Queen’s Day
By John Rogan
1 May 1988
Meara watched
the couples and groups of friends. Her digital watch told her it was just past
midnight. The parking lot was full. It was Sunday - technically Monday now - the
end of a party-filled holiday weekend. People were celebrating Queen’s Day, main
streets were closed, tents were set up, and large markets were open in
Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam and Eindhoven. A carnival-like day and night of
festivities swept through the Netherlands this time every year. Spring was
poking its head through the long Winter. Music muffled, boomed out of the door of the
Bacchus Nightclub in Nieuw-bergen, the Netherlands. A line of people waited to
get in. More people poured into the already crowded sidewalks. The town’s
central square, where people parked their cars, had a wild late-night timeless
hour of child-like drunken revelry. British soldiers stationed in Dutch and
West German RAF airbases liked to come to the discotheques and upscale bars in
Nieuw-Bergen. Voices reverberated off the buildings. Someone yelled something
and a lot of people cackled. A young couple drunkenly dragged each other to
their car. Meara stayed in the alleyway. No one was supposed to see or notice
her. She watched people come alive with the celebrations, the friends, the good
company. She never spoke it to herself, but there was a festering thought
bouncing behind her consciousness that excluded her from being them. That the things
they had, for whatever reason, had been snatched out of her life. Who she was,
was apart. Whatever it was that made people laugh, love and start a family were
not meant for her. She racked her brain in a rotation of guilt and anger, as
she tried to decide if it had been her own poor choices, or if the world she
had been asked to navigate had never been meant to include her. Her experiences
and her reality had all been a cruel trick, and she had not known it, but no
choice would have been the right one. Meara watched a couple make out before
they got into a taxi.
Meara
looked up into the night, and then over her shoulders down to her side, as she
thought where Brendan could be. Meara looked for him, directly behind her, but
when she felt the presence, snapped quickly around, and turned, there was never
anything there.
She
stood in an alleyway across the street. People parked in the parking lot then
crossed the street and waited in line to get in. Trampled trash blew in the
slight breeze. Meara pictured Ann, and she saw her scream, holding her hands
over her ears.
Meara’s eyes fixated on
the lit sign that said Disco Dancing. All the spaces were full, so cars started
parking on the sidewalk. She looked at her watch again. It was just before 1
am.
When
she thought of everything that had happened, it made sense. Late-night smiles
lightly-floated here, but she wanted to hear them scream. She wanted them to wonder
where the people they cared about were. To laugh and joke, and have people know
who she was, and to care about her. She knew that was closed to her now. Meara
thought how absolute the break was, and how before her face had started to heat
up, her chest got hot and the tears came. Now, it was just a coldness, a
knowledge that crying would mean nothing. No one cared. People had their
distraction, their loved ones. Meara saw a young man open a car door for a
young woman. A girl fell, laughing, and her friends giggled into hysterics.
They got her onto her feet and shuffled together across the street to the
parking lot.
She
wanted them to feel a shock, a shock that would daze them for months, and
years, a shock so bad that it made everything make no sense. Meara wanted to
deny. She wanted to isolate them the way she had been isolated. They needed to
feel it. The blinding confusion and not understanding - why the thing that
meant so much to her had to go away.
The
bomb was in the front pocket of her jacket. She tried not to touch it. British
servicemen drove cars with distinct license plates. It was almost 1 am. She
took the package out of her front jacket pocket. Her mind numbed now, she
stopped rattling down the years, and seemed to be watching herself switch the
small metal knob to active it. No static. She held it steady in front of her.
She thought of a radio signal finding its way into the wiring. It had to be flat ground. The car she had
picked out was only 10 meters from where she stood. She squatted beneath it. Refracted light off a
street light dimly lit the underside. She waited until the carpenter level
bubble was in the middle, between the two black lines, and then hit the second
metal switch downwards. Her hands hovered in front of the bomb, after she hit
the second switch. She double-checked that she had done everything right, mentally,
as her hands hovered in the air. Meara realized all at once, squatting, coming
out of the preparations that she could be seen or blown-up, so she walked away.
She
opened the passenger side door, got in and said,
“Everything went fine.” Dessie nodded and said:
“Haven’ t seen anything, no cops, no active
military, nothing weird.” Dessie pulled out and accelerated. They stopped to let a group of people cross
the street. Trailing the group was a blonde boy and blonde girl walking, arms
slung over each other’s shoulders, supporting each other’s weight. Meara
watched the couple arrive onto the sidewalk. She peered out the side window and
saw the ease of people interacting, having fun, and going home exhausted.
Gatherings of soft, positive emotions, played back between individuals
throughout the night. Dessie drove forward, after the couple was finally onto
the other side of the street. “Go the speed limit.” Meara said flatly.
“Aye” Dessie said,
annoyed.
She cracked her window and the distant echo of
voices reminded her of the life she had. The orange streetlights and the
darkening street merged with her thoughts, as they headed out of town. She recalled hitting the metal switch. She
recalled the voices and faces that had known her for who she was, and how she
never would see them again. People would find out, just as she had, that future
was closed now, and their lives would be filled with loss and tears.
17
September 1981
Meara looked left, then behind her.
Turning right, Meara jumped in her seat, startled. There was a girl sitting
right next to her.
“I didn’t mean to scare you.” Meara
laughed at herself, and the ghost-like presence of this girl. “My name’s Ann. I
don’t know if you’ve talked with the other girls, but my cousin didn’t do it.”
“Do what?” Meara asked, taking stock
of the grim-faced girl. Ann’s hair was so light brown it was almost blonde. Her
eyes were so blue they seemed white. Ann’s actions seemed very deliberate. Her
manner of speaking was very flat, elongated, monotone, and emotionless, and Ann
seemed impervious to adhering to any normal style of speaking. Amused, Meara
thought how it was like speaking with a moving statue. Ann’s eyes looked
downwards at the table, only peering up to see if Meara was paying attention.
“I just came to sit with you because I
heard what the other girls were saying about the soldiers being at your house.”
Meara’s face got hot, and she felt like she was going to cry. Meara tried to
picture girls whispering about her in her head, it was too painful. She ended
the thought with a feeling of bitterness, unable to resolve the frustration of
having to comprehend words said about her, but not to her.
“What were they saying?” Meara’s face
subdued into meanness, her eyes angrily solicited Ann.
Ann’s eye’s began to bulge out. She
did not mean to upset Meara. Ann was getting upset that she had upset her. Ann
had just wanted to be friends. She started to stammer, and her voice started to
raise. Other girls started to look over. Ann was trying to start a sentence,
but kept stumbling on the first syllable, and instead of slowing down to
pronounce the word, she tried to force the sound out of her mouth. Ann grew
embarrassed and angry, as the word continued not to form, so her voice began
rising in the frustration. Meara was scared, and was not sure if Ann was having
some kind of medical or psychological fit. Meara was about to stand up from the
table, but she felt bad for Ann, and wanted to make sure she was alright.
“Are you choking?”
“AAAAhhh, w…wh.what?”
“Are you choking or having an asthma
attack or something?” Ann started to cry.
“I..I..I didn’t m..m..m..mean to m..m..make
you maaaad. E.E..E.veryone thinks Ima, Ima, mama weird or a cr..cr.iminal and
no one will t.t.t.t….reat me ” Ann said crying hard now. Meara, shocked, put
her hand on her back and tried to get Ann to calm down. The entire cafeteria
was looking now. A teacher came over and told Ann to collect her things. Like
Ann knew the drill, she dejectedly started to grab her backpack. “I was just
trying to make a friend.” Ann sobbed.
“I know, Ann.” The teacher said.
“Sorry.” Meara whispered to Ann. Meara
felt bad she had upset Ann, but she really felt it was not her fault.
“I…I..iIiii” Ann tried to say.
“Ann.” The teacher said. “We should
get you down to Ms. Florentine’s office.”
2
October 1981
The soldiers and the forensics team
had left, but the rumors seemed to take their place. Ever since the shooting in
mid-July, soldiers, police, detectives and crime scene technicians had been
sweeping her house. They put anything they thought could be evidence into small
plastic bags. They ended up finding 273 shell casings. They looked under
Meara’s bed, and looked through her personal things. Patrick, Bernadette,
Meara, and Jen had to wait outside in an RUC van since it was raining so hard.
When Meara came back into her room everything was in the same place, but
slightly off. Her room felt dirty, and she did not like spending time alone in
it anymore. Instead, she camped out in front of the television, sleeping on the
sofa. Patrick or Bernadette would tell her to go to bed if they found her
asleep on the sofa. Meara would go into her room, lay down, but she felt like
someone was touching her or watching her, so she waited until Bernadette and
Patrick were asleep and crept back out. After repeated mornings of finding
Meara asleep on the sofa, Bernadette and Patrick gave up.
The morning news report always had the
most detail. If it started out with a story on Jobs or the Economy, nothing
good had happened. Meara loved it when they went to the reporter on the street.
There was usually crime scene tape, tear
gas floating along the little rows of houses in West Belfast. When a bomb had
destroyed a car or a storefront, the reporter would say who had taken
responsibility, if warning calls had been given, and how many were killed or
injured.
This
morning the news was about an election for the Ulster Unionist party, bored she
flipped the screen off. Meara took the bus up to Newry, and thought how people
would be talking about her, but she would not talk to anyone that day. When she
looked out the window she thought of the 15 year-old boy who had been hit in
the head by a plastic bullet in Derry, how it had taken him ten days to die,
and she imagined people, screaming and crying, as it got to the end of day
nine.
When she walked into the cafeteria in
the morning it was like the other girls placed a pall over her just by giving
her attention, but never interacting with her. Like she was a sad show to be
watched. Meara usually exhaled and composed her thoughts before going through
the door. Girls called at her, but when she turned to respond, everyone ducked
and giggled. Ever since she started to take the bus up to Saint Mary’s when she
was 11, Meara had trouble fitting in. All the changes. They had happened so
fast. The new school, the new girls, the new uniforms, she was far away from
everything she knew in Killeen. The images she had to walk through hurt, a girl
laughed at Meara when she asked if Meara wore a bra. During the first week she
had lost a folder to one her classes. All the girls had laughed when her face
had grown hot and she cried so much in the hallway they had to get Mrs.
Florentine. Most of the girls were from Newry, and they considered Meara with
suspicion. Was she a Fenian or with British Intelligence? The soldiers on her
property could point to both or either. The rumors about the shooting this past
Summer had put the final nail in the coffin for Meara’s social acceptance into
the larger social groups at St. Mary’s. The things she did, and the things that
occurred to her were just too weird for the other girls at St. Mary’s to risk
their social reputations and take her seriously.
Meara saw Ann sitting by herself. The
waved from afar and both smiled. Meara put her bag down on the table, sat down,
and said “Hey!”
“Hey!” Ann responded, happy to see
Meara, but not enthusiastic. Most of the other tables had ten to up to
twenty-five girls sitting at them. The social pressure of the before-school
cafeteria seemed to recede. Meara had company.
“Do you want to come over after
school?” Meara had slowly felt things slipping out her control. Her family, her
life, the rumors, never fitting in, the news reports she kept running around in
her head. Ann wanted to be a part of Meara. Ann explained how she had trouble
speaking properly sometimes, and she had trouble writing things down sometimes,
how the letters seem to swim around on the page, so it was like she was looking
at the page, but she could not get down the order of the letters on it. “I
can’t see them!” Ann would say frustrated. Meara learnt how Ann went to talk to
Mrs. Florentine every day, because she would get upset. Everybody else could
read and not stutter, but Ann could not absorb anything or express herself, so
she usually ended up crying and getting sent to Mrs. Florentine’s office. Ann
and Meara became friends because of the dueling rumors. Most other girl’s lives
were too dull to draw the celebrity that Meara and Ann had evoked. Ann’s Cousin
was from Omeath, and his friend from London were hiking around Warrenpoint in
79, two years ago. That was the day six paratroopers were killed by a roadside
bomb, so they heard the explosion and went to go see what happened. The British
Military claims they were fired upon in between the explosions. Ann’s cousin
was injured, and his friend from London was killed. They did not have any weapons.
