S - Plan

                                        S – Plan

By John Rogan

S – Plan

                                                                By John Rogan

The magazine article I am reading says how even though the 20^th century has not ended, it has been the most violent century yet. I think I hear people talking, but when I turn my head I hear nothing. The pharmacy should have my prescription ready, but I am still thinking about how I am living in the last ten years of the most violent century in history.

It’s early July, 1990, just before noon, and I am smoking a cigarette, ashing in an empty beer can and thinking of how civilians in particular were targeted. Innocent people suffered the biggest losses through the screaming years of atrocities and world wars. Mass graves and artillery guns all going off at the same time click through my thoughts against the end of a corny ballad by a drunk-sounding-barfly show-tune band from outside Belfast. Commercials blare in and out with waves of static, and I cannot remember when I had switched the channel. A Welsh folk song crackles on, and I turn it off. I think of slick British jet bombers flying low over the water approaching a lonely Argentinian destroyer off the Falkland Islands and a green helicopter spraying a machine gun as it chops upward over a rice paddy somewhere in Southeast Asia. The radio had been on since I got back. The News was on, but I got sick of traffic reports repeating. It sounds like it’s been cleared up. The thought will be there as the reports trickle throughout the city’s population. They will have a longer report on the evening news. I inhale long and finish my cigarette, put it out in the beer can, and think of everyone waking up and talking about it with the people they love and care about. There were no injuries. I wanted it to go off before all the shoppers came out.

I am thinking this, about bodies lying strewn about trenches and wives screaming when their little town posts the lists of all the dead husbands from the front, because I left 2 kilograms of Semtex explosive in a litter bin in The Strand early this morning. The digital watch used as a timer was set for eighty minutes. The bin was where all the congestion from the cars and cabs turns to foot traffic and fashion boutiques.

When a bomb goes off in a container in something like a litter bin, the litter bin expands until it breaks apart and the heated fragments of the once stationary container turn into shrapnel. Essentially, a bomb within a bomb. They will have cameras on it, Special Branch will be watching, it wouldn’t be smart to go look, but it was a good test, my first since arriving in London, so I am celebrating. Since I came back from The Strand, I have drank four beers or maybe this is my fifth one.

My name is Carmel O’Doherty.

The Irish Republican Army active service cell I am part of is made to look like two married couples. There is me and Sean Russell. And Meara Kelly with Charlie Hayes. We are small but aggressive and extremely well-armed. We are kept in the dark, mainly so no one can inform if anyone of us got picked up. There is an ultra-reliance between me, Meara, Charlie, and Sean because we know about each other, not a whole lot, but enough to do real damage if we informed. There has to be this trust. Nebulous gray cells hover in our lifetime of English prisons we could be thrown into at any time.

When I stand back and think about it all sometimes my thoughts come fast. Things get out of order. All the moments flash together and become somewhere real but removed. Voices rise and I can hear everyone talk at once in the ticking taxi engines and in the braking trains of the high locomotive whistle. The voices go in with the cars and I just closed my apartment door, although I realize in a moment it was over six hours ago hours ago when I came back from The Strand, but I keep going back and checking to make sure it is closed. To make sure it is closed I pull the doorknob to see that it is locked and then I push lightly on the door to feel the weight of the door resting locked in the door-frame. I tap above the doorknob three times and I tap below the doorknob three times and I tap below the keyhole three times to makes sure everything is safe and the lock is in place and that my door is closed. When everything gets too fast my nose starts to bleed. It started this morning, but I have decided I need to get out of here and go make some hoax phone calls. I notice it is just past noon and while I am putting on my jacket my nasal passages stop tingling and my mood gets better.

“There will be three large explosions at Pancras, Euston, Victoria, and Liverpool stations. The bombs are very large and have been timed to explode during this evening’s rush hour, sometime before six. The code word is Mr. Brown.”

 The woman at the Scotland Yard switchboard is screaming “Who Is This?” I am using a line of payphones outside Archway Station. With my explosion this morning on The Strand they will not take it as a hoax. The police will shut down and evacuate, oh I forgot Paddington Station. I think of Paddington Station just as the receiver clicks onto the metal cradle and the woman’s voice screams off. I pick up the phone up again and hear the dial tone. I let the person waiting behind me in line pick it up. The old man dials into a conversation happily not suspecting anything I suppose.

Meara wanted to meet. She told me to call her after everything went off. Charlie was supposed to have picked up the package of incendiary cassette tapes. I do not want to use the phones at Archway Station again, so I walk the two blocks to Whittington hospital and use a payphone outside the emergency room.

As I am dialing up Meara, a young boy wails into hysterical crying behind the emergency room doors. A man with no teeth limps by me, wincing in pain with each step into the Emergency room. I see one spot of blood on the painted concrete where the ambulances pull up, but when I look again it’s not there, so I make sure and look again and I think it’s just a light speck of mud. A female Nurse comes out to have a cigarette, another pretty Nurse comes out and they begin talking loudly like I am not there. I try and hear what they are saying, who they are, how did they become the kind of people they are: nurses, but Meara picks up.

“Hello.”

“Hey.”

“Hey!” She does not say anything, but it is like she’s looking me over through the phone.

“St. John’s” I say. I see the red dot on the concrete again and I swear it’s blood this time.

“St. John’s” she says and hangs up.

St. John’s Tavern is always a swirling mess of people. I hope she knows about the cassette incendiaries, Her and Charlie should have gotten them by now. I am sitting in a wood chair amidst the crowded roaring, waiting for Meara. I should have enough tablets for today and tomorrow, but my prescription should be ready. I am not sure if the doctor messed it up again, so I am about to get up and call him when I see Meara clang through the discord of people and peer around the calamitous humidity by the door. She sees me see her and we both smile wide.

My Dad used to say how all crimes were crimes of opportunity, but he never did anything illegal. He is a teacher, head of the district now. When I was younger he was the school teacher in Belcoo, Fermanagh where I grew up.

I get this unfocused anger, and I forget what I am upset about. I just start swearing under my breath, thinking about my brother Adrian. The idea that I could meet him somewhere, like Meara, and we could sit, I could hear his voice, we could talk about Mum, Dad, how things have been since he’s been gone. We could talk about how I grew up, stayed on track, how things went in Belcoo with other kids, and how there was no crying when I had to get up in the morning to go to school. People never called me names behind my back. He stayed with us, and so everything was calm, normal, the way life should be.

“Finding Your Strength in Difficult Times: A Book of Meditations” by David Viscott is a book I carry around with me when I get excruciatingly sick of missing all the people I cared about.  I keep my original copy back in my apartment, but I always have a copy in my purse. In the book the author says the purpose of life is to find your gift, and then once you have found your gift the meaning of life is to give it away. “Finding Your Strength” has these psychological construct exercises, smooth psychological jargon, and self-affirming phrases that are easy to repeat to myself throughout the day. I have been fooling myself, since Adrian was killed up in Derry. That’s what I get so mad about, but I wonder when I think of Adrian’s eyebrow being shattered by a plastic bullet, about life and its purpose, and what exactly mine means. The soldiers are only supposed to fire the plastic bullets at crowds from far away to get them to disperse, but, and the soldiers know this, if you fire one at close range, like with my brother, some  people say the soldier was no farther than four meters, it will shatter bone, and unlike a bullet it won’t pierce, it is like getting shot with a hammer. The plastic bullet bludgeons any bone or soft tissue. In my brother’s case the soft tissue was his brain and the doctors took him off the life support after 8 days.

I can’t remember what town. Some sort of Industrial city outside Tokyo during the War, but the Americans figured out that most of the structures were made of bamboo, so they dropped incendiary bombs on the city, and every house caught all at once, so people burned alive, but the fire got so big that it started consuming all  the oxygen, so people who had gotten away from their homes and were taking shelter by the water began to suffocate, and there were piles of people, gaping dry into death, gathered around this vaporized crevice of a factory-polluted stream in Japan.

After seeing me, Meara is waiting for me on the sidewalk outside. It’s like I am watching her in a movie, while trying to pay for my coffee. Her dyed blond hair looks like she slept on it, and her mouth has that resolute finality in it being set closed and determined. Her eyes move constantly at all the faces coming and going on the sidewalk to see if anyone was watching her arrive. Meara looks at people’s faces without them seeing hers.

I go out to meet her. We quietly scream a smile when we see each other, but we keep walking, casually.

Kids would call me a Taig. Boys would chant when they saw me. “We got your brother!” People always did it when I was far away, long yells, that I could not traverse. A mocking and cruel power over me only done because they did not have to deal with the damage it was doing. I was so far away and the voices mocking my brother’s death echoed over the distance. Kids gathered at the end of our street would yell stuff at me while I was walking home from school. “We got another round in the chamber for you!”

Belcoo sits within the Northern Ireland boundary, so it is within the United Kingdom, but all anyone had to do is take the Sligo road to the bridge over the Belcoo river to Blacklion, Ireland. A two-minute drive and you were out of the UK and in the Republic of Ireland. The Loyalist Paramilitaries saw it as an easy escape route for IRA terrorists dodging Northern Ireland jurisdiction. My father told me of how someone tried to blow up the bridge in the early 70’s. The bridge South of us in Aghalane was bombed so many times by Loyalists it has been closed since 74.

“So Carmel, You are all over the wires. The absolute talk of the town.” Meara says in a sarcastic, grandiose voice. I laugh with her, but when I bend over to laugh I quickly think of tracer rounds being fired out of a .50 caliber machine gun, a constant chugging muzzle flash and these big smoky shells flying into the air, but then I am back.

“I got the tapes.” Meara says omni-potent and perverse. Almost all of our conversations are understood, working within a vast amount of personal knowledge about the other, from childhood down to the hazards of our operations, so when we speak it is with the accumulation of many ideas, and how that idea will hit how we were brought-up, and how we are part of an Irish Republican Army terrorist cell operating in London. So, words have to be chosen carefully. It is too raw underneath the fake identities, clothes, cosmetics and thin words; We both know this about each other and respect it.

What my brother was doing up in Derry has rumors that spring off the other gossip that hatches stories into a created complex, a vast amount of rapidly shifting information that swims around my brother’s name, me, my mother and my father indefinitely.

My father always stayed out of it. I was born on July 12 1960. Adrian was born Christmas Eve 1958.  I was 12 when my brother was killed in the Summer of 1972. Adrian started participating in the Civil Rights Marches in Enniskillen. He was aloof, just a kid. Much of what was going on was happening in Belfast or Derry, and Fermanagh stayed the same, just as it always will. I did not realize that what will always be the same in Belcoo was this hairline hatred that could crack into hysteria at the slightest image-based prompt. My brother was that prompt for Belcoo. The in-rushing new, embodied in the physical frame of a skinny, pale teenager. He never really knew what he was taking on when I look back on all the bombings and shootings, how many people have died, and I wonder how many more. When I think of my brother he seems like a tragic idiot, but through no fault of his own, like he was waiting in a line, offering his best, expecting something just somewhat positive and no one called him up, instead he shriveled away in a hospital bed, and that cruelty still cuts into my stomach and unsettles it to this day. I start to breathe fast and I think I can feel my heart-beating, but only on one-side like it’s trying to compensate for an artery not working. I am thinking of giving a fake name at the emergency room, so they can take a scan and check, but I have found if I smoke a cigarette the lopsided pounding in my chest seems to go away.

My brother first went up to Derry in August of 71. Right after the British troops had gone into the Ballymurphy Housing estates in Belfast and randomly shot anyone Catholic. The British Army’s 1st Battalion parachute regiment was firing back at IRA snipers, but eleven Catholic civilians with no links to any paramilitary organizations were killed between August 9 and August 11 in 1971.

From the stories and what I can recall this was when Adrian started to really get into the rallies, and there was one being organized in Derry against Interment, to support the families of those interned, and to show solidarity with those killed at the Ballymurphy Estates in Belfast.

The rumors constantly shift. I think it’s somewhere in-between, but the truth is it’s all imagination. I really do not know. My mother and father say he was up there because there was more work. People around town say he was organizing rallies, other people say he was running guns, and getting set-up with the IRA. It goes from choir boy carpenter to armed to the teeth paramilitary with Protestant blood soaking from his teeth, so I tried to not listen. I had someone and then I have nothing from that person, so I needed to grab onto something. If the people around you want that to be negative you have to grab it, just because you miss the person so much. So, the hatred, anger started there, I guess. I would get so mad and not know at what sometimes, but I guess it was having people whisper about me, having no control over how I was perceived, so now I am the one sending messages.

If anything, he was involved in the rallies. The stuff I do, where we are, and the kind of violence we can bring at a moment’s notice just did not exist back then. No one had guns. Bloody Sunday in The Bogside of Derry had just happened, and I think the movement was trying to come to terms with the new level of violence we would be engaged in. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was having a peaceful march against Internment when the same regiment, the first Paras, from the Ballymurphy Massacre started shooting. The paratroopers claim they were receiving IRA sniper fire, but they ended up shooting 28 peaceful protesters, 14 of which died. This was January 30, 1972 in The Bogside, Bloody Sunday. People were so naive. They thought the Prods would applaud the Catholic’s push for equality. I remember in that hazy in and out period when Adrian would be at the house briefly, and then gone. Sunlight on his long dark hair, while Mum fixed him some food. I know we talked, but I can never remember anything we said. There are days when I try and try and it is just a blank wall that makes me feel very alone and my eyes start to sting.

“This is where we are supposed to be. And this what we are supposed to be doing.” Meara says confidently. Me and Meara are somewhat similar in that we rode the chauvinistic, patriarchal hierarchy of the IRA out of feminine obscurity and domesticity by upping the violence when everybody else tried to appease and talk. We both were seen as over the top in Northern Ireland. As Irish Republican Army operatives we were both highly respected, and our work spoke louder than any boisterous claims from the political wing of the IRA, Sinn Fein. People like me and Meara wanted to bring the Brits to the negotiating table the only way it will actually work, force, while we bomb and risk our lives Sinn Fein negotiates and gets to look like fake peace-makers.

The way I ended up in London is as complicated as Adrian getting killed, but that is, I suppose, if I had to pinpoint the nosebleeds, swearing at things, and double-checking all the time  was when it all started; the day I found out he was fatally wounded was when things started to become abnormal as far as my life compared to others was concerned.

I got called up to Derry myself in the Winter of 1989, a good while after Brendan and Joe were killed at Loughhall. I took over The Irish Republican Army’s active Service Unit in South Fermangh , after the Special Air Service commandos wounded and then killed Seamus. The SAS ambushed Seamus while he was setting up a road-side bomb. They interrogated him on the ground to see that he was who he was and then shot him in the head. Sinn Fein was running elections that year, they told me my unit was out of control, because of the media outrage over the casualties of the Remembrance Day bombing in Enniskillen we were broken up. I was in the driver seat, but I have no idea why Dessie had to empty two clips from a Kalashnikov into a little car. The woman inside, Gillian Johnston, a young chemist was shot 47 times, and it turned out her wounded fiancé in the car was not her brother, who we thought was in the UDR, she did have a brother, but he was not in the UDR and he lived in Belgium.  We acted on our own and did not listen. The South Fermanagh Brigade of the IRA, my unit, were to be disbanded. I still get too upset in too many directions to think about it for long.

Meara is saying something about stores that are frequented by “rich people”. I see a person who looks like my brother, and then I see another person who I think is Joe Cahill, and I don’t see any like my father, but I start to think about him. I suddenly realize out of all the flashing images and searing voices none are Seamus. Seamus was never a victim. I wonder if I am a victim, but I think of all the things I have done, and I realize I cannot be. My nose begins to tingle like it is itchy, but when I scratch it nothing happens. I can feel my stomach going really fast, and I know it starts in my stomach, always with acid coming up my throat, and then I can feel my heart beating faster and faster, and now I am horrified because Meara is asking, “what’s wrong?”, and I have done it before, but I just got here and I know I can get the operations done, but I do not want to look like an emotional wreck. I think of the trash can blowing apart, and I exhale long, so I feel good for a moment, but right when Meara asks, “what’s wrong?”, again, I throw up the coffee I drank at St. John’s and I start crying.

“Carmel, we are doing the right thing.”

“I know.” I say. Meara looks me over warily, weakness can mean informing. Meara gets me upright and has me swing my arm around her shoulder while we walk. “We had quite a night out last night.” Meara says loudly, even though no one can hear.

“I’ve just been thinking so much about my brother and my family, but I know I can never go back.” I say, wiping my eyes and nose, through decreasing sobs.

If either me or Meara were properly identified, we would be instantly picked up and held indefinitely. They would make up charges if they could not find anything. We are both down a road there is no going back from, and when I try to understand why we are so astray from some of our more conventional peers the image of my brother fades with him smiling, like the signal is skipping on the tv with blips of static washing him out.

As I got older, all the things that were steady seemed to take on a speed. The cool, reliable disposition of my father and mother had turned to horror, hysteria and then a frightened victimhood that lashed out at any fear. They feared everything, like what would happen to me, so I became something to look out for, because there was something terrible coming to crush me.

The absence of someone you love going away creates a kind of detached energy, free-wheeling in the environment he once occupied. Neighbors talk.  People who have knowledge of the absence can then configure that negative energy to their own egos, fears, and affix it to play-off their own criteria that determines whether one is good or bad, until they are good, no matter how awful they have to be to prove it.  “We got your Brother!” His death was in all the papers and the security forces started doing surveillance on our house.  I, along with my father and mother, were brought in for questioning for possible links to terrorist organizations, “Are you or have you ever been a member of the IRA?”, after the questioning and the funeral I was treated like Belcoo’s town witch.

A girl, who I now know is well-off, married and a respected member of The Presbyterian Parish in Belcoo, used a pair of scissors to cut a chunk of my hair off from behind me in school. After that my Dad sent me to live with his sister in Ontario, Canada.

S- Plan

Part 2

By John Rogan

The cool, dark basement, at my aunt’s in Canada, its soft lights that softened when I drank. The dust on low shelves and laundry spread around, remembered, made me feel warm and sleepy.  I felt very safe in Canada a weird way, supreme, I guess, in my removal. But it was only when I was thinking of being apart, escaping, which I was doing, that I felt so in control over my life. I felt confused, otherwise the thought of home always ran through the reality of my life at Regiopolis-Notre Dame Catholic High School in Kingston, Ontario.          

Meara is walking me over to Highgate cemetery. We are going through a particularly thick area of trees to talk.

The loud, sunny haze of the July afternoon subsided into cool, dirt lanes. Insects ticked in the foliage above, and I ducked my head to look up at the sun trying to thinly poke though the Elms and Oaks. The twisting vines, branches and ferns created a dark green intermesh of shadows in between the larger trunks.  There would be no possibility of surveillance here. Along the rows of tombstones is like the low-dust and laundry of the basement. A stone woman adorning one of the tombs sits with her eyes closed in front of a rose bush. A bright red bloom bursts red in the humid grey of her rain-worn face. I really want something to drink, something hard.

Meara knows what most people who know me really well know. I guess its one of the things I’m known for. The shadows of the high trees clouded the creeping Phlox and English Ivy, as it overflowed in the July heat by our feet. The absence in a graveyard seemed to be filled with the cool ground meeting the heat of the sun, and while silent, there seemed to be something vibrating that was all the more unsettling because when I examined the scene around me everything was slow, picturesque, and beautiful.

For a second, I heard my brother’s voice ask about a girl I knew in Canada, which would have been impossible. And I wonder if I am getting Seamus’ voice confused with Adrian’s voice, and I think of the people laying silently below me, like I am x-raying the ground, and suddenly I see thousands of rotting bodies, and I realize, real sad and sharp that I am separated from this group, the dead, Seamus and Adrian. It’s like I can hear a bunch of people talking in a  theatre before the movie comes on, and I turn and look at the more ornate tombs, and then the rows of headstones and I keep looking around, but a single bird flits through the trees or a butterfly waves by, and Meara does not even notice me, because I can tell she’s set on talking to  me.

“Your puke smells like booze.” Meara said. We had found a shady, dirt lane among the tombs of Highgate cemetery. The jagged high Maple trees that had barely fallen through the years, gave out to smaller, moss covered trees, with ferns, wild grass, and ivy bursting into the heat around the fading carved headstones of tens of thousands of Londoners. Karl Marx was buried here, and I wondered if his ideas, if who he was, had brought so much conflict, maybe I was not so bad. But I was really worried what Meara was going to say. I got worried when she got angry, she was unpredictable, sometimes nice, understanding, even motherly, other times her reactions were over-the-top irate, capricious and vindictive.

“We can’t have this getting out of control when you are here. This has to be very disciplined. This is important.” Meara was mad. “We are not shooting up farmhouses in Monaghan.” That was low. Meara came from Newry, Armagh, or a smaller town right on the border of Armagh and the Republic Ireland called  Killeen. She made her reputation, and money, hijacking truck’s on the A1, her family’s place ran along the highway. She was running all sorts of tax scams with shipping along the border, raising a lot of money for the IRA while she was still young. I was in charge of a more rural, less refined, and less lucrative area of operations in my native Fermanagh. Seamus set the tone for Fermanagh with him sleeping in the fields of Monaghan, Ireland most nights, and running raids on Royal Ulster Constabulary Stations within Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. Sometime when I was in Canada or right when I got back, I’m not sure, but Seamus heard of a man, a member of the Ulster Defense Regiment, who made deliveries of fruit and vegetables every Wednesday, early in the morning, to the Roslea elementary school. He hid behind the dumpster and shot the man twice in the forehead while he was a lifting a crate of carrots. Semaus would go sleep in the fields, wait until things died down and find someone else in the Royal Ulster Consatbulary or The UDR to shoot.

 The RUC were more cops, military, shitheads, but still a professional police force, I suppose, but the UDR were just keystone cops who wanted to hurt Catholics. The UDR was raised through television and newspaper adds in "defence of life or property in Northern Ireland against armed attack or sabotage"” when Trouble broke out with Catholics in 1970. The UDR was essentially all Protestant and they loved having that power over the Catholics.

“I’m not drinking like how I did. It was after the operation went off. I did not drink the night before, and I don’t blackout anymore.” I wanted to tell her about my prescription for Xanax, how it helped with nightmares, and counting things, and how it made me drink less, or if I drank a lot on it I just blacked out, so I did not tell her. Plus she won’t like me using my fake passport to see a shrink. Meara would tell Sean and Charlie about that, and they would tell Tommy and it might get back to people in Belfast. “I have a complete commitment and respect for the work You, Sean and Charlie have done here.”

There had been no significant operations in England since the IRA blew up Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s bathroom at the Brighton Hotel. That was in 84. Five people connected with her Conservative party were killed along with 31 others staying at the hotel.  A support beam came down on a husband and wife from the Conservative Party, while they were asleep in their bed, crushing them so bad they had to use the room reservation to figure out it was them, and I think some other people not linked with the Conservative party, just out on holiday, got glass in their eyes, while someone from the hotel staff, a waitress, told a newspaper how she was deaf because of it. Patrick Magee, he’s doing eight-life sentences now, stayed there under an assumed name, set the timer for four weeks in advance then put the bomb in the bathroom wall of his hotel room. But they got Pat, and he was the best operative over here.

So Charlie and Sean, in August 1988, I think Charlie was driving, but they, or one of them walked into the Inglis Barracks and put a bomb big enough to blow the roof off the brick building. I heard it caught fire, and people were trapped under the old fallen brick. They pulled a corporal out alive, but one soldier was crushed to death. The two bombed Ternhill barracks in February 1989, where they planted two devices, but then a corporal on patrol saw them, and when he asked who they were they dumped the third device they had and ran. They were running down the road in front of the base, trying to break through the thick hedgerows where it was thin enough to to get through, when the Corporal fired three shots at them that missed. Sean knocked on people’s doors, in the middle of the night not far from the barracks, saying it was an emergency and when a house finally opened their door, Charlie rushed in behind Sean, and Sean got the use of the husband’s car, with her crying in her nightgown and the dark house, after he threatened to shoot the wife. The Corporal alerted the rest of Ternhill barracks and when the two devices Sean and Charlie had already planted went off all the soldiers were evacuated. They made it away in the high-jacked car, abandoned it and took the train back down to North London.  Sean and Charlie really started getting funding, and notice, after Deal in September 1989.

Sean and Charlie wanted to hit British bases within Britain and inflict casualties because of the symbolism, the significance, hitting their military in their home, so get the fuck out of ours. It was a simple and effective psychological tactic, people in England did not care about Northern Ireland until things were blowing up in England, but the security was brutal, almost as bad as all the checkpoints in Belfast. So, Sean and Charlie found this Royal Marines School of Music in Deal, no guard towers, no fences, and most of the soldiers were there learning how to march in parades and blow into a tuba. They could learn how to be musician without being part of an imperial army with my family’s blood on its hands. So Sean and Charlie, again I don’t know who, set the time bomb in the recreation center for the soldiers. It was a device manufactured in Northern Ireland and shipped over, using powerful Libyan-imported explosives, the blast leveled the adjoining residence building for the soldiers and killed 11 Royal Marines and injured 21 more. It’s important to collapse a structure with people by it or in it, this time flute- playing soldiers, because it’s hard to make a bomb big enough to create the kind of casualties the newspapers need.

