At the office, I scan my badge, then hook the lanyard over my neck, hurrying across the building. I work through assignments at my desk, editing and correcting, restoring order. My face feels dry and composed. I sit trimming a story, in a dark jumper and cigarette trousers, listening to keys tapping around me, while outside rain lashes the taxis and buses on Kildare Street.
I start editing a piece from the news desk on a shooting in north Belfast last night. A Catholic solicitor was shot in retaliation for the kidnapping of a Protestant judge, who was taken in retaliation for the shooting of a Catholic teacher, who was shot in retaliation for the murder of two unarmed Protestants, and it goes back, on and on and on. The victims are like a strand of paper dolls, each one holding hands with the one before.
The article is brief, matter-of-fact. “As part of their inquiries, police are examining a car left on waste ground in the Protestant neighborhood of Sandy Row in south Belfast.” The Protestant neighborhood. How little has changed, how doomed we sound. I highlight the phrase and delete it before sending the piece on.
At ten, I duck out in the rain to buy a cappuccino and an almond croissant from a shop on Baggot Street. Crossing Merrion Square, I taste rain on the plastic lid of my coffee cup. Once I’m back in the office, the reporter comes to my desk. “Why did you change my copy?” he asks.
“Because you can’t call a neighborhood Catholic or Protestant.”
“But it is a Protestant area,” he says, his voice raised. He is one of the most senior reporters on the news desk. He could, possibly, have me fired. Around us, the other desks have gone quiet as people start to listen.
“That’s not the point. Saying the car was found in a Protestant neighborhood is like blaming an entire community for the shooting. How can you not see that? You’re encouraging reprisals.”
“I’m reporting the facts. Change it back.”
“No,” I say. This is, apparently, the hill I will die on. The reporter looks around for support, but no one meets his eyes. Finally he points at me and says to Joanna, “I don’t want her touching my copy ever again. Give it to someone else.”
“Ah, no, Simon,” says Joanna with a bright smile. “You know we’re all a team.”
The reporter walks away, muttering. An hour later, Oisín leans over my desk and says, “They’re using your version. It’s already online.”
“Good,” I say, though that one edit won’t make any difference. A reprisal is coming, everyone knows that.
During our lunch break, Emer, Oisín, and I walk to St. Andrew’s Church to donate blood after hearing an appeal on the news. The blood donations will be sent to Belfast, a convoy of lorries loaded with blood driving north over the border. Hospitals made the appeal for donations, because their supplies are already low, and the North is bracing for a reprisal after the last shooting, this wave of revenge always poised to crash over the province. My donation won’t be used right away. It will have to be cleaned first. Washed, however you wash blood.
At St. Andrew’s, the nurse has trouble finding a vein. She frowns, pushing against my arm, rubbing hard at my elbow. She tries to draw blood from my left arm, but nothing comes into the vial. It remains clear, while we both frown at it. “You don’t have any blood,” she says.
“Yes I do,” I say, stupidly.
“Your veins are constricted. I think you’re dehydrated,” she says. “I can’t do it.”
“Please,” I say. “Please try, please, you have to.”
When I start to cry, the nurse says, “Ah, listen, you’re okay.” She hands me a bottle of juice. “Drink this. I’ll come back to you, all right?” And I sit drinking the bottle of juice, with a tourniquet around my arm and silent tears flooding down my face. The nurse motions me back after a few minutes. She twists open a needle, and we watch red blood lifting up the coil.
Emer and Oisín are waiting for me outside the church. Oisín says, “The victim’s husband was on the news. He was asking for no reprisals.”
“There are going to be reprisals,” says Emer, her voice dull.
“I know.”
The blood draw leaves a bruise on my arm, and the bruise deepens on my walk back to the office, gathering color, darkening like a thunder cloud.
We are called in for a conference at four. Joanna is going over our assignments when I catch a blur of movement on the other side of the glass conference wall. Across the table, the others are all watching the figure moving toward the door, and my body tenses. I turn in time to see the detective opening the door and raising his badge, holding it up long enough for everyone in the room to get a good look at it. He turns to me. “Can I’ve a word?”