Everyone in Omeath was afraid of the reprisals. The Paratroopers were angry and
upset, so they started shooting at anyone they saw, and Ann’s cousin just happened
to be there. The Military had tried to say he was armed, but he was not.
Neither was his dead friend. Their names never got cleared, because half an
hour later another bomb went off. The IRA had guessed the British Military
would use the farmhouse, the only structure around, as a command point after
the bombing, so they had placed another bomb in the farmhouse. Twelve British
Servicemen died when it went off. There had been an aura of mystery surrounding
Ann’s family from Omeath since then, even though Ann knew her cousin and his
friend well. They were business partners, into making money not trouble, and
she knew they did not have guns of any kind. They were just out for a hike.
“I’ll have to ask my Mom, but she’ll
say yes.”
“Cool!, my Mom is picking me up, so we
don’t have to take the crappy Killeen bus.”
“Your Mom’s really pretty.” Ann said.
“Thanks.” Meara said smiling. Ann
seemed lost and looking for something and Meara wanted to give her that. Meara
had been planning this afternoon out since this Summer, looking for a
participant, to partake, and do what Meara wanted. Everything was slipping out
of control, but this afternoon Ann was coming over.
Lace curtains shadows, set against the
sun coming through the window, splayed dark patterns on the side of Ann’s neck.
Bernadette had to go over to the petrol station to help Patrick. Meara and Ann
had sat in front of the television, watching the commercials, when the show
came on they went into Meara’s bedroom. Meara began to explain to Ann how she
had stolen some neck ties from her Dad’s room. Her voice started to shake and
she was trembling, but she told Ann to lay down on the bed. Meara ordered Ann
to sit up and put her hands together in front of her. She started to tie Ann’s
hands together with the neck tie. Ann looked puzzled, and she looked from the
neck tie being tightened around her wrists up to Meara’s face and then back to
her wrists. Meara was shaking, trying to steady herself, and wondering if Ann
would say anything. Ann bowed her head in silence, and Meara grew less nervous.
Meara double knotted the neck tie twice and pushed Ann down onto the bed. Meara
held Ann’s hands over her head and began to massage her vagina. Meara asked if
she could take Ann’s pants off and Ann quietly said ‘ok’.
Bernadette came back in, “Hi Girls. I
got some yarn and some needles, and I was hoping we could practice our
knitting, Meara! Ann!”
Meara untied the neck tie and they put
Ann’s pants back on. Meara opened her bedroom door and they slinked out of it.
Bernadette’s stare became intense.
“What are we doing with closed bedroom
doors?” Meara was dumbfounded, so without a stutter, Ann said, “Meara was just
showing me her room. I like the pink wallpaper.” Satisfied, but still
suspicious, she looked over the two girls before dropping the subject.
Bernadette could sense something was off, but told herself it was something
beyond her adult viewpoint.
“Oh, why Thank You Ann. That was so
nice of you to say. And so well-said. Me and Meara picked out that color. I
wanted a tan, beige and Meara wanted full blown pink, so we compromised. “What
was it called Meara?”
“Vibrant Salmon, and it looks pink
anyways.” Turning to speak just to Ann, Meara said. “My mom wanted my room to
look like the walls were made of human skin.”
“Gross!” Ann laughed and Bernadette
made a sarcastic disapproving face to Meara.
16 March
1982
An eleven-year-old boy waiting for his
friend outside a shop in Bainbridge center in Derry was killed when the IRA
detonated a car bomb with no warning. Thirty-Four other people were injured. A
father and his son had been shot and killed when someone broke into their
house, people said it was an internal dispute amongst one of the loyalist
gangs.
A boy named Brendan would park his car
in the parking lot of Saint Mary’s. he would sit on the hood and offer
cigarettes to girls. Ann and Meara were walking to the bus afterschool when he
called them over. Cigarettes made Meara’s stomach hurt, so she said no thanks.
Ann took one and held it in her hand when Brendan did not offer to light it.
Brendan talked to Ann and Meara, just like they were popular, he seemed a
little older than the girls at the school. He genuinely seemed to wonder what
there day had been like. Ann stuttered,
“S-super boring, I-I-I have a ton of homework.” Ann looked down, embarrassed.
Brendan noticed the stutter, realized she was embarrassed by it, and said
“oohpf, homework, that’s for smart ones like yourselves. I work construction,
only homework we have is draining pints. What are your teachers like?” Brendan
looked past the girls to the school, confounded by what went on within its
walls. Brendan had been leering at Meara the entire time, and kept making
suggestive eye contact. He was trying to get her to understand something
without saying it. Meara reminded Ann that they had to catch the bus, so they
said Goodbye. He wanted to know their names. “Brendan.” He extended his hand
out to Meara. Meara put her thin hand out and held it there as he shook it,
“Meara.”
“Nice to meet you Meara. And..?” He turned to
Ann.
“Ann”, she smiled and finished his
question. Brendan shook Ann’s hand eagerly. “Nice speaking with both of you. I
hope to see you around.” They giggled, but made no audible sound as they looked
at one another on the way to the bus. Ann broke the tension, as they
bottle-necked around the doors to the bus with other girls. “Well, he was
cute.” Meara turned bright red. “Why are you so red!?” Ann asked amusingly.
“Shut up!” Meara laughed and tried to
hide her face.
“You are turning redder.” Ann said.
Meara was able to compose herself, as she walked down the middle aisle of the
damp smelling bus. Meara took the seat along the window. The discipline imposed
roles of the school day wore off, with a wild energy in the bus. All of a
sudden the girls were in a social environment with no rules and no teachers,
and the bus driver never got involved. The bus headed South of Newry, towards
towns along the border, like Meara’s home town of Killeen. Ann was from Meigh,
so her stop was first. There was a girl in their grade, Angela, who seemed to
have put herself in charge of compiling profiles of the personal lives of
everyone at the school. Angela had no real friends because she was always
trying to gleam details of people’s personal lives, so no one trusted her. She
bounced from social group to social group saying too much, so she did not have
the hierarchical social superiority most of the other more cliquey girls had
and she did not use a lower-than-me tone of condescension when speaking with
Ann and Meara.
“isn’t that guy cool?”
Angela
flopped her arms over the big green back of her bus seat.
“Ya.” Meara responded. Angela leaned
in “You know he was questioned in the murder of Sir Norman Stronge. Ya, poor
guy he was 80 or something and just watching tv with his son..you didn’t hear
about this?”
“I
think so.” Meara said weakly.
“They
went out to his big Estate outside Tynan, they blew the doors open with
grenades, and when the RUC showed up the whole Abbey was on fire. The RUC found
Sir Norman and his son James, laying in the library, a bullet in each of their
heads. There was a big gun battle when the police tried to stop the IRA fellas,
there was supposed to be ten to fifteen of them. They had machine guns and
fired a whole bunch at the officers, so they all got away. But the police
brought him in”, Angela motioned toward the parking lot, “for questioning a
whole bunch of times and they think he was there.” Angela seemed to grow
excited telling the story, transferring the information. Without stopping to
listen to Meara or Ann respond, Angela asked, and then panted out of breath
from speaking so much, so quickly: “Why are you two always hanging out so much,
it’s like you’re married?”
Angela smiled, mirthfully, with a
I-know-something-you-don’t-know expression on her face. The bus-driver sat down
heavily in the driver seat, he screamed “Everybody sit down!” Angela slipped
down into her seat, and the bus began to move forward.
7th
December 1982
It was after school, and Meara did not
want to ride the bus to the claustrophobic control that was her house. Ann and
Meara were in the girls’ bathroom. The halls were empty, except for a stray
teacher. Ann started to hit Meara’s
arms. But Meara would not let go. Meara had her hands around Ann’s throat, she
had gently pushed her up against the tile wall, and slowly squeezed her hands
around her neck. She knew that she should let Ann go, but she felt invigorated
watching Ann struggle for air. Meara gritted her teeth, and looked into Ann’s
eyes. There seemed to be real fear there, and reading this emotion, Meara felt
pervasively and supremely powerful.
Last
Spring IRA Bombs blew up in Armagh, Ballymena, Belfast, Bessbroke, Derry, and
Magherafelt all on the same day, two people were killed in Magherafelt, twelve
injured, and they estimated the damage at about 1 million pounds. A 64 year-old
woman was stabbed and shot by the UDA when she tried to stop them from robbing
her post office in County Down.
Over
the Summer two IRA bombs went off in London, one underneath a bandstand with thirty
British Military bandsmen standing on it playing ‘Oliver! tunes to a crowd, the other explosion was in the boot of a
car on the Horse’s Guards parade grounds. Four soldiers were killed, and seven
horses died. A picture of the aftermath was on the news, the horses lay in the
blood and the burnt-out twisted wreckage of the exploded car.
As
school started, there were reports of Catholics being kidnapped by a Loyalist
gang in Belfast, and just before Halloween they found a body. A middle-aged man
getting off of work had hailed a taxi cab, when he got in they started beating
him. They took him back to a house, pulled out his teeth and beat him to death
with a shovel. The leader of the gang, named Lenny Murphy, called a prominent
Catholic politician demanding the release of Loyalist Prisoners. The IRA and
the UDA had gotten together and planned to have Lenny killed. Lenny had gotten
out of control. In November he pulled his car up behind his house, and two
gunmen fired over 20 rounds into him.
Meara let go and Ann gasped in a breath of
air. As soon as Ann began to catch her breath, she started crying. Meara leaned
up against the sink and lit a cigarette she had stolen from her Dad. She took
two puffs, and watched Ann retching on the floor.
“Meara, I think you popped, some blood
vessels, that really hurt.” The word Hurt melted into tears and crying. Meara
put her cigarette out and took Ann’s chin in her hands.
“Where?” Ann pointed to the side of
her neck. Meara could make out two yellowing bruises on either side of Ann’s
neck. “it’s fine” Meara said, but she was silently shocked. Meara thought Ann
would never react. Ann never complained. This was the first time it registered
to Meara that Ann was actually feeling something in response to Meara’s
developing sadistic desires.
“Stop crying.” Meara was starting to
get upset she had hurt Ann. She was losing control of the situation. Ann looked
up in horror. “Are you okay?” Meara responded to Ann’s face, but Ann was
silent. Meara turned around. Mrs. Florentine stood, her face squinched, nose
scrunched up in disgust, holding the half-cigarette Meara had stamped out on
the bathroom sink.
The previous night a bomb had exploded
at the Droppin Well Bar in Balleykelly. 17 people were killed. 11 of them
soldiers. The bar was right by a British Army Barracks, and was frequented by
soldiers. Andrea Florentine saw the stretchers, the strained voices of the
reporters, the destroyed bar front, and the loss of the dead and wounded on
this morning’s news, but there was something else she saw in the instant of
shock, just like the acute horror….
In
February 1978 her and her husband, James, had been eating dinner at the La Mon
restaurant outside of Belfast. There was an explosion, the sound of glass
shattering and then a fireball filled the room. She remembers inhaling out of
shock and the heat. The image of James dissolved like film overexposed. She had
2nd and 3rd degree burns over 40 percent of her body. James’s
lungs, face, and mouth received 1 st degree burns and he stopped breathing just
as the ambulances were showing up. The INLA had attached a bomb to the window
of the restaurant, and attached to the bomb were several canisters of petrol
that ignited. They had tried to call in a warning, but the payphone had been
vandalized, and the warning came in too late.
