Joseph’s train was late coming up, so their lunch in town ended up being a cup of tea in the platform café. They only had a short time together, but it was good all the same, Alice thought. Her mum, and Alan especially, seemed to like Joseph a lot. There was a cold week forecast and they joked together about Joseph having packed his tent, and whether he could use Alice as an excuse not to camp out. Alan’s father had taken him camping when he was a kid, like Joseph’s, and they agreed it was at least half about their dads wanting to get out of the house. Grab a few days’ peace, away from the family. But it didn’t always work out that way, of course, because they had to haul their sons along.
– Not that we didn’t have our uses.
Alan remembered a hailstorm and a night in a hotel, and how the additional expense was blamed on him after they got home.
– He told Mum I’d been unhappy in the tent when the weather turned nasty. But the way I recall it, the hotel room was my Dad’s idea.
Alice watched Joseph smiling, slipped her hand under his knee, under the table, and let it rest there, beneath the solid warmth of his leg. His hair was long again, curling over his ears. She’d been the last to cut it, a warm Sunday morning in his kitchen with the radio on, a couple of months ago already, must be. A week away from him, and she’d surprised herself, thinking about those days, early on, when he’d stopped phoning, and they didn’t see each other. They’d spoken almost every day while she was at her mum’s, so she didn’t know why. He’d given her no reason to worry over the phone, and most days it had been Joseph who’d done the calling, because dinner conversation usually went on for a while with her mum and Alan, and she’d lost track of the evenings. Alice thought, we still haven’t known each other long. Eight, nine months or something. She was happy to see him.
They’d booked into a bed and breakfast their first night, and arrived just as it was getting dark. Joseph sneaked them a fish supper each up the stairs and then they got into one of the soft single beds together and stayed there. The curtains were thin, and there was sun in the room when Alice woke. Joseph had moved across to the other bed at some stage, probably when it got light, and it looked like he was still sleeping, his top pulled off, the sleeves knotted around his eyes.
They walked a lot, ate their lunches in empty tearooms or on windy beaches. It wasn’t summer any more, but not cold enough to put them off. They followed her grandfather’s coastal path the first day, and then kept on over the next few as well, moving from village to village, on foot and with the local buses. When it rained, they sheltered in shop doorways and under trees, and Alice liked this best: not moving, not doing, just still, the two of them. Good and tired, wet salt air blown into their faces, no need to say much about anything, Alice enjoyed all of being with Joseph that week: the twenty-four hours of it, the seven days long, and she let herself relax again. We’re doing fine.
The evening skies were pale from their guesthouse windows, and they ate pub meals, sipping their pints amongst the other walkers. Alice listened to the locals, accents like her grandmother’s: memories drawn out of her like teeth.
On their last day, Alice took Joseph to the village where Isobel was born. They’d planned it that way, to save it up, and Alice had been aware of it coming, through the week. She was unsure of what she felt when they were there and walking together through the rainy streets. Past the squat houses, the granite school building where her great-grandfather had taught. Along the riverbank, and under the high stone bridge from where you could see the beach already: sand and grey waves. Alice hadn’t been there before, only heard about it. Her gran’s childhood memories of fishermen and ceilidhs, her mum’s of teenage boredom on holiday at her elderly grandparents’. Alice told Joseph about them while they stood under the bus shelter, waiting for the latest shower to ease off a little.
– It was dull for Gran here too. Maybe not when she was little, but later. She did well at school, she was expected to, probably, the schoolmaster’s daughter. But a lot of the other expectations didn’t sit so well with her. She hated learning the piano. Said it was all part of a pattern, even if she didn’t really know it at the time. Music lessons and a suitable marriage. Children and a well-run house.
Alice watched the rain fall on the puddles in the road, and she told Joseph that her gran used to read books up at the piano sometimes, instead of practising: propped them open on the music stand. If she heard her mother coming, she’d pull the sheet music over them and start playing, always somewhere in the middle of a phrase, as though she’d been stuck, working out the fingering, and that’s why the piano had been quiet.
– Gran told her music teacher that she didn’t want to get married, and she was going to study medicine. I think she was fourteen then. Very earnest about it. Her teacher wasn’t married and lived on her own, so Gran said she seemed like the right person to confide in. But the teacher reported back to Gran’s parents, in front of Gran and Celie, her big sister, and they all laughed.
Joseph winced, and Alice said they weren’t being unkind, not the way Gran had told it, just not taking her as seriously as she did herself, and she was mortified.
– Did she carry on her lessons?
– Yeah. But Gran said she did more reading than practising after that. She used to like telling that story, I reckon. Because she notched up two husbands, as it turned out. That was her punchline. Never went back to nursing either, looked after my Mum instead, and then me. Taught me piano. She enjoyed it. She was good at it too. Gave lessons to the kids down the road after we moved out.
