elicit the opposite effect and kick-start the Nationalist networks building all across the city of Derry. Norah knows only her father’s opinion of the IRA—drunks, perverts, wankers. Fenian bastards who don’t know their head from their arse.
One afternoon the water boy calls in sick and Coach Malloy asks Norah to fill in. When she steps into the practice room, the humid stench of sweat makes her dizzy. It is the first time she has been in a room with so many boys, especially Protestant boys.
The boys take turns jabbing at one another playfully. Their thin torsos bob and weave behind swinging bags bigger than they are. She senses that the men’s plans, whatever they are, will soon change them all. The fact that she feels this, and believes that the sweating boys before her do not, makes her shiver with delight. She walks through the rows of exercising bodies, conscious of being noticed; she throws her chest a little higher and places one foot directly in front of the other so her round hips dip to the right and left. She can tell from the subtle shift in the air that the boys appreciate this.
Coach Malloy stubs out his cigarette on the floor and hands Norah the butt. She clutches it in her palm as he speaks. "You throw me the towels when I tell you, catch the gloves from the boys when they’re done with practice and throw them here." He kicks an empty bin behind him. "And hand them a towel—that’s at the end of practice, yeah?"
Norah nods, the warm cigarette growing damp in her hand.
"Now I need you just to sit over there, like. And stay out of the bloody way." A new cigarette is lit. "And fetch the water or soda when I tell you. I’ll be having you time some of the rounds, too."
She nods again, averting her eyes, and sits down on the edge of the boxing ring. She watches the boys punch, their skinny arms snapping back quickly to their sides. In bed at night she sometimes shuts her eyes and imagines that sea of extended arms; she hears the shuffle of feet across the mats, the sound of fists making contact with the solid bags, and a low throbbing begins below her belly. With her hand she takes herself to a place that will require a torturous few minutes at the next day’s confession.
After a few days calling times and rounds in the middle of the ring, Norah learns to detect the smell of different boys. When Catholic boys sweat, they smell like moldy vestments and old cathedrals; the Protestants smell like lemon verbena soap and frying beef.
One night the boy who is last in line puts out his gloved hands in front of her. Norah knows him; she admires his fights—light on his feet, he makes smooth wide arcs around the other boys, carefully choosing his punches and usually taking out his opponent in less than three rounds.
"Well, help me off with these, then." His hair is dark and straight and his arms are freckled and thin, but the muscles are defined, hard-looking. With shaking hands she unties his gloves. When a hand is free, he shakes hers and runs his thumb across her rough palm. "I’ve seen you," he says, jumping back to do a quick right hook and an uppercut. "I’m Declan Farrell."
"Norah McDermott," she says, reaching her hand out to his again, already missing the warmth of his skin.
"I see you right now," he says and his smile is a fast beam of light moving across his face.
Soon Norah is waiting for Declan each day outside the gym, her whole body lit with nerves. They kiss and grope one another in the alley and Norah tells Declan what she hears the old men saying.
"Da says it’s a sign of something brewing," says Declan, nodding. He points to the graffiti-covered wall. "See that one there, and there?" He shows her distinct marks and phrases of boys he knows, both Protestant and Catholic. The old graffiti is replaced more quickly each day with new and fresh swipes of angry color. Already Declan and his friends are making Nationalist marks on walls all over the city, not just in Bogside.
"Things are changing," he says. He strokes her forehead and kisses her neck. "I’ll show you—just wait and see."
And this is how Norah Farrell joins the Nationalist Youth Division of the Westside Catholics in Derry.
*
When Michael steps off the DART in Blackrock, he walks uphill to the dormitory where he rents a cheap room with a fishbowl-sized window. There is no hot water or heat—he often writes out his assignments wearing gloves. In the communal kitchen he prepares a dinner of bacon and mash with other budget students, to whom he does not speak. After dinner he walks past lovely brick homes and clean corner shops to the sea. On the rocky beach he watches the refinery set in the curve of Dublin Bay smudge the sky with oily wounds. He is not used to the soft sides and bright counters of Dublin; he longs for gritty secrets passed in pubs with sticky floors and poor lighting.
