A Traitor in the Family Read online

  When eventually they were freed from their seats, the first thing Francis noticed was the sticky, musky heat on still air in a grey overcast dawn. It almost overwhelmed him. He should feel pleasure at this adventure, he knew; for weeks beforehand he’d felt a childlike sense of anticipation. But he’d been inoculated against excitement and felt the weight of home even here. Then, in the terminal, it was the noise, the busyness of all these purposeful people. Their village, even anxious Belfast, to which he returned every so often on business, seemed in slow-motion black-and-white compared with the bright frenzy of this place.

  They collected their luggage from the carousel and trudged through the passport checks. From here onwards it was all-found, from the transport to the hotel, to their accommodation and food and drink throughout the wedding celebrations. Pocket money’s all you’ll need, Cheryl had told Bridget on that buzzing telephone call two months earlier. The rest is sorted.

  Among the press of diminutive men holding placards Francis could see a card across which, in large neat letters, was printed ‘O’NEILL’. So much for anonymity, he thought.

  Cheryl had been Bridget’s best friend throughout secondary school. By the time they were teenagers Tony was invariably in tow, moping after Cheryl. The three of them had been inseparable, slipping off to smoke in the field behind school or nicking Cheryl’s mum’s sherry, so Bridget had liked to tell Francis. They would invent lives for themselves that contained sunlit college days, successful careers and families of their own – anything that would take them away from Carrickcloghan.

  Then Francis had pitched up and changed Bridget’s life at a stroke. He’d opened up a different future for her, he’d known it: the thrill of the boy from the big city and what he did, of which everyone was aware. He was a romantic figure, with his dark good looks and that mischievous smile, and he played on it consciously as he romanced her. It was natural that the four of them should spend a lot of time together, during which Francis and Tony became firm friends. They would all get drunk at parties, then split into pairs to fumble in dark corners.

  Before they knew it – they were so immersed in each other – their friends had gone off to university and things were never the same. Cheryl and Tony would come back during the holidays and talk incessantly about student life. They still had the same dreams, but Francis and Bridget had different ones. It did not destroy their friendship but a distance had opened up that was small then but had widened since. During Cheryl’s occasional trips home now, they called across the chasm that remained, finding only trace elements of the connection between the four of them that they’d thought unbreakable.

  Cheryl and Tony moved into financial services – whatever that was – in London, later joining the same brokers and getting jobs in Singapore. Francis had no idea what they did that was so valuable as to warrant their spectacular salaries, but he envied them neither the money nor the lifestyle. Over the years the distance, and his occupation, had opened up that chasm, which until recently he would have regarded as unbridgeable. When the wedding invitation had arrived, though Bridget was so enthusiastic in her reticent way he’d immediately dismissed the notion. They had no money, the RA wouldn’t let him go, and besides, why should he travel so far to some sweaty hole to watch Tony and Cheryl, who’d abandoned Ireland for money, get hitched? But then he’d got to thinking: he felt so weary, so worn down by it all. The look of that dirty-blonde woman in that car park in Calais had got to him somehow, and it shouldn’t have. So he’d decided to go, and had persuaded Joe, even if he wasn’t entirely frank about his motives. Joe, he thought, must have recognized his underlying fatigue and must have made a calculated decision to permit him to have this moment outside himself. Francis had decided he needed it. He wasn’t so sure now.

  The little Chinese man greeted them with a small bow and a ‘Welcome to Singapore’ in broken English. He led them wordlessly through the crowds, insisting on carrying their bags. Freed of the anchor of his suitcase, Francis swayed slightly. The tiredness, the jet lag, the realization they were here and the upshot of numberless beers drunk in the darkness: all of them conspired. Bridget laid her hand on his shoulder, but he shook it off irritably. He was glad to make the car, where, cocooned in silence and leather upholstery, he swooned between sleep and wakefulness as the suburbs and then the city skidded by.