Mrs. Florentine spent the next two years going
in to The Ulster Hospital in Dundonald three times a week to do painful
nerve-tingling skin grafts. After James’s funeral she went on anti-depressants,
and was terrified of going outside. She never sat or
ordered food in a restaurant or cafe. Never went for drinks at a bar. She cried
randomly when she thought about having to go the grocery store, until she just
had everything brought to her house. She became afraid to walk by cars,
thinking there could be a bomb in it. She got through the skin grafts, and
after cognitive therapy she was ready to go back to work as the head Guidance
Counselor at St. Mary’s. She helped girls fill out their applications for
University, but like today she played a more maternal role, as she waited for
Ann and Meara’s parents to arrive.
In the fluorescent silence of the office,
Mrs. Florentine thought of the news this morning, The Droppin Well bar like a
collapsed burnt shell, and how people were being informed that the person they
loved was gone, just like when, blind, her nerves searing with pain, she had
learned that she would never see James again.
Mrs. Florentine felt a headache
coming from the intensity of her memories. She excused herself from the girls,
went to her private bathroom, kept the door open, so she could still watch the
girls, and took a .5 mg Valium pill. She wanted to be composed in front of Ann
and Meara’s parents and tell them about her concerns. Returning to her seat,
she asked Meara again: “Meara, I just need to know, you are not in trouble, you
know, I just need to know, if it was a game or…did you put those marks on Ann?”
the bruises on Ann’s neck had started to turn blue. Meara shook her head
sideways and said “no.”
“Ok, Ann, can you tell me how you got
those bruises.” Ann said nothing, then moaned inaudibly and cried more.
“Ok.” Mrs. Florentine looked at the
calm, composed figure of Meara with suspicion.
-
Bernadette left Mrs. Florentine’s
office with Meara. At a distance trailed Ann and both her parents. Mrs.
Florentine had done a good job of keeping everything civil, but Ann’s parents were
mad at Meara, and so by default Bernadette. Meara and Bernadette walked across
the school parking lot to Bernadette’s car. It had been cold and cloudy all
day, and now that the sun had set the wind and rain seemed to drive into their
faces no matter how they turned. Meara could not hear what Bernadette was
saying over the wind, until they got inside the car. Bernadette pulled off her
plastic hair bonnet and water splashed over the windshield. Annoyed, Bernadette
tried to wipe the water off while speaking to Meara. Ann’s parents hunched over
Ann as they made their way to their car. Meara was not listening to Bernadette.
Meara thought she saw Ann look in her direction, against the dark wind and the
rain. Her father gently pushed her into the back of the car, holding an
umbrella over her, as Ann’s bluish-white eyes looked for Meara, and did not see
her.
20
February 1983
A 20-year old RUC Constable named
Edward Mcgill walked out of the front of the Warrenpoint RUC station to grab
some lunch. He walked along the high stone wall, and then for about 50 metres
followed the stone wall around a corner, heading for a grocery store that sold
sandwiches.
Brendan and Dessie sat in the car with
black ski masks over their face. They were positioned so they could not be seen
from the security checkpoint at the front of the station. Brendan had a
tech-nine semi-automatic nine-millimeter pistol, while Dessie carried an AK-47.
Dessie had a nail bomb he kept wanting to throw, but Brendan did not feel it
was necessary.
Constable Mcgill walked past them. He
seemed to be thinking of things beyond where he was, because when Dessie and
Brendan stepped out of the car, he immediately recognized who and what they
were, and a look of anguished horror came on his face. For one moment, less
than a second Dessie and Brendan and Edward Mcgill comprehended one another.
Edward saw the determination in their eyes, that he was not just another person
to them, and terrified he took off running back around the corner to the front
of the station and the security checkpoint.
“Shit!” Brendan yelled. Brendan ran
after him. He was firing, one shot right after the next, with the Tec 9, and
running for the Constable. He emptied the clip, and was taking another out of
his pocket, when he looked back he saw Dessie fumbling to pick up the nail-bomb
and put it in his pocket. Dessie kept trying to hold the pipe-bomb with nails
wrapped around it, while firing the AK-47. The rifle kept recoiling out of his
hands, and knocking the pipe bomb he was trying to hold out of his grip.
Brendan looked around the corner of the Base’s wall, and saw the Constable
getting close to the safety of the security checkpoint out front, with its
breast works, and mounted submachine gun. The guard on duty was alerted, so
Brendan yelled to Dessie.
“You’re going to blow yourself up! Go
for the soldier. The soldier in the sanger!” Dessie looked wide-eyed at Brendan
then seemed to realize instantly what he was saying. He stood aside the corner
Brendan hid behind, ten metres over to Brendan’s right into the wide-open road.
Dessie dropped his AK onto the ground, just as the Submachine behind the
breastworks began to fire, unperturbed he focused on the wick and held the
lighter there until the sparks caught. He looked at the guard firing at him,
judged the distance and threw. Right as the nail-bomb left Dessie’s hand
Brendan came from around the corner, determined to reach the fleeing Constable
before he got back into the front entrance of the station. Brendan ran and fired,
not hitting anything, his arm and aim, bouncing around the Constable’s figure
as the tec-nine kept recoiling upward. Just then the soldier behind the
submachine gun noticed Brendan approaching, turned to fire on him, and a giant
explosion rocked the breastworks. The soldier, dazed, began to reach for the
mounted submachine gun again, and Dessie started firing the AK at the sandbags
in front of the soldier, so the soldier ducked. Brendan had emptied his 2nd
clip and took the last spare one he had out of his pocket. Dessie kept firing
the AK. Constable Mcgill, frantically
running, was almost to the safety of the sandbags and the checkpoint. Brendan
put the clip into his gun and chambered the round. Constable Mcgill had his
hand up around his head like he was trying to shield himself from the firing.
Brendan quickly wondered if the Constable was wearing a flak jacket, so he
aimed for the Constable’s hand set against his dark hair. The constable had ten
meters to run before he was back into the safety of the RUC station. Brendan
squeezed slowly once, and then robotically again, his forearm steadied against
the upward recoil. He looked up from the gun’s sights and watched the Constable
fall to the ground. Brendan heard a pause from Dessie firing the Ak-47, but it
started again in a giant swell, now that Dessie had reloaded. Brendan kept
firing at the Constable on the ground, hoping he had killed him. The soldier
Dessie kept pinned behind the sandbags kept trying to come up, grab the mounted
machine gun, but every time the AK cackled, and the soldier ducked behind the
sand bags. Firing a last burst of shots, his clip almost empty, Brendan ran
backwards along the high stone wall of the fort and around the corner. Dessie
stood out in the open firing, and slowly walked out of the road way and to the
safety of the corner. Brendan ran for the car and started it. Dessie stood
behind the corner, firing, keeping the guard pinned. Brendan did a quick U-turn
in the road, and pulled alongside Dessie. Dessie jumped into the passenger
seat. Brendan heard the engine accelerate, the landscape speed up, until the pedal
was hitting the floor. They flew down the Warrenpoint road in the opposite
direction of the RUC base.
Brendan headed for some farmland where
they could cross the border.
“Slow
down, we’re aways enough away.”
“Ok.”
Brendan said, slowing. Dessie lit a cigarette.
“I
think you got that Constable.”
Brendan
dropped off Dessie in Dundalk. He drove over to Omeath and ditched the car. He
got into his own car and drove through the Republic for two hours, entering
back into Northern Ireland from the opposite direction of Warrenpoint by way
Belco and Enniskillen. He had a pre-arranged
alibi that he would be doing construction work with a pro-Republican contractor
in Newry. Brendan had never met the contractor, but if anyone official asked of
Brendan’s whereabouts, the contractor would make a time slip with Brendan’s
name on it, and show investigators how he was at work, during the time in
question.
He
had been smoking continuously since dropping off Dessie. Now after close to
four hours of driving he was back on the familiar streets of Newry when,
flicking his cigarette out the window he saw Meara trudging along the sidewalk,
her eyes staring into the pavement.
“Hey!”
he yelled to her. It would be good to be seen by someone. It was four-thirty in
the afternoon, getting dark and he was off his construction job. His adrenaline
was flat, and he was tired from all the driving. He could not believe he was
alive. He could have been shot. That Constable had family, but he thought of
some rich English monarchs, and he put the thought quickly behind him, before
it gained too much weight. Meara had walked out of school, and had just kept
walking. She had cried so much her face hurt, so she stopped crying and for the
past hour and a half had been unsure of what to do.
Ever
since Meara and Ann had gotten caught after school, Ann’s parents had requested
that Meara and Ann not share the same lunches or classes. The teachers
explained they could not keep the girls separated forcibly. Ann’s parents
forbid Ann from speaking with Meara. Ann and Meara tried to talk before-school,
or after, but Ann always seemed pre-occupied. Ann’s parents had told her all
sorts of true and mostly untrue bad stuff about Meara and the Kelly family, and
now Ann seemed to carry this weight with her when Meara tried to talk to her
like the equals they had been.
Meara
was upset that Ann was not in her lunch break, that things were different, and
now she had to sit by herself. She was the subject of intensified rumors, not
only was there a Republican ambush on her property, but there were rumors now,
about Ann and Meara, dating, being lesbians, into weird pornography. The more
Meara was isolated, the wilder the rumors got. Today at lunch, having no
appetite, with the roar of uniformed girls around her, and no one to talk to,
she had gotten up from the lunch table, telling herself she was going to the
bathroom, but she walked past the bathroom doors, down the hallway. She grabbed
her jacket from her locker and walked out the doors of Saint Mary’s.
“Can
you give me a ride home?” Meara replied, her face tiring into filmy tears
around her red eyes.
27 June 1983
Meara cracked the window. The interior
of the car had become humid. Brendan had told her to wait here. She had agreed
to take the ride down to Ardee in the Republic.
She had been sitting on The Mall in Newry,
looking over the Newry river, and trying to do anything to stay out of her
house. The hot day stretched endlessly before her, she thought of what Ann was
doing, before she saw Brendan pull up.
Her
sister, Jen, was off to a post-secondary Biology program at the University of
Glasgow in Scotland. With Jen out of the house, there was a vacant energy that
found its home by overwhelming Meara. Bernadette and Patrick had trouble
dealing with Jen being gone, and they unknowingly began to be
overly-controlling with Meara. She had begun skipping school, frustrated at the
teacher’s clear efforts to keep her and Ann apart. The rumors had affected the
teachers, and fear governed their safe-nets. It seemed absurdly cruel to Meara.
Whenever she was in the halls of St. Mary’s she got so depressed she seemed to
instinctually head for the doorway outside.
She had told Brendan on the way down.
It was not a lesbian love-affair. After the shooting that took place on her
property things seemed to have shifted into something beyond the neat surface
appearances, into something scary. Meara was increasingly frightened that she
did not know how to understand this phase of her life. She had to become a part
of the environment she lived in, there was no neutral and that had been her
downfall. Not Protestant or Catholic, but something remnant in the
reverberations of conflict. A kind of paranoia that raised immaterial fear to
corporeal reaction. Things that otherwise never would have happened became
barriers that resolutely existed. An emotion pounced on and stifled here, would
have grown elsewhere. Ann and Meara had carried on like conflict was not part
of them, but they never had a choice. Things would become divided. Meara
thought of the arcade in Newry center. Its three or four machines, how Ann and
her had slammed away quarter after quarter. Ann pulled back the lever to shoot
the small metal ball. She grimaced, making a crazed “Aaahhh” sound, before letting
the ball fly. Standing upright, Ann followed where the paddles and bumpers
knocked the ball.
“I guess she was just like stability,
like the ground, just knowing she would be around, and now I feel like the
ground is gone now, and things are like smashing me back and forth.”
She was scared. People things said
could destroy the relationships with people she loved. With school out for the
Summer, the last discreet place Ann and Meara had to catch glimpses of one
another was gone. Ann had grown distant more than Meara could comprehend. When
Meara had tried to talk to her last, Ann acted like she knew some sad thing
Meara did not, but Ann was trying to be polite and amuse Meara anyway. She thought
of before things had gotten bad with Ann, with Mrs. Florentine and their parents,
like at the Arcade in Newry - a sly smile, a crazed laugh, a look of not having
to say why they both looked so tired, and just wanting to joke and talk about
nothing real.