At night Michael tosses in the intense suburban silence. He feels the quiet around his neck, choking him. Rising, he looks out to the road drawn like a thick black line in the distance. He taps the window; he runs the water in the sink; he bounces on the sagging bed just to hear it creak; he pushes empty hangers down the metal rail in the tiny closet.
*
On the day of her first meeting for Westside Catholics, Norah’s father comes at her with a frying pan. It is a common occurrence for the man to employ household items as weaponry, and Norah is relieved to see that it is not an iron as it has been before, yanked from the wall only a few minutes before it makes contact with her backside.
"You feckin’ tart."
A piece of thick, whiskey-laced spit lands on Norah’s neck. Her father’s eyes are red, his face swollen and sweating. He approaches slowly, kicking aside empty beer cans and Wheetabix boxes that litter the floor. But Norah has been watching Declan carefully, and when her father finally swings at her she ducks and pushes past his round body and out the door.
"Feckin’ Fenian bitch! They’re all losers! You!"
Norah runs down the stairs, her re-heeled shoes clicking on the concrete. She adjusts her wool skirt and licks her lips, freshly painted with a soft brown color she pilfered from the newsagent this afternoon. She looks up when she hears the pan hit the wall of the flat and her parents are at it again. She takes off down the street; the leaves from the few trees on the sidewalk cast small shadows in her path.
Once at the King’s Head Pub on Mary Street, Norah and Declan walk around to a small door in the alley. Declan pulls Norah to him, knocking at the door with his right hand, his left hand already halfway up her thigh. The door swings open and Declan pulls her inside. The basement of the pub reeks of hops and barley, and serious-looking people sit with their feet propped up on empty kegs. Norah recognizes some of the Catholic boys from the boxing gym; dressed in shiny tracksuit pants, they fidget next to their fathers. Some of the older men have arms heavy with tattoos, while others sport the Irish tricolor on their polyester lapels.
As more people begin to arrive, the talk shifts to an upcoming sit-in for equal housing sponsored by the recently formed Northern Irish Civil Rights Association. Some of the men and women in the group want to bring about change by less peaceful means—they want action and American-style protests. Norah feels elated, like her mind is opening up. She has only ever lived in the Ballymurphy Housing Estate in one of the soot-covered blocks of cramped flats, where anything that is said in one room is heard in another. Her father knows only how to lift a pint, not a hammer or a gun or any other useful thing. Norah has been told that her proper place is in the kitchen or the nursery, but here are women wearing trousers who speak boldly and well. Declan squeezes her hand and stands up to introduce her to the others. They acknowledge her and, just like that, she belongs. She’s family. No application, no interview, no judgment. She’s in.
When the meeting is over, Norah and Declan walk quickly along the slow river to Williams Street, barely able to keep their hands off each other. According to Coach Malloy, Norah’s presence among the boys makes them punch harder and talk back less, so he gives her the keys to the gym. They shed their clothes and backpacks as soon as the front door is locked from the inside, and Norah has her first time in the supply closet, her butt pressed into a stack of recently cleaned mats.
Declan kisses her gently and runs his fingers through Norah’s fine hair, angel hair he calls it. She loves that he loves her—she can’t get enough of this new feeling. She asks him endless questions about his family, his life, his plans. Declan Farrell: son of the Irish Republican Brotherhood president in Derry, grandson of an IRA captain who fought against the Union Jack in the glory years, great grandson of a man who fought in the Easter Rising. He will marry her, she thinks, and this lineage of brave, proud men will be her life’s greatest accomplishment.
"I want to fight," he explains, his eyes bright in the dark. "And not just with bags and gloves." He punches a heavy bag that hangs from the ceiling. "I want to fight for real."