  The room was luxury beyond their imagination. During his travels in Europe Francis stayed in the cheapest available hotels, generally the most unremitting bare neon-lit modern anonymities at the edge of autobahns or autoroutes or the nastiest cold rooms over city estaminets in mean districts. There would be threadbare sheets, noisy plumbing and minimal hot water. But this was something else: plumped pillows and brilliant white smooth satin bedlinen, the hum of efficient air conditioning, a spotless marble bathroom with fluffy white bathrobes, an imposing television boasting dozens of channels, and a breathtaking view over the city, waking from the fug of night as sun began to break through the mist.

  They did not speak for some minutes.

  Then Bridget said, unnerved, guilty, ‘God, Francis. Will you look at this room?’

  ‘Aye,’ he said simply, and examined the minibar.

  ‘I’ll unpack our things.’

  ‘Aye,’ he said again.

  He switched on the television and tuned into a music channel. Black girls gyrated on the screen to a crushing beat. This detained his tired gaze but only for a moment. He noticed an envelope on the desk.

  ‘What’s it say, Francis?’

  ‘Give me a minute, will you?’

  He opened the envelope. At the bottom of a typewritten letter was a scrawled note from Cheryl. ‘Welcome to Singapore!’ it said. ‘Join us for the reception in the bar this evening. So looking forward to catching up! And by the way, everything’s taken care of. Cheryl & Tony x’ The rest of the letter consisted of a guide to proceedings over the next few days: the reception in the Champagne Bar that evening, the dinner, the optional tours the next two days, the stag and hen parties and the day of the ceremony itself. Francis grunted and put the letter down.

  ‘Going to get some shut-eye,’ he said. He pulled off his shoes and trousers and lay in his underpants on the silk counterpane.

  She lay down beside him for a moment. He snored as if he were blameless. She was too tired to sleep, too tired almost to think. This was what the end of the world felt like, she thought. Or at least the end of life. A point where it is simply too exhausting to continue. But there was no escape for her in sleep.

  The smell of beer exuded almost visibly from his greasy pores. She looked down at her husband with an expression that she intended to convey fondness. Indeed she did feel something close to affection for him. He was a big man in the village. Not that she cared for status. But what it ensured more than anything else was that people did not bother her. Apart from the other volunteers’ women, they would ignore her gaze and scurry along the street. She was connected with Francis O’Neill and that meant trouble. People kept their distance, which these days suited her well.

  He’d been brazen, smiling while he chatted her up in front of the neighbours. Francis is the name, he’d said, Francis O’Neill. We’ll be getting to know each other for sure. It was only later that he’d told her he was on the run. OTR, he’d said, laughing as if it were the result of a small misunderstanding in his home city. Occasionally he’d had to jump across the border when the RUC or army came calling. But it was infrequent. While they could have their incursions with their armoured vehicles and their helmets and their guns pointing every which way and twitching nervously, they were not in control. People would know of their coming, be perfectly civil with them and wait them out. Soon they would be on their way and life could go back to normal. But less so as the years went by. The mobile checkpoints had changed things and now the watchtowers were going up everywhere. The English were strengthening their grip.

  Where had the depth of their love, if love was what it had been, disappeared? When they’d firs
t met, Francis had been so smitten he’d said he’d be giving up the fight.

  ‘I’ve done me bit, Bridget,’ he said. ‘What’s it all for? We’re getting nowhere. And now I’ve met you. We can settle down, you and me. It’s easy for those feckers, handing out their orders. I’m out. I’m going to tell them.’

  Francis could make her do things she would never have imagined before. She would climb out of her bedroom window at the back of the house and slide down the roof of the little lean-to kitchen, dropping into the safety of his arms. He owned a Ford Transit van back then and had flung a mattress in the back. They would drive, where, she did not know or care; and she would undress in the back while he watched, make love for ever, it seemed, and wake as the dawn broke through the mud-flecked windscreen.

