“Why did you come here?” Fegan asked. The question was out of his mouth before he could catch it. He looked back to the beer can in his hand.
Marie stiffened beside him. “What?”
. That’s what he would have said if he wasn’t losing the remnants of his mind. Instead, he said, “They don’t want you, but you came here anyway. And yesterday. Why did you do that?”
She breathed in and out through her nose three times before saying, “Because it’s my family. For better or worse, it’s where I came from. I won’t be driven away, no matter how hard they try.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” he said. “If they don’t want you, why bother?”
“Do you read much?” she asked.
He turned back to her. “No. Why?”
“There’s a little book called
. It turned out to be a hoax, but it appeared to be written by a Jewish man hiding from the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. The most awful things have happened to him, but in the end, he stands up to God. He says, ‘God, you can do what you want to me, you can degrade me, you can kill my friends, you can kill my family, but you won’t make me hate you, no matter what.’ ’
Marie gave a long sigh. “Hate’s a terrible thing. It’s a wasteful, stupid emotion. You can hate someone with all your heart, but it’ll never do them a bit of harm. The only person it hurts is you. You can spend your days hating, letting it eat away at you, and the person you hate will go on living just the same. So, what’s the point? They may hate me, but I won’t hate them back. They’re my family, and I won’t let their hate push me away.”
Fegan studied her skin’s tiny diamond patterns stretching across the back of her hands, the fine ridges of the bones, the faint blue lines of her veins. “I’d like to read that book,” he said.
“Well, you can go to the library. I don’t have it any more. When I was seventeen, my father showed my copy to Uncle Michael. Uncle Michael made me tear it up. He said it was Jewish propaganda. He told me to remember what the Jews were doing to the Palestinians. I remember thinking it strange at the time. He didn’t say the Israelis; he said the Jews. I don’t think he’d ever met a Jewish person in his life, but still he hated them. I just didn’t understand it. Funny, I hadn’t thought about that book in years, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since Uncle Michael died.”
A minute of quiet passed, both of them sipping their drinks, before Marie said, “Seeing as we’re asking difficult questions, why did you come in here to hide?”
“Too many people here I used to know,” Fegan said. “I can’t listen to them.”
“You’re a respected man around here,” she said.
“They don’t respect me. They’re afraid of me.”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
Fegan plucked at the beer can’s ring-pull. “You know what I did?”
“I’ve heard things,” she said. Her shoulder brushed against his and he shivered. “Listen, I’ve known men like you all my life. My uncles, my father, my brothers. I know the other side, too, the cops and the Loyalists. I’ve talked to them all in my job. Everyone has their piece of guilt to carry. You’re not that special.”
The last words were softened with kindness.
“No, I’m not,” he said. Somehow, he liked that idea.
“Anyway, I don’t think you’re like that now,” she said. “People can change. They have to, or there’s no hope for this place. Are you sorry for what you did?”
“Yeah.”
“It shows. On your face. In your eyes. You can’t hide it.”
Fegan wanted to look at her, but he couldn’t. He ran his finger around the can’s opening, feeling it bite at his fingertip. Words danced just beyond his grasp.
“I should go,” he said, raising himself off the seat. He stepped out of the cubby-hole and turned, ducking down to see her. “Can I come and see you later?”
Marie’s mouth opened slightly as she considered it. “I don’t know,” she said. “I was going to take my wee girl out for a walk after tea, if the weather stays clear.”
“I could come with you.”
She closed her eyes and inhaled. After an eternity, she opened them again and said, “Okay. You can come with us. I live on Eglantine Avenue.”
She told Fegan the house number. He smiled once and left her in the alcove.
17
The Minister of State for Northern Ireland had been sitting in the back of the car for more than twenty minutes, and they had travelled less than two hundred yards. Compton and the driver sat up front, staring at the back of a bus. The constant blaring of horns and rumble of London traffic did nothing to ease Edward Hargreaves’s headache. The vibration of his phone only soured his mood further.
The voice told him the Chief Constable was on the line.
“Geoff,” Hargreaves said.
“Good afternoon, Minister,” Pilkington said.
“Please tell me we’re making progress on the Belfast situation.”