She
had told Brendan searching her own motivation, that they did like to hug and
touch, but nothing like what girls at school were saying. They practice kissed
for when they met boys. They were very close. Meara left the part out about
herself being controlling, how she had liked to hit Ann, and hold her down, and
make her upset. Doing that stuff made Meara feel good. In the same thought she
realized how warped it was that she enjoyed hurting her friend, but she also
knew outwardly how insane it would look to talk about this behavior like it was
normal. Meara blamed her parents and the people around her more, suppressing
the painful thought that her own lack of empathy had caused Ann to not want to
be around her.
He listened conscientiously, letting her know
she did not have to talk about it. His interest was piqued, but he realized she
was very young as she spoke. He also got a glimpse into just how unstable
Meara’s outward perspective was, and how he could guide her into a little bit
of confidence. He noticed the outward signs of confusion and anger, not
realizing he knew those signs so well, because he himself experienced these
feelings so often. Ann and Meara had kissed. They had laid together and felt
the warmth coming off of one another’s groin, and it felt good, but it came out
of all the tumult. The constant changes. Meara could remember being a little
girl with her Mom driving her everywhere, and now things were more and more up
to herself. She thought of the soft blue wall-paper of her pre-school, and the
safety that seemed to line her memories. The future seemed jagged and unstable.
Things were moving faster than she could keep up with, and Ann could not keep
up either. Meara told Brendan about Ann’s cousins in Omeath and the Warrenpoint
bombing. “No shit!” he had said amused. “Aye, the Brits got all upset, poor fellas
in the wrong place at the wrong time. They’re trying to make themselves alright
for shooting him for doing nothing. Sad. I see it all the time, planting guns
on fellas, vicious bastards the security forces, even the Gardai.”
Meara
wanted to make clear what she was saying, but on the ride down into the
Republic it seemed to get lost in the air when she heard it out loud.
“We
weren’t like girlfriend-boyfriend, but I still miss her all the same.”
-
“Get
yor fahking cunt face into the floor.” Brendan found that it was better to
yell, be scary, overwhelmingly violent, quickly in and then quickly out. The
woman had looked up from the tile floor of the Ardee Post Office and made
eye-contact with Brendan through his ski mask. He took the sack of money and
change and hit her with it, knowing it would scare her, but not really hurt
her. There was less security at Banks in the Republic. This morning he had seen
Meara sitting on The Mall along the Newry River, after he lifted the car. He
thought it was a risk, but he would look less suspicious if he took Meara with
him, kept her in the dark, told her he was taking her on something like a date.
A guy with a girl was less likely to be stopped or pulled over. Meara was
extremely attractive to him, both physically with her developing teenage body
and long brown hair, and in her forlorn state of young, bewildered anger.
Brendan was 18, the same age as Meara’s older sister, Jen, but Brendan did not
get a scholarship to Glasgow. He stopped showing up to school years ago. He
thought of trying relay her something from the pointless pain of his own
experience, knowing that he could not be too authoritative, or she would just
push back. Present the ideas, the situations, her possible responses and let
her choose. Brendan knew how scary things got when life narrowed into who one
was, but people did not like what one had become.
The
ski-mask was in his hand, and the gun in his belt. When he got back into the
car, trying not to look out of breath, or like his heart rate was high, he said
as casually as he could make it sound. “Ok, that’s all set, you still hungry?”
9 September 1983
Mrs.
Florentine got Meara’s trembling figure into her office. Her office door was
soundproof. Mrs. Florentine felt, some things had to remain private.
School had started again at St.
Mary’s, but Ann was not present. Over the Summer, Ann had been sent to a
boarding school in London. Meara, after the long Summer, had looked for Ann in
the hallways, by the slamming lockers, scanning the tables of the cafeteria,
until she wandered the halls, skipping class, looking into the bathrooms. It
was when she started to get upset that the other girls informed her about Ann.
“Oh Romeo, oh Romeo, where for art
thou Romeo.” A girl paly acted in front of Meara. The malicious hint, subtly
dropped. Were they talking about her and Ann? Meara could not ask, because they
would not tell her. It was by the end of the first week that the panic began to
set in, a feeling that something essential was closed to her. Something that
had once been so active in her mind was now vacant, Meara did not know, but she
sensed the sad future swallowing her up. A flat terrorizing dread buzzed into a
headache. A cold sweat broke out on the back of her neck. she began to smell
her own body odor. Meara had not eaten all day, and she was not hungry. Meara,
wandering the halls, not going to class, and looking in the custodial closets,
had caught the other girl’s attention. They heard Ann was picked up by British
Intelligence, because they found a link between her cousin and the bombing at
Warrenpoint in 79. One girl said Ann had become sick with Aids and had to go to
a hospital in America to get treatment. This rumor circulated then Aids changed
to Cancer. Ann had to go to Cancer treatments in Sweden. By the end of the week,
Meara had trouble sitting in a desk. She would ask to go to the bathroom and
not come back to class. After hearing of the eighth skipped class, Mrs.
Florentine had Meara come to her office, and asked her to sit down.
“Meara, I know this is the first week
of school and there is a lot of transition and stress. I’ve had reports form
some of your teachers and I feel I may know what is going on. Ann is no longer
a student at Saint Mary’s High School. I’m very sorry. I know you were very
good friends. Her parents felt it would be better if she attended another
school, a boarding school in London. It’s best…”
Meara shrieked into crying, Mrs.
Florentine, stunned, stopped speaking and wide-eyed watched Meara’s figure
collapse forward into hysterical crying. The violence of it upset Mrs.
Florentine, who felt like crying now herself. Looking away, unsure of what to
do or say, she pushed a box of tissues towards Meara, and tried to be
respectful. Meara did not calm down, she refused to get up or leave the office,
or stop crying. Whenever Mrs. Florentine would say something helpful to Meara
she would scream red with spit “where’s Ann! I want to see Ann!” Once she was out of the office, Meara howled
through the corridors, not caring what the other girls saw now. Teachers kept
trying to contain the whirlwind of sound. Meara walked through the halls
crying, disheveled, ignoring the bells, until Mrs. Florentine located her,
brought her back to her office and got Bernadette on the phone.
“I was wondering if you would be able
to come down to the school. Meara has become.” Mrs. Florentine did not want
Meara to hear, so she said it quietly “overly upset.”
-
A
week before school had started Brendan had asked Meara to go see a movie. He
told her how amazing Return of the Jedi
was, but Meara wanted to see the movie
Flashdance. Brendan agreed to see Flashdance,
the reservations he had about seeing a movie about dancing were satisfied by
the confident smile and the embarrassed blush Meara gave him. He saw her mind finding
safety when she thought of him.
People did not want to go out with the
violence and the curfews, so each cinema in Newry had closed until there was
one left.
They bought their tickets. Meara did
her hair, had gotten dressed up in a red skirt, with a khaki-yellow blouse. She
put on eye-liner and red lipstick. Brendan had combed his hair. He asked if
Meara wanted any popcorn. She politely nodded, “I’ll have some of yours”, adding
an inaudible laugh afterwards.
“I’m not sharing with you.” Brendan
said with a sly grin spreading, as he turned to the counter. Waiting for the
Poprcorn, Brendan looked and saw Meara waiting for him off to the side. He had
a sense of supreme happiness. That he was a normal fellow, just like everyone
told him he never would be, on a date, with a pretty girl. Things had seemed
like they never would be normal, stable, and calm.
His father had left before Brendan
could remember. He had fragmentary memories of his father’s towering figure and
an alien booming voice. Brendan was never sure if that memory was his father,
or just some other random person. His father had shady dealings with
Republicans, so Brendan’s mother took the brunt of the relentless
discrimination. Having no husband, raising four kids on her own, it did not
matter she worked doing laundry all night, and cleaning houses all day, up in
their old neighborhood in Belfast, Brendan’s mother was regularly called a
Fenian whore. Kids ran him down the street shouting “Fenian bastard!, Fenian
bastard!” On a cold, winter night their house was burnt-out, and they had to
move down to his mother’s sister’s place in Newry. Brendan can still remember
walking with the firefighters, trying to find things from his room, but not
finding anything. He remembers seeing the orange-grey dawn realize the charred
shell. He remembers the panic, of never being able to be inside it again. There
were more Catholics in Armagh, and things would not be as bad. He hated the
kids in Newry, never made any friends, everyone was scared of him. Everything
onwards was a haze of anger.
Meara walked in front of him. They
followed the track lights along the walkway to their seats. The cushioned seats
were dingy, and smelled funny, but sitting down they felt alone in the small,
dark theatre. Only two other couples took up the theatre. Meara kept reaching
over for popcorn and slurping on her soda during the previews. The movie came
on and Meara was watching the screen, but she was also contemplating Brendan.
He was watching the screen, trying not to sweat, and trying to look like he was
watching the movie. He peered over at Meara at the same time she looked over at
him. They both smiled, and looked away, embarrassed. The movie’s introductory
music came on. Alone in the sound, the theatre, with no outside pressure, no
conflict, he turned and kissed Meara in her seat. Meara grabbed the back of his
head, put her arm around his back and pulled him toward her. Meara stopped to
breath, her eyes considering his, her nose almost touching his chin, before
leaning in to kiss him some more. The song “Maniac” from the Flashdance soundtrack played, and the
screen lit their shadowy faces.
17
December 1983
Ann closed her eyes. When she opened
them Harrod’s was dark. The over-head lights had been turned off. Mannequins
made black shadows against the jewelry and perfume cases. She was the only one
in the store. The darkness, like sunlight, seemed to awaken things. Shadows
began to shift and move. She thought there was something moving by her leg, so
she walked faster. A female mannequin holding an elegant black purse in a long
designer dress moved, and then returned to its old pose. She approached the
mannequin and watched the figure sit still. The more she stared, the more she
was certain it was trying not to move.
The woman behind the perfume counter
asked Ann if she needed help finding anything. The lights back on, bouncing off
the clean white, marble floor. A loud, stressful crush of holiday shoppers
flipped by her. “Excuse me.”, “pardon”, or a displeased grunt would ask her to
move. Ann had not heard them. Until the woman from the perfume counter had
called her over.
“You’ve
been looking at that Mannequin for close to ten minutes!” Ann wanted to ask if
the Mannequins moved, but she stuttered and realized how silly the question
would sound. “You like that purse, she’s wearing?” The woman responded to Ann’s
awkward silence. “You lookin for a present for your Mum?”
These imagined hallucinations had been
willfully happening to Ann since she started school in London. She became
homesick and bored. All the other girls seemed scary and foreign. On the
weekends she took to walking the busy streets of London. She loved the energy
that seemed to emanate off of people in crowds. She gave money to street
performers. She stood where tourists stood, and reflected their curious energy
like a mirror. Ann seemed to be watching things more and more. She remembered
participating, she thought of Meara, and what she might be doing now. Ann
thought, sadly, how it would be awkward for her and Meara to sit down and talk,
even if they could, she did not know her anymore. Ann was going back to Meigh
for Christmas, and she realized there would be no way to connect with Meara.
The social avenues they had interacted on had been closed and paved over with
time. That had been her life and now it was gone. Ann realized participating
got her sent away from Meara. Terrified, Ann watched the random movements of
the world from the neat structure of her class schedule, and the edge of
excited crowds massing in the clogged streets of London.
The woman walked from behind the
counter and up to the mannequin. She dodged holiday shoppers as they passed, and
tried to get the purse off its hand. Ann realized the woman wore a heavy amount
of make-up that had looked natural, until the saleswoman stood next to the
mannequin. The woman’s face was a white powdery color, and her eye-lids a
greenish-blue. Ann had a horrible sensation that this woman was fake, a
mannequin herself, only animated. The woman was trying to get Ann to answer
something. Ann felt paranoid, like she had to be constantly reassessing if the
reality around her was real. She did not like the feeling of never being sure,
always second guessing herself, but her experiences had taught her otherwise.