  Once he thought he heard something outside the van. He pulled out a pistol from somewhere and lay on top of her to protect her. ‘Just lie there until it’s over, then don’t say nothing,’ he said in a matter-of-fact voice. She could smell his sweat and feel his heart pounding, never more alive than at the moment of his death. But they realized it was some animal or other and afterwards they’d relaxed, giggling uncontrollably.

  At first when she arrived home after those nights she would creep up the stairs. Later she simply walked into the kitchen, said ‘Good morning’ and tacitly challenged her mother to say something. The sheer doing of it was a thrill. She’d never been so bold, to disobey and flaunt it so brazenly, before.

  For Francis O’Neill she gave up all lingering thoughts of studying. He, rather than dusty libraries or dry tutorials, represented her escape from the mundane. A volunteer in the footsteps of all those brave boys through the centuries, a masked marauder, glamorous and charismatic. Or so she’d thought. Even if his life were that thrilling she knew nothing of it. He said so little about what he did and she could not live her life by proxy. She was installed in the run-down little cottage away from the village where Francis could come and go without anyone seeing him, to wait for him during his absences, at first with a jumpy anxiety, later a bored resignation, to endure his mood swings or, which she at first found worse still, his ignoring her as he brooded. Increasingly she wished for him to ignore her and padded round mouse-like when he was about. But she found she could not altogether evade the sharpness of his glare or the edge of his tongue.

  She’d so looked forward to their wedding, in 1981, in a small ceremony in Dundalk. She was already pregnant but they’d planned the day long before that happened. She wasn’t yet showing and they hadn’t told anyone about the pregnancy, not even her parents, which turned out to be wise.

  But now she recalled the day without fondness. Francis, to give him his due, had tried to make the occasion special for them both, but circumstances conspired against them. Mr and Mrs O’Neill were little less than openly hostile. Liam, then twelve years old, was ostentatiously bored, yawning loudly through the ensuing lunch. It seemed he was only vocalizing his parents’ feelings and the meal ended earlier than planned. The guests were few. Francis couldn’t invite most of the boys he knew and who would form the nucleus of their social circle, such as it became, owing to their notoriety, and big Paddy, the older brother who was later killed by the Brits, was OTR; but they were more than compensated for by the police presence, taking photographs almost brazenly, which in turn annoyed her parents. She’d been tempted to offer the Garda watchers a drink.

  Bridget’s parents, in their wedding finery, had looked on aghast. Her mother had bought a new dress and a hat and her father wore a suit uncomfortably. Marie O’Neill, in her denim skirt, sniggered at the hat, Sean’s grubby trousers didn’t match his jacket and his tie was loose round the neck of the fraying collar of his shirt. He bestowed his beery breath and the rasp of his stubble on all the womenfolk he tried to embrace.

  Her mother had had aspirations for her, if not of a university education and a career then of a sensible marriage to a man with prospects and an escape, most likely to a comfortable existence in a trouble-free town in the South. Instead they watched Sean and Marie bicker and swear, and Francis flash his gangster smile. At least their elder daughter had done as she should.

  Francis’s plans to leave the Provos never materialized. At first he explained that he would have to approach the subject with care. ‘I need to speak to the right boys,’ he said. ‘I need to take it slow. Careful.’ Later he stopped talking about it altogether and was around the house less.

  Once he was fully re-engaged it was as if he’d been snared by an addiction. He was rarely at the cottage and when he was his monotone dealt only with the transactional. He would sit through the night in the sitting room morosely drinking beer or whisky.

  Her mother had once asked her why they remained childless. She’d shrugged.

  ‘Is it him or you? Or don’t you know?’

  She’d shrugged again.

  ‘Him,’ said her mother. ‘I thought as much. Men like him, flash and bossy and angry. They’re the type.’

  She shrugged again, her mother glared, and it was over.

  The child. The poor wee child. It always came back to that. Little did her mother know there had, once, been a child.