As Declan walks her home through the dark streets, he suddenly starts and curses. He spins her around and they backtrack to a low wall covered in graffiti. Fresh red paint reads The IRA: Ran away once, will do it again. "Ah Jesus, will you look at that." Declan reaches inside his rucksack and pulls out a can of spray paint. In large sweeping letters, he writes IRA: Up the People’s Army. When he’s finished Norah backs him up against the wall and kisses him until her lips hurt.
*
Michael shows the students how the men in his unit used to position themselves during practice for battle. With careful strokes he draws stick figures on the blackboard, arranging them in long rows of ten to fifteen men. The students scribble in their notebooks and Michael scratches on the board, chalk dust catching in his throat as he breathes, concentrating, remembering.
"Just like stripping the willow, ya bastards."
The battalion chief stomps through the muddy puddles, spittle glistening around his mouth. The group of pale, freckled boys shifts their feet and nod slowly, pretending to understand, recalling weddings they have attended when they have seen others do this dance. Three lines of lean men run low along the ground through dark pastures. One row peels back between the other two and all the men in the backtracking line lay flat in the marsh, listening to their blood pound, listening for the slurp of boots in the wet grass as the other rows move ahead.
Michael draws the formations on the chalkboard—white lines that take the shape of a dry, leafy skeleton. He explains that this is a flying column—a tactic of guerilla warfare that was used widely for the first time in the nineteenth century, although he has just learned this in a book.
He feels cold suddenly in the heated classroom; he turns his head to the door, expecting a gust of damp wind. The teacher asks if he will explain the maneuvers in relationship to his own experience. He says he will try.
After a few hours, when the two rows that have gone before split like a seam again, up to three more times, the boys left behind will stake out a camp. A group of wet, bedraggled men returns after a few hours. The process is repeated the next day and in this way the men learn the land; they build endurance and patience; they cover ground slowly, but safely.
Michael talks about his battle experience, which consists largely of situations for which he is ill-prepared: an attempt to break someone out of prison in Armagh, a gun drop in a field in Newry—only this time he is chased by three men on bikes who try to cut him off. He barely makes it to one of the safe houses, where he throws his bike in the ditch and runs around the back of the barn, flinging himself through an open window. There is no so-called column support during these acts—he is alone on a bike or on foot.
Although it hurts his pride in a strange, distant way that makes him feel guilty, he tells them most of the action is fleeing from a reputation, fictions you begin to believe about yourself. He explains that if you have a certain family name like Farrell, and you are linked with a specific group—seen at a Sinn Fein meeting in West Belfast, spotted at the Crane pub in Galway speaking Irish with a known IRA man—then you are branded. And to avoid being caught or hurt you will eat and sleep where and when you can, in damp cellars that smell of burning rubber and sparked electrical wire, in houses identified as friendly by a lamp hung on a certain side of the porch, or the statue of a specific saint peeking through the lace curtains of a window. Cork, Drogheda, Enniskillen, Limerick, Armagh, Roslea, Kilcooly—he would not recognize these places in the daylight; he knows them only through cold rooms with banging pipes and basements that reek of fish. He cannot name one cathedral. He recognizes no road above ground, always running at night, blending with the dark.
"We are learning so much from you," says the teacher. For just a moment, before he catches himself, Michael feels the sense of old pride and the rush of accomplishment as his classmates regard him with fearful awe.
That night, his hands shaking, Michael tries to ring Liam in Galway on a number he finally works out of his mother after her first few drinks. He reaches a snotty sounding boy who answers in Irish and tells him that Liam is out. Michael presses him, the pitch of his voice rising.
"Out where?"
"Just out."
"This is his brother. Where?"
"I dunno. Wanker." This last part is said under his breath, but meant to be heard. Insults mean nothing to Michael, but the words of his teacher shine like lit bulbs in his head, and he insists.
"Could you please just tell him that Michael rang? And could he ring me in Dublin? On 675-7892?"
But he is already speaking to a dead line.
