The Bogside Boys Page 15

  Another twenty minutes of fights, of arguments, led to nothing. No minds were changed, but Pat began to calm down. The rational side of him came to the fore again, and he realized that his brother’s mind wasn’t for changing, at least not tonight. He resolved to speak to him the next morning after he’d slept on his decision. He’d play along with Mick’s madcap scheme for that night.

  “We also need the higher-ups to think that you’re doing this out of a sense of duty to the cause, not to assuage any guilt you might be feeling or to protect any witnesses,” Pat explained.

  “Why?” Melissa asked.

  “Mick will meet all sorts of horrible people in jail. He’s going to be famous. Infamous. There could be people who’d like to see him dead. He’s going to need all the protection he can get, and there’ll be none better than what he’d get from his fellow IRA men. So it’s vital that he goes to prison as a hero of the republican cause, his head unbowed. Once he’s inside he won’t have to do anything or take part in any IRA operations, just keep his head down and wait until we can work on getting him paroled.”

  “It’s going to be a long time,” Mick said, his voice distant.

  “Aye, it will,” his brother answered.

  All three fell silent.

  “If you do go through with this, I’ll get you out of there, I swear I will,” Pat said.

  “I should leave you two boys to talk. This is nothing to do with me now.”

  “No, please stay for a while. We can have a drink or something.” Mick argued.

  “No, I’d rather not. Now your time to be together. You have a lot to talk about.”

  “Let her go, Mick.”

  “All right, let’s get you set up in the spare room.” He said, standing up. It felt strange to call their parents’ room ‘the spare room.’

  “I’ll just need to call home first, tell them I’m staying out.”

  “Right. It’s on the wall there.”

  “I know.” She almost smiled.

  She curled the telephone wire around the door so she could speak in private. They heard the murmur of her speaking to her mother and then, she hung up the phone. The door opened, and she was standing in the doorway. Mick drank her in with his eyes. The regret at not taking the chance he had at a life with her permeated to the core of him.

  “Let me walk you upstairs.”

  She led the way, knowing exactly where to go. They stopped at the door to the bedroom as she held it ajar. The bed was perfectly made, the room spotlessly clean.

  “This is it, then.”

  “I suppose it is,” she answered.

  The sorrow for him, and for what they should have had together was almost paralyzing. She stared into his eyes, the most beautiful she’d ever seen.

  “I just want to say, I admire what you’re doing. I don’t blame you for what happened to me or for any of this.”

  “Thanks. That means a lot coming from you.”

  He wondered if he’d ever see her again. He might see her the next morning before he went to the local IRA commanders, but would he ever look into her eyes like this again? The deep longing was already beginning. Another period of mourning. It was too late for wishful thinking. He took a step backward.

  “You’ll be comfortable here, and when we get up in the morning I’ll, go the local commanders, and then to the police.”

  “OK,” she said, her voice barely audible. He took another step toward the stairs. She stood there, watching him go. He started down, stopping on the first step. She was still at the door. “I love you, Melissa.”

  Her face tightened as she forced a smile. He kept on down the stairs. It was only when he went into the living room that she finally replied, “I love you too” in a voice so low that she barely heard it herself.

  Pat and Mick sat talking for an hour or two without enough booze between them to get drunk. Pat offered to go out and borrow some from the neighbors, but Mick refused. Tomorrow was too important to have the haze of a hangover sagging over it. His story had to be unequivocal. Lying had never come easy, and now he was going to have to lie to the entire country. More shootings and bombings would come to erase the memory of what they’d done. Two Protestant brothers had been found dead just that day outside Belfast. Speculation was that loyalist forces had killed them for having Catholic girlfriends. The public fury about the killings of the soldiers in the field would fade, but the feelings inside him wouldn’t. There was no escape from himself. Even Pat understood that now, and he stopped trying to dissuade Mick from the decision that he’d already made.

  They went to bed at around two a.m., trudging up the stairs one after the other. The sound of bedsprings from their parents’ room told Mick that she was still awake. Her life would not be intertwined with his, as it should have been. He thought of her in another man’s arms and pain tore through him. He didn’t want to think about the life that he had in front of him; a life bereft of freedom and joy. But he felt the cold hand of fear and saw the real cost of his integrity for the first time. He had the thought to go into the room, to take her in his arms and beg her to run away with him, to leave the horror that was the daily currency of this war behind them. But he knew that could never be. He walked to his room and went to bed alone.

  Melissa heard the boys going to bed. She sat up her heart hammering as she heard Mick bid Pat goodnight, and the slapping of backs as they hugged each other. Did she have the power to stop this? Mick seemed determined to turn himself in. It did seem like the right thing to do, but even after everything that had happened, the thought of never seeing him again tore at her. She closed her eyes, letting her head drop down to the pillow. Could she trust the rest of her life to him, who had been a part of the most gruesome killings of British soldiers in these Troubles so far? Would saving him be the best thing for him? Maybe he needed this as much as he made out. Maybe true atonement was his only salvation. She had been wrestling with these questions ever since the shootings on Saturday night. At least now he had taken the decision upon himself. That offered some relief. But still the fire raged inside her. Life, her mother had once told her, was about decisions, decisions made in moments of great turmoil, and it was these decisions that defined us.

