'Course I'm bloody alright.'
'You's alive…'
He was alive because he was the bitch's toy thing. And Vinny Devitt, who wasn't, was in the mortuary of the South Tyrone (General) Hospital, with Jacko and Malachy.
'Why didn't they shoot you?'
'I'm precious, because I'm precious to the bitch.'
'Did you's think they'd shoot you?'
'I was wearing the red coat.'
'You weren't shot because they'd told you what to wear?'
'Why I had to have the red coat.'
'You's important to them?'
'It's what the bitch says.'
'Will you get more money?'
'I gets one hundred and twenty-five pounds a week. I gets five hundred pounds a month. I gets six thousand pounds a year. That’s what I get..,'
'How long does you get the money?'
'Till I'm no more use to the bitch, till the trap's closed.'
'How long's that?'
'For feck's sake, I don't know…'
'You'll be waking Mary. Why was they killed today?'
His mother hacked her cough again. He could hear the fire dying in the sitting room, the last spit of damp wood.
'To protect me.'
'Three men…?'
'To keep me alive.'
'Keep you alive?'
'So I survive, that's what three men died for, so I live to tout another day.'
'Is you frightened, Mossie…?'
Always the fear was with him. The fear crept with him to the bed. The fear stalked him when he pasted wallpaper and painted. The fear bit at him when he went to the meetings with his O.C., and when he went to meetings with his handlers. The fear was with him when he kicked the plastic football on the back grass patch for Francis, and when he dressed Doloures, and when he cuddled Patrick, and when he cut little Mary's food for her. He was never without the fear.
'I don't know how to leave it, the fear…'
'Leave it behind you?'
'I don't know how to.'
'Is you more frightened of your own people, or of them?'
'No difference, both bleeding me, and no going back.'
'When could you have gone back?'
'Doesn't matter, too long ago…'
Yeah, great, Mossie Nugent could have told the redhead to go feck herself… Could have had his driving ban, and his mortgage- recalled and his bank loan revoked, could have been put on the ferry boat with his exclusion order. No vehicle and couldn't work, bank loan revoked and debt, mortgage called in and bankruptcy, exclusion order served and home to the north where every man knew that the names of those served with the Prevention of terrorism Act exclusion order were slipped to the Proddie murder squads. He'd thought of that scene, over and over. He had thought he was going to get a beating and he'd found himself thanking the bitch. Oh yeah, that was too long ago.
He had gone home, had told Siobhan it was a mistake, all sorted.
Three months later, going down the shop for fags, hadn't recognised her at first, old jeans and scruffy anorak. All she needed was that he drink at a certain pub, that he watch a certain man. Regular meetings, and then the suggestion that he should sell up, take his family home… too late then to go back. Returned to Altmore mountain, bumping into her in Irish Street, and the note passed with her scribbled telephone number, and the money… too late then to go back.
'Would you like me to make you a pot of tea?'
'It'd be good.'
'I's with you, Mossie. It'll be easier now.'
He held her tight, crushed her against him. For six years he had lived that lie.
His voice was quiet in her hair. 'Last year I tried to break with her.
Lasted three months. I cut the meetings. When I was down in Portadown last year, working on the new council place, she caught up with me. I never saw her, but she watched me. Letters were left for me, no beggar ever seemed to remember seeing them left, but they had my name on them. There was a photograph, Joey Fenton who was shot for touting, that was first. Next month, alter I'd broken the second meeting, there was a bullet. Third month, after I'd broken the third meeting, she sent me the note, her writing, addressed to the O.C., it named me as a tout… If they thought you knew, they'd kill you too. ..'
He felt her lips brush his forehead. She said she'd go and make the tea.
He had never been so cold. The damp seeped through the sides of the hide and puddled on the flooring of plastic. The cold numbed his feet, it ached in his buttocks and his shoulders shook with it The only part of his face that was exposed, between the woollen cap pulled down over his forehead and the scarf wrapped across his mouth and throat, was raw with cold. It was as if she tested him. They had come to the hide as the dusk settled. They had hugged the hedgerows and crawled in the gorse, light enough for him always to be able to see Cathy as she had led the way. He was ice cold and he did not complain. His teeth chattered, a distraction beside the suppressed hum of the electronics.
He felt the dig of her elbow in his ribs. She pulled his head round and she fed him a stick of chewing gum. There was her chuckle, very quiet, beside him. His teeth pounded on the chewing gum and the chatter was gone.
The light at the back of the bungalow came on.
The white brilliance flared the television screen.
There was barely room for the two of them in the hide. Bren's body below, and Cathy's half on top of him. Her leg was over his thigh.
So much that he wanted to know about her…
'Bren…' Her voice was abrupt.
'Yes.'
'I ate too many sausages.'
'Yes.'
'You silly bugger, I want to crap.'Fine by me, Miss Parker.'
He had seen her the day before, treated as equal by the men of the Special Air Service, taken as a friend by the man who could kill and then eat a plate of sausages and beans and chips with her before they made their dry statements to the sympathetic detectives and the supercilious bastards of the army's Special Investigation Branch'. He had been with her the day before, in the watchtower, and seen that she had never flinched through a shooting that left three men dead… and the head shot off the one whose legs were still jumping.
She wriggled away from him.
She was crouched half over his legs, bent double.
She cursed and he thought that her fingers were too chilled to work the buttons of her trousers.
She swore again as she tried to unfold the tinfoil.
Bren stared ahead of him. He saw the light go out in the kitchen of the bungalow. The only street lights were away to the left, the village lights. The mountain was black cloaked,. The darkness was around him.
She wriggled, struggled, in the confined space.
She would have closed the tinfoil over, sealed it.
She would have pulled her trousers back to her waist, fastened them.