*
In 1968, Norah, Declan, and other Westside Nationalist Youth attend the Derry Housing Action Committee’s protest demanding equal housing allocation to Catholics. British News reporters come, and the Protestants begin to get nervous. Men wearing orange Ulster Freedom Fighter uniforms fly Union Jacks in the Fountain, a Unionist section of Derry near the Bogside. Tensions mount. The recently reformed IRA has organized weapons, and the nationalist youth have an impressive collection of stones and loose bricks, but it’s no match for the Royal Ulster Constabulary sent from Britain to put down what reporters are calling an insurrection.
"We refuse to be doormats, and it’s called a rebellion!" Declan addresses a packed basement at the King’s Head pub. Norah is getting names and numbers; she examines and records any weapons that are added to their collection. More youth are joining each week and they must stay organized. The gym has been closed for some time, and apart from her work with the Nationalists, Norah works as a typist in the city centre, while Declan helps his father recruit for IRA battalions in Derry and Belfast. Norah’s father is too far gone to give her much trouble.
*
The Catholic Bogside has been crudely barricaded for weeks in August, 1969. Nationalist youth with knobby knees guard low walls made of bricks dragged from nearby abandoned buildings and stacked in uneven piles at the intersections of streets. Their school uniforms are covered in dirt from kneeling on the concrete and crouching in doorways that smell of mold and piss while the Brits fire tear gas or partially destroy the makeshift walls with clubs. Bogside kids keeping watch at the junction of Rossville and Williams Street clash with Protestant kids flying Union Jacks; their fighting figures cast tiny interlocked shadows underneath the Victorian-style buildings. From the Roscommon Flats to Mary Street, other pale-faced kids patrol with wide, scared eyes. Their scrawny figures are draped awkwardly in British uniforms and they resemble aging people who have shriveled and no longer fit in their clothes. They shake the Union Jack halfheartedly; the flag waves and snaps in the wind.
One evening while Declan and Norah are guarding the wall and teaching the kids a few boxing moves, the Crown forces break through the barricades on Rossville Street, beating two teenagers and shooting another in the leg with a rubber bullet. Norah and Declan toss a few heavy stones at the soldiers wearing body shields until the tear gas sets them running. They crouch in the doorway of the Candy Corner Shop on Westland Street, clinging to each other. As the glass above them shatters, Declan screams, "They’re really trying to kill us!" as if he is surprised.
When chaos has subsided, Norah examines the cut in her cheek where glass scraped her when the shop window was hit; she pulls off the gauze—the cut clean and deep, tinged with red. She wonders if it will leave a scar.
The Battle of the Bogside lasts for three days. When it’s over, Declan shows Norah his first gun; it is his alone—an old, clunky looking thing not unlike most of the weapons in their so-called arsenal.
"Isn’t it brilliant?" he asks, but when he tucks it into the waistband of his trousers, his hands shake.
*
Michael longs to attain the confident voices and articulate speech of the students here; to learn how to live in this beautiful world of ideas, without remembering. He longs for the luxury of a clean mind or an original thought. He learns about Ireland in thick books, written by people with fancy degrees. Thanks to a politics class, he now knows about historical events leading up to the Troubles, which is how the War is referred to in Dublin. He wonders if his father read books—if he knew anything beyond his own family history, beyond the old myths and desires for vengeance.
He begins to realize how much his classmates relish the idea, however false, of Michael on stealth twilight runs. The hero propaganda of Nationalism has infected them, too, though they have never known war and have no need for martyrs—not with their top-notch educations and shining futures. They must imagine him cycling through wet, dark streets with mysterious packages under his arm, hurrying to drop off points in parts of Dublin so far north they never set foot there unless to buy used furniture on Usher’s Quay or cheap cigarettes on Henry Street. Maybe they imagine darkness pooling quietly in the corners of Belfast; in their fantasy, danger is kept at an acceptable distance and it becomes dramatic, like watching a film.
