him only one glance over her shoulder.
Only when he’d lost her did Fegan realise the nine followers surrounded him. The pain dissolved, leaving a feathery lightness behind his eyes. The woman rocked her baby and smiled at him.
“What’s happening to me?” he asked her.
The scowler turned to face him again. “Shut up and listen to the speech.”
Scowler’s friend tugged on his elbow and whispered in his ear, “That’s Gerry Fegan.”
Scowler’s face greyed. “Sorry,” he said, and turned back to the platform.
Fegan watched the followers move among the living, studying the mourners as if they were creatures in a zoo, sometimes touching them. The woman stayed close to Fegan. Her skin caught none of the sunlight beating down on the cemetery, and the breeze did not disturb her black hair. She smiled up at him again, her fine features showing none of the hate she must have felt.
, Fegan thought. He ignored her and concentrated on McGinty’s speech.
‘Vincent Caffola’s murder,” he blustered, “And it can only be described as murder, throws us back to the bad old days. The days when the young people of our community lived in fear of the RUC. The bad old days when sectarianism was the law. When bigotry was the law. When instilling terror into the Nationalist and Republican people was the law.”
A rumble of agreement rolled through the faithful. McGinty paused, letting it subside.
The woman turned her black eyes to the politician as the baby writhed in her arms.
“But I say no more,” McGinty continued. “No more will our community stand by and allow such brutality to go unchallenged. Last night a good man, a tireless worker for his people, was viciously assaulted by the forces of so- called law and order. He was beaten until he passed out, his head split open, his wrist shattered, and left to choke to death on his own vomit. And still they say we should support an institution steeped in the traditions of oppression and fascism.”
The crowd rumbled again, louder now. McGinty let it pass, his eyes marking the beat.
“But I say no more. I will not rest, my party will not rest, my community will not rest until those responsible are brought to justice. And that will be the test, comrades. When those witnesses I spoke to this morning, those witnesses who saw Vincent Caffola dragged into an alley by the forces of so-called law and order, when they go to the Police Ombudsman and tell what they saw, will justice be served?”
The crowd inhaled in expectation, and McGinty held his chin high. The audacity of the lie shouldn’t have surprised Fegan so.
“And if it isn’t . . .” McGinty’s chest swelled as he sucked in air. “I WILL SAY NO MORE!”
An angry roar tore through the men and women; fists stabbed the air.
“I will say no more. The test will have been failed, and I will not hesitate to recommend the party withdraw its endorsement of the PSNI. We know the implications of that action, and believe me comrades, the decision will not be taken lightly. But that is the choice faced by the British Government, by the Ombudsman and by the police service that claims to represent all sections of our society.”
Fegan wondered at McGinty’s conceit, at his temerity in making such threats. The leadership would never have approved it, Fegan was positive. But then, he had no stomach for politics. Not any more. The cause he once killed for was long gone, swallowed up by the avarice of men like McGinty.
Sometimes he wondered if he had ever believed in any of it. As a boy, he’d seen the scars left on his community. He remembered the raids, the cops and the Brits breaking down doors. They pulled young men out of their beds to imprison them without trial at Long Kesh, the old RAF base that would later become the Maze, or on the prison ship at Belfast Docks. He remembered the anger, the hate, the poverty and the unemployment. The only way to have anything, to be any - thing, was to fight. Get the Brits out, seize power from the Unionists, take freedom at gunpoint. That’s what they said, and he believed them.
But there was more than that. Fegan had been a solitary boy, quick with his fists but slow with words. When McKenna befriended him thirty years ago, it seemed to be a path to a bigger world. A world where he mattered. McKenna fought for Fegan to be brought along on the camping trips across the border, to the forests and lakes around Castleblaney, where he and the other boys played soldiers and shot air rifles at paper targets.
McKenna called it a youth club. Fegan’s mother called it indoctrination.
Paul McGinty drove them on the first trip, picking them up in an old Volkswagen Camper. McGinty was not yet in his late twenties, but everyone knew his name. He had been interned at Long Kesh a few years before. He went in a snot-nosed thug, and came out six months later quoting Karl Marx and Che Guevara. He sat at the camp fire reading aloud from
while the boys ate beans and passed cigarettes around.
Now McGinty stood dressed in a designer suit, about as far from the young revolutionary of Fegan’s memory as a man could be.
Somewhere between Fegan’s sentencing for the murder of three innocents in a Shankill butcher’s shop and his release twelve years later, the world had changed. South of the border, in the Republic of Ireland, the old parochial ways vanished, washed away by money and the country’s new vision of itself. The North had become the poor relation, the bastard child no one had the heart to send away. The struggle for the North’s reunification with the rest of Ireland was rendered pointless.
The rest of Ireland didn’t want them any more.
So the longing for freedom, whatever that was, had given way to the lust for money and power. The paramilitaries, Republican and Loyalist alike, maintained the facade of their political ideals, but Fegan knew the truth. Sometimes he wondered if, deep inside, he’d always known the true desires of men like Michael McKenna and Paul McGinty.
Fegan looked again to the nine followers wandering around him, the three Brits, the two Loyalists, the cop, the butcher, the woman and her baby. What was it for? To line McGinty’s pockets?