  She lay there for half an hour, maybe more. There was no clock in the room, and she couldn’t make out the hands on her wristwatch. Sleep would not come, not when her mind was racing like this. She had to see him, just to be sure. She got out of the bed, only in her underwear. No way was she going in there like this, so she, pulled her jeans back on and slipped into the sweater she’d left hanging on the chair. She took a deep breath and opened the bedroom door. The hallway outside was completely dark. Even though there was no light coming from either room, she doubted they were asleep. Melissa didn’t want Pat to hear her, didn’t want him to know she was going to Mick. Her footfall was so light across the carpet that she barely heard it herself. The house was small, and, Mick’s bedroom door was only feet away, just across the landing. She placed her hand on the doorknob and took a deep breath as she turned it. Mick was sitting up in bed, his curtains open, the silver light of the night outside covering his bare torso. He smiled as he saw her, the look of surprise fading from his eyes as quickly as it had appeared.

  She closed the door behind her without a word. He looked so handsome in the moonlight that the words stopped in her throat. He turned his head away from her as she came inside and stared back out the window, motioning with his hand for her to sit down in the chair opposite his bed. He turned back to face her as she sat down.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing in here,” she began. Nerves gripped her the way they had when she’d first seen him when he’d first asked her out.

  “I’m glad you came. I couldn’t sleep. I’ve just been staring out at the night, at the stars. I don’t know how much of this I’ll be able to see once I’m inside. I need to make the most of it now.” He managed a smile.

  She didn’t know how to reply to that, couldn’t imagine life wi
thout the stars. “I don’t blame you for the things you did. I know how devastated you were by what happened to your dad. I don’t know that I would have done anything different if I were in your situation.”

  “I think you would have.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think you would have had more faith in what we had, and I think you would have chosen us, over a commitment to the IRA.”

  “I have no idea. I don’t have an identical twin, another half of the person that I am. I understand that you wanted to support him and the commitment that he wanted to make to the Catholic community.”

  “Pat is a good man, very smart. He can do great things. If this is the impetus he needs to get out of the IRA and do something good with his life, then my decision will be justified.”

  “Is that why you’re doing this, for him?”

  “For him, for you. But like all human beings, I’m selfish at heart,” he smiled. “I need to do this for myself.”

  She felt a rush through her like a stream of heat, and she blurted out the words bouncing around in her head. “But what if you didn’t? What if I just didn’t tell anyone? What if you went to your superiors and stopped the order to kill me?”

  “You don’t know the person behind all this. She’s very dangerous – completely paranoid.”

  “She?”

  “Yes. She’s a woman, not much older than us. The hatred inside her must be strong enough to block out every other piece of humanity. The operation was her idea. There’s no convincing her, no stopping her.”

  “What if you went to the police and told them about her, told them it was her idea, that she carried out the killings?”

  “Then she’d just as likely tell them about me and the other volunteers who went on the mission, and I’d be a tout, an informer, and I’d end up dead.”

  Silence fell on them; the only sound that of a dog barking in the distance. The city was almost entirely quiet. She got out of the wooden chair and sat down on the mattress beside him, her legs touching his through the blanket. “What if we were to run? What if I went with you?”

  “I could never ask you to do that. I could never suppose that you might even consider that, not after everything that I’ve done.”

  “But what if I offered? What if I said that I’d go with you, just like we planned when we were together?”

  “Are you serious?” he said, leaning forward.

  She put her hand on his muscular chest. She was smiling now. “Maybe,” the smile melted and then came back. “I don’t know, what do you think?”

  “I think that you need to consider this very carefully, that you need to be sure before you make any promises.”

  “You said that you still loved me.”

  “I do. I never stopped. I never will. You’ll have my heart forever.”

  “I love you too. I thought that I didn’t anymore, that because of your joining the IRA it had died but I was wrong. I do love you, as much as I ever did.”

  She leaned in to kiss him, and he felt the feather brush of her lips against his as cool water in the desert his life had become. He ran his hand through the softness of her hair and held her against him, her hand on his chest. He knew no other feeling like this, but he still pulled back.

  “I don’t want you to make any rash decisions. I want you to be sure about what you’re agreeing to, about what this is going to entail.”

  “I do know. This has been running through my head for days now.”

  “You’ll have to leave everything behind. They won’t come after you if we both disappear, but you won’t be able to come back for years.”

  The excitement began to take hold of her and a smile burst onto her face. “We’ll come back some day and if we can’t, they can come to us.”

  Mick could see the love for him burning in her eyes, could feel it in the electricity of her touch. He should have been ecstatic, but he wasn’t. The emptiness began to fill him again, the void inside expanding.

  “Are you sure, I don’t…”

  “Stop,” she whispered, and put her finger on his bottom lip. “Just stop talking now.” She reached in to kiss him again, and he fell backward onto the bed, she on top of him. She sat up to pull the sweater over her head and to unclasp her bra. She was utterly intoxicated by him. The love that coursed through her was stronger than anything she’d felt before.

