Patsy told his mother that he had been lifted.
She asked him why.
He told her that if she wanted to know why, then she should ask the bastard police.
Was he in trouble…?
He could handle it…
She told him that men had called for him.
Who had called for him?
She felt the bad taste in her mouth. She disliked to talk of them. They were strangers to her. They had come twice to the door of the house as if they had the right to come. Even early in the morning.
'I didn't know who they were. They weren't from here. We was at tea when they came yesterday, and they came again this morning and woke us, and the man said they'd be back again for you's this evening.
Who was they?'
'I don't know who they was.'
'Why's they want you?'
'You worries too much, Ma, you worries when there's nothing to worry for.'
He walked out on her. He left his bag of tools in the hall. She watched him walk off to the garage. Later she heard the whining of the engine of his motorcycle.
She was in the kitchen and turning the sausages when there was the sound of a car braking. She was about to shake the chips in the fat when there was the noise of doors slamming. The table was laid. Her man was in the bathroom and washing off the dirt of the farm where he helped two afternoons a week, work-shy and thought it was full employment. She went into the hall. There was a car parked outside the front gate and its exhaust spewed fumes into the evening. She could see the shape of the driver's head but not his features. There was a man who walked away up the drive-way from the garage and her Patsy was following behind him, and there was a third man who walked behind Patsy and close to him. The light was falling. It was difficult for her to see the laces of the men. The man who walked behind Patsy, his hand was on her son's elbow. She wanted to shout out, yell the warning to him, and the shout and the yell were dead in her throat. She couldn’t see Patsy's face, just his hunched back. She didn't know whether he went smiling or went frightened.
He sat in the chair close to the fire.
The chair was as close to the fire as it could be without the legs scorching. The O.C. was hunched forward for the warmth. His wife watched the television and his kiddie played on the carpet with a toy.
He didn’t hear the television, he didn't see his kiddie, He looked at the jumping flames of the fire and felt the cold on his back and in his groin, He had been told that the Riordan boy had been seen getting into an unmarked police car, and that the Riordan boy had been gone for a full twenty lour hours and then turned up for work in Dungannon.
He no longer ruled on the mountain. Altmore was taken over by strangers.
A forty minute drive. No conversation in the car. Nothing spoken to Patsy and nothing said amongst them. The explanation had been curtailed in the garage beside his home, where they had found him crouched over the engine of the motorcycle. He was to be taken to a meeting. In the car he was not unduly alarmed. He had seen signposts lit by the headlights. The journey took them beyond Pomeroy and out towards Carrickmore. In a village, just before they stopped, he saw illuminated over the driver's shoulders a sign that was strung from a lamp post. The sign was the silhouette of a volunteer with his head hidden by a balaclava and with the outline of an Armalite rifle in his hands. The slogan on the sign was 'Careless Talk Costs Lives'. He was still thinking of the sign and the slogan when the car came to a stop. In Coalis-land or Cookstown or Dungannon, even in the villages of Altmore mountain, the army and police would have torn down the Provo poster. He was in the no-man's-land where the army and police chose not to patrol. The front passenger and the man who had sat silent beside him in the back of the car led him to the front door of a darkened house. They unlocked the door. Patsy walked inside, into the blackness.
The door closed behind him. There was the blow on the back of his head, and his feet were tripped from underneath him, and as he fell there was the hard kick into his rib cage.
Mossie drove towards home that lunchtime.
It was not usual for him to go home for lunch from work.
He went home because the third and fourth steps of his ladder had cracked, and he kept a spare ladder in the shed at the back. After his injury he was always fearful of a further fall that might completely disable him.
He was two miles from the village when he saw her.
A lonely woman walking against the wind.
He slowed so that he would not splash her from the road's rain puddles as he went by her. She had the collar of her coat turned up and a plastic rain hat was knotted tight under her chin. There was little of her face to see. It was only when he was on her that he recognised Mrs Riordan. It was a moment, fast gone, but time enough for her face to be clear to him.
The face was pain… and he was gone by.
She was a decent woman and her son had done him no harm.
There had been no tail on his car that morning.
He pulled into a farm gateway. The mountain, dark, stretched away above him. Distanced, small, he could see his own home. He could see the whitewashed walls where was Siobhan and his mother. He had switched off the engine. He was slumped in his seat… Who would be his friends? If he quit and ran, who would be his friends? If he stayed, who would be left to bury him…? So many were buried. The day he had come back, on the Heysham to Belfast ferry, with Siobhan and the kids then born and the loaded car, the day the bitch had sent him back, that had been the day that Charlie Mcllmurray, taxi driver from Belfast, had been found shot dead on the border. The day he had first found work had been the day that Tommy Wilson had been killed. Maguire had followed, and McKiernan and McNamee. The day Siobhan had gone into hospital to give him little Mary had been the day that Joe Fenton had been put to rest, and his Francis' birthday had been the day of the abduction of John McNulty before the torturing and the killing and the dumping. He could remember the day, bitter cold and bitter frightening, that he had heard on the vine through which whispered information flowed that Paddv Flood, volunteer from Derry, had been taken from his home for questioning by the security team. Who would bury him, if he stayed? Siobhan was involved now and that was his weakness. She was a as trapped as himself. They had shot Gerry Mahon, tout, and they had shot Gerry Mahon's wife, accomplice.
Siobhan was no safer than himself. The nightmare spread in him. If he were pulled in. If he were worked on by the security team, then sooner or later he would crack, and when he cracked he would name his Siobhan as tout's accomplice… Who would hold the children's hands in a churchyard? And if he fled, then his friends in hiding would be the bitch and her minder. He would have no other friends…
Mossie started the engine. He drove home to collect the second ladder. He could not scour from his mind the pain-streaked face of Mrs Riordan, walking in the lane and walking against the wind.
He was blindfolded. He was stripped naked. He was tied at the wrists and ankles. He lay on the bed.
They searched his privates and his nostrils and ears and mouth, and between the cheeks of his buttocks, and he felt the cold touch on his skin and Patsy Riordan's numbed mind told him that they used a metal detector over his body.
He was lifted from the bed.
He was taken across the room. He felt the thin carpet below his feet.
He was pushed down onto a chair.
The voice was in his ear. 'You know who we are, Patsy?'
So difficult to speak. The fear strangled the words. 'Yes.'
'You know why you're here, Patsy?'
'I done nothing.'
'You're a touting bastard, Patsy.'
'No… no…'
'And you're going to tell me, Patsy, that you're a touting bastard
…'
The voice beat in his ears.
He was clearing his mind. It was the rubbish bin that had his attention.