Surface appearances were deceitful. The substance-less emotions and energies
underneath determined reality. Ann wondered if the saleswoman would ever hurt
her with her make-up off.
A loud yelling occurred at the front
of the department store. A group of police officers were yelling, so that
everyone in the store could hear. The saleswoman forgot about Ann. The
saleswoman and Ann both tried to discern what the police officers were yelling
about.
“We have received a bomb threat
concerning Harrod’s department store at this address! We need everyone to evacuate immediately!”
“Oh my goodness!” The saleswoman ran
behind the counter, grabbed her jacket and was gone. Ann walked slowly to the
front of Harrod’s. She appraised the police officers and the panic in their
faces. She filtered out of the store in a big frenzied pack by the door. When
she got outside on the side-walk, she looked at the window displays with Christmas
trees, elves, little figurines skating on miniature outdoor ice rinks, and
ginger bread houses surrounded by fake cottony snow. A police officer told her
to move along. They were getting everyone behind some yellow tape they were
stretching around lampposts. Ann was herded into the panicked crowd. She got a
spot up front. The crowd was 200 meters from Harrod’s department store, and the
police were making sure no one was close to the store. She listened to the
scared dialogues, she imagined the front of Harrod’s exploding outwards. It got
very boring. Nothing happened. She wondered if she should leave. The police
kept telling everyone to get back. A woman was holding two large paper bags
full of expensive clothes when one of the handles ripped and the bag fell to
the ground. The bag hit the ground and a giant explosion occurred behind Ann.
She felt the force, like wind, not in a singular path, like in a breeze or a
gale, but apart, ripping humans into every direction.
Ann realized she was on the ground.
Her back was wet. All she heard was a high ringing. She stood up and realized
she was lying in blood, but she could not tell if she was hurt. Her whole body
felt numb. She saw a middle-aged man with no leg, screaming hysterically, but
silent against the ringing. He was burnt bad, bleeding heavily, reaching for
where his leg had been. Blood pooled in the jagged cracks between the cobbles
stones. Her feet kept sticking to the ground. She was not sure what just
happened. Bodies and twisted metal lay everywhere she looked, and the air she
breathed in seemed to burn. A man ran through the chemical-smelling haze. He
kept asking Ann a question. Dazed, Ann could see his mouth moving, but could
not hear the words. He wrapped a blanket around Ann and passed her to more men
now coming through the haze.
Two women led her over to the
sidewalk, holding her up, they kept asking Ann her name. Shattered glass lay in
piles along the street. A clear spot in front of an alleyway was found. Ann
could not tell what they were saying. They laid down some blankets, and eased
Ann onto them. People began to crowd around her. The two women who had carried
her over told them to give her space. They kept asking Ann who she was. She did
not understand the question. Ann kept shaking her head sideways, and saying
“no.”
9
July 1986
Meara
did not know Ann had lost her hearing in the blast that killed three police
officers, three civilians and wounded over 90 more outside Harrod’s department
store in London.
Brendan
called and told Meara to come down to McVeigh’s in Newry. Meara told her mother
she was going to go shopping with a girlfriend. Bernadette let her borrow the
car, because she did not want Meara walking by herself, exposed.
When
Meara walked into McVeigh’s Brendan was yelling a joke at another fellow with
marks on his neck like specks, not freckles, and extending his hand, Meara
realized his pinky and middle finger were missing while his mangled ring finger
jutted out in a dead way. Meara contemplated shaking the hand, until a perverse
smile began to turn the fellow’s glum expression upwards, and Brendan began
cackling like a hyena.
“Meara
meet Dessie.” Brendan said. The bartender put down three beers and three shots,
Brendan raised the shot glass, waited for Dessie and Meara, and said, “To the
Newry RUC!
Most
girls had gone off to University, but Meara did not apply. Her grades were
terrible, and she had to attend classes in the Summer to be eligible to
graduate. She was not allowed to walk in the St. Mary’s graduation ceremony.
Bernadette had been up to the school more times that she could count, trying to
work out compromises, assuring teachers that they were keeping an eye on her,
giving her structure. Patrick had Meara doing cashier work in the afternoons at
the petrol station, pumping gas when it got busy, and delivering auto parts to
other garages.
Brendan
and Dessie were celebrating. Everything was in place and the operations were
set to start before Christmas. Brendan had, since his early-teens, practiced
the tactic of launching robberies or high-jackings out of the “liberated area”
of South Armagh. British soldiers and other security forces could not operate there,
a staunchly pro-Republican area, for fear of landmines or snipers. Once the
operation went off, Brendan could slip South over the border into the Irish
Republic, and allude any Northern Ireland security forces. The RUC would
contact the Garda, but there was distrust and animosity between the two police
forces, and many of their joint investigations were so uncoordinated the cases
remained indefinitely unsolved.
Dessie
and Brendan had switched from robberies and high-jacking to shooting soldiers,
and quickly began getting the attention of higher-ups in the Belfast IRA. Brendan
told his plan to the operational commander of the South Armagh IRA, and he
turned it down, because he thought it was too unrealistic. Brendan wanted to
start attacking British Military bases in East Tyrone, destroying them with
large bombs and then launching attacks to prevent the reconstruction of the
military base. Though this tactic, Brendan had reasoned, he could create a
“liberated area” within East Tyrone, like South Armagh, and start launching
attacks out of East Tyrone, into other areas, building on the momentum, until
all of Northern Ireland was free.
Last
winter, Brendan had been summoned to a farm house outside Newcastle, Armagh.
The farmhouse lay in a rocky field, next to a jagged cliff that dropped off
suddenly into the sea. Brendan confused the waves crashing for the wind. The
provisional IRA commander of South Armagh had spoken with the Belfast IRA and
although they had their doubts, they decided to approve Brendan’s plan in
exchange for Brendan’s car-jacking skills.
“Before
midnight on the 27th of February, we need a lorry, a commercial
lorry, brought up to South Armagh, someone will contact you on where exactly to
leave it. If you provide this lorry for the Irish Republican Army the executive
organizational committee of the IRA has decided to approve your offensive
operations planned for East Tyrone.”
Brendan
stole the lorry in the Republic and dropped it off. The next day he heard about
Nine officers killed at the RUC barracks in Newry. The lorry had been
positioned 250 metres from the barracks. Nine shells, rocketed out of the
makeshift platform attached to the back of the lorry, one hit the observation
tower, seven overshot, or landed in the street in front of the base. One mortar
shell fell on a portable, temporary structure that housed a canteen where many
RUC officers were enjoying a tea break. The mixture of Ammonium nitrate and
nitrobenzene in the shell, affectionately called Annie, combusted and
completely destroyed the thin structure, killing nine RUC officers and wounding
over thirty other employees of the security forces.
Dessie
hunched over the bar. Brendan was talking to himself, calling someone imaginary
“a bastard.”
Dessie leaned over to Meara. She felt really
drunk, the objects in reality seemed to float and she had forgotten Dessie was
sitting next to her. He was about to say something when he suddenly said
“Jesus!” Meara turned and saw Dessie run over to the other end of the bar.
Brendan, laughing, had his pants around his ankles and he was urinating onto
the bar’s floor.
“Oh
Big man, come and stop me!” Brendan was screaming at the angry bartender,
challenging him to do something.
-
The
rumors were ripping her apart. Dessie got Brendan’s pants up, paid the
bartender extra, and lead him out onto the street. Dessie told Meara he was
going to take Brendan home. Brendan gave Meara a long, inappropriate hug. He
began smelling Meara’s hair. He seemed to fall asleep instantly with his arms
hung around her neck. Meara laughed, amused, but kind of scared. She was
thrilled this intimidating enigma of a boy liked her. Brendan left singing
Meara’s name. They trailed away from the front of Mcveigh’s. Meara could not help
but be amused at Brendan’s loud aggressive antics. He seemed to swing between
playful and hysterical. Meara had made a date to go out with Brendan later in
the week. In the quiet streets a light mist was falling, and in the vacancy of
Brendan’s wild energy all the voices came rushing in.
After
the Newry Mortar Attack, Meara was brought in for questioning. She had been
seen with Brendan, and the detectives wanted to know her relationship with him.
“Is
Brendan a member of the IRA?”
“Are
you a member of the IRA?”
“Have
you ever seen any guns or explosives in Brendan’s possession while associating
with him?” The questioning got wilder and wilder, until Meara explained that
Brendan and she had just seen a movie together. The detectives wanted to know
everything and anything. What date was the movie? Where did he pick her up?
What was he wearing? After several “I cannot remembers” The detectives made her
sit in the room for a long time, and then called her parents. Bernadette picked
her up from the RUC station. She looked around to see if anyone watched Meara
walk out of the RUC station.
Word
started to filer around. Meara would say hi to people she knew her whole life
in Killeen and they would look away. One day at the petrol station Meara had
been ringing customers up. An older man with a flat cap on waited in line with
nothing to buy. When he got to the front of the line he told Meara in an indignant
heavy Northern Irish accent: “You have blood on your hands and you know it. It’s
not up to me to judge. May God have mercy on your soul!” The older man
determinedly walked out of the store. The bell dinged, and Meara’s face started
to turn hot. The rest of the customers in line looked to her, and she ran into
the back crying. Patrick took her off the cash register, and had her working in
the back or delivering parts.
Patrick
tried to convince Meara to go live with her sister in Glasgow, Scotland, but
she did want to go. The whispered rumors spread. She had trouble finding work
outside of Patrick’s petrol station. Patrick saw her as a liability that was
hurting his reputation and business. Tension rose in the house and Meara barely
spoke to Patrick and Bernadette.
Meara
wondered how things had grown so distant from the time and people she loved,
from Ann and her childhood. When things made sense. There was something always
under the surface, things she was not exposed to because she was a kid, but now
she was eighteen, out of school and looking for work. These fake niceties people
carried around to protect young people vanished, and she felt she was cruelly,
if not borderline violently shoved into an unrealistic expectation to happily
acquiesce her own character into a pre-determined role she had no interest in playing.
Now she saw the true fear that lay dormant, ready to lash out at the slightest
infraction. People spoke of Meara to distract others from their own immoral
behavior. What Meara did was concrete, easily grasped, ruining someone’s
reputation through gossip was abstract. No one person was responsible. People
attached themselves to the power of the circulated word, defining their own
moral identity in relation to their view of Meara’s perceived actions. Once
they distilled an emotion based off their own defined moral identity, they
reacted. Their reaction could not take the form of action or aggression - they
would be no better than Meara, so passively the hatred built into an unfocused
energy, creating an unfriendly set of weird social interactions inflicted upon
her. Icy greetings, snubs, strange smiles, sighs and eyes-rolling upward. Meara
saw the fear of people contemplating all the stories before they spoke to her.
She was treated differently, unfairly, but if she tried to say so - people told
her she was imagining it. People
circulating the tale of Meara’s boyfriend and the Newry Mortar atttack, made
themselves parts of “the group”, whose actions were stable, well-defined, and
moralistic, while they increasingly marginalized Meara into the unfathomable
depravity of “the other.”
Meara
got into Bernadette’s car. She reclined the seat and felt like she could stay
there forever. Looking up at the upholstered interior ceiling of the car, she
thought of Ann. Meara wondered where she was, what she could be doing. Loss
welled a hitch in her throat, until she swallowed it down. Meara thought of how
much it hurt, day in, day out, thinking of Ann and never seeing her. The blank hole that got sadder as the empty
days and lonely nights passed. The picture Meara had of Ann in her head was
getting less solid, the features blurring away with time, until Meara could see
her thinly. She could see through Ann’s
ghost-like image, and then those details evaporated upwards and away, so Meara
could not see her at all. The figure was there in her memories, but it was just
a fuzzy repeat, and the image got fuzzier the more people replaced Ann with rumors
of Meara being a criminal, a lesbian, or a republican. Meara heard three men
outside McVeigh’s. One was doing Security at the door, while the other two were
trading jokes with him.