Humiliation flares across my face. I stand, knocking my hip hard against the conference table. “Sorry,” I say to Joanna, and she hides her surprise fast enough to say, “No bother at all, we’re finishing up anyway.”
The detective steps into the empty conference room next door. He thinks I’m lying to him, he thinks I have information he wants, and he has decided to start our next interview on different terms. Following him into the conference room, I can see others watching us down the open-plan office, and the reporter leaning back in his chair with his brows raised. “Let’s go outside,” I say.
“Why?” says the detective, sitting down, smoothing his suit. “We’re already here.”
I’m facing him, trying to decide what to do next, when Emer pushes through the door and takes a seat across from the detective. He looks at her, his mouth curling. “We need to speak privately,” he says.
“No, I’m afraid not,” says Emer. “I’m her solicitor.”
“She doesn’t need a solicitor,” says the detective. “She’s not speaking to me under caution.”
“Oh,” says Emer, turning to me, “in that case, do you want to be interviewed at this particular time?”
I shake my head. I’m not ready for it, not before talking with Eamonn. The detective will tear me apart.
“Okay,” says Emer. She finds a sticky note and bends over it with a pen. “Here’s my number. If you want me to bring her over to the station for a chat, give me a buzz.”
I follow Emer out of the room, with the detective watching us. She turns down a corridor and opens the fire door onto the external staircase. The two of us stand on the fire escape, under the gray clouds, while I gulp down air. I look at Emer’s small, catlike face, her sharp pointed nose. “How did you know to do that?” I ask, and Emer shrugs.
“Coming into your office, with that face on him. I didn’t like it,” she says. “And I’ve a civil liberties degree, so I actually know what the cops are and aren’t allowed to do, which they assume most people won’t.”
I nod, adrenaline thumping in my veins. The detective was about to wreck me. “He’s going to hate me for this.”
“In fairness,” says Emer, “he didn’t look like your biggest fan to begin with.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“You don’t need to tell me,” says Emer.
“I can’t,” I say, and then realize, with a bright burst in my skull, that I don’t need to worry about Emer dobbing me in to the IRA. The IRA already knows exactly where I am, I don’t need to hide anymore. My mind is pinwheeling, bursting into colors. I have no reason to lie. That’s one silver lining. I want to laugh out loud, or burst into tears. “He wants to arrest me.”
“Truly,” says Emer. “I’m not asking, you don’t need to say anything.”
“He thinks I’m in the IRA.”
Her eyes startle. “Why?”
“Because my sister was,” I say quickly, and the release is like cutting myself out of a net.
“But why now?” she asks, her legal mind shifting ahead. “What made him come here today?”
“My sister went missing on a hike this weekend. I went to the gardaí for help, and now he thinks he’s closing in on a sleeper cell.”
“And you’re certain he’s wrong?” asks Emer.
“My sister became an informer, before we left Northern Ireland. We both did.”
“Funny,” says Emer. “You never talk about your home life. I thought you were having an affair with someone in the office.”
I snort. “Chance would be a fine thing.”
“Does he have any evidence against you?” she asks, and I shake my head. I almost tell her about the bungalow. My fingerprints on the wall and the radiator, the card table. And I remember coughing, my blood disappearing into the black fabric of the Range Rover. Normally the IRA burns a car out after an operation, but they’d hate to with one that expensive. They might try to get away with just cleaning it.
Emer looks at me, and she knows I’m holding something back. “Well, think about it,” she says. “If you think of anything he might have against you, tell me.”
Slowly, feeling my way along the edges, I say, “There are some things I’m not allowed to talk about yet.”
Royce looking at me, saying, If you call the police, if you tell anyone, we will kill your family. Eamonn saying, Can you meet me?
“I understand,” says Emer. “But whatever it is, you’ll be wanting to get ahead of him. My bet is he already has someone going through your phone records and emails.”
“But I haven’t been arrested,” I say, and Emer shrugs. She says, “If they find something, they’ll arrest you, get a warrant, and then say they found whatever it is afterward.”
Something prickles through me, but I shove it aside. “Well, look, I don’t envy the cop who has to read through our work group chats. The ones about Secret Santa alone, can you imagine?”
“Financials, too,” says Emer.
