Nine months have passed, but nothing has gone back to normal, thank god. Everyone now knows my real name. It was in the news, that day.
I know what happened now. Marian slowed the car outside the border checkpoint. She rolled down the window and screamed at the soldiers to run, which they did, scattering away from the blast radius.
But one soldier came toward her, even as the others ordered him to get back, shouting that he’d be killed. He was a nineteen-year-old private from Glasgow, on his first tour of duty. He opened her car door and used his baton to break the handcuffs chaining Marian to the steering wheel. She stumbled out from the car, and they ran together for cover.
When the bomb disposal crew arrived, they found that the bomb was never going to work. It was a dud. One of the wires had detached, by accident, maybe. Or someone had sabotaged the device deliberately. No one knows which is true.
But we do know that Eoin Royce has disappeared. And we know that, the day before the border attack, he had visited his mam in west Belfast. It was their first time together since his arrest. Mam asked Sheila if she’d told Royce to do anything. “No,” said Sheila, bewildered. “I didn’t tell him to do a thing.”
“But what did you say?” asked mam.
“I told him that I forgive him.”
Marian talks with the Scottish soldier every week. He came to Dublin and met Seb, she traveled to Glasgow and met his parents. They’re friends.
Both of them are private, but they’ve given interviews together. They’ve described what each of them did that day. Those joint interviews have done more for the peace process than any number of police operations or army maneuvers. The first interview, on RTÉ’s evening news, showed a photograph, taken by Seb, of the soldier holding Saoirse. It has become one of the most famous images of the conflict.
“Enough,” people were saying, after what happened. “Mother of god, we’ve had enough of this.”
And in our old neighborhood, in Andersonstown, in an IRA stronghold, a group went out at night and threw buckets of white paint over the murals of gunmen on the Falls Road. They dipped their hands in the paint, too, and pressed them over the walls, drew silly things, hearts and rainbows, painted cat whiskers on the portrait of an IRA commander. No one knew who had done it, who had been that brave, that reckless. Whoever it was could be given a kneecapping by the local IRA, or worse.
It was a group of girls, as it turns out. Students from my and Marian’s old school.
Two days before New Year’s, the IRA and UVF announced a joint ceasefire.
It wasn’t because of what happened to Marian, exactly.
Those girls had been coming for the hard men either way.