She was bombarded by people dedicated to
destroying any semblance of equality she could have with her peers. While the
only person who truly understood her had been removed. She could not control the whispers. The utter
cruelty of so many individuals, amassing, choosing to become vicious, and then
uniting and entering into one group-think overwhelmed her. When something is
said enough times, true or untrue, it eventually permeates. The community questions
if the information is valid or invalid so persistently the gossip becomes
simply present. Meara just wanted what was right, however nebulous the means
were for her to meet her end. Everyone else just wanted to sit back, do
nothing, and judge. She rocked the boat, and the people who kept it still wanted
her to sit down. It was not who she was, but who she was could not exist here,
and this was her home.
The
seat slid upward, and Meara put the key in the ignition. She felt the sheer
power of the concentrated hatred she was up against. She wanted to create
something for them to react to, instead of her reacting to them. Stepping out
of the car, she realized how drunk she was. Meara walked back towards
McVeigh’s, just close enough to pique the curiosity of the three guys laughing
out in front.
She was about a block away from
McViegh’s. Meara’s flats swerved on the sidewalk. Steadying herself, Meara
realized the men were aware she was approaching, but they continued their
conversation. Meara moved towards the wall, just out of the cast of a
streetlight, but still in enough shadow for the men outside McVeigh’s to know
she was there. She pulled down her skirt, leggings, and underwear, squatted,
and let go. The warm smell of urine misted upwards, against the dewy-cool late-night
sidewalk. The three men stopped having their conversation. She wondered what
she could be charged for if she was caught. Empty, she pulled up her leggings,
and her skirt. A sense of triumph spread over her face in the shadows. The
three men outside McVeigh’s had not continued talking. She pictured them
asking, “What’s that girl doing?” She took one last smell of the pungent urine.
The smell like power, an exhibition so grotesque people had to look. The act
was anything beyond what they understood.
Meara ran out of the shadow and back
to her car. She tripped, caught herself on Bernadette’s car door, and got in.
Through the driver’s side window, she saw the men considering her in the empty
street. Meara’s eyes glinted supremacy, elated, she chatted her teeth together,
and coupled the invigorating energy she now felt with the ignition of the car.
She turned the key, shifted the gear into drive, drove forward over a curb and
onto the sidewalk. Her passenger side mirror hit a parking meter. The plastic
shell of the mirror loudly cracked off, barely dangling from the side of the
car. Coming down off the curb, Meara felt the suspension smash upwards. The
tires violently rejoined the road. Regaining control over the car, Meara put
the pedal to the floor, and accelerated into the perverse omnipotence of making
a show of herself so loud it drowned out all the other voices.
10
September 1985
Brendan did not like it.
“Say they are able to link your Dad’s
store with you and the shipment. What if the RUC comes asking if you know
anything about this? What are you gonna say?”
“I will say what I say when the RUC
picks me up for being seen with you.” Meara responded. She added an aggressive
tone to her reply that let Brendan know she was going to start a large fight if
he did not let her do this.
“What if your Dad ties the
high-jacking to you or me, and starts informing?”
“He’s been robbed before, and his
shipments have been high-jacked before. I do not think he would connect me and
you with the job.
“Fuck me.” Brendan knew that being
seen with him had ruined Meara’s reputation. He pondered her pretty face and
thought, still not liking it he said “go ahead, take Dessie. I have to go up to
Belfast and get some things straightened out.”
Meara’s face spread into a wide smile.
Power. Meara had been picked up three more times by the RUC for questions relating
to Brendan. No one spoke to her anymore. Patrick rented a flat in Newry for
Meara to stay in. He was worried the petrol station would get robbed again.
When the RUC picked her up now she did not mind. Meara realized who she was,
and she was done trying to fit-in. If she were going to find her place, it
would be on the stage and not in the crowd.
The
last time Bernadette picked Meara up from the RUC station they had a blow-out,
screaming fight in the car, and they were not speaking now. Patrick and
Bernadette did not understand why she had to associate with someone who was a
well-known, if not legally proven, murderer. Patrick was afraid of revenge
killings that would involve his family. It’s one thing to be running rackets,
or making a profit by avoiding the taxman, but when police officers started
being killed things changed. When the RUC could not prove a case they might hand
it over the Loyalist paramilitaries in the UDA or UVF to punish the guilty
parties. His business still suffered from the IRA ambush in his junkyard over
five years ago. Patrick had found out the fellow who had come in and yelled at
Meara on the cash register had been from the Armagh Orange Order, so word was
circulating. He thought of one of the mechanics at a garage he delivered parts
to, how the fellow had gotten knee-capped over ten years ago by paramilitaries,
and he still talked about the pain whenever it was rainy.
Her
apartment was all set up in Newry. Meara was happy to be out from the
obsessive-parental concern of Bernadette and Patrick. In a way she knew they
were relieved, and this along with everyone she had ever known turning her back
on her, hurt the most. It was the people she came from, and they dismissed her
as deficient. The sense of loss only came in the quiet afterword. The negative
energy began building into its own creation. Loneliness exacerbated the anger,
until she came up with the plan to tell Brendan about the truck that delivered
to the pertrol station. Meara knew it came on Tuesday nights after 8 pm. The
truck delivered to convenience stores up and down the A1, so she was sure it
was full of cigarettes and other items they could sell to black market vendors.
Brendan
and Dessie were trying to raise funds for their next operation. On the 7th
of December 1985 Brendan and Dessie had waited until 6:55 pm when the guards
were changing shifts. The dark, cold winter’s night sealed itself against the
set sun. Dessie, Brendan, Dessie’s cousin Michael, and another East Tyrone
Active IRA member, Will O’Hare, joined them. Will and Michael would make up one
team that would cover Brendan and Dessie and guard their escape-route. Brendan
and Dessie made up the bomb team.
They
had quietly parked in the front of the Ballygawley barracks. The gates were
closed. Dessie and Brendan cautiously walked along the wall. When two RUC
constables opened the gate, Dessie and Brendan calmly walked forward with their
weapons partially concealed by their jackets. The two constables were waiting
for their shift to be over. They had opened the gate for the other guards, who
they knew would be arriving soon. One of the guards was about to say something
in protest to Dessie and Brendan’s presence. Dessie shot him in the fore-head
with his AK-47 before the sound of the guard’s voice could be articulated into
a word. The back of the constable’s head exploded out in a red mist, while
Brendan took down the other constable with four shots to his chest. Unsure if
the constable was wearing a flak jacket, Brendan stood over the guard and fired
twice more into the side of his head. Will and Michael came forward and all
four stood in the open gate, firing into the front of the station. Dessie and
Will each had an AK-47, while Michael
and Brendan carried AR-15’s. They each had six replacement clips. The concrete
from of the RUC station chipped, smoked, and pocked under the constant gunfire.
The automatic fire echoed. The gunfire,
seemingly from every direction, bounced between the high perimeter wall and
bullet-riddled façade of the RUC station. Brendan grabbed the revolver off of
the RUC guard he killed. Will and Michael were reloading. Brendan and Dessie
went forward and ran into the front entrance of the RUC station.
Dessie
fired through the glass that separated the offices from the entry hallway. He
walked through a destroyed glass door, and noticed a half-eaten ham sandwich on
one of the desks. He fired through the desks, until loose bits of paper floated
in the air, and he was sure there was no one in there with him. Brendan ran
into the back of the station, firing wildly, to see if anyone was hiding.
Dessie started emptying filing cabinets and throwing the files into a large
sack. They heard intermittent shots coming from Will and Michael out front, but
the RUC base was eerily quiet. Brendan came from out back and said “all clear”.
He helped Dessie load the files into the laundry sack.
A
chorus of automatic fire rose from Will and Michael, so Brendan decided they
had enough documents. Dessie set the 100 pound gelanite bomb onto a detective’s
desk. He told Brendan they were good to go. They shook hands and laughed at one
another. They looked over the serene quiet of the destroyed RUC detective
office, cinched their smiles down, picked the laundry sack up between them and
ran out the front door. Will was just inside the gate, and motioned to Michael
to hold his fire. Michael was firing on the street at one of the guards who had
showed up for the next shift. The RUC constable only had a civilian handgun, so
he deserted his car and ran while Michael kept firing into the shattered
windshield.
Will
ran for the gate when Brendan and Dessie reached him. Michael saw all three
come out of the gate-opening and onto the street, so he ran to the car and
started the engine. The car was moving. Brendan jumped into one of the open
doors. The doors slammed. Michael saw they had everyone. Brendan was yelling
“Go! Go!” They were two blocks away when
they heard the heavy thud of the bomb destroy the RUC station.
The
IRA issued a warning to contractors involved in rebuilding Security force bases:
Any person or company working for Security forces will be targeted for death.
When the first warning went out and the BallyGawley Barracks were destroyed 300
contractors pulled out. Michael waited for an electrician, who was doing work
for the Eniskellen RUC base, outside the fellow’s house. When the electrician
pulled into the driveway, Michael walked up to him and called out his name.
When the fellow responded with a look of dread, Michael shot him with a .45
pistol. The fellow’s wife started screaming from the doorstep when Michael was
running back to the car.
Will
walked into a bar in the Republic outside Omeath. A man who ran a local quarry
that provided stone to RUC bases was enjoying a pint. Will walked up behind him
in the crowded bar and fired two shots into the back of his head. Everyone in
the bar went silent. Patrons looked around after the noise. Their eyes began to
dilate into shock and incomprehension, after the two abrupt bangs had pierced
the loud din of friendly conversation. The man was killed instantly. Will was
out the door and running for his car, by the time people realized what had
happened.
Dessie
and Brendan watched caterers delivering food to the Ballygawley barracks. They
followed the catering van back to their bakery and offices. Dessie went inside
the offices and shot the man who greeted him when he walked in the door. He
went into the back and shot a woman hiding under a desk. They were both
injured, although Dessie had sworn he had shot them both at least five times
with a 9 mm pistol. Brendan was afraid they would be able to identify Dessie,
so Brendan burned all their delivery vans one night, and left a note: “Anyone
working, aiding, or speaking to Security forces will be subject to retaliation.
This is your final warning.”
Dessie
and his cousin Michael went down to the Crossmalgen RUC station. They waited
for a vending machine repair man to return to his truck. When the repair man
came out Michael pulled along-side and Dessie shot him three times from the
passenger side window. One bullet severed the repairman’s spine and he never
walked again. The vending machine company cancelled the contract it had at all
British Security Bases in Northern Ireland five days later.
Brendan
felt they had exposed themselves too much during the Ballygawley operation.
British Intelligence was circulating closed-circuit television images of their
masked, black-clad figures.
In August, they decided to destroy the RUC
station that was being built at The Birches, County Armagh. The station was not
manned yet. There was a large industrial
excavator on the grounds of the base. Brendan, Dessie, Michael and Will pulled
up to the base, and were surprised how deserted it seemed. Brendan thought he
saw someone out front, so Will and Brendan stood out front spraying the doors
and windows with automatic fire. The ground violently vibrated when Dessie and
Michael pulled the excavator onto the street. Two paths of crushed concrete
followed the machine’s tank-like tracks. Dessie put the bomb in the excavator’s
digger and set it. Michael aimed the excavator through the main gates. He put
the machine into drive, stuck a two by four between the gas pedal and the seat,
and then jumped from the moving excavator. They watched as the self-possessed engine
whined away from them. The digger
slammed into the front of the partially constructed RUC base. A couple seconds
later the bomb detonated, there was a flash in the clouds and gray masonry blew
skywards. When they were driving away Brendan said: “It’s strange how the base
was deserted like that. They previously would have at least a detail out front.”