I remember my mother tried to put a wreath on my brother’s grave every year to commemorate when he died, but people kept stealing the wreath and leaving it ripped to shreds in front of his grave. I’ve heard people do the same to Seamus’ grave. By the time I went to Canada, Adrian’s wreath had been ripped up the previous two summers and someone had tried to knock over the gravestone. My mother stopped leaving flowers.

They brought Meara over from West Germany after all the fallout and press from the Deal bombings. She was able to get close enough to the British Army Barracks in Colchester to put a device on a car with two officer’s in it , so when they began to drive the car incinerated. That was November 1989. They were only injured, I read one of them is getting daily skin grafts at the Whittington hospital nearby, but it let Sean and Charlie know Meara could operate independently and be effective, something I wanted to show them all with my bombing on the Strand this morning, doing it, with the go-ahead, essentially all on my own, but it was all just so much. It was good having a partner or a look out, or I just became exhausted with worrying over the details. I wanted to talk with Meara about working together, professionally, but then I racked my nerves, spewed everywhere and got all emotional, like always.

This past June, Sean and Charlie drove up to Staffordshire, because they heard soldiers were always waiting around the Litchfiled railway station. There were a lot of bases in the area, and pissed soldiers were always using the station to get to bars in Litchfield or down in Birmingham. The three boys Sean and Charlie found were going home to visit their families, they were out of uniform, The British Military did not let soldiers wear their uniforms out of service anymore because of IRA attacks, but Sean and Charlie made them for sure. Sean had the silver revolver and emptied it into the group of them, before running across the tracks, back to the car and down to the crowded anonymity of London. I heard that a 19 year old private was killed, his two friends injured. I read an article where there were commuters running everywhere and people were trying to stop the flow of blood for one of them, and they did and it was the one that survived or they didn’t and it was this 19 year old kid, whose father said in the article he could not hear an Irish voice without thinking it was the last thing his son heard before he died.

             Meara knows that’s why my Dad’s sister sent me home from Kingston, Ontario. All I really remember about that place was the cold basement I would spend hours drinking in. My Aunt and Uncle had a collection of dusty old, liqueur bottles, most of them must have been forgotten presents, because I drank most of them before they figured out where I was getting the stuff. I never listened to music or liked to go out and talk to people. In Canada I would drink and think of myself in grander and grander ways, until I was some sort of washy-hero. My father’s sister taught at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and with her influence they were able to quickly get me into Regiopolis-Notre Dame. A pretty affluent secondary school for girls.

            But my Mom and Dad never understood, throwing all this affluence at me. I appreciate the opportunities, and although they do not speak to me, I love my father and mother.  They were always throwing me into things they thought were best, like sending me over to Kingston, Ontario. All the girls made fun of my accent in their weird Quebecois blue eyes. I can remember being taunted in the frosty, dry air by blond, French-looking girls all whispering in a throaty way. It was mostly my own attitude I suppose. I went to school drunk one day, and I kept getting lost, until I ended up in the office and then I was getting brought home. I got suspended a lot. My Aunt’s connections helped me stay at the school.

            Now that I think of it none of the girls made fun of me at Regiopolis-Notre Dame, many were in the same spot as me and away from home, just trying to make friends in an awkward situation, but I always thought people were talking about me, so I attacked some French-looking girl and then no one at the school wanted to talk to me. The girl was talking shit about me behind my back, I think, it was important, I needed to stand up for myself, but It really ended up being not worth any of it. I had gotten some sailor-looking guys to buy me a bottle of vodka, after I showed them my tits. This worked really well at the liquor store down by the water in Kingston. I remember the smell of the shore, the sound of waves on rocks, a group of older guys touching my groin for a thirty rack of beer. But I cannot really remember anyone saying anything to me, most people avoided me, I think, and when I look back, maybe I was the one at fault, but I got drunk on beer, ripped out chunks of this girl’s hair, and afterwards I ran away crying, and the girl’s hair I ripped out was crying, but I don’t remember where I ran to. I ended up in my bedroom at my aunt’s house with the mattress on the floor and the box spring separate from the frame of my bed, the sheets were torn off, and I had fallen asleep, basically pissing, so when I woke to my Aunt screaming about the girl, and calls from the school, and no one knew where I had been, I looked down and realized I was lying on my slanted mattress and it was soaked completely through with warm urine.

I was at secondary school in Ontario from 74 to 78, my teenage years, age 14 to 18, and I wonder if me and Seamus had been able to meet and form some sort normal life, maybe things might not have gone the way they went. I remember hairy, thick forearms in liquor store parking lots, and my first kiss was with a guy who’s breath smelt like cigarettes and he just said “Thanks.” And handed me a bank note with Queen Elizabeth II on it.

Seamus was kicking around Monaghan, Roslea and Enniskillen and we could have met, I know from other girls he had been with that he went to the dances I would have gone to, maybe he would have become a carpenter, or a school- teacher, my father could have helped him out, but by the time I got back, and me and Seamus were dating, they were already looking for him for shooting soldiers.

“You know I will cover for you, as long as you are not compromising anything. Have you talked with Sean yet?” I shook my head no. I was intimidated. “He’s very nice. I mean he’s your new husband.” Meara laughed and then went serious. “Sean and Jim don’t fool around and you are going to have to appear like a couple. Sean and Charlie are very serious about our covers, as you should be. We can’t have you getting picked up for public intoxication. Here, I will call Sean and get you guys met up.” I had said so little since we had entered Highgate cemetery, and it was like I was speaking against a current, or there was a messy chorus off somewhere, but when I said “OK” out loud, it was like everything went silent, and I was alone here with Meara again.

S- Plan             Part 3                                                                          

By John Rogan

Around Sean I feel focused and centered. In the moment he’s something to watch. We are in the 2^nd hour of the three hour drive up from London to Milton, Staffordshire. He is acting odd, revelatory in an angry, sort of scary tone, but lapsing back into the soft voice he used this past Summer. The woods are getting thick, so I cannot see the night sky above the road. There are no stars, it had casted over with a thick layer of blue-ish clouds when the sun had set. We stole the grey Ford Cortina we are driving from a posh restaurant’s parking garage in South London. Sean has been very nice, always smiling, looking at me, remote, but kind, he never really says anything, compliments and smart jokes, but since we got in the car he keeps swearing, saying that he hates how English people, especially Londoners act, and he keeps bringing these angry rants back to Gibraltar.

            It’s the 18^th of September 1990 and nights are getting cool, so the mornings stay dewy and there’s a cold layer of air that seems to fall with the night. Everything is overgrown, it was a hot Summer. It seems like a flash of light, this Summer. I get things confused, but I think people are liking me. It’s 3 am and Sean thinks it should be fine if we get to Milton around 4 am. The cooling dark air seems to deepen the shadows in the overgrowth at the side of the road, once we get past the industrial suburbs around Birmingham, and closer to Milton, it becomes thin roads and thick night-green overgrowth trying to creep into the open passage-way of the road. I am being very careful, I do not want the car to go off the road and get stuck in mud. The ghostly headlights moved slowly over the white-illuminated, alien uncertainty of the hedge roves. The halogen shadows of roadside plants are long and stretch then move out of the way, but are quickly replaced, so a spinning wall of shadows, like when I made shadow puppets up against our bedroom wall with Adrian and a flashlight, keep repeating and it feels like, with each new long-shifting shadow away and replaced, like a constant stream, but it is like there is something in the revolving, constant, sentient shadows beyond the headlights that is watching us. Sean asked me to drive, because we were going to have to come back in rush hour traffic, and him and Charlie had done the shooting at the Lichfiled Railway station in Staffordshire back in June. Sean said me being his wife would be a good cover.

            I have not been with anyone, really, since Seamus and I was not planning on it.

            It was on one of our Beach trips to Brighton, sometime in August, with Sean, Charlie and Meara. “To be a family”, as Sean put it. Big crowds of Moms and kids, and rows of umbrellas, beach towels, and white reflecting sand. But there were some little boys, not older than seven or eight, gawking at me in my bathing suit while I was waiting for Sean to come out of the sandy Men’s room. I looked good in that bathing suit. I guess they were waiting for their Dad or Mum, and I went over into the shadows, where women wash sand off their feet, so no one could see walking by, but the boys watching me could, and I pulled down the lower part of the two-piece bathing suit I was wearing. I let my vagina sit open in the cool ocean air for a couple seconds. The boys went silent and focused like something sacred. Then I put it away, and went back to Charlie and Meara, Sean must have been taking a shit.

 A mess of unkept weeds looks like a farmer for a second and then I see their stringy shadows in the headlights. I take my pills for operations. I don’t tell anyone, but it helps my nerves and keeps me from drinking. The bitter taste of Xanax feels like it is putting a soothing, easy pressure on all the thoughts running frantic in my forehead, so they go away, and I can focus. I get forgetful, sleepy and happy, and hungry, but Sean, when he talks, helps me focus. And even what’s he’s saying now. “This guy is responsible for everything that happened in Gibraltar.” Makes my thoughts tick up and the cool Xanax ticks it down.

            At the end of July, the 30^th, we had done a similar drive down to Pervesney, to Ian Gow’s house. We had left London around midnight, and it was Me and Sean’s first real operation together. I constantly felt guilty about Seamus when I liked how Sean smiled. Meara did not say he was incredibly handsome, but I always wondered, there were rumors, that Meara did not really like men, but I am doing to Meara what everyone has always done to me, so I would never bring it up, unless she did. I don’t really know, of course.

Meara was dating Brendan Lynagh when he went he got a bunch of IRA guys all pissed and pumped up to take things up a notch. Brendan was one of eight of them that drove out to Stronge Estate in 1981.

I know Brendan Lynagh and Seamus McElwaine were both born and raised in county Monaghahn, Ireland, close to where I grew up, right on the border with Northern Ireland. So they both operated in and knew Fermanagh, East Tyrone, and South Armagh well.

Brendan went out to that high, shadowy stone Castle in Armagh with two carloads of kids in the middle of the night. They blew up the iron gate, and apparently 86 year-old Sir Norman Stronge was trying to signal the RUC by lighting flares. And they had to use more grenades to open the thick, wood, medieval looking door, but when Brendan and them got inside they went right after Sir Norman and his son, they each were found with a bullet in their respective heads. The RUC showed up right when Brendan and them were torching the library. Brendan and the group shot it out with the cops and somehow all of them got away, they shot the windshields and engine blocks of the RUC cars chasing them, but that was when Seamus started talking to me about Brendan. This was in the first year or two I was back from Canada, by 1981, I would have been back about a two and half years, it was a couple months before he got picked up by the SAS in Roslea, and I remember Seamus talking about the attack on the Strong Estate, saying in his way that was hardly decipherable unless you knew him well, like me, “That takes some balls. Going up to some Unionist’s big Estate and laying them out like that.” The media’s reaction to the sensationalism of the Strong Estate murders phased Seamus, because at the time he had killed eleven UDR and RUC men operating in Fermanagh, but he got headlines, a murder sure, but he wanted to go bigger, and when he started hearing Brendan was behind the Strong Estate attack he wanted to work with him.

A rabbit hops out of my path, and Sean is telling me we are a close. Sean was very pleased when I put the mercury-tilt bomb on Ian Gow’s car at the end of July. Ian Gow was a heavy-handed Unionist MP from Eastbourne, and we had done the same thing we are doing tonight at the end of July, it was a 2-and-a-half-hour drive South out of London to get to his house in east Sussex. We got there about 3:30 am, I had driven the whole time. Gow had done a lot of Margaret Thatcher’s dirty work throughout the 80’s, like letting Bobby Sands’ group starve to death in the Maze Prison, so we knew politicians high up to the Prime minister would feel this. We could hear the ocean churning off the cliffs he lived by. Sean had wanted me to go put the Mercury tilt bomb on, I had never used or planted one, but Meara showed me how. I was afraid of activating it too early and then titling it, blowing myself up right there in Ian Gow’s driveway, but I did what Meara said. I remembered where the two activations switches were with my fingers in the dark. I put the device underneath the driver side door, let the magnet on the back of the device suck onto the metal of the undercarriage, hit both activation switches and then quietly walked back to the car. Sean drove back, and we heard Ian Gow had his legs blown off while he was backing the car out of his driveway. His wife had come out of the house, but the lower part of his body was so mangled with the car he bled out after ten minutes.

Sean is telling me to drive slow, turn the lights off, while he is trying to see the numbers on the houses. Tonight’s target is Peter Terry, the governor of Gibraltar. I hate the SAS, we all do, there is very real fear, along with acute loss, intermingled with this hate. The SAS took Seamus away to the Maze prison the first time and then shot him the second time, they killed Brendan too. Our whole group was excited when we got this piece of intel.

What had happened in Gibraltar is there was a giant British Naval base, and there were three IRA operatives going to mount a car bomb attack on the base. But this fellow, who was governor of Gibraltar at the time, Peter Terry, authorized the Special Air Service, SAS, to shoot-on site. It was March 1988 when the three in Gibraltar were shot. The assassinations were in the same tradition of what had already happened to Seamus and Brendan and to an earlier and less-organized extent my brother. There was no bomb in their car, no guns, and people said they were trying give up when they were killed. The death of the three got international headlines, and the British military looked like a bunch of savages. When they were having the funeral for one of the boys killed in Gibraltar, back in Belfast, Michael Stone, a loner loyalist with connections to Ulster Defense Association, began hurling grenades into the crowd, he killed three people and injured around 30 more. The crowd chased him through the cemetery and almost beat him to death, before the RUC took him into custody. A couple days later in Belfast, when they were having the funeral for one of those killed by Michael Stone at the cemetery, two British Corporals got too close to the funeral procession in a Catholic neighborhood, and everyone thought they were under attack again, a black taxi boxed them in, and one of the corporals fired a shot in the air to get the hysterical crowd to back up, which they did for a second, I remember watching this all on television, but the angered crowd of mourners swarmed and started smashing the windows and pulling the corporals out and they found British Military ID on them, so an IRA interrogation team was brought in and they stripped and beat the soldiers, and to send a message both corporals were killed, shot in the head, and dumped in a landfill not far from the funeral procession. The television cameras caught the corporals again when a priest was hunched over them, giving them last rights, waving for somebody to help

Sean is looking wide-eyed into the night, and I realize he is relaxed now around me, before he had been stiff, but now it was very calming just hearing him talk to me.

“That was the house. Pull up the road.”

The road Air Marshall Peter Terry lived on is on a steep hill that over-looks miles of soft green farm fields. I can hear tractors running far-off and can still see the distant night lights of pickers trying to get the harvest in before the frost. The hill Peter Terry’s house sits on is surrounded by a dense forest that is cleared in every direction for the rich farm land that stretches to the horizon. As dawn starts creeping in, I am surprised to see only one or two small trees at the top of the hill, one by the Terry house driveway, but only well- manicured bushes in the well-spaced houses. Across from the houses and separated by the gravel road I drove on, are plots of overgrown wheat-looking grass, before the hill gets too steep and gives way to the rocky incline of thick forest.

“ Shit! Shit! Shit!” Sean screams coming back to the interior of the car. He shuts the door, so the interior light would go off, and it looks like he is going to cry. “The timer is frozen, or the battery is not fucking working.” He keeps punching the dashboard, making boyish chugging noises, and I keep thinking he is going to set off the air bag. My mouth just hangs open.

“I know this is him” Sean says, sitting in the passenger seat. He really wants to. It would be easy to just drive back to London and try another day. But this feels strangely personal, maybe because we know the headlines, but for some reason  Sean cannot just drive away from Pete Terry’s house. “We have the old Sten gun.” Sean said with an eerie finality, like a question up in the air, haunting us. We decide, I will be able to see Sean, that he will walk from the Cortina and I will follow him with the headlights off, the houses are far apart, real rural country, so when everyone is waking up there will be no one around, only doing sleepy chores, and it will not be long until I can drive us down to the safe congestion of Birmingham and then London.

The sun starts to come up. And Sean crouches across the road from Peter Terry’s house and watches people start moving inside, first a light, then another, and then a kitchen light. The night turns more into the early croke of birds in the morning, and I feel the exhaustion of seeing the sun rise. A television flickers on inside the house. Sean comes out from the wheat-like grass across the road from the house and he makes sure he has my attention and I am moving. He is creeping up the driveway with the Sten gun. And when I hear the window smash and the rattle- like crack of the Sten’s automatic function, I accelerate forward. Sean keeps blasting through the window he is shooting the eldest man through, who Sean, and I assume is Peter Terry, sitting reading the newspaper on his own couch. Sean keeps firing, and I can see the muzzle flash make all the chunks of glass resting in the window pane fall. I heard an older woman hysterically screaming, a girl squealing, movement behind the shot-out window and Sean crashes into the passenger seat of the moving Cortina.

“There was a little girl. Some dumb bitch walked right into it. The clip’s empty. I might have hit the girl or the lady, but Terry got it.” Sean was breathing heavy.

I thought of the SAS man asking Seamus questions on the ground, Seamus answering calm, exhausted, steady, and then the masked SAS man shooting Seamus’s face, his head slammed and splattered back, bouncing off the blood stain coming out of his destroyed brain. I see the seven and eight-year-old boys’ gawky awed faces while I hear the waves rhythmically lap at the beach. The road turns hard when it winds back down through the rocky forest road, I brake, feel the tires grip the gravel road, and then accelerate.

                                                          S-Plan

part 4

                                               

                                                                        John Rogan

 I miss talking to my parents. We do not speak anymore. A small firework whistles up into the night-air and pops. The group of young boys who set it off are running and cackling. I watch as one pulls down his pants and urinates into a bonfire. I see him laughing, the light reflecting off his drunk, stupid face, his cowlicked shaved head bouncing obnoxious and the glow of the jumping flames consumes his trail of piss.

The Army council is having us lay low before the Christmas season starts. We are trying to do something like normal Londoners, like a family, or young couples before the kids come along. Sean And Charlie took the day off from the black cab company because they knew Bonfire Night would be chaos to get around London in. Meara took an early shift waitressing, so she got off this afternoon. I asked my boss to leave the catering job Meara got me through her waitressing job early, because of a migraine which I convinced myself I had to lie, and then I really had it for a while, sort of, more stress really. I thought he could sense me lying with my fake work visa and everything. I felt sick while just trying to get the food out, but Meara assured me when I met up with her, Sean and Charlie that my boss was alright, plus I am really drunk, to the point I cannot remember how much I drank, a couple big beers, and the shooters I have in my pocket, especially since I took a .5 mg of  Xanax to come out to this thing, so I feel fine now, but I’m lost and walking around the shadowy fairgrounds and I do not really care.

There’s rows of booths, face-painting games, getting your fortune told, throw a ring around something and get a prize, bb gun rifles with popping balloons, a wet, exhausted looking clown gets back on to a seat, as kids shout insults at him and try to hit the red metal dot hard enough so he falls into the circular tub of water again. A boy gives a girl a stuffed animal and I want to get away from the extension cords and lights.

It is November 5^th  1990, Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes’s Night. It’s gotten dark, but the fireworks have not started yet. Branches of wood are stacked into horizontal cones, like the Indian’s tipis on the Westerns I like to watch, just burning, every fifty, thirty meters. Fires taller than people. They throw more wood into it. There’s a line of large, low-lying trees, I am walking by, dark with no bonfires near them, off to the side of a path. The tree’s thick branches snake down, so kids are hanging from the trees, jumping down, carving their names in it. There are kids high up in the trees I can hear but not see, I guess away from their parents, hiding, and boys giving other boys boosts, and under the canopy with the evening filtering out into darkness for a moment I feel like I am in a dark jungle somewhere, time removed, not another country, but somewhere safe. I imagine somewhere outside time, this before that went away, and people I know, but cannot talk to, are up in the branches, like my schoolmates and Adrian. I see Seamus’ scruffy frame swear, smile and spit tobacco at Joe’s feet.

I was trying to get away from the crowd, a boy lights a fuse and a couple others start running and firecrackers, the long strung together kind I see over in China town, erupt not all at once, but almost, one right after the next, the sound of the contained black powder ripping, with a girl screaming somewhere close into the still air under the trees, and I can smell what smells like gunpowder.

I think they told me there would be horse rides because I am from the country, Fermanagh, rural borderland. Meara’s always been close to Newry, Armagh or Belfast, the Continent and over here in London, while Sean and Charlie have operated in Belfast, before London. So, they kind of think of me as a country bumpkin, but anyways there are no horse rides and I think they tricked me.

We are on this long flat green called Blackheath Park. A tuft of trees and tiny buildings separates us from the U-like sweep of the Thames river, as it surrounds central London. They set up fair ground rides, and mostly it is families with tired mothers talking languidly to each other, and children knocking around and the dads all worn out from work sitting, getting pissed, looking around with the other dads.

The Brits started lighting bonfires the night they disrupted the Gunpowder Plot, or the Jesuit Treason, I remember my father had called it. That was in the 16, or 1700’s. Guy Fawkes was guarding a bunch of gunpowder to blow up the Proddo King, beneath Westminster Palace, lying Brits probably planted it themselves, but it was said so a Catholic revolt would start, when Guy Fawkes got caught, and later drawn and quartered. Real medieval stuff, but there’s events, parties, fires and fireworks and they burn effigies of the poor Catholic, Guy Fawkes, they’ve done it every year since.

I am a lot drunker than I had been trying to be in front of Sean, Meara and Charlie, but I wanted to take a horse ride. And I lost Sean at the bathrooms, or I am not sure if he is still in there, because I walked away, and all the bathrooms look the same. Or I say this to myself when I know what bathroom Sean is in, and I examine how I am lying to myself, but the coolness of the night and the Xanax mixing with booze and the hum of families and personalities with the anger or uncertainty of being duped keeps me walking until I do not recognize things and I am somewhere I have not been before. The fireworks would scare the horses, so I would hope they would get them away from the city. I am trying to be positive, but I keep thinking about there being no horse rides and it is making me really sad. It just seems cruel. To take something I liked when I was a kid and not have it. I guess when we were talking about going to Blackheath park and watching the fireworks over the Thames river that’s how they convinced me to go, but I don’t see any horse rides, and honestly what is a “fairground ride” without horses. I think they knew there were no horse rides. It would be irresponsible to have horses around all this. There are these slack-jawed hicks operating unsafe looking Waltzer rides, and merry go rounds for kids. Some vendor with a straw hat tries to sell me a caramel apple and he sees my eyes and moves along.

Seamus was in charge of deploying two of the M60 heavy machine guns they had unveiled at the anniversary of Bloody Sunday up in Derry in January of 1978.  He was told by the IRA Army Council in Derry they were recognizing his work and sacrifice, because they knew how many UDR men he had killed at that time. I would have counted it was 12, but Seamus was always very secretive. The M60s were from Libya or America. I’m not sure. But right when I got back from Canada, I believe Seamus and the South Armagh Active Service unit shot down the Brit’s Gazelle helicopter from across the border in Ireland. The helicopter crashed into a wall and killed a colonel and injured two of his aides. That was in February 78 when my aunt sent me back from Kingston, Ontario early. She told my father she could not control me. The Regiopolis-Notre Dame girls school faculty was relieved to see me not graduate with the rest of the girls who hated me. My aunt was always saying shit about me behind my back.

When I saw Seamus he did not say anything about it, but the La Mon Restaurant bombing outside Belfast was on the same day when he shot down the helicopter. I remember twelve people burned alive, Belfast operatives, napalm-like, petrol and sugar mixed, nasty stuff. Seamus always asked me questions and never talked about what he did. I remember he always carried fishing line in his front pocket and he would stretch out the line and whistle at it. Never made sense to me unless he was constantly testing a trip-wire, but he did it every time I was around him. Why? Seamus was odd. The first person Seamus killed was waving a friendly greeting to him from his tractor. He would just kind of go off on people, never me, but that kind of unpredictability, especially when his body count started rising, gained him a fast-growing reputation by the time I got back from Canada in the Spring of 1978.

I heard Seamus and some guys started firing on some soldiers from the thick green overgrown wall across the border there in Jonestown. The helicopter showed up, to give the soldiers intelligence from the air. The boys Seamus knew from South Armagh were lined up in the Republic, and the two M60’s were in a crossfire, so the metal and the cockpit started lumping metal bullet holes and I always picture the blades chopping into the wet South Armagh farmland, green tossing up, before an eerie quiet, and Seamus slack-jawed at having just downed a British Military helicopter, but I don’t really know. I just know they ran into Ireland, and Seamus made it back to Monaghan alright.