The students do not ask Michael if there is one specific reason for his abandonment of the IRA. If they do, he will tell them about a run outside Omagh—the run—when he crouched in the mud with his brother Sean and four other boys, breathing so hard it was like chewing the air. Michael might forgive himself many things, but not this: It is his second year as the commander of the battalion where he got his start. He is charged with the safety of his men, who are his family. But he realizes, too late, the mission is a farce, and his brother is gone in a spray of bullets. Those bullets that do not hit Sean hit Michael, the scars like rounded teeth marks in his thigh. The retaliation for his brother is brutal, but Michael cannot remember it. Instead, he holds this image deep inside his chest: the artery in Sean’s neck squirting blood so high, into the air, into Michael’s mouth. His little brother goes quickly, gasping and cursing. When he sleeps, Michael sees Sean’s eyes open, not accusing but just looking, as if he were waking up on a fine, clear morning as Michael screams and screams.
*
Riot police are already gathering outside Saint Eugene’s Roman Catholic Cathedral when Norah McDermott and Declan Farrell are married in 1975—it is marching month and Declan is already renowned. July is always violent in the North, bringing week after week of Protestant parades and marches commemorating ancient battles and Catholic defeat. People clash on street corners and at the periphery of neighborhoods. Each year both sides become more organized, more united, more determined.
After the ceremony, Norah and Declan change out of their wedding clothes quickly, Norah gladly throwing off the musty smelling gown that was her mother’s, Declan stepping out of his rented light-blue tuxedo. They stand in Norah’s bedroom, fully naked for the first time. As he pulls her to him, Norah is finally able to block out her parents’ bellowing entirely, because she will never be forced to take refuge here again. They fall on her childhood bed and move in a rhythm they have developed over these past years, only this time Norah lets Declan come inside her, praying fervently for a son that will be just like him. And when Michael is born, Norah feels her prayers being answered—at least for a while.
Their cheeks flushed, Norah and Declan move through the living room. Norah sees it all in slow motion: her father spitting at her feet one last time, her mother grabbing her for a few quick seconds. But Norah is a Farrell now—she has changed her fate. She will never again claim the McDermotts, and she will not see her father again. After he drinks himself to death, Norah’s mother will move close to Norah; she will come to the house on Sundays to see the babies as they come in quick succession, the Farrell family growing steadily with the war.
*
On Sundays Michael calls his mother on a dormitory pay phone next to the stairwell. Often he must wait for someone to finish; he hears other languages with sounds like glass shattering or a stonemason’s hammer hitting its mark. Once connected, he strains into the thin pull of his mother’s voice on the line. She is always angry and usually drunk. He puts a hand over one ear to soften the noise of people descending the concrete stairs in flip-flops, dropping pans in the kitchen, honking their horns on the busy highway just beyond the front windows.
Although she doesn’t ask, he tells her that he is safe and that there has been no contact with old connections. He makes it clear that he must continue to quit, even without her blessing. He asks after Liam, but she tells him nothing new. In the silence, he watches the units of his phone card tick away slowly. Briefly, he drifts north. He sees the flat with its sloped floor; he sees the small handgun hidden in a hole in the wall behind the holy water stand and the water stains on the ceiling. He remembers how the kettle’s steam makes a wet spot in the sheet that hangs between his old bedroom and the stove. He tells her he loves her and hangs up quickly while it still feels true. He will not admit to her that Belfast—that quiet place of live danger—still lurks in his thoughts, and the memory of its familiar streets even comforts him sometimes. He remembers running along the concrete under the stars with the men in his unit, all their bodies filling in the soft angles of the thick night. He wishes he could say, without sounding foolish or sentimental, that he won’t forget the years he spent in that city on street corners, in the back of cars with other boys on their way to somewhere, to the action, which was often just leaning against a fence drinking Guinness from the can, or sitting in a pub, talking blankly, just waiting.
*
January 30, 1972. Several nationalist groups stage a loud street protest against the British policy of Internment Without Trial. Westside Nationalists decide to march. Citizens of Derry run errands and go about their business.
