Terry Brankin Has a Gun. Malachi O'Doherty
done?’
‘Nothing. Whacked a couple of loyalists, that’s all.’
And they laughed.
***
If Kathleen just sat on the sofa and thought about the police coming, she would fret. If she sprayed the surfaces, scrubbed and brushed, dusted and tidied and emptied the bins, checked the bathroom floor for discarded underwear and damp towels and put books back on their shelves, she would be able to contain the thoughts of what might happen and not be unhinged by her fear. ‘Yes, fear!’ She had said it, at last, though only to her clean, empty kitchen. ‘Fear.’ And yet more anger with Terry for bringing this on them.
***
Terry had learnt in the IRA – and remembered still – that children and fools evade their fears and a soldier faces them. He resisted the impulse to push from his mind the contemplation of the worst that could now happen. Did the police have new evidence against him? Was it possible that an informer had exposed him? There had been plenty of those. Mick Harkin, who had worked with him on the Magheraloy ambush, was dead now, and the dead don’t speak. He had spent five years in the Kesh in the early 1990s for a bank robbery and then, after a couple of weeks out, had blown himself apart with one of the new Semtex drogue bombs they were working on. So, if there was an informer behind this new investigation, it wasn’t Mick. It was someone else who had known him back then and remembered him still, after nearly twenty years. He doubted there was anybody talking now, which meant he was safe, but you could never be sure.
Terry understood the informers. He understood them better than he’d ever admitted because he had nearly become one. After Magheraloy, he and Mick had been arrested, held separately and interrogated. They had both been trained to resist the pressure and had both got through it. The lesson was: say nothing. Just sit still for seven days and say nothing. Then, if they had the evidence they would use it and if they didn’t you walked.
It was embarrassing to think about it, even after all those years. Back then, the police had devoted much of that seven-day holding period to kicking Terry about the interrogation room for trying to kill the Chief Con, as they called him.
In the republican mythology, the police were said to operate in pairs, with a good cop and a bad cop, one being genial and offering to help, the other, during his turn, kicking the shite out of you. Alternating treatments played on your fear and coaxed you to hope. That was maybe how they dealt with the younger ones, the ones who might respond to a little psychological manipulation. They didn’t even bother trying to soften up Terry, which was a compliment in a way. They just hammered him.
It is hard to sit still when your balls are swollen and your arse is bleeding. It’s hard to think when you’ve been slapped about the head so often that your ears are ringing constantly and you can’t even relax your face into an expression that doesn’t ache. He had assured himself then that he was weeping with the physical pain, not the fear. It hardly mattered. The kicking had touched on the tenderest nerves in his body and they were pulsing in the weirdest way inside him, and he had hardly trusted that he would be put back together again as a coherent human being. When they let him go, he went to Dom McGrath and told him he couldn’t face doing any more jobs.
Dom was good about it. What Terry remembered now was how the republican leader had handled him so much more gently than the police had done, and filleted him more neatly.
Two
Dominic McGrath was poised and thoughtful when Terry went to see him the day he was released from interrogation – eight days after the bomb. He lived, even then, in the large house on the Glaslough Road, that he occupied still, when he wasn’t abroad at political conferences or meeting heads of state. It was the sort of house a priest or a doctor might live in. From the outside, back then, it was a fortress, with grills on the windows and cameras over the front and back doors. A security man inside had a look at you through the camera as you waited between two gates, in a kind of airlock. Perhaps there were metal detectors. No one knew just what Dominic McGrath had, but they knew he had the best.
Then there was another buzz and the second gate opened. Dominic was waiting for him in the hallway, in jeans and a sweater, a mug of tea in his hand.
‘Turlough, a chara!’ He always addressed him first in Irish. ‘Stand where you are now and Oweny here will frisk you – nothing personal. Then come through to the kitchen.’
Terry let Oweny frisk his body as closely as any soldier or peeler had ever done. He emptied all his pockets and Oweny ran clenches of his big fists along his arms and legs. Terry winced at the clasping of his sore balls, but neither made any remark.
‘Open your shirt,’ said Oweny.
‘Uh?’
‘Open your shirt.’
Oweny ran his fingers through the curls between his pectorals and brushed his belly with his knuckles until his fingers were deep inside the band of his trousers.
‘OK.’ Oweny cleared him.
Terry walked through into the kitchen. Dominic was sitting at a pine breakfast bar. ‘Sugar?’ he asked.
He took the stool facing Dominic and raised a hand. ‘Fine as it is.’
They sat quietly for a moment, Terry warming his hands on his mug.
‘You had a hard time with the peelers, but the training helped, right?’
‘They nearly broke me, Dom. Because I don’t feel good about that operation. If I felt OK about it, I’d be impenetrable. I’m not.’
‘What is it worries you most?’
‘That they could turn me, Dom. I swear to you – there were long nights when it seemed only right that they should. I can’t do this any more.’
‘It’s not for everybody,’ said Dominic, ‘but the way things are going, there’ll soon be a lot less of the dirty jobs and more political work. You’d be good at that.’
‘Dom, we killed a kid.’
‘It’s what happens in a war, Terry. Do you think Maggie Thatcher was squeamish about killing kids?’
‘So that’s what makes a good warrior – not being squeamish about killing kids?’
‘That’s certainly part of it. And you only deal with it by comprehending the full context, by seeing that this is an evil that is not of our making and that when we are free, we’ll create a world in which the children of the nation are safe.’
Maybe Terry just didn’t believe that stuff any more.
Oweny put the morning mail and a few newspapers on the counter and Dom glanced down at the headlines. There was a photograph on the front of The Irish News of a boy with a plastered leg in traction after a punishment shooting.
‘He looks all sweet and innocent now, doesn’t he?’ said Dom. ‘Look, it’s clear you are not ready to go back to this, and maybe you are leaving us. That’s OK, a chara. No problem. Nobody’s going to hold that against you, believe me. You’ve made a big contribution.’
Terry felt immense relief at that. He had always trusted that if things went bad, he could turn to Dom and Dom would sort it out. So they drank their coffee and talked about other things: ‘Have you heard the new Christy Moore album?’ said Dom. ‘Has he found religion or something?’ They laughed.
Then Dom said, ‘The way we’ll work it is this. You’ll go away for a year. That will help you clear your head and remove you from any operations. If the Special Branch think you can be worked on to tout for them, then it’s best you know nothing of day-to-day stuff. Come back in a year and then if you want to get involved again, there’ll be a place for you. That’s a promise. OK?’
Terry was wrestling to comprehend this. Dom, in the gentlest way possible, as if it was a kindness, had just ordered him out of the country. Where would he go? He had nowhere to go.
‘You won’t be under