He kept the two M60s along the Fermanagh border in a farmhouse in The Republic of Ireland, near where he grew up in Knockacullion near Scotstown, County Monaghan. I never drove for Seamus until we were watching the two undercovers in Lisnaskea. That was in May 1979.

A boy up in the trees yells down “Hey lady!! Lady!! What are you doing?” I am staring out over everyone and the Thames, wandering, not looking at anything, until he says it again. “Hey Lady!” I look up and him and his two friends start laughing. I hear something like “she looks like she’s in shambles!” and some more eruptions of laughing, a teenage girl almost runs into me, but she jumps to the side of me right in time and keeps going. So I motion up to the boys, there are no adults around,  no parents, and the boy is about to say something else to me and I motion to him, like come closer so you can see, but they are up in the tree five-ten meters over my head, and they sort of lean like I am going to say something. I lift my shirt and dig my fingers under my bra, so it goes up and I can feel the cold the air on my nipples and my stomach. I kind of forget about the boys, since they stop chattering suddenly,  just trying to keep my sweatshirt up by my shoulders, around my neck, and I can look down and see my white tits, they were never small, and the boys look kind of excited, but confused and a little scared or tricked, and in one quick motion I pull my shirt back down and swiftly walk away.

It was right when I was back, Seamus may have been involved or not. My mum told me about this while I was in Canada and about to come home, but a 20 year-old British soldier was trying to remove an Irish tri-color. The flag was wired to a landmine underneath the telegraph pole it hung from. My mum said she had driven right by that street while shopping in Crossmalgen earlier that day. I remember she told me that she had read later in the papers how the soldier’s body was too mangled for his parents to identify it.

My dad had gotten me a job as a clerk at the Fermanagh board of education’s administration building in Enniskillen. I answered phones all day and filed paper-work I am pretty sure no one ever read. Being back from Canada was like being in a stifling vacuum, where things were new and scary, but only because they were so old and familiar. I was helping my mother take groceries from the car and felt this kind of confinement, and the cycling thoughts feeding off my environment and building into an inner tension that could break, snap, or at least recall the lack of trust, of people whispering about me, but it was when I felt this way, taking the last bag from the car, closing the boot, and heading towards the house when there  was a boom, like a sonic boom. I put the bag down and I had felt the ground shake, but now I touched it and it was still. This was at the end of June 1978, the first time the weather had gotten warm in Belcoo, since I was back from Canada. Before I could come up from the ground my mother was out the side door, looking in the direction of the sound, and it was little pops, emerging, like a Summer thunderstorm when the air is thick and it fills with water and then with a clap hailstones start falling. Well, this is what this sounded like, slow spaced out pops building all on top of one another, until they were all together for 40-50 seconds, and then silence. A young UDR man was killed in the attack and Seamus and probably Joe Cahill took the M60s and ran back over the border into Ireland.

People are starting to sit down because the fireworks are going to start soon. I have no idea how I will find Sean, Charlie and Meara and I am thinking of just going home. When everybody sits down with who they came here with I feel like I am odd, standing alone. I figure I can have a beer and talk with someone else having a beer, so I go over to a tent with a table and a keg, but I buy a beer and drink it so fast I have to get in line to buy a second one, and no one really looks like they want to talk or be friends, just get their beers and go back to their families. I get the second beer, and I think of the first time I drove for Seamus. It was a year after I heard his landmine and M60 ambush in Belcoo that we drove to Lisnaskea. It was May 1979, and it was the first time I had met Joe Cahill, but Seamus told Joe I was alright, so we drove down to Holy Cross church. There were two undercover RUC men who had been tailing men associated with Sinn Fein across the Irish border into Monaghan, and Seamus and Joe had been watching them for over a year when they identified them doing stake-outs around one of the Fermanagh Active Service Unit’s ammo dumps. Action had to be taken.

The three of us had waited in the car, while Mass was going on. One of the undercovers got out to buy a Republican newspaper that was being sold by a Sinn Fein activist outside the church. Seamus thought he might arrest the newspaper boy, so after the detective picked up the paper Seamus walked up behind him and yelled “hey!” When the undercover turned around, Seamus shot him in the chest and kept firing into him while he slumped down to the ground. When Seamus’ shots had gone off, Joe quickly jumped out of our car, a window shattered and there was the automatic pistol going until I figured Joe was out of ammo, before they both came running back. Joe had shot the other detective in the neck while he sat in his car, so the detective was bleeding, opening the door when Joe shot him right above his ear, so the undercover’s body fell out onto the pavement, blood pooling. Everyone attending Mass heard the shots, emptied out of the church and saw the whole mess.

A lone firework goes up, explodes, and everyone thinks it’s the show starting, but everyone keeps waiting. A Guy Fawkes Effigy burns, I watch his sharp eyebrows and his characteristic goatee and mustache disappear, along with the vacant eyes, into the licking flames. Something screeches then bangs. I look left and a bottle rocket’s fuse is hissing and I watch it launch lightly, thin smoke trailing upwards, and then it spiraling down and exploding.

I think of those three little boys up in the tree and how when they grow older, go to a dance, fall in love, get their first crush or their first kiss they will have to think of my tits. My Mum and my Dad are never coming back. This would have been worth it if they had horse rides. When the fireworks start reflecting off the river and the city of London, red, blue, green, yellow blooms expanding, I head for the railway station to beat the crowds.

S-Plan

                                                                        Part 5

                                                                       

By John Rogan

            The stable belonged to my father’s brother. My legs were not big enough to kick the football.  My cousin Sinead kicked a football around with me and Adrian while My father and my uncle’s big legs talked about something adult. I remember Adrian could kick the ball in the air, and him Sinead had quite a back and forth, but when the ball got passed to me, licking wet grass, I picked it up.  

            My uncle had cows, sheep and goats on his muddy farm a little north of Belcoo, but this must have been sometime in the 60’s because I had just started Level 1, junior infants, at Primary School and one of the teachers had scolded me for not understanding color patterns, and this had made me upset. I was hiding out between the laundry drying on the line when my dad saw me crying “Carmel, What’s wrong? Did Adrian hit you?” I had been trying to keep the tears from coming out since school got out Friday, but I kept picturing my schoolteacher’s face “You are not doing it right!” with anger and disgust in it as he pointed down to my crayons and worksheet. I hated school. I just wanted to stay home with Mum. I told my Dad all this in a blubbering scream in between the wavering laundry sheets in our backyard in Belcoo.

            My father led me by my hand from the soft, sunny backyard. School had just started, and I hated the all the other kids. I kept crying about having to go back. Everyone watched me in my uniform all day. My father and mother had a small fight in front of me about going and talking to the schoolteacher. My father was angry, and my mother wanted him to calm down. She was doing something in the sink and when she spoke to my father, she only shifted her shoulder and neck backwards, so her hands and hips stayed forward to be able to keep doing whatever she was doing in the sink. “You are not going down to that school!” My father was a teacher up at the primary school and he knew my teacher. My father agreed to not speak to the teacher, that my Mum would, he had his job at the primary school to worry about. He said “alright.” tired, like he realized a bunch of things he had forgotten. When he came out of this kind of confused stupor he seemed to come awake.  Instead of conceding defeat and wallowing in his loss he got up and started yelling.

            “Adrian! Adrian! We are going riding up at your Uncle’s house! Adrian! Adrian! We are going up to your Uncle’s!” My mother hated my Father’s brother, Pat Joe, but he owned five horses. He lived a solitary bachelor’s life, full of drink and gambling. I never thought he had as much money as he put off.

“You are not taking them up to Pat Joe’s!” My mother shouted and then quieted very quickly, like she had over-stepped. My father looked up and did not say anything for a really long time. My mother went from the sink and in a grand gesture with her arms, sighed, and opened the cabinet full of cookbooks and phone books next to the oven.

“Carmel’s upset, Adrian’s just been sitting around the house. We both have today off, and I don’t get a chance to see my brother much.” My mother started taking cookbooks out and sticking them on the counter. “Sinead is up there! She’s stayed with him since…” And my father went quiet

“Why do we have these old phone books.” My mother said, like there was something wrong with all the people in this family that allowed this oversight to occur. Adrian walked into the kitchen going.

 “What do you want?”

“Say yes Dad. Do you speak to your teacher’s like “What do you want!?”’

“Just go.” Mum sighed. “It’ll be good for Sinead to see someone.”

The stables were in a field above my Uncle’s house. It got cooler and there were clouds sitting in the road going up the mountain where my unlce lived. After we played football and my uncle and Dad talked, we walked up a grass and dirt overgrown path with thick hedges growing into it from each side. Thick gray clouds hung low over the muted sun.  The grass, mud. dirt and the thick overgrowth around my uncle’s seemed wet, but it was not raining. The path was just wide enough for us to walk single file, so my uncle walked in front of my Dad while Adrian walked in front of me and Sinead. Sinead talked about how her Mum would not get out of bed, one day she just went to bed and just refused to come out. My uncle told Sinead to be quiet. “Have respect and don’t speak about your mother with strangers.” My uncle slurred-out in his thick country accent, so I had to listen real close, so I could come close to understanding what he said.

There was little wind, we passed a rotting tree trunk, the grass around the field was vibrantly green and tall where no one walked. My uncle never had anyone come up here and cut the grass, so everywhere outside of the fence was twists of thick green grass anyone could just slip into and disappear.

Adrian went first, with a pony, and Sinead and me rode on the pony together for a couple slow careful laps. And then my uncle brought out his biggest horse, he had run in the races, came in first twice and third once. The horse was a purely black and absolutely beautiful. We each took turns, taking it in a circle around the muddy fenced-in yard. Faded green mountains soaked into the background with the thick gray clouds going to the horizon like a sheet. My uncle put me up on the horse and then he waved my father over. When the horse moved forward, I started to scream. Its muscles all shifted under my legs and I thought for sure he would throw me off. My uncle kept waving my father over, because I kept screaming, bordering on tears. My father’s hands grabbed my hips and my uncle let go of the horse and it was just me and my father, and his soft voice reassuring me. “You’re Okay Carmel….See….nice and slow….it’s just a horse…that’s just how he walks…keep holding on  to the saddle.”

I started getting picked up by the RUC for questioning by the beginning of 1980. They would come knock on our door, a couple of the armored RUC and UDR vehicles would be parked outside our house. Big neighborhood event. My mom would always start yelling for me like it was a wail, like a doctor was at the door and he was telling my mum I was going to die. That is what it did.  My father and mother were hoping everyone had forgotten about Adrian, but I did not want people to forget what I did not have anymore. I felt unsafe not having an older brother, how he could be here, and he was not twisted day in, day out.

When my Mum started wailing, I was usually in my room, and I guess the high-pitched scream my mother gave also served as a warning, like here they come, because my mother would usually be swinging the front door open. I would have heard the knock, the foreign-male RUC official-police voice, and then the door swinging open to the heartbreak “Car-mel!” My mother’s voice quavering in pitch before the second syllable, so the transition from car to mel sounded like she kind of started choking on some thought, but the volume stayed the same.  The first syllable “Car” is almost non-existent, soft, like an exhale and then the reality of the situation seems to break on her as the second syllable starts searing through the hallways with the boots. “Mel!”

I know why they started to pick me up. Seamus went out to a UDR reservist man’s farm, he was big in the Fermanagh Orange Order, an older guy who the UDR would probably not have involved in any serious operations, but Seamus went out there and the fellow was in his barn milking his cow. Seamus said he could hear the milk getting squirted into the bucket, rhythmic. The metallic squint of the milk from the cow’s utters being squeezed and landing in the metal pail, one from the other, the old UDR man was sitting on a low wood stool, bent over, focused on squeezing one then the next.  Seamus had seen the light on in the barn. It was a tin-like marching sound, the milk getting squirted into the pail. Seamus said the fellow never heard him walk up right behind him, so Seamus shot him in the back of the head with an automatic pistol. The UDR man was none the wiser and he went down, spout of blood coming out the back. The man kind of swung out of the low stool with black blood streaming out the back of his head and mixing into the dry mud and hay on the floor. Seamus was into the fields by the time he heard the wife calling for her husband about the sound from the house.

They all knew Seamus did it and they were starting to bring in the Military, like the SAS, and their intelligence officials to deal with all the homicides involving security forces in the area. Seamus had asked me to bring food out to him on the Roslea-Lisnaskea road. It was really cold, windy with clouds like blue ice dark and low. This was not long after he shot the old UDR man, so everyone was watching him, and I found him, dirty, he looked sick and cold. They were behind this big mound of half-frozen dirt, so they could see down the road, but no one could see them. Joe Cahill was sitting watch with him. They had planted a 360 kilogram landmine in the road and they were waiting for the RUC patrol from Lisnaskea for days. I had brought them beer and their cinched close mouths started to smile when I opened a beer bottle for Joe and then handed another to Seamus. They ate the cans of tuna I had brought along with bread, ham and cheese. The sun had started to go down on the already blustery overcast day, and I think Seamus knew the patrol was coming, or something, he seemed to have this extra-sensory ability to understand when I may get hurt and keep me out of it.

“We owe you for this one Carmel.” Joe said, scarfing down a quickly made ham sandwich. Seamus was soaking his ham sandwich in the leftover tuna water from the can. Seamus took a sip of the beer and he walked away from the mound and Joe. People could have seen us, if they were watching, but I guess they would not have let happened what happened if they were watching, but Seamus kissed me on the cheek and said “In a world where a man can rely on no one. I know I can rely on you Carmel.”

“You’re so weird.” I said. As if offering a defense, he said.

“I’ve been sitting out here with Joe for three days and nights now, I know the patrol always comes from Lisnaskea.” Seamus said, scratching the back of his head, looking down the road, like he always did when he was perplexed or working through a problem. “You look beautiful, a lot better than Joe.” We both laughed. I had put on makeup, and I had put on a dress with leggings, and now he could fully see me, not crouched in the mud. There were fields out to the horizon and down to the Republic behind the mound by the side of the road, and he could see my outfit, how I had poofed up my hair like they did in the magazines, and I put perfume on my wrists, and my hair smelt like fancy hairspray, and there was a crimped blonde trail of hair I let rundown the side. I had followed a fashion magazine that gave fashion tips to American celebrities, so I looked way different than other girls in Belcoo, and I was hoping Seamus would notice and he did.

“Seriously though, you look absolutely gorgeous. Your eyes.” He said trailing off. I turned red and listened. “Once we hide out from this would you like to get together? If I don’t have people watching me, we could do something.”  We had always hung out, made out, had sex, but I took this is as close as he would ever come to asking me out in a formal way.

“That would be really nice.” I said something like that, but I remember reeling the whole walk home, thinking of me and Seamus’s future, while someone in Special Branch or RUC intelligence must have seen me. I would have been easily noticeable. It was when we were sitting down for dinner when we heard the far-off thunder, and my father said that it was odd, and my mother agreed, since there was no storm or rain, and they both seemed to realize it was not thunder at the same time I did. The RUC and the UDR searched our entire house the next morning because the far-off thunder we heard was Seamus and Joe detonating the landmine underneath the RUC patrol, killing one RUC man and crippling another.

            My father was fired from his teaching job, and me and my father and my mother fought so much that I had to move out. They were so afraid of me, and we could never communicate again after the RUC raided our house. I always wanted to say to them that I was their daughter, you can trust me, but they never did, they were always scared I would wrap them up in something fatal, and so they saved themselves, I guess, by not siding with me or being supportive. My Dad gave me money when he got re-hired at a lower paid position, but I had to move out, and they did not want everything like with Adrian happening again, so they kind of just acted like I did not exist, and I think I would have preferred my Dad beating me or my mother screaming red in the face to me just getting shut out of my family like I did. It was like I had to be removed. I got picked up again for questioning, brought in to the RUC station in Enniskillen, when Seamus detonated a huge truck-bomb in Roslea center over the Summer so he could as he said “Shatter all those windows with stuff in it only Prods and people working for the police can buy.”

            A UDR man was killed in his driveway in September, two shotgun blasts filled with 00 buckshot hit him in his shoulder then to the side of his head when he was walking from his car to his house. The pellets peppered the man’s skull and he was in a coma for three days before he died. A man in the RUC was shot with a long-range hunting rifle through his driver side window as he left the RUC Station in Derrygonelly in November. The bullet hit him just above his temple and traveled out the other side, so his RUC colleagues found with him his brains sprayed all over the interior of his car. I do not know if Seamus was involved in these, but if anything happened in Fermanagh or on the border he got blamed for it. He had something big coming in the Republic he had mentioned, and we never had that “get together” or date, until he came to my place, a couple days before Christmas 1980.

            I had a job as a bar-maid at McCabe’s by the crossroads. There was a post office, two intersecting roads, blank sky, a gas station and McCabe’s. UDR soldiers were not served at McCabes. The owner, Padraig, had been interned in the 70’s and was sympathetic to anyone with a Republican background. Seamus had told me to apply there, saying Padraig’s alright. I rented out a little cottage out back. It resembled more of a furnished shed. The little cottage was not visible from the crossroads, a thicket of heather and ivy growing out of a tilting field maple obscured the structure from the road. To get from the bar to my cottage I had to take a short, tunnel- like path. My place was not more than 50 meters from the road.

            I was wiping down tables. It was just after 11 pm. The bar itself was just a small room, low wood rafters for a ceiling, with a jukebox that seemingly only played Elvis. Gaelic football flags were all over the walls, the air was a wet smoke of cigarettes. Padraig had just gotten the last old man to walk down the road back to his house. With everything that had happened I did not think I would go to my parent’s for Christmas, everything was still tense. It was the night before Christmas Eve.

            “Padraig, you got anything in a bottle I can buy?” Seamus came in through the front door like he had been running, and he was just asking Padraig a short question, before his jumpy frame had to get going.  Padraig said “I got some cans of Stout in the fridge out back.” Seamus put two pounds on the bar, sat down on a stool and watched Padraig disappear out back. He had not even said hi to me. He was looking into the air above the bar. I had the disinfectant spray and the rag. “Smokes, Padraig. I’ll give you what I got for some smokes!” Seamus yelled into the doorway Padraig had disappeared into. I walked up beside Seamus, without saying his name and he turned, like he realized, “Carmel, you’re why I came. I wanted to say Merry Christmas, Me and Joe are heading down to the Republic, when we get back we are going to have to hide out in the fields. Can me and Joe count on you? I heard the RUC has been picking on you up about me and Joe.” I froze. How could he know that?

            “I never tell them anything.” I almost screamed. With everyone talking it was only time until Semaus heard, but I did not want him to think I was touting. I hated how the RUC represented me to everyone else.

“They brought my father in, took his farm, until he drank himself to death. Don’t let them break you Carmel. I know I can trust you. Getting picked up by the RUC and everything. This is why I’m asking this of you.  And only you.” He said the “only you” part with a slow smile, and he pointed at my nose like he was going to push it like it was a button, but then Padraig came back.

“Stout and some smokes.” Padraig had a six-pack of Guinness and three packs of cigarettes. “Do you need food or anything else Seamus? What’s this, you know your money is no good hear.” Shoving the two pounds back across the bar Padraig leaned in close to Seamus and said “spend it on bullets and claymores. Keep them bleeding!” Padraig said, an icy glare coming over his eyes as his memory went to somewhere awful.

“Aye, you’ve gone above and beyond Padraig. How’s the new bar-maid doing?” Seamus said, a smile slipping up his face while he looked over at me.

“Excellent, thanks for recommending her, hard worker. Good with the customers, friendly. I have gotten a lot of compliments about you, Carmel. That I have not told you about. Some of these old guys just like seeing anything young, but you have a way of understanding, even the regulars who don’t have anything kind to say. They’ll say something positive when Carmel’s in the room.”

My face ached from smiling all night, so when Padraig said this my cheeks and eyes lightened, so that my mouth seemed to stretch and break the tired, fake smile into a real one. I was not sure if I had been doing a good job at McCabes. I have never been sure if people like me, so it was nice to hear that. Padraig, an old veteran, giving me validation, with Seamus listening on. Padraig emptied the cash register and gave Seamus ten pounds.

I think Padraig could see me fawning over Seamus, because he started winking at me, I hate that, people all over Belcoo would just start winking at me, and I never knew if they were just acting weird. But Padraig was winking at me, and he was talking about my place out back to Seamus, and he’s telling Seamus how he can take care of everything else, “Carmel, swept and wiped down the tables…Why don’t you go give her spot out back a look-over.”

There are those moments with a person that I do not think about much at the time. When I am there it seems natural and permeant, like something that I will always be able to access. But when time moves forward, and life boxes that person out for whatever reason, that moment, its details, the person gone, everything becomes amplified. The memory of the moment, the scene becomes something safe, a time I fall back into before I cannot remember, and I fall asleep. Within the safety, something beyond the exterior things we saw, so that shared time was something crucial, beyond the surface, but brings me back to where I belong, not my home, Belcoo, where everyone thinks I am a terrorist, but home to where I know I am alright and everything is stable and safe within me.

It was freezing and I ducked under the leaning maple with frozen-dead heather and ice-cold ivy. When I opened the door to my cottage I was disappointed how cold it was, a drafty thing. I turned on the light, put down my apron, and my purse, went to the wood-oven, filled it and put it on high. I went to the bathroom, kind of forgetting about Seamus, until I saw his scary, hunched figure, smoking a cigarette through the bathroom window. He never saw me I do not think, but I remember in that instant outside my window how detached, animal-like he looked, a hurt person actively discerning if they would be victimized in this situation, keeping many painful things in mind, because he had to, because of all the unreliable things that had happened to his once promising life that made him wanted and considered extremely dangerous, the likeness of his face hanging in every police station on both sides of the border.

It’s those things over time that become lost and when recalled make me feel like I was person, when someone really cared, a point in my life when someone treated me with a normal relation of respect, like respecting me was an afterthought, assumed, and freely given. The little movements become filtered, shaded in a nostalgic hue, warm. Seamus came in from doing his circle and I told him to take off his shoes. He kept walking and I told him “it will be warm soon enough, I’ve got the wood stove going. Your’re tracking mud.” He took them off and took one of the cans of stout out of the six-pack and cracked it open. “Not bad” he said or something like that. He jabbered on like he always did, like he was listening to himself talk and it did not matter if anyone wanted to answer back. He was saying something about what he had been saying vaguely about a job in the Republic and if I could help him. I told him I would be here. In retrospect, I should have asked more questions, but that’s what an informer would do, so I just said I will be here, if you need me I will help. I did not think it would be as a big of a mess as it ended up being, but of course no one ever thinks that before disasters. It was not a disaster, it was, but not for me, for Seamus, but I guess since he was so important to me it became a sadness, a loss, like how we could have done something, if that had never happened, but it did.

The wind blew against the wood planks outside, howled and slipped in the cracks.  The branches of the leaning maple over my rooftop made a shivering, rickety sound in the recurring gusts of wind. The leafless branches knocked into one another in a swell with the rambling of the low vegetation and the wind over the ground. The fire and me changing, nervously moving, coming from the bathroom and turning on lights had warmed up the interior of the tiny room. It was like there was tremendous movement outside, but still, calm inside. Seamus finished his cigarette and stopped talking about the job in the Republic. He got up, and tried to get me stop ignoring him, because I was nervous, him sitting not far from my bed, and I had missed him so much, and I never knew when I would see him again. He knew I cared. Everything stopped and he drew me near, both of us standing, not saying anything, studying each other eyes. Moor-like moans from the wind, bristling the freezing forest outside, all the family we lost, and how things would never be put back together again. We kind of swayed like we were dancing. I parted with him for a second and put in the Led Zeppelin cassette from the cassette player I had brought over from my room in my parent’s house. When the music came on we started making out. We crashed over to my bed and began tearing each other’s clothes off.  We had sex and lay there sleeping in the warm still afterwards.

It was before sun-up, pitch dark, the hazy warm around us in the cold room and Seamus started moving around and would not stay still. He got his boots on, and I said something like “do you have to so early.” He was not used to staying in structures, he always talked about being more comfortable living in the fields, although I knew that way of living was wearing him down. The possibility of him getting caught for spending the night was real. Sometime before dawn he kissed me on the cheek, said something about when he would see me next and went out the front door. We never really said much, but I think of that time often, because I ended up going over my parents for Christmas for the last time. My mother was crying over something a neighbor had said to her about me, and my father wanted to know from me if it was true. I cannot remember. I just remember the yelling, and the outrage over who I had become, and I kept thinking of Adrian’s room, the bed unslept in, dust gathering on the sill and bookcase, because no one ever went in there. It was like a shrine. There was a picture of Adrian on the mantel. I was crying and trying to yell back, but after a while I grew tired, my mother kept picking away and my father bellowed on and with the tears blurring out my vision I focused on the picture on the mantel. My tears began to dry and I could see the outline of the photograph clearly. It was Adrian as a little kid, holding a pumpkin bigger than himself and showing it to the camera with an expression on his face like “Wow! Look at this!”