Joseph stood close to her, listening, and Alice thought about her gran: the way she’d laughed about her teenage ambitions, as though she enjoyed remembering them. Hard to say now, if she’d minded that they were unfulfilled.
– Gran never told my Mum she should marry my Dad. It was his parents that were keen on that idea, I think. My Mum wasn’t, and my Gran didn’t try to persuade her. Thinking about herself at fourteen, probably.
Alice shifted a little. Now that she’d said it, this felt like an unsatisfactory explanation. Too neat a connection. She shook her head, self-conscious.
– I don’t know, though. I’m just guessing, aren’t I?
Joseph returned her smile. It was the most Alice had said all day, and it felt strange afterwards, the quiet under the shelter. Gusts of wind spattering drops onto the roof from the trees. Not raining any more. The timetable said the last bus was at three: too soon for Alice. They’d been in the village just under two hours, and there wasn’t much left to see, but Joseph said he liked it, and that they should spend their last night there, even though it would mean getting up early for the only bus out in the morning.
– There was a B&B down at the harbour, had vacancies in the window. I’ll shout you.
They’d paid for a night back at their first guesthouse already, were due to get a train out from there at lunchtime tomorrow. Alice looked at Joseph, the rain on his face and his smile, his nose and cheekbones pink from the wind.
– You don’t mind?
He shrugged:
– No, this is a good place. A bit damp, but it’s peaceful.
They stayed late in the pub next door, but Alice wasn’t tired when she got into bed. Lay with her eyes open and saw not the ceiling, the wallpaper, just her grandmother’s hands lifting off the piano keys, the corners of her mouth, teeth showing gold when she sang or smiled. Felt the loss of her: permanent, final. She dozed and then later she cried. Tried to be quiet about it, thought Joseph was sleeping in the other bed. But then he reached over in the dark and found the crook of her arm, rested his fingertips there. A bit later he took her hand and held it until she stopped crying, and longer. It wasn’t what she’d expected, Joseph didn’t come into her bed, but it was gentle, soothing somehow, and Alice was grateful to have him lying awake with her. They got up with the alarm for the first time in a week and dressed slowly, without speaking. Handing stray socks and jumpers across the beds to one another, packing and tidying. Sun just rising and they could see each other in the halflight, both puffy-eyed.
It was like his mind got stuck sometimes, turning everything over again to have a closer look. Not like he didn’t know it all already, but when he got that way, it was hard to stop. Thought it was down to David this time. Or down to himself for listening. Thought about the old man a lot that week away with Alice: how he talked, once he got started, just kept running on and getting distracted. Joseph reckoned he knew how that felt: he’d done enough of it over the years, not out loud like David, but in his head. Thinking it might all add up to something, maybe, all the remembering. Different parts of it on different days, and the order of things kept changing, but it was all the same memories and always the same people in them.
September in Ireland, hot for about a week and the local kids swam in the river. Sat on the banks in wet shorts, skinny boys shivering. Sixteen-, seventeen-, eighteen-year-olds, drinking cider out of plastic bottles. Smoking, shouting, the hardest ones jumping off the old stone bridge into the water. Cuts on their legs from the rocks at the bottom, but no limping, no pain showing, at least not while the girls were there on the opposite bank watching. Back at the barracks, in their bunks and the bar, the talk was all about how the girls surely had to go swimming soon, and what the boys should be doing to get them in there. But days passed, boys only, in and out the water, stomachs pulled in from the cold and the skin on their ribs shining blue-white in the unexpected sunshine. Out on Ops, they kept watch on them through binoculars: the boys showing off, charming and persuading, and the girls ignoring them. Joseph remembered being with Lee and Townsend on the hill above the village, always one of them ready for when the girls got their kit off.
The boys nicked some tractor inner tubes from one of the farmers and that was what did it. Genius, Townsend reckoned. Joseph was on stag, but he kept quiet and kept hold of the binoculars when the girls finally got off the banks. Still not showing much skin except leg: pale, wet limbs splayed, floating around on the black inflated rings, mouths wide. Joseph thought he could just hear them from where he was lying. Screaming and laughing, turning with the current, boys swimming out and splashing them, T-shirts and knickers soaked through and clinging so Joseph could see more by then, if he kept the binoculars still enough. Insects dancing in the long grass in front of him, sweat on his belly from the heat of the sun, from lying there for hours on his buckle, bored and uncomfortable. Breath held, pressed down onto the hillside, Joseph kept watching as long as he could, until the girls floated under the bridge and then he passed the binoculars on.
