I wake on the carpet next to Finn’s bed. When I sit up, the towel slips, and I can see black bruises down my rib cage. The bruises feel soft to the touch, with blood swelling under the skin. Slowly I turn my head around the empty room.
It’s already dawn. I need to leave, now. I need to drive to Donegal and find Finn, and pay a fishing boat to bring us to Scotland or France. Royce might have someone watching the airport and the ferry terminal, but there are thousands of fishing boats moored along the west coast. One of them will take us away.
I stand up too fast, and my head spins. How quickly can I pack a bag with our passports, spare clothes, some cash. I’m crouching on the floor of my closet, reaching for a holdall, when my hands stop. Even if I warn Aoife, they will find someone else to punish. That wasn’t an empty threat. A few years ago, an informer from Ballymurphy managed to escape abroad. The IRA murdered his older brother, a teacher in Claudy who had no part in the conflict. He was coaching a football practice when the men came to shoot him. The last thing he did was shout at the children to run.
The holdall drops from my hands. I rock back from the closet, with frustration choking my throat. We’re trapped. After searching through my bag for my phone, I open my messages. That man, yesterday, sent mam and Marian the same message from my phone. “Heading home, talk to you tomorrow x.” They must think I sent it. Mam has replied, asking how seeing off Finn went, and I feel unfairly betrayed that neither of them realized the messages weren’t really from me.
My black swimsuit is still stuffed inside my bag, rolled up in a towel. Both of them are clean and dry, but I put them in the wash anyway, like I did actually spend yesterday swimming at Art’s Lough.
In the bathroom, I take pictures of the bruises and the split on my mouth with the Polaroid camera Marian gave me for my last birthday. Without watching them develop, I put the photographs in a box and hide them in the back of my closet. If the police ever find the bungalow, my fingerprints and DNA will be across it, and they might think I went there to meet Royce on my own. These photographs are my insurance. Proof, if I ever need it.
I run a shower, holding my stiff body under the warm water. Afterward, I sit on the edge of the bath in my bra and knickers, rubbing arnica ointment onto the bruises. I want them gone, I don’t want Finn to ever see them. I wrap a compression bandage around my torso, to hold my cracked ribs in place. It hurts to breathe, but I know how lucky I am. Those men could have killed me last night. I kick away from the thought, like I’m trying to surface from the mangle of a wave.
In my bedroom, I put on a white cotton top and a navy wrap skirt long enough to hide the scratches on my legs. I swallow two Nurofen and walk down to the kitchen to make coffee in the filter. While the water boils, I look around at the sky-blue cover of a Dublin Review on the table, the stacks of mismatched china cups, the thick cookbooks stained with grease. All of it mine, all exactly as I’d left it yesterday morning. I don’t know why I feel guilty, why it feels like I committed a crime yesterday. Not reporting something that happened to you is not a crime.
On the fridge is a snap of Marian, holding Finn on her lap at a restaurant. I look at my sister’s laughing mouth, her clever eyes. This is her fault, I think. She brought these men into our lives.
“If I were you, I’d cut her right out,” said Royce. The thing is, I thought I’d forgiven her. Last spring, the two of us were watching a film at my house, and Marian said, “Sometimes I wish you’d do something really bad.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Kill someone in a hit-and-run by accident, not a nice person, obviously, and ask me to help you hide the body.”
“What, to balance things out?”
“Yes.”
Without looking away from the screen, I said, “Just pretend I did. To be honest, it’s probably only a matter of time anyway, given the traffic in Dublin.”
Marian gave a hollow laugh and turned back to the screen. After a few minutes, I said, “It could have been me and not you. If you’d left Belfast and I’d stayed, I might have been the one who joined.”
Anyone who’d met us as teenagers would have expected me to join the IRA before Marian. I was the stubborn one, refusing to go to mass, getting into shouting rows with our uncles over politics. I was almost expelled during the 2002 abortion referendum for showing up to our Catholic school with a repeal shirt on over my uniform. Marian had never seemed interested in politics. She’d always liked painting, she could have gone away to art college in Glasgow or London.
“Do you really believe that?” asked Marian. “That it could have been you?”
“Yes.”
But Marian stayed in Belfast, while I was the one who left for Trinity. Often I stayed working at the library in the Arts Block until late at night. When Marian called me, I’d text back, “In the library, want me to go outside?” She always wrote back, “No, you’re grand,” and then when I called her on my walk home, she often didn’t pick up.
While I was in my fourth year at Trinity, Marian met Seamus Malone. He was a familiar figure around Andersonstown, a tall, thin man in a corduroy jacket, with red hair. I’d seen him before, browsing in the record store, drinking in the crowd at the Rock bar, standing at the edge of the hurling field.
He started calling round to Marian’s flat, asking her out for coffee, helping her paint her walls. He gave Marian books to read and invited her to join a political discussion group. We were reading some of the exact same books that year, ones about colonialism, power, class, except I was reading them in a library carrel, and Marian was reading them with terrorists.
She still fights me on that word. Marian won’t call the IRA terrorists, which makes me lose the absolute run of myself. I agree with her that the Irish Republican Army weren’t always terrorists, but we’re not in 1916 anymore. We’re not even in 1971. Since Brexit, the IRA has only become more brutal. Something inside the organization has warped and hardened.
That doesn’t make me a colonialist, whatever Royce thinks. I’m outraged that the British still control the six counties of Northern Ireland. That I was born in the world’s oldest British colony, with all the problems of a colony. The partition of Ireland is as unnatural as the Berlin Wall, but this version of the IRA won’t be bringing it down.
We had years of peace after the Good Friday Agreement, but it never felt stable. By the time the conflict reignited in 2019, I’d graduated and moved back to Belfast. I remember standing in my flat one night when the kitchen suddenly filled with smoke. I grabbed the pan off the cooker, thinking I’d burned something, before realizing the smoke was coming from outside. I stood at the open window watching ash drift across the city, stinging my nose and eyes.
A riot had begun. Some lads had hijacked a bus and set it on fire, and the cloud of smoke was spreading over Belfast. I checked the news on my phone and thought I’d be fine, the riot was miles away, those lads would need to burn down half of Belfast to reach my building. I turned away from the window and finished cooking my dinner.
I kept a journal during those first weeks of the conflict. I thought what was happening around me was interesting, historic. I wrote down what people bought out of the supermarkets, and what the helicopter searchlights looked like over the city, like a Blitz diary. I described watching a Molotov cocktail burst on the road, the flames leaping from the petrol as soon as the glass broke, like a magic trick.
When a curfew was announced, it was exciting at first, like a holiday. Everyone was let off work early to get home in time, and the roads were empty, with police helicopters hovering overhead. In fairness, I wasn’t the only person who felt restless, energized by the disruption. Most of us did.
I stopped keeping the journal after three weeks. I didn’t write down the first death in the conflict, or the second, or the third, or any of the ones afterward, and the thought of that journal now makes me sick with myself. I shouldn’t have been looking out at the helicopter searchlights anyway, I should have been looking at my sister. I remember watching the news with her and mam, when the unrest still seemed likely to blow over. I said, “The Troubles are over.”
“Ours aren’t,” said mam.