Seamus looked so scared. That was the last time I saw him for years. He beat on my door at three or four in the morning a couple days after New Years 1981. I had asked him to come in. He threw the bag into me, and it fell onto the floor.  I asked him again and he interrupted in screaming like a whiny little kid. “Give this to Joe when he’s back up! It’s cash and bonds, don’t spend any of it! The cops know where it came from! Joe got hurt, and they are looking for us!” Seamus started off towards the back of McCabe’s. Without putting shoes on, I ran across the frozen ground and yelled after him that Padraig had gone home. I got to the crossroads and Seamus finally heard me, and he nodded his head like okay and started running down the road and then he disappeared into the dead, brown winter hedgerows. I had absentmindedly carried the awkward heavy bag as I ran to McCabe’s and then the crossroads. There was one street light covered with a circle of battered tin that stayed on all night at the intersection.   I had tried to run down the road after Seamus, but I realized he was gone, and my feet were stinging in the hard mud. I was under the tin and the white cone of light when I realized I was holding the bag, and I tried calling his name. There was no way I could find him. My feet were going numb, but I wanted to keep looking down the road at the spot he disappeared, because I think something in me knew that something was going to change. I hurried back to my cottage, opened the bag, counted the cash and bonds at 5,700 pounds.

When they started broadcasting the funeral procession on the television, I told Padraig I was sick and I lay in my bed, away from the bar, the tv, and the talk.

I had to find out afterwards. Joe had been shot. He was somewhere I did not know, alive, and I had to get the bag to him. Mainly because I wanted to be rid of it. They had police on both sides of the border all upset, and there was a manhunt on. This was bad. It was in all the papers, week after week, until they caught Seamus. Both of the officers were young. One Gardai officer had two little kids and his wife was pregnant with the third. I imagined his wife hearing the news and her thinking of the baby in her stomach, part him, and the sinking loss, sinking in her stomach, until I threw up in my toilet, thinking of the bag under my bed over and over, and I hated the money, and I hated how scared I was. The other Gardai officer had a young daughter and widowed wife, he played Gaelic football. They were both Catholic, young, everyone was outraged, and the usual connections would not shelter Seamus this time.

What I was able to pull together from the News and the Newspaper and people talking was that they had gone to a bank in Roscommon in the Republic.  Joe, Seamus and two others from the South Armagh Brigade went into the Bank of Ireland in Ballaghaderreen, Roscomon. One of them fired into the ceiling. They kept the customers as hostages when the Gardai came sooner than expected. I read one of the customers was injured, so Joe or Seamus or someone from South Armagh probably beat the manager or a teller for getting the Garda there so fast. People were lying on the marble lobby floor and Seamus and Joe were wearing black baklavas, grabbing money, while the South Armagh men kept the rifles on people out front.  They were driving away, ripping, maneuvering out of the cordon around the parking lot, heading up to Monaghan when the Garda gave chase. It was three or four kilometers from the bank when there was some sort of collision at Shannon’s cross. Whatever happened to get the cars stopped I do not know, but in the papers it said, “the vehicles collided”

Someone, could have been Seamus, got out and started rapid firing rounds into the Garda’s vehicle that had been part of the crash. That’s where the first young Garda man was killed, in the passenger seat, shooting through the windshield and the passenger window. The other cop came out of the crashed police vehicle and started firing. That’s when Joe must have been hit. The second Garda officer that was doing the firing caught one in the abdomen and hemorrhaged out hours later at the hospital. So, Seamus and them were firing back but running. Everyone got separated. The night Seamus knocked on my door was eight hours after the robbery and he looked like he had been running all day.

People were upset about it. The funeral procession for one of the young officers was broadcast and everyone watched. Seamus could rely on less and less people. I heard when everyone else heard about the SAS surrounding a farmhouse in Roslea with Seamus and another fellow from South Armagh and three assault rifles in it. He was convicted of two murders linked to the rifles and sent to Maze prison in March 1981.

That was the end of that time together, us, not much of it, and I although I saw him again – those days, the air, the light, how we passed though it. I think about the snippets of words, in McCabe’s, music in the background, him watching me count my tips, how the light looked in my cottage kitchen, ashing his cigarette in the sink, him lying around somewhere close, by my bed, everyday I think of that time.

This all comes to me in an exhale, with the double decker bus stopping, the hydraulic lifts on the bus sigh, lower, for the large group of passengers waiting at the bus stop like Meara, Charlie, Sean and Me. It is the 5^th of April 1991. The line goes single file onto the bus and Sean squeezes my ass when getting our fare out and I yelp and smack his hand away, I yell at him something like “You..brute!” or something dramatic, but I like it. Meara has a camera and is snapping shots of the dull Manchester sky line. It is overcast gray and has been speckling cold rain off and on, but I just needed a light jacket and I was able to wear a skirt, with leggings. Sean told us to look like tourists, shoppers, low-life Londoners up to see the shops at Arndale for the first time.  Meara had taken a picture of the Welcome to Manchester sign from the car .“If you snap a picture of me I’m smashing the thing” Charlie had said, not really joking on the ride up from London. We can see the big yellow-blue Arndale tower, soaring brown, yellow and ugly above downtown Manchester, before I duck into the double decker bus, step up the three steep stairs, give the driver my fare in cash, and go and sit down next to where Charlie and Meara are siting down. The bus pulls away from the car-park and I realize my hands are sweating. I am holding onto my purse which has five 18 x 8 cm cassette tapes, each cassette tape has been emptied, filled with a combination of phosphorous and lighter fuel and wired with a timer for twelve hours. I sit down and I am scared of my purse falling off my lap, and exploding or something, so I am griping it firmly, like I could fall off the bus if I let go of the purse, like the saddle, when I was riding my uncle’s horse. I hear my Dad say ““You’re Okay Carmel….See….nice and slow….it’s just a horse…that’s just how he walks…keep holding on  to the saddle.”

            On the ride up from London, they were making fun of my accent. Charlie and Sean were up front and me and Meara were sitting in the back.

 “Carmel, goes Duuuhhhd, when Carmel goes Duuuhnhn to the poouub, she goes Dunnhnntd to the pouub.” Charlie had ranked on, Meara cackled and Sean was trying to make time. We took the M40 out of London and Sean agreed to drive, or did not trust us in his controlling way, to drive the four and a half hours to Manchester.

            “Carmel, remember the other day how you said you missed tractors. Like you were reading the dailies.” Meara does a bad impression of me not a good one like Charlie’s “You know Meara, I miss tractors.”

            “I did not say that.” I seethed. I thought it was a private conversation. I did not think my words would be used against me. I have been good at staying off the drink, taking my pills, and I remembered the airy Xanax had just kicked in when I said something about tractors, which I do miss seeing. I saw them all the time as a kid. I had been thinking about Seamus when I had said it to her, him shooting that fellow up on one. She always was a nasty little thing, sucking up to Sean and Charlie.

“I’ve worked in plenty of cities.” I said.

“Like Enniskillen!” Meara shot back, and she knew what she was saying.

I was about to cry when Meara was saying something about the smell of manure , and I went off “Not all of us could rob our rich fathers.” Meara’s eyes widened when I said that and I could see she started gearing up, so I said “Where I come from we worked tractors to eat. We shot UDR men riding tractors. I believe that is what I was saying. I don’t give a fuck all about tractors. I was talking about operations, but I never made my reputation by pumping gas, and giving truckers tugs on the A1.”

            “Pumping gas, only one pumping gas around here is you. Rich father! My family is more successful than a bunch of bogsiders from the west. I can fill your father’s tractor up next time he comes by for a tug!” Meara said, real bitter soaking off every word.

            “You’re a fucking cunt! Fuck you!” I screamed. I could not believe me and Meara were screaming at each other. I was crying. Charlie and Sean were amused, shocked but instantly concerned, with two hours to go until Manchester Sean did not want any real division or fighting, and he realized about the same time I did that what Meara had said had really upset me. Meara was mad about the rich father remark. I mean she used her father’s gas station to highjack trucks, that is really all I was saying, just trying to get under her skin.

            “I was just joking Carmel. I know. You know I would take a bullet for you.” Meara said, breaking the upward climb of us one-upping one each-other emotionally. It got lost because me and her were so competitive.

            “Carmel”, after a long, awkward pause of watching license plates and highways signs pass.  Sean started, “I,… We, are sorry for making fun of where you are from, how you speak, and what you did to be the amazing person you are now. You are an amazing asset to this team, and I think from the tears springing up back there we should show some appreciation. Carmel has been with us now just under a year and she has been an absolutely flawless operative.” I blubbered out of my face and really started crying. Meara shook my shoulder, until my head started to nod, and my face turning all red and the tears coming down. She made me smile. “I’m just tired and everything has been so new. You are right I’ve never operated in a real city before, besides Enniskillen.” I laughed. Everyone knew Enniskillen was not a big city. But that’s not what Meara was saying I don’t think. I have a reputation for what happened there.

            “Enniskillen is not a city. It’s a village. But Remembrance Day was an event. An important one. You let the military- loving, Battle of the Somme- dick-sucking, uniform-wearing, crisp little Gombeen men know this war is not over…….” The air went out of the car, and I felt like a celebrity. They never spoke to me about Remembrance Day, Meara knew, but I assumed they just did not care. “I am sorry for making fun of your accent. Unsophisticated chaps like me are not very sensitive. I like blowing things up.” Charlie railed, making eye contact and then loosing eye contact with me, looking sideways.

            “but people will never forget what you did there Carmel, down through Republican history, and that’s something.”  Sean said. “We know. And we are glad you are here.”

Charlie started in with his acquired North London accent “Let’s give it up for Carmel.” And Charlie started clapping “Come on, I’m serious now. Let’s give some for the woman of Enniskillen!! Everyone in the little car was clapping, Meara hooting, “Sorry I got so mean.” I tried to say, but Meara said it was all right, “you know how I used those gas tanks!” She said erupting into laughter, they all were laughing, and really, strangely I felt very good. The tension-release laugh died down, and the whole interior of the car seemed bigger, quiet, everyone relaxed and kind of sleepy. I tried to look at the concrete on the ground passing us on the M40, next to the white lines, like it was a sidewalk I was walking on, so I could see the cracks or grass sprouting up, but whenever I leaned my head on the window and focused it was just a blur.

Meara and I have had these fights before and it is like it never happened once we step off the bus. I watch Meara pick her purse up and I carefully carry mine in front of me while we wait in the aisle for the bus to empty. We get lost finding our way out of the bus depot. Sean walks towards the street, but that was not the way in and we follow him. There is a scream of cars and a glass pedestrian bridge, silenced groups, encased in glass, walking above the traffic with the high, ugly brown walls of the Arndale Shopping Center looming over mothers with strollers on the sidewalk. The Arndale tower and the thin passages created by tall city blocks funnels the wind. A well- dressed man pulls his umbrella down and to the side, so it does not crack upwards in a fierce gust. Someone’s hat blows off, another person tries to grab it, but it flies away. I watch a mother swaying in the wind try and keep her stroller straight.

It is all the excess we will never have. Back into the diesel-choked bus depot, I want to light a cigarette to cover the smell, but I remember what’s in my purse. Meara is still on the windy sidewalk clicking photos of the glass pedestrian bridge. An exhausted toddler barely walks by us, crying, but too tired out from screaming to do anything else, until his stressed-out mother picks him up. We go through an automatic sliding door and a world opens.

I am out of breath, scared, but enthralled at the large expanse of tile floor, each tile fitting securely into the next, clear over to the crowd, the escalators, people eating food, carrying full shopping bags, children running and yelling things. I see a tired employee standing in the doorway of an expensive shoe store. “Grab something for the Mrs.” Charlie says to me pointing at the jewelers, its silver-glass cases, white lights and well-dressed salesmen beaming friendly from behind the counter. A giant clock with no numbers hangs down from the ceiling. Little colored plastic flags hang down. The strings with multi-colored flags hanging from them emanate circularly outwards, with white cut outs, like Japanese lanterns hanging above them, so there is a multilayered color above me and I have trouble making out the white panels that make up the ceiling. It is row after row of high-end stores, two levels. There is a fountain filled with glinty coins that tired people leaned against. The low mumble of people talking echoes. A big fuzzy pink and purple bunny with an oversized head stands at the head of a line of children and their mothers. “The Easter Bunny!!” Meara screams too loud, and she goes up behind him, trying to get him to face her for a picture, “Come on, Mr. Bunny, turn around for a photo!” She is actually yelling this into the back of his head, but the Easter Bunny, or the man in the Easter Bunny suit ignores her, on his green plastic grass landscape, and keeps dealing with the relentless line of children waiting to sit on his lap.

Sean tells me to go get Meara, him and Charlie are by the upright glass directory, with every store numbered. He points to the “You Are Here” dot.

“Meara, come on.” I say.

“But it’s the Easter Bunny!” She says, yielding.

“You know people are waiting in line to get a picture with him, you cannot just go around all those people and yell at him to turn around for a picture, darling.” I say gently.

“But he’s the Easter Bunny! How does he leave those baskets all over all in one day, if he can’t even turn to say hi to me.” Meara says in mock outrage. A little boy spills a large orange soda over the white tiles, and Meara forgets about me and snaps a picture.

“We gotta get to work.” I motion over to Sean and Charlie, who look up at us walking towards them like a pair of hoods about to knock over a bank. “Would you guys fucking smile.” I say approaching Sean and Charlie and they stand there without words, no response. Sean points to five stores on the top floor for Meara and five stores on the bottom floor for me. We split up. Meara with Charlie, and Me with Sean. After the fight on the way up, I feel a giggly lightness, but then at the same time I get embarrassed, remembering how I cried in front of everyone, so there is a reservation. We go into an expensive designer store with a black logo and white lights behind it. Everything is sleek and clean. The corners seem sharper. A dandy young salesman, reeking of cologne asks us if we need any help. Sean shoots a smile, puts his hand around my hips and says “We’re just looking”, laughing like a nervous idiot when he says it. The salesman walks away and says “Let me know if you need help with anything.” I stay quiet and show Sean a dress I think I would actually look sexy in. He tries to look away, but he has needs. Sean looks up at a big window display made of paper, cardboard, advertising a Spring Sale above a rack of fur coats. I leave one of the cassettes in the pocket of a fur coat. The coats will catch then the display, and hopefully up to the ceiling, so the sprinklers will go off and damage the whole store’s inventory, or the sprinklers will not and everything will burn. I picture the store shrouded in darkness, a blinking security light on the wall, twelve hours after I activate the cassette incendiary and drop it in the fur coat pocket. The phosphorous will create extreme heat, an instantaneous silent ball of fire, while the lighter fluid will start flames, spreading them, destroying the posh fashions, the upper-class brand names, expensive make-up, designer handbags, dresses I had only seen in magazines, stuff they would never sell in a Catholic neighborhood.

On the drive home to London we all sing “I think I’m turning Japanese” by The Vapors in unison. Sean turns the volume up really loud and all of us know every word.

S - Plan

                                                                        Part 6

                                                                                    By John Rogan

                        Sean is alive.

                        Charlie is alive. They were alive before I got here.

                        Meara is still alive.

                        Adrian is Dead.

                        Brendan was killed.

                        Joe was killed at Loughgall, same with Brendan.

                        They got Dessie, right when I got here. He was in Armagh working with the INLA. Going out to a farmhouse with Ak- 47’s in it that British Intelligence was watching. The SAS shot him 48 times. They said he was holding a rifle, but people say he was unarmed.            

So, Dessie’s dead.

                        Seamus is Dead.

                        Danielle Carter is Dead. We killed her. She was waiting in a car on Saint Mary Axe when I picked up Sean and Charlie from dropping off the one-ton truck bomb we left outside The Baltic Exchange.

                        I am alive in London, right now. It is the end of the Summer in 1992. Yesterday we went up to Shrewsbury.

            We are all sitting around Sean’s small kitchen, smoking, feeling the yokes slowly set in. “What do you think causes it. Angry kid after angry kid. You even got the ones in the UVF. Going wild around Mid-Ulster now. But, do you think if there was nothing going on, you know politically, the Troubles, the fighting, do you think they would just be shooting people and robbing banks for the fun of it…I think they would.” Sean says to no one and everyone.

            “They would what.” Charlie bleeps.

            “Rob….killl, for the fun of it.” Sean answers.

            “Who…the UVF.” Charlie asks, lost.

            “No anybody, paramilitaries, like us.” Sean says to Charlie and it is like Charlie is about to say something back, but he just sits and stares upwards at the light in Sean’s kitchen. Since everything went off in Shrewsbury alright, Sean, at least that was his excuse, told us he had come across some real fire yokes coming down from Glasgow. “He told me it was pure MDMA.” Sean had said. He always acted the part, until he did not, and then he let the last image you saw of him get away with it. The whole persona he kept superficially drilling into Me, Meara and Charlie was this traditional Irish Republican, a Catholic altar boy. Sean went to Mass every Sunday he could, or at least he said he did, while Charlie slept. Sean was always talking about things degenerating, the young were lost, things were getting worse the only thing to do was up the violence, keep fighting until we won. “It’s going to worse before it gets better.” Sean always said. He loved calling people “Godless” referring to the Protestant faith as some sort of sham of Catholicism, or really just to anyone in general who he hated at that moment.

            We each took two yokes each. It was about 1 and ½ hours ago, and the air now is like a pool of water when one drop falls and the wake is a widening circle spreading. Circle spreading, circle spreading, and as soon as I look I cannot really see it, but if I focus I can start to see the circles create new circles, spreading, melting into the other expanding circles, like raindrops on a pond.

            “Thatcherism! It bankrupted the spiritual, economic…..” Meara hated Margaret Thatcher, as did everyone here, but Meara seemed to be obsessed, always pointing to her. Meara was saying “the Invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982 was like the Dutch Congo, or the slave trade from America, or the Sepoys rising up in India in the 1850’s against the British East India company. It is colonialism, simple, but it becomes economic, personal, psychological, and so instilled in families, culture, and societal structures. There has to and always has been a response from the colonized!”

            “That’s what we are. Major is the problem now and we let him know when we let off that V2 rocket on St. Mary Axe. Biggest bomb since World War 2.” Sean, Charlie, Me and Meara had picked up the truck at the ferry. Sean was similarly obsessed with John Major and the day after he won the election as Prime Minister for the Conservative party we timed-out setting off the truck-bomb. I drove behind with Meara and Sean and Charlie drove the truck to Saint Mary Axe. 800 Million pounds in damage the papers said. Killed two fellows and a young girl named Danielle Carter.

            “So you get messed up families.” Charlie chimed in understanding only the part of families being warped. I tried to find out, but Charlie never talked about where he was from, he was born in England, somewhere around Birmingham.

            “So, it’s a spiritual loss?” Sean says to Meara. In June I put a bomb in a litter bin outside an Army Navy Store on Victoria street. It had been one after the other, over the last year. The more bombs, the more fires, the less fear I felt, because everyone else - outside of Meara, Sean, Charlie and Me - around me in London was afraid of it, us, not knowing its source, but I was this power over them, this fear. I was gaining in the stead of what I had lost. Sean is talking back about economic loss, spiritual, something about bombs being dropped from planes and how many military bases there are all over the world. His face turns into Brendan’s, like when Meara was dating him, looking like when we had first talked. When I first met Meara in Strabane, after Seamus got sent up to the Maze. But it is here, now. Sean’s kitchen, the nice hardwood floors, a moth bouncing off the muted milk white glass covering the yellow of the lightbulb.

            “Are we in Starbane?” I say to Meara. I left three incendiary devices in the Ilford underground depot, two under seats, and one underneath a newspaper at the sellers-stand. No one was injured, although I do not know how. Waves are hitting me, and I see Adrian in a field with the sunlight catching the dust. That was before Christmas, Ilford, and then in January someone saw me put the one down at the Elephant and Castle depot. Whoever it was was yelling after me and I just kept walking faster and faster through the crowds, but the police came and disarmed it, although they had to evacuate the whole underground station.

            Meara is playing with my hair, pushing strands up over my ears, smoothing my eyebrows, not answering my strange question. She turns from me and starts kissing Charlie, and Sean is feeling her breasts from behind until she turns around and starts kissing Sean, and Charlie is kissing the back and side of her neck. I can remember making the hoax calls. The vague-inaccurate description to the operator, the code word, Mr. Brown. Sean and Charlie turn into Dessie and Brendan, and Seamus is in the Maze. Me and my parents will see each other for Christmas, and Adrian will come down from organizing up in Derry. There was no warning. Joe lit the fuse in the driver seat for the car bomb we left outside the bank in Strabane. Dessie and me picked Joe and Brendan up. We listened to the radio reports of the detonation filter in. Seamus was alive, but away in prison. My parents could be dead, someone would get the word to me, I think. They are probably not. I feel like I can see everyone all the time, there are no barriers, everything is accessible, nothing separates us, and Sean’s hair feels amazing and his lips are so soft and our tongues are so warm together.

            Stepping back from Sean and Charlie within so much pleasure, I feel the loss we inflicted and it comes out.

            “Do any of you think of Danielle? Danielle Carter” I cannot believe I say, but I am glad I say it, once it is out. Laced within the layers of cigarette smoke, people try to respond but there is something impenetrable in looking back on something they do not want to see, something there that they, and I, do not want to believe we played a part in. Sean is pulling hard on his cigarette.   “A 15-year old girl never had a Summer, doesn’t have a life anymore, she is not 15 anymore.” I think I think, but I am actually saying to everyone like an argument to their quiet thought. I am not saying it like I am not guilty too, so everyone lapses into thought.

            “It’s the cycle, Carmel.” Sean say serious, sighing deeply, knowing who I was talking about. “Pain inflicting pain, random. This generation, lost, competing, everyone trying to hurt, everyone trying extinguish the other, and we will not be exterminated. It’s in the frame of things we’ve lost.” The words do not really hit me in proper order, but I understand. Sean Continues “The bomb outside the exchange on Saint Mary’s Axe is in a long line of Conservatives, Thatcher steeping down and Major being elected the day before. Conservatives prevented Home rule, created Partition, put us in this mess now. And I know it sucks. You know we got two fellows too, grievously wounded many others, but it is to cause this pain, this loss, for them to understand what we have lost, our culture, our security to live a normal life with a job, a house and a family. When you say, you are not equal to us and you do not deserve that, then we have to take away what they have, so we can get what they will not give us. On an individual level it sucks, people like all four of us getting caught in blasts, losing limbs, their hearing, but this is a war, it is not taken seriously, everyone in London is a participant, if they don’t know that then the little girl’s funeral will remind them of how much of a war-zone we are in. Everyone here has lost someone, or something for no reason, because we are not worth it or some other pointless hate-filled reason, so there’s a cost to those who profited, whether they really understand it or not, the bombs, incendiaries and hoax evacuations are to make them feel, once they feel afraid, and they feel the force of that fear, they will understand.” Sean lights another cigarette.

            “I just think of the little girl.” I say. I see her in the passenger window, waiting, calling out for the person who left her there, screaming, silent behind the sealed glass, lost, for all time, separated from her Mum and Dad and I helped put her there.

            “You blew the fuck out of Ian Gow, he had a wife, probably more people who knew and cared about him than this girl to be realistic, but aye I know the girl did not really do anything but be there.” Sean says. I nod seeing him lapse into the kind of thought I had been thinking.

            “The Baltic reminded me of when I met Meara. What was it April, of 81 no it was 82” Meara perks up hearing her name, she had been staring at the stove. “In Strabane. Remember Meara.”

            “With Brendan and Joe and Me and You outside the bank in Strabane.” Meara says and smiles thinking of the time and place. We had picked up Joe and Brendan after they left a 800 kilogram car bomb in Strabane center, The same day bombs went off in Ballmena, Armagh, Bessbrook and Derry. Brendan had taken me and Joe into the East Tyrone ASU while Seamus was in the Maze. We still operated in Fermanagh, but Brendan got us connected with higher ups in the IRA around Tyrone and Derry. I drove Brendan’s friend, Dessie, poor fellow, nice guy, vicious temper, no fingers on his left from a bomb going off early, to Fountain Park and Dessie shot a UDR man coming home from work. Me moving the car slow, opening the passenger door, while fat Dessie comes running winded out of the driveway and into the car. We had moved up to Strabane, about half an hour South of Derry to get away from all the military at the border. We - Me, Joe and Dessie, sometimes Brendan- still went down to Fermanagh. Dessie and I left a device on an RUC officer’s car in Enniskillen that blew him and his wife up. Another time, Dessie was not there, just me and Joe, with me driving. The postman dropped his bag, letters and manila envelopes slid onto the sidewalk, and tried to run, but Joe chased him down, shot him in the back, the postman fell to the ground mumbling desperate and crying. Joe kept firing into his stomach and finally one shot to the forehead. Later we found out the postman was completely unconnected with anything paramilitary, he had been filling in for the part-time UDR man we thought was on the route that day.