Dessie argued it was because they were getting scared. Brendan did not like it.
No one was injured or killed in the attack on the RUC barracks at The Birches.
-
“Most
of these guys understand the deal. Some of them want to be heroes. Get in the
back when we go in the front.” Michael and Dessie were both wearing
construction hats. They had orange glow-in- the dark vests they had stolen from
The Birches. Michael had a large sign that said Slow on one side and Stop on
the other.
Meara
sat by the side of the service road, concealed in the bushes. It would have
been quiet and isolated, if it were not for the A1, about 50 metres ahead of
her. The on-ramp to the A1 was another 100 metres down the road. Rush hour congestion had died down, but the
cars and trucks still roared North to South. They had been waiting for an hour,
and she could start to see the look of unsure anxiety on Dessie and Michael’s
face. They were doing this because Brendan had told them to, and they really
needed the money.
The
familiar truck began to approach, so Meara, relieved, whistled to Dessie. She
lay one palm flat. Meara took her other hand and pointed towards the road and
the approaching truck. She then pointed down into her flat palm. Dessie watched
her, nodded and whistled over to Michael. Michael went into the road with the Stop
sign. The truck started to slow. Michael tried to look as bored and as possible,
while holding the sign in front of the big-rig’s approaching headlights. Dessie
stood next to Michael and approached the slowing truck. The truck’s hydraulic
brakes hissed in Dessie’s ear.
There
was a man yelling, loud, only briefly. Then Meara heard the driver side door
slam. She saw Michael running around the side. She remembered watching the
delivery man pull the handle upwards, unlock something, and then the corrugated
metal door would slide upwards. Her gloved hand was on the freezing cold handle,
but it was solid, immovable. Someone kicked the driver side window out of the
truck from the inside. Meara heard the glass tinkle onto the road, and the
muffled sound of men screaming at each other while they wrestled. She could not
see in the dark. The only light she had was headlights coming off the A1. She
started to violently hit the different components of the lock that held the
handle down. Something went upwards, and she could feel the handle loosen. She
hit the thing in the dark upwards again, and she pulled the handle towards her.
This loosened the corrugated steel door, and Meara pushed the door over her
head and got into the back of the trailer.
Dessie
was knocking twice on the front of the trailer from the cab. Meara ran forward
and returned the knock, solidly twice. When she knocked back she heard a man
yelling, and then a bunch of movement in the cab. When the movement stopped the
man was making a wheezing, out-of-breath, sick sound. The truck started to
move. Meara pulled the corrugate Steel door down.
The
delivery van was packed to the ceiling with cigarettes. They had crossed over into the Republic and
dropped the driver off in a remote part of Carlingford, Ireland, so he would
have to walk over the mountains in the dark to get to any sort of house or
telephone. Meara shoved the last stack of cigarette cartons into back of the
postal delivery van. Michael poured gasoline inside the trailer and cab of the
big-rig. Michael ran back from the trailer, and Meara watched Dessie and
Michael wait patiently. The flames illuminated them, not noticing her, they
seemed to be genuinely content and confident. The trailer caught, and spread,
so Dessie said “Time to go.” They got into the postal delivery van and drove to
a dark loading dock in Newry. It took three of them thirty minutes to unload
all the cartons of cigarettes in the van. They left the cartons of cigarettes
neatly piled behind the door of the loading dock. They never met anyone at the
loading dock. Dessie locked the door with a key. They drove the postal van back
down into the Republic and abandoned it West of Dundalk. Michael poured
gasoline all over the postal van. Meara felt good when the gas tank caught and
the entire van went up. Dessie and Michel got in the car they had stolen and dropped
Meara off two blocks away from her apartment. They had to go talk to someone in
Belfast about the cigarettes and they did not want to involve Meara, or let her
know where they would be going. Dessie lowered his window, said “Good job. We
made a lot of money tonight.” And smiled awkwardly. He never smiled, so Meara
realized how strange it looked, but she was also caught off guard how natural
it seemed to sink into the features of his face.
“Thanks!”
Meara said, her face blushing in the night. “I’m serious. Aside from that
driver thinking he was some prizefighter, everything went good. Mike says so
too.” Michael leaned forward and nodded his head in agreement with what Dessie
had just said. Dessie’s happy disposition made Meara’s head swarm with elation and
acceptance. Her mind kept jumping forward to more and more possibilities in the
future. Meara got back to her apartment and drank four cans of beer to calm
down, before masturbating and drifting out of her orgasm and into the
sanctified, pain-free nothingness of sleep.
9 May 1987
It
had been a long time since anyone had considered her alright. So, when, she
became a welcome part of the crew it seemed like she had arrived somewhere.
They would drink down at Mcveigh’s. The guys’ face would light up when they saw
her. They could trust her, and she was kind - two traits that never intertwined
in most of Dessie’s, Brendan’s, Michal’s, and Will’s personal relationships.
Meara began imitating their brawling, bellicose disposition. No one ever messed
with them. They were this group of misfits, making headlines, going outside the
established moral order of right and wrong and turning heads, making a name for
themselves. The nasty violence was all for that, so people saw and knew. An individual
disseminated an overload of knowledge and information in the instant a bomb
exploded. The energy compressed and spilled outward, either destroying the
person’s physical body or creating a psychological pain so immense it would permanently
destroy the normal functions of their psyche. The gang transferred their pain
onto another person, who did not have the knowledge of their own experience. They
could create an experience for someone with a more comfortable existence that
would make this person understand the sadness, the loss, and the pointless pain
of Meara’s, Brendan’s, Dessie’s Michael’s and Will’s own lives.
Meara
went down to a pub around noon in Newry Centre. It was a cool Spring day, when
the wind blew speckles of rain came with it. She chose the pub because it was the closest
walk from her apartment. The bartender knew of Meara through rumors. He cut
Meara off, after she had quickly finished her third beer. He told her she was
too drunk. Meara knew she had seen other men and women in this Pub more pissed
than herself now. The bar-tender was working off his own self-fulfilling
narrative, reinforced by his moralistic worldview, and solidified by the
negative gossip coming from people he positively understood. He knew Meara to
be weak-minded, frivolous, and prone to causing bad things to occur. This
nebulous fear lingered in his brain and seemed to jump into an uncontrollable
urgency when he saw Meara hunched over his bar. The superiority he derived from
not being gossiped about lead him to this conclusion of Meara. He felt, people
like Meara thought the rules did not apply to them, and they could act however they
wanted. The bartender took consolidation in being this representative for the
reality Meara was too flippant to be aware of. This was his establishment and
he would not have violent Republicans in it enjoying themselves on their days
off from terrorism. The bartender viewed himself within the eternal tradition
of moral righteousness, and Meara wanted, from what he had heard of her
behavior, to deviate from this tradition. He was afraid something terrible was
going to happen. Something terrible always happened around Meara, or so he
heard.
Of
course, Meara was oblivious to the fact that her care-free and anti-authoritarian
image in relation to himself had caused her to be cut off. (She had a healthy
buzz going, but she was perfectly functional, especially since her tolerance
was way up, since she had spent nights matching shots of whiskey with Brendan
over at McVeigh’s.) Meara began to grow visibly upset he would not give her
another beer, and the bartender had his upper hand: emotion instability. Meara
knew it was completely unfair. She was being cut-off because of rumors about
her she could not control. The display of weak emotion disgusted the bartender.
He imposed more order on the instability he himself had caused. He stayed calm
and stable while he steered Meara quietly into the dangerous level of
disrespect that caused her irritation. In an instant, the lashing emotionally violent
memory-responses of being treated unfairly made her slip into a psychic stress
so profound that she felt like hitting someone or crying. If she was to start
yelling or acting uncivil then he could toss her out the door immediately. He
saw her as the typical, impotent, overly-excitable, crazy person. Meara was not
going to be served, because he did want her associated with his Pub. There was
no way he was going to be fooled by someone like Meara. Meara was bad, and he
knew it. The words came out of her lungs like fire-drenched air. She did not
want to go walk out in the rainy-wind to grab another beer.
“Give me another Pint!...... Or I’ll
go back behind the bar and start smashing your nice bottles of liquor! And
you’ll call the police, but they’ll never be able to find me!”
When
she was finished, she realized her throat ached. She was sweating and breathing
heavily, but she had not taken her eyes off the bartender. The inequity played
back like a rerun. She just wanted to be treated how other people were treated.
Fear gripped his face. The bartender saw a regular customer slip out the door. Annoyed
she was driving away customers, the bartender forcibly said “No!, leave. You
are not welcome here! You are drunk and your acting out of line!” The bartender
looked away from Meara, and waited for her to leave.
Meara stretched over the bar, her butt
sticking in the air, her fingers were just able to touch an unopened bottle of
Chivas Regal in front of the mirror she quietly watched her reflection in. The
bartender, turned, and saw her, “hey!” She jumped forward, abandoning
discretion, and took the bottle in her hands. She quickly slid backwards, so
her feet were back on the floor, and she ran out the door of the pub. The
bartender followed her onto the street. He grabbed her arm, so the bottle
smashed onto the sidewalk. She tried to pull her arm out of his grip, while he
began trying to pull her back into his bar. “I’m calling the police. I asked
you to leave, and now you’re staying until the cops show up.” Meara heard cops
and realized she was being dragged down the sidewalk. She began screaming,
high, and closing her free fist and smashing it into the bartender’s mouth.
“Help! let go! You are hurting me!” He tried to grab her other hand. She was
wielding around him, avoiding his free hand, while her wrist was painfully
twisting in his grip. “Ooww!” Meara screamed. She landed a closed fist just
below his nose that stunned him. He held one hand to the area Meara had just
hit below his nose, and he spit blood onto the sidewalk. Meara was still trying
to break free from the grip he had on her with his other hand. When he saw the
blood, he began to wind up to punch Meara in the face. “You fuckin…” Just then
an RUC constable jumped in-between Meara and the bleeding bartender. The
bartender told the policeman his story, and Meara was booked at the Newry RUC
station for public intoxication, larceny, and assault.
In
the central booking office of the Newry RUC station a greasy, old man was
handcuffed to a bench and singing. They were having trouble processing Meara
because they had a young loyalist paramilitary, who had been arrested for the
first time. The boy spit at the guards, until they slammed him into the wall.
He was a big kid who looked a lot older than Meara, although they were about
the same age. He kept calling the guards cunts, cowards, and he threatened to
kill them all as soon as he got the chance. When he wriggled a hand free he
would swing it at the guards. Meara wondered if he was drunk, because they kept
saying they were going to charge him with more assaults, but he seemed to not
listen. His forehead was bright red, spit drooled off his chin, and his voice
grew hoarse from outraged screaming. Meara watched as the RUC officers gave up
trying to get his finger prints for now. The officers handcuffed his hands and
carried him down the hallway to the men’s holding cells. The boy’s howling
threats bellowed loudly down the hallway, until the door to the male holding
cell unit was closed. Meara continued to hear the muffled howling threats. “Come
on in! See if you could last with just you and me, no guns, no badge!!”