  *****

  When she awoke, he was gone. She ran downstairs, desperate to stop him, knowing already that it was too late. The house was empty. The note he’d left her was on the table.

  Melissa,

  I didn’t want to wake you. I can’t make you go through with what you said you’d do last night. It wouldn’t be right to make you pay for what I’ve done.

  You’ve got a wonderful life ahead of you. Please forget about me.

  Mick

  Chapter 16

  The Long Kesh Detention Center, County Down, April 26th, 1974

  The guard led Mick out of the hut. The sun shone over green fields still visible through the twenty-foot high wire fence. The outside tasted cool and clean, nothing like the squalid air inside the over-crowded cylindrical steel huts that he and the other republican prisoners lived in. Long Kesh had once been a Royal Air Force base, and the huts had been built to house airmen during World War II. The government took over the base in 1971 to house the detainees from the internments. The same internments that had given the IRA all the impetus it needed until the Bloody Sunday killings finally convinced the Catholic youth of the province that violence was the only answer. But Mick was not a detainee. He was one of the new breed of IRA political prisoners crowded in with them. Mick pulled the clean air deeply into his lungs, shuffling behind the guard as he led him toward the hut designated as the visitors’ center. Mick longed to hear the sound of birdsong or to see a hare in the fields in the distance, any sign of a world beyond wires, guards, and bars. But there was nothing. Nothing to take him away from the grotesquery of the human world he was trapped inside, nothing to remind him of anything else but the rats that scurried under his bed at night.

  “Lewis,” Mick called out. “Any chance of a cigarette?”

  The guard stopped walking and turned to Mick, a half-smile on his face. “Ever the smart-ass, Doherty.” He shook his head.

  “Yeah, but you like me. Come on, how about a smoke?”

  “You’ve got a visitor. They’ll have cigarettes for you.”

  “Aye sure, it’s probably my Aunt Lisa, she never brings anything but that fruitcake she bakes me. I wouldn’t mind if it had a file in it. Maybe I’d get out o’ here.”

  Lewis let out a snigger and reached into his pocket. “Don’t tell any of those other louts I gave you this, they’ll be all over me.”

  “It’ll be our secret, Lewis. Thanks. You’re a good man. You’d be even better if you gave me a light though.”

  Lewis shook his head but still reached into his pocket. He handed matches to Mick, who lit the cigarette. “Let’s get moving. We don’t want to keep your visitor waiting, do we?”

  “Certainly not,” Mick replied.

  They walked the two hundred yards to the visitors’ center in silence. Mick was perfectly content. Good cigarettes were hard to come by. He intended to enjoy this one.

  It was a Friday afternoon and the visitors’ center was swollen with people. Some prisoners sat resolute, with straight postures and determined eyes. Others looked broken, on the verge of tears, pleading with their families to get them out at any cost. Mick thought of where he might fall, likely somewhere between the two. Lewis led him to an empty table, and Mick sat down, finishing off his cigarette. Lewis told him to stay put, but Mick knew the protocol. He had visitors most weeks. He looked around the room, catching eyes with Davey O’Byrne, also from Bogside. Davey waved across and introduced him to his family. Mick waved back. Davey was a good guy, in for seven years on a bomb-making charge. The bomb factory he’d been working in had blown up. He had been around the back takin
g a pee. The other two volunteers inside hadn’t been so lucky.

  Melissa walked in, her eyes immediately on him. The cold shock of seeing her again paralyzed him. She was radiant in her short skirt and dark blouse. Her hair was different, parted in the middle. She sat down; her face a clear reflection of her disgust at the place. The guard left her. Mick gazed across, not knowing what to say.

  “Hello, Mick.”

  “Melissa, what are you doing here?”

  “I just wanted to see how you are. It’s been a long time.”

  “Almost two years.”

  “You’re looking well. How are you?”

  “I’m doing all right. It’s not exactly a holiday camp in here.” Just to feel the soft touch of her hair would have been more pleasure than anything he still thought possible. “You look wonderful.”

  “Thank you,” she replied. Her gaze fell from his. “Does your mother come over to see you?”

  “She came at Christmas. It’s hard. She still lives in Paris.”

  “How did she take your confession?”

  “Not well. I told her the truth. I knew I could trust her. I couldn’t have her thinking those things that the paper said about me were true.”

  “You confessed to those things in court.”

  “Aye.”

  She smiled and reached into her bag for some lip-gloss but then thought better of it and focused back onto Mick. “Are you always allowed to wear your own clothes?”

  “Yeah, I’m a political prisoner. I have Special Category Status. We’re allowed to wear our own clothes, have more visitors, get packages from the outside, just as if we were prisoners of war.”

  “Is that how you see yourself, as a prisoner of war?”

  “I try not to think about it too much. That’s for the others to worry about. I’m just trying to keep my head down and do my time.”

  “A life sentence is a long time to keep your head down.”