I Hear the Sirens in the Street

The phone was ringing.

The first of many phone calls: McCrabban, Matty, Sergeant Quinn, Tony, Inspector McCallister, even Chief Inspector Brennan, who was slap in the middle of messy divorce proceedings.

They had all heard. They talked to me like there was a death in the family.

I called my parents.

My dad said I should resign. All the bright people were leaving Northern Ireland for England and America. I had so much potential. I was wasted in the sectarian, poisoned atmosphere of the RUC …

I drank and listened to the blues and at nine put on the BBC.

Port Stanley had fallen to the British forces.

The Argentinians were formalising a surrender.

The BBC correspondent was ecstatic: “There is jubilation here in the streets of Port Stanley as the Falkland Islands flag once again rises above the Governor’s—”

I turned off the box and sat in the silence with the Jack Daniel’s.

Just before midnight the phone rang again and I picked it up.

“It could have been worse, Duffy,” a female voice said.

It was her. Little Miss Anonymous. She who had caused me so much trouble.

“Could it have been worse?” I said.

“Oh, very much worse. The Americans are terribly cross with you.”

“The Americans say jump and you ask how high.”

“Quite.”

“Why did you do it? Why did you pick on me?”

“I was trying to help you, Duffy.”

“You set me up. Why didn’t you go to America, love? Why didn’t you look in that safe deposit box?”

“That wasn’t my scene. Not my scene, at all, Duffy.”

“No, but you sent me, didn’t you? Turned me round and pointed me in the right direction. Did you know what was going to happen when I went to that bank?”

“Of course not. We wouldn’t have done that to a friend.”

“Who do you work for? MI5? I already have friends in fucking MI5.”

“Look … Duffy, or can I call you Sean?”

“Don’t call me anything! Don’t call me again! I’m hanging up on you.”

“Wait! Wait a minute. As you well know, Sean, life is cheap in Northern Ireland, so why is it, do you think, that you have been allowed to live after all the trouble that you’ve caused for us and our allies across the sea?”

“Why don’t you fucking tell me?”

“I have no idea. I can only imagine that to the powers that be, you are, as yet, of some value. Some of us play the long game, Sean.”

“This isn’t a game,” I said, and hung up the phone and pulled the jack out of the wall.

I went to the kitchen and wrote out a hasty letter of resignation.

I stuck it in an envelope and addressed it. I found a stamp and walked to the post-box at the end of Coronation Road. I stood there for a minute, thinking.

“Best to sleep on it,” I finally decided, put the envelope in my jacket pocket and returned home.

EPILOGUE: A FOOT PATROL THROUGH THE ABYSS

Images from the asymmetric wars of the future: curling pigtails of smoke from hijacked cars, Army helicopters hovering above a city like mosquitoes over a water hole, heavily armed soldiers and policemen walking in single file on both sides of a residential street …

Night is falling.

The sky is the colour of porter.

The soldiers are carrying semi-automatic SLR rifles and wearing full body armour. We, the embedded cops, are wearing flak jackets and carrying Sterling submachine guns.

We are watching windows and rooftops. We are spaced well apart so that a bomb or a rocket-propelled grenade cannot kill all of us.

Every hundred metres the pointman alternates. Every dozen paces or so the man at the rear does a one- eighty and walks backwards for a step or two.

Even we seasoned veterans are pumping adrenalin. The street is full of civilians and any one of them could be a watcher for an IRA button man, ready to detonate a booby trap under a car or dug into a road culvert. There could be unseen assassins waiting behind windows and doors with sniper rifles or anti-tank rockets.

Is this what the squaddies signed on for? These British soldiers who were brought up on Zulu and The Longest Day.

This is the way it’s going to be from now on.

Wars in cities.

Wars with civilians all around.

Make one mistake and you’re dead.

Make another kind of mistake and you’re on the TV news.

We walk through the maze of red-bricked terraced houses off the Falls Road. This part of West Belfast that has been ruined by endemic conflict and economic catastrophe and suicide martyr cult.

Bomb sites. Waste ground. Helicopters throwing up dust from pulverized brick and stone.

Recall the noise boots make on cobbles. Recall the eyes watching you. Recall the fear.

Recall the sights: the scene of a notorious ambush, the graffiti proclaiming death to enemies of the IRA, a bonfire in the middle of a street.

At a road junction a cat has been shoved into a birdcage. A young private hesitates and turns to look at his commanding officer. He wants to save the cat but everyone shakes their head at him. It could so easily be a booby trap. Such things and worse have been done in the past.

People jeer as we walk by.

Others make throat-cutting gestures.

I thought that my days of foot patrols were behind me. Already the sweat is pouring down my thighs. A kid playing kerby with a soccer ball catches my eye.

“Bang, bang, you’re dead,” he mouths at me.

I fake a bullet in my gut and he grins.

Hearts and minds.

One heart and one mind.

The patrols turns on Divis Drive.

It’s getting dark now. The sun has set behind the Knockagh. It’s cold. Later they say it might snow. We’re now at Reilig Bhaile an Mhuilinn, as the Republicans call it. Mill Town Cemetery, to you and me.

This is where the IRA buries its dead.

“Let’s take a look through the graveyard, lads,” the commanding officer says. He’s a Scot from Edinburgh. A boy really. Fresh out of Sandhurst. Must be twenty or twenty-one. A young officer of the Black Watch. My life completely in the hands of a green lieutenant walking through a city he doesn’t know, on his first or possibly second combat patrol.

We cross the Falls Road in single file.

The traffic waits for us.

We walk through the cemetery gates. An experienced staff sergeant whispers something to the lieutenant. The lieutenant grins and nods, agreeing to the sergeant’s suggestion.

I look at the other two policemen on patrol with me. They shrug. They have no idea what the squaddies are up to either.