            On Magazine street in Derry Brendan had driven Dessie to collect protection money from an off-license being run out of a corner shop, but when Dessie came in for the money the shopkeeper pulled a gun and started to telephone someone. Dessie bolted out. Brendan and Dessie, sitting outside on the street, had no gun, so they called me and Joe staying in Strabane. Dessie said the shopkeeper was talking about the UDA, doing some sort of revenge or something. I drove Joe over and Dessie told us how he had black hair, a white shirt with a brown jacket behind the counter. Joe went in like a regular customer, commented on how bad the weather was out, shot him, and took the money from the till.

             Yesterday, Charlie and Sean went to The Shropsire regimental museum in Shrewsbury Castle, which holds thousands of irreplaceable artifacts from Britain’s ultra-dominant military history, while me and Meara went into the furniture shops and boutiques along the river in Shrewsbury town center. We left two incendiary devices each of us, all four ignited, causing some damage but no injuries, and they had to shut down Shrewsbury to shoppers and search everything, while Charlie and Sean left a device, a big one in a backpack on the first floor of the regimental museum and an incendiary on the 2^nd. What was not destroyed in the explosion, was damaged by smoke. The castle dated back to Norman times, when the Brits could not leave well enough alone and stop invading everything, including Ireland.

“It’s a kind of vacuum.” Sean is saying. “Trying to get back to the air. Oxygen. I guess.”

“Everything , all the time, everyone melts together.” I say to no one, and Meara looks at me like I am talking to her.

            “If I had a proper job and things had not gotten so messed up between me Mum and Dad I could have gotten a good start, something honest, but all they did was fight. At least from what I can remember, until my Dad was gone and not long after my mum. These politics you are all jabbing on about creates something real.” Charlie says in disbelief.

            “All the fighting creates something.” Meara says

            “Is it a perception of them having something we do not. Or do we really have it?” I say.

            “Have what?” Meara says, “All you’ve got is all the people in this room, same as me, Sean and Charlie. We have nothing and are trying to be compensated. I suppose.” Meara says drifting off.

            “The right to live freely with no authority making it unfair. Stacking and stacking things against us and telling us all it’s normal. The discrimination leads to an anger and the anger, realized, becomes a historical movement out of that subjugation. That’s what Irish Republicanism is, that’s what the PLO fight for in Palestine, that’s what the Vietnamese shot the shit out of the Americans for and that’s who we are.”

            “The people saying no. When everyone is telling us to take it like it is and like it.” Charlie contributes.

            “The people saying no.” Sean points at Dessie, but it is Charlie. I think Sean is Brendan when Sean was saying “The people saying no.”

            “Brendan was an amazing soul.” I say to Meara and she looks at me slow-drawn, knowing it.

            “He’s dead.” Meara says flatly, standing up. “Can we get out of this little apartment.” The E has really got us yoked and we have trouble getting on our coats and we keep getting lost on the stairs down, but when we get outside, we stare at the streetlights, cars passing like the phantoms only we can see lost behind them.

S – Plan

Part 7          by John Rogan

The porch in the back of our house at Belcoo was screened-in when we had the birthday party. Last time I saw Dad he was telling me how they were going to convert the porch into a sunroom they could use year-round. He got a job as an administrator for the Board of Education of Fermanagh County in Enniskillen. He was joking how he had an office, “With my name on it!” to relieve the tension. His eyes welled up in fear, when he got to the death threats, on his car at work under the windshield wiper, and another on the front door of the house. Seamus was not back yet, or was about to be, and I was running around with Joe and Dessie and Brendan, making a name for ourselves. It was never really said, more of a look, appraising who I was in the context of where I came from and the self-evident answer was we could not relate any more, our family. The differences had grown possibly fatal. Everything so pitched, I had tried to do what was right, honor Adrian’s death in the way I thought honored it, not wreaths and candles, but action, an effect. I understood, all the shooting, driving, robbing, getting picked up and questioned all the time, the loyalist death squads that tried to reciprocate the steady loss of British Military, RUC, and UDR men by targeting anyone associated with Sinn Fein or the IRA, including family. My father looked down time, and saw, before he said it, that I could not be a part of himself anymore, or my mother, who was a part of him, all of us together: me, Adrian, Dad, Mum. How I reacted jeopardized what little we had, ruined it, with the loss of Adrian or family was already lost, it was just up to me to make the wrong choices afterward.

The last time I went to the house in Belcoo I saw the workmen setting up out back and my father and mother had called me over to talk to me, and when I asked who the carpenter and the apprentice was they told me about the work being done, taking the screens off the porch, reinforcing the thin wooden walls. I started to talk about the birthday party we had out there. Dad turned off the television, and Mum got a heavy look in her eyes like she was going to cry, but she was disappointed too, and this had to be done, it would be the hardest thing either of them had to do, but they loved me, they said, but they could not support who I was anymore. When I objected my father’s voice rose hard, and serious, and my mother started crying, and so did I, and my father told of the threats to his life, of potentially losing his job, how much they loved me, but the politics, the community. They begged me to stop. I acted like I did not know what I was doing. My father said something, very upset, and I did not hear it, but my vision blurred, wiping away tears and my nose running, and I remember thinking, with everything that was being said, every word meant to effect an intended purpose, of separation for the sake of survival, that this was the last time I would probably speak to them.

Dust always came through the screens, yellow pollen on the soft blue floor. We only put furniture out there that could be outside, a big wooden table, wood chairs, folding chairs, white plastic chairs that turned brown and chipped off flakes until we got new ones, there were big wood rafters overhead for such a small little structure. It was my birthday, Adrian’s was on Christmas and it always blended with the holiday, so my birthday party in the middle of the Summer, July the 12^th, was kind of a communal party. Many of the families in Belcoo could not afford to go away for the Summer, like other families. I remember Belcoo during the Summers seemed empty, slowed-down, oppressively humid so far from the ocean, but no one really went anywhere. Kids jumped through irrigation sprinklers. Tired parents stayed inside out of the heat and kept an eye on the crops for the Fall harvest.

 The ice cream cake was a big turtle with a brown chocolate shell, and birthday candles, and the frosting told me: “Happy Birthday Carmel from Mum, Dad and Adrian” in red lettering, while a giant purple number eight rested above the words on the center of the turtle’s back. My mother and father invited their friends over, they had more then. Their friends would bring their kids, and our little one-story house was full of faces, and everyone was there for me, so I would ask random kids their names, making them tell me like I was someone to answer. Before the cake I think we had soda, and Mum made a light Shepard’s pie for the all the kids. There is a picture of me at the table, wearing a pointy hat, and Adrian pulling the rubber string under my chin, and me looking at him like “what are you doing”. When he let go of the rubber string it smacked onto my skin below my mouth with a stinging thwack sound. I was caught off guard by the sudden jolt of pain and started to cry. Mum had come over and I was saying something about how Adrian was ruining my party, but Mum got me calmed down, and showed me how everyone was here for me, while pulling Adrian up by his arm , away from me, him all hopped up on sugar, saying “I’m not doing anything!” while he jumped up and down from a white plastic chair, trying to land on Mum’s toes in her one pair of dress shoes.

I think that’s why they brought the cake out, because I was crying in front of everyone. My parents had assembled everyone in the post-dusk dark out on the porch, parents lined the walls and looked admiringly at their kids interacting at a party, all the kids knew me by name. An adult bent over and picked up a boy named Peter, who owns a garage over in Donegal now, he went into a red tantrum from all the noise and his Mum came and scooped him up and held him while she talked with the other parents along the wall. I could not see my parents. My mum had just hauled Adrian back into the house, and things were dark, only the light from the room we just ate Shepard’s pie in was casting light out onto the porch, bugs bounced off the screen, and kids looked around scared, the neighborhood kids were all positioned around this table, looking to their parents for answers, getting cranky, and then my Dad came through the kitchen door, with this slipping, grand light, and Mum made some sort of announcement, and the whole room starts singing real sleepy with no lights, and the eight candle flames were floating on my Dad’s face as he was walking really slow, balancing the weight, from the kitchen, through the doorway onto the porch, and parents were singing to get their kids singing, “Happy Birthday to You. Happy Birthday to You. Happy Birthday Dear Carmel. Happy Birthday to you.” Repeating, getting louder, and I just kept saying wow really quiet to myself. Behind my Dad, steadily pacing his way around the mess of chairs and kids, is my Mum holding Adrian’s hand, urging him to sing, but his head was sunk dramatic-like because having to hold Mum’s hand was an embarrassing punishment he had to go through when he could not behave himself. The ice cream turtle, with the dark room, was slowly lowered down in front of me. I had just learned to read, and I read the words on the cake to everyone, trembling in the silence, the words resonating back to me like I could not believe I was speaking, with everyone listening to me. The flames made a shallow yellow pool on my face, the glow shifting and my smile softly reflecting it. The parent’s along the walls and the kids faces were silent, dim, but licking within the soft light. I inhaled in the cloistered light, the rest of the porch dark now, with the sun long gone below the horizon, with the thin wood walls, the screens windows like squares of black now. The wood table was covered with a paper table cloth that matched the paper plates we had in a stack, and the waxy cups kids drank soda out of. Adrian was up on the table, screaming for me to blow them out, and he was getting other kids excited, and a girl upset by Adrian looked to her mom against the wall, and another boy hooted next to Adrian, and Dad had receded and was taking another picture with a big bulky Polaroid. Kids were saying make a wish, but I wanted to blow the candles out, and my Mum was right beside me, holding my hand, knowing how keyed up I was. She was keeping me calm saying softly into my ear, “make a wish, Carmel, make a wish, whatever you want Carmel.” My mind went blank and I exhaled long, and the slivering orbs of fire went sideways and blurred into a mess of smoke rising into my face above the ice cream turtle and everyone was clapping and cheering and my mother kissed me on the side of the cheek. My father switched on the over-head light switch and the room seemed smaller, with less people in it, the wood-grain ceiling illuminated, and my mother started to cut the cake, and started putting slices on paper plates and passing them around.

Sean beeped me, so I went to a pay phone, called him and he told me to meet him in Hyde Park by Kensington Palace the next day, he wanted to talk to me. This was just before Halloween 1992, and when I got to the park by Kensington palace cafe, I saw Sean sitting, off to the side, smoking under a tall oak that splayed out into orange and brown leaves above his head. The sky an impenetrable vapor of light grey.

Meara told him, that bitch. The week before I had gotten sloshed legless and gone out on operations. Meara saw the cut on my face and I apparently called her that night at some point. It was on a payphone, but I was crying about David Heffer. The guy who was killed by the bomb Charlie and Sean left in the Sussex arms men’s bathroom on October 12^th. Sean and Charlie called a radio station nine minutes before and said the bomb was “in the Leicester Square area.” Five people had been injured when it went off in the gent’s toilet of the Sussex Arms pub in Covent Garden, this 30-year old psychiatric nurse, David Heffer, gravely, his head and neck taking the force of the blast, and he passed a couple days after in the hospital, shrapnel from the blast left him brain-dead, like Adrian, with his Mum and Dad and girlfriend watching him die. He had been having an afternoon pint with his friends.

The day after David Heffer passed I could not sleep. I took a Xanax, but that made me want to drink more, so I drank a beer, thought it over, grabbed two incendiary cassette tapes with putty wrapped in wax paper stuck to the sides, took a long pull of Bushmills from the bottle, filled a water bottle over halfway with the thick brown liquid and I went out and got on the Tube and headed over to the West London. I had to pee at Hammersmith station. The concrete platforms were cold, dark, and vacant of people, it had been just before midnight. I came out of the bathroom, had drank some of the Bushmills in the water bottle, and was looking at the checkerboard pattern of the floor, black and white, like an actual checkerboard each square interlocked, no white square touching black square, and no black square touching white square. I walked across the pattern. There were a few sleepy commuters passing, wanting to be out of the cold night, the station was closing down, but I heard someone whistle, and it seemed to be two maintenance workers off in the shadowy distance from the bathroom and closed shops and news-sellers that I had just come from. The incendiaries were in my purse, and I felt so powerless with them whistling at me and staring, because they want to fuck me, or they want my attention or they are trying to have power over me, so I felt them watching me respond to the whistle, and I angrily pulled my shirt up over my head, like I was trying to pull it off and they could see my stomach and my tits in my bra and I almost fell over and someone was coming near, so I growled into my shirt in my face and whoever was walking towards me stopped and the maintenance workers were walking close and not turning to look at anyone in one motion I pulled down my shirt and walked out of the large double swinging doors of the station and onto the sidewalk.

The activity in front of the Novotel hotel caught my attention, spotlights on the white stone of the tall, new building. I walked towards it and headed over to the carriages, with horses waiting in their bridles, and limousines pulling up, parked, a throng of successful people, lights, doormen nodding and smiling. I made sure the limousines parked, so none of the horses could get burned, and it would only scare some rich people, the line of white and black unattended limousines, and it was around now that I started to black out, because I remember taking the wax paper off the putty on the side of the incendiary cassette, but I do not remember placing it, just that it would be terrible if a horse, drawing one of the fancy white carriages was burned. But I was back on a bus heading for central London and a bus driver was telling me I could not do that on here, and some old man, who I thought was drunk, starts yelling at me to stop drinking, so I got off at the next stop and I remember the posh street, BMWs tightly parked and nice quiet black windows in the sharp granite apartment building that rose grandly up twenty stories. And that must have been where I left the second, under one of the BMWs on Oxenden street. The devices went off at 1 am, it only spooked the rich people coming and going over at the Novotel and a couple walking back on the sidewalk from a pub were treated for shock on Oxenden Street when a device went off under a parked car.

I went by the high stone dome sitting atop the darkened shadows of the recessed façade behind the roman columns of the National Gallery and started to walk into the freezing wind coming off the river, by Trafalgar square. Nelson’s column like an abandoned light house looming in the eerie gray refracted city light of the night-sky, the fountains off, their ornate stone levels of flowing pools like ancient artifacts at this hour, with the lowest circular pools filled with motionless black water. I had the bottle out, I guess, and someone asked me if he could have a drink, and I said “fuck off” and he said “how about a tug then.” And I was hitting him and he was laughing, but then I hit him in his eye and he started screaming something like “You bitch”, so I ran past one of the dark pools of the fountains, looking behind me, and I lost my balance, fell really hard, my arm was not out, so my chin scraped along the concrete and there is a big swollen black bruise along my hip, and it felt like I did something to my wrist, but I could still get the bottle out of my purse, and drinking, thinking, I saw a black cab and had him take me to two blocks away from my flat in North London. I stepped out of the cab and forgot to pay, and exhausted from running around, him screaming about calling the cops, and I bend over and give him more than the fare, and I think I pulled my shirt down from my neck, so he could see down my shirt, and I said something like “have that for your night” and then turned around and walked into a newspaper kiosk on the curb that made me fall again, this time a big blue, purple, black bruise on my right butt cheek, and the cab driver got out, and I started yelling something like “he’s attacking me!”. I am pretty sure I yelled “rape!” because he got right back in his cab, and sobering in the cold wind, feeling the pain spreading on my butt cheek, my hip and wrist tightening, the cut on my chin sensitive and drying over in the cold wind gusts, and I thought maybe someone would call a cop, and I take off and that is the last thing I remember before I wake up in my apartment, with painful sun searing through it, my clothes still on, a beer spilled next to me, and half-eaten food rotting on the kitchen counter.

Sean knew me. “I don’t want you to be mad at Meara, or feel that she ratted on you. Carmel, many of us are here because we don’t have families, because our families were impacted negatively by the Brits. This is a professional, organized cell but we are on our own here, and we need to take into account the stresses of this job. We are our own family. I know it sounds stale like a fairy tale from when you were a kid, but it’s true, and I asked you here only for that reason. To see how you are and talk about the future.” He could be smooth when he needed to be.

The nosebleeds had started again after the death of David Heffer. He was a year or so younger than me, and before I respond to Sean I pause, because I have a bloody tissue up my nose, and it is hard to talk, and what he just said to me makes me want to cry, but I do not want to look unstable, so I just stare, blood watering in my nasal passage, and I think of an in an instant the blank days, this past week, looking at the clock and not knowing if it was 5 am or 5 pm. Drinking in my apartment, sleeping, just going out to get food, people disappearing, David Heffer could not do things like I do now.  I did not want reality to exist anymore, so I could stop fighting back, inflicting losses that maybe never had to be lost. My nose started to tingle when I went down the chain of people I loved going away and me making other people who were loved go away, so who was I, when I got drunk I felt like God or Satan, with this power, this weight, the pressure, and I could not decide which. If I was influencing evil, creating momentary pain so love could flourish in the future, or if I was just like the British soldier who shot Adrian in the forehead with the plastic bullet: pain-inducing and pointless. The confidence in myself, that I was better than the people I was killing, had begun to slip, and that is what I figure now, looking back at Sean, has caused my drinking to come back bad, and made me call Meara the night I blacked-out and went on operations.

“Carmel.” Sean says, taking my elbow gently, us still around the Kensington palace Café, and getting out of ear shot of people with thick jackets, having hot tea, and resting on the wet chairs, looking over the finely kept lawns, muddy and rained-on. Me and Sean go down a cement lane. There’s a person sitting on a bench playing with their dog blurrily in the distance, but the cool, rainy, late October weather has kept the park mostly empty. The leaves of the trees towering anciently over us are a decaying lion-colored brown, heavy, dead and about to fall or are falling, as I say to Sean.

“I would never jeopardize what I am a part of, who I am. You know how long I have been dedicated, but all this fighting, standing up so resolutely for a cause, and breaking up families over it like, like the Carters or the Heffers, we are doing to that family what the Brits did to ours and I do not know if it is effective, after doing this so many years. It is just I’m 32, David Heffer no loner exists, Danielle Carter no longer exists and I victimized them, randomly, cruelly, the way I was.”

“Well technically David Heffer was me and Charlie.” Sean is about to say something else but I keep going.

“And I’ve been doing it for years, as long as I can remember essentially, like it’s learned, or I am conditioned…I know it is so they can see the loss, the way that we have had to look at it. I understand that, and I feel the righteousness of balancing the pain inflicted on us by reciprocating it.” I sigh really long, and wipe blood, that was drying into a black crust in my right nostril. Sean was letting me finish. We stop talking and say hi when the man sitting on the park bench comes to get his dog from jumping on us “Hi there! Good boy! You are excited yes!” I say nicely, smiling wide, actually thinking the dog was cute, but kind of annoyed, Sean did want to speak to anyone and awkwardly kept walking which I thought was more suspicious than saying hi and petting the dog. Moving deeper into Hyde Park, the heavy wet leaves meld with the grey horizon into a brownish-yellow haze. The tall, old trees, seem to lean, retiring for the Winter as a cold, light rain starts and me and Sean have to pull up our hoods. More wet leaves fall as bursts of wind kick up with sideways rain going into me and Sean’s face. I want to finish my point, but I feel too exhausted and unfocused to grasp the rationale for my own actions

“Carmel, I know and we know what it’s like loosing people, and getting older, everything and everyone comfortable seems to disappear, and you can see it in the people here, the families, they are not lost, a system wanted them to succeed, economically and so every other aspect of their life became a success, while fighters like me and you, well, we just keep losing things, and it does create a disorientation, over time especially, a loss of how to react to it, but we have a plan, and we are in a long line of historical attempts to throw off the domination that British Imperialism imparts on our home. In this common goal, uniting generations, we are a cell, a group, I don’t want to hoke this up like I have said, but we are a family, so to speak, a properly operating one, and I don’t want you to be mad at Meara, but I just want to make sure you are doing alright.” Knowing what was getting at me. “Civilian casualties, as you know, have always been an unfortunate side effect of an effective war.” Sean added flatly, turning, studying my reaction in the wind, and the rain was picking up, so he got nothing out of my face, but I knew.

“I know. It’s just maybe getting old, killing people younger than myself now. I guess I am understanding the hole I create, how many holes I have created throughout my life, and, yes doing this work for as long as I have, I wonder, what it’s worth.” Not wanting to sound soft like I might tout, I went back to the real anger that my mind naturally turned-to to justify anything. “My family fell to pieces after we lost Adrian.” The black, crusted blood in my nose is watering light red, with the rain picking up, I tighten my hood so Sean cannot see me cry, but he must have heard my voice crack and Sean says “We are going to get caught out in this.” We line up against a huge trunk, leaves falling with plops of rain, loud, bursts of wind, and my throat scratchy but not heaving into tears, I feel fatigued from trying to feel compensated for losing things and people, with so much slipping away. I exact casualties on innocent people I rationalize into combatants, and I am not sure if I am happier, or if I am just causing more problems.

I create catastrophes to maim and kill as a projection of my own unhappiness on the people and environment I blame.

I can say these things to Sean, question like a grass, because people in the Republican movement know my past.

Danielle Carter, David Heffer, Adrian O’Doherty, Carmel O’Doherty, Mum, Dad, the husband and family that could exist if I had made different choices. The rain comes on harder and the melancholy seems to have passed or be vented out. I look as an alien sense of glee overtakes me and I hear the rain pick up throughout Hyde Park, the beating heavy rain sounds become enhanced, faster, more frantic, and the chaos of everything hits me, people disappearing into black like Adrian, Seamus, Brendan, Joe, Dessie, Danielle Carter and David Heffer, and how beautiful the mess is, the uncertainty and how I can play any part I want in it. Fading with them into that black dissipation. I lean into Sean watching the rain pick up on the thicket of woods and thin paths through-out Hyde Park. “What do we have planned for the Christmas Season?” I ask, letting Sean see me smile, that I have not lost my edge, and seeing him smile, he starts to talking, but I tell him to speak up because of the wind, and all I can hear is something about a shopping center, and I motion to him to lean in and I have to yell, “Let’s go somewhere dry!”

We were coming back from Dundalk, Ireland at the end of September 1983. Meara had told us about some electricians on the way up from the Republic who worked on RUC bases in Northern Ireland. They regularly stopped at her Dad’s gas station, and hit on her. She got the company name and found their office and headquarters in Dundalk. I was driving and Dessie, Joe, and Brendan would never shut up about their “no-go zone” plan.

Dessie and Brendan went in and threatened a girl who was at the desk, while Joe set fire to the company vans. Brendan thought they would have money, but they only got a couple checks from the file cabinets they ripped apart in the company office. Brendan smacked the girl at the desk over the head with his pistol when she would not stop gobbing about how there was no money here and how they would get caught. They left her crying on the floor of a locked back-storage room, and Dessie and Brendan were making shrill voices mocking how she was begging for her life. Joe did not think they could pass the checks, but Dessie was saying something about removing the ink with nail-polish remover. Brendan seemed to begrudgingly agree with Joe.

Brendan wanted to destroy RUC stations and British Military Barracks in South Armagh and East Tyrone. He wanted to make these areas into “no-go areas” where they could launch bigger attacks from, with flying guerilla columns, but the plan started with destroying RUC stations or British Military stations and then targeting any contracted services brought in to rebuild. A warning of serious injury or death to all contractors working for crown forces within Northern Ireland had been given by the IRA’s central command in Belfast. The plan was deemed too “unrealistic” by central command, but Brendan was going to try and hearing all the names read off, everyone was shocked, but Brendan immediately thought of filling the ranks of his envisioned flying column.

“Breaking….The largest escape of prisoners since World War 2 has occurred at the Maze prison camp” interrupted the advertisements coming from the car radio. I turned the volume up and the car went quiet, “Breaking News Bulletin. Bobby Storey, Gerry Kelly, Seamus Mcelwaine, (we all gasped, but we did not know about what, did Seamus get out?) Kieran Fleming, Antoine Mac Giolla Bhrighde, Pádraig McKearney and Dermot Finucane are seven convicted terrorists who had been serving long prison sentences at the Maze Prison in County Antrim, twelve miles outside Belfast, formerly Long Kesh Prsion. These individuals named are now free or missing from Maze Prison custody (We erupted, I screamed “oh my god” or “yes!” and then quickly got quiet with everyone else in the car because we wanted to listen) along with twelve other inmates authorities are still trying to identify. Maze Prison officials recaptured close to half of those who had escaped immediately after the attempt, but a large number of dangerous terrorists are free once again, and officials have asked their names and pictures to be broadcasted so that the public may stay vigilant, these violent individuals are now free to prey on the peace-loving individuals of Northern Ireland. Stay tuned we will keep you updated as we receive more information.” Sean told me to drive faster back to Strabane so we could watch a report on television.

