He thought about Wright’s message. Month of fools ’92. He thought about it and knew there was nothing good to come of it. The last time he had believed any good could come of Northern Ireland was 1991.
When Jeremy landed in Lisburn that year, they gave him a name to follow. Gunner. In retrospect, a poor alias. Facile. He arrived to Jeremy as paper before flesh: a file, text. Date of birth, criminal record, address. He was a Belfast arms liaison, moving lethal technologies to the republicans. Gas-operated guns from Estonian radicals. The PIRA sweetheart special: M16s. Then the British had caught him with a shipment of Degtyarev bullets powerful enough to leave a victim looking exploded instead of shot. On capture, they told him silence was the sound after a dead child hit the earth. Your boy is old enough to know fear, they said. Your boy with the condition. Secrets for the boy, they said. And it had been easy to turn him because the mother of the child was eighteen months in the grave. The first time he met Gunner, Jeremy stood in the basement of a fish shop in Shaftesbury, the smell of sea flesh clinging. There were boxes everywhere, an agony of newsprint. In an icebox, black fish eyes stared over gaping mouths. You could see the moment of recognition, the startled look that would stay forever. He slipped ice chips in his hands to clean them of rubbish.
Gunner had selected a crate stacked over a pile of collapsed cardboard cartons, plunked down, and Gunner had brushed the metal wheel of a lighter with his thumb so that small blue flames hiccupped in his hand. “Got a clinker seat for the show. Will you not take one too?”
“I prefer to stand,” Jeremy said, but something about Gunner’s smile made him feel foolish. Jeremy had not expected Gunner to be so boyish. The photograph in his pocket that day, small and grayscale, showed only a compromised head against cheap paint.
“Like making it hard on yourself, do you, Allsworth?”
“We’ve got business to attend to,” Jeremy said.
“Protestant work ethic will fetch you supper, but it won’t win you time to eat it.”
“I’m not a Protestant,” he said, flush running up his neck. “Or a Catholic for that matter.”
“Everyone needs someone to pray to, Allsworth, even the English,” Gunner said.
Jeremy had not known what to make of the man. He had groped for the tongue of someone in such a position. He had thought of what someone else, someone who did not turn red as jam, would say.
“You talk a lot for a tout,” he said.
A freezer groaned in the corner. “I suppose that’s what touts do.”
Now, many years removed, Jeremy remembered how that one word had knocked off patina, and Jeremy remembered how when Gunner had finished snitching, he stood, face wrung out. Gunner had rubbed his thighs, straightened. He had a way of inviting looks with casual vigor. Jeremy remembered thinking it was a poor quality for a man with secrets. And Jeremy remembered the thought to touch his hand. They had not shaken on meeting, but his own swampy palm remained in his pocket. Do not extend to the informant, the trainers had advised. He will swallow kilometers.
That afternoon, Gunner crossed the room. He paused at the door out of the shop basement, turned back abruptly so that the upstairs light bristled around him.
“Cecil’s his name,” Gunner said, “my boy.”
“I know,” Jeremy said.
“And he’ll not be harmed now.”
“I’ll make contact again soon,” said Jeremy.
“Already he’s company. I burn a toast and he shouts, ‘Own goal.’”
“You’re proud.”
“Don’t have one of your own, so,” Gunner said. Jeremy bent down to lace his shoe. “You’re not a bad man, Allsworth. But are you decent?”
Jeremy stood again. “Who would believe whoever it is a person claims to be?”
“I’m original but not creative, Allsworth; I won’t lie to you.”
“You already did. The boy isn’t speaking yet. The specialists say he’s nonverbal autistic.”
Gunner shrugged. “I figured you for pitiless, but I thought you might be charmed.”
In that moment a prickle began, perhaps not yet the knowledge that nothing good could come of Northern Ireland but some consciousness of how little he knew. He would not until then have known the inertia of divisions. Nor would he have known that one day he would go around his home turning lights off, Alexandra already dunked under sleep, that looking at her, he would want to blot out the information of his life until she’d arrived in it.