The previous evening he had formally given his name as Harry McEvoy. That was what she called him when she replied.
‘Well, Mr McEvoy, they’re not the easiest of times, to be sure. One minute it’s all quiet and the place is full. Then you’ll have a thing like last night, and who is going to come and sleep a hundred yards or so from where a soldier was shot dead? The travellers from the south find all this a bit near. They like it a bit further away from where it all happens. Having it full like it is now is a luxury. What did you say your business was? I was flustered up a bit when you came, getting the teas and all, yesterday.’
‘I’ve been away, ten years or so, just under in fact, at sea. In the Merchant Navy. Down in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean, mainly.’
‘There’s a lot you’ll see has changed. The fighting’s been hard these last years.’
‘Our people have taken a bad time, and all.’
‘The Catholic people have taken a bad time, and now the Protestants hate us as never before. It’ll take a long time to sort it out.’
‘The English don’t understand us, never have, never will.’
‘Of course they don’t, Mr McEvoy.’ She flipped his egg over expertly, set it on the plate beside the halved tomatoes, the skinned sausage, the mushrooms and the crisp fried bread. ‘Look at all the ballyhoo and palava when that man of theirs was shot — Danby. You’d think it was the first man who had died since the troubles. Here they are, close to a thousand dead and all, and one English politician gets killed… you should have seen the searches they did, troops all over. Never found damn all.’
‘He wasn’t mourned much over here.’ Harry said it as a statement.
‘How could he be? He was the man that ran the Maze, Long Kesh. He brought all his English warders over here to run the place for him. There was no faith in him here, and not a tear shed.’
‘They’ve not caught a man yet for it?’
‘Nor will they. The boys will keep it close. Not many will know who did it. There’s been too much informing. They keep things like that tight these days. But that’s enough talk of all that. If you want to talk politics you can do it outside the door and on the streets all the hours that God gave. There’s no shortage of fools here to do the talking. I try and keep it out of the house. If you’re back from the sea, what are you going to do now? Have you a job to be away to?’
Before answering, Harry complimented her on the breakfast. He handed her the empty plate. Then he said, ‘Well, I can drive. I hoped I could pick up a job like that round here. Earn enough so that with a bit of luck I can pay you something regular, and we can agree on a rate. I want to work up this end of town if I can, not in the centre of town. Seems safer in our own part. I thought I might try something temporary for a bit while I look round for something permanent.’
‘There’s enough men round here would like a job, permanent or not.’
‘I think I’ll walk around a bit this morning. I’ll do the bed first… an old habit at sea. Tomorrow I’ll try round for a job. Wonderful breakfast, thanks.’
Mrs Duncan had noticed he’d been away. And a long time at that, she was certain. Something grated on her ear, tuned to three decades of welcoming visitors and apportioning them to their birthplace to within a few miles. She was curious, now, because she couldn’t place what had happened to his accent. Like the sea he talked of, she was aware it came in waves — ebbed in its pitch. Pure Belfast for a few words, or a phrase, then falling off into something that was close to Ulster but softer, without the harshness. It was this that nagged as she dusted round the house and cleaned the downstairs hall, while above her Harry moved about in his room. She thought about it a lot during the morning, and decided that what she couldn’t quite understand was the way he seemed to change his accent so slightly mid-sentence. If he was away on a boat so long then of course he would have lost the Belfast in his voice — that must have happened. But then in contradiction there were the times when he was pure Belfast. She soundlessly muttered the different words that emphasized her puzzlement to herself, uncomprehending.
They don’t waste time in Belfast lingering over the previous day. By the time Harry was out on the pavements of the Falls Road and walking towards town there was nothing to show that a large-scale military operation had followed the killing of a young soldier the previous evening. The traffic was on the move, women with their children in tow were moving down towards the shops at the bottom end of the Springfield Road, and on the corners groups of youths with time on their hands and no work to go to were gathering to watch the day’s events. Harry was wearing a pair of old jeans he had brought from Germany, and that he’d used for jobs round his quarters in the base, and a holed pullover that he’d last worn when painting the white surrounds to the staircase at home. They were some of the clothes the officer had collected when he’d called and told his wife that her husband was on his way to the Middle East.
The clothes were right, and he walked down the road — watched, but not greatly attracting attention. The time had been noted when he came out of the side road where Mrs Duncan had her guest house, and into the Falls. Nothing went on paper, but the youth that saw him from behind the neat muslin curtain at the junction would remember him when he came back, and mentally clock him in. There was every reason why he should be noticed, as the only new face to come out of the road that morning. Last night when he had arrived it had been too late to get a decent look at him. All Mrs Duncan’s other guests were regulars, discreetly vetted and cleared by the time they’d slept in her house enough for a pattern to emerge.
Harry had decided to walk this first morning, partly because he thought it would do him good but more importantly to familiarize himself with his immediate surroundings. Reconnaissance. Time well spent. It might save your life, they’d said. Know your way round. He came down past the old Broadway cinema where no films had been shown for two years since the fire bomb exploded outside the ticket kiosk, and the open space of the one-time petrol station forecourt where pumps, reception area and garages had all long since been flattened. Across the road was the convent school. Children were laughing and shouting in the playground. Harry remembered seeing that same playground, then empty and desolated, on West German television when the newsreader had described the attack by two IRA motorcyclists on William Staunton. The Catholic magistrate had just dropped his two girls at school and was watching them from his car as they moved along the pavement to the gate when he was shot. He had lingered for three months before he died, and then one of the papers had published a poem written by the dead man’s twelve-year-old daughter. Harry had read it in the mess, and thought it of rare simplicity and beauty, and not forgotten it.