Norah, at the front of the marching line, sees huge lorries roll up to Rossville Street and British soldiers spill out with guns and strings of ammunition slung across their chests. The marchers and other people in the Bogside run for cover as machine gun fire begins to stream out of open doors. A water cannon sprays the length of the street with purple dye, and now Norah is running with a small army of purple, alien-like figures. The smell of the dye makes her vomit on the ground as she runs from the rumble of tanks and the ping and splatter of bullets hitting shops, glass, people. Strangely, she feels no fear; she feels light, airborne. She sees the Abbey Taxi station on fire as she sprints down the alley behind the old bakery. In Glenfada Park, she crouches inside a bush and digs up two big stones with her hands as she watches a man in front of the Nook Bar beaten down with the butt of a gun.
She hears single shots coming from the car park near the Rosscommon Flats, where Declan lives. As soon as she thinks it’s clear, she runs across the street to check if the man is dead. He is. She runs back through the park to the east end that meets up with the Flats Car Park, the stones in her pockets hitting her thighs hard enough to bruise, her body a purple stripe cutting through the heat-distorted air from the exhaust of armoured cars.
Norah tries for hours to cross the car park, but each time she is almost there she hears a lone shot or a loud shout. An old tire has been lit on fire and she can only see glimpses of uniforms through the thick, rancid smoke. The sky is black and hot and smells of rubber and tear gas. All of the lights have been shot or burned out, and the streets feel as alert and anxious as a war bunker. Finally she gives up and takes the back way to the King’s Head, where she finally finds Declan—he has been shot in the arm trying to stop a teenager who was so scared he stumbled directly into the sight of a sniper crouched on the roof of the Flats.
Reports trickle in throughout the night and become official in the morning—fourteen people are dead, more than half of them teenagers. The British government issues a statement that force has been and continues to be justified. Bloody Sunday. The war has begun.
His arm in a crude sling, Declan stays up late into the night, crafting retaliation strategies with unit commanders and battalion chiefs. Norah imagines the battalions stitched across the North lighting up like a power grid. Declan has already accepted a promotion to district commander in Belfast, where he will supervise and train new recruits. At nineteen, he will be the youngest commander. In reverent tones, Norah and Declan will tell their children the story behind Daddy’s wound. It will be a story woven into family history, whispered into their boys’ soft ears like a fairy tale.
Once in West Belfast, Norah finds her niche; she runs the IRA hideout like a proud ship, full of long friendships and memories of old wounds. She knows better than anyone the network of safe houses and rooms, the best drop-off points in burned-out buildings, the names of sympathetic shop owners. How can she explain to Michael that these are the best years in her life? Declan shares everything with her—plans, bomb construction, war strategy—she is an integral part of the action. Michael and Sean are just toddlers padding around in the kitchen with bottles and crackers while Norah cleans guns at the table. She counts bullets, investigates new safe house locations and, as district secretary, carefully types out the minutes from each of the battalion meetings.
At night the men arrive in twos and threes at the house, slipping through the back door of the kitchen and greeting Norah first. She pulls a lever on the wall above the sink, and the bottom half of the kitchen cupboard swings up on hinges, exposing a narrow staircase to a lower room. Norah hears rustling papers, low voices, and matches being struck. After the men descend into the smoke-filled room, she swings the door back to its position, and just like that, it is only herself and her boys—a regular West Belfast family.
Norah takes Michael and Sean to Mass on Sunday and each night Declan goes to confession with a trusted priest who absolves all the men in his division. She loves the idea of being at the center of the secret life coursing beneath the façade of domesticity.
Now that Michael is banned for desertion, entire networks of companions are off limits to her, the doors to whole worlds shut in her face overnight.
*
One Saturday afternoon Michael rides the DART to Howth, a northern beachside resort just minutes from Blackrock. He rides past backyards where clean wash billows from lines; when the train stops at Raheny, he sees a woman laughing in a bright kitchen. A group of scantily clad teenage girls sitting across from him giggle and blink their makeup-drenched eyes dramatically while they sip from bottles of Fanta.