The
Newry RUC station had a separate small row of cells for women offenders. A
female RUC officer came to Meara and told her if she did everything she said
everything would be fine, and Meara believed her, so she quietly acquiesced to
whatever the guard asked her to do. She was photographed, fingerprinted, lead
down the woman’s holding cell hallway and watched the female RUC officer walk
away from the other side of the cell door when she was locked inside. Meara
felt like exploding. She had not even done anything. The bartender had
initiated the conflict, but had hammered his hatred within the rules, his
aggression stopping at the minutely detailed limits of what would fall into the
category of being a legal civil infraction. She had done everything, and that’s
what made her so paradoxically angry about herself. She had been weak, for even
trying to respect the bartender like he was a bartender. He was a wolf, and she
was a sheep, and she was seeing more and more clearly it was kill or be killed,
hunt or be hunted. It was becoming more and more of a liability to treat other
people with respect, because more often than not, this power she had given
these individuals, by granting them respect, was able to be turned around on
her, so she was prodded and pushed, by someone, who in her ignorance she felt
would have treated her fairly, and would have never tried to take advantage of
her, but fooled again, Meara’s kind nature fell for it. They elevated
themselves, momentarily above her, so they could for a fleeting amount of time
feel superior. They were on top and Meara was below them. They could string
petty hatreds and cruel aggressions into accounts of Meara’s overreaction, and
piece each momentary win together, enough people gossiping, coming together, to
create a narrative, compiled like a puzzle, each disgruntled member of the
community bringing their bit of terrible information together to form one grand
image. The grey wall began to undulate in the anger, seething, she did not
really understand why she felt such an intense mix of anger and self-loathing,
but she knew she had fallen for it once again.
The RUC officer came back and put a newspaper through the
cell door. Meara looked at the front cover and read the headline “8 IRA
Terrrorists Killed in Loughgall.” Meara began reading the first paragraph, and
she felt like she was going to faint - a pressure came down and everything went
black.
She thought of leaves shifting in the wind at the top of a large tree. Brendan,
a little kid, led by an RUC officer, looked at the melted toys in the ashes of
his burned down bedroom. She felt like the tide slipping back into the oncoming
curve of a crashing wave. He had the strength to overcome what she did not
understand. The nasty swirl of this community never got him. Maybe it was
another unit? It sounded like one of Dessie’s and Brendan’s operations, but the
realization, as each possibility got less likely, and reality, no, no, no, no -
was there.
Meara
put a hand on the wall, but the wall felt like it was moving. She looked around
her cell, but didn’t see anything. The white overhead light swirled out into
the dark black, and Meara, bent on her knees, vomited in the corner, both of
her hands on the shifting walls. Her thoughts returned to the assumed fact and
she violently wretched forward out her mouth. The female RUC officer was
exiting out the holding cell door to the Central booking unit. Meara was not
sure if the guards or anyone at the station knew her connection to Brendan. The
RUC guards were trying fingerprint the Loyalist paramilitary boy in central booking
again. Just before the female RUC officer closed the door to the female unit
she heard the crazed loyalist boy yell: “We got your boy! We got your boy!”
8 May 1987
The
night before the operation was to go off, Dessie was picked up by the Garda in
the Republic. He was being questioned about a bank robbery in Dublin where a
police officer had been killed. Dessie was the only person Brendan completely
trusted. Everything was in place though. With only Brendan, Will and Michael on
for the operation, they decided they should bring in a five-man active service
unit from Tyrone. Brendan, Michael and Will knew them all well. The barracks at
Loughgall RUC base would be manned, so he knew they needed more suppressing
fire than Will and Michael could provide. Michael located an excavator they could
steal half a kilometer from the base.
Brendan
wanted to call it off, but Will and Michael wanted to go ahead. Bringing in the
five IRA members from Tyrone was making Brendan paranoid. He had a bad feeling
about the whole thing. Will and Michael thought Brendan was getting cold feet
because Dessie was not going.
The
setting sun’s soft amber waned into a breezy humidity. The misty cool Spring
night turned cold with evening settling down. Michael stole the excavator from
the construction site and drove it, concrete rumbling and cracking, into
Loughgall centre. One man from the Tyrone Active Service Unit drove ahead of
Michael in a car as a scout, and another fellow sat in the seat next to Michael
in the excavator. Will and Brendan pulled up in a van in front of the darkened Loughgall
RUC base with three Tyrone IRA members. Brendan and Will got in a fight.
Something felt off. Brendan wanted to keep driving. Will wanted to go ahead.
They shouted at one another until they felt they looked stupid and disorganized
in front of the Tyrone active-service members.
“You
were saying the same thing at The Birches. You’re getting spooked.” Will said,
before he opened the door to the van and began walking towards the base. He
motioned to Michael in the excavator. Michael jumped out of the slowly moving
excavator, went to the front, and lit the forty-second fuse for the semtex bomb
in the digger’s front bucket. The chain-link fence around the base came
crashing down under the tracks of the steadily chugging excavator. Will started
firing at the front of the base, and three of the other active service members
from Tyrone came out of the van and joined in with automatic fire.
Brendan
stepped out of the van and saw Will’s forehead explode. The firing erupted all
around them. The burst of automatic fire ripped in from the base, from behind
them, and beside them. Approximately 125 rounds pocked metallic holes into the
van’s side with a repeated halting metallic thud that climbed into a frenzy of
ripping metal. With two sickening simultaneous plunks he saw two Tyrone
active-service members each get shot in the head and go down. The third active
service member was hit in the shoulder and arm, howled, and began to run. Brendan
was shot in his right hand. His knuckles were ripped apart and dark red blood dripped
out like a faucet. He dropped his rifle. Two more bullets slammed into his
chest and were absorbed by his flak jacket.
He saw a flash of something white, like starlight compressed.
He remembered a long time ago when he had been
unable to sleep, so he had gone outside and looked up at the milky way. The
stars’ light reached his eyes from millions of light years away. He thought of
the burning-sun-like orbs in the cold of space. He remembered seeing a plane
blinking its way high up. A satellite was slowly moving across the stasis of
the stars and the deep black of the night sky. He thought he saw a shooting star slip by,
like a quick blip. When he turned his head to follow it, he only saw its
instantaneous trail evaporate, and he was not sure if it had even happened.
The
SAS team approached the bullet riddled van. The left side of Brendan’s face and
jaw had been blown off. He tried to inhale, but choked, wheezing and hacking,
on his own blood. When he heard the footsteps, he made an instinctual lunge for
his weapon, although he could not see where it was. The SAS team halted and
fired into Brendan’s head until he stopped moving.
1 May 1988
Yellow
pollen rippled on the surface of the water. The Eindhoven canal was a
reflective slick that mirrored the vivid green of the bursting buds on the dewy
trees. The airy chalk-white of the wispy clouds was set against the pastel-blue
sky. Racing white amber sunlight ran out of the day that Meara had slept
through in the cool humidity of her dark bedroom. The wind, moist and cool,
barely stirred tree limbs. The black pitch of the sun’s absence expanded, while
the sun disappeared in the dying lion-coloured haze of late-afternoon light.
The shadows were deeper below the water in the canal. The fronts of Old Dutch row-houses
lapsed into a slate-like undetailed darkness as the orange-red sun screamed
desperate, dying rays in sky above their rooftops.
Meara
felt a cool breeze gently lap the shade in her window. The bright square
outline of day-light behind the shade was fading from yellow to grey to black.
When she thought of last night her body seemed to jostle awake, her heartbeat
rose, and she wanted to stop lying in bed.
From
Nieuw- Biergen Dessie and Meara had driven an hour to Eindhoven, the
Netherlands. They encountered no checkpoints, and they were back in the crowded
city by the time they heard preliminary reports coming off the radio. Dessie
and Meara had been part of a carefully selected group to target British
Military personnel from Royal Air Force Bases in West Germany. Nieuw-Bergen and
Roermond were known to be popular places for British Military personnel to
cross over into the Netherlands and enjoy a night out. In Roermond, the other
IRA team had seen a group of British airmen piling into a car about the same
time when Meara planted and set her bomb underneath the airmen’s car outside
the Bacchus Discotheque in Nieuw-Bergen. The team in Roermond fired 23 shots
from a fully-automatic SLR rifle into the vehicle killing one of the airmen and
seriously wounding two others.
Meara
could hear plates rattling, Dessie mumbling, the babble of news reports and the
television, while people quietly talked and ate. The small cheap apartment in
Eindhoven had no lights on yet. The day’s sunlight had lit the interior of the
apartment, but with night setting in - the hallway was dark now. Meara let her
hands slide smoothly across the cool walls. She could not see where she was
walking, but she saw the bright room ahead of her. A perfect illuminated
square, set against the black hallway, like she was walking into a television
screen. The shaded lamplight reflected off the soft cream color of the paint on
the walls. She saw the green arm of a dingy couch. Dessie laughed with members
from the other team. No one saw her at the edge of the room, hovering in the
doorway.
Her
eyes adjusted to the light in the room. Dessie saw her and jumped up from his
seat.
“Hey!
We did not want to wake you up.” Meara nodded to the television.
“How
many are they saying we got?” Meara said.
“Here,
sit down.” Dessie gave Meara his seat, and had someone go make a plate for
Meara in the kitchen. Another member knew Dutch, and the evening news was just
coming on. Dessie motioned to the other volunteer, and he began to translate
from Dutch to English what the anchorman was saying in a patient, measured tone.
“British
Security forces are on high alert after the death of three British Airmen in a
coordinated attack on British Military personnel stationed in the Netherlands
and West Germany. Around 1 am in Roermond one soldier was killed and two other
were seriously injured when terrorists fired an assault rifle into a vehicle
filled with British military personnel. About a half-hour later in Nieuw-Bergen
a booby-trapped bomb exploded underneath an RAF servicemen’s car. Two RAF
servicemen were killed and two more seriously wounded.”
She
saw British soldiers with mirrors on long sticks checking the undersides of
cars at a checkpoint outside the Lurgan RAF base. The television screen showed
a map of the Netherlands and West Germany and showed Nieuw-bergen and Roermond
highlighted in big letters. She saw the destroyed car, the police tape, and the
flashing lights. She did not remember any of the car’s features, while she squinted
at the burnt shell. The concrete was scorched black like a halo around the
remains of the vehicle. The paint had been burnt off, and the searing
hot-melted-white color of the cars exterior was contrasted by the ghostly stillness
of the desolate black-burnt gray of the vehicle’s interior. The airmen had been
in there. Meara had planted the device that created flames so hot the windows
exploded outward. She could not discern
any of the vehicle’s details from last night contrasted with what she saw on
the television screen. Nieuw-Bergen's town square looked much different in the
daylight. Bomb squads in large Olive-color padded suits searched the town
centre, while all the locals had to stay inside.
“People
at home and abroad are shocked at the loss of life. The outlawed Irish
terrorist organization – the Irish Republican Army - has taken responsibility
for the attacks. In a message to British Security forces on the European
continent…”
Meara
thought of girls from St. Mary’s checking under their cars before they left to
go on a date. She thought of their face’s wincing in fear when they turned the
ignition. She pictured the bartender in Newry, having to drive his car around
the block once or twice to make sure it was safe, before he picked up his wife
and kids. She had been ignored for so long, and now everyone was reacting to
her. Dessie told her to sit down, but she stood in the doorway, transfixed on
the television, her pulse rising, with her own self affirmed. Her ego mixing
and rising with the realistic facts of the news report. Unable to be ignored or
dismissed, she saw a Dutch translation on the screen and she heard Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher’s heavy English accent breakthrough the other IRA
member’s translation. Silent, they all listened to Margaret Thatcher.
“Security
at all British Bases in West Germany has now been increased even further. And
servicemen have been given a warning that they can’t afford not to be
vigilant.”
An
officious male English voice continued: “All military personnel and dependents
with private motor vehicles should therefore immediately carry out a thorough
search of their vehicles before using them again. The search should pay
particular attention to the underneath of the vehicle…” She stared into
everything she had lost, how nothing seemed familiar, and it was all gone now:
Brendan, Ann, her family, long afternoons of not caring had been taken from
her. Dessie yawned and handed her a plate of food. “Sit down!” Meara let the
plate of food hang in Dessie’s hand in front of her face. She looked behind her,
down the darkened hallway, and she saw everyone she had known trying to talk to
her, connect, get her to listen, laugh and have an easy moment, but she could
not hear them, and there was something between them, like a curtain, nothing
material, but a barrier, so she actually saw only the cool, dark hallway.
In all the voices she could not hear, Meara
realized how she was the news, and everyone she ever knew could hear this
report.
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