“Then he’ll know how often I’m in my overdraft,” I say, but the prickling feeling has grown worse.
“What about your sister?” asks Emer.
“Joint account with her husband,” I say. Marian would never have been stupid enough to wire money to Niall in prison from her account. She said the payments were anonymous. All the cops will find are a lot of Tesco and Dublin Bus receipts. Though Marian does spend an absolute fortune on skin-care products. Sometimes I feel like we’re running a sort of accidental experiment, with her using expensive serums and me using off-brand lotion, and in ten years we’ll see if her routine has worked. By which point my own face might be too wrecked to fix, but there you have it.
Emer is looking at me like she’s about to snap her fingers in my face. “Do you think the detective has sent people into my house?” I ask, and the prickling feeling bursts down my arms and back. Not in my house, not where I give Finn a bath, cook his dinner, read him stories.
“I doubt it,” says Emer. “It would be hard to get a search team in and out without leaving any trace. If they were caught searching without a warrant, their whole case would be ruined.”
“Good.”
“Listen,” says Emer, “something has him convinced the two of you are worth his time. If I were you, I’d want to find out what it is before he drops it in my lap.”
“I’ll think about it, I promise. Thank you, Emer.”
“Anytime. Zakura for lunch tomorrow?” she asks, and I nod, feeling childish for thinking she wasn’t really my mate because she has never gone to the toilets with me in a pub.
I motion down at her athletic sandals. “Were slippers too formal, no?”
No one else in the office mentions the detective’s visit. I catch them sneaking glances toward me at first, but they stop soon enough, distracted by their own work, their own daydreams. Somewhere, a cop is reading transcripts of my phone messages. I picture a man, younger than me, paging through the messages in Kevin Street Garda Station.
I swipe open my phone and scroll through my messages, choosing a few at random, to see what the officer might be reading. They’re almost painfully dull, all of them. A fair few desperate messages to mam, begging her to mind Finn when his playschool is closed. Group chats with other parents, arranging playdates on the weekends. A work chat, full of low-level gossip. Good luck to the cop reading month after month of this clabber.
I click back onto a story for our financial pages, and I’m editing a passage about lender rates when the hairs rise on my arms. I have to wait for nearly an hour until Emer finally leaves her desk and starts toward the canteen, and I can follow her into the hall.
“Sorry—”
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“My phone records,” I say, holding up my mobile. “Do you mean this phone, that I’ve now? Or the one I had in Belfast?”
“Oh,” says Emer. “Both, probably.”
“Even if I haven’t used the number in three years?”
“Depends on your server,” she says, “but odds are they’ll find that data, too. Are you okay? Want to come get a coffee?”
“No, I’m all right. Thanks,” I say. Emer waits for a second, then heads toward the canteen, and I lock myself in the women’s toilets, digging my hands into my hair.
All of my messages are harmless now, but what about before, in my twenties, when I took my privacy for granted, when I never thought that anyone else would ever be reading through my conversations? What was I saying back then?
Already I can think of two conversations. When the cop finds them, he will sit up in his chair, take a screenshot of them, send them up to the detective. I sit with my knuckles pressed to my mouth, staring at the toilet door.
The first conversation was a group chat with my friends, one summer when I was home from Trinity. We’d been to a protest that night in Ballymurphy. The protest’s organizers were all future IRA leaders, but we didn’t know that at the time, we thought we were protesting the housing board and income inequality. One of the protesters got hold of a loudhailer, and read off part of a Black Panthers speech from the sixties. “This is a hold-up. We’ve come for what’s ours,” he said, and the crowd roared. We were all buzzing afterward, messaging back and forth about the protest. I wrote, “That was deadly.”
And the other conversation was a few years later, soon after the conflict kicked off again. I sent Marian a picture of the Dark Hedges, in north Antrim. I’d never been before. You wouldn’t want to, with the buses crowding the lane, but the tourists had stopped coming because of the conflict. In the picture I took that day, all you can see is the long tunnel of twisted, ancient thorn trees. I sent the picture to Marian, and wrote, “Dark Hedges, and not another soul in sight.”
Marian wrote back, “Never say the IRA is good for nothing.”
“Fair play to the lads,” I wrote. “Something had to be done about the tourists.”