Howth is a calm, quiet town with streets that wind out from an ancient castle set into a heather-covered hill. Colorful, tidy-looking bed and breakfasts perch along the main street facing the water. People in pressed trousers and trendy wax jackets walk along the concrete jetty with small, leashed dogs, fighting to keep their hats over their ears in the sea wind. Michael is conscious of well-dressed bodies moving close to his own, but does not feel threatened. He walks up along the sea cliffs, past homes that look west, struggling with his smoker’s lungs. He steps off the path into rows of heather, walks on to where high green foliage becomes a tunnel, leaves almost touching over his head. Finally he stumbles into a clearing of purple and blue wildflowers and looks out, where the sea meets the horizon, and thinks, What have I missed? Where have I been?
In the spring of 1994 it is better. The sky stays light until eight o’clock and then eases into a soft black rinsed with pink. Michael’s winter exam scores are higher than his advisor expected. His scholarship increases and he buys a space heater, which makes his room feel warm and close.
He imagines taking his mother to Howth and showing her the fields of wildflowers, the way the grass bends toward the sea. They will buy fish and chips from Beshoff’s and sit in the town park, watching the sailboats rock in the wind.
*
In 1981, a famous Nationalist prisoner dies on hunger strike, sparking an international outcry, and Declan is released from prison. Six-year-old Liam can hardly remember his father. Declan heads straight to Birmingham with soldiers from his former division. Two weeks later, a car bomb intended for a British ambassador goes off accidentally in Declan’s hands. Norah spends whole days in bed, adhering to a strict diet of gin and beer. Nine-year-old Michael picks Liam up when he cries and Sean, only eight, crawls on his mother’s bed, combing her greasy hair with his thin fingers.
*
There are no plans for retaliation because the death, however horrible, is classified as an accident, and it is impossible to blame anyone directly. When news of the bomb breaks, the IRA men are in danger of being rounded up and they go underground. The Army Council in Dublin decides that a high profile funeral will only lead to more captures, because men loyal to Declan will risk their lives to attend. Norah is promised a monthly sum for herself and her children—a widow’s pension that is much larger than the meager one she was given while Declan was imprisoned. The first check, together with the promise of future checks, will be given to her at an honorary ceremony at a safe house in Dublin. She boards a bus for Dublin. It is her first time out of the North.
A thick morning fog still hugs the gritty buildings when the bus enters the city on the Northside. Norah expects Dublin to be different, but it looks to her like any other Catholic ghetto, just another stretch of flat-faced, colorless houses packed tightly along narrow streets, tattered tricolor flags tacked up on doors with chipping paint. She walks across the Liffey River, not so spectacular—a dirty river with a halo of muck floating over it. She peers in the shops along Westmoreland Street that sell cheap T-shirts and key chains, cigarettes and soda. The smell of baking bread steams out of Bewley’s Café, and she stands for a moment staring at the colored glass windows, watching women in white uniforms pull down the polished wood chairs stacked on the tables.
The cashier at the newsagent on Dame Street stares at her when she buys a pack of cigarettes; she fumbles with the money trying to produce the right change—the pound is so light and thin compared to the British sterling used in the North. She has a few hours to explore before she catches her bus to the suburb of Rathmines and the safe house. She looks down at the string of glittering shops, the clean pubs with well-tended plants hanging out front. She sits down on a bench. Her throat itches. If she could just have a drink to relax.
She watches as a long, silver tour bus pulls up to the curb. An even number of older men and women pile out, dressed in uniforms of matching jogging suits and sport shoes. They look around, nodding and breathing loudly, sniffing the air as if it is fragrantly exotic. A woman wearing a pink plastic poncho trots over to the bronze statue next to Norah—"Oooh lo-ok, it’s Mol-ly Ma-lone"—stretches her vowels as if addressing a large crowd instead of a group of twenty standing less than an arm’s length away. The statue is indeed Molly Malone, her bronze cleavage booming over a barrel of flowers. A woman with impossibly blue hair holds a book with Dublin printed across the cover. She flips through the pages and says triumphantly, "Molly Malone, the tart with the cart!" Laughter bubbles up from the group. The woman in pink continues to touch and examine Molly. She admires her frilled apron and oddly realistic breasts. She doesn’t look once at Norah, although Norah is openly staring at her, the first tourist she’s ever seen.