What happened was that on the 25th of September 1983 Seamus and ten others were being housed in a section of the Maze called H7. The Maze prison, the name changed from Long Kesh after Bobby Sands and all the hunger strikers starved to death, was a prison within a British military base. The prison housed dangerous paramilitaries involved on both sides of the ethnic conflict that had been violently fighting each other since 1968. The H7 wing housed inmates convicted of serious crimes involving the Provisonal wing of the IRA, many of the men were doing life or sentence of thirty to forty years, so escape was one everyone’s mind.

Everyone in H7 came together to gather intelligence, plan and organize the break-out. It was just after 2:30 pm, Seamus acted as a watch out, while five inmates pulled out smuggled-in pistols and simultaneously subdued the five guards on duty. The Emergency control room had a metal grate over it and the security officer in it tried to call an alarm, but Gerry Kelly told him not to, and when the guard thought Gerry was not looking he went for the alarm again, and Gerry shot him in the head, but the guard did not die, just knocked him senseless into a pool of his own blood, and luckily no one outside the H7 wing heard the gunshots.

The four remaining guards stationed outside the wing, the alarm not raised and out of ear shot, were admitted into H7 by the inmates sliding open the automatic doors, when the guards came in to see why the doors had been opened they were attacked by the escapees, one was hit in the back of the head with a hammer and another was stabbed with a screwdriver.

The entirety of H7 was now under their control and Seamus took one of the guard’s uniforms. They knew the lorry that delivered food to the kitchen would come around 3:30.

At 3:25 the lorry driver made his delivery. They jumped him and told him to act normal, they tied the driver’s foot to the accelerator, and 37 inmates, including Seamus in a guard uniform, piled into the covered back of the lorry, Gerry Kelly lay on the floor of the front seat with a gun to the driver.

At 4 pm they drove through the British Military base, snaking along in the Lorry, 37 men in prison uniforms concealed under the thin tarp, and up to the guard house at the main gate. Ten prisoners dressed as guards, Seamus among them, went in with chisels and knives and quietly tried to subdue the guards. The guards were fighting back, and Seamus told us later he punched this pale, scared looking officer in the face, and took a screwdriver and jabbed it into his neck and the guard, put his hands up, crying, not wanting to die.

Prison officers showing up for their shifts were being admitted through the gate and taken hostage, Seamus and the nine others were losing control of the guardhouse. Dermot Finucane tried to hold onto a guard who was trying to run out of the guardhouse at the main gate, and back out to warn the guards at the pedestrian gate. Dermot held him, stabbed him three times, until the guard broke free, and Dermot gave chase, but loosing a lot of blood the guard had a heart attack and collapsed right by the pedestrian gate. The guard was never revived and was pronounced dead at the hospital of a heart attack. There were two guards on the pedestrian gate who saw Dermot chasing the blood-soaked guard and the guard collapse. Before they could go telephone an alarm Dermot started fighting and stabbing them, so they could not run.

The main gate house had become a rolling fist fight of stabbing, punching and wrestling between the growing number of guards taken hostage and inmates in their stolen uniforms. At 4:12 a guard pushed an inmate out of the small room he was in and telephoned the Emergency Control Center, and the alarm was raised.

The men in the lorry had opened the main gate and were waiting for the ten inmates in guard uniforms to rejoin the lorry, but prison officials with the alarm going off now, blocked the lorry with their personal cars, so the lorry had to be abandoned and the 38 prisoners spread like a rapidly dispersing riot through the main gate and into the countryside and fields around the prison. Four inmates beat a prison guard in his vehicle and highjacked it. Soldiers in the watchtowers opened fire. They crashed the car into the gate and abandoned it. Two of the inmates in the car were captured while another two got through the gate. An inmate who had not reached the main gate shot a guard in the leg with a smuggled revolver. A soldier from the watchtower put the inmate down with a couple shots to his upper body and then his knees.

35 prisoners, including Seamus had gotten through the main gate. Fifteen were captured fleeing into the fields that day, and four were captured in a stand-off at a farmhouse the day after, but Seamus and seventeen others, were hiding out somewhere in South Armagh and once things cooled down, soon, we were told by someone in the South Armagh IRA, we could go see him.

S - Plan

part 8

by John Rogan

           

Sean and Charlie went up North to meet some people around Manchester. I have not seen Meara without Sean and Charlie around for three weeks. I think she is scared of me. In his conspicuous absence Sean wanted me and Meara to plan an attack on a shopping centre in the lead up to Christmas. It is December 9^th,  1992. Meara is taking off her coat and boots, putting down the bag with Semtex and flash caps in it and closing the door to my flat. There is a hollow yellow lamp above my door way, illuminating the sneakers and boots I have on a muddy matte. She says “Hi Carmel” in a wary, cautious tone, like she might run into some flak and I pick up on it and before she has her second boot off: “If you ever go behind my back again I will fucking kill you, you fucking bitch. I have built my reputation over years, moment after accumulated moment of work, not knowing if I will be arrested, shot, and you whisper something in Sean’s ear…” I am still smiling, saying this upbeat, but trying not to cry. Meara is nervously frowning, and she looks really sad.

            “I did not think he would react to it that way!” Meara responds her face animated in surprise but resigning into digging right in. “All I said was you were upset about David Heffer dying because you called me in the middle of the night, crying, and saying crazy shit, so I just mentioned it off-hand to Sean and he got all upset.” Meara says stammering. Taking this in, I am embarrassed, because I have felt in over my head lately, like I have come up against something I do not understand. What death really means, producing the actual loss of an individual, I don’t know. But something vague and dark is hanging over me and Meara as I try to remember what I said during the phone call, but it is just black. There is a lack of confidence in who I am, what I have done, and I want to get at what I really feel, but I am not sure if I am lying to myself. I am scolding Meara for accurately representing myself, like an ugly person angry at a mirror.

            “You should have come to me about it first.” I say with a finality. Meara knows I am still sensible, not spitting, non-sensical angry, like we have both seen each other at.

            “You are absolutely correct, Carmel, I went behind your back. Sean was asking me questions about you, like where you grew up, what you were like when you were younger, what happened with the West Fermanagh Brigade…”

            “Did you tell him?”

            “About what you were like when you were younger?” Like all people care about is what I did when I was young, and aging now, people think I am losing it.

            “No, you idiot, why the fuck would I care about what I was fucking like when I was younger.” I snap, chest and shoulders red, everything shaking and I exhale, things become still, and then I say slowly “about the West Fermanagh Brigade? About us getting disbanded?”

            “He knows about that.” Meara says, relieved I had reverted back to my calm tone. She wants me to stay at this level, because I feel like I am about to explode, and I know Meara can tell when that is about to happen. Finding out everyone else had been talking about me was absolutely humiliating. I was supposed to be respected within the Republican movement, but things were taking on the promenading and gossip of Belcoo. I am not sure if Meara is trying to angle herself for some kind of benefit from Sean and Charlie, while talking trash about me to elevate herself. I am looking right into her face, and she knows I know, and even if there is nothing to know, if Meara thinks of going over my head ever again she will think, reflect on it in a way more favorable to myself. No one humiliates me. “Carmel, I told him about the West Fermanagh Brigade getting broken up, but you know Sean, he was impressed, not like ‘oh she’s not voting for Gerry Adams.’ Sean’s hardline, and I think he just wanted to hear you were too, so I told him so.” Meara says simply like a little girl, convincing me I am the one being stupid for being upset. “Sean is a little shit.” Meara continues. “He has all these little power games, and ways playing off of people, so he is like some ultimate leader until his shit gets back to him. He wanted me and you to distrust one another, I think he dislikes or feels left out of the fact that me and you have known each other so well, for so long, and I think he is trying to drive some sort of wedge, whether he realizes it or not, and I asked him if me and you could plan something, on our own, with the men gone, like the old days.”

            I know what Meara is talking about, in a moment and realize I never recognized it, but Sean is threatened by me and Meara’s sister-like communication. Probably along the lines of the same sexist jealousies me and Meara have always dealt with among these bogsider republicans.

Males are scared of two females willing to kill and maim, they are threatened, so they have to air their fears through gossip and ruin our reputations. There was stuff about Meara sleeping with other girls I never brought up, but she must know that I know, and she just let that gossip hang while idolizing me. Meara was a couple years younger than me, and I think, or I like to think she kind of looked up to me. I know they always watched and talked about my drinking and maybe that is all Sean was doing was a making sure I was okay, like he plainly said he was doing. I am calming now. Meara is on my side.

            “Carmel, you have no cups.” Bursting into the kitchen like it is her own, putting on a pot of tea, and then picking up two mugs from the filthy pile of dishes, Meara says in a mock play-house way, not allowing me to remain angry at her, and she knows I have calmed down and things are alright. “Jesus, Carmel, if you don’t clean up they will be calling social services.” I try and not let her see me smile.

            “Aye, I’ve been letting things go around here.” I say

            “I would say it’s gone!” Meara yells, noticing the greasy slime on the pile of plates in the sink. “Now if you are done airing your grievances with me we can start looking at targets.” It is clear to me that all Meara and Sean does, I suppose, is care about me, but I do not want to be attacked or victimized, and letting your guard down, or being lulled into a sense of friendship, because it is easier than always being vigilant is a hazard that can crush a person, and a way of being attacked or more pacified into weakness. People use care as an excuse to abuse. The caring relation grows out of moral perspective, and people get dominated and hurt. Cared about until they do not exist. It is better to be always fighting it seems. On the offensive. Stay Independent. As soon as you stop, you are the one being attacked, and considering this all, I let Meara think I trust her, which I do, but I am watching her, like I do with everyone all the time. Tapping my finger repeatedly on the kitchen table, I ask Meara if she brought any cigarettes and she says how she smoked her last on the walk over. Her bag with the Semtex and timers in it is by the door, and before we get start planning, I say how he we are going to need cigarettes, and pulling back on her boots, Meara is talking about the Woodgreen shopping centre, how it’s not far, and I’m listening and telling her how the newsstand down the way should have some fags.

            When we get back from the newsstand, I remember the flash caps and the Semtex and decide to smoke outside my flat before we go inside and start assembling the bombs. It looks like rain on my stoop in Archway, North London and exhausted from our little fight we stand there quiet, inhaling, exhaling smoke. Meara is moving her arm in the wind, trying to catch gusts in the cup of her hand.

            My mother, before school, to get my oatmeal to cool down would pour the milk right after pouring the boiling water. Adrian was nearby, getting ready for school, eating breakfast with me at the table, babbling away, and I remember the milk congealing with the small bubbles in the water and spreading into the steaming oatmeal and the dark cinnamon losing its consistency and spreading in the milk and boiling water like puffs of rich brown smoke hitting the air.

            “Sorry I got so upset.” I say soberly to Meara. She just nods and she says

            “Nevermind, I would have done the same thing.” She never breaks out of the windmill she is making with her arm, watching her elbow be moved by the wind hitting her hand and looking at the movement in a sort of detached, awed amazement, dragging from her fag with her free hand.

            I am leaning up against a trash can that needs to be emptied, cushioning myself on the overflowing lid, and the clouds turn a white like sun might break through, but a wind turns up, snaps around the corner and I can look down the narrow lane of sky above the street and see a swollen blue, purple mass where the cold wind whips out of.

            The first time Me and Meara really spoke, I had heard of her through Brendan, but never really spoken directly with her. I was at a phone booth. It was late afternoon in Newry, Armagh in October 1983 and I remember being surprised it was a girl’s voice, but the number I called to tell my South Armagh contact I had arrived in South Armagh was Meara’s, even though I did not know her yet. It was pouring rain I could not go outside the phone booth without being completely soaked to my underwear. I had driven over with Brendan and Dessie to see Seamus. Seamus was in hiding after escaping The Maze Prison and Brendan wanted to get the East Tyrone Brigade into fighting shape and start doing larger scale hit-and run-operations. We were told to make contact with the South Armagh Brigade in Newry, where Meara’s voice told me Brendan and Dessie to go to a phone booth in Crossmalgen, Armagh. I picked up and dialed into a phone outside a pharmacy off Crossmalgen center and Meara’s voice came on again. Her voice informed me there was a blue Cortina across the street watching us. I looked across the street and this was accurate. Behind darkened, rain-soaked windows was a vague male face. Meara’s voice on the phone told me “follow the vehicle”. The blue Cortina started driving into mountains and farmland. We followed the car along a dirt road and then another and then the car quickly drove down one dirt road and then jumped onto another and Brendan was swearing keeping pace with him, sliding, breaking slow in the mud “These crazy fuckers down here!” and we got to a point in the road  deep in the hills where two men with green balaclavas over their face came out of the woods with Armalite assault rifles, asked us to get out for the car, checked our real IDs, our fake IDs and searched the vehicle, and us for any weapons. Brendan and Dessie each had a pistol. The men with the green balaclavas took the pistols and told them they could come back here to get them. I was surprised that Dessie and Brendan were alright with this but they seemed to be scared and trying not to show it. We were to keep following the blue Cortina. The sun went down. I remember not being sure if we were in Ireland or Northern Ireland, probably just along the border when we came across a low-lying farmhouse, with open, muddy pens for cattle or horses and many buildings of the same height, so that all the pens, corrals, sheds, stables, and structures created a windswept complex being beaten by the slanting gusts of rain. There was a clump of black pine trees that looked like their branches had been burnt off. The blue Cortina stopped. Someone with a rain jacket came out of a house we could barely see and held there hand up to us like “stop”.  The blue Cortina drove away. The person in the rain jacket went back inside. The three of us sat in the car listening to the heavy rain relentlessly pound on the top of the car. The raindrops hit the road and flecked into small bursts of mud. The brown, ruddy puddles were plopping with expanding wake circles that overlapped and dissipated. We were stopped next to an old farmhouse.

            The person with the rain jacket came out and came up to the driver side door, through the roar of rain we could hear that it was a man’s voice and he just yelled “Follow me” The man got on an all-terrain vehicle and we drove away from the complex and over a muddy hill with no crops in the bare field I could hardly make out. After following the ATV for about ten minutes turning onto three different muddy lanes we came to a two story house in the thick hedgeroves, and the man with the rain coat on the ATV stopped, came up to our driver side window and pointed to the green side door. “In there, the green door.” The man on the ATV took off and we parked our car and went in through the green door and Seamus was sitting in a kitchen, tapping the ash of his cigarette off in an empty silver tray in the center of the table, drinking a fizzy orange drink, and he said hi to us like nothing had ever happened.

            Brendan and Dessie left in the car. I stayed the night. I saw Seamus everyday until he was killed. When he was off sleeping in the fields, he would make contact with someone he knew would talk to me and they would tell me that Seamus had called. I stayed with him in the two-story house amongst the brown hedgeroves for another week.  We had sex every night, usually multiple times, and in the morning. There were blue and yellow pills on the table. “Speed.” He said. “With nothing much else in the to do in the Maze we’d have fun with these.” We crushed up the amphetamine salts and snorted the powder. Like chalk burning down my throat. We took the Valium when we were crashing into cold sweats. Seamus kept building into these crazed visions where he would wipe out every Protestant in Northern Ireland. Some of the stuff he said I wrote it off to being in prison, the isolation, how it messes with your head, but he seemed to be looking at something beyond reality, his own pain he could maybe not see past, but his ideas were similar to Brendan’s: romantic and unrealistic.  Brendan was always talking that shit into his ear about No-go zones, and liberated areas, and launching flying columns like back in the 1920’s, and exterminating Police and Military bases. All this talk built Seamus into this state. He was still adjusting to the outside world and driven to engage in these promoted fantasies. Seamus felt his life had been wasted, turned to drivel over nothing, that people would feel it, the fantasies would for however long he could create them be reality, his pain, his loss, staring at the prison cell walls, not speaking to anyone for weeks, getting treated like an animal, called a Taig, loyalist prisoners trying to stab him, threatening his life, and Seamus crying in his bed in his cell, not sleeping, waiting for the gray sun to come up again, so the abuse could start over. He had been powerless, not one person he could take out without the guards or the loyalist prisoners swarming him, whistles going off or someone making sure the coast was clear, someone holding his arms and hitting him from behind, hauling him off to the hole, bloody, frustrated beyond human comprehension and shrieking.

I was sitting at a table smoking a cigarette, and Seamus was holding his nose up in the air, snorting, getting the amphetamine salt powder dripping down into his nasal passage. It was during that week, before we went up to Strabane, and I remember him wheezing with the salts kicking in, and him talking about burning everything. It was not even making sense. He was saying he was going to burn the rich people in London, and Derry and Belfast, anyone comfortable, and all the shirt manufactures that killed babies and starved women, and he was talking about Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan working with the CIA and Israel’s Mossad to wipe out Catholics. Madrid had been a strong hold, but Seamus wanted to go to Madrid and “burn down the palaces.” To “keep the faith” and I was starting to get scared, so I snorted some amphetamine salts and Seamus fingered me and we kissed and we moved onto the bed and started having sex and he starts crying because he said sniveling,  “no else can feel the fire, only me, no one else cares, and the only way they will care is if they burn, and people don’t understand how much it hurts until someone one dies.”

            “What burns? What are you talking about, darling?” I asked wondering what his thoughts were speaking to him, calming him, so he stopped crying, but he said.

            “Carmel, there are things in this life I never thought I would go through, prejudices and hatred directed at me at such a constant strain, directed at one person, this pressure, closing opportunities at just the right time so my life gets passed by with no mind, these people, the British, and money, and eating and losing family, I just, when I was a kid I did not think it would be like this, all the fighting, if I’m not burning them then my house is on fire, and I’m exhausted, but it’s like there is no choice. We have to go up and over the top.” Articulating it seemed to calm Seamus and I was relieved as I watched him settle. I stroked his dick in my hands and he gave me a kiss and then he went down my neck with his lips.

We moved back up to Strabane with Kieran Fleming and Antoine MacGiolla Bhrighde. Seamus, Kieran and Antoine had served time in the Maze together, stolen guard uniforms, escaped, dipped themselves in mud and waded in the shallows during the day and moved cautiously by night, until they eventually made contact with someone and they were sent to a safehouse down in South Armagh. Kieran and Antoine were very close to Seamus. They had spent a lot of rough time together and come out all right. Brendan and Dessie had operations planned to go off in East Tyrone. They wanted to assist Joe Cahill and Seamus in getting the West Fermanagh Brigade running again. Brendan and Dessie asked Meara, Joe Cahill, Seamus, Kieran, Me, and Antoine to launch a mortar attack on the Carrickmore RUC station in November 1983.

Seamus had told me about Meara at this point. The Mortar attack would be the first time we worked together. Her father owned a gas station just over the border in Kileen, Armagh, and she had been giving information to IRA affiliated high-jackers, and high-jacking some trucks of her own. She generally was a major financial part of the IRA’s South Armagh organization.

The IRA’s South Armagh branch was so self-enclosed that they sometimes ignored orders from Central Command in Belfast. The Catholics in South Armagh were concentrated, marginalized, and highly organized. Generations were proud of their resistance to British rule and people stayed united - no one informed. They made serious money from smuggling along the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, which Meara was a big part of, coupled with the geographic isolation, the South Armagh IRA was able to operate independently from the rest of the IRA. Many of the truck bombs and complicated cassette incendiaries we blow up in London now are assembled in that impenetrable region. No one seems to be able to have control over the authority-jaded Catholic residents of South Armagh and Meara acted in this tradition, making large sums of money for the local South Armagh IRA hierarchy, so she could be free to participate in whatever illegal behavior she felt necessary.

I was instantly drawn to the talk around her and meeting her face in a hunched posture under a hood, hand outstretched, “Hi, I’m Meara”, but feminine and pretty under the dark clothes made her even more alluring.

Seamus said how she was a “soldier’s wife” like me. Meara and Brendan had been off and on for years and it seemed like they were on again in a very different and serious way this time.

Antoine and Kieran were parked diagonally across the road from the house with the big, enclosed, private backyard, trying to see how many people were inside. Me and Seamus were parked further down the country road in a stolen Toyota. Dessie and Joe got the stolen car and met up with Brendan. They put the two mortar tubes into the trunk, picked up Meara and came over to the house near Carrickmore we had picked out. 

I knocked on the door of the house, my balaclava curled up like a hat with my dark brown hair over my face. I asked if Adrian was home. The woman behind the door looked confused and a man called out from the living room to see who it was, when Seamus, Joe, Kieran, and Antoine ran up behind me, burst through the door, forced the woman onto the ground, and went in and subdued the yelping man. They took the woman and the man upstairs and found the two kids in their rooms, a little girl and an older boy playing, they tied the family up and brought them down to the basement where Antoine stayed with a pistol and Seamus told him, real loud, to shoot anyone trying to get away. The tied family screamed into the concrete floor. Seamus threatened if there was any more noise the youngest daughter would have her throat slit.

Brendan, Dessie, Joe and Meara pulled all the way down the driveway. It was late afternoon, still enough light to see, but the yard we choose had a thicket of trees out front, and the low clouds, light rain, and lack of neighbors made it hard to notice anything unusual happening at the house. Hardly anyone went down the country road our stolen cars were parked on. Seamus introduced me to Meara quickly, we shook hands, and eyed each other wearily. Joe was introduced to Meara, and everyone knew one another. Kieran, Seamus, Joe and me helped unload the two mortars. Meara, Brendan and Dessie set them up. Dessie adjusted the height and slant of the mortar tubes so they would fall from this distance into the Carrickmore RUC station. Brendan quickly instructed me and Kieran how to drop the mortar round into the tube, and get clear, while Dessie and Meara would pull the fire switch with a length of rope to stay clear of the recoil. We did mortar six rounds. Me and Kieran would load, Dessie and Meara would fire, Brendan, Joe And Seamus acted as lookouts. I dropped the mortar round in the tube, walked a few steps, head and hands clear, and heard the loud bang with a woosh, like something was flying, and there was a whistling silence and then like thunder far off. Once, back, again, the whistle and silence and then thunder, and once, back, again, the whistle and silence and then thunder. I remember trying to look up through the rain to see the round soaring in the air, but I just saw the grey clouds between the wet tree branches and I got rain in my eyes.

We broke down and loaded the two mortars into the stolen car, frenzied-quick, but methodical. Joe, Kieran and Antoine drove off fast. Brendan, Dessie and Meara took off, doused the car in petrol, abandoned it, lit it on fire, and switched it for a safe one. Me and Seamus took off in the Toyota we had stolen earlier outside Strabane, and we left it, burned-out, not far from where we stole it from, and went back to me and Joe’s flat. We listened later over the radio for the crackling breaking news bulletin and heard the radio man’s voice tell us how we seriously wounded a bunch of officers in the Carrickmore RUC base and killed one of them.

It felt different, like we were askew from the whole world, in some weird dark place only we operated in, but we were building something together. The more people that died the more people took notice.

I remember overhearing a conversation my Mum and Dad thought I could not hear, up late sneaking into the kitchen, Adrian asleep in his room. Me crawling on the tile floor, stealthy, up and out of my room just for the sake of it. I start remembering things I do not think they could have said.

In March 1984 Me and Seamus drive down to Fermanagh. There was a UDR man on a rural farm around Pettigoe, Fermanagh Seamus remembered. We drove up and Seamus saw the house and a woman out front checking the mail. Seamus asked “Is Ronnie home? I am from the Orange Lodge and wanted to have a word with him.” The women went into the house and a man came out onto the front step of the wood porch, looked at our car, got a scared look on his face and tried to go back in the door. A shot hit the man in his left arm and blood was smeared brilliantly red on the door. The man was screaming shocked, and the woman opened the front door and she began screaming and pulling at the man and Seamus got out of the car and ran up and shot him in the doorway, pumping rounds into him on the wood porch, with the woman trying to pull the man through the half-open door. She was crying, hysterically high-pitched, begging, still trying to pull the man in, now dead, but he did not move, and she was unable to stop looking at Seamus’ face and down at the bleeding dead man on the porch she was hopelessly pulling at, so Seamus put a bullet through the storm window that made her duck and run into the house. He ran back to the car and I drove the speed limit back up to Strabane.

“She’s always withdrawn into her own worlds. Her schoolteacher’s say so.” My Dad says. He knew a lot of the teachers that taught me in Primary before I was sent to Secondary in Ontario.

We killed an ex-UDR man while he was walking to his car in the parking lot of the hospital in Dungannon, Tyrone. Brendan knew his car and when he got into it Meara drove along side him. Brendan sprayed the driver side window with a shotgun. The man’s head framed in the wet window, sleepily fixing his key into the ignition. Dessie and me were in another car, saw the ex-UDR man stumble out of the passenger side door, his head a mess of blood, but he was still aware, but concussed and Dessie got out and shot him from behind. He emptied his gun into him as the man fell, crawled and then folded over motionless on the car-park pavement. I followed Dessie with the car slowly, watched his automatic recoil to empty and picked him up.

“ Does not sound like a daughter of yours.” My mother says. My father’s family dislikes my mother for some reason that was never clear, and she despises his family for it.