– You dirty fuck, why didn’t you say nothing?
That was Lee. Who said guard duty was for wanking. Told Joseph all about his porn collection at home in boxes, in the attic at his mum’s place. Always left a Forum or something stashed somewhere in the sangar, and if you were on after, you could spend half your time searching, take it away with you for later. Lee liked talking about it: called himself an addict, junkie for skin. Blamed the army, said they got him started, and that filth was all part of his training for the province. He told Joseph they showed him videos of riots and bombing with hard core cut in. Cunts and petrol bombs. Parades and fucking and burnt-out cars. Joseph didn’t believe him, you sick bastard, laughed:
– How come I never got to see them?
Jarvis was out with them that day, heard Lee talking. Told Joseph to stop laughing, because it wasn’t right to mock the afflicted. Said Lee’s training video was just wishful thinking: too much time on his hands and not enough in his y-fronts to fill them.
They heard later that a few of the younger boys took a tube each and drifted off downstream, beyond the bridge and away from the town. Made it as far as the sea, miles away, down at Dundalk in the Republic, and when it got dark they hitched home again.
The farmer was furious about his inner tubes, dumped at the beach. His wife wanted him to go down to the police station and report them stolen, but there was no chance of that, because two of the boys were sons of someone who counted. An RUC officer told them about it, tight-lipped and livid.
– That’s the way things work here. No such thing as due process. IRA makes its own laws. No one follows the ones we’re here to be upholding.
Joseph knew it should have bothered him too, but he couldn’t get worked up with the policeman: about the principle, maybe, but not about the boys and their inner tubes.
They saw them again a few days later, all up on ladders, painting the guttering on one of the farmer’s outbuildings, and Townsend said they were witnessing the local version of justice in action.
– You’ve got to admire it, haven’t you?
He was in the same brick, patrolling with Joseph most days, the whole time they were there. Townsend was Welsh, and kept a photo taped up on the wall by his pillow, of the hill behind his grandad’s house in the Rhondda. Said he climbed it every time he got home on leave, and he liked having the picture there, to remind him what mattered. But you could never tell with him if he was serious. A wind-up merchant. Always watching you while he was talking, and always some part of him smiling: mouth, eyes, something about him. So whatever he said you’d have to be careful about joining in, just in case he turned it against you. Told Joseph his cousins used to torch the English holiday homes and quite right too, he’d have done it as well only his dad said he had to wait a couple of years until he was old enough to go with them.
– It was all over by that time. Wanker.
Not the most convincing story, Joseph thought. Especially the bit about his dad: sounded like a poor excuse for not joining in, if he’d wanted to.
– What the fuck you doing here then?
– Fuck knows. You?
Townsend sang ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ in the NAAFI bar and got put on CO’s orders. Drink in one hand, standing on a chair, loud, but still in tune. Hard to tell if he was pissed or just acting it. They were on two cans then, so he couldn’t have been. Insisted he was only proving a point, settling a long-running bar room dispute: Macca could be as political as Lennon when the mood took him. Only Townsend was smiling again when he said it, and the Company Commander didn’t take kindly. Two weeks on drill, forty minutes every morning being bawled at in the transport yard by the Provost Corporal, who told him to stay out of trouble, because he hated drill, too fucking boring.
Townsend reckoned most of the locals were happy enough with the way things were. Just like the law, they didn’t really give a toss about the border: took the long view and figured it couldn’t last. Plenty of money to be made while it was there, besides. Most of the time it wasn’t guns getting smuggled, just pigs borrowed to double the subsidy from Brussels, or car boots full of fags and disposable nappies. The border was only marked every so often, so you had to keep your eyes open: for a line painted on a fence post, a symbol on a tree. Easy to cross and not know you’d done it, they ended up spending most of one patrol in the Republic. The Lieutenant heading up their multiple got a bollocking for that one. They didn’t think they’d been spotted, but the local Gardai had put in a phone call to the Company Commander.
– What were you doing, playing Special Forces?
Joseph saw the blood vessels working under the Major’s eyes, thinking about them upsetting relations with the Irish government, making the company a laughing stock in front of the locals. It didn’t turn into a diplomatic incident, but they did get a few cool smiles over the next few days.
– All Ireland, isn’t it? Same woods, same fields, same rivers.
That was the woman who ran the post office, calling across the road to them, opening her shutters while they were out early, patrolling. Townsend said she was right, but not to her face, only to Joseph later on when they were mopping out the bogs. It was part of their punishment, not for crossing the border, but for laughing about it afterwards in earshot of the Major, and while Townsend was going on about drawing stupid lines in the earth and sky, Joseph thought he’d sooner be painting a barn than scrubbing out a pisshouse, any day.