The couples link arms and walk to the "All Things Irish" store where they stand outside, waiting to be the first customers. Norah begins to panic as she watches the coiffed tourists press their foreheads against the glass to admire the Aran-knit sweaters and Waterford crystal. Her eyes settle on a pub just across the street. She will just have a quick pint.
Inside the Long Stone Pub wrinkled alcoholics are tucked into the dark corners of the front room; they stare into their pints as if they are crystal balls and an important message is about to be unveiled. Norah moves to the back of the pub where no one can see her. She scoffs at the drunks lined up at the bar, brooding quietly in each other’s company. She’s been up since four in the morning so, say, if she had gotten up at nine instead, four hours would put it well past lunchtime now—a perfectly acceptable time for a pint.
She stays in the pub until she has missed both her meeting and her bus back to Belfast. Instead, she walks through the city until daylight, drunk and sad. Nobody stops or harasses her, nobody speaks or acknowledges her. She walks the entire length of the Liffey, from the Customs House to Phoenix Park, thinking only of her feet hitting the ground and Declan, his voice coming to her with the splash of the dirty river against the embankment wall. When she arrives home the next morning, dazed and stinking, her mother regards her with horror and Norah smiles. This is the beginning. She is not yet thirty and ready to be old and invisible. This will be the way she honors Declan; over time, her ache for drink and her grief become so intertwined that to solve the first would be to betray the other.
Now, over a decade later, when she’s really had too much she has to search for everything: the door, the faucet, the toilet, the bottle with its yellow label—she searches passionately, like a child looking for Easter eggs, completely wrapped up in the hunt.
Norah hears the band of boys approaching again, their voices running like a banner underneath her window. She rises, elated. Finally, they have come. This time she will be sure they do not miss her. She walks to the window and waves through the iron bars. "Boyzzz. C’mon up then and we’ll have you on your way soon."
"Wha?" One boy laughs meanly. "Yeah, you drunk fat slapper, I’m sure you could really get us on our way." The other boy thrusts his hips back and forth. It takes Norah a few minutes to realize what is happening; she feels a sudden chill and realizes her robe has dropped away somewhere and she is standing naked and shivering in the window, her wrinkled skin illuminated in the light of the street lamp. The boys race by, becoming bouncing specks in the distance. "You’re all a load of shite!" she yells. "You know nothing!"
*
One afternoon as Michael is leaving Kennedy’s, he sees the first line of smoke like a long skinny finger reaching out to him. A bomb has gone off. People erupt from the station like water bursting from broken valves. He searches for the dark-haired girl in the crowd, but there are too many running feet, too much panic ringing in the air. It was the southbound train, not the 5:25, but still.
He turns around. He feels heat and anger building in his chest as he walks up Dame Street. He tries to resist the old rush of adrenaline rising like vomit in his throat. He walks through the Liberties, passing secondhand stores, fish and chip stands and a man sleeping under a dirty blanket in the porticos of an old church. He knows he should go home—take a taxi, a bus, hitch. But he doesn’t want to be alone. Instead he walks steadily through the charcoal night, across the Liffey, past Phoenix Park to the North Circular Road. Squat brick houses ring the street, each with stiff lacy curtains in the window; in one a tabby cat sleeps on the windowsill next to a statue of the Virgin. The rattle of the explosion has not yet reached this far and the street is still silent. Then the sirens begin.
Michael stands on the corner in front of the house he remembers, turning in one direction and then the other. If he knocks at this door, the password will drop from his lips like a sardine spit into his hand. He feels all that he has learned—who he was, who he is and who he wants to be—grinding down to a steady pulse just behind his eyes. He keeps turning in the flickering light of the streetlamp, waiting to decide, to be found, to choose.
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