Me, Joe and Seamus went down to Enniskillen to the Lakeland forum Leisure center. We had heard that there were officers there regularly using the gym, the pool, and the sauna. The idea of British officers having a relaxing time in a hot tub in County Fermanagh seemed to really agitate Seamus. So, Seamus drove and Joe kept watch out from the passenger seat. They picked out a car that had soldier’s plates and I went and put a mercury tilt booby-trap bomb underneath the driver side door. We watched the two lads get in it. They could not have been much older than myself at the time. They got about a block. Seamus drove slow out of town, back up to our safehouse in Strabane. One young officer was killed instantly while another was burned so bad he hung on for eleven days. I thought of his family in the hospital, the smell, the beds, the beeping machines, like shit and eggs, and before I could feel anything for these two men I remembered the only reason I knew those details was because I had watched Adrian die. A confused block of pain made me not think anymore, and I suppose I was happy they died that way, but I do not really know if you can call it happiness, maybe justice, but anyways I felt ecstatic afterwards, like I had scored two points on some sort of scoreboard. I did not really care how their families would deal with it, or if they had a sister like me, I thought about it, but they were getting an invitation into my pain, my loss and I reveled in spreading it, making it real for someone else beside myself. A well-off British officer’s family with the gray-haired mother crying over the young son, never to get over his loss, and I knew this, because that is what happened to my mother. I only thought of it as something that needed to happen, people had to be exposed to cruelty, so they could understand what had been done to my life.

“ And, really, what is that?”

Controlling the fear: Am I acting right? Am I going to be imprisoned forever? Am I going to hell? was draining, constant, and wearing on us. Time was expanding as we were growing older and what was the point. I was wondering if things were getting out of hand, if we were taking too much for the loss we had sustained in our lives, but the more we did the better we felt, so we kept doing it. We made money too.

“ She’s stubborn, strong-willed, if she does not crack apart like your brother She will be very successful, nothing wrong with her ‘being in her own worlds’ Belcoo as savage as it is. I don’t blame her.”

Seamus and Brendan got in a fight after they robbed a bank in the Republic. It was just the two of them, and the two Garda officers were escorting a cash delivery to the Drumcree post office. “He just starts firing! No words, no commands, just opens up on the two of them! We shot them both to shit, killed one of them! I think it could have been done quieter. It is a bank robbery we are not trying to get press or make a statement! We need money!” Brendan was yelling at Seamus.

“Everything is a statement!” Seamus replied. “The one with the Uzi jerked his head around fast, and I thought he might have recognized me, but in retrospect he was probably just looking around.” I asked Seamus if it was payback for the Garda officer he killed that got him sent up to the Maze and his eyes flared at me and he started thinking about something to himself.

“My brother gets along fine, breeding his horses. He is just not a city, professional type. He’s not so smart like you. The other day Carmel had that funeral for that pet mouse of hers. She called the thing Speedy. Very emotional, I was scared when she cried for as long as she did, but I guess she came out of it.”

Brendan and Dessie found a cab company that hired mainly UDR men. There were catholic drivers, but the manger was a former UDR man and he hired some of his retired buddies. Meara dialed up the phone number from a payphone and asked to be picked up on a road in the middle of nowhere and Joe, Seamus, Brendan, Dessie, Antoine and Kieran would ambush the driver. The cab saw Kieran on the side of the road and tried to speed forward, but Dessie or Seamus sprayed the windshield with automatic fire from an AK 74 and he crashed into a tree. Brendan went up and shot the driver in the head, but he was already dead, his foot slammed on the accelerator, the tires spinning in the mud.

“ She renounced church and I, you no help, had to drag her there and she kept crying and everyone is looking, that girl, I swear to Mary.”

Brendan and Seamus were over the border in the Republic with Kieran and Antoine in County Tyrone acting as the gun team. They were watching an eight man UDR foot patrol that went over the same route twice a week near Castlederg, Tyrone in Northern Ireland. The wire was carefully concealed under light, natural looking amounts of hay and strung along until the command switch was safely over the border in Donegal in the Republic. Seamus and Brendan detonated the landmine when the patrol walked over it, while Kieran and Antoine started ripping automatic fire into the soldiers screaming into their radios and running for back up. Two soldiers bled out on the grass and Seamus, Joe, Kieran and Antoine ran West into the Republic and slept in the fields while the helicopters were out. The four of them made contact with me and I drove over from Strabane and picked them up in Sligo.

“ She is always fighting and causing little spats with Adrian. Adrian seems to get along well enough while she’s cranking up a problem out of thin air.”

Kieran and Antoine stole a car in Donegal and loaded it with 9 beer kegs full of ammonium nitrate. Seamus and Joe had cleared out the Drumrush Lodge restaurant over the border in Kesh, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. Brendan and Dessie planted the landmine in the road leading up to the restaurant. Joe and Seamus telephoned the RUC that a suspicious device was found in the Drumrush lodge restaurant. Kieran and Antoine showed up and were wiring the nine beer kegs together on a timer when two RUC armored patrol cars came flying down the road towards the Drumrush lodge. Dessie and Bredan hit the activation switch but nothing happened.  The two armored cars pulled into the parking lot. Seamus and Joe were coming out the front door and Antoine and Kieran had just set the timer for the nine beer kegs. A soldier told them to “show me your hands!” Seamus noticed they were not wearing RUC or UDR uniforms, but dressed in black, and they had small, expensive sub-machine guns like the SAS.

Kieran put his hands up. Antoine went around the other side of the car and shot the soldier commanding Kieran in the head. The soldiers behind the SAS soldier who had just been shot opened up and Antoine was hit over fifteen times. Kieran ran. Joe and Seamus ran. Dessie and Brendan down the lane decided to run too. There was no plan for an ambush, so they only had pistols on them. Joe, Seamus, Dessie and Brendan went East while Kieran went West, and Kieran being the most visible to the SAS team got chased down, he was trapped between the raging river Bannagh and the SAS team. Kieran jumped into the swollen river, and soldiers pulled his bloated, blue drowned body out three weeks later.

“ These tantrums she just builds in her head, and she’s fighting back against something that’s not even happening.”

Seamus thought someone had informed, but no one knew of the operation outside of who was there. Me and Meara found out about the whole mess later, like a sad event the boys were too embarrassed to talk about. Seamus was very upset over the death of Kieran and Antoine, he felt like it was his responsibility in a way to look after them. He felt he let them down. There was a crack in the trust between everyone. We wondered if someone was touting on us, if it was one of us, or maybe we were being watched.

“They had to separate the boy out of her class. She could not keep her hands off him, and the parents are complaining to me, saying you’re a teacher, a girl should be raised better and what am I to say?”

Seamus told Dessie, Brendan, and Joe he thought he knew who was informing on him. I do not think this retired UDR man tipped the SAS off about the ambush, but Seamus seemed convinced this old guy down in Fermanagh had it out for him. Seamus never let go of grudges and with the kind of pressure he was under he started to imagine all his old enemies trying to talk to the Brits.

“ She keeps tearing at this poor cute little boy, until her teacher is upset and not sure what to do. And then she starts puling the teacher’s hair! I have to go in and smooth everything over!”

Meara called his house number and a young girl said he drove a bus for the school district. The four of them went down to Derrylin, Fermanagh and waited for school to get out. Seamus and Brendan at the primary school and Joe and Dessie at the secondary when Joe recognized him. Dessie and Joe followed him as he made his stops, and they took note of where the last stop was and how there were no children on the bus. The next day the four of them crouched in the woods by the last bus top. Dessie and Brendan came out of the woods to try and get the driver to stop, after the last kid had ran off. The driver saw Dessie and Brendan, closed the sliding bus door and tried to drive on, but Dessie shot through the windshield and knocked the driver out of his seat. The bus whined to a halt. Dessie and Brendan could not get the sliding door up front open and they were trying to shoot through the narrow windows on the door. They were commanding and swearing at the wounded driver who was trying to put the bus in gear. Joe and Seamus opened the back door and quietly made their way down the narrow bus aisle.  The bus started to move, startled by the jolting movement, Joe and Seamus fired all the rounds in the automatic pistols they had into the back of the driver, until the bus stopped, and Seamus went up and saw he was dead for sure.

“ She cannot focus.” My father says, his face going pale.

Brendan and Dessie were bringing the AK’s back to our arms dump, an abandoned house with a large stone basement, in Strabane with two brothers, Michael Devine and David Devine, two dedicated kids from strong Republican families.

They had been doing target practice out in the hills with the new recruits for the East Tyrone flying column.

When they were walking up to the basement door, two teams of SAS opened up on them from two different directions. David Devine went down and when his brother went for him he caught one in the temple and went down too. Brendan had glass shatter in his face, but him and Dessie were able to get out of the kill-zone.

“ There are better daughters out there“ My mother says looking over her shoulder

Meara would get prescription pills to Seamus. A pharmaceutical company’s trucks had used her father’s gas station and she got the South Armagh IRA to threaten the company to pay protection, so the drivers gave high-jackers industrial bottles of Dexedrine, Benzedrine, Valium, and painkillers along with sweaty wads of cash. I did not know Meara was supplying all the pills until after Seamus died and I needed my own.

“I just don’t know what to do.” My father cries into his hand.

It was some time in the blur that was around 1985, I had been up for three days, walking at night, sleeping in the day, swearing into the thoughts from the past, and I tried to drink to get to sleep, and I could not sleep, so I got in Joe’s car. I ran over a trash can, late at night, and the front light came on and someone came out, so I sped up.  Freezing rain was falling that night, so the wheel would not move, even though the car was picking up speed and turning. I had my foot pounding on the brake and nothing was happening. I tried to angle myself so I would shoot through the narrow street, but I smashed along a line of parked cars. I smashed-scraped the sides of three or four of them. The crunching metal had made me become rational, and not wanting the cops to come I limped home on the two flat tires. I pulled the car down the driveway and came back out and put my bedsheet over half of it and fell asleep curled up in the fetal position.

“At some point we cannot blame ourselves, Adrian turned out all right, and she was raised the same as any other kid in this town. It’s this country, the border, the politics, something within herself she has to control and be responsible for.”

Brendan killed a kid he thought had informed on the arms dump, and central command in Belfast said Brendan had shot the wrong person. Seamus and Joe were incredibly angry at me over our smashed-up car, but there was so much chaos going on it was quickly forgotten about. We ended up having to torch the registration numbers off and burn the car out with petrol somewhere outside Strabane. Brendan told Seamus and Joe how we may all be compromised. An IRA interrogation team was working a supergrass over, it looked like he was in British Intelligence, sent to join the East Tyrone Brigade, and he found out and touted about the arms dump in Strabane. Brendan suggested we relocate.

Seamus wanted to get back down to Fermanagh and establish a base to operate out of. We got a flat on the outskirts of Enniskillen, trying to blend into Fermanagh’s largest population center.

“I wish she would have stayed.”

We announced our arrival back in Enniskilen by borrowing the two mortars from Brendan. Dessie came with us to sight the distance. There was an RUC training station in Enniskillen. Dessie took Me, Seamus and Joe out to the endless, thick, green fields by the border, and showed us how to slant the tube and use math formulas to calculate distance and trajectory. The grey clouds went to the horizon and met the wet haze of the expansive fields, like a closed tent over the layers of green grass. I could tell Dessie was very proud of this skill he was passing onto us. Dessie had been powerless his whole life, and now he was teaching other people a skill, and we were grateful to him for teaching us this outside of where he normally operated. I could tell no one was ever nice to Dessie. He was a little off, touched in the head, they say, spacey, but he was no dummy, even though everyone treated him like he was retarded. Dessie kept watch for patrols while yelling instructions over to us. We let ten rounds go and the RUC training Center in Enniskillen was almost completely destroyed.

“When I am in shopping boutiques and I see other girls with their mothers, trying on clothes, I wonder where Carmel is, what she is doing.”

Seamus killed an RUC officer he knew went to Catholic mass at Saint Gabriel’s in Enniskillen.  Seamus said we were going into town to go get groceries, so I parked in the car-park of the grocery store and Seamus was gone, and it was lucky for him I did not go in and start shopping. I stayed outside looking for him when I heard a crackle of gunshots and Seamus was running at me, pointing to the car, and I called him a fucker. Me with no mask, and people coming out of the grocery. The officer was bleeding onto his steering wheel a block away, with Parishioners looking for the man with a green balaclava over his face, who took off running toward Enniskillen Center.

“It was not something we could carry. Our family has to be part of the community it was established in.”

Brendan wanted to launch his first flying column attack and he asked Joe, Meara, Me and Seamus to help. It was a freezing cold, black night. Me and Meara kept open a clear escape route, While Brendan and Dessie went up to Balleygawley RUC station and waited for the guard’s shifts to end. Seamus and Joe stayed back at the car with assault rifles. The wind was howling and ripping against the heavy concrete corners of the fortified base, shaking the wavering yellow-orange light of the streetlights.  They knew they let the officer’s going home out through the heavy front gate. The gate opened and once Dessie and Brendan shot the two officers coming off their shifts in the head at point blank range, Joe and Seamus started spraying the front of the base. They had pre-loaded clips they kept switching in and out, so the automatic fire never stopped for five minutes. Brendan and Dessie went inside and filled laundry bags full of intelligence reports from the file cabinets in the detective offices. Brendan left a bomb on the desk of a detective he knew, and when I was driving them out of Balleygwley we heard it explode, a muffled womp, that destroyed the entire structure.

“Part of her growing up was us having to get realistic. Tough with her.”

Seamus admired Brendan’s ambition. I asked him to stop targeting police-men, military, go after some contractors, or take a break, lay low, but Seamus and me hardly ever slept during this time. We were always fucking, taking pills, planning, coming from here, or driving there or getting fucked-up and doing something. The idea of slowing down or stopping would stop the on-rush of power we were feeling and be a kind of defeat. We had to show we could operate at a higher level of violence than what had been experienced before and slowing down would have meant a failure to meet this level. At the funeral for the UDR bus driver the eulogizing priest said there was a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Protestants in the border region, and we were the cause of this vice, gripping these people who had ripped our lives apart for so long.

“If she came around….”

At the beginning of 1986, Seamus went into the Talk of the Town bar in Maguiresbridge, Fermanagh, a real police drinking haunt, he shot the barman, who never let Seamus drink there and would have called the police if he had, and then shot a man turning his face to look at him, like an astounded baby with a close-cropped military hair-cut. The man Seamus shot with a military hair cut was a detective and he flopped onto the floor like a dead fish, but he was only wounded when the bullet went out, clean, behind his ear. His partner came running in from outside. I saw him run in, while I waited in the car out front. The detective’s partner shouted some command at Seamus and was trying to take his gun out when Seamus shot him in the face and put two more into side of his head on the ground. Seamus left a bomb on the bar that fizzled out and started a small fire.

“Oh my, we would have a big meal, and I would bake an apple pie like at Christmas.”

Someone was watching us up in Strabane, and whoever they were, they had come down with us. I remember I could feel it, and I tried to get Seamus to go down to the Republic for a while, but I did not try really hard because then he would be gone, and what we were building together, this movement, this violence, would have lost its momentum.

“Carmel was a good kid. She just got confused, hung out with the wrong people, tapped into the wrong influences. She had a vivid imagination and she wanted to be part of something, anything….Oh I miss her. We don’t know where she is, and when I greet the little girls at the beginning of the school year, after they have come back from the Summer, I wonder if we could have done things differently, so that she could be around, and things did not have to turn out the way they did.”

Seamus always targeted the patrols along the Linaskea- Roslea road. He was burying a landmine when a SAS team came out of the long grass and shot him. He crawled out of the road into the unkept field. They came up and asked him if he was Seamus McElwaine, they knew he was. It was not silence but the sound of soft wind making its way around millions of blades of grass, an endless easy crashing and swoon, barely discernible to the ear unless one stopped and listened. Shots echoed over the quiet fields and he was dead. That was the 26^th of April 1986.

I still wake up screaming. Slipping out of the non-reality of a dream and realizing what is here is gone.

It has been almost ten years since I met Meara and seven since I lost Seamus.

It is just after 9 a.m. on December 10, 1992. A freezing gray slate of clouds covers the sky. I have my thick winter jacket on with hood up over my face. I wipe my nose and there is blood on the back of my hand. I dial Scotland Yard and tell them a bomb will ignite outside the Woodgreen shopping center in 40 minutes.

Meara is at another payphone dialing the police saying the bomb will go off in 30  minutes.

I call again from a phone a block away and say the bomb is going to go off in 35 minutes. I set my timer for 18 minutes, while Meara’s is set to explode five minutes after mine does at 23 minutes. Meara put hers in a litter bin about three hundred meters from the litter bin I dropped mine in. Each bomb is 3 kilograms of Semtex and a flash cap attached to a digital timer. The sidewalks are teaming with Christmas shoppers.

Me and Meara had agreed to go separate ways. After I hang up the phone, I am amazed how good and normal I feel, free of racing thoughts, like the air is clear, and I get on the Tube at the Greenwood station, and I want to keep moving, so I do not get off near my flat in North London and I keep going into central London, to be more a part of the chaos I am causing, and I see the increased security at Piccadilly Circus station and people watching on televisions hanging from the ceiling. They are not sure if anyone was killed but over a dozen civilians are injured and four London police officers were rushed to the hospital. “The injured policemen were trying to clear the area, when the bomb went off sooner than the telephoned calls had warned.” A newscaster says disgusted.

S – Plan                       Part 9

                                                            By John Rogan

For years I have been able to hear the voices, no one speaking to me, but a crowd gathered, waiting. I can hear older lilty female tones, low scratchy old men, playful, distance-echoed peals of laughing and yelling from a group of kids. I cannot see the crowd. I never did see the crowd. The different tones, ages, voices worn and fresh, waiting for the parade coming down the road, meld and people get excited. The pace of conversation begins to pick up, the anticipation, a kind of quiet happiness settles while people wait for the uniformed soldiers, the approaching music and the marching band to come down the road. We put the bomb we mixed down in the Republic in the Reading Rooms, we knew they would be empty with the Remembrance Day holiday. There were old men, veterans, dressed proudly in the uniforms of their youth. They stood with their wives they could not imagine life without.

The isolation needling into too much thinking. It is the night of February 26, 1993. Meara called me on the phone, crying like she never does. She said we should not have contact for a couple days.  She wants to get together and plan what to do once we both know we are not compromised. We agreed we should wait until we have more information. She told me to watch the news. Sean And Charlie had been working with IRA operatives from Manchester in the suburb of Warrington. Early this morning they were arrested. They put a bomb, ammonium nitrate fertilizer enhanced with barrels of a petrol-based accelerant, onto the Manchester Electric gas holder in Warrington. The tower looked like a short, fat grain silo, and Sean, Charlie and the others from the Manchester IRA believed the fireball would destroy the highway adjacent to the gas tank, cutting off the authority’s ability to respond, while shutting off heat and disrupting the electrical grid to the city of Manchester. I am still trying to figure out what happened from the news. My mind keeps skipping, unable to focus, when I think of Sean and Charlie in English police custody. They are gone.

One of them had to climb the service ladder and put the bomb on top of the gas holder.  A police officer approached the van. They needed a bigger van to transport the barrels of petrol-based accelerant and someone from the Manchester IRA or maybe it was Sean or Charlie shot the police officer four times and then tried to drive away in the van, but it was too slow. The police cars swarmed the van. They tried to high jack another vehicle, but the cops caught up with them when the motorist would not get out of her car, and they ended up beating the women badly in a violent desperation. They got going in the high-jacked woman’s car, but the police were all over them. The Manchester police were trying to shoot out their tires. Sean and Charlie and the other two fellows who got arrested with them shot into the windshields of the police. While they were getting chased, the device went off at Manchester Electric gasworks in Warrington. The fireball went up into the air and the squat cylinder of the gas holder was ripped open, police had to close down the highway and evacuate the neighborhoods around it. Sean and Charlie were too far away at this point for the explosion to be a distraction. They were shooting at the cops until they ran out of pistol rounds. The police were able to box in their car and get them to surrender. I just watched the report on the evening news. My nose stopped bleeding when I went to the bathroom and threw up. I add lemon-lime soda to my glass of vodka to get rid of the vomit taste in my mouth. Something switched off when Seamus was killed. It is like a tape being re-played on a VCR or seeing a re-run and knowing in an instant I know the ending, the words, what the characters are going to say, how it will work into a finality. All the choices and turns coming to this, my isolation, my loss, the absence of those people from my life and how I remedy it. The incomprehension of how I got so on the outside, every step seemed to push me farther out, away from the people I care about and into this present where I keep switching the channels up three, down three, up three, down three, up three, down three, up six, down six, up nine, down nine, multiples of nine, eighteen up, twenty-seven down. The flash of switching channels blares into my eyes in my dark room, the wall flashing blue and black and white behind me, sipping lemon-lime soda with vodka out of a glass with no ice and the motionless stun I know, but I do not want to really know, will turn into anger, and I do not want to recognize the feeling, yet, of losing someone all over again. I go numb switching the channels. I turn it off when I realize the remote-control hurts in my hands and my fingers are sore from pushing the rubber buttons. The cease of flashing makes me feel sick when I think of Sean and Charlie being processed in shackles. I stare into a deep sea of darkness in my lightless flat and sip from my cup of vodka. They would have their fingerprints and pictures taken and their clothes would be removed. Sean and Charlie would be strip-searched and be given uniforms. The guards would lead them to a cell and the heavy iron door would be closed. I go into the bathroom and almost throw up, but just dry-heave over the toilet. I wander out to my refrigerator and fill a new glass half-full of vodka, add a little lemon-lime soda and sit on my couch in front of the dead television. My eyes have adjusted to the dark and I watch a drop of blood drip from my nose onto my chest. I watch the blood sit on the surface of the white-pink night shirt I have on. I watch it sink and dry into a maroon brown, until I need more to drink. I open the door to my flat, stick my head out, see no one is in the hall and close the door. I push with my fingers above the lock, below the lock and above the doorknob three times after I make sure it is locked and closed. I keep pulling at the door handle to make sure it is closed. Once I know it is closed, I touch it in the three spots again, above the lock, below the lock and above the doorknob, three times, 123, 123,123, and I feel sure it is closed. I know it is, but I keep walking back to check, convincing myself that I was mistaken, or maybe the moment I had closed the door I had been too preoccupied and may have forgotten to lock it.

Maybe…but it is replaying like a re-run and I know the ending.

I try to smoke a cigarette, but I feel like I have been running. I get dizzy and queasy after two puffs and I put it out. I lay on my couch exhausted, too tired to be angry, but remembering things and ripping into tirades, the loss, so unnecessary, the anger all the more acute because of the pointlessness, everyone dead and gone over a power play. Who is in charge of this plot of land? Everyone kept play acting until things got out of hand. The petty hatreds people kept inside were lashing out into reality in unbelievable ways. One person insecure about being on top, and mercilessly pushing the other one down, with that replicating over and over, moment after moment, interaction after interaction, until there was a string of these actions against me. I was the powerless one. Until the voices passing judgement and slights, worked into an identity that was drilled into me so well I believe it. Carmel O’Doherty: criminal. My deviancy was minor in the scheme of actual difference, but to people with opinions, stilted psychologies and developed world-views I was scarier than the concept of hell. I could never rely on people to treat me fairly, so an independent selfishness bloomed in the face of all the hatred, a necessity for survival, because if I relied on them they would have killed me, bullied me to death, forcing me to choose from all the wrong answers, because they do not want my type to succeed. Whatever I am, or how people view me, I will not be eliminated. Who I am, what my experiences have been and how I want the world to recognize those experiences is very real and something that people will feel.

I try to get up off the couch, the room dark, but thinking in a tired flash that tightens my stomach, Adrian with blood pouring out of his eye from the plastic bullet, Seamus’ body freezing into rigor mortis, and Sean and Charlie crying in their cells. I need another drink, but I feel like if I stand I may fall onto the floor. I feel completely exhausted and my mind seems to be examining things while leaving out anything positive, like it has been gutted, only picking up hate-filled things people have said to me as long ago as primary school. I cannot view myself positively without having to hate people who dislike me so strongly. It is just something I have to live with. I have chosen who I am.

I flip back on the television and see a Stuka dive-bomber flying in formation with a Luftwaffe symbol on its wing. I go down seven channels and in-between the 6^th and the 5^th I see Adolf Hitler making a speech. I switch back to the channel, but Hitler is not making a speech now and tanks are rolling over some plain in Russia. I count up three, the flashing channels in the dark room, and I can hear the crowd again. I see the lines skip, blur, fuzz into static and then solidify into an image. I stop on one channel and I can see the cold November morning, the weak sunlight against the freezing wind, the old couples bundled up against the cold, old men with their battalion pins on their pressed uniforms. I click the channel up three, down three, up seven, down seven, and up nine, and I see a channel with the band coming down the road. I turn down nine and the channel is just an off-air signal. I go up nine channels. The dark walls of the room blipping into black when I change the channel. The constant stream of rapidly disappearing glowing images on the television screen creates an undulating blue-white glow I sit entranced in.