  It had been a month or so after the wedding. Fortuitously Francis was at home when she doubled up with the stomach cramps.

  ‘What is it, love?’ Francis had asked, though he probably suspected.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she’d said, though she did know, for certain.

  He helped her upstairs and into the bathroom. Already blood was trickling down the inside of her thighs and she was terrified. He led her to the toilet and sat her down, gently pulling her bloody knickers off. She could feel the dragging inside her and the gush and the agony. Despite what he was, he could not hide his expression of horror. He stared helplessly into her eyes and then the pain hit again like an explosion and everything but her core became distant and unreal.

  Afterwards he filled the bath, testing its warmth with his elbow, and, having removed her clothes carefully, as if their contact with her body might harm her, he carried her the couple of paces and laid her in the water. He turned back to the toilet. She could see him standing there, looking down into the bowl for what seemed an age before pressing the flush. Then the sound of the churn began and life, such as it now was, started again.

  He called the doctor and carried her to the bed. They lay together as they waited but did not say a word. Perhaps it was at that moment it had begun to unravel. There was nothing the doctor could do, other than recommend rest, prescribe painkillers and tell her to go to the hospital if the bleeding became profuse again. He referred her to a specialist who could not say with any certainty what had caused the miscarriage but confirmed that any subsequent pregnancy could be high-risk and that they might have difficulty conceiving anyway. His matter-of-fact demeanour did not add to the pain, she was already numb. Another pregnancy was at that moment unthinkable and the idea later became irrelevant. Bridget and Francis did not discuss what had happened and it felt as if he blamed her. The deficiency of her body had killed his child, so it seemed to her, and he did nothing to reduce her guilt. Nor did he say it would be all right and that one day they would have kids.

  Her child haunted her now. She did not even know its sex. Francis had flushed it away, whatever it had been. And now, however irrationally, Bridget O’Neill still desperately wanted a child, though she knew she would never have one. She wanted, beyond reason, a wee one to care for and to live for, on whom she could bestow the love she stored so assiduously in her heart. She longed to observe her baby as he or she grew and became gradually sentient, to shape and nurture this small being the right way, to teach the child as best she could. But not in this life, it was not to be; and here her child would have had to share not only her life but also her burden – her fear of the police, the army, the Protestants, even her own people, her fear that this whole place might explode or implode, taking her and her lovely child with it.

  Eventually he’d been c
aught. Did his stint in the H-Blocks. Took part in the Dirty Protest. Grew his beard and long hair. She waited for him, quietly.

  He was stopped at an RUC roadblock in possession of an old Lee-Enfield rifle. It was enough in front of a bastard Diplock judge to sentence him to two years, but he’d been lucky. He was supposed to be carrying Semtex and a resupply of sub-machine guns, so Aidan Murphy had whispered in the pub one night, but the quartermaster had had other ideas for them. The change of plan had enabled the Provos to isolate the source of the information, an ill-advised telephone call to the QM from one of his lieutenants that had seen the lieutenant disciplined and drummed out of the RA.

  She visited him regularly there, running the gauntlet of the hard-eyed wardens, feeling occasionally the warm wet slap of saliva on the back of her neck, absorbing the undiluted hatred of the place. Francis’s eyes begged her but his words were resentful, as if she’d put him there. The stench might have made her gag, had she not been determined to be loyal, or at the very least to appear loyal.

  There were what they called support structures in place. Stevie Shaw, one of the local boys, brought Francis’s weekly volunteer’s wage, along with occasional small bonuses or food parcels. Father Dunstan, the priest from Forkhill, paid the odd awkward visit. Legal help was on offer. The man from the council called to say that they would understand if she fell behind with their payments.

  But mainly it was the girls, the wives and partners of other volunteers in the area, who had converged on her to offer embraces and tea and numberless half-pints of lager down the pub.

  ‘You’re not alone,’ Cathy Murphy would say. ‘Any time you need company, you just give one of us a call. We know what it’s like. We’re family.’