It was as Archie had said.
Eban was required to attend an evening meeting in North Belfast.
It was an unusual last-minute request from his boss, and something that Eban had assiduously worked to avoid for the entire duration of his time in the Department of Leisure and Tourism.
He had very bad memories of the last time he’d helped them out of a jam under similar circumstances.
But tonight it would be necessary because Brian Kelly had been in a car accident. His natural successor for this gig was Colin Foy, but he was at the City Hospital maternity department with a heavily pregnant wife.
So even for Eban, it would have seemed somewhat unreasonably disingenuous to decline.
And it was for these and for no other reasons that he agreed. But it sat badly with him.
Certainly he had no fear of censure or redress should he refuse.
For Eban had single-mindedly worked hard at remaining on the lowest grade point available to him within the Civil Service employment structure. Internal promotions initiatives and in-service training came and went. Transfers to different departments carrying higher-grade status were offered to him. Even length-of-service increments were proffered. Eban turned them all down, fighting tooth and nail to maintain his coveted, lowly Clerical Assistant Grade 1 status.
He printed out his job description and displayed it proudly and perversely on the filing cabinet next to his desk:
He did all this in anticipation of moments just like these.
And precisely so as he could tell Philip Walters, his line manager – in the nicest possible terms – to go fuck himself.
However, circumstances and happenstance seemed to get the better of him this evening and a date with the good citizens of Ballysillan Community Development Project lay ahead.
He dreaded it.
It had been a similar situation all those years ago.
A goodwill errand with unimaginable consequences.
His brief tonight was to say something encouraging about the possibility of funding and hand out grant forms for cross-community Good Relations projects.
He thought about phoning Emily in case she were wondering where he might be, but didn’t.
Something about that smacked of a shared domesticity that simply didn’t exist between them.
Above all, he was pissed that his ‘project’ would be put on hold for the evening.
Just when he was bringing it to fruition.
As the Silverstream bus rattled and rolled, Eban laid his head against the vibrations on the cool window pane and considered how long it had been since he was last in this neck of the woods.
When he was very young, North Belfast had been a much sought-after residential area. And for all intents and purposes, it still appeared to be so. But the leafy thoroughfares of the North Circular Road and the tidy privets of Cavehill hid darker truths, and during the Troubles had come to be known to journalists and punters alike as ‘The Killing Fields’.
The buildings were old, solid, semi-detached, red-brick feel-goods. A nice garden front and back. Built for the bourgeoisie who filed dutifully home from their management tasks in the linen mills and shipyards.
The Unionist merchant class who had seen their civil legacy go up in flames, but whose love of property and capital meant that a scorched earth policy was out of the question.
And so, resignedly, they abandoned these places of science, reason and commerce for comfortable homes in East and South Belfast, or maybe even further afield in Bournemouth or Torquay.
They sold them originally to the skilled labourers over whom they had for so long affected a smug superiority. Then to the new-money Loyalist trailer trash of the sink estates. And finally – unthinkably – to the rebel hordes of professionally educated ‘Fenians’.
Because now apparently there was peace.
Everyone said so, so it must be true.
Despite still-volatile interfaces and dividing walls suggesting something to the contrary.
The demographics and geography of the place meant that Catholic and Protestant areas interfaced and merged in ways that determined local knowledge as a prerequisite for survival. In the bad old days, random drive-by shootings and abductions were the norm.
Driving along now, Eban could see dark housing estates – lit up by piss-orange streetlamps – ominously fringing those affluent leafy avenues. Loyalist Glenbryn bordered the Republican Ardoyne, which stretched to the better-off Cliftonville. Catholic Ligoniel edged Protestant Ballysillan, which met the prosperous North Circular Road.
The whole territory was a bewildering maze of sectarian football supporters’ clubs, bookie shops, bowling teams, gardening centres and bridge fraternities.
All a mish-mash of poverty-fuelled resentment, swirled in along with affluent, palatial monuments to an acceptable level of violence.
Whether things were good or bad, the streets pretty much emptied after dark up here.
In the past that just led to the death squads phoning up taxi cabs and pizza deliveries from companies located across the sectarian dividing line.
Let your fingers do the walking.
Shit! Poor bastards!
Walking unwittingly up garden paths – pepperoni deep pan in one hand, garlic bread in the other – Crack! Crack! Crack!
Christ, he felt depressed.
It was all coming back to him again. In similar circumstances, the favour he had done so many years ago.
And what that had led to.
He should never have said he would do this.
He should never have come up here again.