After Seamus was killed, we wanted to make a statement. Something in-keeping with the loss we all felt with him being gone, replacing his hole with carnage. Not really compensating for his loss, but something big enough, the taking of innocent lives, to compensate for losing the only direction my life had. The isolation, loss, and hopelessness was the same with the channels flashing into my vision, turning from numb, to anger, to how long this would hurt. I knew about the ugly time alone, thinking of people who could make it better, but for whatever stupid reason they were taken from me. The anger bubbling up in my stomach from all the kids making fun of me because of someone murdering Adrian, like a tape replaying, over and over, and I want it to stop. I will kill as many people as I have to. I want it to stop.

Joe made sure the bomb got across the border. Me and Dessie drove to the Reading Rooms in Enniskillen Center across from the World War I memorial. On the 7^th of November 1987, the evening before the Remembrance Day parade, Me and Dessie carried the bomb up to the second floor of the Reading Rooms and placed it against the wall facing the road. We timed it so when the UDR soldiers would be coming down the road the bomb would explode.

What happened was the bomb went off as timed, but the parade had not reached it yet, so the Reading Room walls fell onto the crowd waiting for the Remembrance Day parade. Thousands of pounds of stone masonry fell onto old veterans, their wives, and families gathered before the World War I memorial to see the parade pass. We never gave a warning. Twelve people were killed. All Protestant. Sixty-three people were injured. Three married couples were dead. A family I would never see.

There was an immediate international outrage after the bombing. Fucking Bono condemned it. The IRA central command put out a statement that the West Fermanagh Brigade had been disbanded. It had not, but I was asked to step down from operations. The Remembrance Day bombing was seen as reckless and amateur, so of course they blamed it on Seamus’s girlfriend. Joe and Dessie got through it unscathed, but the reputation within the IRA stuck with me. Carmel O’Doherty was the Enniskillen Remembrance Day bomber. I murdered a group of war-veterans and pensioners. I crossed a line.

The IRA central command got me down to Dublin and gave me a place to hide out, but things never really blew over, like I thought they would. News articles said the Remembrance Day bombing in Enniskillen caused “a soul searching within the IRA” and made people like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness focus their energy entirely on the political and parliamentary aspects of uniting Ireland with the IRA’s political party Sinn Fein.  I ended up in Bayonne, France with Basque separatists, the ETA. They had given the IRA a large amount of firearms, so I was sent to the Basque region to give them training in manufacturing explosive devices. We would test different kind of bombs in the sunny countryside outside Bilbao, Spain or cross over the border into France and construct car bombs at arms dumps dotted along the French border. I was showing a young group of Spanish and French recruits how to fire heavy M60 American made machine guns, like how to switch the hot barrels out. This would have been sometime around the beginning of 1990. I remember the M60’s echo and the cracking rattling in the background when I got the call from Meara, it was good to hear her voice, and a couple days later central command told me to use my fake passports to go to London.

I keep switching channels up three, down three, and I see aerial footage of a city being bombed, looks like World War II, maybe London or somewhere in Germany. I can see the fires spreading in grainy and white small glowing blips against the black night of the city. I hit the channel up three times and think of Adrian saying something I cannot make out and Seamus exhaling a cigarette next to me in bed. I wake up on my couch, freezing, with pre-dawn, grey light weakly glowing through the window.

S – Plan part 10

By John Rogan

            Our neighbor three houses down in Belcoo was an old widow with an enormous garden. In the short Summers of Belcoo she would water her garden with a sprinkler attached to her garden hose. The sprinkler had a bright green plastic base, so it could be placed anywhere.  Above the green plastic base, there was a cylinder where the streams of water shot out almost ten meters high. The cylinder slightly rotated, so the streams of water shooting upwards into the air moved in one giant wave from one side to the next.

            School was out and Mum told Adrian and me to take our bikes and go get groceries down the dusty road. We never had to do that kind of stuff when school was in, but Mum kept us busy, endlessly trying to get us to go outside or expend some sort of energy doing some choir. The safest was to not be around.

The hedgeroves were a translucent green color. The road we rode our bike on was cracked dry and looked the color of sand. When we went through the door to the general store the bell rang. It was wet and cool inside the store. The old man sitting behind the counter, who seemed to always be creasing under some enormous weight into the floor of the general store, knew me and Adrian. We got what was on the list bread, flour, butter, eggs, canned broth, and milk. I was in charge of holding the eggs. The Summer in Belcoo was extremely short, essentially July to early September, and this was a day at the end of July or sometime in August. The general store had a black cat that quietly brisked its way through the dusty, brown, off-white tiles of the fluorescent lit aisles.

            “Hi Carmel, Hi Adrian.  Tell your father and mother I said hello for me.” I remember he said, The old store owner’s name was George or Robert. He had a small mustache, a large strong frame that was crumpling under gravity and age, and he told me I could have one of the lollipops on the counter. He was balding and had little eyes with brown eyelashes that seemed to look far away, so I was shocked when he stopped talking to Adrian and addressed me. “Would you like one?” My eyes came just above the counter top and I could see the sour apple lollipop with bubblegum in the center, and Adrian was saying something about sports at school, trying to sound like how my Dad said things in off-hand ways. I did not say anything, but I just smiled wide, and held open my hand until the owner took the sour apple lollipop and put it in my hand. “What do you say Carmel?” Adrian leaned down to me. “Thank You!” I exclaimed, mumbling, looking away, holding up the green and white wrapper with the white stick coming out of it, so Adrian asked me to say it again, so I yelled it, “Thank You!”, and I turned red and got embarrassed

The old man behind the counter who never smiled, said “You’re welcome Carmel.” He was kind of laughing, but not at me, just amused I was so happy about something. Our bikes were parked underneath the big tree in Belcoo center. The seed supply store, where farmers bought fertilizer seed and got their tractors fixed was the only establishment operating, aside from the dark brown pub named The Well. The dusty main road had fewer cars parked on it than usual. We waved to the police officer who seemed to be bored and looking for someone to talk to. Not as many people were in town. Before the harvests came in and when Belcoo got really hot, many people went and visited family or friends along the shore. Adrian saw a lottery ticket on the ground, and I told him to leave it, but he wanted to check all the numbers, it was a loser like I told him.

Before we got on our bikes we sat under the shade of the big tree and looked over Belcoo center. The squat two rows of closed stores sat oppressed under the sun, with the main road running down the middle passed us, the shade of the big tree and out of town. The road went over the river that trickled into Lough Macnean. We were kids, so we did not know there was a border there.  A sun- soaked figure hunched out of the seed store and walked in a daze because of the sudden heat. He sauntered down the dry main road and sought shelter in The Well Pub. The usually mud-covered main paved road was caked with dry dirt that kicked up in the slight breath of the wind. Older people stayed inside unable to deal with the spike in sun and heat.

Adrian said let’s go, so we got on our bikes. I was trying to balance the carton of eggs in the canvas bag I had on my bike for carrying groceries, but the carton kept swinging and smashing into the wheels. I wanted to try my lollipop, but I was afraid of choking on it while riding my bike. We rode out of the shade of the big tree and I felt instantly hot in the noon-time sunlight. It was hard to see, we had to squint against the sun, the road turned to gravel, and there were clouds of dust. It was when Adrian stopped that I banged the egg carton into my wheels really hard.

“Excuse me miss. My name’s Adrian O’Doherty , you may know my parents, they live a couple doors up.” The old, pearl white woman seemed to be scared having someone shout at her, but she seemed to calm when she saw Adrian and me barely able to peep over her fence. It was like she was stepping out into a heavy rain. She looked into the sky from the shade of the garden in her yard and stepped to the sunny fence to speak to Adrian. At the fence, she seemed to consider us both rather than talk to us. She was smiling the whole time, and her voice was in a play-act like she was talking to a small baby. Her tuff of white hair was illuminated by the sun. Adrian promised he would have the sprinkler back before the sun went down. Sunlight lingered in the sky until nine o-clock this time of year in Belcoo, so Adrian was not worried about the deadline.

Adrian carried the garden hose we had along the side of the house out to the front yard. He connected the brass nozzle with the sprinkler, and he told me to go turn on the hose. I turned the handle the wrong way and I started to get really upset. I turned the handle all the way one way and no water come out and then I turned it all the way the other way and it seemed to be off. “What are you doing?” Adrian came around the corner of the house asking. I mumbled something and did not make eye-contact, so Adrian turned the hose all the way in the right direction. We came around the side of the house and saw the streams of water shooting into the sun in our front yard. I said something like “Wow” but not audible. Adrian told me to go get my bathing suit, before sprinting into the house to go get his. I heard my mother yell at Adrian to stop running in the house, slow down, but my mother and my father tended to sit in the dark television room with towels full of melting ice and an oscillating fan. Me and Adrian had not been through so many winters, so our bodies were not accustomed to anything. As soon as it got to be above twenty-two degrees Celsius, my parents broke into sweats, they desperately tried to stay out of the sun, and basically lost the will to do anything. My mother was not even really yelling at Adrian, more tiredly asking, when he sprinted out of his bedroom then slammed the front door. I was putting my suit on in my bedroom and I heard my father ask in the next room what we were doing. My mother said “I have no idea what they are up to. Something with an irrigation spigot. I hope it wears them out.”

I lost touch with her after I was sent to Canada but there was a girl named Shelly in my grade, who I believe became a hairdresser and works at a salon somewhere in Fermanagh now, and she had a brother younger than me. When I had my suit on, I came out of the humid, cool of our house and saw Adrian talking to Shelly and her brother. I remember I said hi to Shelly, but I did not know what else to say.

Adrian did the first run. He showed me, Shelly and her little brother how he could jump through the stream, how he could do a handstand over it, and then he finally sat down in the rotating stream like he was going to the bathroom in the woods.

He came back over to me, Shelly and her brother, dripping wet and out of breath. “Any of you want to give it a go.” Shelly and her brother left and came back minutes later with swimsuits on. Shelly had told her cousin, who knew Adrian, and she showed up with three of her friends. Michael O’Neil, who lived diagonal from us, was always getting into wrestling rows with Adrian and our parents were not sure whether they were real fights or just play. Michael came over and asked if he could jump through and Adrian told him to go get his suit. The girl who always said nothing at school and lived four doors down walked into our front yard with her suit on and said nothing. I went over and I do not think I really said anything, but she was giggling with me when we went through the sprinkler together. Michael asked Adrian if his two sisters could come over and Adrian said, “Tell them to come over”, like him and Michael were old friends.

By the time the sun was getting low in the sky, the sunlight going from a white-yellow to a deep orange with lengthening black shadows under the bright green tree-leaves, there was close to twenty kids jumping through the sprinkler in our front yard. Parents started to drift over. They stood in the street making baffled comments, awkward, not sure what to do with everyone not able to hide behind their houses. Adrian told them how he was going to return the sprinkler shortly and he had the woman’s permission to use it, so the parents seemed to realize the kids were happy and this would tire them out and make them hungry for dinner. My mother went out into the street and talked to two women. My father eventually roused from the dark interior of the house and made a few awkward but sincere handshakes with the neighbors in the street, my mother introducing him, doing all the social work so he would be less awkward. The street was becoming more shadows. The parents were talking on darkening concrete. The light was waning into weakness and parents seemed to realize this without being conscious of the fact. The parents had extra towels. Kids went and got them and stood with teeth chattering, tired, drying-off. People started saying Dinner and Supper and everyone seemed to disburse fairly quickly. My mother was cooking something in the kitchen. I heard the crackle of it and the smoky meat smell. Adrian walked back down from the old widow’s house. The sun was down, but it was not dark yet. The vibrant green of the neighborhood lawns had been muted into the extending shadows of the foliage of the large trees that dotted the road. Ticking, thick hedgeroves full of birds and crickets lapsed into a cool black. I sat on our side stairs, washing the dirt off my feet. Adrian was coming down the road, still in his wet bathing suit, but with a t-shirt on. He was lost in his own thoughts and I watched him walk up to the house. My mother had just turned on the kitchen light, and my father turned on his reading light in the living room. It was dark enough so Adrian could not see me, but I could see our neighborhood in Belcoo blurring into a Summer night, crickets kicking up, stars twinkling into a distant point of light as the sky went from light blue to purple-black. Adrian was not able to see me, but I watched him walk up the driveway. He was not startled, but he noticed me sitting there and said “Hey, Carmel.”

I am poking along the booths of the antiques and vintage collections fair being held at Alexandra Palace. I walked through Highgate Wood from my flat in Archway, North London. It took me about an hour to wander out in the wind and sleet, knowing something would probably be going off in Alexandra Park.  I have not been in public since me and Meara drove up to Warrington. An old-woman gets out a chair and asks if I need help finding anything. I say “no, thank you just looking, some beautiful stuff you have.”

“Thank You.” She says back, smiling sweetly and she goes to sit down with her husband and I wonder if she knows. There is a clinging anxiety of helplessness, as I watch her sink back into her chair next to her husband. Voices bounce and echo off the ceiling. Anyone can see me.

I walk into another booth and see a big heavy wooden chest on the floor with pictures of Elvis on the cloth walls and before the dealer can say hi to me, I move on. I took two .5 Xanax pills to leave my flat and I keep trying to recall the cool, numbing sensation in the middle of my forehead, slowing down my thoughts, making my movements more languid, but I am calm, slightly dazed and out of it, tired and a little dizzy, but I feel very hungry and weirdly confident that no one will recognize me.

They are looking for two males. No one saw me and Meara. They pulled the life support for the twelve-year old boy today. The doctors told the family there was no brain activity. The boy, if he ever recovered would be in a coma, or a vegetable. They had said that about Adrian, I can recall hearing “vegetative state”, my eyes glazing over, my mouth dropping open into incomprehension, realizing my brother, Adrian, my best friend, was in in that inaccessible place. I saw the horror of time alone ahead of me, and my family dissolving, breaking into our own separate hysterics when we were watching Adrian waste away in the hospital.

It is March 25, 1993. Couples and elderly people are mingling in the antiques fair. The white walls and ceiling bouncing back the auditory activity. Meara went to Belgium. She said, “Until the heat dies down.”  I want to walk back outside into Alexandra Park, but it is dripping cold sleet, and the wind was making it impossible to keep it out of my face. Alexandra Palace will usually hold big concerts, like The Cure played here last Summer, I wish I could have gone to that. I did not think Sean would like it, Charlie guffawing next to Sean while he drills me about the event security, so I never bought tickets. Now that Charlie and Sean are gone, I feel sad. I feel sad I did not go. I feel sad because the reason I did not go was because of Charlie and Sean, they probably would not have cared, maybe they even wanted to go, but now there is nothing, no one.

I think about how I tried to solve the pain of someone going away, initially Adrian, and then as life accelerated, it seems, everyone, my parents, friends, loved ones, all became dispersed, unfairly, cruelly, and I had to make this right, so I wanted other people to experience what I did, so these people I lost could be brought back. In a way, to let others feel the emotional turmoil, the stinging disruption in their appetite and sleep when someone they loved went away. But no one came back. I feel like I am drowning, like I can’t breathe. My remedy never heals, I work myself into circles and have wasted my life. I cause more problems. I look down the white wide hallway where the antiques fair is being held, and I see nowhere to sit. My nose feels itchy. I go to scratch underneath my nose with my index finger and blood bursts out of my right nostril and onto my hand and coat sleeve. “Shit!” I pinch my nose and throw my head backwards and hold it. I can taste the blood dripping down my nasal passage. I take out a tissue and blow my nose and it is bright red with dark red snot. I pinch my nose and put my head back, dizzy, hungry, sleepy-confident, but trying not to touch the white walls. People are probably looking at me. The family would have gathered around the hospital bed, and the doctor would say: “Do you have anything you would like to say to him?” The doctor would reassure the family that he could hear them. They would croak out their last words to him, knowing he was a good kid, he never hurt anyone, that this was unfair, and how he had so much more to live for, but this was how it was.

I try tapping my free hand on my thigh, the other hand pinching my nose closed, while staring up at the ceiling with everyone looking at me and talking about me, “What’s that woman doing?”  I nod my head down to look and older couples are going along, examining small pieces of furniture. A woman looks in my direction after I stare at her and her husband and I try to duck, but I do not have anything to go behind. My fingertips are red when I dip my head down, and I feel a kind of swimming sensation in my sinuses. I start to cough and blood from the back of my throat comes spitting out of my mouth. The white wall now has specks of blood and seeing this I completely freak out and want to get far away from the white echoing walls of the antiques and vintage collections fair, so I start walking. When I try to see, I get a headache and my nose seems to bleed more. My eyes are half open and a door opens in front of me. It is a bathroom and I go inside, and I see urinals on the wall and a guy looking over his shoulder at me like he was glad I walked in. I spit blood into the sink and walk out the door. The walls turn black and the light oddly dims along this long hallway. There are no girl’s room signs, but it looks like offices and there is a big swinging door that goes into an enormous kitchen, so I go into the shiny, industrial-sized kitchen and spit into the sink. I hold my head down in the sink, so the blood will run out, but I have to keep spitting to keep the steely taste out of my mouth. The quiet of the unmanned kitchen starts to make everything still, the shiny metal surfaces, giant sinks, huge ovens, with vents like gaping mouths over them have a calming effect in their indifference. I try breathing in and out. Seamus putting a plug of chewing tobacco into his lower lip flashes into my mind. He is staring like he is trying to look through a window he can only see his reflection in, with his jaw bulging brown like he’s biting the air.

Something moves where I cannot see it, and it starts to sound like footsteps. I bust back though the double doors and out into the long dim hallway. My mother would sit on the edge of the bed and say “Goodnight Carmel,” She always made sure I prayed. I would kneel next to my bed and think of the teachers telling me how I was going to hell and I felt stupid talking to someone in my head, so I usually imagined flames engulfing my classroom and my teacher crying out, about the flames and me just walking out the door, with the teacher left in the classroom, screaming for me to come back. It was usually some weird angsty, imaginative scenario I played out silently in front of my mother, but she always kissed me on the forehead. She would softly exhale, kiss me on the forehead, and say “Goodnight Carmel.”

I think of this safe-place, right before sleep, and my thoughts seem to grow less sharp.

Five Days ago, Meara dropped five kilograms of Semtex with a digital timer set for twenty minutes into a cast-iron litter bin on Bridge street in Warrington. There were crowds of people shopping. I dropped five kilograms of Semtex attached to a digital wristwatch into a cast-iron litter bin 90 meters from Meara’s, outside of the busy McDonalds restaurant. It seemed like the only thing to do with Sean and Charlie gone. I called the Samaritans Suicide Prevention hotline from a payphone and told the person who picked up: “A bomb will explode outside McDonalds’s. Code word Dr. Brown. This is not a hoax. There is a bomb outside McDonald’s.” There was no way to evacuate people in time, there was eight minutes left on the timer, and the Samaritans would have to contact the police and there were McDonald’s all over England. The newspapers said shoppers fled one explosion and walked right into the other. A three-year-old was immediately killed. A twelve-year-old boy’s life support was switched off today, after the doctors found minimal brain activity. Fifty-four people were injured, some mangled for life. The cast-iron litter bin expanded with the heat meeting the oxygen. A wound on a small child is so much more fatal because they are still growing.

The hallway I am walking down is strangely dark, with only fire exit signs illuminating the way. In the shadows, I come across a fire door and push it open. There is something going on behind the door. The fire door closes behind me, it is freezing cold, and I see people walking, buying hot cocoa, they have heavy jackets on, and small children walk, wobbling, with skates on, the blades guarded by a rubber edge. I walk and see the glowing white ice through the walkways out to the ice rink. Soft pop music booms out from the sound system, muffled here, where people buy food and go to the bathroom underneath the bleachers that slant diagonally up over my head.

A young boy walks up to me and points “Mary, Mary! Mary!”

“I’m sorry you have the wrong person.” I say panicking. My nose is still bleeding. I can manage to not pinch it upwards in order to see, but a drop drips onto the rubber floor and the boy stops calling Mary so loud and looks down at the drop of blood and says like he is concerned “Mary?”

“You have the wrong person!” I say breaking away from him, tilting my head up, so I walk right into a group of guys who are chuckling, one of them says “easy sweetie.” I find the urine smelling girl’s room, go into a stall, sit down and burst into tears. I am cupping a small pool of blood in my hand that I let drop into the toilet, the painful, gusted exhales I let out with snot and blood seem to stifle the blood. I am so tired, and the more I try to gain influence the more I isolate myself from people I care about. I do not respond in the proper way to situations. I get overwhelmed and lash out. That’s why I spend so much time by myself, but all I am trying to do is connect, with anyone, someone, and I just feel so alone and exhausted. Things are getting dark, there is a staleness to the hope I usually have. I believe I can win, we can unite Ireland, get justice for all those slights, keep fighting but is it worth losing everybody? And if I am losing everybody, who am I actually fighting? Am I mad at the Brits for taking away Adrian, Seamus, My Mum and Dad or am I just blaming this alien imperialist government for my inability to tolerate and relate to others, or my constant need to have everything my way? I miss people. I am trying to get back to them, but I feel like my choices are driving me away, or maybe that is just time moving forward, people float off, and other people just go on with their lives, but I do not want to accept the change. I want everything to be like when I was a kid and it will never be that way again. I do not really understand what I am doing, and it scares me. I wipe my eyes with toilet paper. Feeling like I will have balance if I stand again, I open the stall, avoid eye contact with anyone in the bathroom and walk out to the crowded walkway below the bleachers of the Alexandra Palace ice rink.

I am considering where I am, the families together, couples, groups on dates, skates slung over shoulders. There is a vendor selling hot pretzels and beer, so I buy two over-priced plastic cups of beer and walk out to the ice rink.

Once I come out of the portal from underneath the bleachers, an enormous amount of space opens before me. The ceiling is probably about ten stories over my head. There is a beautiful mosaic painting covering the ceiling, it seems to recreate the marriage ceremony between Prince Edward and Princess Alexandra of Denmark in some older Victorian time. A lined gallery of dignitaries, nobles, and on-lookers stare at the alien queen as Prince Edward takes her hand.   There are tall glass-paned windows with red curtains that make the ice rink resemble more of a giant ballroom. People twist, tangle, and circle on the glowing white of the ice. Blades crunch. I see a teenage boy fall down and a girl of the same age is laughing with him trying to get him up. Exhausted, I fall into one of the numbered plastic seats meant for sporting events.

The ice blackens like gunpowder and before the sound can hit my ear I see a clap of light. I am imagining the bombs at Warrington annihilating a group of preschoolers inching along the ice holding onto a rope and a skating instructor. I picture Meara’s explosion occurring, like a flash, and all the skaters screaming, shocked, people flailing in pain onto the ice, people hopelessly trying to stop the flow of blood with their scarfs. One girl drags a boy with a destroyed leg over to the other side of the ice rink and my bomb explodes. I see the clap of light, the light gray smoke, and then I hear the crack. The skaters are not sure where to run for safety, real fear pains their face, and I can start to hear ambulance sirens.

“Heaven Is A Place On Earth” by Belinda Carlisle comes over the sound system and snapping out of my imagination I see the quiet gliding of people on the pristine ice-skating rink. A young girl in a track suit lands a double axel, spreads her arms elegantly to the side, one leg lifted and smoothly skates backwards. A mother calls for her son to come to the side, he ignores her, so she yells his name, Sean Michel Smith, so loud he has to stop skating and go over to her bellowing frame. Blood is crusting underneath my nostrils above my lip, but that is all right, I do not want to rub it and start the blood flow again. I try breathing through my mouth. A few tired parents and babysitters are sitting in the numbered seats with me. On the ice, a couple looks like they are practicing a routine like they are professional figure skaters, they even have on costumes, the girl a sequined, skin-colored jump-suit and the man a tuxedo-like coat that leaves half of his chest exposed. A little girl is crying, standing on her skates on the ice, and her nanny is trying to figure out what is wrong.

I take a long pull from my beer, look at the crowds on the ice, spinning pairs, spiral sequences of uncertainty, scared falls, tired moms, hungry kids in snowsuits, people trying to have a nice time together. Taking another long pull, almost finishing the beer, feeling the cool waves of Xanax in my empty stomach, I come to realize that everything is just a twirling mess of people drifting into and away from one another. It is cruel and it is beautiful in its possibilities. I find peace a hard thing to dream of, for myself and my country, but I want to keep going, keep fighting. I drink the foam out of the bottom of the plastic cup and pick up my second beer. My eyes water from the bubbles trickling up through my nose, my face is still a swollen mess from crying, and I blink through a film of moisture so I cannot see what is in front of me. Closing my eyes, I sink into my seat.

Someone is behind me calling my name. “Carmel….. Carmel.”, so I begin to turn around.